Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death 9780822394235

Citation preview

Beyond Biopolitics

patricia ticineto clough and craig Willse, eds.

Beyond Biopolitics Essays on the Governance of Life and Death

Duke University Press Durham and London 2011

© 2011 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ♾ Typeset in Quadraat by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. A version of Chapter 1, “National Enterprise Emergency: Steps Toward an Ecology of Powers,” by Brian Massumi, appeared in Theory, Culture & Society 26:6 (2009) and is printed by permission of the publisher, SAGE Publications. A version of Chapter 2, “Human Security/National Security: Gender Branding and Population Racism,” by Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse, appeared in Social Text 105 28:4 (2010) and is printed by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press. A version of Chapter 3, “‘The Turban Is Not a Hat’: Queer Diaspora and Practices of Profiling,” by Jasbir K. Puar, appeared in Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007) and is printed by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press. A version of Chapter 4, “Strict Scrutiny: The Tragedy of Constitutional Law,” by Sora Y. Han, appeared in Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties 4:1 (2008) and is printed by permission of the journal. A version of Chapter 8, “Strange Circulations: The Blood Economy in Rural China,” by Ann S. Anagnost, appeared in Economy and Society 35:4 (2006) and is reprinted by permission of the publisher, Taylor & Francis Ltd.

contents

Acknowledgments vii IntroductIon

Beyond Biopolitics: The Governance of Life and Death Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse 1 part i Unexceptional control: Governance, race, and population

1. National Enterprise Emergency: Steps Toward an Ecology of Powers Brian Massumi 19 2. Human Security/National Security: Gender Branding and Population Racism Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse 46 3. “The Turban Is Not a Hat”: Queer Diaspora and Practices of Profiling Jasbir Puar 65 4. Strict Scrutiny: The Tragedy of Constitutional Law Sora Y. Han 106 part ii preemption: death and life-itself

5. Necrologies; or, the Death of the Body Politic Eugene Thacker 139 6. Mnemonic Control Luciana Parisi and Steve Goodman 163 7. Thanato-tactics Eyal Weizman 177

part iii transforming Value: the Measure of life capacities

8. Strange Circulations Ann S. Anagnost 213 9. Necropolitical Surveillance: Immigrants from Turkey in Germany Çağatay Topal 238 10. From the Race War to the War on Terror Randy Martin 258 part iV technological investments: temporality, Media, and Methodologies

11. “Seeing” Spectral Agencies: An Analysis of Lin+Lam and Unidentified Vietnam Una Chung 277 12. Here We Accrete Durations: Toward a Practice of Intervals in the Perceptual Mode of Power Amit S. Rai 306 13. Fascia and the Grimace of Catastrophe May Joseph 332 14. Blackness and Governance Fred Moten and Stefano Harney 351 Bibliography 363 Contributors 381 Index 385

acknoWledGMents

Many of the chapters in this book are elaborations of presentations given at a symposium held at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (cunY), in 2006. We are thankful for the support of the Center for the Study of Women and Society, which hosted the symposium, and the Graduate Center, for funding the event. We are especially grateful to all those who participated in the symposium, and from whom we learned so much. Many graduate students and faculty at cunY have made possible the ongoing elaboration of social theory and social criticism that has informed this collection. In light of that effort, we happily thank each other. This collection represents the work we did together when we were first active at the Center for the Study of Women and Society (Patricia was director and Craig a fellow) and now as fellow sociologists. Doing the work of scholarship together proved rewarding and productive. We also thank our current and former colleagues at cunY, especially Neil Smith, David Kajanzian, Michelle Fine, Joe Rollins, Victoria Taylor Pitts, Soniya Munshi, Greg Goldberg, Jean Halley, Hosu Kim, Jonathan Cutler, Jacqueline Berman, Jeff Bussolini, Ananya Mukherjea, Grace M. Cho, Lauren Jade Martin, Una Chung, Jamie Skye Bianco, Rachel Schiff, Mitra Rastegar, Sam Han, Elizabeth Bullock, Aaron Weeks, Kate Jenkins, Kim Cunningham, Deborah Gambs, and Karen Gregory. We thank as well our friends and colleagues from our wider circles whose support and thoughtful en-

gagement made this work possible, especially Dean Spade, Christina Hanhardt, Kerwin Kaye, Beth Bernstein, Em Thuma, Jackie Orr, Vivian Nixon, Anahid Kassabian, Amit Rai, Joseph Schneider, Steven Seidman, Anne Hoffman, Norman Denzin, Jasbir Puar, Stefano Harney, and Bruce Reis. To our families we also send thanks: Christopher Martin Clough, Elizabeth Hariss Clough, and Lucy Nash Clough, as well as the Steppe family, the Willse family, the Spade-Goldschmidt-Lenz family, and David Proterra. Finally, we would like to thank everyone at Duke University Press—Ken Wissoker, Sharon Torian, Courtney Berger, Jade Brooks, Neal McTighe, Jeff Canaday, and Christine Choi. We especially wish to thank J. Reynolds Smith, who stood behind this work from the start.

viii Acknowledgments

patricia ticineto clough and craig Willse

Beyond Biopolitics

The Governance of Life and Death

Both in the United States and around the world, neoliberalism continues to raise difficult questions about the rightful conduct of the state. This is in part because in neoliberalism an extralegal administrative discourse has turned the legitimacy of governance over to technical systems of compliance and efficiency that underwrite the relationship of the state and the economy with a biopolitics of war, terror, and surveillance. From the very start of Barack Obama’s administration, for example, there was an intensification of an administrative and bureaucratic legality, even though the administration was set to reformulate neoliberalism. In the first few months of 2009, the administration responded to the debate regarding practices of torture authorized and administered by U.S. government and military officials during the Bush regime’s “war on terror.” The practice of waterboarding was particularly controversial. While public knowledge of waterboarding already existed, a series of events—Attorney General Eric Holder’s unequivocal comment during a confirmation hearing on January 16, 2009, that waterboarding is torture, Obama’s issuance of an executive order on January 22, 2009, banning the use of harsh interrogation tactics, and the release in April 2009 of the so- called torture memos—coalesced to produce calls for the investigation and possible prosecution of Bush administration officials who had authorized waterboarding. While some members of the Obama administration voiced an interest in “mov-

ing ahead” and not dwelling in the (very recent) past, emphasizing the end of those practices, others understood that the use of torture by the U.S. in the war on terror was not simply an aberrant practice that could be abandoned, but was constitutive of the political context. Torture became a condition of possibility for the Obama administration: while a critique of certain practices of torture could distinguish the Obama administration from the Bush administration, a war on terror by other means, or by practices renormalized as “not torture”1 could be legitimized. Indeed, even as torture practices changed and took on other names, the Obama administration, in its very first months, deployed more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, committed airstrikes in Pakistan, and maintained not only a U.S. military presence in Iraq, but also the private mercenary troops that accompanied and outnumbered U.S. troops. The Obama administration, elected in part through a campaign that invoked a hopeful future with promises of “change,” found the past was not so easy to leave behind. Taken together, the essays collected in Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on The Governance of Life and Death represent a transdisciplinary effort to account for and critically engage the multiple tendencies and trajectories that have both informed neoliberal governance and found expression in its reformulation today. As such, these essays hover at the threshold between the present and the near future. Moreover, these essays echo the way in which neoliberalism has made the near future lean even nearer, spilling into the present, filling the present with fear, speculation, anxiety, and, perhaps beneath all this, a generalized and heightened sense of expectancy of what has not yet come. As studies of the policing of migration, military occupation, blood trades, financial markets, the war on terror, mass death, media ecologies, branding, and the production of political memory and amnesia, these essays explore the governance of life and death, beyond biopolitics, in the near future. This near future is not so much a product of the present, but rather the present is a preemption of future potentialities. These essays do not present only a “history of the present” as Michel Foucault encouraged, but a history of multiple and incommensurable presents that overlap and overspill with the presence of ghosts of the past as well as the conjured ghosts of the near future. However, this is not to suggest that in today’s reformulation of neoliberal governance, what Foucault meant by biopolitics, “this very specific, albeit very complex, power that has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge and apparatuses of security [or dispositifs] as its essential technical instrument,” has been abandoned by governance.2 2 Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse

Rather, biopolitics, as these essays suggest, gives the ground for today’s reformulation of governance, the platform for the extension of biopolitics beyond itself. Nor is this a “beyond” in which the state plays no part. Rather, governance continues to address itself to what Randy Martin, in his essay, describes as the “paradox of neoliberalism,” where “far from stripping away the inert body of the state so as to free the economy to pursue its true expression, what was called deregulation, regulatory activities of government became hyperactive. . . . Neoliberalism should not therefore be identified with laissez-faire, but rather with permanent vigilance, activity, and intervention.” In these remarks, Martin takes a page from Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics and governmentality where Foucault traces governance and economy from the rise of liberalism in Europe to the rise of neoliberalism in the United States.3 In these lectures, Foucault makes it clear that unlike liberalism, neoliberalism does not eschew interventions into the market, but rather seeks to secure its conditions of possibility, both by assisting in the calibration of the market’s indeterminate and nontotalizable features to risk assessment and by inviting a crisis- oriented sociality. An economy of risk and a crisis-oriented sociality creates the conditions for preemption, or what in their essay Luciana Parisi and Steve Goodman call “mnemonic control.” This describes a control of future memories, which, as Brian Massumi suggests in his essay, is not precisely a “biopower,” because preemption returns to “life’s unlivable conditions of emergence in order to bring it back, redirecting its incipience to alter emergent effects.” Yet, for Massumi, preemptive power is precisely the power deployed by neoliberalism’s reaching beyond biopower in the governance of life and death. We opened our introduction with some remarks about torture, terror, and war that were meant to suggest the contemporary conditions for the transformation of neoliberal governance, the very same conditions in which the essays collected here have been written. In what follows, we will give a brief overview of the essays and the political and theoretical problems they raise for consideration. Focal points include states of exception that are not exceptional but foundational; the risk analysis applied to the adjudication of “ethical” forms of war, terror, and occupation; population racism and the management of the life capacities of populations; the production and circulation of death as political and economic currency; and the potential for critical and aesthetic response. That we would call the theme of the essays “governance of life and death beyond biopolitics” points to what Foucault described as the “tendency” or “line of force” that has led toward the “pre- eminence over all Introduction 3

other types of power—sovereignty, discipline, and so on,” to the consolidation of apparatuses for organizing, assessing, and investing populations in terms of the biopolitical (in)capacities of life and death.4 Governance, TorTure, and excepTion

When torture practices became representative of a certain political moment, a debate arose in academic circles about what Giorgio Agamben has described as the “state of exception,” defined as that which is illegal or outside the rule of law, but in fact constitutes the law and political rule. Yet the debate over torture and detainment is endemic to neoliberal governance. Not only is there a preeminence of administrative functions “served by analyses and reflections, calculations and tactics,” but there are also emergency laws, which “are neither temporary nor categorically distinct from a larger set of state practices.”5 Against scholars who conceptualized the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, for example, as a case of the state of exception, other scholars have argued that “there is a proliferation of new laws and regulations passed in an ad hoc or tactical manner, administrative procedures, and the use of older laws” that carries a “thread of continuity from the legal decimation of personhood that began with slavery.”6 Following this thread shows how terror and torture have been well prepared for by a range of regular laws and daily disciplinary state practices, particularly those pertaining to black enslavement and its afterlife, indigenous genocide, domestic mass incarceration, and immigrant detention.7 Agamben recognized that the state of exception is not unrelated to the juridical order. But it is the thread of continuity that holds together moments in the history of racism—from white settler colonialism and slavery through to the twenty-first century—that makes what may be socially extraordinary nonetheless more legally ordinary.8 In her essay, Sora Han takes up the internment of Japanese Americans to argue against Agamben, who treated internment as a state of exception like that found in the formation of Nazi concentration camps. Agamben’s viewpoint overlooks the judicial activities supporting Jim Crow laws delimiting the civil rights of African Americans in the same years of Japanese American internment. Thus, interpreting internment as “the most spectacular violation of civil rights,” Han argues, “pushes the history of black segregation outside the concept of the camp and biopolitics.” The segregation, ghettoization, and mass imprisonment of black Americans, along with the internment of Japanese Americans, point to what we, 4 Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse

in our essay, call “population racism.” Drawing on the history of racism to which Han returns, theories of population racism also refer to the concentration of regulation on the life capacities of populations, a governing of the species. In his often cited description of biopolitics, Foucault argued that “after a first seizure of power over the body in an individualizing mode, we have a second seizure of power that is not individualizing, but, if you like, massifying, that is directed not at man- as-body but at man-as-species.”9 Furthermore, populations, Foucault argued, are to be seen “not from the standpoint of the juridical-political notion of subject, but as a sort of technical political object of management and government” that is “dependent on a series of variables.”10 Thus, the species is brought into governance, when population becomes the object of biopolitics, when population can reveal the species or life itself through statistically organized probabilities. Statistical analysis shows the population possesses “its own regularities: its death rate, its incidence of disease, its regularities of accidents.” And statistics show that the population has “specific aggregate effects,” economic effects irreducible to a smaller frame.11 As a measure of risk, statistical analysis constitutes an actuarialism that is potentially productive rather than merely representational. It is the calculability of risk that underwrites the comparison of populations and their life capacities or lack thereof, thereby value-coding an expectation while producing a fear of probabilistically marked populations often distinguished as dangerous. The LoGic of preempTion, BrandinG, and popuLaTion racism

It is against a statistical background that “blackness” is entangled with governmentality. In their essay, Moten and Harney argue that blackness is “an originary drive whose fateful internal difference (as opposed to fatal flaw) is that it brings regulation into existence, into a history irregularly punctuated by transformations that drive imposes upon regulation.” These regulations produce criminality, fugitivity, and extract “unpaid debt unfairly imposed and untold wealth unfairly expropriated” from those “who are owed, the ones who bear the trace of being owned,” yet who nonetheless remain “poor but extravagant.” Blackness is enfolded with a governance that deploys population racism, often through a form of branded policy and programming. We, in our essay, use the term “political branding” to point to the way gender, for example, has been made to affectively brand policy to mean “interested in the protection and/or the liberation of women and, therefore, modern, progresIntroduction 5

sive, civil, and democratic, or . . . ‘ensuring choice’—the choice to be personally safe, nationally secure, to be invested in peace.” In her essay, Jasbir Puar points to something like a brand deployment of “queerness” in relationship to “terrorist” in the post- 9/11 treatment of Muslims and Sikhs in the United States, where “terrorist” works as an “implicitly installed prerequisite of perverse sexuality, queerness, and gender nonnormativity beyond the pale of proper citizenship sexuality, both heteronormative and homonormative.” As such, the queer diasporic subject may not be able “to respond to the turbaned Sikh victim and the related figure of the Muslim terrorist, both of whom are seen as conservatively heteronormative and antiqueer, yet in the perverse sexualities ascribed to them are almost too queer to rehabilitate.” For Puar, “queerness,” in this sense, becomes “both an identificatory modality producing individual bodies and a generalized rubric applied to populations.” Population is important in the affective configuring of what Puar refers to as “terrorist assemblages”; this is because population is the medium of an affect that circulates across bodies, a circuiting of fear and threat. But the circuit of fear and threat works not only to target bodies that look alike or can come to resemble other threatening bodies. Fear and threat also work as a racialized affective background such that a sudden bodily irritation can lead to any body racially defining any bodies in a chance event of contact. Population offers a shifting back and forth from race as a matter of a known visible body or perception to race as a possibility of becoming part of a population that is itself ever in the process of being assembled, a population assemblaging in the immediate feeling of distributed life capacities or affective intensities. In their essay, Parisi and Goodman offer an elaboration of branding, or brand culture. Their treatment resonates with what they tag “cybernetic capitalism,” adding to the other tags critics have been using—such as “service economy,” “affect economy,” “caring economy,” “knowledge economy,” and “digital economy”—to grasp what capitalism is doing in the relationship of neoliberal governance and economy. For Parisi and Goodman, branding is the preemption of memory necessary to neoliberalism and activated by cybernetic capitalism. It is the modulation of the enfolded potentialities of a virtual memory—the almost (but not quite) complete foreclosure that encourages “repetition of consumption as a repetition of a memory you haven’t had.” Through branding there is a “remodeling of long-term memory through an occupation of short-term intuition, inducing loyalty through a modulation of affect across bodies or populations.” 6 Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse

While Parisi and Goodman focus on brand culture as an everyday consumerism, they also underscore the forgetting that brand deploys in the production of value, or when the circulation of affect is meant to produce value. In the context of a discussion of the state of exception and the concept of branding policy, legislation, and programming, it might be argued that political exclusion can nonetheless be a kind of economic inclusion, a productivity in an affect economy. As Aihwa Ong has suggested, the negotiations on behalf of the politically excluded can produce “indeterminate or ambiguous outcomes” including those derived from a “business rationality” in “an extraordinary departure in policy that can be deployed to include as well as to exclude.” The politically excluded may not only be included economically, but they often are economically included precisely because they are politically excluded. Ong thus rewrites Agamben’s exceptionality, concluding that “the exception can also be a positive decision to include selected populations and spaces as targets of ‘calculative choices and value orientation’ associated with neoliberal reform,” or where there is “a sort of complete superimposition of market mechanisms, indexed to competition, and governmental policy,” to use Foucault’s terms for characterizing American neoliberalism.12 In this same vein, Moten and Harney write of nGos as “the laboratories of governance” or “a research and development arm of governance” branded with the idea of democracy and carrying the demand that everyone speak for themselves or submit to those who will “manage” democracy for them. This is a situation in which the political incoherence of democratic narratives is both easy to access and nearly impossible to critique, as neoliberalism autoadjusts to accommodate such ambiguities. The consolidation of neoliberalism has fundamentally challenged the idea embedded in the Keynesian welfare state as well as Foucault’s account of such a state in terms of biopower—the idea that the life and growth of the state’s population would be protected and secured by that state. For sure, the concepts of protection and security have gained special currency in the post- 9/11 context, but this is an insecure and destabilizing security that reverberates globally. In these circumstances, Massumi argues, it might be better to refer to power relations in terms of ontogenesis or ontopower. Drawing on the way in which “natural” disasters (such as Katrina) and national security have been coproducing the language of threat, Massumi argues that threat has become “ubiquitously generic,” bringing power relations beyond biopower to an ontopower. Ontopower is environmental, the “altering [of ] the life environment’s conditions of emergence” by preempting life Introduction 7

capacities or potentiality. As such, ontopower operates in a prototerritory “that is unlivable.” Parisi and Goodman also use the term “unlivable” for the repetition of memories of what was not experienced, remembered, or forgotten. In their essay, as well as in Massumi’s, this term is used to point to an activation at the intensive limit of life, or an obliging of life to continuously reactivate its emergent capacities in an ordinary state of emergency that is all but outstripping a military, bureaucratic, or legal containment. If neoliberalism naturalizes national security, Massumi concludes, it also incites economic growth, “a neoliberal world of unleashed capitalist expansion.”13 occupaTion, miGraTion, necropoLiTics

Beyond biopolitics, then, there is a profiting both politically and economically from living death, or deadly living. We can see this in the ongoing occupation of territory as well as in migrations that are not forced outright but are made necessary by a reconfiguration of the governance of populations, labor, production, and consumption. In these contexts, there is a cost accounting of populations’ capacities for living, a commercializing of life, and a proffering of deadly desire. Questions arise about the integrity of the human organism, the ends of desire, and an ethics that has become politically economical. In his essay, Eyal Weizman takes up some of these questions, focusing on the mix of military and economic aims in Israel’s policy of “targeted assassinations” of Palestinians. Drawing on the experience of the war in Lebanon and reliant on digital technology and military engineering, targeted assassinations are meant to obtain control through armed conflict short of war, and therefore not placed under the jurisdiction of international laws. While touted as “an occupation in disappearance,” targeted assassinations are to provide “technocolonial rule after evacuation,” rule without direct violence. Still, as events in Gaza show, rule at a distance can turn into direct violence. But by putting security services with the proposed aim of lessening the killing of bystanders in place of an intense Israeli Defense Forces (IdF) presence, Israel justifies targeted assassinations on legal and humanitarian grounds. Linking targeted assassinations to the doctrine of “lesser evil” affirmed in lower body counts, Israel demonstrates what Weizman describes as “an economic model embedded at the heart of ethics according to which various forms of suffering can be calculated (as if they were algorithms in mathematical minimum problems), evaluated, and acted upon.” While they are meant to be a preemptive response to future threats of massive violence, targeted assassinations actually have not reduced violence; 8 Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse

instead, “Israel’s security organizations . . . have been acting as the agents of chaos.” Weizman, labeling Israel’s targeted assassinations as a “thanatotactics,” would add to what Achille Mbembe has described as “necropolitics.” In his essay, Eugene Thacker also points to what he calls “necrologies of the body politic,” noting that with the development of biotechnologies bare life has become ubiquitous as “unhuman forms of life” are made to be “the agents of attack” as well as an economically productive force. Other authors are also drawn to the necropolitics of biopolitics. Hurrying to address Foucault’s treatment of death, they propose that in neoliberalism death would not just be an excision to eliminate social and economic costs, but would itself be productive in an affect economy that circulates, multiplies, and invests in death. Death supports governance and economy, but not just by eliminating weak, problematic, or dangerous populations. Rather, death grants life because of its own presence as an economic vitality. And so there is no longer the idea that death will be held off, or that security will reduce the likelihood of death and other harms. Rather, insecurity is multiplied and invested in as it is circulated with great vitality and speed. Within this generalized insecuring of governance, of course, differential distributions of security and vulnerability persist, and entire populations become expendable, “collateral damage” in contemporary war-speak: prison populations, populations dying of HIV/AIdS, Iraqis, Afghans, Palestinians living under military occupation, and those populations seeking work who migrate from nation to nation, or from country to city within their own nation. In his essay, Çağatay Topal focuses on the history of Turkish migration to Germany, arguing that more recently the fuller inclusion of Turkish migrants has meant their subjection to an extensive and intensive array of public security risk measurements, as the German state collects data on ethnic, cultural, religious, and gender differences in relationship to potential criminality, deportability, and detainability. To address this move to keep records of migrants’ characteristics beyond those relevant to any labor-force activity, Topal makes use of Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson’s term “surveillant assemblage,” a concept Weizman also uses.14 The term is meant to describe the current interdependence of institutions that, together, can better count, monitor, evaluate, and oversee registration of migrants and their life capacities, as well as their risks to the German state. The surveillant assemblage produces disciplined laborers, as they work with fear and insecurity. It does this by creating a population capacity, “deportability,” whereby the threat, rather than Introduction 9

the actualization of mass deportation of migrants, is maintained by keeping migrants’ illegality an ongoing concern of the state and society.15 In the generalized insecurity of deportability and detainability, migrant workers carry a capacity that determines their relationship to governance, their willingness to submit to counting, evaluation, examination, and estimation of all sorts. It also makes laborers anxiously available for work in the short term and the value of their labor less negotiable. Exploring internal migration in China, Ann Anagnost, in her essay, also addresses laborers and migration, pointing to the materiality of what was metaphor for Marx. She writes of the “vampiric capital” that characterizes Chinese economic reforms of the last twenty-five years, reforms which, Anagnost argues, are motivating the migration of Chinese from the country side to the city, a movement limited by intense government policing. But Anagnost uses Marx’s terms not only to refer, as he did, to laborers’ wearing out and wasting their lives. She also traces the sale of blood by those in the country where their work has been devalued in the increasingly urbanoriented economy of China. So even with their migration to and from the cities, those living in the country are finding that they often cannot meet the cost of life’s necessities. But they also cannot purchase the consumer items that are often taken as the mark of those who possess suzhi. As a translation of “human capital” into the Chinese context, suzhi marks the value that is invested in children of the urban middle classes. As such, Anagnost argues, suzhi determines the wage price of Chinese labor while it “plays a role in the cultural politics of embodied human worth and . . . the distribution of life chances.” Putting biopolitics in touch with a labor theory of value, Anagnost argues that capitalism, or what Parisi and Goodman call cybernetic capitalism, is reproduced through a long chain of value back to the Chinese who sell their blood and work to replenish it, often all for the purchase of commodities. Just as Anagnost analyzes China’s “monstrous accumulation” of “life potentiality” by resituating it in terms of the complicity of North America in the production of the biovalue of Chinese blood exchange, we, in our essay, trace the deployment of the term “Chinese” in a feature article appearing in 2007 in the New York Times Magazine. The article addresses labor practices that it suggests are abusive—that is, the so-called farming of virtual gold coins by workers who play computer games for long hours, who are paid by the hour or by the coin, and whose farmed coins are sold to players who want the coins but do not want to play to obtain them. We argue that the article’s branding of 10 Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse

long hours of poorly paid work as “‘dehumanizing’ labor typically Chinese” might well be understood as a defense of American capitalism, a defense meant especially to “realign proper divisions of work and play, or legitimate work and entitlements to play, with an American nationalist- capitalist masculinity.” This also serves as “a matter of a racialized economic superiority of . . . a proper capitalism” and a shaping of “the meaning of humanness in human rights or human security discourse.” We take our analysis of virtual gold farming back to a discussion of political branding and population racism. Without forgetting the poor working conditions of many Chinese both in the country and the cities, we question what is being produced by branding labor or the accumulation of capital as monstrous, dehumanizing, and Chinese. What is the difference between branding labor and capital for the sake of political critique, as Anagnost does, and branding them for the sake of defending an American capitalism? Can such a difference be maintained? Or to put it another way: What of the indeterminacy arising in the space-times of the long chain of value? The answer perhaps lies in a discussion of representation and the place of representation in a biopolitics joined with cybernetic capitalism. inTermediaLiTy, indeTerminacy, and criTique

While the authors of a number of the essays collected here had recourse to film representations, magazine photographs, video, blogs, graphs, and other mediated texts upon which to rest an argument, authors of other essays included here have more explicitly engaged the deployment of representation as such. These authors suggest that what is at issue in questioning representation is an encounter with indeterminacy, or the threshold between the present and the near future as it is felt and lived, a threshold in which the present is full of the ghostly presences of the past and future and loaded down with life after death, life before life, future-life, and potential life before its actualization. To approach indeterminacy is to attempt an account of multiple times, an account that itself performs in multiple times in a moment in which indeterminacy reveals itself. In her essay, May Joseph uses the question of representation to explore the event that has implicitly, if not explicitly, left its mark on all the essays collected here, the attack on the World Trade Center. But Joseph puts her essay at some distance from the event. She offers a meditation on Pia Lindman’s performance art, which is not only about mourning and grief but about New York City’s effort to monumentalize the event and the site of the catastrophe. Introduction 11

Ever aware of “the gaping hole of Ground Zero,” Lindman’s art “excavates the aftershocks” of the event as an “‘interrupted spectacle’ between the city and its people.” For Joseph, Lindman’s performances, along with her use of sketches and digital imaging technology, are exemplary of Jacques Rancière’s concern with the (im)possibility of the unrepresentable. Without representation, what happens to mourning, understanding, and, perhaps most importantly, critique? Joseph concludes that no matter how catastrophe is staged for a performance of remembering, there is always forgetting, but there is also an excess beyond the will to know, a surfeit of affect, even what Joseph calls a “surfeit of witnessing.” The performance, however, offers some possibility of moderation in that it fails to be coincident with a lasting representation. As such, Lindman’s performance is able to touch on the “nervous embodiments of living within hardscape,” as an ever disappearing event. Nonetheless, in its insistence on conjuring ghosts of the past and of the near future, the performance spreads phenomenological doubt as an urban art form. While Joseph poses the question of representation to the traumatic and to a not-knowing that ever returns, demanding the (im)possibility of representation, other authors writing here all but give up on representation, not only because of unrepresentability but because of an ontological shift from performance in the construction of meaning to performance with the aim of the affective modulation of bodies or populations. In this shift, excess is displaced by indeterminacy, opening critique to a nonphenomenological approach. In her essay, Una Chung addresses indeterminacy as a matter of incommensurability of language, cultures, and media, taking as her subject Lin+Lam’s Unidentified Vietnam, an exhibition based on the Library of Congress’s holdings of the Vietnam/American War, shown in 2006 in a gallery at the edge of Chinatown in New York City. In recognizing the biopolitics at play in the transport of the war archive from Vietnam to Washington, D.C., to Chinatown (a construction of the so- called ethnic enclave) Chung underscores the challenge of finding a “particular (historical) method of art” that might counter biopolitics; the difficulty is that biopolitical “governmentality is the art of method.” Chung understands the archive, or the installation of an archive, as a spatial expansion of limbo that is “capable of eliminating the multiple temporalities of transition, transience, transport, transfer, precisely by insisting on its own domain of liminality.” Always a supplement that repeats a repetition or endures it, the installation of the archive lays bare the difficulty of an account of and in multiple temporalities. 12 Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse

The way that Lin+Lam point to the multiplicity of temporalities that are nonetheless enclosed in the installation is a matter of what Chung describes as an “intermedial movement” in an assemblage of technologies. There is an in-betweenness in the contact of the “various modes, mechanisms, and technologies giving form to time,” in “photography, the still image, the magnifying glass, the book, the typewriter, film, sculpture, performance television, video.” Furthermore, the installation refuses to give the in-betweenness of technologies over to an evolutionary or developmental arc. Without doing so, the assemblage of diverse technologies offers a resistance to the passing of the temporal into knowledge such that the multiplicity of temporalities are felt and sensibly attach to certain periods of time in Vietnam and the peoples thrown into movement with the transitions from one state to another. In her use of intermediality, Chung also refuses to privilege the human over the technological, or more specifically, intermediality is made to announce the indistinguishability of the human and the technological. As such, biopolitics, Chung argues, “comes to name a much larger number of things than those discussed explicitly by Foucault, not least the nonhuman and nonorganism regions of biological life and the realm of affect belonging to inorganic life.” In treating affect as immanent in inorganic life, affect is put in touch again with the irreducibility of the incommensurability of languages, cultures, and media, in order to expose the seeming communion with colonial and postcolonial others as an often violent reduction of the multiplicity of temporalities, a practice typical of ethnography but also of all sorts of anthropologically oriented representations. As autoethnography is also refused, self-referentiality as a critical aim is displaced by self- differentiation, which for Chung is preferred to “a politics of redemption” or “a utopian return of human naturalness” as a way to counter biopolitical governmentality. In his essay, Amit Rai also addresses method and critical response. Beginning with the notion of topology, Rai works within the topology of media ecologies or media assemblages and defines method as a “counteractualization,” or an unbundling of durations that are caught in habituations while moving back “to the intensities that are differentiating and differentiate forms or technologies.” Although Rai insists, as Chung does, on the irreducibility of multiple temporalities as the horizon against which to move from the representation, the enclosure, or the capture of intensities of affect, he nonetheless wants to consider the issues of representation linked to biopolitical and racist distribution of life chances among populations. He takes up the argument that the use of digital technologies, especially for surIntroduction 13

veying, classifying, and excluding, are coincident with digital technology’s “emptying the (visible) raced image” of its power to interpellate subjects as raced subjects. Rai argues that it is by no means certain that “the death of an exhibitionist politics of recognition” has been accomplished, even as he moves toward releasing the potentialities of affective intensities that he takes to be the aim of a nonphenomenological analysis of technology, affect, and inorganic life. Rai, insists, as Chung does, on a nonphenomenological approach, but he does so to suggest that race is a matter of a surfeit of sensation in media ecologies belonging to a topology of “diagrammatic flows of matter, energy, biomass, and information” that are irreducible to the human. Rai’s take on race, linked as it is to digital technology and inspired by Foucault’s treatment of racism in relationship to biopolitics, also resonates with Moten and Harney’s treatment of blackness and Puar’s and our treatments of population racism operative with the deployment of branding, where identity characteristics are not only a matter of subject identity but are “liberated” from identity (and the body as human organism) and are thereby deployable for a kind of representation that Rai describes, following Gilles Deleuze, as “orgiastic representation.” By this Rai means “a mode of irritation that joins in the futurity of dynamic thresholds that it diagrams” or “a chaotic representation that does not mediate between sensation and sign, but proliferates through contagion and shock,” a representation that is ontogenetic. As the question of representation returns to power, there is a return as well to Agamben’s discussion of politics, critiqued in a number of essays collected here. It might be noted that the criticism is not only a matter of differing about the exceptionality of proclaimed states of exception, pointing to exceptions that are not exceptional but foundational. There is also a claim that exceptionality often only masks the increasingly ordinary workings of a logic of preemption in a domain of indeterminacy “whose constituent operations are distinct from any combinatorics,” as Massumi puts it.16 Massumi goes on to suggest that rather than facing the challenge of indeterminacy at play in the neoliberal relation of governance and the market, Agamben assumes normative systems that are analogous to the signifying system of language, where “the linguistic combinatoric is fundamental.”17 In Agamben’s treatment of politics, the linguistic combinatoric allows for variation but is itself invariant. Yet, in a number of the essays in this volume, there is an insistence on the physicality of real conditions of emergence, on an indeterminacy of matter, including bare life as matter. This insistence comes with a turn from a symbolically oriented politics to the realized per14 Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse

formativity of critique. In a number of the essays collected here, there is the enfolding of politics, critique, and a performative or an activation of affect, rather than a commanding of linguistic combinatoric aimed at meaning. Thus the attempt to critically engage the present and the near future of a neoliberalism and its governance of populations, its investments in the proliferation of risk and its production and circulation of death, is inevitably drawn to indeterminacy and emergence as its form of change. This is not the change that was evoked in the Obama campaign, which was imagined by many of his supporters as that liberal-progressive kind of change toward a good. Rather, indeterminacy provokes change as mutation in the sense of invention and the multiplication of times and presents and near futures that cannot be contained or controlled by political regimes, even if they can be directed or egged on toward some ends. But not reaching these ends does not signal a failure. Governance seems not to need ends absolutely; it does not need an end to war, to death, to debt. Though the Obama administration once promoted itself as an end, as a break with the past, even as it acknowledged being haunted by the ghosts of that past, the administration, at best, falls within the bounds of legal formal equality. The mutation and extension of the prison industrial complex, the detention and deportation of immigrant populations, the violent militia and military border control, the mass death and the abandonment of thousands, not only during but after Hurricane Katrina, all suggest something other than a sheer break with the past. But the future still keeps coming fast. The essays in this collection engage this speediness, but they also address and seek out interventions in the multiplicity of times engaged by governance and economy today. They seek methods that slow down time or support writing within passing time, so as to apprehend what is passing by and what is not, to attend to and produce affective states of attention and intensity, but also to engage the diagrammatic flows of matter, energy, biomass, and information in biopolitics and beyond. noTes

1. Stout, “Holder Tells Senators Waterboarding Is Torture”; Executive Order 13491; Isikoff and Hosenball, “The End of Torture”; Mazzetti and Shane, “Interrogation Memos Detail Harsh Tactics by C.I.A.” 2. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 108. 3. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. 4. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 108.

Introduction 15

5. The debate around the “state of exception” goes on, but we are taking these particular terms of the debate from Hussain, “Beyond Norm and Exception,” 735. 6. Ibid., 741, 743. See also Andrea Smith, who reminds us that appealing to the Constitution to critique the war on terror, by designating its tactics “anti-Constitutional”— and hence by implying that “constitutional” is good—actually serves to reify the founding of the United States and to erase the genocide that constitutes that founding. Smith, “American Studies without America,” 310. 7. The term “afterlife of slavery” is introduced by Saidiya Hartman; she identifies it with “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.” Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008), 6. For a further elaboration, see Jared Sexton, “People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery,” Social Text 28, no. 2 (2010): 31–56. 8. See Jared Sexton, “Racial Profiling and the Societies of Control,” in Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy, ed. Joy James, 197–218 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 9. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 243. 10. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 70. 11. Ibid., 104. 12. Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception, 5; Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 121. 13. On Katrina and governance, see also South End Press Collective, eds., What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race, and the State of the Nation (Boston: South End Press, 2007). 14. Haggerty and Ericson, “The Surveillant Assemblage.” 15. De Genova, “The Production of Culprits.” 16. Massumi, “National Enterprise Emergency: Steps Toward an Ecology of Powers,” Theory, Culture & Society 26, no. 6: 172. 17. Ibid.

16 Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse

Brian Massumi

national enterprise eMerGency

Steps Toward an Ecology of Powers

of War and The WeaTher

A leisurely three weeks after Hurricane Katrina, George W. Bush touched down in New Orleans, into the media swirl of a brief but lavishly staged son-et-lumière spectacular from the heart of the French Quarter. His nationally televised address struck the appropriate tone of urgency, in studied contrast to the languor of his practical response. Bush landed on the beachhead of natural disaster not as chief executive of the civilian bureaucracy, but in his post- 9/11 capacity as commander in chief. Help, he assured, was on the way “by land, by air, by sea.”1 National Guard units recently returned from Iraq would spearhead the “armies of compassion” massing. They would be joined by the U.S. Army’s 82nd airborne division, fresh from assignment in Afghanistan. This transfer from an escalating war half a world away to a stormbeaten home-front mid-America drew a link between war and the weather. Their respective theaters of conflict, geopolitical and socioclimatic, fell into line. The weather, exceptionally figuring as an urban assault force, had taken a prominent place in the spectrum of threat. “This was not a normal hurricane,” Bush reminded us. “Nature is indiscriminate,” a chorus of administration officials had repeated in the preceding days. What was this hurricane if not the full-force expression of nature’s indiscriminateness, amplified to the status of a national emergency? Katrina was the meteorological equivalent

of the improvised devices then exploding onto the scene of the U.S. effort in Iraq. This hurricane was to the weather what a terrorist insurgency is to “nation-building.” Each bombing is a self- organized microevent punctually expressing endemic background conditions of instability. Like the fabled flap of the butterfly wing seeding popular accounts of chaos theory with an ebullition of proto-Katrinas, the agitations bubble and build, resonating to crisis proportions. Background conditions of instability can feed up the scale, reaching the level where the security dikes are breached, channels of order swamped, and bulwarks of stability erode and even collapse. This is the figure of today’s threat: the suddenly irrupting, locally selforganizing, systemically self-amplifying threat of large-scale disruption. This form of threat is not only indiscriminate; coming anywhere, as out of nowhere, at any time, it is also indiscriminable. Its continual microflapping in the background makes it indistinguishable from the general environment, now one with a restless climate of agitation. Between irruptions, it blends in with the chaotic background, subsiding into its own preamplified incipience, already active, still imperceptible. The figure of the environment shifts: from the harmony of a natural balance to a churning seed-bed of crisis in the perpetual making. This hurricane may well have been abnormal. But it expressed nothing so much as the normality of a generalized crisis environment so encompassing in its endemic threat-form as to connect, across the spectrum, the polar extremes of war and the weather. War cLimaTe

In his address, Bush reinforced the war-weather continuum while at the same time strategically breaking its symmetry: “In a time of terror threats and weapons of mass destruction, the danger to our citizens reaches much wider than a flood plain.” The generic model of the indiscriminate threat remains, most broadly, the enemy in war. “Most broadly” here means most intensely: more insistently incipient, more everywhere, potentially. Weather conditions are unlikely be major formative factors in an IEd incident, but a large-scale weather-related disruption may well be enemy-agitated. Drought-induced fires in Greece in the summer of 2007 attracted investigation by counterterrorism agencies. Why? Because no one could say for sure that arson was not involved. Given that uncertainty, “we can say that this is truly constitutes an asymmetric threat,” said the Minister of Public Order “without elaborating.”2 Uncertainty truly determines a threat, prior to any elaboration, to be a potential national security concern.3 In a crisis-prone environment, threat 20 Brian Massumi

is endemic, uncertainty is everywhere; a negative can never be proven. Positive military response must then be ever at the ready. The on- all-the-time, everywhere-on-the-ready military response operatively annexes the civilian sphere to the conduct of war. Civilian life falls onto a continuum with war, permanently potentially premilitarized, a pole on the spectrum. Any domain harboring threats with a potential to disrupt the rhythms of civilian life is similarly annexed, climate included. The Bush administration formalized this operative annexation of the civilian sphere, in its chaotic interdependence with other self-organizing systemic environments such as the weather, with two reciprocal moves: on the one hand militarizing the National Guard, traditionally defined as a national police force for service in domestic crises, by extending its service overseas to Iraq; and on the other hand overturning the longstanding ban on the deployment of U.S. military forces on domestic soil, extending the military’s reach in the inverse direction, toward active duty among its own civilians. This mutual inverse extension of operations betokened the construction of a civilian-military continuum covering the full spectrum of indiscriminate threat. The operational continuum was laced with potential openings for outright military intervention at any point. The openings came in the form of arbitrarily invokable “exceptions” to such civil guarantees as habeas corpus and the right to privacy. The aim was to make war response as ubiquitously irruptible as the indiscriminate threats it seeks to counter. The civil sphere would no longer stand outside the military sphere, defined as its opposite. It would become integrally paramilitary, in operative continuity with war powers, on a continuum with them, suffused with battle potential, even in peace. The continuum, as it expresses itself on the amplified level of government administration, runs between two institutional poles. At one pole stand the many departments and compartments of the U.S. national defense establishment, and at the other pole stands that enduring monument of the Bush administration, the tentacular Department of Homeland Security. naTuraL securiTy

That the Obama administration would prove reluctant or unable to fundamentally reverse this full-spectrum recomposition of power, even while distancing itself from many aspects of Bush administration policy, was unintentionally foreshadowed before Obama took office. The announcement to the press of Obama’s national security team contained a telling typo. “In this unNational Enterprise Emergency 21

certain world,” the statement read, the continued prosecution of the “war on terrorism” requires a “skillful integration” of American power in all its forms [read: on the full spectrum], enabling immediate response to any potential “catastrophe be it manmade or natural,” as well as to “unconventional” (read: indiscriminate/indiscriminable) threats of any stripe. The public was assured that the future president had assembled the best possible team of “natural security” officers.4 It is more than a slip of the keyboard to naturalize the continuum annexing the civilian sphere to the military. The “naturalization” at issue should not be understood in the social constructivist sense, in which the cultural comes to be taken for natural. The formula of the cultural “taken for” natural leaves the opposition between the two intact, attributing any blurring of the boundaries to mystification. Under indiscriminate threat, the opposition is no longer generally tenable and cannot be taken as a starting point. A base redefinition of nature is required outside any categorical opposition to the cultural, social, or artificial. The overall environment of life now appears as a complex, systemic threat environment, composed of subsystems that are not only complex in their own right but are complexly interconnected. They are all susceptible to self-amplifying irruptive disruption. Given the interconnections, a disruption in one subsystem may propagate into others, and even cascade across them all, reaching higher and wider levels of amplification, up to and including the planetary scale. The complexity of the interdependency among the changing climate system, the food supply system, the energy supply system, social systems, national governments, their respective legal systems, and military-security apparatuses is an increasingly preoccupying case in point. Each subsystem harbors endemic threats specific to its operative domain. Each is also haunted by the exogenous threats represented by flowover effects from neighboring subsystems. In spite of this diversity and variability, the relation of each subsystem to threat is isomorphic. This means that threat operates analogously regardless of the characteristics of a given domain, the specificity of the domain’s elements, and those elements’ particular functional structuring in the workings of a given system.5 This is as much a journalistic observation as a philosophical assertion. Let Newsweek speak. “Disease and Terror,” screams a 2009 headline: The similarities between the swine flu and biological terrorism are not coincidental. In recent years the world has changed in ways that have made

22 Brian Massumi

the threats of natural and man-made epidemics more and more alike. As we deal with increasing prospects of a bioterrorist attack, we are also struggling with the challenge of emerging diseases. . . . The way these threats unfold—and the responses they call for—are becoming ever more similar. The central driver is the increasingly interconnected world we live in. . . . Diseases now . . . without warning, show up in far-flung towns and cities. . . . It’s difficult to overstate the threat [of bioterrorist attack] . . . It is virtually impossible to stop or interdict . . . organisms [that] would float as an invisible, odorless cloud, driven by breezes.6 Threat is as ubiquitous as the wind, and its source as imperceptible. It just shows up. It breaks out. It irrupts without warning, coming from any direction, following any path through the increasingly complex and interconnected world. The longer it has been that a threat has not materialized, the greater the prospects must be that it will: It is difficult to overstate an indiscriminate threat. It is impossible to stop. Absence makes the threat loom larger. Its form is a priori neither human nor natural. Its form is in the looming, as-yet-undetermined potential to suddenly show up and spread. Threat is self-organizing, self-amplifying, indiscriminate, and tirelessly agitating as a background condition, potentially ready to irrupt. The potential of threat is already, in the waiting, an incipient systemic disruption. The world did not wait for swine flu pandemic level five to disrupt daily routines, travel, and trade. The etiology is always synergistic. In the web of highly interdependent subsystems, the moment a threat has amplified to noticeable proportions it is already fixing to propagate across the web of interconnections, its effects already prospectively felt. Complex nonlinear causation is the rule, between moments of the event (the outbreak already bringing a foretaste of the anticipated outcome) as between systems. The conditions of emergence of swine flu reside as much in the stress of industrial pork farming, the intensive human-pig commerce it necessitates, the globalized capital market it feeds, as in “natural” process of viral mutation. The “cause” of the pandemic is an ultimately untraceable nonlinear microflow that self- amplified and spread across the planet. The fateful interspecies connection between human and swine (with an avian contribution somewhere in the mix) occurred in a zone of indistinction between species, and between systems (genetics, animal husbandry, economics, and the human practices associated with all three). Global warming is another prominent example. It is intensified by non-

National Enterprise Emergency 23

linear feedback between a complex combination of factors. Hardly a day goes by without another “multiplier effect” being discovered. Even if contributing factors, taken separately, may be ascribable as either natural or manmade from the point of view of the classification scheme of a given system, in the synergistic process of their producing an effect they are integrally both and neither.7 If indiscriminate threat could be categorized as natural, as opposed to cultural or artificial, it would not be indiscriminate.8 sinGuLar- Generic

Indiscriminate threat is generic threat, in a sense of “generic” that has nothing to do with “general.” So far is indiscriminate threat from a generality that it deserves a name accentuating its difference: singular-generic. The singular-generic of threat is the unstable holding-together of divergent possible ascriptions as to the form and identity of the threat in an inclusive disjunction. An inclusive disjunction is the either/or of a number of possible terms belonging to different genera copresenting themselves in such direct proximity as to stroboscope into what is effectively a both/and. The instantaneity of generic differences coming together is a singular event. More precisely, it is the just-beginning of an event, an eventfulness suddenly making itself felt. What is felt is more than the possibility of alternate ascriptions. It is the potential for the coming to pass of eventualities answering to those ascriptions. This incipience of an event as yet to be determined, overfull with really felt potential, carries an untenable tension. It strikes like a force. Its intensely problematic holding-together, of what cannot actually come together, is unbearable. The tension is unlivable. It must resolve itself. It is a life-problem that must play out. The both/and must shake down into one or the other. Foreign infiltrator or “homegrown” terrorist? Arson or climate change? Flu or bioterrorism? Accident or attack? If at the moment of impact an assumption is made as to one or the other, any forthcoming response may well prove to have been misplaced by the event’s subsequent unfolding. On the other hand, if at some point in that unfolding a determination is not made, systematic response will fail to develop. The singular-generic is a compelling charge of felt potential striking with the full force of an indeterminacy that is not a simple lack of determination, but a determination to be determined of a coming event, welling into formation. The problem for systems triggering into operation to field the event is that the charge of indeterminacy which is the birthmark of the event carries 24 Brian Massumi

across systemic determinations of it, emerging out of the far side of the systems’ fielding, in the form of synergetic effects. The both/and returns. Arson encouraged and augmented by climate change: both/and. A copycat terrorist transposing the foreign onto the home front: both/and. Global warming intensified by feedback effects between human industrial activity and climate dynamics: both/and. In every case, there is the irruptive event of a threat just showing up, or noticeably crossing a threshold to another. Each onset and transition hits with the force of an attack, and carries across into flow- over effects indistinguishable from one (“the way these threats unfold and the responses they call for are becoming ever more similar”). What begins with an indeterminacy determined-to-be- determined ends by overspilling any system-specific definitions it may have been ascribed in called-for rapid response. What is born in indiscriminate potential, returns to it. The life cycle of a threat-event is a nonlinear looping, its “cause,” complex and nonlocal. Any ascription earned is pragmatic and provisional, relative to a particular systemic take on the event. The accident is not one example among others. In today’s environment, given the indeterminacy at impact, every event strikes with the selfoverflowing attack-force of the accident. The accident is the general model of the singular-generic of threat. Or rather, since the singular-generic is by nature unamenable to any generality, it is the matrix. The universaL accidenT

The singular-generic of indiscriminate threat must be as carefully distinguished from the notion of a priori as it is from the general. Far from an a priori form of possible experience, it is the force of the formally unbearable, eventfully felt, to formative effect. It is less an ontological foundation than the matrixial strike of an ontogenetic event. Although not an a priori, the singular-generic is universal. It is immanent to all of the contributory operations of the system of systems that is the overall environment, at every point of its complexly differentiated space of operations, and at every moment of their multiple interlooping runtimes. It is on- all-the-time, everywhere-atthe-ready. Another name for its “problematic holding-together of what cannot actually come together” is the “accident.” The singular-generic of indiscriminate threat is the universal accident of the environment of life. At the root of what we know and what we are lies neither truth nor being, but the exteriority of the accident.9

National Enterprise Emergency 25

The universal forcefulness of the accident is such that the tiniest local ingression of its indeterminacy actualizes the conditions of system-wide crisis. Whether the event of that conditioning amplifies into an actual crisis depends on a panoply of cofactors. The potential disruption that already makes itself felt with the strike of the accident may be absorbed into the system as a perturbation provoking a minor, readaptive iteration of a subset of system operations. In that case, the incipient disruption dissipates into a minor reordering that actually feeds the system’s positive evolution. On the other hand, the force of the accident may elude evolutionary capture and grow into a full-fledged systemic or even pansystemic disruption. It all depends on the cofactors with which it enters into complex resonation, within and between systems, as it feeds up in scale. It may amplify to crisis proportions, fall back into the immanence of the flapping agitation from which it breezily rose, or dissipate into a localized stir. It depends on intrasystemic response abilities and intersystem synergies. Whatever the case, it is always a case of complex co- conditioning. anTi- accidenT

Full-spectrum paramilitary power enters the co- conditioning fray with the mission to act as a synergy dampener: to stanch perturbatory amplification and its intersystem propagation. It continually toggles from one pole of its civil-military operational continuum toward the other, settling preferentially on a setting in between. It moves in lockstep with incursions of threatpotential, adopting forms as generically singularly charged, and as proteiform in their eventual determinations, as those of threat itself. It aspires to the singular-generic. It aspires to supercharge itself with a force of indeterminacy determined to be eventfully determined, as a counter to the accident. Its vocation is to be the antiaccident. The most visible form full-spectrum power takes in pursuit of its antiaccidental vocation is in the role of “first responder.” This is power going out to meet the accident in rapid response, at the first flush of an eventfulness setting in. In this role, it takes many forms. The fabled first responder is the most visible figure of the hero in the “waging of peace” against indiscriminate threat. The naTure of ThreaT

Given the incipiently pansystemic reach of the slightest strike of threatpotential, it is clearly arbirary to classify the indiscriminate threat as either 26 Brian Massumi

natural or cultural in any final or stable way. It is just as unsatisfying, however, to say that it is a cultural phenomenon taken for natural as it is to say that it is a hybrid between the two. The singular-generic is logically and ontologically prior to such categories (whose predefinition the notion of hybridity supposes). An alternate strategy is to integrally redefine “nature” in such a way as to include in its potential the incipience of what comes to distinguish itself from it as “cultural.” Define nature as: the universal tendency for arising events to strike with a force of indeterminacy that is so determined-to-be- determined as to drive systemic evolution or breakdown. Nature is then a name for the immanent reality of the accident, as formative force. It is the most singular-generic ascription to which this force is susceptible (bar God).10 Defined in this way, the Obama team’s accidental assimilation of “national security” to “natural security” makes perfect sense. A consequence of this definition is that the more complexly differentiated and uncertain an environment, the more naturally charged it is. Nature’s singular-genericness need in no way be reduced to threat. But in this epoch of the universe (to talk like Whitehead), from the lived perspective of earth’s peak mammal, indiscriminate threat has become the bellwether of nature. naTures naTured and naTurinG

It is important to note that this definition of nature does not make any force applied to counter the incipience that is the accident “cultural.” Like the accident it counters, the antiaccident operates in a zone of indistinction logically and ontologically prior to the applicability of general-level classifications. Under pressure from formative forces, classifiable terms reemerge, with a difference. All are consequent distinctions, under variation. To return to the example of global warming, what nature is for meteorology is palpably different since climate change has hit. The complexity of the interdependencies that naturally manifest themselves has vastly increased. Multiplier effects pop up everywhere. Mutual conditioning is the order of the day. Potential amplifications lurk in the slightest contributory factor and, perhaps even more worryingly, in applied counterforces (witness biofuels, which quickly about-faced from a celebrated global warming “solution” to a contributory factor, while simultaneously system-hopping into a major perturbation of the world food supply). Nature weathers far greater uncertainty, more widely fielded. The charge of indeterminacy carried in each of its emergent events is intensified. Hurricanes wax “abnormal.” What culture National Enterprise Emergency 27

is in relation to its changed meteorological nature undergoes a correlative shift. The force and meaning of its past activity changes in back-projected synchrony with the uncertainty of its future prospects. What nature is for meteorology is a consequent nature: nature as it appears for a particular system, consequent to that system’s pragmatic take on its emergences. Nature comes in plurals. There are as many consequent natures as there are systems capable of wresting a serviceable nature- culture dichotomy from the zone of reemergent distinction that is nature in the universal singular-generic sense. Nature in the singular-generic is a supercharged prototerritory of distinctions rearising, of striking singular-generic indeterminacies coming to be particularly determined. Borrowing a Spinozist term, the supercharged prototerritory of emergence may be termed a “naturing nature.” It is a prototerritory in the sense that the reiterative playing out of its formative forcing creates conditions for a plurality of extensive distinctions and their iterative regeneration. The reiteration is due to particular systems’ fielding successive emergences, that is, emergencies, working them out and working them through, each in its own manner. By “extensive distinctions” is meant a contrast between terms such that they can be effectively opposed to one another, as mutually external. This renders them juxtaposable, and in turn spatializable or territorializable. Each system internalizes the incursive force of naturing nature in the form of iterative variations on its own pattern of operations. The operative distinctions the system must make, to continue to make itself work, vary accordingly. This forced readaptive coupling, this folding together of a patterning of operations and an efficient system of extensive distinctions in codependent variation, constitutes a territory: a dedicated, internally differentiated, systemic environment. How “nature” figures for a territory, as opposed to “culture,” is system-specific. System-specific nature is natured nature: naturing nature coming to cultivation; formative force feeding in, working through, and being worked over. Although consequent and cultivated, natured nature is real and effective. It really, effectively figures for the system as given. The system’s operations effectively assume it as a raw material, in passive opposition to what the system takes, by contrast, to be its own value-adding activity. The systemspecific isolation of value-adding activity from passive nature defines what “culture” is for that environment.11 A natured nature is equally produced and presupposed. It has the odd status of the produced presupposition, or cultivated givenness. This is the 28 Brian Massumi

status Michel Foucault attributes to the “object” of power. The emphasis on natured natures’ operative reality and effective givenness distinguishes this concept from social constructivism’s notion of naturalization. A natured nature is not “merely” constructed. It is both emergent and constructed, as presupposed as it is produced, given for the making and made a given. Its construction is a reemergent expression of naturing nature’s determinationto-be- determined. Naturing nature is so determined-to-be- determined that it lends itself to consequent definition even at the price of bifurcating once again into an opposition between passive nature and active culture. Such an opposition, however, holds sway only provisionally, and only on a derived level. It arises when a system’s operations turn back over on themselves, in order generally to reference the particularities of the system’s own process, in operative self-reflection. The appearance of a passive-nature/ active- culture opposition is always a reflexive sign of a particular system’s general self-referencing. It marks: a translation of the singular-generic into a particular-general schema; a transduction of the inclusive- disjunctive intensity of an indeterminate, yet determinable, force of irruption, into a serviceable extensive distinction; and a transposition of prototerritory into a territory. “Passive” nature is naturing nature natured, so as to stand, in a system’s self-adapting, for its evolutionary outside. It is the systematic form in which the outside of the accident is unrefusably found, and reflexively kept, for systemic variation, in reiteration. force of Time

The proto-“territory” of naturing nature is, in its own activity, more insistently temporal than distinctly spatial. Its everywhereness forecuts any possibility of its having a specifiable territory of its own. It occupies an intensive “zone” of spatial indistinction. Having no territory of its own, naturing nature can only “give” of itself, to various territories’ systemic self-organizing. What it gives is a charge of indeterminacy to-be- determined, which strikes with driving force. Its ubiquitous “zone” of indistinction is the universal “before” of a coming to emerge. Its prototerritory is the force of time, just making itself formatively felt. The force is only determinately felt in the consequent form of its effects. The native tense of the force of time is a universal will-have-been: a will-have-been felt, for the forming, followed by a willhave-been formed for synergized on-flow and over-spill, tending toward a limit of pancatastrophe.12

National Enterprise Emergency 29

onTopoWer

When threat becomes ubiquitously generic, and the generic makes itself singularly felt, with effectively indeterminate formative force, toward an irruptive impulsion that is immanently conditioning, driving potentially pansystemic disruption and reordering, it becomes the bellwether of naturing nature for the complex, crisis-incubating environment of life. Preemptive power directly follows. An antiaccidental exercise of power, at whatever setting on its operational continuum, can only counter the event- driving force of the accident if it catches it in the before of incipience. To do this, it must move into that prototerritory. It must move as the accident moves, to where it may irrupt, catching it “before it actually emerges” (as the Bush doctrine of preemption instructs). It must come as “naturally” as the enemy. It must give of itself just as insistently. It must mimic the accident, in operative anticipation of the actual playing out of its potential effects. It must preempt. Dampening accident-amplification is not enough. An alternate growth pattern must be planted on the prototerritory. Full-spectrum power preempts threat by counterproducing its own systemic effects in its stead, in a supplanting of incipience. Its business is to induce potentially systemic countereffects through an alter- emergent incursion of change- conditioning force of nature. Preemptive power is the cuckoo in the nest of naturing nature.13 Preemptive power is environmental power. It alters the life environment’s conditions of emergence. It is not, however, a “biopower” strictly speaking. Biopower’s “field of application,” according to Foucault, is a territory, grasped from the angle of its actually providing livable conditions for an existing biological being. Biopower normatively regulates the life conditions obtaining in the territory. Preemptive power operates on a prototerritory tensed with a compelling excess of potential that renders it strictly unlivable. It turns on an incursive surcharge from which life’s iterations are obliged to wrench their reemergent formation. It targets an unlivability impelling a potential more of life to come. It does not correlate to the normative speciesbeing of a population. It correlates to its singular reemergence. In his postKatrina speech Bush indicated as much. He did not say, as might have been expected, that his emergency measures were aimed at bringing life back to normal. He said that they were aimed at “bringing life back.” An environmental power that returns to life’s unlivable conditions of emergence in order to bring it back, redirecting its incipience to alter- emergent 30 Brian Massumi

effect, is an ontopower. Ontopowers rejoin naturing nature’s force of emergence, to ride it out, and even hijack it. Full-spectrum preemptive power is a mode of ontopower that hijacks naturing nature’s force of emergence by counter-mimicking the accident. In more familiar political vocabulary, a term that can be used for fullspectrum preemptive power is “neoconservatism”—this word usage itself a supplanting. For what is meant by “neoconservatism” in this sense is not a historically specific group of individuals advancing a particular political project. In this context, it refers to more than Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and their allies, working to realign U.S. foreign policy on full-spectrum preemptive power, starting in the Ford administration, continuing through the Reagan presidency, into the Project for a New American Century, and on to the George W. Bush administration. It refers to the tendency their actions expressed. It refers to the momentum impelling the tendency beyond this particular cast of its carriers’ exit from the scene. Understood in this way, neoconservatism is a process carrying the force of naturing nature through history in a certain mode defined by the dynamic of the antiaccident. Each particular expression of this tendency in an explicit political project will suggest, in consequence of its playing out, extensive nature-culture distinctions for territorialization. The tendency itself, however, is a powerful rejoining of nature on its own naturing prototerritory. Neoconservatism, understood in this way, is an intensification of the nature of power. process

A “process,” in the terminology suggested here, is different from a system. It takes as its field of application (“where it implants itself and produces its real effects”14), not the ground of a territory, but the accidental groundlessness of the prototerritory. It does not settle into guarded and reproduced extensive distinctions. It starts in the striking simplicity of the inclusivedisjunctive, passing eventfully through system definition, only to overspill any and all acquired determinations ascribed it, to in the end complexly rejoin its inclusive- disjunctive conditions of emergence, with an added difference (consequent to actually having come to pass). “Process” refers to this life cycle of potential, from its incursion, or what Whitehead calls its “ingression,” to its “satisfaction” in an actually effected transformation.15 The coherence of a process is that of tendency, feeding back on itself in such a way as to generate always another difference. A process is essentially unstable. A system, on the other hand, is an emergent, provisional stability arisNational Enterprise Emergency 31

ing at the crossroads of processual tendencies whose formative force it siphons into its own self- organization. A system feeds back on itself in order to settle things for itself: in order to settle a territory. Its mode of coherence is self-reproductive. Its operations feed back on themselves in the interests of their own conservation. A system is effectively self-referencing by virtue of its operations turning back over on themselves. Certain system operations may take other operations of the same system as their objects. There may emerge from this a second- order self- organization, operating in a pilot capacity on a derived level of operative self-reflection. Both process and system are reiterative. Processual reiterations, however, are difference-referenced. They are alter-referenced. The tendency is directed toward an effectively added variation. A system’s reiterations, by contrast, are self-referenced. The tendency is toward regaining or preserving a provisional stability. Variation is again the rule, but it arises as by-product of selfpreservation. It is adaptive. The adaptability of the system depends on the evolution of a second-order self-referencing (which, once it arises, is operationally inseparable from first-order operations, or those considering themselves to act upon an object). A system is not the opposite of a process. System is a mode of expression of process. It is a self-stabilizing expression of ingressive potential’s determination-to-be- determined. A system embodies a processual tendency toward self-preservation (adaptive self-reproduction). Both process and system involve positive feedback. Thus neither a process nor a system can be accounted for without accounting for the nonlinearity of its causality. If a system is territorializing, a process is deterritorializing—starting from and returning to the exteriority of the universal accident. There are many systems, as many as there are natured natures. There is, however, but one process. That one process, which is naturing nature, holds the multiplicity of reemergent tendencies in inclusive disjunction. In view of this immanent multiplicity, it is admissible to speak of “a” process when referring to the life cycle of one such tendency, bearing in mind that no one tendency ever expresses in isolation. An incursion of processually formative force always brings more than one tendency into incipient expression. It is this coming-together that must eventfully play itself out. In the playing out of the tension of what cannot hold together, having come together, tendencies compete with each other. One may dominate another. A given tendency may end up monopolizing the production of difference. Many tendencies will fail to fully express. More creatively, a new 32 Brian Massumi

capacity for actually holding together may emerge from the playing out. A symbiosis has been invented, immanent to process’s unfolding. Systems also vie and mutually adapt, in their own ways. The complexity of the playing out of processual tendencies and their systemic expressions, in the eventfulness that is the overall environment of life, demands an ecological approach. All the more so as there is a tension and interplay between system and process, exponentially raising the degree of ecological complexity.16 infra- coLonizaTion

Neoconservatism is the process whereby naturing nature comes to be militarized, along the full spectrum. Emergence is militarized, at the same time as the military is politicized, making civilian life a degree on the continuum of war. War is no longer the continuation of politics by other means. Politics is an intensity setting on the continuum of war. “Neoconservatism,” as the term is used here, is the nonlinear onrush toward dominance of this processual tendency to monopolize naturing nature for battle potential. The neoconservative power of the antiaccident occupies the prototerritory immanent to all life’s extensions. It is infra-vital. Incoming, extending upward, through, and outward. Its immanence to life is also, indiscriminately, the imminence of death: the threatening actualization, everywhere and at all times, of the conditions of emergence of life crisis. The prototerritory occupied by the antiaccident is at life’s operative limit. It is where life rebeginning loops into such short- circuited proximity to its end that they stroboscope into a both/and so rhythmically taut, so compellingly tense, so indiscriminably intense, as to strike with undetermined force. Its coming carries a singular-generic imperative: reactivate or die. Bare acTiviTy

“Activation” is a word for the leading edge of incoming event at this intensive limit of life. “Bare activity” is another word for it. “Bare,” not as in strippeddown, but as in “barely”; barely there. Activation is the just barely-there of a generically life- challenging event singularly stirring, as yet unextended and already overfull, carrying any consequent extension and all extended qualities, in welling potential. It is the barely-there of a compelling “any-and-all” at the impelling edge of incursion, to be eventfully determined. This is not Agamben’s “bare life,” the life without qualities. Bare life for Agamben is that life station consisting in life’s stripping down to the animal minimum, excluded by nature from culture and politics. It is life radically National Enterprise Emergency 33

emptied, dequalified, in implosive indifference, held eventlessly in suspension. Death in life: potential stillborn. Bare activity is the taut suspense of a dynamic indeterminacy agitating the field of life’s emergence. It is the already imperceptibly astir, readying toward an imperative move into another pulse of life carrying risk of death. The unlivable, impelling life potential (actively including that of death). Bare activity is naturing nature’s own ontopower. It is what neoconservative power preemptively infra- colonizes. The preemptive tendency is to supplant life’s emergence, to antiaccidental alter- effect. naTionaL enTerprise emerGency

The supplanting of emergence by the antiaccident of full-spectrum preemptive power sows the ontogenetic seed for a Bush-like “bringing life back” with a difference. But if in order to do so preemptive power must mimic the accident it aims to counter, what prevents the antiaccident from becoming its own enemy? What prevents its counteractions from amplifying into a systemic disruption? This is a real danger that neoconservative power faces by nature, and often succumbs to. Bush’s May 2003 declaration of preemptive “victory” in Iraq announced nothing so much as a protracted, self-amplifying geopolitical crisis that was to propagate to Afghanistan, then to Pakistan, and is still many years and countless lost lives from having played itself out, in spite of the change in U.S. administrations. If the danger of “success” is so far-reaching, why risk it? Because the stakes are equally high. Neoconservative power’s process does not move alone. It is one half of an ontogenetic couplet. In addition to delivering to territorial systems incipient countereffects potentially feeding their evolution, it cooperates with another process for which it similarly serves as an ontogenetic delivery system. It entrusts this other process with the job of amplifying its counteragitations into adaptive modulations of a more or less sustainable large-scale life system. When the feed-forward succeeds, the ubiquity of indiscriminate threat is transduced into an emergent global order. A “successful” military intervention is just the first flap of a higher order fanfare. It is worth risking large-scale crisis, losing lives along the way, because the stakes are as far-reaching as they come: nothing less than global. Preemptive power infra- colonizes the environment of life toward the emergence of a macroprocess as ubiquitous, as indefinite in reach, and as tendentiously monopolistic as it is itself. If there is any doubt as to what process makes the relay, Bush once again 34 Brian Massumi

makes it clear in his post-Katrina address. Rather than referring to the storm as a natural disaster or a national emergency, he dubbed it a “national enterprise emergency.” Neoconservatism’s naturalization of national security activity is one half of a double movement. As power moves into the bare-active realm of emergence to bring life back, life’s induced return is met by an economic expansionism that wraps life’s rearising into its own unfolding. Preemptive power is a positive power, in the sense of delivering the potential for intersystem enhancement effects. These are maximized when its interventions kick-start amplificatory movements whose nonlinear synergies come in the form of economic multiplier effects. The enterprise aspect of Bush’s Katrina response was represented by his strategy of replacing government assistance with outsourcing to the private sector and shunning the shelter of government-planned and -regulated redevelopment for the gale winds of enterprising investment, following eagerly upon those of Katrina. The aim was less security-assuring than productivity-boosting. It was less a return to the perceived stability of a preperturbed normality than a fast-forward into a brave new neoliberal world of unleashed capitalist enterprise. The same impulse was formalized in post-invasion Iraq by a far-reaching series of unilateral decrees issued by Coalition Provisional Authority administrator Paul Bremer starting immediately after Bush’s declaration of victory, which radically reorganized the Iraqi economy along neoliberal dream-lines following the IMF’s familiar blueprint.17 Neoliberalism is a sister process to neoconservatism. As it operates in this epoch, it displays a predisposition toward a symbiotic relaying of incursions of preempted naturing nature into economic value-creation. It is amenable to relaying unfoldings of formative force of all tendencies. But it is most adventitiously predisposed to the neoconservative sort, flowing into the generation of profit. Or, more precisely, of economic surplus-value: investment capital feeding back into its own process to produce multiplier effects driving not just growth, but an accelerating rate of growth, carried by a momentum snowballing toward the limit of the exponential. “Neoliberalism,” as the term will be used here, is the capitalist process turned ontopowerful, in symbiosis with neoconservatism (but also in its own right, for example through technological supplantings of life’s incipiency driven by purely capitalist concerns, as in the biotechnology industry). The symbiosis between neoliberalism and neoconservatism is not without tensions. Although adventitiously predisposed toward symbiosis, they both rejoin the prototerritory of life, in relay, but also each in its own way. The prototerritory, lacking determinate National Enterprise Emergency 35

extension, knows no bounds. Thus both processes can entertain monopolistic tendencies, once again each in its own way. Since they share the same unboundedness in different monopolistic modes, the two processes are in potential conflict by nature. Beyond securiTy

Neoliberalism, as a process, does not presume stability. It does not prioritize a stable-state vision of security. In a white paper extolling the virtues of globalized deregulation published not long before his ascension in Iraq, Paul Bremer cites a poll of American business executives finding that 68 percent believe that neoliberal policies increase their risks.18 Support for those policies is correspondingly high. Neoliberalism wrestles with the complexity of an uncertain, neoconservatizing environment in which risk is not only endemic but is inexpungible, and ultimately unknowable. Far from operating in a securely closed field, it operates in what Foucault calls “an indefinite field of immanence” in which life falls under the “dependence” of a “series of accidents.”19 The interests of an individual human inhabitant of this environment will depend upon “an infinite number of things,” “accidents of nature about which he can do nothing and which he cannot foresee . . . linked to a course of the world that outstrips him and eludes him in every respect.” The enterprising individual of neoliberalism is at the perturbing mercy of incursions from an “uncontrollable, unspecified whole”: naturing nature. Nonetheless, from this “apparent chaos” there spontaneously arise “positive effects” of convergent order. This spontaneous self-organization is owing to synergies between productive activities of the individual lives unfolding in the universal risk environment. Individual activities automatically and mutually readjust to create a “directly multiplying” mechanism “without any transcendence.”20 Neoliberalism operates in a field of immanence whose bare activity, fed forward and transduced into enterprise activity, amplifies into a self- expanding pattern of economic multiplier effects cresting into an emergent order. That order, which never transcends its environmental conditions of emergence, is the neoliberal economy as globalizing process. The neoliberal economy is commonly called a global “system.” In terms of the present vocabulary, however, this is a misnomer. Neoliberal capitalism values its own exuberantly irrational momentum (to paraphrase Alan Greenspan) over any particular systemic holding pattern. It values “creative destruction” (Schumpeter) over self-preservation. To mark the difference of the volatile self- ordering of the capitalist process from a 36 Brian Massumi

system, as it is defined here, Deleuze and Guattari borrow the notion of the “axiomatic” to describe it.21 The neoliberal economy is in a state of enterprise emergency by nature, at every complexly interconnected level, from the local through the national to the global. And it embraces that condition. Its mechanism is to ride waves of metastability through the turbulence of a permanently uncertain environment. A metastability is not so much a provisional stability as a wave patterning. Neoliberalism’s metastable order explicitly operates under the uncontrollable dependence of the unspecified accident (and antiaccident). It does not try systematically to shelter itself from the storm. It spontaneously self-organizes following the turbulence of a far-from-equilibrium environment whose immanent agitation never ceases to haunt it with the specter of wave- convergent synergies suddenly forking into crisis. Faced with the specter of catastrophe, it does not turn self-protectively inward. It fully assumes the risks of its ontogenetic outside. A metastable order positively embodies instability. Rather than turning back on itself, it flees forward. It lives out its instability. It is emergent order on the edge, riding the wave crest of everywhere-apparent chaos. It is not its business to pause to self-reflect. It self-references only as a technical mechanism to boost its momentum (such is the purpose of market indexes). To self-reflect in the systematic sense is to adaptively self-regulate. Neoliberalism is, by naturing nature, deregulatory. This makes it adaptively challenged—and all the processually stronger for it. excepTion incorporaTed

For an edge system born of and fed on instability, the perturbation of an “abnormal” accident, even of the magnitude of Katrina, can actually offer a supersized opportunity. A once-in-a- century hurricane is just a “natural” instance of the far-from- equilibrium creative destruction that is the driving force of neoliberal capitalism. For that matter, what accident is not abnormal? It is of the very nature of the accident to confound the normal course of things. Under neoliberalism, normativity ceases to be a foundational concern, or even a constitutive factor. The neoliberal tendency is not to mold to the norm, as do systems characterized by Foucault as disciplinary powers. Rather, neoliberalism’s tendency is to capture the exception and incorporate it (in both senses of the word). Neoconservative power actively concurs. It realigns its own process along the axis of exception, in dogged pursuit of operative outs from instituted limitations on arbitrary exercises of full-spectrum force. It does not incorNational Enterprise Emergency 37

porate the exception in its own right so much as it precipitates through openings perforating the fabric of state and governmental powers. By “state powers” is meant the interplay of the executive branch of the state with legislative systems and their associated systems of jurisprudence (constitutional, civil code, or common law). “Governmental powers” is taken in Foucault’s extended sense of regulatory systems, whether or not they are formally part of the administrative apparatus of the state, which aim to provisionally stabilize and ostensibly secure the environment of life by “rationalizing” how its teeming population of territoried systems interrelate.22 The neoconservative outs from state and governmental powers enable antiaccidental strikes to cut in. Neoconservatism’s dedication to preemptive power puts it in a posture of pronounced processual cynicism toward forms of power that delude themselves into operating according to the principle that the overall environment of life, at the mercy of indiscriminate threat, can be effectively rationalized. Neoconservative power’s propensity to take every out it can from the limitations of state and governmental powers also deviates from regulated disciplinary powers such as the prison system, for which unregulated “black sites” are substituted. This is only natural, given how closely preemptive power embraces the “abnormality” of the accident. onToGeneTic coupLeT

The coupling of neoliberalism with neoconservatism’s assertion of the primacy of preemptive power, operating on a full-spectrum paramilitary continuum telescoping war into peace, is largely of mutual benefit. Preemptive power, already an ontopower, gains the cachet of contributing more extensively and metastably to life-productivity. Neoliberalism, for its part, gains both in intensity and in extension. It gains in intensity by following closely in the wake of preemptive ontopower as it tracks the accident into the immanence of its natural environment. Neoliberalism’s incorporation of the emergent effects, accidental and antiaccidental—a distinction that is ultimately impossible to sustain given the effective mimicry of one by the other—gives it a proprietary hold on life’s emergence. The neoliberal economy becomes ontopowerful in operative relay with war-in-peace at every setting, from the hardest of the “hard” of all- out invasion to softest of the “soft” of datamining and surveillance. As alluded to earlier, the neoliberal economy already has its own proprietary ontopower in relay with another, in this case technoscientific, system of operations. Following the intensive investment vector of biotechnology, the economy has a direct plug-in to the variational field 38 Brian Massumi

of life’s emergence, from a specifically infra-biological angle.23 Piggybacked on preemption, its ontopowers boost into earth orbit. As its intensification extends globally, technoscience infra- opens life to its forces of capital-value creation. The traditional model of imperialist colonialism is not adequate to describe the ontopowerful cooperation of the neoliberal economy and neoconservative power. That view often casts the apparatus of war as a consciously applied device for capitalist expansion. This underestimates contemporary war, reducing it to the status of a passive tool. It also overestimates the knowability and manageability of capitalism. It treats the capitalist process as if it were a self-reflective system piloted by a second- order level that folds back on its operations self-referentially in such a way as to fulfill hierarchical control functions. Both the neoliberal economy and neoconservative war power are processes. They are neither integrally self-referencing nor given to hierarchical control. It is not illegitimate to describe them as complex “open systems” if the term “system” is used advisedly. They are perturbatory and amplificatory. As a nonlinear consequence, they are both indefinitely complex, each within its own ambit and even more so in operative relay. Preemptive power is only apparently territorialized in the systematic operations of the military establishment. Its reach, by nature, spills over from that territory toward the civil pole of the continuum. In doing so, its operations extend ubiquitously into the prototerritory of indiscriminate threat. This is a realm that is unviable for the sustenance of any particular system, or organization. Preemption’s ontopowerful countereffects cut away from rationalized state and governmental limitations, to sew themselves into the prototerritorial field of emergence. Supplanting effects then percolate back up through the organized-system levels of state, civil, and other systems. These receiving systems are forced to modulate their operations around the incursive force of the event. The only hope they have of effectively adapting is if they find a way of responding to the temporal force of the prototerritory. They do their responding with urgency. The state of emergency is the form in which the singular-generic, formative force of time systemically appears. Preemptive power’s umbilical link into the prototerritory of emergence gives its process uncontainable, trans-systemic scope. This dynamic uncontainment produces tensions with the military establishment which is war power’s rationally assigned territory. Systematic attempts are made to rein it in. But it always outflanks them. The state of emergency is, after all, a National Enterprise Emergency 39

condition of exception. And as Walter Benjamin foresaw, if anything is normal now, it is the state of exception. The state of emergency, turned everyday life condition, affords ample exceptional outs from such process encumberments as the international laws of war, internationally instituted human rights, and domestic civil liberties. The exercise of neoconservative power follows its own rhythm. It forms its own preferential relays. It reiteratively varies its processing. It forwards its own momentum. It becomes increasingly self-driving. The on-all-the-time ubiquity of its potential deliveries to territorial systems gives it such plasticity that its drive lacks, overall, an ascribable organizational form of its own. It lives up to its vocation to be as indiscriminate, and indiscriminable, as threat. As naturingly natural, process is possessed of an operative autonomy overspilling any containable system of operations. A process abhors closure. A process achieves horizon- expanding liftoff from the institutional territories purporting to contain it. They are its launching pad. They condition its trajectory but are not, of themselves, determining of it. Preemptive power lives out its nature as process, full-spectrum.24 The neoliberal economy, predicated as it is on a constitutive openness to the accident, has the same tendential complexity and self-organizing drive. It similarly achieves liftoff from the territories conditioning, without containing, its emergent axiomatic order. These territorialities include national and international regulatory institutions; protectionist legislative measures expressing a nationalist dynamic in tension with capitalism’s drive toward the global; moralizing formations in ecumenical competition with globalism, and fundamentally uncomfortable with the processual embrace of the abnormality of the accident it shares with preemptive power; local and regional particularisms threatened by deterritorializing momentum; and stabilityseeking tendencies reacting to unstoppable exuberance by recoiling into individual-, family-, or community-based fortresses of self-protection. The neoliberal economy is a master at finding ways of using these countertendencies as a launching pad for its own process (a prime example, in relation to moralizing formations, is the rise of “prosperity churches” in the United States). At every liftoff, the neoliberal economic process frees itself to further its own process, and to renew its preferential alliance with preemptive power. The constitutive openness of these two processes to each other is a match made in nature. There is, however, nothing ordained about their interlooping. Their connection is adventitious, a marriage of historical convenience between two processual autonomies that have happened to form, in this epoch, 40 Brian Massumi

a mutually reinforcing ontogenetic couplet. This is not to be confused with a structural coupling. This is a processual relay, occurring at a fortuitous intersection of self- driving tendencies. There is nothing in principle preventing the processes from decoupling, except the bonds of reciprocal strengthening born of their spontaneous convergence. Still, that reciprocity is a mighty force. Its staying power in the face of organized opposition is not to be underestimated. But it is not a destiny. The form of the processual relay naturally readjusts to some degree from one organized transition to another, as can be seen in the transition from the Bush to the Obama administrations. The Obama administration’s defense of the Bush- era rules of exception, which came as a cruel surprise to many hopers, indicates a trans-administration tendency to hold the potential for preemption and its economic coupling in ready reserve. Certain legal and regulatory limitations have been applied to them, it is true, and certain wedges inserted between them to loosen their mutual embrace. But these measures should be (and have been) greeted with considerable skepticism.25 The odds are that the neoconservative/neoliberal ontogenetic power confect is not going away anytime soon. Hope aside, it has many accidental adventures, and adventurous antiaccidents, ahead of it. noTes

1. “President Bush Delivers Remarks on Hurricane Katrina Recovery.” Unless otherwise noted, all quotes in this section are from this presidential address. For a description of the staging of the event, see Engelhardt, “Tomgram: The Presidency Shines.” 2. Paphitis, “Greek Government Points to Arson for Fires.” The Greek government’s allegations of arson were criticized by conservation groups and the opposition Socialist Party for not being based on any empirical evidence. 3. For an analysis of the process by which a felt conditional possibility becomes a tautological truism, see Massumi, “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact.” 4. “Transcript: Obama’s National Security Team Announcement.” 5. On processual isomorphism as an operative identity independent of structure, form, and content (and therefore not a homology), see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 424–73. In this chapter, “Apparatus of Capture,” Deleuze and Guattari also provide a prescient theorization of full-spectrum war-in-peace, and of the convergence of the capitalist process and the war-powers process. 6. Henderson, “Disease and Terror.” Within hours of the news of swine flu, the Internet was buzzing with posts speculating that it was a bioterrorist attack. 7. This point was forcefully advanced by Latour, We Have Never Been Modern: the emergent “actors” in today’s world are nature- culture “hybrids.” For present purposes,

National Enterprise Emergency 41

the notion of the hybrid carries the inconvenience of still presupposing as its starting point oppositional definitions of nature and culture, even if only to neutralize the opposition. The strategy that will be followed here (one which Latour would not endorse) is to redefine nature in a way that already includes the potential for “culture,” making culture an emergent expression of nature. 8. This is in no way an argument against taking measures against global warming, or a belittling of the fundamental role of human activity in its triggering. Quite the opposite, it is an argument for taking radical measures toward a post- carbon economy constitutionally disinclined toward these kinds of global-environmental synergies. The only post- carbon economy that would meet that description would also be a postcapitalist economy, given that capitalism’s process of self-valorization is predicated not only on perpetual growth but on perpetually accelerating growth, posited to be unlimited in principle. This makes capitalism constitutionally unsustainable. 9. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 146. 10. Whitehead, for his part, does not bar God. He does, however, define it as the “primordial accident.” Whitehead, Process and Reality, 7. Spinoza’s deus sive natura holds God and Nature in inclusive disjunction. Deleuze develops a similar notion of a “nature- culture continuum,” but as a resolutely atheological proposition. 11. For a similar use of the concept of (natured) nature, in the specific context of governmental powers, see Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 16: “Nature is something that runs under, through, and in the exercise of governmentality. It is, if you like, its indispensable hypodermis. It is the other face of something whose visible face, visible for the governors, is their own action. . . . It is not a background, but a permanent correlative. Thus, the economistes explain, the movement of population to where wages are highest, for example, is a law of nature.” Ascribable entities (“visibilities” in Foucault’s terminology) are taken for visible markers of invisible laws of nature. The invisibility of the law of nature is the mode in which naturing nature’s ontogenetic imperceptibility formally appears to the system as the correlate of its own functional operations. The laws of nature are the formal mirroring, for the system, of the system’s own pattern of actions. They are the form in which the system internalizes the activity of its outside as it own. 12. On preemptive power and the force of time, see Brian Massumi, “Perception Attack: Brief on War Time.” With respect to extensive distinctions and spatialization, the infamous theses of the “clash of civilizations” and the accompanying rhetoric of “culture wars” makes an extensive distinction of cultural difference, enabling cultures to be grasped as territorialized entities, in spite of the premise of transnational globalism impelling this very theorization. This spatialization of culture presupposes a prior externalization of nature, figuring as a reserve of prospectable raw materials rather than of formative forces, and prioritizing the model of the passive deposit. This simply located, spatialized nature is passive before the industry of the human, whose own space is dynamically fragmented into opposing cultures. All formative force and conflict, all dynamism, falls to the side of the human. The spatialization of culture and correlative pacification of nature is the signature trait of humanism

42 Brian Massumi

in its many incarnations. Posthumanisms and antihumanisms strive to avoid this extensive dichotomization. However, versions of these assigning the ascension to language as a limit between the human and the animal (such as those of Heidegger, Lacan, and Agamben, among others) are led to miss or misconstrue constitutive power, or what Deleuze calls the “real conditions of emergence” of individuations human, animal, and otherwise: the real, and really felt, impelling potential of incipient formative forces creatively agitating an intensive field disjunctively including nature and culture (in other words, folding their potential differentiations together in the same event, in a kind of occurrent continuum of any and all extensive distinctions they potentially unfold into on constituted levels of systemic organization). Deleuze’s “virtual” (on the edge of actualization), Whitehead’s “real potential,” and Simondon’s “associated milieu” are ways of conceptualizing the real conditions of emergence constitutive of power (ontopower). 13. On preemptive power as emergently counterproductive, see Massumi, “Potential Politics and the Primacy of Preemption.” 14. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 28. 15. Whitehead, Process and Reality, passim. 16. On process as nature, see Deleuze and Guattari, Anti- Oedipus, 2–5. The account of system in the present essay is loosely based on the work of Niklas Luhmann, with certain major deviations pertaining to the principle of “operational closure.” 17. For a detailed account of Bremer’s decrees, see Juhasz, The Bush Agenda, 185–260. For a history of the IMF’s model of neoliberalism and its imposition on developing nations, see Klein, The Shock Doctrine. 18. Bremer, “New Risks in International Business.” 19. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 277. 20. Ibid., 277–78. 21. On the axiomatic, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 454–73. 22. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 259–60, defines “neoliberal governmentality” as an “environmental type of intervention” in which “action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than the players.” It is associated with “an optimization of systems of difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating process.” The distinction between self- organizing systems determining differences and the fluctuational process to which they are constitutively open is integral to Foucault’s definition of present- day governmentality. That governmental action bears on the “environmental” rules of the game evokes an ecological theory of power. Attention is focused less on individual human actors than on the interactions between naturalcultural systems inhabiting an open field of accident-prone covariation. This shift in the modus operandi of power corresponds to a “massive withdrawal with regard to the normative- disciplinary system.” That withdrawal entails a renegotiation of how disciplinary power cooperates on the continuum of power, which includes revived practices of sovereign power. “State powers,” as used here, involves a mix of regimes of power, unique in the case of each actually existing state, between Foucault’s “sovereign power” (the power “to put to death or let live”), “disciplinary”

National Enterprise Emergency 43

power (the normative production of the individual by a collective apparatus operating in self-enclosure; Foucault, Discipline and Punish), and “governmentality” (regulation of production in an open “transactional” field following the formula “make live or let die”; Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 12–13, 297). Governmentality overlaps with state power but is not reducible to it: it is “is both external and internal to the state, since it is the tactics of government that allow the continual definition of what should or should not fall within the the state’s competence” (Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 109). Governmentality’s extending beyond and encompassing of the state exerts a defining pressure on state power, pushing it massively away from disciplinary power and at the same time placing it in tension with the arbitrariness of sovereign power. The counter-pull of sovereign and disciplinary powers in response to this centrifugal pressure gives rise to a continual movement of reciprocal reintegration and regathering (and at times mutual limitation). This movement of reciprocal reintegration of regimes of power, in its interplay with preemptive and capitalist process, is what defines the contemporary state as a system. 23. For an excellent theorization of the interconnections between emergence, preemptive power, and neoliberal capitalism, see Cooper, Life as Surplus. 24. For an analysis of preemptive power’s self- driving dynamism as an uncontained “operative logic,” see Massumi, “Potential Politics and the Primacy of Preemption.” The concept of “operative logic” is a special-purpose variation on Deleuze and Guattari’s “abstract machine,” particularly as deployed in A Thousand Plateaus, 424–73. 25. For a convincing journalistic account of the unhoped-for continuities between the Bush and Obama administrations on the issue of preemption and the “Revolution in Military Affairs” that sought under Bush to remake the military apparatus in its operative image, see Engelhardt, “John Feffer: The Piracy Problem.” The article argues that the fortuitous arrival on the scene of Somali pirates in 2008–2009 gave the Department of Defense a conveniently fresh and dramatic figure of the “terrorist” with which to justify significant increases in the military budget in a time of economic crisis, and to further pursue the realigning of the U.S. on full-spectrum “strategic flexibility” and high-tech “rapid dominance” (matching the timing of counterinsurgency response to the time-nature of threat). For examples of the Obama administration’s defense of Bush-era exceptionalism, see “Obama Channels Cheney: Obama Adopts Bush View on the Powers of the Presidency,” Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2009 (loophole for warrantless wiretapping: “a legal stance identical to, if not more aggressive than, the Bush version . . . [asserting] that the court-forced disclosure of the surveillance programs would cause ‘exceptional harm to national security’”); “Obama to Appeal Detainee Ruling,” New York Times, April 11, 2009 (Obama administration supports suspension of habeas corpus with no appeal); “Judge Weighs Dismissing Case Involving Torture Memorandum,” New York Times, March 7, 2009 (on the argument that “constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures can be overridden” for national security reasons); “Mr. Obama and the Rule of Law,” New York Times, March 22, 2009; and Andy Worthington, “In Selling Its Version of the ‘War on Terror,’ Obama Is Adopting Bush’s Playbook,” AlterNet

44 Brian Massumi

.org, March 17, 2009, http://www.alternet.org/ (using the “state secrets” loophole to bar court oversight of rendition, torture, and indefinite imprisonment without charges); William Glaberson, “US May Revive Military Tribunals at Guantanamo,” New York Times, May 2, 2009 (exceptions to due process for terrorism suspects, including allowing hearsay evidence: “Military commissions are only beneficial for the government if they make it easier to win a prosecution than it is in federal court”); William Glaberson, “President’s Detention Plan Tests American Legal Tradition,” New York Times, May 23, 2009 (plan to allow indefinite detention without charge on U.S. territory of terrorist suspects who would be subject to Guantánamo-style military commissions operating on domestic soil). The early Obama administration’s strategy has been twofold: (1) to create administrative rules interdicting suspect practices while fighting to maintain legal loopholes leaving open the potential for the covert employment of these same practices in case of natural security emergency and (2) to openly normalize exception by formally writing into the law or into administrative rules the outs that it exploits, with the ostensible purpose of overseeing it and regulating and its excesses. The two strategies together undermine any effective regulation. Although the term “war on terror” ceased to be used weeks into the Obama administration, it continues to be quietly prosecuted under the less attention-grabbing moniker “overseas contingency operations,” and with the main front shifted from Iraq to Afghanistan/Pakistan. Preemptive cross-border attacks into Pakistan continue and have been intensified. The term “enemy combatant” has similarly disappeared, in favor of the more neutral “detained persons.” But the legal concept is still very much in place, and necessarily so because the promised closing of Guantánamo could not even be contemplated in the current political atmosphere if the remaining detained person fall back into the domestic judicial system with simple accused- criminal status. Rather than being reassuring, the Obama administration’s change in rhetoric comes off with the slightly Kafkaesque effect accompanying all attempts to normalize the paradoxes and contradictions in terms that come with the prototerritory of the exceptional exercise of power. Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the main advocates of the “unitary executive” principle supporting unregulated presidential powers of exception, snidely predicted in his first major televised interview following Obama’s election that Obama would quickly learn to “appreciate some of the things we put in place,” Andy Barr, “Cheney: Obama ‘Not Likely to Cede Authority,’” Politico.com, December 15, 2008, http://www.politico .com/.

National Enterprise Emergency 45

patricia ticineto clough and craig Willse

HUMan secUrity/national secUrity

Gender Branding and Population Racism

On September 8, 2002, a series of photographs and text advertising fashions by Kenneth Cole appeared as an insert in the New York Times Magazine.1 To the right of the insert’s cover photo, the words appear: “Some statements are more fashionable than others. Kenneth Cole Fall 2002.” The first photo appearing on the inside of the insert shows a young, seemingly heterosexual white couple. She wears a white coat and tan boots; he is wearing gray, brown, and black. They sit in front of a building on an extended stair in what appears to be lower Manhattan. The sentence to the right of them reads: “Wearing protection is the new black.” On the next page there is a photo of a black woman standing with a bike. The sentence to her right states: “Not voting is so last season.” The center photo of the insert is of a white man dressed fully in black, bent on one knee over a briefcase in which he is putting a newspaper. Just below the fold of the newspaper, one’s eye catches the word “hopes.” There is no sentence accompanying the photo, but there is one on the next page. It runs across the body of a white boy dressed as a soldier. The boy bends on one knee while aiming a gun at another boy, also white, dressed like a cowboy. The cowboy’s arms are extended, held up under arrest. The two young women from earlier photos are also in the picture; the black woman has passed the boys and the white woman is just doing so. All four are pictured on a city

street, again seemingly lower Manhattan. Across the soldier boy’s body is the statement: “Gun safety . . . It’s all the rage.” On the next page, the two women are on either side of a security guard in front of a building with a wall sign: “The United States Federal Courthouse.” Across the body of the black woman, who is dressed in black, is written: “Security . . . The Accessory for Fall.” Two more sentences will appear on the next two photos. The first of these shows a young man with a newspaper, the headline reads, “HoLY WAr,” and above it the word “bombers” can be glimpsed. To the right of the man is a white woman dressed in white at a newspaper stand eyeing with some suspicion another man dressed in black who is dark haired and bearded. The sentence just below this man and woman reads: “Mideast peace is the must have for fall.” Finally there is a photo of the two women, showing the bottom of the leg of the black woman as she comes down the stairs of what appears to be a government building, with the white woman to her right sitting on the stairs. Across the white woman’s body the sentence reads: “Choice . . . No woman should be without one.” And again: “Some statements are more fashionable than others. Kenneth Cole.” Borrowing from the advertorial genre, the Kenneth Cole photos and text make the theme of security a matter of fashion, just a year after the attacks on the World Trade Center, and a few months before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.2 Through the gendered codes of fashion, the photos and text link national security to personal security, proposing that the former is essential to the latter, and that the latter might be gendered in such a way as to concern women in particular and—in the visual treatment of the white woman and the black woman as equivalent and interchangeable—all women in the same way. The photos and text point to and all but erase a distinction proposed with the concept of human security, a security policy promoted by international organizations such as the United Nations, post-1989, when the end of the Cold War was taken to signal an opportunity to shape policy that would ensure personal security and define it as distinct from a national security based on militarism and war. With the surge of U.S. militarism and the intensification of war after 2001, human security discourse and human security policy would not disappear; cultural critics would, however, increasingly suspect them of being unable to ensure a distinction between personal security and national security. Human security discourse and human security policy even came under suspicion for their complicity in militarism and war, a complicity that would be elaborated in debates among cultural critics.

Human Security/National Security 47

For example, antiracist and anticolonial feminist critics would become critical of efforts to make human security policy sensitive to the specific needs of women, rather than take the opportunity to offer a more general critique of the concept of human security and human security policy. In outlining the specific human security needs of women, it was argued, a certain view of gender was promoted; a universal norm of behavior was offered that could be imposed on others as it was taken up by legislators, policymakers, advocates, and activists. This deployment of gender is concerned not only, nor primarily with, the differential treatment of men and women. It also points to a “political branding” of policy and programming where brand does not so much signify but rather arouses, or affectively activates. Here gender as a political branding arouses interest in the protection and liberation of women as modern, progressive, and civil, activating democratic action aimed at what the Kenneth Cole advertisement describes as “ensuring choice”—the choice to be personally safe, nationally secure, and invested in peace. As such, gender is used not to distinguish human security from national security, militarism, and war. Rather, national security is again made necessary to human security, as war and counterterrorism are promoted as the means to liberate women in certain designated parts of the world. Indeed, a number of scholars who helped shape the debate over the use of gender in the promotion of war and counterterrorism addressed Islam and the historical figure of Muslim woman/women, pointing toward what the Kenneth Cole images and text evoked and affectively circulated with words like “holy war” along with their placement so close to the word “bombers” and at a distance from the word “choice.” Lila Abu-Lughod urged that “we should be wary of taking on the mantle of those 19th-century Christian missionary women who devoted their lives to saving their Muslim sisters. . . . One can hear uncanny echoes of their virtuous goals today, even though the language is secular, the appeals not to Jesus but to human rights or the liberal West.”3 Here gender as political branding rests on Orientalist and racialized histories at the same time it folds memory into affective intensities, reductively absorbing the force of histories into preconscious bodily irritations or activations so as to generate a sense of safety and fear without having to point explicitly to the source of those feelings. In saying that gender “brands” war and counterterrorism, therefore, we mean to point to a shift in the understanding of brand from its being a sign of subject status to its making objects things that exude and transmit affect or potentiality, the way we might think of the things that commodities have 48 Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse

become in “aesthetic capitalism.”4 As another tag for grasping the changes in capitalist economy, aesthetic capitalism points to a shift in branding, moving branding from the auratics of the circulating sign to a matter of things functioning affectively to stir bodily propensities or initiate activation in mood shifts. Here branding seeks to produce a surplus value of “audience effect” or affect in a political economy that embeds what Luciana Parisi and Steven Goodman have called the “mnemonic control” of a preemptive logic.5 For Parisi and Goodman, the operation of preemption through branding seeks to remodel long-term memory through an occupation of or a “parasiting” on the dynamics of short-term intuition where past, present, and future coexist as affect, a preindividual preconscious incipience or potentiality, an intensity that repeatedly instigates activation in the neurophysiological plasticity of the body-brain. Branding’s occupation of short-term intuitions is something like “a distribution of memory implants” that provides one with the bodily or affective sense of an experience one has not had, or a memory one has not had, while nonetheless creating a basis for future activation or repetition. In what follows, we will trace political branding through two other media presentations—the first, a story about “cyber-farming” conducted by Chinese laborers, and the second a series of advertisements selling storage space. If the images and text of the Kenneth Cole campaign gender human security in order to reproduce a discourse of national security, these further cases point to the way political branding operates to make other characteristics, such as ethnoraciality and sexuality, less the effect of a gaze embedded in scenarios for disciplining the individual subject and more a matter of modulating life capacities at population levels above and below the individual—a matter of biopolitics in terms of what Tiziana Terranova, following Maurizio Lazzarato, describes as “the ontological powers of time memory.”6 In other words, what has been understood as a characteristic of identity, such as ethnoraciality, sexuality, or gender, can now also function in terms of “audience effect,” through a political branding that is a source of value where the economy is speculative, informational, or affective.7 It is in this light that we want to explore political branding and the way it is linked to the power of biopolitics. This necessitates revisiting the relationship between subject identity and populations, a relationship to which Michel Foucault pointed when conceptualizing biopolitics. At the same time, this requires going beyond Foucault’s treatment of state racism to a “population racism,” which, we will argue, political branding circulates affectively.

Human Security/National Security 49

securiTy . . . The accessory for faLL

For Foucault, biopolitics is one trajectory of a form of power that he described as biopower, which, he argued, arose in eighteenth- century Europe, when “the old power of death that symbolized sovereign power was now carefully supplanted by the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life.”8 The two trajectories of biopower—discipline and biopolitics—bring life described as biological into political calculation. Discipline entails political calculation by fostering life and focusing on the disciplining of the subject within an ordered space, such as the school or the prison. Anatomopolitics takes on the life of the individual in terms of “infinitesimal surveillances, permanent controls, extremely meticulous orderings of space, indeterminate medical or psychological examinations, an entire micro-power concerned with the body.”9 In contrast, biopolitics turns to the life capacities of populations, or the regulation of the productive economic and biological capacities of human life at a mass scale. Biopolitical technologies are a matter of making-live, but at the level of populations. As Foucault puts it: “So after a first seizure of power over the body in an individualizing mode, we have a second seizure of power that is not individualizing, but, if you like, massifying, that is directed not at man-as-body but at man-as-species.”10 While Foucault’s remarks seem to suggest a linear progression from individual body to species, Foucault more often and more convincingly suggests that biopower always works as the governance of a constituted multiplicity that must also govern in depth, at the level of the fine points and details of the individual or the singular.11 Foucault’s history of sexuality demonstrates the relationships between the disciplinary and biopolitical. He argues that the deployment of a technology of sex spreads out between the disciplining of the individual subject and the biopolitics of populations, and so it offers “a whole series of different tactics” that combine “in varying proportions the object of disciplining the body and that of regulating populations.”12 Similarly, we suggest there is a relationship between biopolitics and the deployment of the political branding of what we will call a “population racism.”13 While Foucault argues that the biopolitical power over the species or life-itself is a matter of fostering life, putting the sovereign right over death at a distance, he also argues that “to improve life, to prolong its duration, to improve its chances, to avoid accidents and to compensate for failings,” it might be legitimate to kill, or at least to let die.14 Foucault argues that a form of racism allows for death in biopolitics, 50 Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse

the death of some populations that are marked as inferior and harmful to the larger body of the nation. He refers to this racism as “state racism in its biologizing form.” But we prefer to use the term “population racism,” not only to emphasize the biopolitical register at which such racism operates ordinarily, but also to attend to the ways that distributions of life chances and death probabilities operate transnationally, at a global scale not confined to state bureaucracies. The war on terror forcibly demonstrates that the kinds of life that are taken in service of a state may be located far outside the boundaries of that state. As histories of racism are elided by programs and policies of population racism, populations become vulnerable to political branding; the histories of racism are subsumed into a circulation of affect, as when gender branding circulates insecurity and fear and thereby justifies the exceptional treatment of some populations as a matter of biopolitical manipulation. But as a political branding, gender further “frees” the histories and identities of populations so that they can be used in the process of political branding. When political branding supports extreme versions of population racism, extermination, for example, these more extreme versions can sit beside the more ordinary biopolitical policies and programs of population racism, or what might be referred to as the “technical solutions” of making live and letting die. WearinG proTecTion is The neW BLack

The more ordinary deployment of population racism in neoliberalism functions in a field of many populations, all of which are differently targeted for manipulation through technical solutions. Technical solutions take part in and thereby give support to population racism not only as a matter of governance, but as a matter of economy as well. That is to say, population racism functions on behalf of capital accumulation by enacting a fragmentation of the biological field, enabling differences to be cut into the biological, which, as life-itself, had been made abstract. The calculation of biological differences enables a process of value production in the differences of race, or in the differences of life capacities rendered as racial probabilities to be circulated as data. Not only do probability statistics activate a population, the probabilities draw future possibilities of life and death into the present, and in so doing generate and circulate value, or what might better be called the biovalue of risk or life and death chances.15 As Aihwa Ong suggests, here all populations, even those marked for the extreme violence of political excluHuman Security/National Security 51

sion, are included economically, as the excluded are made targets of calculation and there is, as Foucault describes it, “a sort of complete superimposition of market mechanisms, indexed to competition, and governmental policy.”16 Technical solutions have been made ordinary practice in neoliberalism, where economy and governance have had as their primary function the evaluation and management of risk through processes of technically supported calculation, especially digitized calculation. As Randy Martin has noted, twenty years ago the financialization of the economy concerned the opportunities of the market, while risk concerned the societal provision of damage control, especially for technological threats. Today, in neoliberalism, economy and society have been brought into “a grand, nonlinear matrix,” what Martin refers to as “securitization.”17 Securitization, rather than reducing everything to economy, has instead enabled economy and governance to engage common techniques of management. Governance obtains its legitimacy from markets of information, including the financial market, allowing indices to give shape to feelings of and capacity for well-being, or the lack thereof. Fear, for example, is modulated not simply as a matter of national security, but also as a matter of producing and sustaining confidence in markets that, in turn, offer verification of government decisions. Here population racism also plays an important part in producing affect, as, for example, it circulates fear along with statistical profiles of populations, providing neoliberalism with a rhetoric of motive in the process of political branding.18 Populations, therefore, are not simply groupings of human beings or individual juridical subjects of right, but rather are statistically organized and manipulated as groupings of characteristics, features, or parts. As Foucault puts it, “Population will henceforth be seen, not from the standpoint of the juridical-political notion of subject, but as a sort of technical political object of management and government” that is “dependent on a series of variables.”19 The manipulation of populations through a population racism, therefore, is a manipulation of life capacities, of vitality, and operates as well to produce sensation, affects, and somatic effects that are not only felt at the individual level, but more importantly at the population level through political branding. These manipulations are not meant to produce behavior of individuals or groups so much as they are meant to produce affective states, states of attention or activation with indeterminate, though already to-be-

52 Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse

sensed, future effects. As such, population is not only a matter of biology, of the life of species. Population may also be grasped in terms of what Foucault refers to as “publics,” or populations under the guise of opinion, milieus in which political branding might be said to operate best.20 Tiziana Terranova describes these publics as “addresses of communicated affective states.”21 To be sure, publics are not the public, imagined to be engaged in a discourse about narrative knowledge and truth claims. Publics, rather, are engaged at the level of affect and sensation, being drawn into images and commentary that are full of passions and prejudices that allow affective states to take on a facticity without employing a logic of evidence. Constituted on the same ontological plane as populations, publics come and go in time, and in so doing they “express a mobility of the socius that further deterritorializes the relation between individuals and collectivities.”22 Terranova argues that there is no relationship of belonging that characterizes the individual elements that constitute the public of a population. Belonging is itself an effect of the mediated modulation of affectivity. And not surprisingly, Terranova concludes that digitized technologies are fundamental to the deterritorialization of the relationship between individual and collectivity, as well as to the constitution of the publics of populations. These technologies are not only able to bring all sorts of populations to calculation, but they are also able to produce publics through the provisional capture and dissemination of affect.23 As the digitization of biopolitics allows for the calculation and distribution of life and death capacities at increasingly greater speeds for a greater number of population types, value itself has been undergoing a transvaluation, bringing populations and their publics together in the production of value and the circulation of affect. That is, populations and their publics labor together, in the circulation of the political branding of technical solutions in an affect economy. Here what has been called affective labor or immaterial labor encompasses the laboring of calculation for technical solutions and the production and consumption of politically branded opinion about population capacities for life and death. Politically branded opinion is even put to work in producing a division of affective laborers or an affective division of laborers—a sensibility circulated about workers around the world, as in our next case, where there is the “feminization” of laborers who are imagined to be male and who are working endlessly for little pay in parts of the world characterized as having dehumanizing labor practices.

Human Security/National Security 53

some sTaTemenTs are more fashionaBLe Than oThers

As much for the style of reportage as for the story reported, a 2007 article in the New York Times Magazine most likely was as shocking to readers as it was intended to be.24 Its writer, Julian Dibbell, author of the book Play Money, tells of Chinese laborers who work twelve hours a night, seven nights a week, for a wage of thirty cents an hour—more or less. Thirty cents is an approximation, because how much a farmer makes depends on how many gold coins he harvests. Gold coins? Yes, the farming that workers do takes place in cyberspace, where they participate in multiplayer online role-playing games, or massively multiplayer online games (MMos), such as World of Warcraft. Millions of players participate in this fantasy world of combat and adventure, playing for months or even years as an avatar, a virtual stand-in for the computer user. The farmers play to gather the “gold coins” that buy the magic swords, enchanted breastplates, and the like needed to earn the points required for advancing through levels of the game. Gold coins worth about thirty cents to the laborer are sold online for about three U.S. dollars and then to the final customer, usually an American or European player, for about twenty U.S. dollars. Dibbell suggests that gold farmers labor in ways imagined to be “typically” Chinese. The gold farmer usually works with others in a small commercial space. There are thousands of such places all over China, neither owned nor operated by owners of the games but part of a $1.8 billion worldwide trade in virtual items. Because “the grind,” or playing to get the virtual loot that is needed to get to higher levels of the game, is both time and patience consuming, some players choose instead to buy virtual loot with “real” money, a practice that has gone on for some time through auctioning on eBay. While eBay has recently ended players’ auctioning their hard-won loot, there are now high-volume online specialty sites selling virtual items like gold coins, where working players are replaced by retailers. But gold farming still goes on, and it is not surprising that game owners have responded to the underground market in gold coins. Yet, rather than crack down on buyers (otherwise good paying customers of games), game makers crack down on gold farmers by banning their accounts. Meanwhile, there is also legitimate auctioning within the game by game owners, an official virtual economy that parrots and delegitimizes the underground economy Dibbell’s workers labor in. But there is also a response like that of Donghua Networks, where players actually play for others who give over their account names and passwords and 54 Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse

pay a fee. Inventiveness has also been displayed around the endgame, where a customer is escorted by a team who plays for the most valuable rewards that cannot be bought, only won in rounds of playing near the very end of the game. Once the team has enabled the customer to get a valued item, they stand back so he can bag it—for a fee, of course. Developing a deep sense of cooperation, these teams have forced the development of guilds for training in the skills of end gaming. Dibbell writes that when this market for end gaming proved less than lucrative, some team workers found it difficult to go back to farming on their own. It seemed boring to return to the repetitive rounds of playing for nothing but gold coins, even though gold farmers often play in their downtime, not only as a matter of r &d, but also for pleasure. Perhaps it may still seem shocking that play has become real work and virtual loot makes real money, or that there are players who don’t want to play even though they are in the game, or that there has been a stratifying of game playing, defining some of it as boring, a grind, while some of it remains exciting, worth playing. It seems a lot less surprising that the work of playing, defined as boring, is outsourced to groups of players-made-laborers, paid by the piece. And not surprising at all is that the gold farmers who make for a good story are those working in China. The story of gold farmers points to conceptualizations of immaterial or affective labor, conceptualizations that by the 1990s were meant to register a change in work, production and consumption, ownership, and personal property. Laboring in “a realm of atomless digital products traded in frictionless digital environments for paperless digital cash,” gold farmers, as Dibbell would have it, do produce product, gold coins.25 However, the value of their labor is based on their immaterial and affective capacities as players— not only those capacities they already exhibit, but those they are capable of developing in response to the sophistication of other players, and therefore they develop the game itself through their play. Gold farming is a continuous laboring that absorbs play, if not all of life. As though it were another side—the underside—of playing and gaming in the financial market, gold farming is part of the laboring of an assemblage, including scientific and technological advances, corporate resources, research and development of capitalist modes of producing desire, and complex sets of game-playing practices. Moreover, the gold-farming story plays its part in this assemblage as it politically brands the practice and, through branding, implements population racism. It does so differently than the gender branding of the Kenneth Cole campaign, which draws from those senses of woman Human Security/National Security 55

as vulnerable, in need of protection, and desiring choice, in order to code national security in terms of individual safety and protection and encourage the investment of affective energies in national security. As to the gold farmers, political branding operates to evoke a Western, capitalist fantasy that aligns feminization with a communist deindividualization of Chinese workers imagined to be male. The policing of farm work, taking place among the Chinese gold farmers, becomes a way to realign proper divisions of work and play, or legitimize work and entitlements to play, with an American nationalist- capitalist, masculinist imaginary. In asserting the illegality and illegitimacy of gold farming, here the protection of labor and play (rather than of woman, as in the Kenneth Cole advertisements) becomes a matter of racialized economic superiority felt to be a defense of proper capitalism. In the political branding of the gold farmers, there is an overlay of population racism that functions to draw the productive assemblage of potential back to various population publics, through reference to past media coverage of a “‘dehumanizing’ labor typically Chinese,” thereby shaping the meaning of humanness in human rights or human security discourse. That is to say, just as the story of gold farming recapitulates some things already well known about labor, production, consumption, ownership, and personal property in contemporary capitalism, the fact that this is a story set in China cannot be taken as incidental. After all, gold-farming activities are not unique or confined to China. As Rey Chow would remind us, the story of gold coin farming, and not just the coins themselves, has to be understood as circulating in an economy in which “Chinese ethnicity” has been made valuable and serves as a political branding.26 Although the working conditions endured by laboring gold farmers is not news, their labor is nonetheless made surprising, given shock value through its infusion with the contagious affectivity of population racism. In 2007, when Dibbell’s piece was published, China was (and continues to be) of great interest to a United States characterized by economic insecurity and an apprehensive sense that the only thing more dangerous than Chinese communism might be Chinese capitalism. This insecurity points to the way Cold War ideologies that demarcated an ethical nationality against an easily identified foreign threat had disintegrated, and as the open field of capitalism comes not just to include but affectively circulate “the other,” the accompanying production of fear and insecurity is itself invested in and modulated. Thus, the case of Chinese gold farmers occasions not only the circulation of virtual currency in exchange for money (really, one system of credit interlock56 Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse

ing with another) but the circulation of branded population racism, enjoined to the securitization of market confidence in the face of a “creeping Chinese” threat of capital takeover. None of this, however, stops the farming, or is even meant to stop it. Even when attacks on gold farmers’ play are mobilized by nonfarming players, the players, who object to the labor of the Chinese farmers and who spend their playtime working to contain the threats the Chinese gold farmers pose, will only intensify the value of play. That is, given the circulation of the affect of a population racism, the play to contain the threat of the Chinese farmers can only invest the gaming with affective force, with impetus for ongoing and competitive play, making the labor of farming more valuable. As value undergoes a transvaluation, drawing the ethical to the economic and deploying the ethical to enable economic circulation, Chow reminds us of a related interest in China and argues that the concern with China’s “human rights abuses” is not contrary to or even separable from economic circulation. Arguing that an economic circuit has been put into play by human rights demands concerning political prisoners, Chow reports that Chinese authorities respond to these demands by releasing “political prisoners” (from whom, she also reports, body parts are taken for exchange in the global market). The prisoners are released a few at a time, even as others are imprisoned, nonetheless compelling Western nations to soften their rhetoric so that China can gain more trading privileges and opportunities. The circuit, being dependent on the ongoing evaluation of human rights abuse, leads Chow to conclude “human rights can no longer be understood purely on humanitarian grounds but rather must also be seen as an inherent part— entirely brutal yet also entirely logical—of transnational corporatism, under which anything, including human beings or parts of human beings, can become exchangeable for its negotiated equivalent value.”27 All this goes into a construction of “the Chinese,” into the use and further intensification of population racism. Far from a negotiation with a transcendental morality (for example the rights of humans), ethical value in an affect economy is very much a material operation, an immanent force drawing attention or activation toward sites of investment for capital and neoliberal governance. It is this forceful attraction at play in neoliberal governance that has made possible the deployment of political branding in the field of human rights and human security, branding embedded in and occurring simultaneously with the implementation of population racism. Chow, as we have done with human security, takes her Human Security/National Security 57

discussion of human rights and Chinese political prisoners to the history of feminist efforts to enter “woman” into representation in human rights policy, but in her criticism she also implicates the drive for the representation of all identity politics. Chow argues that the claim to representation made for women could only be realized as a supplement to man, in that it required the undoing of the erasure of woman in the construction of the “essential identity” of man. But by the time woman enters representation by unveiling the fictionality of man’s essential identity, the coupling of man-woman is “already obsolete.” This is “not so much because its twosomeness is heterosexist as because such twosomeness itself will have to be recognized as part of something else, something whose configuration—as class or race, for instance—becomes graspable exactly the moment of the supplement’s materialization.”28 This undoing of gender identity, and other identities as well, in the application of the logic of supplementation or deconstruction has behind it the ongoing transformation of the certain configuration of the separate social spheres of the state, the economy, and the public and the private domains that, at least in Western modernity, has provided the institutional arrangement for the regime of subject formation, the condition of possibility of the individual’s rights, freedoms, and obligations in relationship to a national collectivity. The shift of emphasis in neoliberalism from discipline aimed at the subject to biopolitical manipulation of populations turns to the ethical, producing the transvaluation of value in the context of a reconfiguration of social spheres, the private and public domains, the economy, and the state. choice . . . no Woman shouLd Be WiThouT one

In the summer of 2007, around the same time that Dibbell’s story was published, a far from high-end photo advertisement appeared on billboards and in train and bus stops, one in a series of advertisements for Manhattan Mini Storage, a storage facility in New York City. The ad showed an iron hanger tilted slightly to the right. To the left of the hanger and crossing over the corner of the hanger the copy read: “Your cLoSEt SPAcE IS SHrInKInG AS FASt AS HEr rIGHt to cHooSE.” The ad, with a flurry of responses on the blogosphere, instigated a rethinking of affect, gender as brand, and population racism. Though in a more pedestrian fashion, the Manhattan Mini Storage ad suggested, just as the Kenneth Cole campaign had, there is a particularly gendered insecurity that requires defense. Just as the Kenneth Cole advertisements had, this ad for storage space linked a gendered personal 58 Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse

security with consumer choice. But if the Kenneth Cole campaign gestured toward an external, nonspecified threat that nonetheless recirculates the racialization and Orientalization of threat, these ads pointed to the internal threat of a spreading neoconservatism. In this case, Western society needed to be defended against itself. During the consumption boom of the mid-twentieth century, U.S. corporations learned to tie a product to sexuality, producing advertisements that offered a layer of implicit and explicit suggestions that a particular commodity would improve a consumer’s sex appeal or experiences of sexual pleasure, suggestions that would be normatively raced as well as gendered, but affective advertising does not work in quite the same way. To connect with an affective register, advertisers must activate a circulation of moods, desires, impulses, pleasures, and attentions that pass through a brand but do not need to be directly tied to a product of that brand. Branding does not rely on the attachment of connotative associations to a commodity. Kenneth Cole makes the selling of fashion the stuff of political commentary, but not by explicitly suggesting there is a benefit to national security or personal safety in wearing Kenneth Cole fashions. Rather, the commentary works along with the bright surface of the photographs—the sheen of bodies and buildings, the sense of movement captured yet still in motion—to elicit a mood that draws a reader’s attention, attention to be mixed with sentiments and affects that do not have to be sorted into cognitive thought, or directly exchanged for a commodity. This is advertising and marketing as political branding. In separating advertising from a product, branding like that of the Kenneth Cole fashion photos avails itself to more ready replication, as it moves in a pool of affect that cannot be contained by a product (if it were to solidify that way, it would not be working as affect). So it is not surprising that other corporations have followed Kenneth Cole’s lead. Though perhaps less artful, the campaign of Manhattan Mini Storage is nonetheless quite effective and affective, and its lack of artiness may register as a populist lack of artifice, eliciting feelings of solidarity between the “common folk” reader and the corporation. The clothes-hanger ad is but one is a series. These ads—lacking the high-end photography of the pictorial in the New York Times Magazine and seeming more Comedy Central than nPr—are directed at city dwellers lacking space in small, cramped quarters. They have taken equal aim at celebrity and political culture. One ad stated, “Your closet is so narrow it makes Paris [Hilton] look deep,” while another attacked the reader’s inadequate storage space by admonishing, “Your closet is so narrow it makes Cheney look libHuman Security/National Security 59

eral.” During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaigns, a neck-down photo of a woman dressed in an unmistakably Sarah Palin–esque jacket, accompanied the question, “What’s more limited? Your closet or her experience?” There is something to note here about how an affect economy encourages the erasure of distinctions between some kinds of fame and others (for example, the fame of a media figure versus that of a politician) as fame is set not to produce a meaningful aura, but to marshal the rapid movements of attention. This is politician as celebrity, and celebrity as political branding. In fact, not only what a politician might be, but what politics itself might be, is the question raised. Although the New York Sun reported on the advertising campaign mocking Palin in terms of how its liberal politics might dissuade conservative customers, the politics of the campaign, not to mention its effect on consumption patterns, might not be so clear.29 To be “against” neoconservatism is not to subvert the circulations of political branding and population racism. Thus we might agree with a blogger writing in response to the ads who pointed out that they work simply to “get people emotionally moved.”30 For example, “Your closet space is shrinking as fast as her right to choose,” drew various responses. Commentators on one feminist blog were content to accept the ad as a pro-choice statement defending women’s reproductive health and freedom; a photo of the ad appeared on this blog under the headline “Yet another reason why I’m proud to be a New Yorker” and was captioned with the line, “We love you, Manhattan Mini Storage.”31 The last bit is, of course, hyperlinked to the Manhattan Mini Storage website. Other bloggers remained skeptical—though of exactly what is not clear. Blogger Subway Fox also presented a photo of the billboard under the questioning headline, “Does this ad go a little too far?” followed by responses that include the suggestion that “it has crossed a line.” What line is not specified, and neither is the direction that this might have gone too far in. Responding bloggers commented that any defense of abortion goes too far; that a joke about abortion goes too far; that there is no too far in politics; and that it is images of aborted fetuses used by antiabortion activists that have gone too far.32 The openness to interpretation of this question signals the openness to interpretation of the ad, and gives further evidence, if any was needed, that traditional models of a political spectrum that moves from left to right lose their bearings in a context of affect economies and population racism. Rather, the Manhattan Mini Storage ad campaigns operate by mobilizing and intensifying attention, carrying the brand in the gone-too-far-ness, or excess of af60 Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse

fect, produced by the ad and its distributed Internet-based reproductions and commentary. They also function to make a political ground for marketing, advertisement, and capitalist exchange that presents the choice the ad advocates, which, like the choice advocated in human rights and human security policies, is a neoliberal choice, gender branded to fuse consumer options with freedom, producing an indifference between access to closet space and access to abortion. This is a rearticulation of freedom exactly as it is mobilized by the occupying forces of democracy that open markets and liberate consumers, making available whole populations of occupied territories to affective investment: the life of the oppressed Other-woman offering a branding of legitimacy to military intervention. Just as the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were never really about the “liberation” of women, this ad was not really about women, especially not those women whose bodies have undergone the torments of the clotheshanger abortion. Nor was the ad about the history of the joining of reproductive technologies, including contraception, sterilization, and abortion, to eugenics programs of race population control, a history in which some women, especially poor women and women of color, have sought protection from those technologies at least as often as they have sought access to them. Even as this ad evokes woman—the “her” that is losing out (unlike the “you,” who can at least buy more storage space)—it makes abortion not about women, which is to say it disaggregates an identity or subject bound up with rights, and redistributes gender, in the figure of woman, as brand. Here, woman is a set of feelings and senses about freedom and capitalism; woman is a way to think and feel about choice. In the gender branding of certain social and political policies and programs, a certain sheen of fashionable modernity and civility is given them, while populations are held in fear and terror of other populations in the gender deployment of population racism. We nonetheless can see, although barely, the differential effects on each of us as we differently take up the risk and try to live the various lives cut out for us through these programs of governance and economy. mideasT peace is The musT- have for faLL

Though some hoped the historic election of Barack Obama would signal a break from some forms of racism, the backlash that has risen in the first years of his administration suggests another affective configuration and circulation of population racism. In this round, population racism is bolstered by a political branding that connects populist white racial resentment to a Human Security/National Security 61

conservative hostility to “big government” and any form of social welfare democracy. Though some public outrage followed the circulation by e-mail of an image depicting the White House lawn planted with watermelons, circulate it did, along with defenses of “free expression,” which recalibrate democracy along familiar lines of racialized subordination, determining what kind of society (and what parts of it) must be defended.33 In the context of Tea Party protests and an intensified terrorizing of (presumed) immigrant populations, the popular imagination of how government should respond to crises in the economy and healthcare is mired in the affective forces of a renewed and insecure racialized nationalism. Defenses of racial profiling in the name of national security, panics of the supposed nuclear threat posed by North Korea, Pakistan, and Iran, and the specter of further deployments of U.S. troops to Afghanistan suggest that the political branding of population racism will remain at play, even as Americans have been invited to imagine that economic neoliberalism is facing its demise and that racism has had a historic reversal in the election of an African American president. No doubt there is reason to wonder about the future, about the indeterminacy of the present affective background of hope and what it will yield. There is no doubt, as well, that this hope and what it yields will come in some form of capitalist governance attached to projects of militarized securitization opposed to internal and external threats. As the economic crisis, unemployment, and the rate of foreclosure continue to worsen, entrenched economic and political powers are marshaling a populist backlash that demands “something be done,” while it calls for governmental nonintervention. A great deal depends on how governance will respond to this double bind of demands for and against regulation, what the relationship will be or can be between financial markets and an economy seeking again to enhance infrastructure and produce the jobs to do so. The force of the past marks an affective background of fear. As conservative neoliberal governance has found support in the manipulation of affect and gender as brand in the implementation of population racism, future governance will continue to engage methods of manipulating affective potential. It is these methods that we must become more able to critique. Our engagement with media circulations seeks to be a model for such criticism. noTes

1. Advertising insert, New York Times Magazine, September 8, 2002. 2. In relation to advertising, marketing, and, therefore, spending, it is difficult not 62 Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse

to think of President Bush, who immediately after September 11, 2001, reminded Americans to keep shopping to save democracy and prevent an interruption of the economy. 3. Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” Further critiques of the mobilization of “feminism” against “Islamic fundamentalism” are offered by Hirschkind and Mahmood, “Feminism, the Taliban, and Politics of Counter-Insurgency”; Sharpe and Spivak, “A Conversation with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak”; Grewal, Transnational America; and Puar, Terrorist Assemblages. 4. We are drawing on Patricia Ticineto Clough’s development of political branding in “War By Other Means: What Difference Does the Graphic(s) Make?” presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science, Washington, D.C., October 30, 2009. As Clough does in her essay, we are using Christine Harold’s term “aesthetic capitalism.” Christine Harold, “On Target: Aura, Affect, and the Rhetoric of ‘Design Democracy,’” Public Culture 21 (2009): 611. We also note the idea of gender as brand in Adkins, “The New Economy, Property, and Personhood.” 5. Parisi and Goodman, “Mnemonic Control,” in this volume. 6. Tiziana Terranova, “Another Life: the Limits of Sovereignty and the Nature of Political Economy in Foucault’s Genealogy of Biopolitics,” Theory, Culture & Society 26 (2009): 234–62. 7. See Clough’s discussion of political economy, attention, and teletechnologies in Autoaffection. See also Clough and Halley, The Affective Turn, and Clough et al., “Notes Towards a Theory of Affect-Itself.” 8. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 138. 9. Ibid., 145–46. 10. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 243. 11. A linear progression has also been critiqued by scholars who have emphasized the centrality of imperialism and colonialism. See Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). 12. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 146. 13. The term “population racism” is introduced in Patricia Ticineto Clough, “The New Empiricism: Affect and Sociological Method,” European Journal of Social Theory 1 (2009): 43–61. 14. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 254. 15. “Biovalue” is introduced in Waldby, The Visible Human Project. 16. Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception, 5. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège De France 1978–1979, translated by Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 121. 17. Randy Martin, An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 63. 18. Massumi, “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact.” 19. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 70. 20. Ibid., 75.

Human Security/National Security 63

21. Terranova, “Futurepublic,” 135. Terranova is drawing on Lazzarato, La politica dell’evento. 22. Ibid., 139. 23. Ibid., 140. 24. Dibbell, “The Life of a Chinese Gold Farmer,” 36–41. 25. Dibbell, Play Money, 23. 26. Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 27. Ibid., 21. 28. Ibid., 160. 29. Lapidos, “Storage Company Ads Too Political for Some Tastes.” 30. “Manhattan Mini Storage Abortion Ad: does this cross over too far into bad taste?,” June 23, 2007, http://www.reddit.com/. 31. “Yet Another Reason Why I’m Proud to Be a New Yorker,” June 20, 2007, http://www .feministing.com/. 32. “Does this ad go a little too far?” June 23, 2007, http://subwayfox.net/. 33. In February 2009, the mayor of Los Alamitos, California, was criticized for sending out an e-mail message with an image depicting the White House lawn planted with rows of watermelons. The text accompanying the image read, “No Easter egg hunt this year.”

64 Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse

Jasbir puar

“tHe tUrBan is not a Hat”

Queer Diaspora and Practices of Profiling

“The turban is not a hat” became the slogan for an educational Sikh crusade, a central, organizing refrain for numerous national Sikh advocacy groups soon after September 11, 2001, who were reckoning with a surge of reported assaults on turbaned men mistaken for Muslim terrorists.1 The first victim of these hate- crime murders was in fact a turbaned Sikh, fifty-two-year-old Balbir Singh Sodhi, who was shot five times in the back at a gas station in Mesa, Arizona, on September 15, 2001.2 His killer, Francisco Silva Roque, proclaimed, “I’m an American. Arrest me and let those terrorists run wild.”3 Sodhi subsequently became the poster child for a wronged Sikh American citizenry, the symbolic and material evidence of the fact that Sikhs were indeed most certainly not Muslims. At this time, I was involved with efforts at the Garden State Sikh Association (GSSA; a temple community in New Jersey that I have been a member of throughout my childhood and some of my adult life) to protect its membership, especially turbaned men facing various turban clawing and grabbing incidents, often involving Sikhs working at gas stations and in bodegas.4 Our gurdwara community went to great lengths, as many across the United States, Britain, and France did, to enact a performance of allegiance to our nation, a performance bolstered by the display of heteronormative model minority ideals. Along with the typical assimilative but self-preservationist tactics—candlelight vigils, flags covering the temple, red-white-and-

blue turbans, and patriotic statements aligned with the American idea of victimhood—public relations firms were hired to manage the damage control and “deal with this misunderstanding among the American public,” while an endless stream of lawyers went to Washington, D.C., to meet with senators and other public officials and expound upon the Sikh commitment to American civic life.5 The cry of “mistaken identity” thus became central to Sikh lobbying efforts. Organizations such as the Sikh Mediawatch and Resource Task Force (SMArt; a Sikh American civil rights advocacy group) have released statements, talking points, and photos explaining the differences between “those” turbans and Sikh turbans.6 (The attacks themselves were becoming increasingly bizarre in their execution. Often the turban itself was the object of the assault, and the unraveling of hair signified a humiliating and intimate submission, hinting at homosocial undertones.)7 Sikh communities were flooded with missives on how to navigate airport security and promote interfaith exchange, and also released many documents.8 One such document is “The Turban Is Not a Hat,” which instructs Sikhs dealing with airport security to insist that their turbans, if they were required to be checked for weapons, be scanned with a sensor wand rather than being removed and sent through X-ray machines or forcibly unwrapped, both prevailing practices at the time. In the hopes of helping Sikhs avoid inspection altogether, SMArt directed Sikhs to claim that the turban could not be removed without its unraveling: “The turban is not a hat. It is a mandatory symbol of the Sikh religion. I cannot simply remove it; it must be unwrapped.”9 The widespread campaigns undertaken by liberal Sikh advocacy groups to educate “ignorant Americans” about Sikhs also responded to a series of offensive video games (like Hitman 2) and cartoon strips (such as Carol Lay’s “A Field Guide to Turbans” and “Randy bin Laden”), as well as to demands that the turban be removed for driver’s license and work-related photos and for other administrative jobs and work-related procedures. Largely disregarding that there is a wide variation of turban styles, colors, material, sizes, and even uses between Sikhs from varying diasporic locations, class backgrounds, and even genders—for Sikh women may also don turbans, however rarely—these efforts were driven by a desire to inhabit a proper Sikh American heteromasculinity, one at significant remove from the perverse sexualities ascribed to terrorist bodies. Furthermore, the hypothesis of mistaken identity as the main cause of post- 9/11 hate crimes, along with the liberal push to educate an unknowing citizenry, relies on multiple premises: that the viewer (assumed to be white, despite the proliferation of these attacks by people of color) is open to 66 Jasbir Puar

and willing to discern the visual differences between Sikh turbans and Muslim turbans; that the ideals of multiculturalism, as promulgated by liberal education, acknowledge that differences within difference matter; that the violent backlash toward Sikhs is a displacement of hostility from the rightful object, the “real” Muslims. These political tactics encouraged a kind of amnesia, glossing over a history of turban assaults that stretches back to the late 1800s, when the “tide of the turbans” came to the northwestern United States, and more recent attacks such as those that followed the 1984 assassination of Indira Gandhi.10 The campaign acknowledged the perverse masculinities encrypted into Sikh bodies, rescripting these masculinities in an enactment of anti-Muslim sentiment. The disavowal of the perverse queernesses thought to be attached to Muslim terrorist bodies functioned as a rite of initiation and assimilation into U.S. heteronormative citizenship. I was also part of a group of activists loosely working together, many of whom were part of the South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association based in New York City. In the months following September 11, 2001, SALGA members across the tristate area reported numerous sexual, verbal, and physical assaults, queer South Asians being mugged, beaten, and molested. We were struggling to articulate a relationship between queer bashing and what were narrowly defined as racist hate crimes, a connection that was being patently ignored by mainstream queer antiviolence organizations such as the New York Anti-Violence Project, and only preliminarily approached by many Arab American, South Asian, and Muslim groups, some of which were admirably attempting to tackle issues about sexuality for the very first time. It certainly appeared to be the case that our queer South Asian communities were doubly vulnerable to these attacks, especially those more conspicuously marked by visible traits associated with gender nonnormativity, working- class and working-poor backgrounds, and immigrant bodies and speech. Some of those assaulted encountered very specific references to “faggotry” or other homophobic slurs. But by and large it was more obvious that the invocation of the word “terrorist” in these crimes always already betrayed an implicit prerequisite of perverse sexuality, queerness, and gender nonnormativity beyond the pale of proper citizenship sexuality, both heteronormative and homonormative. We labored to produce materials and resources for the queer South Asian community that specifically addressed racist and homophobic crimes, recognizing that the queer perversity of terrorist bodies was both being read from their bodies as well as imposed upon their bodies; that is, queerness was both an identificatory modality producing individual bodies and a “The Turban Is Not a Hat” 67

generalized rubric applied to populations. The interstices between the brown queer subject who is hailed as a terrorist and the terrorist who is always already pathologically queer surfaced as a complex activist scotoma that challenged the bounds of our work (a limitation that has everything to do with an understanding of queerness that is unable to address its often subterranean proclivities toward sexualities that are adamantly secular). Ironically, South Asian queer diasporic subjects were and continue to be under even greater duress to produce themselves as exceptional American subjects, not necessarily as heteronormative but as homonormative, even as the queernesses of these very bodies are simultaneously used to pathologize populations configured as terrorist. In response, there was and continues to be a double movement. The first aspect of the movement extends an invitation into queer and homonormative folds of American patriotism participating in and reproducing narratives of U.S. queer exceptionalism in contradistinction to perverse (Orientalist) and repressed sexualities of the East (expressed in neo-Orientalist human rights discourses). The second aspect of the movement demands an investment in foregrounding and reclaiming the sexual perversities of the brown terrorist implicit in the queering of terrorist populations. In this latter move, however, there seemed to be a figure, or should I say an object, at the limit of this strategy: the turban, and the body that it sits upon. The turbaned body’s historical attachments to hypermasculinity, perverse heterosexuality (and at times pedophilia and homosexuality), and warrior militancy rendered it neither within the bounds of respectable queer subjecthood nor worthy of a queer intervention that would stage a reclamation of sexual-racial perversity, suggesting that it is a body almost too perverse to be read as queer, a problematic that is specific to certain diasporic contexts and not generalizable to South Asia itself. As contagions that trouble the exceptionalisms of queer South Asian diasporas, male, turbaned Sikh bodies are read as patriarchal by queer diasporic logics because they challenge the limits of queer diasporic identity that balk at the nonnormativity of turbaned bodies (even as they avow the pathological and sexual-racial renderings of terrorist bodies). Many queer South Asians in New York during fall 2001 were working with South Asian community-based organizations such as Desis Rising Up and Moving, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, Manavi (a help line for South Asian women), and the New York Taxi Workers Alliance. However, despite the best efforts of South Asian queer organizers and gurdwara community leaders, the two activist initiatives I have just sketched

68 Jasbir Puar

did not and dare not converge, despite their common circumstances and concerns about racial profiling, surveillance, and security. On the one hand, a queer diasporic subject may contest the limits of the liberated subject of Lawrence and Garner v. Texas, a liberated subject produced through privileges of class, whiteness, and gender normativity; on the other, the queer diasporic subject may be unable to respond to the turbaned Sikh victim and the related figure of the Muslim terrorist, both of whom are seen as conservatively heteronormative and antiqueer, yet in the perverse sexualities ascribed to them are almost too queer to rehabilitate. But where the Sikh victim and the Muslim terrorist converge is crucial: their subjects of resistance, to one degree or another, fail. Furthermore, to a greater or lesser extent, both queer diasporic and GSSA responses rely on the specular as the conduit for the transfer of correct information, the diasporic through recourse to a queer visibility that forecloses the turbaned body as an object worthy of a queer intervention, and the GSSA through the privileging of “seeing” as a naturalized activity that can be easily disrupted in order to redress misrecognition and rearrange configurations of gender, sexuality, and race. queer diasporas

Brian Keith Axel, in his ground- clearing essay, “The Diasporic Imaginary,” poses two radical modifications to the study of diaspora as it has developed in anthropology, cultural studies, and interdisciplinary forums. Referencing his study of Sikh diasporas, he argues first that “rather than conceiving of the homeland as something that creates the diaspora, it may be more productive to consider the diaspora as something that creates the homeland.” Axel is gesturing beyond the material locational pragmatics of the myth of return, the economic and symbolic importance of the nonresident Indian (nrI), Khalistan and Hindutva nationalist movements funded by diasporic money, or the modalities of homeland that are recreated in the diaspora. The homeland, he proposes, “must be understood as an affective and temporal process rather than a place.” But what impels a diasporic sensibility or collectivity if not the fact of place? The “temporalizing and affective aspect of subjectification” involved in the creation of the homeland pulls “the homeland into relation with other kinds of images and processes . . . different bodies or corporeal images and historical formations of sexuality, gender and violence.”11 Axel’s formulation can be productively reworked to further query the habitus of nation and its geographic coordinates. The paradigm of queer dias-

“The Turban Is Not a Hat” 69

pora retools the notion of diaspora to account for the connectivity beyond or different from that created by sharing a common ancestral homeland.12 That is, to shift away from origin for a moment allows other forms of diasporic, affiliative, and cathartic entities to show their affiliative powers. For Sikhs, “the homeland,” Khalistan, is a perpetual fantasy and not a current political fact; thus the experience of temporality is already commanded to futurity rather than organized through tradition, a common past, an origin. Furthermore, an unsettling of the site of origin (i.e., the nation) as one of the two binding terms of diaspora wrenches ancestral progression out of the automatic purview of diaspora, allowing for queer narratives of kinship, belonging, and home. While Axel is primarily interested in images of the tortured Sikh male body, I would argue that a focus on affect reveals how actual bodies can be in multiple places and temporalities simultaneously, not (only) tethered through nostalgia or memory but folded and braided into intensifications. The sensation of place is thus one of manifold intensities cathected through distance. To extend Axel’s formulation, the homeland is not represented only as a demographic or a geographical place, nor is it represented primarily through history, memory, or even trauma. But it does cohere through sensation, vibrations, echoes, speed, feedback loops, and recursive folds and feelings. Axel argues that the homeland is a spatial rather than a locational or place-based phenomenon. It coalesces in corporealities, affectivities, and, I would add, multiple and contingent temporalities, as much as it does in memory of place, networks (of travel, communication, and informational exchange), the myth of the imminent return to origin, and the progressive telos implied in the movement from origin to diaspora. Queer diasporic theorizing has emphasized self- crafted kinship, erotic and affectionate networks or lines of affiliation, rather than filiation. David Eng’s wonderfully generative writing on queer diaspora is instructive here. When diaspora is reconceptualized “not in conventional terms of ethnic dispersion, filiation, and biological traceability, but rather in terms of queerness, affiliation, and social contingency, ‘queer diaspora’ emerges as a concept providing new methods of contesting traditional family and kinship structures—of reorganizing national and transnational communities based not on origin, filiation, and genetics but on destination, affiliation, and the assumption of a common set of social practices or political commitments.”13 Foregrounding queer diasporic affiliations created through conscious adoption of alternative networking may cohere and centralize a prediscursive, agential queer subject and proactively create nonassimilable diasporic 70 Jasbir Puar

circuits, rather than elucidate the ontological presences that constitute and are constituitive of queer diasporas. Shifting focus to affect also unsettles a longstanding preoccupation with queer diasporic representational practices. We move from asking what this body means to asking what and whom this body affects. What does this body do? While the notion of contagion is slightly overdetermined in relation to unwanted and afflicted bodies, in this case specific bodies should not be read as contagions, though all bodies can be thought of as contagious or mired in contagions. Bodies infect other bodies with sensation, vibration, irregularity, chaos, and lines of flight that betray the expectation of loyalty, linearity, the demarcation of who’s in and who’s not. Contagions are autonomous, unregulated, their vicissitudes only peripherally anchored by knowable entities. They invoke the language of infection and transmission, forcing us to ask, how does one catch something whose trace is inchoate or barely discerned? Contagions conduct the effects of touch, smell, taste, hearing, and sight—the five primary senses defined by Western science—into shivers, sweat, blushes, heat, and pain, among many other sensations. Contagions thus complicate even the most complex articulations of affiliation; that is, contagion returns the process of affiliation to indeterminacy and contingency. The oppositions that subtend Eng’s proposition—origin/destination, filiation/affiliation, genetics/sociopolitics—are thus defied by the unpredictability of contagions, whose unregulated forces have no designated a priori affinities or opponents, and coagulate instead through sympathies. Contagions bypass the question of what constitutes a viable affiliation. This question returns us to the opening activist scenario whereby Sikh gurdwara sectors and South Asian queer diasporas are seen as incommensurate affinities or affiliations. It is this shift from origin to affect, from South Asia as unifying homeland to contagions—the assemblage of the monster-terrorist-fag, for instance— that troubles queer diasporic exceptionalisms, but also impels their exponential fortification and proliferation. South Asian queer diasporic communities in the United States (as well as in Britain) are disproportionately impacted by the production of terrorist corporealities as they navigate the figures of the Muslim terrorist, the turbaned Sikh man so often mistaken for him, and the woman in a hijab who must be rescued from them. These generative figures, always already sexually pathological, speak to the prolific fertilization and crosshatching of terrorist corporealities amid South Asian queer diasporas. As such, South Asian queer diasporas must contend not only with the stigmatization of their communities by the construct of these perverse terrorist “The Turban Is Not a Hat” 71

bodies, but also with the forms of queerness-as-exceptionalism that are often offered in response to this stigmatization. As a regulatory construct, queer exceptionalism may mimic forms of U.S. model minority exceptionalism, positing queerness as an exemplary or liberatory state devoid of nationalist impulses, an exceptionalism that narrates queerness as emulating the highest transgressive potential of diaspora.14 But the tensions—and overlaps— between the now fetishized desi drag queen or even the hijra (think of the British and Broadway stage performances of Bombay Dreams) and the turbaned or otherwise Sikh- or Muslim-identified terrorist invariably temper this exceptionalism. Since September 11, 2001, many activists and community members from SALGA in New York have voiced sentiments similar to the one expressed by a Pakistani Muslim queer man: “My sexuality has taken a back seat to my ethnicity.”15 This statement suggests some retrenchment of organizational relations away from mainstream queerness, a recomposition of the categories of race and nation, a rehashing of intersectionality as a viable identity framework, and the differential impact of surveillance optics. Furthermore, the war on terror demands a dual homonationalism, as allegiances to the nationstate of India are unwittingly or often deliberately rearticulated through allegiances to the United States. (This is reflective of the recent rise of the IndiaU.S. power couple.)16 Forms of regulatory queerness that collude with and are rooted in the quest for queer diasporic representational purchase, operating in tandem with the historical narrative of South Asians as a model minority population in the United States, must contend with the contagions of differently queer terrorist bodies. The queer liberal subject again attempts to split off from attachments and associations to terrorist bodies. This time the subject becomes the exceptional, queer, diasporic model minority subject, regulatory insofar as it must disavow neighboring contagions of populations, regulated insofar as it is both domesticated by and domesticating of spatially and temporally constricted amenable national populations, in this case, Indian and American.17 The shift we can mark, then, is that these queer diasporic subjects are under pressure, perhaps more than any other population today, to naturalize or normativize their exceptional Americanness, not through heteronormativity but through homonormativity, at the exact moment that queerness is a modality of nominalization that demarcates these very same bodies as those of terrorists. Because much queer diasporic theorizing seeks to enact the elaboration of a transgressive agential queer diasporic subject, I would like to offer an inter72 Jasbir Puar

pretation of affectation that does not demand that the (agential) queer (diasporic) subject be read in line with affective or emotional resonance or that the queer subject be produced through these resonances. I am not interested in reading the turbaned body as a queer body or in queering the turbaned body. As a figure that deeply troubles the nation’s security, the turbaned body can be most fruitfully rearticulated, not solely as a body encased in tradition and backwardness, attempting to endow itself with modernity, or as a dissident queer body, but as an assemblage, a move I make to both expand the expectations and assumptions of queer reading practices (descriptive and prescriptive) and to unsettle the longstanding theorizations of heteronormative frames of reference for the nation and the female body as the primary or sole bearer of cultural honor and respect. My aim is to rethink turbaned terrorist bodies and terrorist populations in relation to and beyond the ocular, that is, as an affective and affected entity that creates fear but also feels the fear it creates, an assemblage of contagions (again, this is distinct from the perverse body as contagious), cohering not through identity or identification but the concatenation of disloyal and irreverent lines of flight—partial, transient, momentary, and magical. (In this sense, I am departing from the currently cohering convention of queer theory on affect or queer affect.) This rereading of turbaned bodies offers a critical counternarrative both to queer subjects who regulate the terms of queerness (in this case, hinting at the foreclosure of a queer, diasporic, turbaned Sikh, male or female, distinct from the queernesses that have often been attributed to Sikh masculinities) and the pathological queernesses imposed on terrorist populations that Sikh gurdwara communities seek to evade. Crucially linked to this rereading, the purported coherence and cohesion of the organic body is at stake in positing that, first, the intermixing of the organic with the inorganic turban needs to be theorized across an organic/inorganic divide, a machinic assemblage, and second, that informational and surveillance technologies of control both produce the body- asinformation and also impact the organic body through an interface—organic and machinic technologies that interface to points of mutual dissolution. My reading thus elaborates the biopolitics of population that racializes and sexualizes bodies not entirely through their visual and affective qualities (as they are acquired historically and discursively) but rather through the data they assemble, what are otherwise known as “data bodies,” bodies materialized through information and statistics. Here I proffer some speculations about the connections and divergences—the dance—between the profile and the “The Turban Is Not a Hat” 73

racial profile, keeping in tension with each other the ocular, the affective, and the informational. What is the concept of race in profiling if we are not to privilege the visible, the knowable, the epistemological? Is the informational body, the data body that precedes and follows us racial or racist, and if so, how is it articulated within profiling? This is of particular concern to me in part because the notion of “surveillance assemblages” that is currently emerging from the field of surveillance studies, while rightly deprivileging the visual field in favor of affect and information, tends toward discounting and dismissing the visual and its capacity to interpellate subjects. This discounting is simply not politically viable given the shifts around formations of race and sex that are under way in response to a new visual category, the “terrorist look-alike” or those who “look like terrorists.” TurBans BecominG sTranGe aTTracTors

The turban is accruing the marks of a terrorist masculinity. The turbaned man—no longer merely the figure of a durable and misguided tradition, a community and familial patriarch in a resistant antiassimilationist stance— now inhabits the space and history of monstrosity, of that which can never become civilized. The turban is not only imbued with the nationalist, religious, and cultural symbolics of the Other; it both reveals and hides the terrorist, constantly sliding between that which can be disciplined and that which must be outlawed. Despite the taxonomies of turbans, their specific regional and locational genealogies, their placement in time and space, their singularity and their multiplicity, the turban- as-monolith profoundly troubles and disturbs the American national imaginaries and their attendant notions of security. The turban has faded in and out of U.S. historical consciousness.18 In 1923, Bhagat Singh Thind, a turbaned Sikh man, petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to grant Indians citizenship status. Arguing that North Indians have a Caucasian-Aryan ancestry similar to that of white Americans, Thind forced the issue of racial exclusion in relation to citizenship, despite ultimately losing his case. In the literatures of ethnic, South Asian, migration, and Asian American studies, Thind is hailed as a landmark ruling about the racial status of South Asians in the United States, but in the broad citational span of the case, little commentary has been offered on the specific markings of the Sikh bodies that were represented in this claim. Nevertheless, the presence of the turban confirms a priori the properly religious Sikh man within essentializing Sikh historical scholarship. The language of the ruling itself speaks of the 74 Jasbir Puar

importance of the “resemblance” between “cultivated citizens”; the majority decision states that what matters is not that “groups of persons who are supposed to be or really are descended from some remote, common ancestor, but who, whether they both resemble him to a greater or less extent, have, at any rate, ceased altogether to resemble one another. It may be true that the blond Scandinavian and the brown Hindu have a common ancestor in the dim reaches of antiquity, but the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences between them today.”19 By invoking the everyday experience of race over the scientific and anthropological evidence presented by Thind, the decision confirms the anxiety regarding dominant imagery of brown, turbaned “Hindoo” laborers at that time. The ruling is thus symptomatic not only of the demand for phenotypical resemblance, but also for the resonance of visceral properties of the body. It is not only that the blond Scandinavian cannot see himself in the brown Hindu, and vice versa. Rather, the bodies inhabit different tactile and affective economies, insofar as touch, texture, sensation, and the turban-as-appendage render the impossibility of resonance, of appearing to feel the same. There is a refusal to allow the simultaneous inhabitation of tactile economies that cut through and across these representational divides.20 Thus, the pressure to naturalize the aspirant citizen is reflected in the erasure of nomenclature and the psychic deturbaning (perhaps symbolic castration) that promotes a representational but not ontological assessment of the historical impact of Thind (though the ruling might suppress turbaned embodiments, it never completely forgets them). As a form of unveiling, deturbaning allows the true nature of the Hindoo to emerge and be recognized; bodily practices involving the hair, beard, turban, and cultural body are under pressure to conform. Furthermore, the claim of Aryan ancestry links into a foundational belief system of Hindu nationalism, which centrally asserts the truth of this connection: Hindu racial, cultural, and civilizational purity and superiority vis-à-vis Muslims, as well as the Hindutva state of India, are complicit in the production of Sikh and Muslim terrorist corporealities.21 Mistaken as Hindu in the early twentieth century and now mistaken as Muslim, middle- class Sikhs, conservative and progressive factions alike, have embraced the hypothesis of mistaken identity as the main causal factor for post- 9/11 hate crimes, thus paralleling the official response of the Bush administration.22 Since September 11, 2001, Sikh men wearing turbans, mistaken for the kin of Osama bin Laden, have been disproportionately affected by backlash racist hate crimes. Let us ponder for a moment the span “The Turban Is Not a Hat” 75

of violence: verbal harassment (being called “bin Laden,” “son of bin Laden,” “Osama”), especially on the phone or while driving; threatening driving or tailgating; hate mail; defecation and urination on Sikh gurdwaras, Islamic mosques, and Hindu temples and, in some cases, arson; the blocking of the entrance of a Sikh temple in Sacramento with a tractor and truck, and the perpetrators’ jumping into the sacred holy water at the temple; bricks, gasoline bombs, garbage, and other projectiles thrown into the homes of Sikhs and Arabs; slashed car tires; death threats and bomb threats; fatal shootings of taxi drivers, the majority of whom have been turbaned Sikhs; verbal and physical harassment of primary and secondary school children, as well as foreign students on college campuses; and attacks with baseball bats, paintball guns, lit cigarettes, and pig’s blood.23 This enumeration is provided to detail the prolific creativity engendered within these attacks in order to situate the importance of the turban not as an entity that merely represents any number of given meanings in these instances, but rather as a vector of information, a point of contact, a transfer and conduit of turbulence. The deturbaning undertaken by massive numbers of Sikh men was a manifestation of the demanded domestication of Americanness, where removal functions as a reorientation into masculine patriotic identity. More importantly, deturbaning, along with hate crime statistics, underscores the costs of an association with terrorist bodies. Assaults on turbaned men continue to escalate, and are attributed in part to a “resurgence of backlash” since the beginning of the war in Iraq. The Sikh Coalition estimates that in 2003 there was a 90 percent increase in bias incidents since 2002, and that a vast majority of crimes go unreported because of language barriers and unfamiliarity with hate- crime legislation.24 The nature of these assaults has also become more sophisticated and more complex. Recent attacks (in the United States but also globally) involve not only verbal commands to deturban—“Hey, you fucking terrorist, take that turban off !”—but also the grabbing, unraveling, or knocking and pulling off of the head covering. It is not for nothing that in one hate crime incident after another, turbans are clawed at viciously and unshorn hair is pulled, occasionally even cut off. The intimacy of such violence, in this case conventionally defined in terms of liberal autonomy and privacy, cannot be overstated. Indeed, it is often the actual turban itself, an embodiment of metaphysical substance, that is the desired object of violence, suggesting that it is understood by the perpetrators of hate crimes as much more than an appendage. Within Sikh community contexts, dethroning someone’s turban is the paramount insult to the wearer, the most humiliating form of 76 Jasbir Puar

disrespect, the sheer force of which is usually unknown to hate- crime perpetrators. The attack functions as a double emasculation: the felling is an offense to the (usually) male representative of the community, and the shearing of hair entails submission by and to normative patriotic masculinities. Yet the colliding of discourses involved in normative patriotic enforcement— “Take that turban off, you fucking terrorist”—and community shame is noteworthy, suggesting that even without any understanding of the turban’s contextual significance, its magnitude is somehow comprehended. As substitute embodiments for an elusive Osama bin Laden, Sikhs are a sanctioned hate crime target, a target for what Muneer Ahmad has called “a socially appropriate emotion [expressed] in socially inappropriate ways.”25 No longer remarkable, these hate crimes have become normalized within a refashioned racial landscape.26 But more significantly, they have become immanent in the counterterrorism objectives of the state, operating as an extended arm of the nation, encouraging the surveillance and strike capacities of the patriotic populous. The duality at work here—the centrality of multiculturalism and diversity to the discourse of citizenship, coupled with the surveillance, domestication, quarantine, and containment of the corporealities that attempt to represent these democratic ideals—enables the emergence of liberal multiculturalism not only as a consumptive project and as a process of inclusion, incorporation, normalization, and assimilation, but more perniciously as a form of governmentality.27 Writing in December 2003 during the peak of France’s debates on banning religious head coverings, Timur Yuskaev and Matt Weiner claim, In the aftermath of Sept. 11 the American model of a secular state that is tolerant of religious difference has worked remarkably well, though not perfectly. The public’s anxiety over the Muslim “enemy within” was higher than ever. Yet not a single official asked Muslims to become invisible and remove their headscarves. The official policy was to protect the freedom to be visibly Muslim. Had the government acted otherwise, it would have sided with the ignorant bullies who harassed and physically attacked so many Muslims, Arabs and Sikhs.28 This exalting of the United States in contrast to France is sorely ironic, for the function of the state in retaining the visibility of religious difference is hardly benevolent. Rather, the state depends on that isolated difference, the oh so celebrated difference (of food, clothing, literature, art, tourism, film) that allows for the watching and the assaulting of these different bodies, of “those “The Turban Is Not a Hat” 77

whose difference is hard to stomach.”29 No official request is necessary: the imposition of dual discourses of citizenship for Sikhs—normalization and expulsion—is not merely realized in the form of cultural or discursive negotiations. The state works to promulgate anti-Sikh rhetoric with one hand, while welcoming Sikhs as a protected population under hate- crime legislation with the other. Turbans, in their symbolic weight, are the masculine counterparts to veils, and in their usage irrevocably link Sikhs and Muslims, signifying honor, dignity, purity, virginity, and chastity. A sardar removes his turban as an offering of his word, representing his commitment to a promise. My intent here is not to draw any simple analogy or equivalence between the practices, but rather to highlight the ways they converge (and diverge in Western, queer, feminist, and national imaginaries). Turbans are emerging as a signal of an “other masculinity,” similar to the way veils have generated Orientalist fantasies of female submission, emerged as nodal fixation, been established as a standard topic of discussion in women’s studies curriculum, and become an easy marker of an other (Muslim/Arab/Islamic) femininity—one of the most potent self/othering mechanisms in the history of Western feminisms. Within these heteronormative frames, the turbaned man is the warrior leader of the community, the violent patriarch, and at the same time, the longhaired, feminized sissy, a figure of failed masculinity in contrast to (white) hegemonic masculinities. Like the burqa, the hijab, and the headscarf, turbans mark gender (though women, usually converted, white American Sikhs, do don turbans), religion, and region, as well as signal, to the untrained eye, the most pernicious components of oppressive, patriarchal, backward cultures and traditions, those that have failed at modernity. Turbans have become strange attractors, centripetal forces to which the eye is instantly drawn. As are veils, the turban is multiple. Sizes, shapes, and colors designate gender, caste, religiosity, militancy, marital status, and age. Assembled through a taxonomy of regional and religious differences (Sikh, Muslim, Middle Eastern, South Asian, Northern Indian, Sunni, and Shi‘ite), turbans not only mark differences within U.S. discourses of banal multiculturalism, but also racial and sexual differences among South Asian, Middle Eastern, and Arab communities. Indeed, they are vehemently used within communities to demarcate insider versus outsider, devout believer versus religious fake. Yet turbans acquire a bizarre singular momentum, the sheer might of multiplicity collapsed into one stagnant pool of meaning. Just as veiling does,

78 Jasbir Puar

turbaning generates anxiety in the observer, the sense of inaccessibility, of something being out of place and out of time, of incomprehensibility. Unlike veils, however, turbans have not preoccupied Western feminist scholarship and organizations concerned with missionary liberationist practices; in this sense, turbans do reiterate a masculinist centrality of cultural and religious norms, and as such have not been the target of social protests seeking to liberate those deemed to be subjugated. This is a crucial distinction, one that informs contemporary debates about head coverings in several parts of the world (France and Britain, for instance). While veiling, not turbaning, in migrant communities has been the primary source of disquiet in France, where such practices are most visible, turbans have been the central focus of debate in Britain. This is partially a fallout from the history of the incorporation of Sikhs into the British colonial military in India, a disciplining that established Sikhs as warriors but also as partners colluding with British imperial occupiers and posited them as figures of guilt and treason in the anticolonial movement. However, as a form of cultural continuity serving the maintenance of tradition, the plight of male turban wearers problematizes decades of feminist inquiry that locates women as the bearers and transmitters of authentic culture. Thus, my concentration on turban profiling, which displaces the conversation about racist backlash against women wearing the hijab, or violence against women generally, is nonetheless committed to an unearthing of the often obscured issues of gender and sexuality in relation to masculinity and effeminization. The turban is a contested icon imbued with the possibilities of remasculinization and nationalism. That is to say, attending to the vulnerability of male turbaned bodies also opens up the possibility of their very restoration, their rephallicization and recentering within patriarchal nationalisms, a restoration courted here (perhaps fed by its major shortcoming, the absence of a specific discussion on turbaned women). Turbans are also loaded with the weight of victimology, an overdetermined discourse, involving the fetishization of injury, about the trauma and suffering of turbaned Sikh men. This victimology, which predates September 11, 2001, is often entangled in discourses about racism and racist encounters, in part narrated through relations with the white gaze, thus reestablishing the ascendancy of whiteness. What Sara Ahmed terms “injury as identity,” this exceptional narrative of victimhood (making the claim, for example, that Sikh men encounter more racism than Sikh women, conveniently effacing gender inequities between Sikh men and women) is complemented by a re-

“The Turban Is Not a Hat” 79

claiming of the turban as a form of religious and multicultural excellence.30 This example foregrounds once again the heterosexual mandates of national belonging, a circuitry implicating homonational subjects, model minority heterosexuality, and perversely queered populations. This circuit depicts immigrant communities and communities of color as “more homophobic,” solidifying them, ironically, as simplistically heterosexual (as mindlessly or carelessly reproductive) or heteronormative in an uncosmopolitan, regressive manner (as unable or unwilling to participate in the nuclear familial individuation of market capitalism that promotes child raising and kinship as consumption projects). The depiction thus opens up greater liberatory possibilities for white, queer, liberal, and homonormative subjects and forecloses, in an enactment of “interested denial,” queer subjects of color.31 Furthermore, regulatory queerness (liberal, homonormative, or even diasporic) denotes queer, turbaned Sikhs (male or female) as improbable, if not impossible, subjects. ocuLar and affecTive

Judith Butler, in her examination of the Rodney King case, has written, “The visual field is not neutral to the question of race; it is itself a racial formation, an episteme, hegemonic and forceful.” The field of the visible is a racially contested terrain. “Seeing” is not an act of direct perception, but “the racial production of the visible, the workings of racial constraints on what it means to ‘see.’” Therefore, the act of seeing is simultaneously an act of reading, a specific interpretation of the visual. But this reading passes itself off as a seeing, a natural activity, hiding the “contestable construal” of what is seen. The racist organization and disposition of the visible also works to define what qualifies as visual evidence; thus the ocular distinctions between various turbans—the visual evidence of their differences—can be rendered meaningless in advance: “For when the visual is fully schematized by racism, the ‘visual evidence’ to which one refers will always and only refute the conclusions based upon it; for it is possible within this racist episteme that no black person can seek recourse to the visible as the sure ground of evidence.” What Butler terms the “inverted projections of white paranoia”—in this case, extended to a nationalist paranoia—posits the recipient of the violence, the object of violence, as the subject of violence, the threat of impending violence that was justifiably curtailed.32 In the way that the visual field situates the black male body as always already the site of violence and a source of danger to whites and model minorities, the turbaned Sikh is always already circum80 Jasbir Puar

scribed as a dangerous terrorist look-alike or aspirant terrorist. The principal place of the anticipatory future tense secures the necessity of the preemptive strike: the infantilized attacker, in need of protection, locates the aboutto-be-attacked body as the site and source of danger, and, convinced of the desire of the turbaned individual to become a terrorist, defends against the imminent conversion through the attack. This narrative coheres the attacker as a patriotic vigilante and obscures the reading of the attacker’s violence in favor of locating the attackee’s probable, always-about-to- occur violence. Butler claims that the attack completes the circuit of white paranoia, whereby attackers initiate “the projection of their own aggression, and the subsequent regarding of that projection as an external threat.” This projection can be thought of as “the reversal and displacement of dangerous intention,” transforming the attackee into a representation of “the origin, the intention, and the object of the selfsame brutality. . . . He is the beginning and the end of violence.”33 Butler’s account, while attentive to the materialization of the violent black body, does not elucidate how the black body, beyond its discursive baggage, comes to be feared as such. There is as well a reliance on the very act of seeing that Butler problematizes; while she is critical of the relationship between seeing and what counts as visual evidence, she nonetheless centralizes the visible black body whose difference is seen rather than felt, whose episteme cannot escape the chain of signs of danger qualified as the beginning, the end, the origin, intention, and object. To augment Butler, I turn to Sara Ahmed’s exploration of hate and fear: “Hate does not reside in a given subject or object. Hate is economic; it circulates between signifiers in relationships of difference and displacement.” In this challenge to the localization of fear in a body, the materialization of the feared body occurs through a visual racial regime as well as the impossibility of the containment of feared bodies. The anxiety of this impossibility of containment subtends the relegation of fear to a distinct object, producing the falsity of a feared object. It is precisely the nonresidence of emotions, their circulation between bodies, that binds subjects together, creating pools of suspicious bodies. Riffing on Fanon, as does Butler, Ahmed focuses not on the black body that will assault, but the one that passes by: The black man becomes even more threatening if he passes by. . . . The economy of fear works to contain the bodies of others, a containment whose “success” relies on its failure, as it must keep open the very grounds

“The Turban Is Not a Hat” 81

of fear. In this sense, fear works as an affective economy, despite how it seems directed toward an object. . . . It is this lack of residence that allows fear to slide across signs, and between bodies. This sliding becomes stuck only temporarily, in the very attachment of a sign to a body, whereby a sign sticks to a body by constituting it as the object of fear, a constitution taken on by the body, encircling it with a fear that becomes its own.34 This is a different claim to an anticipatory, preemptive temporality: the real danger, as it were, is not that he will attack, but that he will pass by, the imminent attack unknown in terms of when, where, how, or if. Passing, or passing by, raises the possibility that the difference is imperceptible: the injury is endlessly deferred. The object that once appeared to contain the fear, and was thus containable, instead contaminates and multiplies into many bodies through a sliding that works metonymically to ooze and seep into these bodies, “construct[ing] a relation of resemblance between the figures: what makes them alike may be their ‘unlikeness’ from ‘us.’” Stickiness implies that the temporary reprieve granted through passing by is muted by residual remnants and echoes of older bodies that rub off, leaving traces of nearly getting off clean: “The word terrorist sticks to some bodies as it reopens past histories of naming, just as it slides into other words.”35 Both Butler and Ahmed ground their analyses in signification: for Butler the visible black body is a priori signified as threatening, while for Ahmed emotions circulate between bodies and thus signs stick, however momentarily. Unmoored emotion, such as fear, slides amid bodies, getting stuck on them. Is it the fear that is sticky, or the bodies that are already somehow signified as sticky, or both? But there are two distinct temporalities of anticipation and preemption at work here. Butler foregrounds the dangerous subject in need of rehabilitation, a temporality of preemption where the black body, already known as scary, must be beaten before it is able to beat first. The subject is created, known, and confirmed as the body is beaten. In Ahmed’s frame, some subjects are known, but others are anticipated: the circuit of passing by, sliding, and sticking entails that sliding emotions must invariably stick to bodies, giving other bodies their (new or accentuated) sign. Subjects can be anticipated but never known for certain; the contagious body that passes by (if we are even sure of the danger of this body) infects other bodies. The preemptive force is not focused on one body, in this case the black man or the turbaned terrorist; rather, stickiness can draw into question almost anyone, pools of bodies, populations, in this affective economy of fear. The difference between

82 Jasbir Puar

Butler and Ahmed can be qualified as the difference between a defensive position (I am ready to attack to preempt your attack) and a defended position (I am preempting altogether the conditions of possibility for your attack, much less the attack). In other words, the defended position, or posturing, attempts to preempt the necessity of a defensive position. What is being preempted is not the danger of the known subject but the danger of not-knowing. Ahmed’s move from residence to circulation can lead to a fruitful understanding of the forces of population construction; their control is made necessary not by their knowing who the others are, but by the impossibility of fully knowing, as this circulation “work[s] to differentiate some others from other others, a differentiation that is never ‘over’ as it awaits for others who have not yet arrived.” Sliding works to create likenesses—relations of feared objects to each other—among differences that, despite such variance, appear to be distinctly different from the “us” at stake. The fact that fear does not reside in a body, but could materialize in anybody within a particular profile range, allows for the figure of the terrorist to retain its potent historical significatory ambiguity while it also enables the fear to “stick” to bodies that “could be” terrorists.36 Ahmed’s focus on resemblance allows emotions to slide to and between bodies, ensuring the stickiness of signs and creating the relations of resemblance of feared objects to each other. Thus, the affective economy of fear that Ahmed lays out is a democratization of sorts: it does not rely solely on internal and external positionings (black man, white cop); instead, it modulates differentials of fear of populations that are caught within these resemblances, populations that are sutured to as well as defect from these resemblances. The scenario is never finalized. In the context of mistaken identity, passing functions as a double modality where the distinctions between turbans may be incomprehensible—the Sikh passes for a terrorist or the terrorist passes for a Sikh—and where the Sikh must pass for an American, and in that sense, may pass by, as it were. The proof offered in any performance of loyalty is betrayed by the demand on the performer to articulate himself or herself as an American, this demand acting precisely as the evidence that the subject is neither constituted nor understood as American. The turban is thus a “sticky” signifier, operating as a fetish object of fear, and the ontological becoming of the turbaned Sikh is intricately tied into the temporal logic of preempting his futurity, a deferred death, a becoming that is sutured through its failure, its decay. It is fear, then,

“The Turban Is Not a Hat” 83

as it materializes in the turban, rather than the turban itself, that creates the chasm between subjects and objects and mediates the conviviality among objects; the boundaries producing fear do not then exist. Rather, fear produces these boundaries. As Ahmed has argued, “The other is only read as fearsome through a mis-recognition,” not despite it.37 Visibility is an inadequate rubric because of an old liberal predicament—visibility invites surveillance—but also because regimes of affect and tactility conduct vital information beyond the visual. The move from visibility to affect moves us from a frame of misrecognition, contingent on the visual to discern the mistake (I thought you were one of them), to the notion of resemblance, a broader affective frame where the reason for the alikeness may be vague or repressed (You remind me of one of them): from “looks like” to “seems like.” As distinct from the “looks like,” the “seems like,” relegated to the optical restrictions of visibility, is mired in loaded tactile economies, an affective space that pushes the “seems like” toward “feels like” and even, to explain the conviction of radical difference, “feels like nothing I could ever feel like” or “nothing I have ever felt before.” The “mistaken for” itself is not a mistake, insofar as it is the very point. The claim to have made a mistake functions as an alibi, a foil, for the prominence of resemblance, indicating either that the Sikh is a fine replacement (one other is as good as another other) or a substitution (the Other is undifferentiated and needs to remain so); both reflect the circulatory economy of fear proffered by Ahmed: feared bodies are contagious. The widespread campaigns undertaken by liberal Sikh advocacy groups to educate “ignorant Americans” about Sikhs, focusing both on who Sikhs are (not terrorists but peace-loving, good Americans, model minority immigrants; our turbans look like this) and who they are not (Muslims, terrorists; our turbans do not look like that), while important, do not address the affective economies that conflate resemblance into misrecognition.38 Flooding the media and Internet with “positive images” of Sikhs uses a representational fix for an ontological dilemma, where what one “knows” about “the turban” is still trapped in an epistemological ocular economy, and where one assumes the differences within and among difference actually matter.39 In Ahmed’s usage, “affect,” however usefully deployed, remains within the realm of signification. Signification, narrative, and epistemological coherence—known or unknown—subtend and mediate the stickiness, or slipperiness, of objects. For Ahmed and Butler, fear is still produced predominantly, if not exclusively, by signs. As Butler’s incisive commentary on the Rodney

84 Jasbir Puar

King trial lays bare, the visual is saturated by a racial schema that is built upon layers of racial knowns and displaced unknowns regarding the fearsome and violent black male body. But there is little sense of how the black male body comes to be feared as such. Concerning Ahmed’s schema, we might also query, how do bodies become sticky in the first place? “History” is Ahmed’s answer. But must bodies already be signified as something sticky in order to become even stickier? Is stickiness only a product of signification, of epistemic formation rather than ontological properties? The assumption that drives Ahmed’s analysis of affect is a form of narrativized discursive knowing that ironically functions as a prediscursive necessity for “stickiness” to have any force at all. That is, the body is already known discursively as a body to fear; its signification is a prediscursive necessity for an argument that claims that the attachment of signs to bodies is the primary way they come to be feared. How did stickiness come to be? It is not quite clear. We learn only how it feels to feel fear, never how it feels to be feared. Butler and Ahmed rely on acts of reading to contest epistemological truths; that is, the logic of visibility is challenged through the logic of visibility by pointing out the instability of visual evidence, rather than moving aside the visual, however momentarily, as the primary epistemological terrain of racial knowledge. Similarly, the logic of signification is contested through pointing out the instability of signs. Brian Massumi, whose work in Parables for the Virtual is critical fodder for this project, insists upon ties to affective processes that mediate cognitive and epistemic knowing. The body’s “visceral sensibility” precedes sense perception: “It anticipates the translation of the sight or sound or touch perception into something recognizable associated with an identifiable object.” So the lungs spasm even before the senses cognate the presence of a shadow in a “dark street at night in a dangerous part of town.” The “dangerous part of town” and the shadow are then the identifiable objects for which epistemic force is confirmed only after, or, more accurately, as affective response has taken place.40 What we have, then, between Butler, Ahmed, and Massumi are differentials of bodily participation. Butler reads meaning on the epidermis of the black body. Ahmed locates chains of signs between bodies, in this case those bodies already prone to stickiness around the figure of the terrorist. And Massumi foregrounds the body that knows before it cognates, an antedating body, distinct from the preemption of anticipatory temporality. However, despite his attentiveness to the matter of bodies, for Massumi, in his perhaps unintentional reproduction of the generic body of science, race

“The Turban Is Not a Hat” 85

seems also to be relegated to the cultural, the discursive. Foregrounding “phenotypical encounters in public spaces,” Arun Saldanha offers a different notion of stickiness from Ahmed’s, through the “figure of viscosity”: Neither perfectly fluid nor solid, the viscous invokes surface tension and resistance to perturbation and mixing. Viscosity means that the physical characteristics of a substance explain its unique movements. There are local and temporary thickenings of interacting bodies, which then collectively become sticky, capable of capturing more bodies like them. . . . Under certain circumstances, the collectivity dissolves, the constituent bodies [flow] freely again. The world is an immense mass of viscosities, becoming thicker here, and thinner there.41 Unlike Butler’s rendition of phenotype, which exists within discursive signification, and Ahmed’s stickiness, which also only has force through signs, Saldanha’s notion involves the matter of phenotype and how phenotype matters.42 Saldanha argues that “bodies gradually [become] sticky and [cluster] into aggregates” because of how “certain bodies stick to certain spaces, how they are chained by hunger, cold, darkness, mud, poverty, crimes, glances full of envy and anxiety.” If one agrees that “race is devious in inventing new ways of chaining bodies,” this chaining or linking occurs not only through the force of historically blighted signifiers that metonymically link and bleed into each other, as Ahmed suggests. They are also linked through smell, sweat, flushes of heat, the dilation of pupils, the impulses bodies pick up from each other, the contagions of which we know little, the sense of being touched without having been physically touched, of having seen without having physically seen, “what immanent connections [bodies] forge with things and places, how they work, travel, fight, write, love . . . become viscous, slow down, get into certain habits, into certain collectivities, like city, social stratum, or racial formation.”43 Saldanha privileges the encounter of phenotypical difference itself, not only the difference bound to visual representation or historical signification of phenotypical difference, but phenotype experienced outside of or beyond the visual, the haptic where the visual induces the sensation of touch. Presumably, the experience of phenotypical difference is where the representational weight (of blackness, for instance) might actually rupture and defuse rather than endlessly reify.

86 Jasbir Puar

TurBan moderniTies

In the inaugural issue of Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, the first journal devoted to fostering a critical Sikh cultural studies that diverges from anthropological, sociological, theological, and area-studies approaches to Sikhs and Sikhism, a meditation on turbans (known as paghs or paghardis) is proffered by the British South Asian scholar Virinder Kalra. Arguing that the advent of Sikh modernity is contingent upon the turban’s being perceived as just another article of clothing, Kalra states that the turban is, after all, merely a piece of cloth. An inability to grasp this simplicity renders Sikhs “in some halfway house between tradition and modernity” because of the policing norm of a “non-turbaned head” as well as the turban’s enduring signification and fierce ties to tradition. The significance of the turban is eternally “deferred from the time of the present,” residing in a tradition-modernity binary that is, in effect, produced as a religious-secular dichotomy. Asking if “the pagh can become . . . just an accepted dress of a modern person,” a change effected through a “rapprochement with the modern, a secular removal,” or if it can even be turned into a “fashion accessory” by redemptive consumer markets that now advocate a pliable modernity through the combination of jeans and turbans, as has been done in Turkey, Kalra avers, “Something more is at stake than just the question of six yards of cloth. The question that is posed is ultimately whether a Sikh modernity is at all possible.” Kalra rightly points to the British colonial incorporation of turbaned Sikhs into military units (by means of a Sikh masculinity narrated against an effeminate Hindu masculinity), an incorporation made possible by the significance of the turban as “a mark of discipline and obedience,” and also as a symbol with a trace of savagery and wildness, double significations delicately bound up in each other.44 British colonialism is therefore complicit in the fusing of the turban in the late nineteenth century with an emergent Sikh identity, ironically an identity that is mocked and vilified in contemporary Britain.45 While the terms of the debate over what the turban might signify are of great importance, I want to turn from the question momentarily. Thinking of turbans as assemblages allows us to exit the question of temporality that doggedly binds all cultural forms attempting to reconcile the yesterday of tradition with the futurity of the modern, and instead allows us to consider anew other temporal and spatial possibilities. For one, there is the fact of the daily ritual, as it is repeated morning after morning, of selecting, tying, binding, pinning, folding, and winding what might seem to be endless (cer“The Turban Is Not a Hat” 87

tainly copious) amounts of cloth, altering on a rhythmic basis the color and form and the manner in which it is wrapped. The daily temporal frame therefore operates differently in relation to representational limits. The repetition is key; it enables not only the repetition of the familiar and time-worn but also the becoming of something open to the future, the repetition with a difference. Each turban is unique; repetition is never the same. Each turban is tenuously held together, as the rigidity of coarse fabric fades over the course of the day. Repetition is also open to huge variation over lifetimes as turbans are adopted, discarded, worn one day but not the next, used for special occasions, and used with unshorn as well as shorn hair. Thus the temporal life of turbans should not be defined primarily by longevity but rather by repetition, pacing, fluctuation, and lines of flight that always hold open the chance of a disruption of the exact terms of mimesis. Readings of turbans as appendages and prostheses postulate the turban as an extension of the body and usually consider it a phallic extension or an extension of the phallus, or consider the body an extension of the turban, taking for granted the body as whole, that it corresponds exactly with the body-as-organism. The notion of the discrete organic body persists even in Massumi’s thinking. He presumes the discreteness of an organic body in relation to a “thing”: What is a perceiving body apart from the sum of its perceivings, actual and possible? What is a perceived thing apart from the sum of its beingperceiveds, actual and potential? Separately, each is no action, no analysis, no anticipation, no thing, no body. The thing is its being-perceiveds. A body is its perceivings. “Body” and “thing” and, by extension, “body” and “object” exist only as implicated in each other. . . . Body and thing are extensions of each other. They are mutual implications: co-thoughts of twoheaded perception. That two-headed perception is the world. Extensions. The thing, the object, can be considered prostheses of the body—provided that it is remembered that the body is equally a prosthesis of the thing.46 While there is a mutual relation in Massumi’s notion between body and thing, that mutual relation is contingent upon the clear and finite separation of the two entities. Furthermore, the thing is assumed to be nonorganic, without any force of its own, and only a thing of relevance insofar as it is a sum of its total being-perceiveds: how the body perceives the thing is the thing itself. The body is apparently not a thing at all. The body perceives and the thing is 88 Jasbir Puar

perceived; the possibility of an inversion is not entertained. But what if the thing perceives? Or if the body and thing perceive together, a one-headed rather than two-headed perceiver? Or, more pointedly, what if the enactment of this relation of perceiving to being perceived then changes altogether the separation of perception? That is, what if perceiving and being perceived can no longer be separate processes, nor even processes that act as extensions of each other? This would be one difference (among many) between appendage and assemblage: thinking of the turbaned man as a man with an appendage and thinking of the turbaned man as an assemblage that cuts through such easy delineations between body and thing, an assemblage that fuses, but also scrambles into chaotic combinations, turban and body, cloth and hair, skin, oil, pores, destabilizing the presumed organicity of the body. On assemblages, Deleuze and Guattari write: On a first, horizontal axis, an assemblage comprises two segments, one of content, the other of expression. On the one hand it is a machinic assemblage of bodies, of actions and passions, an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another; on the other hand it is a collective assemblage of enunciation, of acts and statements, of incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies. Then on a vertical axis, the assemblage has both territorial sides, or reterritorialized sides, which stabilize it, and cutting edges of deterritorialization, which carry it away.47 Even if the turban is indeed witnessed as an appendage that is the sum of its being-perceiveds, it is often represented by the wearer as part of his or her body, not as an appendage or thing that has properties and qualities separate from the body. The horizontal axis of “actions and passions” between bodies reveals the “phenotypical encounters” that Saldanha writes of, but also implodes bodies, defying bodily boundaries. Accomplice to this is the representation of the turban as “part of the body.” The turban is always in the state of becoming, the becoming of a turbaned body, the turban becoming part of the body. In all its multiple singularities it has become a perverse fetish object—a point of fixation, a fixation that is most certainly reproduced in this text—an object with a kind of centripetal force, a strange attractor causing the density of anxiety to accumulate. For the wearer, the rituals and sensations attendant on wearing the turban, the smells during the weekly starching of the linens, the stretching of yards of coarse fabric to induce softening, the wrapping and pinning of the turban into place, are elements of experiences in the midst of becoming quali“The Turban Is Not a Hat” 89

tatively different over time. Reworking Michael Taussig’s notion of “tactile knowing,” May Joseph eloquently asserts that the tactile practices of “cultures whose forms of social knowledge have been fragmented and mutated by multiple experiences of conquest and cultural contact . . . are difficult to read and contain multiple meanings. Such exchanges are frequently informal events intrinsic to everyday life, through which cultural knowledge gets cited, transmitted or re-appropriated. The senses acquire texture.”48 As that which “immerses the senses beyond the structuring logic of vision and dislodges memory as the fascia of history,” tactile knowledge installs normativizing traces of danger, fear, and melancholia into the bodies of racialized terrorist look-alikes.49 (Deleuze and Guattari warn against use of the term “tactile,” stating that it forces a divide between seeing and touching, preferring instead the term “haptic” as one that “invites the assumption that the eye itself may fulfill this nonoptical function [of touching].”50 However, I believe Joseph is using “tactile” congruently.) Tactile economies reassert ontological rather than epistemological knowing, and highlight touch, texture, sensation, smell, feeling, and affect over what is assumed to be legible through the visible. Rey Chow points out that even within the study of the “human sensorium,” seeing and hearing have been the privileged rubrics of analysis, “dictating the representational issues being discussed.”51 (Thus any perceived dichotomy between affect and representation is manufactured, obscuring the question of which sensorial functions are centralized in representational practices and analyses.) In the case of turbaned Sikh men, the notion of racist backlash also invokes the temporal confinement of “the return of the repressed,” a scapegoating mechanism insinuating that previously submerged, and thus disciplined and conquered, racial hatred reemerges during state and capitalist resource crises. Recall, however, that for Foucault, racism is not linked to scarcity theory, nor is it an ideological project driven by notions of difference or contempt between races, a displacement of hostility, or the production of the Other in order to consolidate the Self; but it is about the destruction of “the enemy race.” Racism is endemic to the production of populations and the shifting, fuzzy demarcations between biopolitics and necropolitics, as well as multifarious, ambiguous spaces we could call spaces of the deferral or deflection of death. Foucault writes in Society Must Be Defended, “What in fact is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die.” The separating out of groups into populations or those that 90 Jasbir Puar

exist within populations is, Foucault writes, “the first function of racism: to fragment, to create caesuras within the biological continuum.”52 Instead of body and event, or a body that has suffered a traumatic event, we have Massumi’s “body-as- event” and the trauma of the hate crime rescripted as “intensification.” “The best word for a complicating immediacy of self relation is intensity.”53 As it is in Joseph, the memory (of trauma) is dislodged as the primary arbiter of remembering (and forgetting). This is a reading that has the potential to be used politically, to address victim narratives of racism toward turbaned men that discount Sikh women’s experiences of racism. The three domains of “intensification” relevant for Sikhs—partition, Operation Bluestar and the pogroms following Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, and the terrorist acts of 2001—articulate bias attacks not as singular traumatic events or phenomena, but as an ongoing, nonlinear process of collecting and discharging intensities. Furthermore, turban wearers, usually male, bear the burden of safeguarding and transmitting culture, and of symbolizing the national purity typically ascribed to women. But this does not automatically or only feminize turbaned men. And here we are pressed to rethink race, sexuality, and gender as concatenations, unstable assemblages of revolving and devolving energies, rather than intersectional coordinates. Instead, the fusion of hair, oil, dirt, sweat, cloth, skin, the organic melding into the nonorganic, renders a turban, not as part of a queer body or as a queer part of the body, an otherwise foreign object acculturated into the body’s intimacies between organic and nonorganic matter, blurring the distinction between them, blurring insides and outsides, speaking to the fields of force—nonorganic entities having force—in relation to and melded into the organic, the body and turban folding in on themselves, quite literally, as folds press against other folds, folds of cloth and skin. On the body folding in on itself, Massumi writes, “A knitting of the brows or pursing of the lips is a self-referential action. Its sensation is a turning in on itself of the body’s activity, so that the action is not extended toward an object but knots at its point of emergence: rises and subsides into its own incipiency, in the same movement.”54 It is this assemblage of visuality, affect, feminized position, and the bodily disruption of organic-nonorganic divides (the not-fully- organic, not-fullynonorganic body) that accounts for the queer figuration of the turban in the calculation of a hate crime. And this line of analysis does not even approach theological considerations involving turbans and their significance, nor does it approach the affective realms of the divine, the spiritual, ethereal forces “The Turban Is Not a Hat” 91

that inhabit turbans and that turbans inhabit. Additionally, according to religious tenets, practicing and baptized Sikhs do not cut, shave, or pluck the hair on any part of their body, and body modification (piercings, tattoos) is prohibited. The turban theologically signifies not a modification to an otherwise pure, intact body, but is rather part of a body that is left unmodified. The curious undermining of the distinction between organic and nonorganic entities that I am interested in affirming in turbaned bodies resonates with other bodies in our time of war: the (female) suicide bomber, the burqa’ed figure (perhaps female, perhaps male passing for female), the monstrous terrorist-fag, the activist crushed by a bulldozer in Palestine, the Iraqi civilians brutally tortured by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib, the disturbingly charismatic (even sexy?) Osama bin Laden. The becomings of these bodies, many blurring the distinctions between the machinic and organic, have disruptive and eruptive capacities. Trapped by precisely these poles—tradition versus modernity—this frame enables a disavowal of turbaned sexualities by queer diasporic subjects seeking to approximate cosmopolitan status, as well as by queer diasporic subjects seeking to embrace the illegitimate and perverse sexualities ascribed to terrorist bodies (but again, the turban is almost too perverse). It continues the preoccupation of Sikh communities with positive representation, even if in the United States the turbaned Sikh can perform, especially in middleclass communities, allegiance to modern American citizenship through a religious faith and conviction resembling a commitment to Christian fundamentalism, but he cannot cultivate a predominantly secular identity that views the turban as simply a form of dress. The overdetermined reliance on narratives of visibility by all of these discourses—queer, Sikh respectability, and the state regulation of visible difference—both privileges an epistemological knowing over an ontological becoming and foregrounds a process of panoptic racial profiling, disregarding other contemporary uses of profiling. raciaL and informaTionaL profiLes

In a 2006 New Yorker article that contrasts the profiling of pit bulls as dangerous, vicious, and constitutionally violent dogs with the profiling of terrorists, drug smugglers, and other mobile, detectable criminals, Malcolm Gladwell describes the New York City Police Department policy against racial profiling as it was instituted by Raymond Kelly, New York City’s police commissioner. A list of forty-two suspicious traits was replaced with a list of six “broad criteria”: “Is there something suspicious about their physical appear92 Jasbir Puar

ance? Are they nervous? Is there specific intelligence targeting this person? Does the drug-sniffing dog raise an alarm? Is there something amiss in their paperwork or explanations? Has contraband been found that implicates this person?”55 This is a shift from “unstable generalizations” (involving race, ethnicity, gender, as well as what people do: arriving late at night, arriving early, arriving in the afternoon, being the first to deplane, the last to deplane, deplaning in the middle) to “stable generalizations,” how people seem. A patrolling of affect changes the terms of “what kind of person” would be a terrorist or smuggler, recognizing that the terrorist (terrorist is brown versus terrorist is unrecognizable) could look like anyone and do just like everyone else, but would seem like something else. (“After Kelly’s reforms, the number of searches conducted by the Customs Service dropped by about seventyfive percent, but the number of actual seizures improved by twenty-five percent.”)56 But in this revised frame, the ocular, affective, and informational are not separate power grids or spheres of control; rather, they work in concert—not synthetically, but as interfacing matrices. On contemporary profiling practices and their historical antecedents, Horace Campbell writes, “The racial profiling and targeting of suspected terrorists in the United States brings the ideas and organization of yesterday’s racial oppression in line with new technologies and the contemporary eugenics movement.” Thus profiling is the extended, modern, biotech version of eugenics (fugitive slave laws, sterilization laws and practices, Tuskegee experiments), while it is also extended by biotechnology, genetic engineering (cloning, stem cell research), and viruses such as AIdS and Ebola (if these diseases were not engineered in the lab as biological warfare experiments, the political responses to the AIdS pandemic certainly suggest genocide via neglect).57 The profile, as a type of composite, also works, as Deleuze maintains, as a mechanism of information collection and analysis that tabulates marketing information, demographics, consumer habits, computer usage (cookies), public policy data, airplane passenger alerts, and public intellectual and political activist blacklists. And now to return to the turbaned body. So if the turban is not a hat, in the way skullcaps and hijabs are deemed to be religious hats, what is it? “This ain’t no rag, it’s a flag,” begins a song by the country musician Charlie Daniels, written in October 2001. “And we don’t wear it on our heads.” Sikh advocacy groups received complaints that turbaned men were being asked to remove and unravel their turbans at airport security checkpoints to check “The Turban Is Not a Hat” 93

for weapons; alternatives recommended by Sikh advocacy groups included using X-ray technology (sensor wand and X-ray machine) to scan the turbans. This scenario—monitoring the turban and the body to which it is attached— reflects the joint operations of ocular, affective, and informational profiling. The turbaned body is not only available for disciplining, not only meant to enable internalization of the sense of being watched. On the effects of this internalization, Butler remarks in an interview, “It’s a kind of patrolling of the phantasmatic Arab, on the streets and in the cities of the U.S. It strikes me as a way of defining who is American, the ones who are on alert, watching, and the ones who are not, the ones who are watched, monitored.”58 But this again is a singular model of discipline: one person watches and there are fixed locations, positions, distinctions between those who are watched and those who are not, those who watch. Of a biopolitical model of control, Deleuze writes, “Control is short-term and rapidly shifting, but at the same time continuous and unbounded, whereas discipline was long-term, infinite, and discontinuous.”59 Insofar as the racial profiling of the panopticon works to discipline the patriot, the informational profile works to accuse in advance of subject formation. The panopticon serves to isolate, centralize, and detain; the profile disperses control through circuits catching multiple interpenetrating sites of anxiety. As strategies of surveillance, the panopticon and the profile work simultaneously to produce the terrorist and the patriot in one body, the turbaned body. The panoptic and the profile work together, not synthetically (that is, I am not arguing here for a notion of synthesis of these differing technologies), but through interlocking layers of vulnerability that are produced and distributed in their wake. The intimacy of deturbaning and the intimacy of the surveillance that X-rays the turban are bifurcated. Deturbaning first produces the violated subject of regulation, similar to the queer liberal subject produced by Lawrence and Garner v. Texas, imposing a liberal fantasy of bodily integrity, a projection of wholeness. We can say that part of the panoptic policing embedded in this ritual of submission is indebted to regimes of regulatory heteronormativity as well as regulatory homonormativity and even regulatory queerness. The turbaned body does not appear amenable to any of these frames, yet rehabilitation is nevertheless attempted. The second method of surveillance, involving the turban’s departing on the conveyor belt, toppled, slightly askew as it maneuvers entry into the X-ray apparatus, and the sensor wand that scans the fabric and folds, is part and parcel of affective population control that rewrites bodies and their intimacies as it surveils them, the perception of 94 Jasbir Puar

intrusion diffuse rather than penetrative or focalized, multiple rather than singular. In either scenario, there remains the moment-to-moment, shifting assemblages of turbaned, deturbaned, and returbaned bodies. We have multiple bodies here: the “body of excess” that is constitutive of any reading that foregrounds the racial and sexual excesses of the visual, representational body (here, the gender of the turbaned body is given substance); the affective body (shifting from turbaned man or turbaned woman to turbaned body), whose transformations and transformative potentiality lie in its contagions, its energetic transmissions, that is, its affective capacity to effect; and the data or informational body cohering through digitalized bits.60 The body is both seen and seen through. The visual is expanded through a certain kind of transparency, not only by looking at the body, but by looking through it. The X-raying of the turban is a surveillance event that does not dismantle or disaggregate the coherent body bit by bit; rather, it is a rematerialization of the body, a splaying of the body across multiple registers that adumbrates the terms of intimacy, intensity, and interiority. Joining biometric procedures that capture the iris of the eye, the geometry of the hand, and the gait, these digitizing informational and surveillance technologies of control both produce a data body or the body-as-information and also impact and transform the contours of the organic body through an interface of organic and nonorganic machinic technologies that tempt the mutual dissolution of their boundaries. In this economy of sight, to be able to “see” the terrorist is not contingent upon the surveying of the entire body; rather, the securitization that aims to make something visible to ensure its capture relies on an assemblage of subindividual capacities. These technologies of “attention that suspend certain assumptions in order to make others,” Massumi states, “perturb to make perceptible.”61 Race and sex are reread not only through the regulated (i.e., resistant) queer subject, but through the regularizing of this rematerialization of the body. Pivotal here is the notion of capacity, in other words, the ability to thrive within and propagate the biopolitics of life by projecting potential as futurity, one indication of which is performed through the very submission to these technologies of surveillance that generate these data. Rey Chow states that biopolitics is implicitly about the ascendancy of whiteness, though the terms of whiteness cannot remain solely in the realm of racial identification or phenotype but extend out to the capacity of capacity; that is, the capacity to give life, sustain life, promote life, the registers of fertility, health, environmental sustainability, and the capacity for risk. Race and sex are not dis“The Turban Is Not a Hat” 95

posed of as analytic categories, but supplemented by their redefinition as the capacity to regenerate, identity categories working with the kinds of statistical racisms that see some populations as worthy of life and others as decaying, as destined for death. Optimizing the body entails oscillation between the subject of rehabilitation, an already cohered subject that can and must be represented, and populations of regeneration, forward-looking, regenerative bodies that appear to have the capacity for capacity. Thus it is not necessary to eliminate the turbaned man (as is implied in the French ban on head coverings) or sequester him—quite the contrary. Turbans function in multiple power sites of perpetual monitoring linked together to stimulate a continuous circuitry and regime of control, interconnected pathways of surveillance and discipline. The turban exists not as a closed site of differentiation, but among proliferating vectors of capture: at airport security, while driving or in a vehicle, in a detention cell, in a driver’s license photo that disallows “hats,” in a police force that bans the wearing of turbans because of the official uniform hat, in a terrorist video game, through rapidly disseminated and repetitive Internet and media imagery. The mistake of mistaken identity must be available in multiple tactile economies, whether through the cut and paste of Photoshop, the simulacra of video games, or the imprint of the replayed image of Sher Singh—available not solely in terms of a representational space (positive versus negative images) but also in terms of speed, pace, repetition, and informational flows. What is at stake here is the repetition and relay of the ubiquitous images, not their symbolic or representational meaning. Invariably this analysis participates in the very fixating on or fetishizing of turbaned bodies that it seeks to disrupt, and again this is an enterprise pivotal to the coagulation of Sikh diasporas. I would also argue, however, that my reading suggests the applicability of this analysis to all sorts of other bodies to destabilize the taken-for-granted assumption that the discursive body, however socially constructed it may be, is always already presumed to be a wholly, discrete, intact, and fully able organic body. It would be a mistake, and the most damning interpretation of this work, to transpose this reading onto the most obvious bodies that lend themselves to a discourse of cultural alterity (burqa’ed or veiled bodies, disabled or dismembered bodies, diseased bodies). While the frame I proffer may still privilege bodies that are engaged with technology, assemblages that are in some sense machined together, all bodies are to some extent machined; in this case the turban is not remarkable at all. We return, albeit obliquely, to the nexus of Sikh moder96 Jasbir Puar

nity that Kalra proposes, one that calls for a neutralizing of the difference of turbans, ironically through the commodification of their purported alterity. But instead of being tagged as sporting just another fashion accessory, turbaned bodies join all other bodies in destabilizing the boundaries between organic and nonorganic entities and forces. For LGBtIQ communities, it is this type of reading that can enable a rethinking of violence against queer persons and attendant strategies to combat hate crimes. It also encourages Sikh masculinities that transcend or refute a victim status, but without recourse to a muscular nationalism. Ultimately, queer and gurdwara organizing may open up creative political conjunctures that are not bound through identity politics but gel instead, however transitorily and contingently, through the politics of affect. noTes

1. Sikhs also experience religious discrimination based on the wearing of kirpans, regardless of their gender. See Suan, “Suspension for Ceremonial Knives”; and the Sikh Coalition, “Coalition Continues to Defend Sikh’s Rights to Practice Their Faith.” 2. At the time, however, his death was not news; no photos of this turbaned Sikh man circulated on television or in the national print media; the New York Times reported his death on page A17, without comment. He remained largely faceless, and only due to the efforts of community-based organizations were the details of his death dispersed. His turban, of course, rendered him largely unimportant as a victim of post- 9/11 racial backlash. Sodhi’s brother, Lakwinder, publicly stated, “My brother was killed because of his turban and beard.” When asked by reporters, “What are you feeling about Americans?” Lakwinder Sodhi angrily responded, “Why are you asking me that? We are Americans also.” Sodhi’s killing prompted a phone call from the Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to G. W. Bush to “ensure the safety of Sikhs living in the U.S.”; CNN.com, “Hate Crimes.” Investigative reporting details the movement of white supremacist groups into the Valley, the area where Sodhi was shot, a year prior to his death. Hate crimes in this region continue to escalate. Less than a year later, on August 4, 2002, Sukhpal Singh, another brother of Balbir Singh Sodhi, and a turbaned taxi driver in San Francisco, was also shot and killed while on the job; Hanashiro, “Hate Crimes.” Few know of the double deaths of these brothers. By the time of the second incident, hate crimes against turbaned Sikh men, the misrecognized, mistaken-for terrorist, had been neutralized and absorbed into the media sensationalism surrounding 9/11. For the responses of advocacy groups, see Sikh Mediawatch and Resource Task Force, “Multi-Jurisdiction Meeting”; and Leonard et al., “Sikhs Voice Outrage.” 3. Thomsen, “Arizona Man Accused of Killing Sikh.” Roque also stated, “I’m a patriot. . . . I’m a damn American all the way,” according to Goodstein and Lewin,

“The Turban Is Not a Hat” 97

“Victims of Mistaken Identity.” In 2003, Roque was found guilty of murdering Sodhi and received the death penalty. He was also found guilty on charges of drive-by shooting, attempted first- degree murder, and endangerment, and received an additional thirty-six years. In response to the judge’s asking if he had any comment, Roque stated, “Just that I’m sorry that all this happened”; Associated Press, “Man Sentenced to Death Receives 36 Years in Prison.” 4. The GSSA of Bridgewater, New Jersey, produced a series of public materials after the events of September 11. On September 14, 2001, they issued a press release that condemned the attacks and Osama bin Laden. In response to media coverage of bin Laden and the Taliban, they argued, “What is unfortunate is that the images of the likely perpetrators have made suspects and victims of Sikh communities. . . . In the days following the attack, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Sikh sentiments have steadily grown.” They called for “the media, public advocates and politicians . . . to be careful and accurate about the distinctions between various religious, national, and ethnic affiliations that are implicated in rhetoric about who is responsible for the bombings.” The press release was followed by fliers, including one titled, “Our Fellow Americans and President Bush need our support to win the war against terrorism,” an informational flier stating “SIKHS ArE FroM IndIA and have no relation at all to oSAMA BIn LAdEn or the tALIBAn,” and a final flier that states “Sikhs are not Muslims.” Despite the general opposition to hate crimes, GSSA materials are clearly invested in distancing Sikhs from Muslims and presenting them as deeply patriotic. The materials do not push for an analysis that acknowledges that one cannot assume a person’s political allegiances based on religious, national, or ethnic characteristics. See Garden State Sikh Association, “Press Release”; “Our Fellow Americans and President Bush”; “Post-September 11th Flier”; “Flier: Sikhs Are Not Muslims.” 5. The Sikh Mediawatch and Resource Task Force (SMArt) responded with a press release, “Sikh Americans Denounce the Terrorist Attack, Ask Americans to Unite.” Sikhs held vigils to mourn 9/11 in conjunction with the pogroms of 1984; United Sikhs in Service of America held a candlelight vigil in memory of the 1984 pogroms and September 11 on December 8, 2001, in Madison Square Park; Sikh Coalition, “Please Participate in Candle Light Vigil.” On uniting with Americans under the rubric of “victims of terrorist attacks,” see Times of India, “Sporadic Violence against Ethnic Minorities”; Sikh Coalition, “Please Participate”; Singh, “Are Kashmiri Sikhs Next on India’s Hit List—Again?” and “35 Sikhs Murdered on March 20, 2000 in Indian Occupied Kashmir.” Another tactic drew attention to the support of Sikh runners in the New York Marathon in 2003; Newindpress, “Sher-e-Punjab Sponsors 92-Year-Old Sikh.” Initially the Indian government responded to violence against Sikhs by using the phrase “mistaken identity”; Parasuram, “Indian Embassy Condemns Attacks on Sikhs.” While much of this “damage control” coincides with Hindu nationalist agendas to discredit Muslims and Pakistan, Prime Minister Vajpayee was actually reprimanded by Sikh groups for suggesting that women wear bindis in order to pass as

98 Jasbir Puar

Hindu and also for asking the U.S. government to protect Sikhs against hate crimes, while not mentioning the need to protect Muslim Americans. See Sikh Mediawatch and Resource Task Force et al., “Americans of Sikhs [sic] Extraction.” Reporting on U.S. hate crimes against Sikhs and community responses to them appeared in India as well as U.S.-based Indian papers, including Swapan, “South Asian Reporters”; IndiaExpress Bureau, “U.S. Sikhs’ Initiative to End Hate-Crime”; Associated Press, “Sikh Shot at in Hate Crime Case”; Indo-Asian News Service, “White Hate Groups Target U.S. Sikhs.” See the press release from SikhNet et al., “Sikhs Respond to Representative Saxby Chambliss Bigoted Comments.” The organizations authoring the press release state, “As Sikhs and as Americans, we are deeply distressed about the comments that Representative Saxby Chambliss made November 19th to a group of law enforcement officers in Valdosta, Georgia. He alluded to ‘turning the Sheriff loose to arrest every Muslim that crosses the state line.’ We in America look to our elected officials for responsible leadership and guidance.” The Sikh Council on Religion and Education describes itself in the following manner on its website: “Founded in 1998, the Sikh Council on Religion and Education (ScorE), based in Washington, serves as a think tank and represents Sikhs in various forums and venues. Its leadership has been invited repeatedly to the White House, Congress and by various non-governmental organizations to present the Sikh perspective from its inception and most recently, since the September 11th tragedy. The Sikh Council fosters understanding through education and interfaith relations, promoting the concept of community and working to secure a just society for all.” The Sikh Coalition issued a “Resolution on Hate Crimes against Sikh-Americans: Congressional Briefing Package,” on September 28, 2001. See SikhNet, “Sikh Representatives Meet U.S. Congressional Leaders.” On December 11, three months to the day after the September 11 tragedy, Sikh leaders from across the United States and Canada gathered under the dome of the Capitol for the first annual “One Nation United Memorial Program” sponsored by the Washington-based Sikh Council on Religion and Education; attending were members of Congress, government officials, and top leadership from commerce, labor, and the interfaith communities. This was the first event of its kind the Sikh community hosted in Washington. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton stated, “We will always remember the sacrifices that were made by the Sikh Community in the wake of the terrible terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. No community suffered greater loss as a reaction to the terrible losses” of September 11. Leaders of Muslim, Arab, and Sikh communities met with Attorney General John Ashcroft on October 16, 2001, to voice their concerns about hate crimes; Frieden, “Ashcroft Meets with Muslim, Arab Leaders.” 6. See Sanders, “Understanding Turbans”; and Pradhan, “The Mourning After.” About SMArt: “SMArt was founded in 1996 to promote the fair and accurate portrayal of Sikh Americans and the Sikh religion in American media and society. The Sikh Mediawatch and Resource Task Force (SMArt) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan membership based organization. Its mission is to combat bigotry and prejudice, protect the

“The Turban Is Not a Hat” 99

rights and religious freedoms of Sikh Americans, and provide resources that empower the Sikh American community.” Sikh Mediawatch and Resources Taskforce, “SMArt Calls for Action against Cooksey.” 7. See Mahabir and Vadarevu, “A Cultural Torment.” 8. For a summary of the work of the Sikh American Alliance, a collaboration between ScorE, the Sikh Coalition, the Sikh Communications Council, and SMArt, see Pradhan, “The Mourning After.” Pradhan reports that the “Decreasing Hate by Increasing Awareness” campaign had a three-pronged plan: improving community relations (participating in prayers, vigils, relief efforts, and interfaith dinners), producing public relations materials for the media (press releases, educational videos), and creating stronger liaisons with government officials (meeting with the Departments of Transportation and Justice, inviting politicians to commemorative events). 9. See SikhNet, “Attack on America,” November 16, 2001, Community; Sikh Mediawatch and Resource Taskforce, “SMArt Initiates Airport Educational Campaign, Requests Community Involvement,” and “SMArt Encourages Community Members to Educate Local Airport Security Personnel about Sikhs.” Stating that many cases of “turban-removal have occurred at small or mid-size airports,” such as RaleighDurham, Albany, and Phoenix, but also at larger airports such as JFK. SMArt urges Sikhs to initiate educational forums for security personnel and airline employees about turbans and Sikhism and has developed presentations and other resources for this purpose. See also SikhNet, “Federal Aviation Administration to Ensure New Security Procedures That Preserve and Respect the Civil Rights of All Americans.” The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a set of directives detailing methods for conducting airport security based on information presented by the Sikh Coalition and other Sikh organizations (ScorE, Sikh Communications, SMArt, and uSSA), information “about the racial profiling that has caused turban-wearing Sikh-Americans to be denied air transportation while being publicly humiliated and embarrassed.” “This kind of treatment to loyal Americans makes many feel humiliated, naked in public, victimized and most important, unwelcome in the country that many of us were born in,” said Harpreet Singh, director of community relations of the Sikh Coalition. “It is especially upsetting since terrorists take great pains to wear typical American clothing in order to not stand out. We are grateful that the FAA has taken such a firm stand against this type of racial profiling as it is against everything America and Americans stand for.” See also Sikh Coalition, Sikhs, and “Your Rights and Avenues of Action as a Victim of Airport Profiling”; Sikh Mediawatch and Resource Task Force, “Airport Security”; SikhWomen.com, “U.S. Department of Transporation (dot) Turban Policy”; Shenon and Toner, “Immigrant Arrests.” 10. In the early 1900s, the term “rag heads” was already being used in the northwestern United States to refer to turbaned men, mainly Sikhs. In 1907, hundreds of white workers rioted in Bellingham, Washington, “stormed makeshift Indian residences, stoned Indian workers, and successfully orchestrated the non-involvement of local police”; Shukla, India Abroad, 33–34. Some Sikhs evicted from Bellingham settled

100 Jasbir Puar

in Everett, Washington, where they were subsequently driven out in another riot; Hess, “The Forgotten Asian Americans,” 109–10. On the violence in Everett and Bellingham, also see Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 297. The online exhibit Echoes of Freedom contains an image of a January 28, 1910, New York Times article, “Hindus Driven Out: Citizens at Marysville, Cal. Attack Them—British Consul Informed,” briefly describing an attack on seventy “Hindus” that drove them out of Marysville; McMahon, Echoes of Freedom. See also Street, Beasts of the Field, 481–89, for an account of tensions between Punjabi and Japanese laborers. On tensions between Hindu and Sikh communities in Canada after Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 and the downing of Air India flight 182 in 1985, see Martin, “As Indian’s Ranks in Canada Grow, Old Conflicts Are Also Transplanted.” On the reaction against Sikhs in the United States after the Air India explosion, see Howe, “Sikh Leaders in U.S. Voicing Fear of Becoming Scapegoats,” which quotes Jagjit Singh Mangat, president of the Sikh Cultural Society: “We have been dubbed as terrorists.” On backlash after the Iran hostage crisis in 1979, see Chhibber, “Sikh Lives,” which quotes Surinder Singh of Atlanta: “I had cut my hair, but kept my beard after the Iran hostage situation when I was heckled everywhere.” 11. Axel, The Nation’s Tortured Body, 426. 12. Ibid. 13. Eng, “Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas,” 4. 14. See Susan Koshy’s work on the history of South Asian American exceptionalism, such as “Morphing Race into Ethnicity.” 15. Atif Toor (SALGA organizer since 1990), interviewed by author, July 2004, New York City. 16. As the “India Shining” project launches the normative upper- cast Hindu Northern Indian subject as an economic, cultural, and cosmopolitan player on the global scene, national Indian queerness, a liability at home in relation to Hindutva politics, is a form of cultural capital, however tenuous, in the global consumer market and human rights and nGo arenas. That is, Hindu Indian queerness, as an identity paradigm indebted to modernity, works in the service of consolidating normative Indian modernity, in both the homeland and its diasporas. This is especially true, for example, with regard to Indo-Caribbean populations, who historically and contemporarily “disavowed modernity”; see Niranjana, Mobilizing India. If Indo-Caribbean populations in the United States (predominantly in New York and Miami) are already marginalized by dominant South Asian model minority prototypes, South Asian queer diasporic formations that leave their own Hinducentric dynamics and representations uninterrogated may in fact enhance these dominant forms instead of being excluded from them, as is usually assumed. 17. Interviews with current and former SALGA members reveal that Islamophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment is and has been alive in SALGA’s membership. (In 2002, for example, there were right-wing BJP supporters who refused to march in the India Day parade or the gay pride parade if signs condemning communal violence, specifically of the genocide of Muslims in Gujarat, were present.)

“The Turban Is Not a Hat” 101

18. In the early 1900s, turbaned Punjabi Sikhs constituted the majority of the first immigrants from India to arrive in numbers in the United States, working primarily on railroads and farms and in lumber mills in California, Oregon, and Washington. While initial press on these newly arrived laborers described them as Sikhs, they were rapidly assimilated into the lexicon of U.S. immigration racial categorization, despite a burgeoning separatist Sikh identity emerging in India at this time (this is documented in Roots in the Sand). Renamed “Hindoo,” a term meaning “from Hindustan,” Sikhs were simultaneously transfigured into the representative Indian Hindu majority, and abnegated precisely the difference from Hindus they sought to embody. Turbans, specifically Sikh turbans, proactively and intentionally mark a distinction between Sikhs and Hindus, who do not wear turbans (exceptions are made at events such as weddings). During partition, turbans were a primary factor in distinguishing Hindu from Sikh from Muslim. 19. United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 1923 U.S. LEXIS 2544, 617. Emphasis added. 20. We can read Thind, then, as an instance where the ocular-specular is hailed, but the recourse to “resemblance” is really about common sense, instinct, or “something everybody knows.” 21. Finally, the slippage from Sikh to Hindu, while initially appearing semantic, actually foreshadows post-1965 model minority discourses and how and who those discourses exclude and include. That is to say, among South Asian populations, the normative Hindu has come to personify the idealization of the model minority construct. While this can be correctly ascribed to structural factors such as economics, immigration patterns, and the consolidation of bourgeois immigrant family models, the undertheorized variable is simply that Sikhs and Muslims look and feel different. This point was driven home during the Gulf War in 1991 but most recently and vigorously in a post- 9/11 racial climate of scapegoating. A special irony is the global celebration of Desi-ness, not only through the skyrocketing popularity of Bollywood film, but also in fashion, food, lifestyle, and the lauding of India’s technologicalindustrial presence (though efforts to praise it are increasingly vexed by resistance to job outsourcing). 22. An exception is seen in Alliance of South Asians Taking Action, “Press Release”: “As South Asians, we stand in solidarity with communities of color, including Middle Eastern/West Asian communities (Afghanis, Arabs, Arab-Americans, Iraqis, and Iranians), rather than trying to distance ourselves from them in order to secure safety. We also recognize that many South Asians are Muslim, and deserve to be free from prejudice and discrimination as Muslims.” 23. KRAC.com, “Man Accused of Sikh Hate Crime Apologizes.” 24. See Deborah Kong, “Arabs, Muslims, and Sikhs Report Sporadic Hate Crimes as War Continues,” Associated Press, March 28, 2000; Patrick Healy, “3 Indians Attacked on Street and the Police Call It Bias,” New York Times, August 5, 2003; Paul Menchaca, “Sikh Community Outraged in Wake of Woodside Hate Crime,” Queens Chronicle, August 7, 2003; IndiaExpress Bureau, “U.S. Sikhs’ Initiative to End Hate-Crime.” In response to the shooting of a truck driver, Avtar Singh, who survived his attack, the

102 Jasbir Puar

Anti-Defamation League offered a reward for information on his attackers; Associated Press, “Sikhs Coping with Apparent Hate Crime”; Anti-Defamation League, “AdL Offers Reward in Attack on Sikh.” See Sikh Coalition, “Press Packet.” Hate violence continued a year after September 11, 2001. See Associated Press, “Anti-Arab Incidents Hike Number of Hate Crimes in Mass.” 25. Muneer, “Homeland Insecurity.” 26. Other early incidents included the fatal shooting of Adel Karas in San Gabriel; Associated Press, “FBI to Investigate Killing of Egyptian Grocery Store Owner as Hate Crime.” In St. Petersburg, Florida, a hijab’ed woman driving home had her car beaten with baseball bats; a mosque in Ohio was rammed by a car; a sixty-six-yearold, turbaned Sikh man was beaten by four youths with a baseball bat outside a Sikh gurdwara in Queens, New York; Bishnoi, “Hate Crimes Rise from Ashes of September 11 Attacks.” A Pakistani store owner was killed in Dallas, Texas; IslamOnline and News Agencies, “Pakistani Grocer Shot Dead in Texas.” Additional reporting includes cnn, “Hate Crimes Reports Up in Wake of Terrorist Attacks”; Mangat, “Hate Crimes against Sikh Community” posting to email list of Xml.org, September 14, 2001; Bradford, “Re: Hate Crimes against Sikh Community” posting to email list of Xml.org, September 14, 2001; Nanda, “Sikhs Become Targets of Ire in New York”; Purewal, “Threats, Snide Remarks Worsen the Pain of Bay Area Muslims”; and Naim, “SABA” (includes “Important Message to All NetIP North American Officers and Members”). For a collection of reported hate crimes that occurred in the first month after September 11, 2001, see Hamad, “Appendix.” Actions described include the throwing of bags of blood at an immigration office and law office in San Francisco; the attempted running off the road of a Muslim woman in St. Petersburg, Florida; the attack on and robbery of an Indian man in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and the cutting of his penis; a mutilated squirrel and a note in a mailbox in Minneapolis; the beating of a woman on her way to prayer in Memphis; and numerous fire bombings. This list is not exhaustive, and activities range from various forms of verbal harassment and physical violence aimed at people and places assumed to be connected to Muslims or Arabs, and involve the loss of employment and racial profiling. 27. Struggles over whether or not turbans (and to some extent, at least as indicated by reporting, head coverings) are appropriate work wear included those serving in the military and police. See Jewett, “Army Rules Deter Sikhs from Joining”; Sikh Coalition, “Allow Turbaned Sikhs to Serve as Officers in the nYPd”; Gardiner, “Sikh Wants End to Turban Ban”; Purnick, “Transit Rules?”; and Donohue, “tA Edict Spurs Turban Tussle.” 28. Yuskaev and Weiner, “Secular and Religious Rights.” Emphasis added. 29. Ibid. 30. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 49. 31. Spivak, The Postcolonial Critic, 125. 32. Butler, “Endangered/Endangering,” 17, 16, 17, 16. 33. Ibid., 19, 21, 20. 34. Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” 119, 124, 127, 119, 131.

“The Turban Is Not a Hat” 103

35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 123, 135. 37. Ibid., 128, 126. Emphasis added. 38. Cross-faith and interfaith dialogues are part of this mission; see IndiaExpress Bureau, “U.S. Sikhs.” 39. For example, the documentary Mistaken Identity: Sikhs in America is billed as a film that shows “a white American, the young student Amanda Gesine, trying to demystify the enigma of Sikh Americans while sharing the hopes and desires of Americans from all ethnic backgrounds who seek to close ranks against bigotry and hatred. Amanda plays the host and investigative journalist in a search to discover her Sikh American neighbours.” Here, Sikhs are made out to be exotic creatures devoid of any modernist traits: a sense of their “enigma” speaking to Orientalist fantasies. In short, the mistaken identity line of reasoning articulates a fantasy about cultural difference that behaves as if racism did not exist. Asians in Media, “Award Winning Documentary on Sikh Hate-Crime Comes to London.” 40. Massumi adds, “Call that ‘something recognizable’ a quality (or property)”; Parables for the Virtual, 60–61. 41. Saldanha, “Reontologising Race,” 13, 18. 42. Interestingly, all three authors—Butler, Ahmed, and Saldanha—read Fanon’s work in order to make their divergent arguments. Perhaps some thought on the potential of a rereading of Fanon through Massumi’s work—or even a rereading of Massumi through Fanon’s work—is necessary. 43. Saldanha, “Reontologising Race,” 10, 20, 19. 44. Kalra, “Locating the Sikh Pagh,” 77, 82, 84. 45. On the history of British colonial fascination with Sikh turbans, see Axel, The Nation’s Tortured Body, especially “The Maharaja’s Glorious Body” (39–78), and the travels to Britain of Maharaja Duleep Singh, the “last Sikh ruler of Punjab” (39). Axel traces the emergence of the Sikh subject in the mid- to late nineteenth century within the “colonial scene of surrender” (41), marked predominantly by the visual identification of a Sikh male turbaned body (42). This visual recognition produces the Sikh turbaned male as a regulatory figure and the Sikh subject par excellence, yet simultaneously produces this subject as “a figure of subjection to the [British] Crown” (49). Axel’s historical analysis demonstrates that the “image of the male Sikh body became increasingly translocal” (63), cleaving and collapsing various male Sikh bodies: sardars, Amritdharis, and the tortured body. 46. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 95. 47. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 88. 48. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity. Joseph, “Old Routes,” 46. 49. Joseph, “Old Routes,” 46. On racial melancholia, see Eng and Han, “A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia.” 50. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 492. 51. Chow, “Writing in the Realm of the Senses,” ii. 52. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 254, 255.

104 Jasbir Puar

53. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 14. 54. Ibid., 139. 55. Gladwell, “Troublemakers,” 42. 56. Ibid. 57. Campbell, “Beyond Militarism and Terrorism in the Biotech Century,” 31. 58. From an interview with Butler. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, no information was available about this interview. 59. Deleuze, Negotiations, 181. 60. Rai, untitled paper presented at “Beyond Biopolitics: State Racism and the Politics of Life and Death” conference, cunY Graduate Center, March 17, 2006. 61. Massumi, untitled paper presented at “Beyond Biopolitics: State Racism and the Politics of Life and Death” conference, cunY Graduate Center, March 17, 2006.

“The Turban Is Not a Hat” 105

sora y. Han

strict scrUtiny

The Tragedy of Constitutional Law

The close-up discloses a depredication of the subject, an emptying out of personality. The face, then, withdraws from the represented space, retreats into an “other dimension.” —Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman

This essay is a critique of the strict scrutiny doctrine in racial jurisprudence, and the legal history of Korematsu v. U.S. (1944) and Japanese American internment from which the doctrine originates.1 The preoccupations at the heart of this legal history, including security, disloyalty, and racial prejudice, capture the feelings that exceed Korematsu when the decision is read for its lessons on civil rights, citizenship, and war—and, more generally, on sovereignty, discipline, equality, and freedom. These political terms are a basic but insufficient part of how the law imagines life in a multiracial society. While such terms now appear to have a certain novelty and urgency, especially when used in Foucauldian notions of governmentality and Agamben’s notion of biopolitics, by returning to Korematsu via literary and cinematic representations of internment in the film Snow Falling on Cedars (1999) this essay explores how the rhetoric of the logic of strict scrutiny is actually a gloss that cannot completely resolve certain paradoxes of race and sexuality within the broader constellation of political terms Korematsu invokes.2 By taking the post–civil rights maxim that the strict scrutiny doc-

trine is not “strict in theory, but fatal in fact” as an admission of sorts, we should understand the doctrine’s “fatality” not through Agamben’s biopolitics of life and death elaborated through the paradigm of the camp, but through the structure of death in tragedy as discussed by Lacan.3 Understanding strict scrutiny through tragedy and, more specifically, through the relationship tragedy poses between the feminine and law, allows us to discover new ways of interpreting and utilizing the doctrine in racial jurisprudence. The camp reframed

Perhaps the most obvious example of Korematsu’s implications for contemporary political philosophy can be seen in Justice Hugo Black’s majority opinion adamantly rejecting dissenting Justice Frank Murphy’s description of the internment camps as concentration camps. For Agamben, who takes the same historical moment to think about the political significance of the geography of the Nazi concentration camps, the camp is the paradigmatic space of biopolitics. It is the “nomos of the political space in which we are still living.”4 The camp is the space in which the modern world witnesses the politicization of life per se; it is a manifestation of the paradoxical function of the sovereign, as both the implementation of a diffuse rule of law and total domination; and, as Walter Benjamin contends, the use of violence instantiating law and the violence enforcing it. Between these two poles of sovereignty, we observe the space where humans are divided into those with the capacity to bear life and those who simply are bare life. Agamben claims that the camp is “a state of emergency linked to a colonial war [that] is extended to an entire civil population. The camps are thus born not out of ordinary law (even less, as one might have supposed, from a transformation and development of criminal law) but out of a state of exception and martial law.”5 The paradigmatic space of the camp grounding the contemporary concept of biopolitics and its translation in American history is, specifically, the Japanese American internment camp and its subsequent permutations in Camp X-Ray, immigration detention centers, and military prisons.6 However, Agamben’s own discussion of the Japanese American internment camp as a spatial metaphor for “the state of exception as a paradigm of government” in the United States conspicuously marks the absence of the history of race in the paradigm of the camp: “The most spectacular violation of civil rights (all the more serious because of its solely racial motivation) occurred on February 19, 1942, with the internment of seventy thousand AmeriStrict Scrutiny 107

can citizens of Japanese descent who resided on the West Coast (along with forty thousand Japanese citizens who lived and worked there).”7 Although Agamben marks race in his commentary on the American internment camp, the history of race is elided by the implication that the violation of civil rights resulted from exercises in executive and martial law, and not a remarkable judicial interpretation of civil rights law in and by then a well- developed and systematized tripartite constitutional democracy. Two notable historical problems are discernible in Agamben’s attempt to bring Japanese American internment into the paradigm of the camp, and thereby to bring race into biopolitics. First, as I have suggested, there is the problem of race’s historicity. Japanese American internment occurred simultaneously in the United States with Jim Crow segregation and the ghettoization of black Americans. The state of exception to which Japanese Americans were subject—violations of civil rights by executive order and martial law—occurred against a more “mundane” state of exception—violations of civil rights by both federal laws and omissions, and state and local Jim Crow laws.8 Interpreting internment as “the most spectacular violation of civil rights” pushes the history of black segregation outside the concept of the camp and biopolitics. In fact, the imposition of executive law in cooperation with congressional legislation at this moment in U.S. history—the dawn of the civil rights movement—would become the primary legal strategy by which Jim Crow segregation would be abolished, despite the resistance of state and local powers. Thus, while the state of exception is produced for Agamben through an aporetic tension between executive and congressional powers in a constitutional democracy, racial deprivations of civil rights in segregated America complicate this fundamental tension. In American constitutional democracy, we see documented in the legal history of race not the one aporia, but multiple aporias of law—between executive and congressional, federal and state, enforcement and interpretation, and political and civil rights—in which the Supreme Court intervenes as a third term of governmentality Agamben’s notion of the camp fails to represent.9 The unavoidable conceptual problem that the longue durée of race poses for the camp results in Agamben’s historically truncated reliance on the transitory Weimar Constitution to demonstrate the function of the camp, without any serious consideration of the centuries-long elaboration of the U.S. Constitution by the Supreme Court— both of which codify the legality of the state of exception.10

108 Sora Y. Han

Second, there is the interpretation of Japanese American internment. For Agamben, Japanese American internment, and the categorization of a civilian population under martial law as disloyal, indicates a state of exception in which racial discrimination only adds to the spectacle of internment. For all intents and purposes, internment, according to Korematsu, was not motivated solely by race as Agamben claims, but by race and ethnicity’s association with foreign nationality. It was, rather, African American segregation that was singularly motivated by race, and untempered by the justifications exigent foreign relations provide.11 The segregation of African Americans, as a form of singularly race-based discrimination, again falls outside the exceptionality through which biopolitics works. More problematic, though, is that biopolitics and its motivating concern about executive law is not able to account for the default condition of racial animus American law works to disavow, most forcefully expressed in judicial law-making. In other words, Agamben’s biopolitics, derived from the juridical life of law—the institution of law’s enforcement—is not conceptually adequate for thinking about race because the fundamental relationship between state racism and democratic principles is most intimately drawn in the judicial life of law—the institution of law’s written interpretation. A biopolitics that takes the juridical nature of constitutional law to the exclusion of its key judicial nature in tripartite constitutional democracies not only presents a partial picture of governmentality; it thwarts a full understanding of the relationship between race and law. Based on these two problems, there is an important question that must be put to Agamben’s camp: What are we to make of the erasure of the judicial in political philosophies of biopower? In other words, what is to be made of the disappearance of the third term of constitutional democracy, the judicial, the most literary, visual, indeed rhetorical, sphere of legal production? If we track Korematsu’s impact on the paradigm of the camp, then race in biopolitics appears to be organized according to fluctuations of power between martial or executive law and congressional legislation. The paradigm then speaks only to one aspect of Korematsu’s legal legacy—namely, its impact on national security law. However, if we track Korematsu’s racial significance in American civil rights law as the translation of the logic of strict scrutiny into post–civil rights culture, then we find a compelling reason for why focusing on race requires thinking beyond biopolitics: the representation of race in legal judgment exceeds the concerns of biopolitics, the nomos

Strict Scrutiny 109

of the camp, the modern state of exception. Race remains unpresentable.12 That is, Korematsu challenges not only paradoxical distinctions in legislative and executive forms of law in modernity, but the ideal of constitutional civil rights. The disappearance from biopolitics of the judicial as the third term of constitutional democracy suggests the difficulty of describing in juridicalpolitical terms a position of suffering for which there is no justification— being subject to state action motivated solely by race, subjection under racial animus. In American constitutional law, it is the experience of racial subjection under a network of formal enactments of sovereign power that is outside the realm in which justice and injustice, humanity and inhumanity, morality and immorality are distinguished. Interestingly enough, this network is most clearly represented through the judicial opinion—by judges charged with interpreting multiple and conflicting forms of laws, even as they disavow the productive force of this hermeneutics. And while the judicial opinion does not recognize that it imagines the people on its docket as characters in the mythical story of a nation birthed by the letter of the Constitution, the judiciary is nonetheless charged with the duty of judging whether a multiplicity of legal enactments abides by the universal mandate of the Constitution. This mythical status of the Constitution begs inquiry, and who the protagonist of Korematsu is remains a central question. Andrew Norris’s discussion of contemporary medical experimentation and corporal punishment in the American criminal justice system notes that Agamben’s work on the homo sacer is reminiscent of the Greek myth of Antigone, while recognizing she is absent from Agamben’s discussion.13 Norris’s reading of Antigone’s relevance to biopolitics finds that the liminal position of the U.S. prisoner in such circumstances—as living dead— resonates with Creon’s sentence that Antigone be buried alive in a tomb because she interred her dead brother, and thereby broke the city’s rules prohibiting citizens from honoring the disloyal. For Norris, Antigone is one in a diverse line of figures that resemble the juridical figure of the homo sacer. While Norris presents a compelling reading, the question remains why such a prominent character in Western legal history is omitted from the formulation of biopolitics. On my reading, there are two reasons Antigone is unable to become the juridical form of the homo sacer: one historical and one formal. Despite the centrality of the prison and its place in the genealogy of Foucault’s work, Agamben’s biopolitics is not concerned with crimi-

110 Sora Y. Han

nal transgressions of law, but martial executions of law. “The camps are . . . born not out of ordinary law (even less, as one might have supposed, from a transformation and development of criminal law) but out of a state of exception and martial law.”14 In moving away from the spatial metaphor of the city to the space of the camp as the locus of sovereign power, Agamben displaces Antigone’s relationship to law and reinterprets her punishment as an ordinary criminal under ordinary law, even if her criminal punishment resembles those forms of terror to which the homo sacer is subject. The difference between the homo sacer and Antigone is that the former’s criminality is relatively inconsequential in an understanding of sovereign power; while the latter’s (and her family’s) willful disobedience and desire for transgression of the law is intimately tied to sovereign power. Indeed, Agamben notes that the homo sacer is a criminal: “The sacred man is the one whom the people have judged on account of a crime. It is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide.”15 But it is the nature of his killing, between sacrifice and homicide, that defines him as a pure victim of sovereign power. This is in contrast to the ordinary criminals of Norris’s American prison, subject to medically administered disease and death, who do not toil because of the terror of the camp, but because a prior act justifies the sovereign’s wrath. It is also in contrast to Antigone, a figure of political criminality. In the camp, one is unjustifiably terrorized by martial law; in the city and its prison, one is justifiably punished through criminal law. Beyond the historical difference between criminal and martial law is the formal difference presented by Lacan’s discussion of tragedy in Sophocles’s Antigone. Here, while the homo sacer and Antigone might resemble each other, they are fundamentally different types of characters. The homo sacer is juridical, subject to the abstraction and contextualization of the jurist, while Antigone is mythical, subject to the desire and passion of the audience.16 The former locates the politicization of the individual under sovereign law, while the latter locates the elocution of the individual through sovereign law. The juridical marks legal processes after judgment, while the literary casts the act of judgment across legal processes. More specifically, Lacan provides an implicit theory of biopolitics—what he calls a “second death” in his reading of Antigone—that restores the judicial in relationship to the juridical. And it is this restoration of the judicial that more accurately reflects the historical relationship between the individual

Strict Scrutiny 111

and the rule of law in contemporary society. For the judicial form in American constitutional democracy works through both the legal and literary, the political and the visual, the juridical and the rhetorical. Like the homo sacer hovering between life and death, Antigone is described by Lacan as “the advent of the absolute individual.”17 Prohibited by Creon to bury her brother, and under not only a death sentence but a sentence to suffer, Antigone is said to represent the peculiar existence of this individual. The tragic hero is fearless, pitiless—one who relates to sovereign law through both a fierce love and hate.18 The position of the tragic hero is “the situation or fate of a life that is about to turn into certain death, a death lived by anticipation, a death that crosses over into the sphere of life, a life that moves into the realm of death.”19 This “second death” denotes Antigone’s crossing over into the realm of atë, a sphere beyond the realm of the human. At this moment, she is likened to a bird, a lonely mother, whose cries and moans over her lost children signify the metamorphosis of the human into something beyond.20 Beyond the “fascinating image of Antigone herself,” beyond “Antigone in her unbearable splendor,” is the sound of this second death allowing for the emergence in the first instance of sovereign power, municipal regulation, and moral good. However, Lacan is also interested in how the passion of Antigone’s attachment to her dead brother, absolutely singular and criminal, goes untempered by the laws under which she lives, remains untouched by the doubt, measurement, or rationalization of her community and family. If in various and fleeting moments we all experience this second death—a consequential suffering we know will come from a certain action—Lacan asks how (not why) we, nonetheless, take that action. This question arises, in Lacan’s reading, by asking what it is about this “terrible, self-willed victim” we cannot stand. What is it about Antigone that remains absent from conventional readings of the myth, that exceeds the rhetoric of Antigone the martyr, that renders unbearable the justification she offers but that we do not want to hear—that she loves her brother because he is her brother? It is the relationship between Antigone’s beauty and her point of view on life, “that place [in which] she can see [life] and live it in the form of something already lost,” that provides an answer.21 This is what Lacan calls the aesthetics of the second death. The blinding effect of Antigone’s image, the “violent illumination, the glow of beauty,” halts the audiences’ analysis of Antigone’s situation; it structurally positions them in “essential blindness” to Antigone’s criminal being.22 Thus, contrary to conventional readings of 112 Sora Y. Han

Antigone’s criminal being—which locate it in her civil disobedience and the moral conscience that brings on her punishment—Lacan locates it in her desire for her family. This desire for her family, the absolutely singular and irreplaceable relation establishing her association with her brother—two children “born of the same father and of the same mother”—is the equivalent of what Lacan refers to as her desire for death, since that is the certain legal consequence of failing to relinquish this association.23 In offering this prohibited relation as Antigone’s justification for her criminal act, Lacan writes, “she pushes to the limit the realization of something that might be called the pure and simple desire of death as such. She incarnates that desire.”24 Death is the starting point of modernity, not its culmination. Death, as the aim of desire and not its satisfaction, is the center of Lacan’s project to outline how desire works. And for this reason, Lacan places Antigone’s image between two deaths: the “second death” discussed above and the Freudian “death instinct.”25 Situated between two deaths, Antigone’s being broaches the biopolitical and the unconscious. That is, Antigone poses a relationship between the juridical and psychoanalytic that turns on the problem of judgment. Medicalized psychoanalysis and the rule of law both attempt to traverse the impossibility of knowing that secret motivating human action, a knowledge both presume will provide happiness and racial equality. In much the same way psychoanalysis is supposed to guarantee happiness through curative techniques such as catharsis, the law is supposed to guarantee an antiracist society through various modes of legal analysis, such as strict scrutiny. Yet, Lacan’s return to Antigone is occasioned by a need to think beyond the medical definition of catharsis in the field of psychoanalysis, wherein a genealogy of catharsis provides that the literary effect of catharsis occurs through tragedy’s play on pain and beauty. The kind of cathartic promise that strict scrutiny holds out to purify the law of racial animus would benefit from a similar inquiry, which I take up later by exploring the cinematic reflection of Korematsu seen in Snow. Ultimately, the significance of Lacan’s reading of Antigone for critical legal studies and its bearing on biopolitics necessitates a deeper understanding of the function of justification—and, more generally, judgment—in post– civil rights political culture. Justification and judgment do not operate in an economic relation to desire in the sense that they separate good from evil, norm from taboo, and order from transgression—distinctions allowing the legal subject to choose the former over the latter. Rather, Antigone’s justification—the incarnation of pure desire—reveals only an underlying tautolStrict Scrutiny 113

ogy of reasoning, the threshold of the signifying chain of meaning and its inscription in the human experience, a space wherein inhabitants are categorically criminal, unpresentable, invisible, blinding. Opening up the double scene of death in Lacan’s psychoanalysis as a realm of inquiry for legal analysis is particularly relevant to the post–civil rights era, in which strict scrutiny has caused state action to repress racial language and motivation in order to circumvent judgment by the courts. To that end, we return to the Supreme Court’s admission that strict scrutiny is not “strict in theory, but fatal in fact,” and to how this maxim represents within post–civil rights racial jurisprudence a double scene of death: the purported death of state racism, on the one hand, and on the other, the near impossibility of giving legal life to claims of racial inequality.26 As a matter of civil rights litigation, this double scene of death has, by and large, resulted in a stalemate between citizens and the nation. At the same time, the nonexpression of this double scene of death is nonetheless audible through the tragic, an example of which we see in Snow as a reflection of Korematsu’s judicial reasoning. race, LaW, and The feminine of sexuaLiTy—a cinemaTic exampLe

In the film Snow Falling on Cedars, a young, white veteran of the Second World War, Ishmael Chambers, returns to his island hometown in the Puget Sound to begin working as a journalist for a local newspaper he inherited from his father. As the newspaper’s lone employee, Ishmael covers the criminal trial of Kazuo Miyamoto, who is accused of killing Carl Heine, one of the town’s white fishermen. During his investigation, Ishmael negotiates traumatic memories of war and his relationship with Hatsue Miyamoto before he finally comes forward with the necessary information for Kazuo’s acquittal. Organized by the temporality of what turns out to be a criminal trial occasioned by the accidental death of a fisherman at sea one foggy night, Snow braids together three major dramas: the drama of the Second World War that leads to the internment of the Japanese American community on the West Coast and the conscription of young men to fight on the Pacific and Western fronts; the legal drama of a Japanese American criminal defendant railroaded through a murder trial because of his race, culture, and economic exclusion; and the romantic drama of an illicit, interracial love affair between a Japanese girl and a white boy. Although these dramas, disparate in time and place, come together nicely through the course of Ishmael’s restoration from scorn and bigotry to innocence and virtue, one immediate impression Snow

114 Sora Y. Han

offers in its attempt to span war and peace, race and nation, and politics and experience, is the current of sexuality underwriting all three dramas. War stigmatizes the purportedly equal Japanese American population, who fished and farmed as others did in the provincial town, and the countless young men (including Ishmael), who returned home from war dead, or maimed, or mute. The war makes boys into men, and Japanese Americans into Americans, through an unspoken but shared experience of castration.27 Though omitted from the film, the private thoughts of the mortician charged with determining Carl’s cause of death are detailed in the novel. Enviously observing Carl’s naked and virile—though dead—body, the mortician wonders how it is that the life of such a robust man could be taken so easily.28 Though the mortician concludes that Carl died by drowning, he is fixated on a wound to Carl’s head—of mysterious and indeterminable cause—that will occasion Kazuo’s criminal prosecution. Kazuo, Carl, and Ishmael are each faced with their own mortality. Each must painfully negotiate family life after war and cope with memories of killing, indescribable and secret. Ishmael and Kazuo have a common tendency toward emotional fixation on family in the chaos of their war-torn worlds. Ishmael’s fixation is on Hatsue, the lost object of an interrupted and ultimately unrequited love. Kazuo’s fixates on farmland, the lost territory of a confiscated family inheritance. Ishmael’s love for Hatsue is never codified by the legal status of marriage. The two are first separated by Hatsue’s physical removal from San Piedro to Camp Manzanar, and later by her marriage to Kazuo, with whom she hopes to recover the possibility of a respectable life while in prison. Kazuo, who had negotiated a deal with Carl’s family to circumvent the Alien Land Laws, is denied his land, and the dreams of self-sufficiency and capitalization associated with it, when he is sent to the internment camps. The bodily inscription of resentment on his face is introduced by the prosecution as key evidence establishing suspicion for Carl’s death. For Kazuo and Ishmael, family becomes the referent for the good life, while at the same time, the cause of each man’s potential demise. Amid scenes of justice, scenes of interracial love provide the most pointed gestures toward Snow’s unifying narrative. The site of sexuality—poetic, intimate, and dangerous—allows the film’s three dramas to come together not only through the pain and death caused by natural disaster, but through the sweetness and plenitude of nature. Indeed, it is in the cradle of nature that Ishmael and Hatsue come to know and consummate their desire for each

Strict Scrutiny 115

other despite the ugly cynicism of the world. Child’s play in the liminal spaces of forest and beach becomes a deep-seated, essential beauty, through which Snow makes sense of otherwise unresolved, mysterious, and unknowable flaws in human character and condition. In fact, it is in this beauty that the diverse critics of Snow, critics of both the novel and the film, find a point of agreement. The feminine figures of woman and land contain in their images the historical potential for mass human destruction and the secret of human life. Both women in Ishmael’s life, his mother and Hatsue, at key moments in his redemption, attempt to reveal to him this secret. However, their words fall on his ears as the nagging or cruel advice to settle, marry, and have children. Be happy, they plead or command as Ishmael’s cloud of resentment and helplessness overwhelms him, as the memory of that moment in his life when all seemed lost returns. A variety of cinematic images illustrates this returning memory, the tasting of strawberries, Hatsue’s letter, her face, Ishmael’s amputated arm, fish out of water, the smell of cedar—all of which reference a time with Hatsue now lost. Against this feminine beauty, its promise of bliss or, at the very least, deliverance from terror, the law is cast as the agent of war, castration, and racial inequality. Despite the fact that Snow’s temporal logic follows Kazuo’s criminal trial, it is Hatsue and Ishmael’s illicit affair, and within it the haunting of feminine beauty, that brings together the three dramas—scattered as this feminine beauty might be in Ishmael’s memory at various stages in the mystery of war and murder. The love affair is presented as a subplot to the criminal investigation that establishes unjust suspicion or personal prejudice in what is supposed to be fair and systematic legal procedure. The love affair, the triangulated sexual relation between the white man, Asian woman, and Asian man, is symbolic of the structure of the history between Asia and the West.29 The question is repeated over and over again in Snow: Will Ishmael make sense of this interracial love before it consumes his being and life? Ishmael ultimately ends up rejecting principles of fairness, familial devotion, legality, morality, and natural selection as satisfactory answers to this variously articulated question. At the end of Ishmael’s catharsis and his short-of-heroic exposé of key evidence for Kazuo’s defense, he finds peace in knowing that while tragic “accidents” do occur in the realms of politics, justice, and family relations, they do not occur in the realm of love. Made whole as a white man in love with an Asian woman, he is able to fulfill his civic duties as a journalist and make human his acts of war. 116 Sora Y. Han

This revival plays as a miracle of sorts, after the entanglement of image and emotion that makes up Ishmael’s traumatic experience of war. Ishmael, alone in his house after rescuing Hatsue and her father from a roadside during a snow storm, finds Hatsue’s break-up letter, written while she was imprisoned and first read by Ishmael while he was away at battle. The scene comprises a complex montage of images stitched together by Hatsue’s voiceover reading of the letter and the sounds of gunshots and exploding artillery. Ishmael rereads the letter in real time, has memories of reading it while in his barrack, remembers himself remembering it during his near- death experience. He remembers himself remembering stumbling as a child with Hatsue upon a fish on the beach. He imagines Hatsue addressing the letter to him while interned, reading it to her mother, reading it directly to him in the abstract darkness of his imagination. And throughout, the montage flashes images of dead, white male bodies on the beachfront battlefield, nighttime bombings, Ishmael’s recognition of his injured body, and dead fish washed up onto shore. The substance of this montage is Ishmael’s general confusion of sound and voice, memory and event, Hatsue’s affirmations of her love for Ishmael and simultaneous impossibility of that love. Amid this confusion, Ishmael finds his voice at the precise moment he remembers his amputated arm. An inverted image of Ishmael’s pained and malign face as he lies helplessly, and less one limb, on the operating table fires back, “Fucking Jap bitch.” The emotive force with which Ishmael directs his anger (a product of his war injury and rejected affection) contrasts with the cold indifference with which Hatsue expresses her trauma (the result of her false imprisonment and racial stigma). Ishmael’s and Hatsue’s speech acts are overlaid with the sound of gunfire, are equated and conflated as Ishmael struggles to regain a sense of self out of the chaos of his memories. Given that no other scene significantly references the Second World War, and given that in Ishmael’s reminiscences he equates the back and forth between Japan and America with that of his quarrel with Hatsue, we are left to assume that when Ishmael is later able to discern reason and intention in his love for Hatsue, he was able to find the same in his involvement in the war. We are led to understand Ishmael, and the construction of his emotional prison, from a balance of offensives that he and Hatsue, the United States and Japan, launch against each other as embittered and embattled lovers. This balance of sexual and national relations is delicate. For sexual love and equality between nations exists only when it is not tainted by the tradiStrict Scrutiny 117

tion of U.S. race-based imprisonment on false pretenses and the culmination of the Second World War in the U.S. nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These two elements are necessarily invisible, repressed, and disavowed as a matter of history and geography in the film—and more importantly, as a matter of sexual relation between Ishmael and Hatsue. The locations of the battle scenes are unnamed and unidentifiable, and legal adjudication adheres strictly to boundaries between criminal, property, and civil rights law. This disavowal corresponds with a curious inequality at the level of representation that traverses Snow’s three dramas. In contrast to the representation of emotional and psychical injury on the white, masculine body—the amputation of Ishmael’s arm—the Asian, feminine body remains expressionless as a signifier of pain.30 Returning to the scene of Ishmael’s reverie, induced by Hatsue’s rejection letter, where the film inscribes the pain of Hatsue’s speech act (her break-up letter) on Ishmael’s body (his injured, amputated arm), we find no similar inscription of pain on Hatsue’s body by Ishmael’s speech act, “Fucking Jap bitch.” Hatsue’s quivering face, washed-out skin, teary eyes, and classic red lips are the features of the white feminine ideal, but one without the power to invoke masculine protection from injury. She was, after all, not a real princess. She is San Piedro’s Strawberry Princess, described by Guterson in the novel as “a virginal Japanese maiden dressed in satin and dusted carefully across the face with rice powder.” Crowned in a public ceremony by the town’s mayor the day before the Japanese would begin harvesting the town’s berries, she was the necessary but “unwitting intermediary between two communities, a human sacrifice.” It is this inequality at the level of representation of injury that speaks to the value of Snow to a contemporary understanding of the meaning of internment in the United States. Internment marks less an inequality of inclusion in the nation, and more an inequality of injury necessary to becoming culturally recognizable. This inequality registers starkly in the film, where Ishmael’s body is literally partial, missing, in pain, and Hatsue’s body remains, like all the others. In a film that uses the resolution of racial tension at the level of criminal and civil adjudication to attempt to resolve the tragedy of war, it is the interracial sexual desire between Ishmael and Hatsue that belies the ideal of equality in Snow’s social world. Their sexual relation, the traumatic memory of it, its impossible representation, spills over into the law—a legal system that carries with it a narrative of racial equality through legislation, redress through historical revision, and ultimately, compassion toward human suffering. 118 Sora Y. Han

Korematsu: The condiTionaL LoGic of sTricT scruTiny

On this reading of Snow, the historical scene of internment insists that we consider the force of sexuality in the field of law, politics, and adjudication. This is not to say that using sexuality to analyze internment as a legal phenomenon would not benefit from studies of individual sexual motivations, social patterns of interracial marriage, or even studies of sex-based economies. Rather, a consideration of the force of sexuality troubles approaching the question of internment as a matter resolved by rational reforms to legal doctrine or policy. For it is the difficulty of expressing interracial sexual desire, as seen in Snow, that presents itself as the unrepresentable underside from which the textuality of law and law-making emerge as the rule of law. This underside of the law is best outlined through an attention to the feminine—how its presence is felt in the various texts that constitute the mainstream discourse on internment, how it erupts despite its repression in the dominant political terms shaping legal debate, and how it can, or cannot, be seen. Korematsu remains good law in two divergent fields of law: Fourteenth Amendment antidiscrimination jurisprudence, commonly known as civil rights law, concerning race-based state action and inequality; and executive wartime jurisprudence, commonly known as national security law, concerning the regulation of executive power during times of emergency. The first branch of Korematsu’s legacy, which establishes the constitutional foundation for outlawing race-based state action through the rule of “strict scrutiny,” has been rendered ineffective to the extent that the rule has provided little or no relief for racial minorities. The second branch of Korematsu’s legacy, which defers constitutional protection of American civil liberties to the constitutional mandate for executive action to protect the nation, is, however, a mainstay of authority for various legal reforms made during times of war, including the present moment. This bifurcated legal history of Korematsu tells a story about Japanese American internment that attributes the law’s treatment of race and nation to two separate doctrinal paths. Strict scrutiny reasons that if the state has a compelling objective for racially discriminatory action, and if the discriminatory course of action is narrowly tailored to achieve this objective, the state’s action is not based on racial animus and is thus constitutional. But how is strict scrutiny entangled with national defense? Is national defense ever anything other than compelling, necessary, or urgent? And how does the either/ Strict Scrutiny 119

or relationship between national security and racial discrimination, presented by Korematsu’s legacy, compare to the way the two are related in the rhetoric of the case, in which the need for the former signals the absence of the latter? Does this noncoincidence push us to think further about the relationship between race, nation, and sexuality? Where do we locate the work of compulsion (within and/or beyond the nation), in the structure of justification Korematsu sets for the development of contemporary civil rights law? Despite the historical inconsistencies and inaccuracies that attend any treatment of the two poles of race and nation in American constitutional law, does this very legal formation not reveal a certain necessary omission at the heart of antidiscrimination jurisprudence—an omission of a relationship with the feminine, the invisibility of the feminine within law and its production of a nation defined as fraternal, and thus sexually repressive, in its politics? Ishmael’s belief in the ideal of equality echoes the strict scrutiny logic of Korematsu, the possibility for balance between the defensive excesses of sovereign power and the subjection of racial minorities under the nomos of the nation. The logic limits the law’s capacity to recognize the nuances of racism: if racism is rational, justifiable, and calculated (and thus constitutional), then it is not naked, compulsory, and emotive (and is thus unconstitutional). The logic’s flaw is not that the law can only recognize two as opposed to multiple types of racism, or that it privileges remediation for unconstitutional racism and not constitutional racism, but rather the conditional relationship the law poses between the two—if one, then not the other. If the law can, at best, only approximate an equal relationship between state action that protects the state during times of national emergency and that protects racial minorities from racism, then why did Korematsu pose this particular relationship between the two? What do we make of this overconfidence in the law—which insists that emergency obviates animus, that need eliminates passion, that justification negates compulsion? There are two major sources of discontent toward Korematsu, neither of which actually takes issue with the fact that Korematsu stands for a logic that makes a finding of racism conditional to the state of national security. In one sense, Korematsu stands for the adjudication of apparently contradictory constitutional principles that cannot entirely mask the injustice of suspending the civil rights of a racial minority in the interest of providing more expansive executive powers necessary to protect the nation against its enemy. Whether

120 Sora Y. Han

opinion sways toward a condemnation of targeting American citizens based on racial identity for any reason, or toward a total defense of expansive executive powers that use racial identities during national emergencies, this critique grants that there is an essential tension between protection of the nation and protection of racial minorities, and that the law can find a just way to negotiate this tension.31 In another sense, the problem of racial discrimination in Korematsu is subsumed under a prevailing and more fundamental legal tension between the civil rights of citizens and the executive powers of the nation representing those citizens. Race is understood here as tangential or inessential to Korematsu. This suggests that Korematsu is more a case about conflict between nations, and less about conflict between races; that internment is more about the violence of war between nations than it is about the violence of peace between intranational racial groups; and that biopolitics is more about the obscenity of sovereign power than it is about the perversion of race. Whether one thinks Korematsu correctly takes race into constitutional consideration or the issue of racial discrimination should be subsumed by general constitutional issues, the terms of the “if-one-then-not-the- other” proposition can be argued with the logic of strict scrutiny. The “other” of the strict scrutiny logic is either justified in the former instance, or disavowed in the latter; but both justification and disavowal appear as two sides of the same coin. The problem with the logic of strict scrutiny is that it poses a conditional, if- one-then-not-the- other relationship between race and nation. The conditional logic of strict scrutiny should not be confused with an either/or, or disjunctive, logic. In adjudications of the constitutionality of race-based deprivations of civil rights, the conditional logic makes the denial of racism dependent on the affirmation of a national interest, but not the reverse (in which case it would then be properly disjunctive). In other words, strict scrutiny logic says that a positive finding of a need for national defense negates the presence of racial animus. However, it does not say that a positive finding of racial animus negates a finding of a need for national defense. If strict scrutiny posed a disjunctive relationship between nation and race, it would then make sense to argue that both national exclusivity and racial animus worked together to produce the legal outcome of Korematsu. This is the argument behind the concept of “racial foreignness” developed within critical race theory. Racial foreignness describes particular forms of racialization, including Japanese American internment, in the historical context

Strict Scrutiny 121

of Asian (immigrant) exclusion from the polis and culture of the nation.32 Within this historical context, internment, as an example of racial exclusion based on national foreignness, is a mode of exclusion in line with policies prohibiting immigration from Asian countries, the marginalization of Asian American communities from equal participation in the economy, and the social representation of Asian cultures as outside or counter to Western values. Notwithstanding the fact that determining racial foreignness through a general experience of national formation based on exercises of sovereignty and legislations of formal national belonging captures a limited range of racial exclusions at the heart of American democracy, the concept of racial foreignness does not entirely capture the complexity of Korematsu’s logic and what its legacy allows us to understand about the hydraulics of race in the United States. For this understanding, we now turn to a closer look at the conditional logic of Korematsu through the language of the case. Korematsu: a cLoser Look aT The condiTionaL LoGic of sTricT scruTiny

In 1984, Fred Korematsu was granted a writ of coram nobis, which set aside his criminal conviction for violating a local law excluding people of “Japanese ancestry” from remaining in particular areas of the West Coast, including his city of residence, San Leandro, California.33 Finding forty years after internment that Korematsu’s conviction was based on a grave and unconstitutional deprivation of due process, the court reflected on the meaning of the 1942 case: Korematsu remains on the pages of our legal and political history. As a legal precedent it is now recognized as having very limited application. As historical precedent it stands as a constant caution that in times of war or declared military necessity our institutions must be vigilant in protecting constitutional guarantees. It stands as a caution that in times of distress the shield of military necessity and national security must not be used to protect governmental actions from close scrutiny and accountability. It stands as a caution that in times of international hostility and antagonisms our institutions, legislative, executive and judicial, must be prepared to exercise their authority to protect all citizens from the petty fears and prejudices that are so easily aroused.34 The court’s memory of Korematsu here is striking. It is focused on the lesson Korematsu taught the nation: that no amount of military necessity and international hostility should lead the nation astray in protecting its citizens. 122 Sora Y. Han

Yet, in its articulation of this lesson, Korematsu is couched in two disavowals. First, as legal precedent, Korematsu has limited application despite its permanent mark on legal history. And second, the “petty fears and prejudices that are so easily aroused” against minority groups during times of international and national emergencies are not shared by and do not emanate from the government and its various institutions, which are presumed instead to “protect all citizens.” While admitting in opinion that Korematsu’s conviction was the result of a severe miscarriage of justice—that the government violated his right to due process—it simultaneously retracts this admission by denying the law as an agent and agency of racism. The way that the court’s memory betrays its opinion, displaying the court’s profound ambivalence with respect to the law’s racist past, begs the question of what terrible truth this ambivalence negotiates. This question is especially pressing given the fact that Korematsu has had far-reaching applicability in civil rights law by ratifying the strict scrutiny standard of review for race-based state action. That the government has been “so easily aroused” by “petty fears and prejudices,” leaving minority groups completely exposed, in perpetual lack, with no due process mediating their encounters with the government, makes the question all the more pressing. The fact that the strict scrutiny standard of reviewing race-based state action originates in Korematsu and is the case’s lasting application to civil rights law is no simple matter.35 When the court is faced with circumstances in which the state explicitly uses racial categories in its enactment of law, and when this type of state action deprives this racial group of its civil rights, then the court will review this action with strict scrutiny to determine its constitutionality. The government must show that its action is justified, in contemporary language, by a “pressing public necessity,” or a “compelling state interest”; and that the action is “commensurate with the threatened danger,” and “narrowly tailored.”36 If these two conditions are shown, then the court will find that the race-based government action is not motivated by “racial antagonism,” or, expressed another way later in the opinion, “racial prejudice.”37 Stated in Justice Black’s words: “It should be noted, to begin with, that all legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single racial group are immediately suspect. That is not to say that all such restrictions are unconstitutional. It is to say that courts must subject them to the most rigid scrutiny. Pressing public necessity may sometimes justify the existence of such restrictions; racial antagonism never can.”38 In conversation with Justice Black, a dissenting Justice Murphy writes, Strict Scrutiny 123

“Yet no reasonable relation to an ‘immediate, imminent, and impending’ public danger is evident to support this racial restriction.”39 In other words, there is no evidence showing a “pressing public necessity” that would “support,” or justify, the race-based government action. Justice Murphy’s dissenting argument is not about which level of judicial scrutiny should be applied in this case, or about the effectiveness of strict scrutiny in regulating racial discrimination, but about whether the facts support the majority’s finding that a strict scrutiny analysis is supposed to justify race-based state action. Justice Murphy, then, concluding that the evidence does not demonstrate a finding of justification for the race-based action, warns that the internment “falls into the ugly abyss of racism.”40 The conversation between the two justices regarding the law is rather simple, and their two opinions regarding the persuasiveness of the evidence remains their most significant point of departure. In order to register his disagreement with the outcome reached by the majority, Justice Murphy emphasizes the racism that remains—evil, void, immeasurable, and unsightly, troubling and embarrassing. Despite their disagreement over the persuasiveness of the evidence, the two justices share a similar theory of race. Although Justice Murphy provides a more detailed framework for analyzing whether a group’s racial characteristics have some “demonstrable relationship” to a particular “dangerous trait,” his theory of race is based, just as Justice Black’s is, on a notion of race as ancestry and descent. Both Justices Murphy and Black use the language of blood to describe Japanese Americans as a racial group, though they diverge in their theories about what implication this has for determining the group’s capacity to be loyal to the nation. Justice Murphy states, “All residents of this nation are kin in some way by blood or culture to a foreign land,” even as he goes on to reject internment advocates’ “charge[s] relative to race, religion, culture, geographical location, and legal and economic status.”41 The point here is that whether or not Justice Murphy is convinced of actual disloyalty among Japanese Americans, he is still concerned about, and grants racial difference to, both the biological and cultural. The two justices also share a theory of justification for race-based state action. Strict scrutiny, as a mode of legal analysis designed to ensure that racial discrimination is adequately justified, goes unquestioned by the dissenting voice. That is, by centralizing constitutional inquiry around the issue of justification, the logic of strict scrutiny preempts the question of whether racial discrimination can be justified. This presumption then leads to all sorts 124 Sora Y. Han

of inconsistencies regarding the relationship between race and nation. For example, Justice Black accepts the idea that placing a selective burden on some for the good of the nation is justified by conditions of warfare, at the same time that he elides the logic’s presumptive correlation of race and national threat by referring to Japanese Americans as “a large group of American citizens”: We are not unmindful of the hardships imposed by [internment] upon a large group of American citizens. But hardships are part of war, and war is an aggregation of hardships. All citizens alike, both in and out of uniform, feel the impact of war in greater or lesser measure. Citizenship has its responsibilities as well as its privileges, and in time of war the burden is always heavier. Compulsory exclusion of large groups of citizens from their homes, except under circumstances of direst emergency and peril, is inconsistent with our basic governmental institutions. But when under conditions of modern warfare our shores are threatened by hostile forces, the power to protect must be commensurate with the threatened danger.42 At another point in the opinion, Black invokes the context of warfare to justify internment and defend it against the racial charge that it is a form of a concentration camp. First he disagrees that internment camps are concentration camps, a correlation he finds, apparently, unjustifiable. It is said that we are dealing here with the case of imprisonment of a citizen in a concentration camp solely because of his ancestry, without evidence or inquiry concerning his loyalty and good disposition towards the United States. Our task would be simple, our duty clear, were this a case involving the imprisonment of a loyal citizen in a concentration camp because of racial prejudice. Regardless of the true nature of the assembly and relocation centers—and we deem it unjustifiable to call them concentration camps with all the ugly connotations that term implies—we are dealing specifically with nothing but an exclusion order.43 Black disagrees that only racism was at work, and instead claims that both race and nation were used to provide a justifiable explanation for imprisoning Japanese Americans, a claim evident in his reference to them as “citizens of Japanese ancestry”: To cast this case into outlines of racial prejudice, without reference to the real military dangers which were presented, merely confuses the issue.

Strict Scrutiny 125

Korematsu was not excluded from the Military Area because of hostility to him or his race. He was excluded because we are at war with the Japanese Empire, because the properly constituted military authorities feared an invasion of our West Coast and felt constrained to take proper security measures, because they decided that the military urgency of the situation demanded that all citizens of Japanese ancestry be segregated from the West Coast temporarily.44 I quote these passages at length so that we can better see the inconsistency of the presumption that justified racial discrimination treats Japanese Americans as American citizens, or as a type of American citizen, while it adamantly denies that Japanese Americans are treated solely as a racial group. Because strict scrutiny grants that race can be subsumed under nation, it obscures this presumption. And the obscurity of this presumption is troubling because the correlation between race and nation remains unsubstantiated, arbitrary, and wholly illogical with respect to its difference from the racial “prejudice” and “hostility” Justice Black so adamantly denounces. The only difference, as Black would have it, seems to be that state action premised on race and nation is justifiable, and state action premised solely on race is not. He tellingly concludes his opinion with an attempt to protect the doctrine of strict scrutiny and its presumption by writing out the use of context to reevaluate the Supreme Court’s affirmation of internment: “We cannot—by availing ourselves of the calm perspective of hindsight—now say that at that time these actions were unjustified.”45 How does the distinction between state action based only on race and race-and-foreign-relations-based state action affect our understanding of internment? First, internment marks a synchronous relationship between race and nation at the same time that it points to a form of racial subjection outside the imperatives of nation. This we saw in the text and logic of Korematsu. Second, this other form of racial subjection is not immediately discernible in any one type of enactment of law, since a court’s analysis of racial discrimination will only presume this other form when its strict scrutiny analysis fails. According to the conditional logic of strict scrutiny, this other form of state action based only on race is both there and not, whether or not the court is dealing specifically with immigrant or native racial groups. Internment, in this way, becomes part of the American history of race, even as it designates a particular group’s experience. Third, the particularly obscure and unpresentable form of racial sub-

126 Sora Y. Han

jection based only on race, contained in the strict scrutiny logic suggests a sexual economy of the law, a realm of juridical discourse that is underwritten by the force of sexuality. This point is drawn out by considering the previous discussion of Snow and internment law in the context of internment as a political phenomenon. The tension between the majority and dissenting opinions about the constitutionality of internment, about the persuasiveness of the evidence supporting a correlation between race and national disloyalty, is mirrored in Snow’s criminal trial. Just as Snow restores through the recovery of evidence the criminal justice principle of “innocent until proven guilty” from the taint of racial prejudice, the logic of strict scrutiny is able to restore the constitutional principle of due process through evidence. At the same time, we know from Snow that it is not evidence, or the lack thereof, that thwarts the justice of criminal procedure. The exculpatory evidence Ishmael held in secret only entered into the trial record after he was able to negotiate his sexual relationship with Hatsue. Similarly, in the now publicized archive of official records related to Japanese American internment, it was not a shortage of evidence that left the court vulnerable to racial prejudice.46 The retraction of Korematsu’s criminal conviction and, more broadly, reparations made to the Japanese American community for internment came after long and hard-won legal battles and political organizing.47 Snow and Korematsu point toward the domain of desire, to the irrationality of justification at the heart of criminal procedure and constitutional analysis. In the context of the obscure form of racial subjection internment implies, the interned racial minority emerges as a sort of limit to American constitutional law. Internment is inscribed cinematically in Hatsue and Ishmael’s narratives of sexual desire, an internment that renders Hatsue unable to love Ishmael. Hatsue does not at any time say she loves Ishmael. During and after her internment, Hatsue’s love for Ishmael is only rendered in the past tense, or claimed to have never existed at all. Similarly, Korematsu inscribes the position of racial subjection by racist state action as a logical impossibility, as strict scrutiny is presumed to render such action justified. As much as strict scrutiny and its development since Korematsu has attempted to make the analysis of state action more exacting and thorough, the impossible is still present in its logic because, absent evidence, or when the evidence simply fails to persuade, strict scrutiny affirms the default: “the ugly abyss of racism.”48 Incapable of being offset by any context of foreign or national crisis, racism persists when justification falters. Strict Scrutiny 127

film still from snow Falling on Cedars, “fantasm.”

Korematsu, disabused of its historical context, reveals the logically unmanageable position of the racial minority in legal discourse, a position prior to the hypothetical proposition a strict scrutiny analysis imposes on it. It is a position for which the law is incapable of offering any justification, even if the law offers nominal protection or reparation. snow: a cLoser Look aT TraGedy

If it is possible to propose that Antigone is the homo sacer’s double, based on the analysis of biopolitics above, then it might also be possible to propose that Hatsue is Korematsu’s double. This analogy hinges on the relationship of beauty to the rule of law, wherein beauty provides an entry point for thinking about the relationship between race and sexuality, and their relationship to the law. The tragic play of beauty and pain is illustrated in Hatsue’s internment and Ishmael’s encounter with it. On first blush, Hatsue appears to be the calm center of Ishmael’s hurricane of reasoning, that her practical position is what drives Ishmael from the madness of sexual passion to the sanity of love. However, in contrast to Ishmael’s consistent vacillations between passion and righteousness, it is Hatsue who is actually driven by love and hatred. The ferocity of this love and hatred is an undercurrent of disavowal in Ishmael’s attempts to bring human good and human desire in line. From the confines of racial condemnation—the internment camp and her mother’s home—Hatsue writes a letter to Ishmael explaining why she can no longer talk to him. Before Ishmael receives the letter, Hatsue decides that she will disclose her interracial relationship and her sexual foray with Ishmael to her mother. In the final shot of Hatsue’s reading, the ambivalent addressee of her 128 Sora Y. Han

love letter is represented by her face—floating as the representational space around her begins to empty out. In contrast to the darkening background of the shot, her face is illuminated as her voice travels out from the prison of her mother’s home, to the internment camp, and finally to Ishmael’s emotional economy. Her voice repeats: “I loved you, and I didn’t love you at the same moment. I’m going to move on with my life the best I can. And I hope that you will, too. I don’t love you, Ishmael. Whenever we were together, I knew it. I loved you, and I didn’t love you at the same moment.” This letter—addressed to Ishmael and read to her mother—was a long time coming, as Hatsue had been commanded to reject Ishmael’s love less by a legal division between her race and the white nation than by a familial association of blood and tradition. In the first scene in which Hatsue and Ishmael talk about their childhood relationship, Hatsue asks whether Ishmael thinks their relationship is wrong. When Ishmael answers that Hatsue’s friends and father would disapprove—notably evading Hatsue’s question about what he personally feels, as well as the larger question of white racism and antimiscegenation practices—Hatsue responds, “My mom is the problem.” Hatsue would later give in to the maternal command, not because she is under duress, but because she does not love Ishmael. “I’m not yours anymore. I don’t love you, Ishmael. I can think of no more honest way to say it.” Furthermore, her submission to the maternal command is not done out of affection for her family. Hatsue consistently expresses a deep-seated resentment toward her mother and father, finding intimacy with a Japanese boy, caring for sisters who appear to unquestioningly adopt traditional Japanese womanhood. Despite the reasons to hate her family and its “racial curse,” she nonetheless loves it. She cries continuously for her family even as she explodes, “I don’t want to be Japanese!” Here we see the parallel between Hatsue’s letter and Antigone’s claim. The very justification Hatsue offers Ishmael for her distance from him is the very reason why Ishmael continues to torment her and her family. Hatsue’s refusal becomes a way for Ishmael to manage the unannounced ambivalence of the rightness/wrongness of their relationship by projecting and recasting his racist repulsion in the context of her unprincipled rejection of him. Ishmael is able to pursue his harassment—and his hatred—with the vindicating narrative of colorblind love.49 And Ishmael, in the throes of his fascination with Hatsue’s beauty, continually fails to do the right thing. He remains silent about her incarceration, Strict Scrutiny 129

demands love from her despite her protests, and lashes out at her for his arm amputation qua figurative castration. And he is justified in his silence, his demands, his pain—after all, he endures all of this because she means the world to him. It is in the name of his love for her that he remains in a constant state of doubt, fear, and cynicism about the world. He is consumed by the colorblind fantasy of their childhood, searching for ways to make this fantasy a reality for his town, for his country divided by race and war.50 In the sequence of memories that gives Ishmael his sense of duty, impelling him to come forth with key evidence, he recalls an encounter he had with Hatsue soon after returning from war. Stumbling after Hatsue, his balance thrown off by the absence of his left arm, he pleads, “Please. I know you’ll think this is crazy. But all I want to do is hold you and I think that if you let me do that just for a few seconds, I can walk away and never speak to you again. Hatsue, can you please look at me?” Perhaps up until that moment he had only remembered her words, “I did a terrible thing, Ishmael. But you have to hear this. I can never touch you. You have to let go. That’s the way things are. Things end, Ishmael. They do.” This time, however, he remembered that Hatsue had looked at him—had in fact given into his demand: “Hatsue, can you please look at me?”—as she spoke those words. During Ishmael’s encounter with Hatsue, not a thought about his hatred for Hatsue’s race enters Ishmael’s mind. He feels shame (looking at her as the Strawberry Princess), curiosity (her emotionlessness), and betrayal (her unavailability because of her new family)—but he does not feel racial animus. In fact, he is silent as to her race and internment. When asked as a boy whether he thought their relationship was wrong, he spoke not of himself, but of Hatsue’s Japanese family and friends. When Hatsue, panicking about the first arrest made of a Japanese man after news of Pearl Harbor broke, Ishmael offered only promises that everything would be alright, kissed her in the safety of the cedars, and watched in silence along with the rest of the white residents, as Hatsue, in line with the rest of the Japanese American community, boarded a ferry to the camps. Even his deluded exclamation, “Fucking Jap bitch!” expresses his pain and fear more than his revulsion and enmity. In other words, Ishmael has no reason to feel hatred toward her race because he is attracted to her, he wants to know her, and ultimately he wants to marry her. However, in Ishmael’s emotional economy, Hatsue unfairly denies him all of this. At the end of the story, when Ishmael comes forth with exculpatory evidence—for all intents and purposes, saving Hatsue and her children from a life of suffering after Kazuo’s execution—his purportedly 130 Sora Y. Han

film still from snow Falling on Cedars, “structure of Beauty.”

heroic act is the result of reasoning that is silent as to his own feelings about his love’s race, his love’s internment. The beautiful, as an aesthetic, is by definition transmitted not by the object, but by its example. The beautiful is the appearance of the exemplar; a judgment about the exemplar considers both its appearance and its coincidence with something beyond it. Ishmael seems to sense this about Hatsue’s beauty, while searching for something else he feels lies beneath it. He claims to want to know what she hides, what is behind her beauty, her body, her face. Lacan takes the tragic structure of beauty as a model for understanding how desire works: desire is produced so long as a gap is maintained between the object and the object a. As much as Ishmael claims to want to know Hatsue, he must maintain a separation between her image and her person in order to sustain his desire for her. Indeed, Hatsue reveals her person to Ishmael—the realities of her impending incarceration, her alienation from both her Japanese American and white peers, all the dreams she does not dream—only to be ignored by blind, racist eyes. Ishmael’s desire is sustained, despite Hatsue, through an ideal love. Ishmael’s ideal love is not, however, the sublimation that an encounter with beauty effects. The sublimation involved in judging a thing to be beautiful, or holding a beloved person, according to Joan Copjec, “ought to be thought [of ] not as the substitution of a culturally valorized object for one that is immediately gratifying sexually, but as a changing of the object itself. The object of the drive is never identical to itself.”51 Hatsue demonstrates this, as the object of Ishmael’s desire.52 The metamorphoses Hatsue characterizes as lies—the pain and anguish she endures because of her love for her family— are a series of split appearances. Her life is, she tells Ishmael, layer upon layer Strict Scrutiny 131

of appearances—all of which are contrary to the laws of San Piedro, their families, and their nation. She is a phantasm to herself. Lacan observed that tragedy already revealed the flaw in a Kantian identity between modern law and reason.53 Snow, as the aesthetic dimension of Korematsu and its legal history, reveals this to be similarly true with respect to American constitutional law. Extending Lacan’s observation to an analysis of contemporary American constitutional law has less to do with any intersection between race and gender than with the stark absence of an intersection, and what this absence suggests about the force of sexuality in law. Hatsue, a phantasm to herself, suggests that the deaestheticization of constitutional law through strict scrutiny is a disavowal of its limit in racial subjection. The obscurity of the “ugly abyss of racism” to which Korematsu refers is precisely the blinding effect of Ishmael’s encounter with Hatsue’s beauty, with an abstraction that must remain invisible in order to encounter feminine sexuality. The inhabitants of the camps are less the homo sacer and more the racial phantasms of feminine sexuality. Cinema provides the occasion to reexamine the significance of strict scrutiny in American constitutional law. Specifically, the centrality of interracial love in Snow’s narrative allows us to read how sexuality figures into the politics of Japanese American internment, and to interrogate the flawed bifurcation of the legal history of Japanese American internment brought about by the Korematsu case. Situated within the broader terms of biopolitics, Korematsu reveals that biopower does not fully explain the history of race and the force of sexuality as they are implicated in the Japanese American internment camp. Given Lacan’s reading of Antigone, the modern project of the rule of law and the function of the conditional logic of strict scrutiny in post–civil rights culture allows us to locate the feminine figure of race in American constitutional law. By wrenching constitutional democracy away from the juridical and toward the judicial—at once literary, juridical, and political—a reading of the sexuality of race is opened up. And by this opening, this essay hopes to have suggested that exclusion from national belonging based on race endures as much through inequalities in legislation and its enforcement as it does through the intimacies of language and logic rehearsed by those charged with judging the law, through sexual contracts wished for and broken. noTes

1. Korematsu v. U.S., 323 U.S. 214 (1944) (hereinafter “Korematsu”). 2. This analysis is of the film, directed by Scott Hicks, Snow Falling on Cedars (Universal 132 Sora Y. Han

Pictures, 1999) (hereinafter “Snow”). Quotes from the film are the author’s transcription of the dialogue found in Hicks, Snow Falling on Cedars. The film’s narrative is almost identical to the narrative constructed by David Guterson in the original novel, even as the respective aesthetics and points of emphasis in the film and the novel diverge in interesting ways. See, for example, Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars, 46–59, 75–79. For an introductory comparison of the two versions of Snow, see Haytock, David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars. 3. Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena, 515 U.S. 200, 237 (1995) (quoting Fullilove v. Klutznick, 448 U.S. 448, 518 [1980]). Adarand required all federal race-based policies to be subject to strict scrutiny—the highest level of constitutional review. The ruling effectively forced federal affirmative action policies into a defensive posture as the court granted that such policies in education, contracting, and public hiring were forms of reverse discrimination against white applicants. Despite, or perhaps because of, this reality, the court accompanied its ruling that all race-based policies be treated equally with a “wish to dispel the notion that strict scrutiny is ‘strict in theory, but fatal in fact.’” 4. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 166. 5. Ibid., 166–67. 6. Agamben, State of Exception, 21. 7. Ibid. 8. We might call this more mundane but no less violent state of exception a state of racial exception. 9. Prominent theories of race and law, as well as feminist theories of law, have all pointed out the fact that it is impossible to apprehend the state’s racist and sexist projects within the boundaries of legal forms, jurisdictions, and doctrine. Slave codes, and then the Black Codes, which stretched across boundaries to construct the institution of slavery and Jim Crow, required theories of race and law to cross multiple legal aporias. See Bell, Race, Racism and American Law. Feminist theories of law have also been committed to thinking across multiple legal aporias to discern how the law relegates women to the private sphere. See Weisberg, Applications of Feminist Legal Theory to Women’s Lives, and Weisberg, Feminist Legal Theory. 10. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 167–68. My critique can be extended to Judith Butler’s recent work to the extent that she shares Agamben’s concern for the use of extralegal power in the current war on terror. See Butler, Precarious Life. 11. In point of fact, during the Second World War, federal legislation dismantled segregation in a number of public employment contexts due to a shortage of white male labor. However, federal desegregation did not reach the many spheres of segregation over which states had jurisdiction. See Kryder, Divided Arsenal. Thus, even if it were possible to argue that individual, segregated institutions were influenced by exigent foreign relations, as many have argued in explaining the outcome of Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), this influence did not categorically change the African American social position. 12. Derrida, “Force of Law and the ‘Mystical Foundations of Authority,’” 27.

Strict Scrutiny 133

13. Norris, introduction to Politics, Metaphysics, and Death, 13, 26. 14. Agamben, State of Exception, 166–67 (emphasis added). 15. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 71 (quoting Pompeius Festus’s On the Significance of Words). 16. Lacan distinguishes between the function of the spectator and the auditor in tragedy, arguing that the style and action of tragic forms are experienced more through what is heard than seen. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 252. This resonates with the scene of the modern courtroom, in which elocution is the driving force of persuasion, even as the use of visual aids is becoming a more common practice in litigation. 17. Ibid., 278. 18. Ibid., 263. 19. Ibid., 248. 20. Ibid., 264–65. 21. Ibid., 280. 22. Ibid., 281, 281–83. Beyond the formal distinctions between ius divinum, ius humanum, and mythology in classical times and how those distinctions influence our contemporary understanding of law and sovereign power, it seems here that those distinctions also inform our understanding of law and criminality. But that issue is beyond the scope of this chapter, thus my discussion of Lacan does not address his reading of Kant with Sade. 23. Ibid., 255 (quoting Antigone). 24. Ibid., 282. 25. Ibid., 281 (referencing Freud). 26. Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306, 326 (2003) (quoting Adarand). 27. Both the novel and the film’s aesthetic qualities rely heavily on subtle looks and terse comments between men regarding this thematic—Japanese and white, at work and at war, in public and in private. 28. Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars, 49–50. 29. See Marchetti, Romance and the “Yellow Peril.” 30. The inscription of injury on the Asian, masculine body, represented on Kazuo’s person, still has a sort of presentness that the Asian, feminine body does not. Kazuo’s time as an American soldier on the Western front allows him to bear witness to the masculine castration that Snow depicts as the trauma experienced by those in wartime battle. It is this experience that allows Kazuo and Carl to find common ground and negotiate the overdue land deal before Carl’s accidental death at sea. 31. The terms of debate surrounding Korematsu are, not surprisingly, reproduced in the common refrain heard since 9/11 about balancing “security” and “freedom.” 32. See, for example, Gotanda, “Other Non-Whites in American Legal History”; and Gotanda, “The Story of Korematsu,” 249–95. 33. Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34 was issued by the Commanding General of the Western Defense Command under authority of Executive Order No. 9066 and the Act of March 21, 1942. It directed the exclusion after May 9, 1942, from a described West Coast military area of all persons of Japanese ancestry. Other orders, also pursuant

134 Sora Y. Han

to Executive Order No. 9066, provided for their mandatory reporting to assembly centers, and their detention in assembly centers and internment camps. 34. Korematsu v. U.S., 584 F. Supp. 1406, 1420 (1984). 35. Justice Clarence Thomas, in his dissenting opinion in Grutter, 351, notes that the court first articulated strict scrutiny as a standard of reviewing racial discrimination in Korematsu. Interestingly, he uses this historical fact as a way to negate the compelling governmental interest of diversity, at issue in affirmative action cases, by contrasting it with the government interest at issue in Korematsu, namely national security during a time of war. Other key civil rights cases using and citing Korematsu as authority on strict scrutiny include: Bush v. Vera, 116 S. Ct. 1941 (1996); Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena, 515 U.S. 200 (1995); City of Richmond v. J. A. Croson Co., 488 U.S. 469 (1989); Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978); Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967); and Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U.S. 497 (1954). 36. Korematsu, 216; Grutter, 325; Korematsu, 220; Grutter, 326. 37. Korematsu, 216, 223. 38. Ibid., 216. 39. Ibid., 235. 40. Ibid., 233. 41. Ibid., 242 (emphasis added), 140 (Murphy dissent). 42. Ibid., 219–20. 43. Ibid., 223. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 224. 46. See Irons, Justice at War. See also Murphy’s arguments related to the lack of evidence to impute disloyalty to all Japanese Americans. Korematsu, 235–40. 47. See Matsuda, “Looking to the Bottom.” 48. Korematsu, 233 (Murphy dissent). 49. This relationship between Ishmael and Hatsue would be the national security equivalent in the intimate sphere. 50. Analogizing Ishmael to Joan Copjec’s reading of Creon, a reading of Ishmael might assess the primary drive of his superego, which causes a “fixation on dissatisfaction.” Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman, 46. 51. Ibid., 39. Copjec further notes that this particular structure of desire is analytically demonstrated by Alenka Zupančič as the “splitting of appearance from itself.” Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman, fn. 37, 237. 52. Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars, 204–8. In this particular passage, Hatsue is thinking about how the conflict between Japanese tradition and interracial love determines her life, a life of thinly disguised lies, but also the truth of her existence. “She felt a sickness overtake her. Her late-afternoon walks had not concealed her meeting with a boy her mother had long had intuition of. Hatsue knew she had not fooled anybody, she had not fooled herself, as it turned out, either, she had never felt completely right.” Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars, 206. 53. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 259.

Strict Scrutiny 135

eugene thacker

necroloGies

or, the Death of the Body Politic

The sections that follow have a very simple aim: to reconsider the contemporary discourse on biopolitics in light of a much older, and, perhaps, anachronistic discourse—that on the body politic. In fact, considering the longevity of the concept, one might even say that an aspect of the concept of the body politic is that it is continually resurrected. The body that is resurrected is, of course, different from the body that has died, and different again from the body that was once living. Thus, a question that will rear its head, if the concept of the body politic is still operative today, asks what mutations has the body politic undergone. While we will not simply reduce biopolitics to the body politic, we will also question the presupposition that today our political ontologies have somehow gone beyond the conceptual framework of the body politic. We will first trace the contours of the body politic as a problem for political ontology. This will entail a brief overview, from which a series of presuppositions concerning the body politic will be drawn, determining the constitution or composition of the body politic. At the same time, we will also note how this constitution tends to turn in on itself, the body politic becoming defined more by dissolution or decomposition. Highlighting this aspect of the body politic concept will require paying attention to a framework that is at once medical and theological, natural and supernatural, the domain of the dead and the living dead.

parTs, WhoLes, and LimBs

One of the most familiar images of the body politic comes from Hobbes, who articulates that image through a language of natural law—illustrated in the famous frontispiece of Leviathan—an image of the body politic that is by turns mechanistic, vitalistic, and theological. A passage from the introduction deserves to be quoted in full, providing as it does a sort of compendium of the concept: For by art is created that great LEVIAtHAn called a coMMonWEALtH, or StAtE (in Latin cIVItAS), which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; the magistrates and other officers of judicature and execution, artificial joints; reward and punishment (by which fastened to the seat of the sovereignty every joint and member is moved to perform his duty) are the nerves, that do the same in the body natural; the wealth and riches of all the particular members are the strength; salus populi (the people’s safety) its business; counselors, by whom all things needful for it to know are suggested unto it, are the memory; equity and laws, an artificial reason and will; concord, health; sedition, sickness; and civil war, death. Lastly, the pacts and covenants by which the parts of the body politic were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that fiat, or the let us make man, pronounced by God in the creation.1 There are, certainly, many comments to make on this paragraph alone, and one can easily trace a lineage that moves backward to the vague naturalism of Bodin, Grotius, and Althusius (Althusius’s notion of the corpus symbioticum deserves more attention in this regard), and forward to the organicism of Hegel, Rousseau, and, in a more decadent fashion, Nietzsche. However, the goal here is not to provide anything like a comprehensive history of the idea. Rather, we can pay particular attention to the literalness of the body politic concept expressed in passages such as these (passages that are likewise echoed in Hobbes’s De cive and The Elements of Law). To call the body politic concept a metaphor doesn’t quite do justice to the way a great number of political treatises take the concept at face value. Again and again, we find specific comparisons made between the human body and political order, as if the basis for legitimacy in the latter depended on the coherence of the understanding of the former. 140 Eugene Thacker

The body politic concept is particularly literal in what is often said to be the two key moments in Western political thought concerning the concept: that of its formulation around the polis, most thoroughly expressed in Plato, and that of a reformulation and recapitulation in the medieval theological notion of the corpus mysticum. Medieval scholars such as Étienne Gilson have noted the debt scholasticism owes to antiquity, and the body politic concept, it might be argued, owes the same debt. In Plato, the concept is formulated at several points in The Republic, in which Socrates proposes understanding justice in the individual by extrapolating from the polis, or the individual “writ large.” Plato immediately provides us with the language through which the body politic concept is most often understood—that of medicine, health, and illness. Socrates argues that “health is produced by establishing a natural relation of control and subordination among the constituents of the body, disease by establishing an unnatural relation,” wherefrom he then posits that “justice is produced by establishing in the mind a similar natural relation of control and subordination among its constituents, and injustice by establishing an unnatural one.” The conclusion Socrates arrives at: “It seems, then, that excellence is a kind of mental health or beauty or fitness, and defect a kind of illness or deformity or weakness.”2 The Platonic body politic presents several ideas that are fundamental to the body politic concept. The language of medicine, health, and illness implies there is something human and living that is larger than the living human individual. At the same time, this large, living, and human thing must be understood through a logic of parts and wholes. The subsequent sections of The Republic, in which the qualities of the ideal polis are laid out, discuss the body politic not only in terms of health and illness, but also in terms of parts and wholes: the body politic in Plato is divided into three sections, the sovereign head (the reasoning part), auxiliaries and soldiers in the heart or chest (the impassioned part), and the peasantry and laypeople in the nether regions of the groin (the animal part). Plato’s body politic must be read alongside the Timaeus for the tripartite division of the body it proposes (a rigid corporeal organization of parts and wholes that is, arguably, deconstructed in the Parmenides). This scaling-up procedure is also found, as we’ve noted, in later antiquity and the Middle Ages. Its greatest formalization, however, comes in late medieval scholasticism, itself profoundly influenced by the writings of Paul, whose notion of the corpus mysticum, or the mystical body of Christ, introNecrologies; or, the Death of the Body Politic 141

duced the language of community into the theological variants of the body politic concept: “The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body . . . there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.”3 However, while Platonic hierarchy and Aristotelian naturalism provide the philosophical terms for the medieval body politic concept, the idea also takes new turns in its emphasis on spirit, the creature, and corporeality, on a body that is ensouled, living, and never quite dead. Scholastic philosophy “brought out with no less force,” Gilson notes, “the necessary connection between faith in the resurrection of the body, and the philosophical thesis of the substantial unity of the human composite.”4 Significant sections of late medieval political treatises, including those of Aquinas, Dante, Marsilius of Padua, Nicholas of Cusa, and William of Ockham, contain passages in which the anatomical human body is analogized—or, we might say, anatomized—point for point with the body of the church, the state, or some mixture of both. Entire texts, such as John of Salisbury’s remarkable Policraticus, are based on this kind of tabular matching between individual-natural and collective-political body. The head, the limbs, the torso, the feet, as well as an entire symbolics of the viscera—heart, brain, hands, genitals—are all offered up as functional parts within a greater whole. Though there were, of course, extensive debates about what kind of body this “whole” was, and, more importantly, what constituted the sovereign “head” of this body, the terms of the discussions remained focused on this conceptual movement between an anatomical, individuated human body and an equally anatomized, but collective, political body. “as aBove, so BeLoW”

Contrary to the treatment it often receives, the analogy of the body politic does not neatly progress from a theological to a secular order, or from divine law to natural law. It is filled with incongruities, diversions, and proliferations that express nothing in common except a lack of consensus on what exactly is the best or most ideal body politic. Rather than elaborate endless quotations that demonstrate the body politic concept, we can present four principles that delineate the challenge posed by the body politic concept to political ontology. These principles implicitly argue that our current discussions have not yet rid themselves of the categories of thought historically formulated through the lens of political the142 Eugene Thacker

ology. But, at the same time, new problematics have arisen, ones that refashion the old debates in novel ways (as theorizations of the network society or the “control society” suggest). We begin with a first principle: the body politic is a response to the challenge of thinking about political order. Put another way: a minimal congruity between order as natural and artificial (political) is the a priori of the body politic concept. Thus the body politic is a way of thinking about politics as a living, vital order. It is a living, vital order insofar as it is defined within an ontology of the one and the many, of wholes and parts, and of the relation between the natural and the artificial. And it is a living, vital order insofar as it posits a correlation between the natural world and political order, either to say that the natural world is divinely ordered (as we find in Augustine), or to argue that political order is built upon a “natural law” (as we find in Hobbes and Spinoza). However, to simply posit politics as a certain combination of the living and the ordered is not enough, for it is the way in which this relation is formulated that is important. This takes place through a figure, one that presupposes a certain correlation between “life” and “politics.” Thus, a second principle: the foundation for the intelligibility of political order is based on an analogy between the body natural and the body politic. The former is said to preexist the latter, and often serves as its model; it is essential that the latter governs, manages, and regulates the former. Moreover, the body natural is often taken as the basic, individual, atomic unit of human life, which is then extrapolated to a metaindividual level for collective political existence. In a sense, the challenge of political thought is the correlation between the body natural and the body politic, for the two never exactly coincide. The analogy, as analogy, presupposes fissures and incongruities—does the body politic have one head or two (spiritual and temporal)? Is it a single system or does it have systems within systems (“corporations,” “councils”)? Nevertheless, in the relation between the body natural and the body politic we see a set of general criteria: there is the criteria of unity, for the body politic must be “one,” a unified, coherent political body, a unity within which all multiplicity is accounted for, the singlular that encompasses the plural. There is also the criteria of hierarchy, for the body politic obtains unity through stratification, or a set of defined relations between the “members” or parts of the political body. For instance, the modern cluster of sovereignpeople-multitude stresses the relation between “head” and “body,” while the late medieval cluster, God-priesthood-faithful, stresses the sovereign place Necrologies; or, the Death of the Body Politic 143

of “soul” in the body politic. In his masterful study of the body politic, Ernst Kantorowicz shows how, in the later Middle Ages, the figure guaranteeing the continuity of sovereign power shifts from a Christ- centered to a Lawcentered, and finally to a “polity- centered,” notion of rulership: “Late mediaeval kingship, from whatever point of view it be considered, had become polity- centered after the crisis of the thirteenth century. The continuity, first guaranteed by Christ, then by the Law, was now guaranteed by the corpus mysticum of the realm which, so to speak, never died, but was ‘eternal’ like the corpus mysticum of the Church.”5 Finally, in addition to unity and hierarchy, there is a criteria of centralization, or better still, a certain concern with the governance of the vital flows and circulations that mark what Aquinas refers to as the “life-giving spirit” of the body politic. Jacques Le Goff remarks on an underexplored tension in late medieval conceptions of the body politic: that between the “head,” which is, for thinkers such as John of Salisbury, connected to the nerves that move the body, and the “heart,” connected to the veins and responsible for the distribution of blood throughout the body. Le Goff suggests that debates over spiritual versus temporal rule often played themselves out through a kind of visceral topology, in which the rule of nerves and the rule of blood are pitted against each other: “The centrality attributed to the heart expresses the evolution of the monarchical state in which the most important thing is the centralization that is taking place around the prince, not the vertical hierarchy expressed by the head.”6 These criteria—unity, hierarchy, and centralization—are coupled to a narrative form, one that articulates the “constitution” of the body politic, both in terms of an account of the origins (and thus the legitimacy) of the body politic, and also in terms of that which guarantees the coherence of the body politic through time. The body politic is therefore conserved through a narrative of constitution. The most well known of such narratives is the one derived from natural right theory, encapsulated by Hobbes as the transition from the prepolitical state of nature to the laying down of rights and the establishment of a commonwealth. But Plato, both in The Republic and The Laws, has already given us a narrative of constitution in the analogies that Socrates makes between the idea of justice in the individual and the idea of justice in the polis, or the individual writ large, and both Augustine and Aquinas likewise provide narrative accounts of the necessity of the divine sovereign and the guarantee of order in the act of creation.7 All of this implies a thoroughly abstract model to which, of course, an 144 Eugene Thacker

actual political regime may or may not correspond. Even though the body politic concept may entail a narrative of constitution or origin, this in no way means that the concept of the body politic itself precedes an actual political regime. In fact, the opposite is often the case, which brings us to a third principle: the body politic is ontologically expressed retroactively in the terms of political theology. The body politic analogy is employed in order to justify or legitimize a de facto political order—that is, to justify a particular ontological relation between “life” and “order.” The term “political theology” has been used in different ways by a number of political thinkers, including Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, and Jacob Taubes. Conceptually, it refers to the embodiment of sovereignty, be it in a single ruler (the king, the pope, the “head”) or in some notion of the people (popular sovereignty, collective rule, religious community, the “body”). Historically, “political theology” has referred to the manifold relations between spiritual and temporal powers in theological, legal, and scholastic discourse in the later Middle Ages.8 But it also refers to the necessity of a sovereign power that is at issue in the modern debates over political theology. Schmitt’s primary argument that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts,” argues for the necessity of an exceptional sovereign since it is in the very nature of the political to be unable to legitimize authority except by reference to an outside source.9 Taubes disagrees, for though the Judeo-Christian tradition does emphasize a sovereign law, it also counteremphasizes in the Pauline tradition a notion of community and, perhaps, more pluralistic rule: “Carl Schmitt thinks apocalyptically, but from above, from the powers; I think from below.”10 A political theology of the body politic raises a number of questions that directly link ontological questions to political ones. One of the central issues here is “the question of sovereignty,” the question of who acts as the head of the body politic (or indeed, what counts as a head in the body politic). For Schmitt, there is a direct correlation between the miracle in theology and the exception in politics, the latter being simply a secularized version of the former. Just as the divine sovereign is not only capable of establishing the natural workings of things but is also able to intervene in the natural workings of things to make exceptional (or rather, supernatural) decisions, so is the secular sovereign capable of claiming an exception to the rule. “Political theology” is this relation between miracle and exception, and it is this aporetic state of being that forms the basis of Giorgio Agamben’s arguments concerning sovereignty. In terms of the body politic concept, this means that Necrologies; or, the Death of the Body Politic 145

the head is both a part of the body (forming a unified, whole body politic) and yet detached from the body (it rules the body and stands opposite in the exception). Another issue is “the question of the two natures,” which is summarized by the German legal theorist Otto von Gierke: “Two necessary attributes are thus presented as determining the conception of the State. One is the existence of a society . . . directed to the objects which compel man to live together: the other is the existence of a sovereign power . . . which secures the attainment of the common end.”11 At issue is not only the shape that sovereignty takes (who acts as head), but the often divided relation between ruler and ruled, sovereignty and community, head and body. Gierke’s theory— influential on the work of Kantorowicz—situates the debates between spiritual and temporal powers within the framework of organicism. Gierke’s Political Theories of the Middle Age suggests that the “organic theory of the State,” encapsulated in the analogy of the body politic, is an attempt to resolve an irremediable gap between ruler and ruled, between sovereign and people, between head and body: “In all forms of State indifferently, a distinction was drawn between the Ruler and the body of the Ruled: the legal basis of the Ruler’s authority was regularly ascribed to a previous devolution of its own authority by the body of the Ruled.”12 These characteristics of the body politic, predicated as they are on a topdown model that emphasizes the rule of the head over the rest of the body, may appear to us as rigid and inflexible concepts. Insofar as the body politic concept serves to legitimize a given political order, this would not be far from the case. But it is also important to stress the many internal tensions, inconsistencies, and curious permutations that the body politic undergoes, especially in the context of political theology. Thus a fourth principle: the concept of the body politic entails the creation of a logically coherent monstrosity. This is not to say that the body politic—like Roberto Esposito’s description of biopolitics—is, in an “immunitary” fashion, dependent on that which negates it. In many of the early modern debates, there is little concern for boundary management and forms of immunization. Rather, it suggests that the concept of the body politic, raised as it is to address a problem of political ontology, often entails the creation of aberrant logics—that is, modes of thinking that make sense logically but that result in an image of the body politic that can only be described as teratological. One sees such a monstrous logic in discussions over dual sovereignty, which result in a “two-headed” or bicephalic body politic,

146 Eugene Thacker

as is seen in Dante, Ockham, and Giles of Rome.13 Limbs multiply or are cut off, the mouth and anus become mirrors of each other, and the lowest parts partake of the divine. As such, the body politic is not a single, unified concept but one that constantly rises, falls, and is brought back to life again. It is a concept predicated on variations, permutations, and recombinations, like so many interchangeable, anatomical parts. The debates that preoccupied late medieval scholasticism were not simply debates over church and state; they were a set of attempts to resolve the tension between head and body, sometimes with rather bizarre, teratological implications. But beyond the monstrous bodies inadvertently produced, the body politic concept has many heterogeneous layers to it, “thicknesses” to the body politic that may be stressed or destressed, depending on the context. There is, for instance, a medical-natural thickness to the body politic concept, in which the ideal body politic is “healthy” or “diseased” (as we find, in different ways, in Plato, Nicholas of Cusa, and Marsilius of Padua). The body politic also has a topological thickness, which deals with the network of relations between parts and wholes, between the members themselves of the body politic (again, occurring differently in Plato, Althusius, Hobbes, and Spinoza). The body politic is also never quite rid of a theology that posits divine order and divine intervention as the hallmarks of body and head, respectively (and thus the demonological aspects found in Paul, Augustine, and, later, in Bodin and even Hobbes). Not only are there great differences in any single historical period’s ability to think the body politic, but the body politic is not simply a “political,” “theological,” or “medical” concept. The body politic concept does not develop, it does not progress, and it is defined as much by its internal tensions as it is by its repetition. What, then, is the body politic concept? The body politic is a response to the challenge of thinking about political order (as a living, vital order). It is formally based on an analogy between the body natural and the body politic (through a narrative stressing unity, hierarchy, and vitalism). This formal relation is historically expressed in terms of political theology (and the questions of sovereignty and the “two natures”). And, despite this formal coherence, it is also a concept defined through its failure (that is, its internal tensions and corporeal variations). We have begun by talking about political order and have ended by talking about corporeal permutation, monstrosity, and headless corpses. Perhaps this concept, one that is so often assumed in political thought, is less familiar to us than we think.

Necrologies; or, the Death of the Body Politic 147

resurrecTion medicine

Much of what is contained in the above principles is not, of course, new. A whole tradition of scholarship, including the work of Gierke, Henri de Lubac, F. W. Maitland, and Kantorowicz, has, in different ways, elaborated established characteristics of the body politic. Nevertheless, there is one aspect that has generally been underexplored, and that is the role that a “medical ontology” has played in articulating the shape of the body politic at different political and historical moments. Recent work in biopolitics has, of course, pointed to the role that medicine plays in relation to Nazi biopolitics and eugenics policies in America and Europe. But it is also important to trace the continuities from these more extreme examples to the long philosophical tradition of the body politic. While medicine does not determine the body politic concept, neither can the body politic as such be reduced to its medical content. However, what remains striking is the way in which the body politic is, on the one hand, always ascending beyond itself to a more ideal order, and, on the other hand, the way in which this ascension (or resurrection) is discussed in thoroughly corporeal, anatomical, and even vitalistic terms. There is a great deal of ambiguity in the body politic concept, and nowhere is this more apparent than where the body politic fails to be a body politic, or where it fails to live up to its claims. A body politic that fails can only be understood as an aberrant or unhealthy body. And, at its extreme point, its very existence as a body contributes to an irremediable process of disease and decay that is at its core. Let us follow the analogy to its logical conclusion: in the same way that the body natural is open to disease, decomposition, and decay, so will the body politic be defined in relation to its own “disease,” “decomposition,” and “decay.” Again, we can turn to Hobbes, who gives us a clear example of this logic: Though nothing can be immortall, which mortals make; yet, if men had the use of reason they pretend to, their Common-wealths might be secured, at least, from perishing by internall diseases. For by the nature of their Institution, they are designed to live, as long as Man-kind, or as the Lawes of Nature, or as Justice it selfe, which gives them life. Therefore when they come to be disolved, not by externall violence, but intestine disorder, the fault is not in men, as they are Matter; but as they are the Makers, and orderers of them. . . . Amongst the Infirmities therefore of a Commonwealth, I will reckon in the first place, those that arise from an Imperfect

148 Eugene Thacker

Institution, and resemble the diseases of a naturall body, which proceed from a Defectuous Procreation.14 Hobbes, in whom we find a sort of culmination of the Platonic polis and the medieval corpus mysticum, carries the analogy to its logical (and bio-logical) conclusion. The body politic is not only constituted through natural law and the contract; it must also confront—and must continually confront—the immanent possibility of its dissolution. This polarization between constitution and dissolution in Hobbes is echoed in the Platonic body politic that Socrates uses to make a direct comparison between disease and disorder. “When a person’s unhealthy,” Socrates notes, “it takes very little to upset him and make him ill; there may even be an internal cause for disorder. The same is true of an unhealthy society. It will fall into sickness and dissension at the slightest external provocation, when one party or the other calls in help from a neighboring oligarchy or democracy; while sometimes faction fights will start without any external stimulus at all.”15 It is not just mortality that is a problem, but rather the processes of disease, decay, and decomposition that inhabit the very ontology of the body politic concept itself. Late medieval scholasticism, concerned as it was with the problem of the “creature” and its dual nature (immortal soul and mortal flesh; incorruptible, more-than-human spirit and corruptible, animal body), also explored the connection between “corruptibility” and disease. In this connection, a fuzzy mixture of Aristotelian animism, Galenic humoral medicine, and the first stirrings of early modern anatomy all intersect to produce an inconsistent image of a body politic that is at once capable of an incorruptible health, and yet thoroughly determined by its corruptible lower half. For a philosopher-theologian such as Nicholas of Cusa, this implied that the body politic required an ongoing, special care: “And so like an expert doctor the emperor’s concern should be to keep the body well so that the life-giving spirit can dwell in it properly because it is well-proportioned.” Nicholas goes on to note that the watchful physician-sovereign should act once any imbalance of the “four temperaments” occurs, which can “produce various diseases in the body” such as “usury, fraud, deceit, theft, pillage,” and “choleric wars, dissension or division.”16 What, then, are the diseases of the body politic? Civil war, strife, rebellion, dissent, factionalism, mob rule—these massing, swarming, and ambivalent forms constitute the dissolution of the body politic. One of the lessons put forth here—and this is especially striking in the context of political

Necrologies; or, the Death of the Body Politic 149

theology—is that the greatest threats to the body politic come from within; they are threats distinct from external invasion or war, threats that indelibly sweep up into a single motion medicine, theology, and politics. And this pathology of the body politic was in place far in advance of the modern discourse of immunology and its tropes of boundary management. Such formulations pose the possibility that the very structure of the body politic itself articulates a countermovement that is its own undoing. Thus, to our previous principles, we can add another: the body politic implicates a medical ontology that it is nevertheless always attempting to supercede. What is this medicalized body politic? We have already delineated a number of its characteristics, and from our citations above we can highlight three of them. First, as we’ve seen, a fundamental analogical operation sets the body natural in relation to a body politic, or, alternately, creates a fundamental premise concerning the relation between the body-as-natural and the bodyas-political. For thinkers like Aquinas, this largely meant an infusion of Aristotelian naturalism into the theological concept of the corpus mysticum; for others, such as Nicholas of Cusa, this entailed direct appropriations of Galenic medical philosophy. This analogy—between body natural and body politic—opens onto another, equally fundamental analogy, one between the physician and the ruler, between doctor and sovereign. At numerous points in Plato’s dialogues, Socrates makes the comparison between physician and ruler, most often to show that the philosopher-king ought to act with a certain knowledge and a certain technique (technē): just as the physician is skilled in the art of healing the natural body, so should the ruler be skilled at governing the body politic. This analogy finds its way into medieval theology via the idea of the supernaturalism of the Messiah-healer, as well as the secular variants of the concept of the ruler as the representative of Christ on earth. While this is not “medical healing” in the postvaccination sense of the term, there is nevertheless a sense in which the practice of medicine is equivalent to the sovereign capacity for governing the body politic. Healing, then, bears some essential relation to governing. Finally, it is these analogies between body natural and body politic, physician and ruler, that facilitate an entire way of thinking about collective political existence in terms of a medical ontology. Recent work in science studies has done a great deal to elaborate the cultural politics of medicine, colonialism, and militarism in the nineteenth century.17 Often such studies focus on the rise of germ theory and its attendant language of invasion, xenophobia, 150 Eugene Thacker

and war (a similar dynamic would seem to be at work today, if, as it is said, terrorism is the “autoimmune” condition of politics).18 But this is only part of the story. For in its ancient and late medieval variants, the body politic concept expresses itself through a dialectic of health and illness. Here, however, the lines between the supernatural and the natural, miracle and exception, theology and medicine, are not always clearly demarcated. For this reason alone, the concept is worth reflecting on. When references to pestilence or corruption arise in the writings of Aquinas, Dante, or Marsilius of Padua, it is not always clear when the reference is to an actual disease interpreted in theological terms, or when the potential threats to theological and political order are being expressed in the eschatological language of disease, corruptibility, and judgment. Thus, while the body politic is certainly not exclusively a medical affair, this sort of medical ontology forms its central problematic. The medicalized view of the body politic is thus that beyond which the body politic must always move, but that without which the body politic cannot be thought as such. “onLy ThaT Which faLLs can rise aGain”

Every attempt to formulate the constitution of the body politic must also confront its dissolution—and this is inscribed and perhaps even prescribed within the body politic’s structure itself. The body politic is constituted on its dissolution, the shaping of a collective, living body that always exists in relation to the corpse (nekros). We might therefore call the study of such phenomena a “necrology” of the body politic.19 Its central ontology is the correlation between the body natural and the body politic, but the correlation is never complete; the body politic never perfectly coincides with the body natural. The corpse—that which remains after life, after health, after the vital— this thing-that-remains becomes at once that which the body politic concept struggles against, and that which provides a promise of a more perfect, resurrected body. In a sense, the central problematic of the body politic is this ontomedical revenant, the body that remains. In other words, the primary concern of the body politic is neither a theology of spirit nor a physiology of organism, nor a physics of mechanism, but rather a necrology of the corpse. We know that the concept of the body politic is predicated on a comparison with the body natural. And this opens the door to a pervasive, medical view of the body politic. We also know that one of the by-products of this analogy is that the body politic is also open to disease, decomposition, and Necrologies; or, the Death of the Body Politic 151

decay. But is the thing we call the body politic actually, and not just figuratively, living? Is it not made up of the many bodies that form a single body? Is it not the actual life of the multitude of members that serves as the ground for the body politic analogy itself ? At what point does the figurative collapse into the literal? In short, what happens when the analogy of the body politic itself collapses, becomes pathological, or undergoes decomposition? This is why it is worth thinking about the body politic concept alongside the historical and political occurrences of epidemics, plagues, and pestilences. Epidemic, plague, and pestilence—different terms that for the moment will be grouped together—provide us with instances in which the diseases of the body politic immediately fold onto the state of emergency occasioned by actual disease.20 In fact, this generalized medical ontology asks us to think of the body politic concept next to epidemic, plague, and pestilence not because they have something to say about civil war or public health per se, but because they raise the issue of “the problem of multiplicities.” This is the somewhat anomalous phrase Michel Foucault uses in his comments on epidemics and public health. The problem is always the management and regulation of multiplicities, and the problem is greater when the multiplicities in question are construed as living multiplicities. In his 1979 lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault outlines three epidemic diagrams that each correspond to a type of power. Leprosy in the Middle Ages is aligned with juridical sovereignty’s power to divide and exclude bodies. Plague in the early modern era is aligned with disciplinary power’s ability to include, observe, and organize. And smallpox in the seventeenth century is, for Foucault, marked by a new type of power, an “apparatus of security” (dispositif de sécurité) whose main objective is to “let things be,” to allow circulations and flows, and to calculate probabilities in an effort to effectively intervene.21 In each case, Foucault notes, the presence of epidemic disease puts forth a challenge that is fundamentally political: how to prevent the circulation of disease and still permit the circulation of peoples and goods. Foucault explores the problem: “I mean, of course, circulation in the very broad sense of movement, exchange, and contact, as a form of dispersion, and also as a form of distribution, the problem being: How should things circulate or not circulate?”22 The main problem is not simply one of forbidding or allowing, but of regulating networks, flows, and circulations. Somehow the sovereign action of “shutting down” must correlate with the security action of “letting things be.” This problem of multiplicities leads Foucault to experiment with think152 Eugene Thacker

ing about a new type of sovereign power, one that operates more through the regulation of circulation than through interdiction: “The sovereign will be someone who will have to exercise power at that point of connection where nature, in the sense of physical elements, interferes with nature in the sense of the nature of the human species, at that point of articulation where the milieu becomes the determining factor of nature.”23 And it is perhaps for this reason that Foucault ultimately prefers the phrase “apparatus of security” to describe this combination of intervention and circulation: “It seems to me that in the apparatus of security, as I have presented it, what is involved is precisely not taking either the point of view of what is prevented or the point of view of what is obligatory, but standing back sufficiently so that one can grasp the point at which things are taking place, whether or not they are desirable.”24 If we again take up the overarching question—of what happens when the figure of the body politic itself collapses—what is at stake is not just medicalization or public health, but the tension at the heart of political theology— the question of sovereignty and the question of the “two natures.” The end of the body politic—both in terms of its aim, but also its more eschatological end—is its ability to effortlessly move between claims that are political and claims that are, in effect, medical. But when the body politic analogy collapses, as it must, it shores up a series of fundamental challenges for thinking about political order. What threatens the body politic? It is not just figurative or literal disease, and neither is it the lack of distinction between them (which in many ways serves the function of the body politic). What threatens the body politic is something we can call, simply, multiplicity. In this case, multiplicity is not the Platonic dialectic of the one and the many (in which the one always wins), and neither is it a Deleuzian-Bergsonian multiplicity that posits an organization outside of the one-many relationship altogether. In what does this multiplicity consist? It is both constituted by and exists through its circulations and flows, by its passing-through, its passing-between, even its passing-beyond—movements that are, at least in cases of pestilence, plague, and epidemic, both the constitution and the dissolution of the body politic. Multiplicity is, in those cases, not simply against the body politic in any sort of libratory sense. A necrology of the body politic pertains not just to the moment when the body politic concept decomposes or dies, for it is in the very politicaltheological nature of the corpse to return, to be resurrected and reinvested Necrologies; or, the Death of the Body Politic 153

with supernatural life. In the “problem of multiplicities” presented to the body politic concept by plague, pestilence, and epidemic, multiplicity is never separate from, and is always inculcated within, the problem of sovereignty. Perhaps we can say that multiplicity is the disease of the body politic. Or, alternately, it is multiplicity that plagues the body politic. dead Tropes and resurrecTed Bodies

A necrology is, then, the study of the disease, decay, and decomposition of the body politic concept. But what is this nekros if not a certain decomposition of life and order, a decomposition that is itself the dispersion or proliferation of the nexus between life and order? To simply position sovereignty visà-vis multiplicity is not enough to comprehend the corporeal permutations the body politic undergoes; sovereignty does not simply oppose multiplicity, nor does it exercise dominion over it in a recuperative fashion. How then to articulate the strange isomorphism between them? In cases of epidemic, plague, and pestilence, for instance, we are led to consider the massing and aggregate processes of decomposition and resurrection, of breaking down and proliferating, of a passing between and a passing through.25 These processes invite an examination not just of the pathologies of the body politic, but also of the poetics of the body politic. It is in the cultural expression of the living dead—and too often it is forgotten that the body politic is also a cultural concept—that we again discover this intersection between sovereignty and multiplicity. Nowhere are the poetics of the body politic more effectively demonstrated than in Dante’s Inferno, where we see stratifications of the living dead that are at once the product of divine punishment and, as such, are meticulously managed as massing or aggregate bodies. One of the most interesting examples comes in the sixth circle, where Dante and his guide, Virgil, come to the giant fortress gates of the infernal City of Dis. Virgil must enlist divine intervention in order to pass through the gates guarded by fallen angels. Once Dante and Virgil enter, they see a city in ruins, an uneven landscape of burning, open graves: And then we started moving toward the city (terra) in the safety of the holy words pronounced. We entered there, and with no opposition. And I, so anxious to investigate the state of souls locked up in such a fortress ( fortezza), 154 Eugene Thacker

once in the place, allowed my eyes to wander, and saw, in all directions spreading out, a countryside (campagna) of pain and ugly anguish. As at Arles where the Rhône turns to stagnant waters or as at Pola near Quarnero’s Gulf that closes Italy and bathes her confines, the sepulchers make all the land uneven, so they did here, strewn in all directions, except the graves here served a crueler purpose: for scattered everywhere among the tombs were flames that kept them glowing far more hot than any iron an artisan might use. Each tomb had its lid loose, pushed to one side, and from within came forth such fierce laments that I was sure inside were tortured souls. I asked, “Master, what kind of shades are these lying down here, buried in the graves of stone, speaking their presence in such dolorous sighs?” And he replied: “There lie arch-heretics of every sect, with all of their disciples; more than you think are packed within these tombs.”26 Again we have the ambiguous vitalism of the “shades” in Dante’s underworld, as well as their massing and aggregate forms. But here the living dead are not simply a force of judgment or divine retribution; in fact, they are the opposite, that which is produced through sovereign power. And this sovereign power not only punishes (as it does in the famous contrapasso), but, more importantly, it orders the multiplicity of bodies according to their transgressions or threats. In Dante’s version of the “dead walking the earth,” the living dead are explicitly included within the City of Dis; indeed, the living dead are the “citizens” of this city. As Virgil emphatically notes, the living dead are specifically politicized: they are the heretics, those who have spoken against the theological-political order and, most importantly, those who have done so from within that order.27 The heretics, as living dead, are those who spread

Necrologies; or, the Death of the Body Politic 155

disorder from within the polis through dissent or factionalism, and in this way Dante links the heretics to the inhabitants of the other circles of lower Hell, including the “sowers of discord” (who are meticulously dismembered) and the “falsifiers” (who are ridden with plague and leprosy). Nowhere else in the Inferno are we presented with such explicit analogies to the classical polis. The City of Dis is, of course, very far from the idealized polis in Plato’s Republic, or the civitas dei described by Augustine. The City of Dis is not even a living, human city. Instead, what we have is a necropolis, a dead city populated by living graves, by the dead walking the earth. The City of Dis is, in this guise, an inverted polis, an inverted body politic. In the Inferno, the living dead are not only a threat to political order; they are also organized and regulated by sovereign power. Sovereign power determines the living dead through an intervention into the natural workings of things, thereby managing the boundary between the natural and the supernatural. It does this not only to preserve the existing theological-political order, but also to identify a threat that originates from within the body politic. Within this mortified body politic we witness two forms of power—a sovereign power that judges and punishes, but also a regulatory power that manages the flows and circulations of multiple bodies, their body parts, and bodily fluids.28 In this way, Dante’s underworld is utterly contemporary, for it suggests to us that the body politic concept is always confronted with this twofold challenge—the necessity of establishing a sovereign power in conjunction with the necessity of regulating and managing multiplicities. This is a remarkably persistent motif, and one found in the contemporary, lowbrow example of horror film. The peculiar subgenre of the zombie film has, for many years, provided us with different cultural expressions of Dante’s living dead. The American and Italian traditions are the most prominent examples in this regard. While early Hollywood thrillers such as White Zombie or Revolt of the Zombies placed Western doctors and heroes (or often a hero- doctor) within the context of voodoo and colonialism, zombie films after George Romero’s landmark Night of the Living Dead (1968) place the living dead within a decidedly postindustrial, American context, self-reflexively stressing the “silent majority” and the use of political satire. By contrast, the Italian tradition of zombie films displays parts of both the early and later American traditions. Though well-known horror directors have dabbled in the genre, it is Lucio Fulci who has explored (some would say exploited) the motif of the living dead in the most detail. Fulci’s zombie films not only pick up on the idea that the colonial encounter is a medical 156 Eugene Thacker

encounter, but medical power is always linked to the supernatural—perhaps even sovereign—power to raise the dead.29 Critics of Fulci dismiss his work, noting that he basically made one film over and over. And it is hard to deny such dismissals, for Fulci’s films, such as the cult classic Zombie (1979; released in Italy as Zombi 2), The Beyond (1981), or the strangely uneventful City of the Living Dead (1980), repeatedly present an archetypal scene, one that visually encapsulates each of the films—that of the “dead walking the earth.”30 Usually such scenes are moments of retribution, the living dead—themselves the product of a medical-sovereign power— taking vengeance upon their creators. Similar scenes are found in Romero’s zombie films: Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985), and, more recently, Land of the Dead (2005), all contain key, climactic scenes of the living dead as a massing, contagious movement seen through the fences, barricades, and bunkers that various human groups construct to manage them. The spaces through which the living dead move—houses, suburbs, malls, streets, city squares, military bases, and corporate towers—are porous to the miasmatic logic of the living dead. There is a certain political romanticism in the modern variants of the living dead. Eventually, the multitude prevails through sheer persistence, and all symbols of hierarchy fall. All of this is not without a certain eschatological flavor as well, for if the living dead are universal they are also the despecified, a massing and ambivalent force of judgment. In these archetypal scenes of the dead walking the earth, the living dead are driven by an ambiguous vitalism. Occupying the grey zone between the living and the dead, the zombie is “animated” in an Aristotelian sense; the living dead are living precisely because they are a construed threat. But, at the same time, they are the not-living because they are excluded from the polis and the fortifications of security and political order—and yet they always reside within such spaces. Furthermore, if the zombie is living, it is never living in only one sense. Zombies are also massing and aggregate forms. They not only occupy the borderland between the living and the dead, but between the one and the many, the singular and the plural. Their massing and their aggregation is not only a matter of number, but also of movement (albeit a maddeningly slow, persistent movement). The movement of such massing and aggregate forms is that of contagion and circulation, a passing-through, a passing-between, and even, in an eschatological sense, a passing-beyond. The body politic is not only an ontology, it also involves a poetics, and Necrologies; or, the Death of the Body Politic 157

both ontology and poetics dovetail in this “necrological” point—the point at which constitution turns into dissolution, composition into decomposition. Today, the body politic concept requires us to consider the relationship between sovereignty and multiplicity, to adopt a necrological perspective, but to think of the relationship between sovereignty and multiplicity as “vital,” though not vitalistic. Perhaps it is the conjunction between life and multiplicity, between something that decomposes and yet is living, that is the crux of the body politic concept. WhaTever Life

“The disaster,” writes Maurice Blanchot, “ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.”31 In our era of natural disasters, climate change, global pandemics, and the ongoing specter of bioterror, we are continually invited to think about the extinction of the human in terms that are at once political and biological. It would seem, given this context, that the body politic is global and networked, viral and informatic. At its limit the body politic would perfectly overlap with the planet, resulting in the uncanny image of a living dead planet. Crumbling cities, flooded cities, quarantined cities—the corporeal coherence of the polis seems to be constantly under attack at the very same moment attempts are made to refortify its boundaries and to rearticulate the conceptual apparatus for doing so. In the midst of these fissures and fragmentations, “bare life” is constantly rendered in its precariousness, a life that is always potentially under attack and therefore always an exceptional life. Nowhere is the precariousness of life rendered with such detail as in the medical and public health concerns surrounding “biodefense.”32 That the bios can itself be defended is itself noteworthy; but more relevant is the notion that the bios can be defended against the attacks of terrorism as well as the “attacks” of nature. In the case of bioterrorism, the two attacks become indissociable, culminating in a body politic that is both natural and artificial, threatened by the same form of life that constitutes it.33 A certain notion of bare life, evident in the words of a Department of Health and Human Services secretary, is absolutely central to this concept of biodefense: “These new investments [in biodefense programs] will not only better prepare our nation for, and protect us from, a bioterrorism attack, they will also better prepare us for any public health emergency.”34 This bare life is, moreover, split—or rather, it proliferates—into the bare life that must be protected (epi-demos, “against the people”) and the bare life that must be pro158 Eugene Thacker

tected against (the epidemiological categories of “susceptible,” “infected,” or “recovered” victims). Between the life that must be protected and the life that must be protected against, between the healthy and the infected, we also find another, frustratingly nonhuman kind of life, that of the microbe itself, a kind of degree-zero of life, bare life at its molecular minimum (rnA plus a protein shell). On one level, biodefense renews the political challenges that come with any epidemic, what Foucault describes as “the emergence of the problem of the ‘naturalness’ of the human species in an artificial milieu.”35 In fact, in the context of biodefense, bare life is perhaps best defined by its ability to move from that which must be protected to that which must be protected against. Moreover, the concept of biodefense puts forth a notion of bare life that is at once the most general and the most specific. “Bioterrorist attack or emerging infectious disease, it matters not which,” is a statement that also means “bioterrorist attack or emerging infectious disease; both always matter.” Whatever bare life is, it matters a great deal, since it now obtains a ubiquity as the protected, the infected, or the nonhuman vector between them. What we have here is not just biological life or political life, but a whatever-life in which biology and sovereignty, or medicine and politics, continually inflect and fold onto each other. Whatever-life is the pervasive potential for life to be specified as that which must be protected, that which must be protected against, and as those forms of nonhuman life that are the agents of attack. The causes are different, and yet the effects are the same; if the cause is unequivocal, then the response must be equivocal. In many instances, the identification of a bioterrorist attack will only take place after the effects of the attack are registered. Thus, in biodefense a military or security action becomes largely indissociable from a public health action. What is happening in epidemics that infect the coherence of political order, and in which the various threats to political order fold onto actual epidemics and contagion? Something besides security or public health is at issue, and this something has to do with one of the oldest political concepts in the West, the concept of the body politic. Today, however, we no longer speak of the body politic, its terms are relegated to the obscure corners of historical and scholarly interest—they are dead metaphors. Yet, in spite of or because of this, what needs to be accounted for is the rather gothic longevity of the body politic concept. If today we no longer speak of a body politic, this is not because the concept as such has ceased to exist. Perhaps it is because the issues that are raised by the body Necrologies; or, the Death of the Body Politic 159

politic concept have never been so relevant as they are in contemporary discussions over the “state of exception,” “biopolitics,” and the “multitude.” The body politic concept is never so vital as when it ceases to be an explicit part of the debate, and its ontological categories invisibly serve to make possible political discourse. noTes

1. Hobbes, Leviathan, “Introduction.” 2. Plato, Republic, 444a–e. 3. 1 Cor. 12: 12–31 (New International Version). The text continues: “As it is, there are many parts, but one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you!’ And the head cannot say to the feet, ‘I don’t need you!’ On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor.” 4. Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, 171. 5. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 231. 6. Le Goff, “Head or Heart?” 22. 7. See, for instance, book 18 of Augustine’s De civitate dei, and chapters 1–3 of Aquinas, De regimine principum. 8. Taubes summarizes the basic positions of such debates: the solution of representation (in which a single secular ruler is God’s representative on earth), the solution of dual sovereignty (in which a strict division between spiritual and temporal authority is posited), and the solution of theocracy (in which the church obtains sovereignty, unmediated by secular or temporal powers). 9. Schmitt, Political Theology, 36. 10. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 142. 11. Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society, 42. 12. Ibid. 13. See, for instance, William of Ockham, “A Dialogue,” 3.1.2, in A Letter to the Friars Minor and Other Writings. 14. Hobbes, Leviathan, part 2, chapter 29, “Of those things that Weaken, or tend to the Dissolution of a Common-wealth.” 15. Plato, Republic, 556e. 16. Nicholas of Cusa, The Catholic Concordance, 593. 17. The work of Sander Gilman, Emily Martin, and Laura Otis stand out in this regard. 18. Jacques Derrida’s comments on the “autoimmunitary” condition of security appear in Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror. 19. The concept of the “necro” has also been theorized in Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, Negarastani, “Death as Perversion,” as well as in Mbembe, “Necropolitics.” My use of the concept is derived not from contemporary theory but from two literary lineages: the tradition of the gothic, from the graveyard poets and the eighteenth-

160 Eugene Thacker

century gothic novel and plague fictions, which range quite broadly from Boccaccio, to Defoe, to Mary Shelley’s underrated The Last Man, to Camus and Octavia Butler. 20. In fact, one could, albeit heuristically, reorganize political theory along the axis of plague, pestilence, and epidemic. The ancient body politic (represented by Plato’s anatomization and Aristotle’s animism) would have to be considered within the context of the Plague of Athens (431 BcE), and the siege on Athens during the Peloponnesian War. The late medieval body politic (represented by its foundations in Paul and Augustine, and its formalization by Aquinas) would have to be considered alongside the recurrent outbreaks of bubonic plague during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (of which the Black Death of 1347–51 is the most devastating instance), as well as the subsequent social disorder and long-term restructuring of property relations that it entailed. Finally, the modern body politic (represented by natural rights theory) would have to be considered against the Great Plague of London (1665–66), which took place in the midst of civil war and renewed debates about secular sovereignty. From a contemporary vantage point, epidemics appear to have the following commonalities: circumstances combining political theory, civil strife or war, and an outbreak of a disease; networks of communication, travel, and trade at once constituting the body politic and dissolving it; a range of political and theological responses to what is identified as a state of emergency; and resulting thinking about the body politic’s figurative diseases becoming inseparable from the actual diseases that spread through a population. 21. This is presented in the first few lectures of Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. It is worth noting that the English term “security” often covers two French terms: sûreté, which refers more to “national security,” or the security afforded by military forces (to secure internal or external threats), and sécurité, which refers to the management of risk in contexts such as social security or health insurance. On the surface, the two French terms appear to split into foreign (sûreté) and domestic security (sécurité). However, activities such as public health surveillance or the governmental management of an epidemic are examples that frustrate this neat division. 22. Ibid., 64. 23. Ibid., 23. 24. Ibid., 46. 25. The issue, then, is not simply Aristotelian-Thomist “animation” but rather Lovecraftian “reanimation.” 26. Dante, Inferno, 104–29. Italian consulted at the Digital Dante Project. 27. They include the Epicurians, who question the immortality of the soul, but also members of the warring Guelf and Ghibelline parties of Dante’s own time. 28. But what is striking is that Dante can only express this by, in effect, turning the body politic upside down, in which it seems to function even more efficiently than in the more vague topologies of Purgatorio’s penitentiary-like cliffs, or the abstract, celestial geometry of Paradiso. 29. This combination—a sovereign-medical intervention in death, and the context of

Necrologies; or, the Death of the Body Politic 161

colonialism—has meant that, in such films, the living dead are often a conflated representation of a colonized population and slave laborers. In this regard, many of Fulci’s films are explicit references to H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau. At the end of Zombie, for instance, the living dead rise and begin to move in their massing form from the isolated context of the colonial island to—gasp—“civilization.” 30. The final scene in Zombi 3 (1988) depicts the living dead slowly descending on New York City (they are crossing Brooklyn Bridge—apparently the living dead come from Brooklyn). 31. Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 1. 32. Hypothetically, public health concerns in the U.S. are more or less separated from military concerns: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (cdc) specializes in health concerns, while branches of the military such as the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (uSAMrIId) specialize in public health directly related to biological and chemical warfare. The reality, of course, is more complicated; in the U.S., the term “biodefense” has exponentially widened to include both bioterrorist attacks as well as a whole new category of “emerging infectious diseases.” 33. In the U.S., the flurry of biodefense policies developed after 9/11 have arguably shifted the conceptual base of previous public health initiatives. I can note, in passing, a few of them: the Bioterrorism Act (2002), which involves the regulation and monitoring of materials such as food, livestock, microbes by multiple agencies; Project BioShield (also 2002), which mobilizes research in the pharmaceutical sector toward the production of “medical countermeasures,” a “national pharmaceutical stockpile,” and a new FdA “fast-track” approval process for vaccines; the Biosurveillance Program (2003), which takes up medical surveillance initiatives at the cdc from the 1990s (e.g., BioWatch, the National Electronic Disease Surveillance System) and aims for a real-time, nationwide, medical surveillance system. Developments such as these have in part contributed to the influx of federal funds for biodefense research, and all of this has taken place alongside ongoing investigations into the U.S. military’s classified bioweapons research, which includes, among other purported programs, the construction of ad-hoc germ weapons labs and the engineering of weapons-grade, antibiotic-resistant anthrax. Ongoing global concerns over flu pandemics have prompted the Department of Health and Human Services, in their “Pandemic Influenza Strategic Plan” of 2005, to devise hypothetical doomsday scenarios. 34. Former secretary Tommy Thompson, Department of Health and Human Services, HHS press release, February 2, 2004, available at http://www.hhs.gov/. Discussions of these issues often center around what is to be done: Is it a question of if or a question of when? Should the strategy be preventive or preemptive? But what often goes unnoticed is the clause, “emerging infectious disease or bioterrorist attack.” These little grammatical connectors—“and” or “or”—reveal a great deal about the current concept of biodefense. 35. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 21–22.

162 Eugene Thacker

luciana parisi and steve Goodman

MneMonic control

In William Gibson’s 2003 novel, Pattern Recognition, brand researcher Cayce Pollard has a rare condition that allows her to spot potentially effective visual logos in the environment through the psychoaffective response of an allergic reaction.1 Her allergy provides her with a sense of the future, a sense of the potent contagiousness of visual information. But a brand is more than its sensory appendages, more than its logo. It is the entirety of the intangible, virtual world lurking behind any specific perceivable pattern. Cayce’s ability to anticipate which logos among many will be more successful in a future branding campaign is only an instance of the power of branding to establish a special relation with futurity. Logos are indeed machines of prehension able to transduce the pure potential of a brand into a real potentiality. The logo (not just visual, but sonic, haptic, or olfactory) becomes a cipher for the brand, a password to get through cognition, to access the realm of affective control in which the future is preempted in the present. This is a future that is installed every time you pass through hyperbranded environments of consumption and zone-out into the simultaneously stealthy and overloaded barrage of suggestion, association, and subliminal waves of affective capitalism. We are already accustomed to marketing’s harnessing the creative power of the consumer, transforming the allegedly passive demographic into a reservoir of innovation to be capitalized on. Lifestyle branding, for instance, has defined itself in terms of promoting individual cre-

ativity and autonomy to the point where the difference between the image and reality collapses into the hyperbranding matrix. For the postmodern critique of capitalism, the advent of the real subsumption of value (e.g., the valorization of desire) has come to define a world governed by a machine of consumption able to incorporate all kinds of deviations from the norm. Since all values are reducible to sign values, then, as postmodern critique suggests, the realm of the simulacra engulfs all possibilities to break out of the dominance of optical capitalism. As opposed to the critical impasse proposed by postmodern critique, the return to biopolitics has most recently meant the reacknowledgment of the productive force behind the image. From terminal hyperreality to the more nuanced notion of the multitude’s autonomy within the context of cognitive capitalism, the aesthetic creativity of the market has become the new site for the production of surplus value. Here, living labor becomes machinic, consumers become producers, and everyone designs their own products through self-organizing networks of spontaneous creativity. Yet this harnessing of aesthetic power exceeds cognitive networks. As Gibson’s example illustrates, power does not just operate across networks of brains, but through affective networks that envelop sensations in addition to cognition. Affective capitalism is a parasite on the feelings, movements, and becomings of bodies, tapping into their virtuality by investing preemptively in futurity. Possessed by seductive brand entities, you flip into autopilot, are abducted from the present, are carried off by an array of prehensions outside chronological time into a past not lived, a future not sensed. We term this mode of affective programming “mnemonic control,” a deployment of power that exceeds current formulations of biopower. Biopower refers to the practice of the modern state to regulate their subjects through what Michel Foucault describes as “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations through the use of statistics and probabilities.”2 The distinctive quality of the political technologies of biopower is that they allow for the control of entire populations. Power becomes positive as opposed to merely negative, preemptive instead of merely repressive. Biopower has, to date, been about techniques of keeping populations alive as a memory of life, recording that memory in a vast, cosmic archive of mnemo-machinery, a resource to be capitalized, a weapon against an uncertain, indeterminate future. In this sense, biopower attempts to function preemptively, to postpone the certainty of death. Biopolitical control, for 164 Luciana Parisi and Steve Goodman

Antonio Negri, is the measure, the organization and the limit, of the time of life. So it is not just social life itself that is at stake, but an ontology of time, and thus an ontology of measure in relation to life. For Negri, biopolitical production is open and implies a view toward an immeasurable, indeterminate future, a political future to come.3 For Foucault, the productivity of biopower is symptomatic of the ontopolitics of the modern state, a new, architectonic, postsovereign, disciplinary mode of power, while for Giorgio Agamben the power over life is the very motor of sovereignty, not just in the modern context.4 The ability to exercise total control, on life itself or bare life, is defined by the state of exception or emergency. In the name of bare life’s being under threat, sovereign power is both inside and outside the law. The potential to be under threat justifies the state of exception or emergency, the space of preemptive power or governmentality over life itself. However, a new tendency of control has increasingly oriented itself not just to the deferral of death through an investment in living memory, stored in humans or in machines, but also in the production of unlived memory, a preemptive memory of the future that does not oppose, but rather allies itself with, uncertainty and indeterminacy. What we call mnemonic control, therefore, is a refined mode of preemptive power. This mode of power compels us to interrogate the achronological nexus of past and future, and the complex unfolding of time in the present. As part of preemptive cybernetic capital, a memory of the future is not just some predictive simulation, but the investment in future feedback, an investment in intuitive, prehensive anticipation, part of a ceaseless betting on future desires. In this article, we look at modes of power or preemptive power as investing the dimensions of memory. From the interventions of branding into microcultural memory, to nanopolitical interventions into the molecular memory of matter, we will map modes of control that go beyond the biopolitical engagement with genetic memory and the governance of the living, to point to the virtual governance of the unlived. We think that current debates about the persistence of biopower should be supplemented by a return to the intricate speculative operation of preemptive power. Power no longer leaves the future unoccupied and open. It does not merely operate on probabilities, the actual forms of living that already exist in the present-past. Neither does power merely regulate the living by maintaining bodies in a liminal state between life and death. Instead, the concept of biopower should be confronted with an ontology of unlife, where unlife denotes, in the words of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, or ccru, the “autopropagating transmutation on the Mnemonic Control 165

anorganic plane. Flatline culture.”5 Unlife tags the relational (dis)continuum ontologically prior to the separation of the living from the nonliving, and therefore engages with the reality of unlife, virtual entities and their active agency within actual, living processes. As Science magazine noted in 2004, and as has been acknowledged in molecular biology since the 1960s, “All life forms are composed of molecules that are not themselves alive.”6 The mnemo-machinery of preemptive power is installed in ubiquitous computation. By stringing together distributed digital storage devices across the planet, designers have created a network of technical machines that have become receptacles for human memory. The designed environment, with its ports and connections, its mobile devices and wireless networks, its hubs and hotspots, has become a mnemonic ecology. In this ecology, information saturation and sensory overload are the norm—and a symptom is the generalized condition of time anomaly, generated by the swirling weather system of looped media. This is the sphere of prosthetic memory, which leads some to controversially suggest that in evolutionary terms, machines are currently acquiring human memory, preserving it in nonliving, technical networks. Is this merely the capitalist extraction of the surplus value of bodily potentials, the reduction of life to bare life, whereby every extension of the human nervous system is used as an optimization toward the increased efficiency of the system, freeing up time for even more lucrative consumption? (Free your memory space, deliver your thoughts to the archives—data banks—and save your life in insurance policies so that you can be whatever you want to be now.) Despite its apparent success, such a biopolitical model only scratches the surface in explaining how capitalism abducts memory. The symptom of such abduction is affective overload, the generalized proclivity toward distraction and attention deficit disorder as cultural norm rather than psychopathology. Accompanying this mnemo-technical ecology of prosthetic memory, the contemporary crystallization of preemptive power sees an attempt to populate and program the unlived, that which has not yet happened, by actualizing events instead of merely warding them off. Branding, in particular, crystallizes this mode of preemptive power in its active production of memories of the future—memories that you haven’t had yet, despite their seeming familiar. Branding generates an atmosphere of time anomalies crowding the mediatic sphere. The body feels the activated sensation as past. In its infinite differentiation of product ranges, branding plays with a combination

166 Luciana Parisi and Steve Goodman

of familiarity plus novelty, a past-futurity. New memories are installed that you have not phenomenologically experienced in order to produce a certain receptivity to brand triggers. No longer relying on lived bodily experience— actual sensory responses—brand memory implantation operates through the body that remembers a virtual sensation. In short-term intuition the future yet to be formed is actively populating the sensations of the present, anticipating what is to come, the feeling of what happens before its actualization. No longer can memory be restricted to the psychological, even when expanded to include a whole culture (a collective unconscious), or to the finite storage systems of hardware. Rather, we argue for a machinic conception of memory that does not focus exclusively on technological or human memory. Engaging with the contagious virtual residue of memory allows us to tackle the mode in which the mnemo-technics of capitalism invest in the unlived potentials of the body and implant future desires. Here mnemonic control is about the power over futurity, which is seen as the power to foreclose an uncertain, indeterminate future by producing it in the present. The third wave of cybernetics highlights how futurity is always already decisive of the conditions of the present. The actualization of potentiality or futurity cashes out the demarcation of the present as a sphere of possibilities. This is the speculative probe of affective capitalism. We argue that there are already new elements in this third wave at work now, elements instantiated in some aspects of branding: the power to instigate unlived experiences or participations in the hyperstition of worlds that do not actually exist, but are really effective. Mnemonic control here implies the construction of memories for what has not been actually lived. This form of mnemonic control can be understood in terms of déjà vu, the installing of a certain automation of response, where one does not have to elaborate, or cognize, but affectively feel what does not physically exist. Branding, as a mixture of the familiar and the unknown, is an example of control operating as an addiction for an unlived future. In these mnemonic dimensions of contemporary culture, a postcybernetic concept of time challenges narrow concerns with life, identity, and history. Instead, an analysis of memory within cybernetic cultures necessitates examining nonhuman modes of remembering (e.g., technical machines, cellular automata, and autopoietic systems), biologically based models of cultural memory (e.g., memetics), and the different speeds of mnemonic function (e.g., long-term and short-term memory). These analyses will be the starting

Mnemonic Control 167

point for an investigation of memory and preemptive power, via the achronological nexus of past-present-future as discussed in the philosophies of virtuality and immediacy of Henri Bergson and Alfred N. Whitehead. precoGniTion

It has been noted that reality has been transformed by waves of cybernetic intervention, which layer up, their nuances coexisting and resonating in complex ways. If biopower is entangled with the operative modalities of the first two waves of cybernetic power, the model we are discussing is at the threshold of a third, postcybernetic wave, where control operates virtually. The first wave concerns the power to predict the future through probabilities. Here memory is incarnated in the machine: the computer is able to incorporate a finite quantity of data. The second wave deals with extended memory, the cybernetic mind as the interaction between the inside and the outside, the living and the nonliving, involving bodies, environments, technical objects, and machines. Here mnemonic control operates through the possibility of a collective intelligence, where humans and machines are mutually part of a wider cognitive system forming what is termed the knowledge economy of cognitive capitalism and its simulations. The third wave moves beyond human-machine interaction and engages with the mechanisms of virtual control, the control of the future, of the not yet experienced, of the unlived. This power is not simply autopoietic—it does not merely refer to itself, but is preindividual; it incorporates all potential individuations. In this essay, we look at the transformation in cybernetic understandings of memory as interventions in the ontological field of unlife, or the virtual. Cybernetics is the study of systemic self-governance, the way systems, biological, physical, mechanical, economic, religious, political, etc., regulate themselves through feedback relationships. Changes in cybernetic thought imply changes in strategies for the modulation of unlife, the current remit of preemptive power. We are interested in the relationship between control and memory within contemporary cybernetic culture. By “cybernetic culture” we mean much more than the typical 1990s orientation to technoculture (the study of the Internet, identity, cyberspace, cyborgs, etc.). We refer instead to modes of nonlinear feedback relation, affective transmission, and abstract culture (transversal migration of processes across scale and milieu). Cybernetic culture therefore includes the affective ecologies of genetic (biotechnical), prosthetic (appendix), and mediatic (perceptive) memory. 168 Luciana Parisi and Steve Goodman

These cybernetic modalities of communication are not, in our view, determined by the impact of technology, but rather the nexus of bodies and technical machines, and the physical, biological, and cultural strata that transect them. What defines cybernetic culture is therefore the agencies of matter working through these nexuses, indicating the agencies of unlife, the power of the not yet actual. We think that such agencies are neglected in current formulations of biopower because of their relentless concern with life, the forces of the living, and the survival of the human. With the advent of cybernetics, the science of communication and control of information in humans and machines, the mnemo-technics of capitalism faced the problem of a past tending toward an uncertain future through an irreversible arrow of time. Cybernetics, in its first wave, exposed the problem of memory to the contingencies of learning future information that did not match those of the past. Since future events were uncertain, cybernetics merely attempted to calculate future probabilities, based on past sensory feedback stored in memory. Gregory Bateson’s vision of the cybernetic mind, however, was not limited to inbuilt instructions that reduce memory to physical storage. Instead, memory was not stored but depended on positive feedbacks with the environment.7 Bateson’s work marked an important turn in cybernetic theory from the first to the second wave. Following Bateson’s, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s notion of autopoiesis also argued that the nervous system was not defined by input- output but was a unity perturbed by interactions with the environment. Thus memory could not be thought of as a static snapshot, isolated from the interaction of the brain with the environment, but was always entangled in cognitive processes.8 Similarly, in memetic conceptions, memory is understood in the context of cognitive evolution. This meme, for Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and others, is the basic module of culture (the cultural equivalent of the gene), and is subject to the abstract principles of evolution: selection, variation, and adaptation. Memetics maps the transversal culture field of propagation of contagious memories between humans and machines. For Robert Aunger, memories are distributed across neural networks and are therefore always relational. These networks are thought to vary most importantly between longterm and short-term memory. As with memetics’s extension of memory into the cultural field, contemporary neuroscientific research on the workings of memory has demonstrated that states of mind are not in the head, because they are extended throughout the whole of the physical body and its environment. For Gerald EndelMnemonic Control 169

man, the relation between short-term and long-term memory is the relation between perception and memory, where each new perception alters recollections, by short-circuiting preexisting synaptic connections.9 For Andy Clarke, a sort of intimacy between brain, body, and world defines an extended adaptive system, where memory is the activity of an essentially situated brain: a brain at home in its proper bodily, cultural, and environmental niche.10 In this view, all bodies and media partake of the extended cognition of the mind. These different approaches to memory reflect a series of mutations in cybernetic strategies of mnemonic control. In first-wave cybernetics, control operates through the mechanical regulation of input and output in which the brain is a receptacle of memories. In second-wave cybernetics, mnemonic control is deployed via the reproductive regulation of living systems in which the unity of the brain is in contact with the environment via perturbation. Memetics and contemporary neuroscience go further in distributing mnemonic control around neural networks, both living and nonliving, in an extended field of brains and media. Here we are facing a cognitive ecology of mnemonic control. However, none of these orientations can account for the affective production of memories. More recently, Antonio Damasio has made an attempt to extend neuroscience into the affective domain of memory. Memory, for him, depends on the state of the affected body.11 Memory is not in the mind, but in the emotional experience of the body. Such emotional memory provides evolutionary advantages since the experience of danger serves to prevent-predict danger.12 The evolutionary advantage of emotional memories involves foreseeing the future more than passively retrieving the past. However, it may be argued that these neuro-affective conceptions of memory are still too dependent on models of probabilities in which the future remains a statistical calculation based on past experience, even when memory is given an affective dimension. What is needed is an engagement with virtual memory, the entanglement of the past and the future in the present, the locus of preemptive power. Such temporalities can more usefully be elucidated through the theories of Bergson and Whitehead. premoniTion

For Bergson, memory is not primarily stored in the brain, but is housed by a virtual field of action.13 In contrast to distinctions made in psychoanalysis, he distinguishes between psychological memory (of the psyche), habitual memory (of the body), and adds an ontological dimension to memory, pure, virtual recollection. The lived body exists amid the virtual, nonliving aggre170 Luciana Parisi and Steve Goodman

gate as an image among many receiving and giving back movement. In short, the brain does not exist without the images of the material world on which it feeds. Here the body is an indeterminate center of action and not the container of memories.14 Bergson does not argue against realism and idealism. Nor does he argue that matter can be reduced to the perception we have of it. Memories, as images, are more than idealist representations and less than realist things. Memories as such are present even when they are not perceived. Despite the movement of images, the world remains in continual variation: “A set of movement-images, a collection of lines or figures of light; a series of blocs of space-time.”15 Thus, while memory is related to bodily and intellectual habits, it also enjoys autonomy: a memory-image residing outside chronological time returns in perception. In this way, the past never passes but remains contemporaneous with its present. The past stays in potential, continuously ready to actualize its present. While indicating two different dimensions, the actual is always accompanied by its double virtuality; perception and memory— present and past—are intrinsic to time or duration. In duration, the past does not simply follow the present but coexists with it; it is continuous with it. This is why, according to Bergson, we experience paramnesia, the illusion of déjà vu, false recognition, time anomalies, and memories of past-futurity. What is left of memory when past-present chronology collapses? The notion of déjà vu in common English and German usage is translated from the French to mean the “already seen.” The sensation that it usually tags relates to an uncanny feeling of familiarity with something you should not or could not be familiar with because you are experiencing it for the first time. The concept of déjà vu suggests a sense in which time has collapsed in onto itself, perhaps where there is some kind of mnemonic haunting, or future feedback effect. In the literature on déjà vu, the sensation is often related to a memory disorder known as paramnesia, in which there is some kind of illusion of remembering events while they are experienced for the first time (or when the proper meaning of words cannot be remembered). For Bergson, paramnesia is a disorder that explains that “there is a recollection of the present, contemporaneous with the present itself.”16 Here there is a sense of duration, where the past appears to be lodged between two tendencies of the present, the one it once was and the actual one in relation to that which is now the past. As Deleuze puts it, “The present is the actual image, and its contemporaneous past is the virtual image, the image Mnemonic Control 171

in a mirror.”17 The virtual plane of the past indeed indicates that the past and the future are not separated but coexist in the present. This is not linear continuity, where the past determines the present or the present constructs the past. Each present perception stirs what lies in potential, the futurity of the past, emerging again yet anew. The lived present, for Bergson, is a synthesizer of the nonliving past and future contracted in microtemporality. Whitehead also focused on the microtemporality of the immediate present. Memories, for him, exist between the immediate past and the immediate future. Here the past does not determine the future but eats into it. In such achronological causation, the future is active in the present, unfolding the process by which the past-present enters the present-future. Whitehead suggests that to prehend the transition between the immediate past and the immediate future is the order of short-term intuition. This can be conceived as a time-span that lasts a second or fraction of a second and “which lives actively in its antecedent world.”18 Prehensions are microtemporal modalities of perception defining not only the conceptual feeling of past occasions in present experiences, but also the way the objective existence of the present lies in the future. Conceptual prehensions indicate not that the past predicts the future, but that the future is anticipated in the present. As Whitehead argues, “Cut away the future, and the present collapses, emptied of its proper content. Immediate existence requires the insertion of the future in the crannies of the present.”19 Prehensions establish a causal relation between the subject prehending and the external world at the moment of perception. Yet, causality here enters a multilayered architecture of durations, where past, present, and future are temporal intricacies of the perishing and onset of actual occasions. To remember then entails a cyclical yet nonlinear dynamic whereby an occasion of experience is initiated in the past, which is active in itself and terminated in the future, which is also active. Such an occasion itself starts as an effect facing its past and ends as a cause facing its future.20 If the present emerges from the past, it is at the same time immanent in the future. The reenaction of the past passes through the acquisition of the new, the to be accomplished, in the present, yet the content of the present remains the future. Completion is also anticipation, anterior future: the present remains at once occupied by the past and the future. Yet, this is not the cybernetic prediction of probabilities, whereby future contingencies can be statistically calculated. The memory of the past experience enables the system to learn, to accumulate data, to be better equipped to face the probabilities of future experi172 Luciana Parisi and Steve Goodman

ence. Contrary to memories of past experience, prehensions tackle a universe of microtemporalities, enabling the future not to be predicted by means of probabilities but to actively occupy the present by means of immediacy. Such a sense of present-futurity entails how uncertainties cannot be calculated in advance, since they become certain in the immediacy of past-future in the present. Whitehead suggests that it is in short-term memory, short-term intuition, where the sense of a present’s immediate past and future returns, a sense of invention inherent in the present.21 “In this sense, the future has objective reality in the present . . . For it is inherent in the constitution of the immediate, present actuality that a future will supersede it.”22 Whitehead defines this temporal immediacy as the enjoyment of the present: an open-ended enjoyment of reenaction and anticipation where the future enters the present once the past has perished to allow futurity to populate the present anew. Preemptive power therefore operates precisely on this activity of the future in the present. mnemonic fuTuriTy

The mnemo-technical ecology of cybernetic culture is generally characterized as an age of sampling, in which chronology is twisted from a straight line into a loop. Electronic memories are plucked out of history, stored in machine banks, to be mutated, to be rhythmically reassembled in any combination digitally. Coded events leave sensory residues across distributed networks of body-machines. Memories are genetically transported across species and scales. Biological programming is folded into unintended host bodies, forming a mnemonic symbiosis. All these layers of memory are stratified into a geology of achronological time. In this cybernetic culture, Deleuze argues after William S. Burroughs, control operates through mediatic addiction in terms of repetitive bodily habits.23 This does not stand for a kind of zombification of the body as a result of dependence on the imperatives of the mediascape, but rather describes the harnessed microactivation of what a body can do, within the domain of demarcated, and relatively predetermined, possibility. Contemporary branding culture, for example, sets out to distribute memory implants, which provide the recipient with the sense of the already enjoyed, encouraging repeated consumption, a repetition of a memory the recipient hasn’t had. The operation of power through branding seeks to remodel long-term memory via a kind of time anomaly. Branding, when it occupies the shortest possible time-spans, is a parasite on the dynamic of short-term Mnemonic Control 173

intuition—the coexistence of the past-present-future—ceaselessly affecting long-term memory by instigating movement in the neurophysiological plasticity of the brain. Branding potentiates long-term memories through the stirring of new synaptic connections, re-rerouting memories that are immediately familiar. Long-term memories are continuously reassembled in nonlinear combinations by the immediacy of short-term memory. Thus, branding attempts to create a collectively felt aura that induces loyalty through repetition. Of course, loyalty to a brand, the agency of the virtual corporate body, is simultaneously a mode of addiction. Branding installs a web of associations and generates loops of libidinal investment. But as an addiction, this double sward process is inadequately understood if conceived of in terms of closed loops, or the locking down of behavior in a homeostatic circuit whereby a chain of association becomes habit, and mainly moves from short-term to long-term memory through reward. Positive feedback, the immediate transformation of virtual memory, is conspicuously omitted from this picture. Could it be that memory has always been synthetic, that its extension into the networked cybernetics of mediatic communication was actually invented during the genesis of culture, as has been implied in evolutionary theories of memetics? We propose, on the contrary, a cosmology of affective memory in which the past does not precede, and the future does not succeed, the present. The time-scrambling of Bergson and Whitehead suggests that, in a specific sense, memories of the future are conceivable where they are either intuitive or prehensive, as opposed to simply being knowledge of possible futures. Affect is both the unfolding of the past into present experience and the way this experience acts on the past to unravel a new future. This is key to the programming of affective power and its investment in autonomic responses. According to Massumi, these responses are not simply reducible to habits, but are activations in which an unpredictable potential enters. In this framework the preemptive foreclosure of potential is still productive. With each occurrence, a body is transformed by the vague memory of the previous instance and the anticipation of the next occasion. Memories affectively impinge on bodies’ acting on bodies, in fields of speed and slowness, entering into compositions and concrescences that activate potential in a rhythmic virtual-actual oscillation, inventing process and processing invention. Every actual body is shadowed by its virtual double. As do monads, each body has it own singular, enfolded memory of matter ready to enter a new curvature of time. 174 Luciana Parisi and Steve Goodman

This is how preemptive power operates within the dimension of memory. We have attempted to describe the third-wave cybernetic conception of memory as virtual body/matter in which the future is deeply implicated in the present. Zooming into the microtemporal, affective dimension opens up analysis of the always excessive potential trapped in autonomic response. The hard-wiring is never devoid of disjunction. The capture of the past in memory, the enfolding of sensation into the virtual body, is immediately the activation of futurity in cybernetic capitalism. Is it appropriate, however, to describe the mechanics of preemption through the persistence of biopower, or has power’s concern with virtuality, futurity, and affectivity introduced elements that cannot adequately be accounted for in terms of a power over life? Can power be reduced to biological forces, to the investment of power in the potential of the living? We suggest not. Preemptive power exceeds the bio-logic of control. If preemption inserts a temporal dimension into power, then this dimension cannot be equated with the time of the living. The virtual should not be equated with the potentially lived but is rather a pure potential of which life potential is merely a subset. Mnemonic control, for us, does not, in its harnessing of the not yet lived, merely constitute an imperialist extension or annexing of power over life. The virtual as the realm of pure potential objects can never be lived despite orchestrating the present preemptively as present-futurity through the ingression of real potentialities in occasions of experiences. It is in this sense that for us mnemonic control poses the problem of power beyond biopower, and opens memory to the plane of unlife. noTes

1. Gibson, Pattern Recognition. 2. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 139–40. 3. Negri, Time for Revolution, 233. 4. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 6–7. 5. ccru, “Digital Hyperstition,” Abstract Culture: Swarm 4 (1999). 6. Rasmussen et al., “Evolution: Transitions from Nonliving to Living Matter,” 963. 7. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind. 8. Maturana and Varela, The Tree of Knowledge. 9. Edelman and Tononi, Consciousness. 10. Andy Clarke, “Where Brain, Body and World Collide,” 257–80. 11. Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, 179. 12. Ibid., 146–47. 13. Bergon, Matter and Memory.

Mnemonic Control 175

14. Ibid., 44–45. 15. Deleuze, Cinema 1, 60. 16. Deleuze, Bergsonism, 79. 17. Ibid. 18. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 192. 19. Ibid., 186. 20. Ibid., 188. 21. Ibid., 178. 22. Ibid., 215. 23. Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 3–7.

176 Luciana Parisi and Steve Goodman

eyal Weizman

tHanato- tactics

During the years of the second intifada, a major Israeli effort was directed toward the development of airborne assassinations and the specific technology related to it. What was often described as a “rare and exceptional emergency method” has become the Israeli Air Force’s main form of attack in the Gaza Strip. According to Ephraim Segoli, a helicopter pilot and former commander of the air force base in Palmahim, located halfway between Tel Aviv and Gaza, from which most assassination raids have been launched and where the largest fleets of remotely controlled killer drones are now located, airborne “liquidations are the central component of IdF [Israeli Defense Forces] operations and the very essence of the ‘war’ it is waging.” Moreover, Segoli claimed in May 2006 that “the intention to ‘perfect’ these operations meant that Israel’s security industries have . . . started concentrating [much of their efforts] on the development of systems that primarily serve this operational logic.”1 According to data collected by the human rights organization B’Tselem, from the beginning of the intifada to February of 2008, 376 Palestinians were killed in targeted assassinations. Only 227 of those were the intended targets of assassination. The rest were Palestinians who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. About fifty of them were children.2 Those assassinated included many of the political and military leaders of Hamas, as well. What follows deals with the methods—technological, operational, legal, and other—that form the basis of these operations.

How do these tactics of assassination intersect with political considerations and calculations? How do the Israeli government and military seek to justify these assassinations, legally, morally, and politically? Targeted assassinations were not only a direct, preemptive response to terror. Israeli security organizations conceived of assassination as a central component in a political “project,” an attempt to generate a degree of control over Palestinian politics and the population at large.3 The question Achille Mbembe raises in “Necropolitics” is pertinent here: “What is the relationship between politics and death” that these efforts suggest?4 How, after the evacuation of the ground surface of Gaza, did bodies, rather than territories, or death, rather than space, turn into the raw material of Israeli sovereignty? TarGeTinG

Segoli explained that targeted assassinations are “a success story based upon a high degree of cooperation between the General Security Service (GSS) and the air force.”5 Above all, targeted airborne assassinations were fed by the information and organizational powers that the GSS developed under Avi Dichter, who, as director of the GSS from 2000 to 2005, gained considerable popularity with the public and with Prime Minister Sharon as a result of his “success.” The efficiency of the operations has relied on the close networking between the intelligence provided by the GSS, fast-tracked political decisions, and the strike capacity of the air force. The GSS drafts the death lists and recommends the time of the operation (once included, rarely has a name of a living person been removed from the lists). The GSS provides the files on each person to be liquidated (including details of their involvement in the resistance and their prospective danger to Israel), and a special ministerial committee gives its approval (the typical length of deliberation is fifteen minutes, and there are generally no objections). The air force does the killing.6 Each targeted assassination is a large-scale operation that integrates hundreds of specialists from different military branches and security apparatuses. Beyond its reliance on background intelligence (much of it gathered in mass arrests and from Palestinians stopped at checkpoints), targeted assassination depends on the sharing of real-time information between various agents, commanders, operators, and different military planes, and on their ability to act on that information. After a Palestinian is put on the death list, he is followed, sometimes for days, by a “swarm” of different kinds of unmanned, aerial vehicles. Different swarms often follow different people simultaneously, in different areas of the Gaza Strip. In this way, the secu178 Eyal Weizman

rity services establish the targeted person’s daily routines and habits and maintain continuous visual contact with him until his killing.7 As well as being cheaper to operate, unmanned drones have the advantage over manned planes or helicopters because they can remain in the air around the clock, some for as long as thirty hours, and because their formations circulate in relatively small areas, while providing a multiplicity of angles of vision. Moreover, drones are quiet and barely visible to the human eye. This is the reason that, beginning in 2004, the air force started to shoot its missiles from drones, rather than from its more visible battle helicopters. A swarm of various types of drones, each circulating at a different altitude, up to 30,000 feet, is navigated by a GPS system and woven by radio communication into a single synergetic reconnaissance and killing instrument that conducts the entire assassination operation. Some drones are designed to view the terrain vertically, in order to establish the digital coordinates of a targeted person, while others look diagonally, in order to distinguish facial features or identify a vehicle’s license plates. Some drones are designed to intercept radio signals and mobile-phone transmissions, while others can carry and shoot missiles. With the development and proliferation of drone technology, “very few Israeli soldiers [are] in the airspace over Gaza,” and “the air is mainly filled with Golems.” It is “an army without soldiers.”8 Airborne assassinations depend as well on other mechanisms within Israel’s system of domination. While targeted assassinations are explained as the alternative to collective punishment, as the alternative to mass incarcerations and the hardships imposed on the “uninvolved population,” they are dependent on intelligence obtained in those mass incarcerations and interrogations. They rely, primarily in the West Bank, on seducing Palestinians into collaboration in exchange for travel and work permits. The checkpoints themselves are part of Israel’s “surveillance assemblages.” Checkpoints make it is easy for the GSS to contact its informers without raising suspicions. The clandestine Unit 504, jointly operated by military intelligence and the GSS, is responsible for forcing Palestinians to collaborate. From one of its bases south of Haifa, Unit 504 maintains Facility 1391, a Guantánamo Bay–style secret prison for “administrative detainees” where Unit 504 trains groups of Palestinians to mark targets, plant and detonate bombs, and “shake the tree for the air force.”9 In previous years, members of this Palestinian military unit of the IdF would splash ultraviolet paint on the roofs of cars to identify targets for pilots to destroy.10 The missiles are aimed most often at vehicles, but increasingly at pedestrians, since Palestinians now often take the precaution to walk. Each assasThanato-tactics 179

sination thus juxtaposes different spaces and domains: a control room in central Tel Aviv in which young soldiers navigate remotely piloted drones and missiles, as they would in a computer game, into the narrow, dusty alleys of Gaza’s refugee camps, where they end young Palestinians’ lives. The IdF employs the sanitizing term “focused obstruction” or “focused preemption” to describe these assassinations. Such rhetoric is repeated by most of the popular Israeli media, which conceals as far as possible the real impact of the killings, mostly avoiding mentioning the names of Palestinian civilians killed in Israeli attacks and the display of the corpses, blood, and body parts—the very images on which the media linger when covering the aftermath of a Palestinian terror attack. Indeed, the Israeli media’s use of selective imagery allows them to project assassination not only as necessary, but also as ethical, rhetorically legalizing it by what Neve Gordon has called “the discursive production of a pseudo-judicial process.”11 One of many counterpoints to these digitized visions of “precision” killing was provided by ’Aref Daraghmeh, a witness to an August 2002 targeted assassination in the village of Tubas in the West Bank who has provided the following testimony to B’Tselem: The helicopter . . . fired a third missile towards a silver Mitsubishi, which had four people in it. The missile hit the trunk and the car spun around its axis. I saw a man stepping out of the car and running away. He ran about 25 meters and then fell on the ground and died. The three other passengers remained inside. I saw an arm and an upper part of a skull flying out of the car. The car went up in flames and I could see three bodies burning inside it. Three minutes later, after the Israeli helicopters left, I went out to the street and began to shout. I saw people lying on the ground. Among them was six-year- old Bahira. . . . She was dead. . . . I also saw Bahira’s cousin, Osama. . . . I saw Osama’s mother running towards Bahira, picking her up and heading towards the a-Shifa clinic, which is about 500 meters away. I went to the clinic and saw her screaming after seeing the body of her son, Osama.12 operaTionaL pLanninG

The operational aspect of targeted airborne assassinations relies on military developments that originated in Israel’s war in Lebanon during the 1980s and 1990s. In February 1992, Hezbollah secretary general Sheikh Abbas Mussawi was the first to be killed in an airborne assassination when a group of Israeli

180 Eyal Weizman

helicopters flying inland from the Mediterranean attacked his convoy, killing him and his family. The first targeted airborne assassination in a Palestinian area took place on November 9, 2000, when an Israeli Apache helicopter pilot launched a U.S.-made Hellfire antitank missile at the car of a member of Tanzim al-Fatah, Hussein Muhammad Abayit, in Beit-Sahur, near Bethlehem, killing him and two women, Rahmeh Shahin and ‘Aziza Muhammed Danun, who happened to be walking by the car when it exploded in the middle of the street. The IdF’s spokesperson announced that the killing was part of “a new state policy.”13 Since 2002, Gaza has become the world’s largest laboratory for airborne assassinations.14 The U.S. administration feebly protested Israeli assassinations, demanding through diplomatic channels that Israel merely “[consider] the results of its actions.” Meanwhile, different branches of U.S. security forces, themselves engaged in unacknowledged assassinations using unmanned drones, began to “examine Israeli Air Force’s performances and results in order to draw lessons for its own wars.”15 The planning and execution of these operations follows the principles of air force operational planning. The unit of “operational analysis” is part of the Israeli Air Force’s “operational group” and is responsible, with various intelligence agencies, for planning and optimizing bombing missions. There are three levels on which bombings are planned: mechanical, systemic, and political. At the mechanical level, planning is concerned with the matching of munitions with targets—calculating what size and type of bomb is needed to destroy a particular target; what amount of explosives is needed to destroy a car, a building, a tunnel, or a bunker. The mechanical level involves calculations by civil engineers and blast experts assessing the structure of the target and the quality of its construction. Military engineers then use a computer program to determine the munitions, attack angle, and time of day that will ensure the destruction of the target, while minimizing the use of munitions, the amount of destruction, and the number of bystander deaths. In the context of targeted assassinations, the mechanical level is concerned with the development of the warhead, the explosives used within it, and the accuracy of its delivery. Just as the blade of the guillotine did, the warhead and other innovations making killing more efficient and “civilized” enable the routine and more frequent application of those technologies. As the designer and employer of the blade of the guillotine, the unit of operational analysis has been criticized at least twice, once for the use of excessive force, and again for excessive caution. The first case involved the decision, Thanato-tactics 181

on July 23, 2002, to use a one-ton bomb to destroy a residential building in Gaza where Salah Shehadeh, the leader of Hamas’s military wing, was spending the night. The attack caused several buildings to collapse, killing Shehadeh and fourteen Palestinian civilians, more than half of them children. In the second case, two years later, the operational analysis unit was criticized for allocating a quarter-ton bomb for an attack on a meeting of Hamas’s leadership. The bomb failed to cause the collapse of the building, allowing the leaders to escape unharmed from the ground floor. The second level of planning is the systemic. The function of the unit of operational analysis extends beyond the planning of physical destruction. The unit attempts to predict and map the effect that the destruction of a particular target might have on the enemy’s overall system of operation. Following the principles of “system analysis,” the unit understands the enemy as an operational network of interacting elements.16 In air force targeting theories, cities, societies, and political regimes are vulnerable because of their reliance on networked infrastructures that sustain life. In the context of Israel’s war with the Palestinians, the killing of members of Palestinian organizations is similarly thought of in relation to a systemic logic. Unlike the infrastructure of state militaries, much of whose power is grounded in buildings and equipment, the infrastructure of the Palestinian resistance is the people themselves.17 The effectiveness of the Palestinian resistance is grounded in its people and in the efficiency of the relations between them: political and spiritual leaders, spokespersons, financiers, commanders, experienced fighters, bomb makers, and recruiters. The killing of a key individual is understood in terms similar to those pertaining to the destruction of a command and control center or a strategic bridge. Both are intended to trigger a sequence of systemic “failures” that will disrupt the enemy’s system, making it more vulnerable to further military action.18 “Operational shock” is best achieved, according to the military and the GSS, when the rhythms of these operations is rapid and the enemy system is not given time to recover between attacks.19 The third level of planning is political. Aerial bombing has had a political dimension from the advent of air forces between the First and Second World Wars. In The Command of the Air (1921), the Italian general Giulio Douhet recognized the effects of bombing on civilian and military morale. Air power could break a people’s will by destroying a country’s “vital centers,” he argued. Douhet identified the six basic targets: industry, transport, infrastructure, communications, government, and “the will of the people.” The first four are targets in a military-systemic logic, while the last two could be consid182 Eyal Weizman

ered political or psychological objectives. The political objective of targeting is to compel the enemy leadership to negotiate a surrender on the attacker’s terms. Douhet was explicit about the fact that air war calls for the manipulation of civilian fear and suffering in order to achieve its political aims and that according to these terms an air war could be considered a terror war.20 When considering the political rationality of targeting, the killing of uninvolved civilians that the military calls “collateral damage” could no longer be simply considered the byproduct of the intention to hit military targets, but the very aim of bombing. Often, the political logic of targeting is hidden behind military rhetoric that argues for the logic of bombing according to the first two levels of planning, the mechanical and systemic, which are considered legal according to international law. For example, in Israeli military announcements during the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, Israeli targeting was explained according to a military logic, by Israel’s pointing to the destruction of airports, bridges, Hezbollah offices, launching sites, supply lines, infrastructure, and so on. Israeli announcements presented civilian casualties as the regrettable side effects of the military’s attempts to hit military or dual-use targets. However, the destruction of homes and the killing and displacement of civilians was the main lever of political pressure. This set of calculated acts has precedents in the logic of Israel’s military interventions in Lebanon, which often aimed to manipulate differences and existing hostilities within Lebanon’s complex social-political- ethnic fabric. The bombing in the 2006 war, according to Israeli speakers, aimed to turn the Lebanese populace against Hezbollah—a stratagem that was based on the assumption that a cold political calculus can triumph over vengeful rage in time of war. The creation of civilian casualties and their justification as “collateral damage” was part of an attempt to create a human catastrophe that could not be tolerated internationally and that would thus precipitate international intervention on Israel’s terms. The bombing of Shi‘ite towns and villages in the south was meant to force hundreds of thousands of civilians to flee north toward Beirut. There, Israel hoped, the refugee presence would put pressure on the government, who would in turn put pressure on the Hezbollah leadership to stop its military activities and disarm. Needless to say, these tactics led to crushing strategic failures. The refugees had neither the inclination nor the power to pressure the government in Lebanon or Hezbollah, and the bombings created nothing but public outrage and further support for Hezbollah.21

Thanato-tactics 183

TechnoLoGy insTead of occupaTion

Perennial overoptimism regarding air power has led successive generations of airmen to believe that unprecedented technological developments would allow wars to be won from the air. The role of new technology was to reduce uncertainty and increase control. The fantasy of a cheap aerial occupation, an “aerially enforced colonization,” is as old as air forces themselves. In the 1920s, Winston Churchill, as minister of war and air, was fascinated with what he perceived to be the economically efficient, quick, clean, mechanical, and impersonal alternatives that air power could provide to the otherwise onerous and expensive tasks of colonial control. Emboldened by a murderous aerial attack on a tribal leader in Somaliland in 1920 that put down a rebellion, Churchill suggested that aircraft be further adapted to the tasks of policing the empire. In 1922, Churchill persuaded the British government to invest in the air force and offer the Royal Air Force (rAF) 6 million pounds to take over control of the Mesopotamia operation from the army, an effort that had cost 18 million thus far.22 The policy, described as “control without occupation,” envisioned the rAF’s successfully replacing large and expensive army contingents. Sir Percy Cox, the high commissioner in Baghdad, reported that by the end of 1922, “on [at least] three occasions demonstrations by aircraft [have been sufficient to bring] tribal feuds to an end. On another occasion planes . . . dropped bombs on a sheik and his followers who refused to pay taxes, held up travelers and attacked a police station.”23 Arthur “Bomber” Harris (so called after his infamous bombing campaigns on German working- class districts when he was commander of the rAF’s bomber wing during the Second World War) reported after a mission in Iraq in 1924 that “the Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means, in casualties and damage. They know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.”24 The methods pioneered in Somaliland were also applied by the rAF against revolutionaries in Egypt, Darfur, India, Palestine (mainly during the 1936–39 Arab revolt), Jalalabad, and Kabul.25 Anticipating the logic of targeted assassinations, Harris later boasted that the Afghan war was won by a single strike on the king’s palace.26 A similar belief in “aerially enforced occupation” allowed the Israeli Air Force to attempt to replace the network of lookout outposts woven through the topography of the terrain by translating categories of “depth,” “stronghold,” “high point,” “closure,” and “panorama” into “air- defense in depth,” 184 Eyal Weizman

“clear skies,” “aerial reconnaissance,” “aerially enforced closure,” and “panoramic radar.” A “vacuum cleaner” approach to intelligence gathering included sensors aboard unmanned drones, aerial reconnaissance jets, attack helicopters, unmanned balloons, early warning Hawkeye planes, and military satellites that captured most signals out of Palestinian airspace. Since the beginning of the second intifada, the air force has put in hundreds of thousands of flight hours, harvesting a stream of information through its network of airborne reconnaissance platforms, information that was later put at the disposal of different intelligence agencies and command and control rooms. Distinctions must be maintained, however, between the kinds of operations that the IdF conducts in Gaza and those conducted in the West Bank, distinctions even more important after the “evacuation.” The degrees of violence that Israel employs in Gaza greatly exceed the levels of violence employed in the West Bank. These differences in military approach are shaped by differences in degrees of control over the territories and the populations in question. In the West Bank, Israel has a massive civilian presence of about half a million settlers and soldiers and an extensive ground military presence, whereas even before the evacuation, Gaza was always considered a territory that was hard for ground troops to enter. While Israeli soldiers have infiltrated Palestinian cities, villages, and refugee camps in the West Bank again and again, they have entered the larger and more impoverished refugee camps of Gaza much less often. The evacuation of Gaza made entry even more difficult, and the strip was thereafter controlled primarily from the air, but also from the territorial waters off its coastline and through border terminals along its fences. In the West Bank, as its former chief commander Yair Golan mentioned in 2007, the military seeks to maintain a constant degree of “effective friction” for both operational and intelligence purposes, bringing the Palestinian civilian population into constant contact with Israeli soldiers and other security personnel.27 The tactic of constant friction is maintained by the presence of settlements, roadblocks, checkpoints, and military offices for civilian administration. This infrastructure controls the population by constant harassment, as well as by modulating flows of people, goods, and services. Aerial assassinations in the West Bank have indeed ceased after Operation Defensive Shield in April 2002, when the IdF destroyed organized Palestinian police and military forces, as well as many government offices, and reinstated complete ground control over Palestinian population centers. Since Thanato-tactics 185

the end of 2002, assassinations in the West Bank have been undertaken from the ground, many of them under the pretext of arrest operations. According to figures released by B’Tselem, Israeli security forces killed 157 persons between 2004 and 2006 during operations referred to as “arrest operations.”28 The most common justification for IdF killings conducted during ground raids in the West Bank is that the victims “violently attempted to resist arrest,” but ground forces do not always allow militants to surrender, and often try to steer them away from it. The legal framework for targeted assassinations has developed in response to the pace of events. Immediately after the start of the second intifada, the head of the IdF’s International Law Department, Colonel Daniel Reisner, stated that due to the heightened level and frequency of Palestinian violence, Israel could start defining its military operations in the Occupied Territories as an “armed conflict short of war,” which placed the intifada in the context of international law, rather than criminal law.29 Such a definition implied that, for the purpose of their killing (but not their internment), members of militant Palestinian organizations could be seen as combatants and thus attacked at will, not only when in the process of a hostile action or while resisting arrest.30 Given that in international law, distinctions between “inside” and “outside” regulate the logic of security operations (“internal” operations are perceived as policing or security work; “external” ones as military) and that the definition of “inside” depends upon whether a state has “effective control” over the territory in question, the evacuation of the Gaza Strip strengthened Israel’s conviction that targeted assassinations are legal, and it has made assassinations more frequent.31 Politically, Israel expected that once it had evacuated the settlements and had retreated to the international border around Gaza, the international community would be more tolerant of these forms of military action.32 This implies that the tactics of airborne assassinations have developed in response to the Israeli military’s ceding territorial control or that the evacuation could be thought of as a means of facilitating the continuation of assassinations. The tactical precondition for Israel’s policy of territorial withdrawal was its security services’ ability to dominate the evacuated areas by means other than territorial control. The members of an IdF think tank called the Alternative Team, a group involved in rethinking Israeli security after the evacuation of Gaza, admitted, “Whether or not we are physically present in the territories, we should still be able to demonstrate our ability to control and affect them.”33 The occupation that they thought would follow the supposed end of the occupation—that is, the domination of Palestinians after the evacua186 Eyal Weizman

tion of the ground space of the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank was completed—was alternately referred to by these and other military planners as the “invisible occupation,” the “airborne occupation,” or “occupation in disappearance.”34 The ability of the Israeli Air Force to maintain a constant “surveillance and strike” capability over Palestinian areas was one of the main reasons for the popular support for and the Sharon government’s confidence in unilateral ground withdrawals. The logic of occupation was accordingly transformed. Sharon’s sacking of Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon and his replacement with the pilot and former air force commander Dan Halutz several months before the ground evacuation of Gaza testified to change in military emphasis from the ground to the air, and to the Israeli government’s acceptance of Halutz’s mantra, “technology instead of occupation.”35 Halutz, as head of the air force, supervised almost one hundred targeted assassination operations. Until the result of the 2006 war in Lebanon made him change his position, he was known as the strongest proponent of the claim that air power can gradually replace many of the traditional functions of ground forces. In a lecture he delivered at the National Security College in 2001, he explained that “the capability of the air force today renders some traditional assumptions— that victory equals territory—anachronistic,” and he even suggested any subsequent war in Lebanon could be won from the air.36 “Why do you need to endanger infantry soldiers?” he asked. “I can resolve the entire Lebanon [situation] from the air in 3 to 5 days—a week, maximum.”37 The approach that Halutz promoted was drafted in a military publication that was handed out to members of the senior staff in April 2006, two months before the second Lebanon war, explaining that in future conflicts, new military technology would allow for the transformation of warfare from conflicts based on maneuvers to conflicts based on “standoff capacity, precise fire and the deadly effects of invisible forces, without the need to resort to occupation and with minimum friction with the enemy and the civilian population.” The publication further emphasizes the importance of generating an “effect” on the enemy’s leadership, either by searing their consciousnesses or by their “decapitation.”38 While previously the IdF would cordon off an area with fences and earth dikes and place checkpoints on the approach roads, the current airborne occupation of Gaza enforces its closures by leafleting villages and refugee camps around the area to be shut off, declaring them off-limits and then targeting whoever tries to enter. In this manner, the evacuated settlements of Thanato-tactics 187

the northern part of Gaza have remained under closure ever since the 2005 evacuation. Following the evacuation, a procedure, codenamed “A Knock on the Door,” replaced military bulldozers with bomber jets for the purpose of demolishing houses. This new method involves an air force operator telephoning the house to be demolished, as happened on August 24, 2006, at the a-Rahman family home in the Jabalia refugee camp. On Thursday, August 10, 2006, at 11:30:24 in the evening, someone called the a-Rahman home, claiming to be from the IdF. The phone had been disconnected because the Palestinian phone company had not been paid, but the line was activated for the sake of this conversation. The wife of Abed a-Rahman, Um-Salem, answered the phone. On the other end of the line, a voice said, “Evacuate the house immediately and notify the neighbors.” Um-Salem asked, “Who is talking?” The answer: the IdF. Um-Salem tried to use the phone, but it was disconnected again. The family left the house, though they were unable to take anything with them. At 24:00, the house was bombed by military helicopters and was completely destroyed.39 This shows that “evacuation” could not be thought of as an act of decolonization, but rather as the reorganization of state power and control, the enactment of a technocolonial rule. For targeted assassinations to assume the preeminence they have among all other Israeli techniques of domination, they had to rely not only on the maturing of operational and technological developments, but also on legal and popular support. When all these components were put in place, less than a year after the beginning of the intifada, and with successful assassinations carried out routinely since then, the appetite for assassinations has grown. A central factor helping to maintain a high level of popular support for targeted assassinations was the daily terror alerts that the GSS under Avi Dichter routinely released. During the height of the intifada, from 2001 to 2003, between forty and fifty alerts were released daily, and Israeli popular support for targeted assassination, which seemed not only a response but a suitable revenge, stood at about 80 percent.40 In government meetings called to authorize the attacks, Sharon’s enthusiasm for successful assassinations encouraged the GSS and the military to pursue such operations with greater vigor. Given the high level of Israeli public support for targeted assassinations, no government minister could afford to let slip his or her opposition to the policy or to the timing of a particular assassination recommended by the GSS, lest that slip be leaked to the media. The partial relinquishment of control and the selective absence of government from decisions authorizing attacks encouraged the growing autonomy 188 Eyal Weizman

of the security services. With targeted assassination, security operatives filled the political vacuum of the intifada years, dictating developments on the ground. From their own perspectives, the GSS and the military believed that targeted assassinations provided the government with “military solutions to situations that were thought of as militarily unsolvable.” As the intifada wore on, an obsession with assassination gripped the entire Israeli security system, so much so that in a 2002 meeting called to discuss the assassination of several Palestinian leaders, a military officer suggested conducting one killing every day as a matter of policy. The minister of defense thought it was “indeed an idea,” and Sharon seemed excited about the plan, but the GSS recommended dropping the idea because the GSS, not the military, was supposed to decide where and when Palestinians should be killed. (At that point, in any case, killings were already being carried out at an average rate of one every five days.)41 The military and the GSS, confident in their ability to hit anybody, anywhere, at any time, started publishing in advance the names of those to be killed.42 According to a June 2003 statement by then chief of staff Ya’alon, targeted assassinations had become the continuation of politics by other means. “Liquidations,” he claimed, “gave the political levels a tool to create a change of direction.”43 The effects of targeted assassination on political developments were varied. One of its effects was assuring that no diplomatic process could be “forced” on Israel. Whenever a political initiative, local or international, seemed to emerge, threatening to return the parties to the negotiating table, an assassination followed and derailed it. Until the opening of government and GSS archives, it will be hard to establish this correlation beyond a doubt, but the following examples demonstrate a clear pattern of actions intended to radicalize conflicting parties even when the level of conflict could have been subdued. On July 31, 2001, the Israeli Air Force bombed an apartment building in Nablus in which a Hamas office was located, killing two boys and two Hamas leaders, Jamal Mansour and Jamal Salim, an attack that brought to an end a nearly two-month-long Hamas cease-fire. The GSS spent millions of shekels preparing for the January 2002 killing of Ra’ad Karmi, a leader in Fatah’s militant group, al-Tanzim. The assassination went forward, despite the fact that the killing was certain to bury an American diplomatic initiative and bring about the collapse of a cease-fire that started in December 2001. The assassination led to the spate of Palestinian suicide attacks of February and March 2002. On July 23, 2002, a day before al-Tanzim was to announce a unilateral cease-fire, Salah Shehadeh was assassinated, foreclosing this deThanato-tactics 189

velopment. A year later, at the beginning of the summer of 2003, another type of cease-fire, a hudna, or tactical truce, was declared, and another American diplomatic initiative was launched. As the truce was being formulated, on June 10, 2003, the military attempted to assassinate Abdul al-Aziz Rantisi, a political leader. A few weeks later, Israeli security forces targeted al-Tanzim militant Mahmoud Shawer in Qalqiliyah, derailing the initiative completely. On December 1, 2003, the same day that the Geneva Initiative was launched, the IdF conducted a massive operation attempting to kill Sheikh Ibrahim Hamed, head of Hamas in Ramallah. In June 2006, just as Mahmoud Abbas was about to declare a referendum vote on a progressive political initiative of the “prisoners’ document,” Israel targeted Jamal Abu Samhadana, the commander of the Popular Resistance Committees in Gaza, and the idea for the referendum was canceled.44 From the very start of the intifada, Palestinian political leaders were targets of assassination. At the end of August 2003, government authorization was given to kill the entire political leadership of Hamas in Gaza without further notice. A place on the assassination list was assured, according to Israeli speakers, to anyone who had crossed the threshold of being involved in planning terror attacks, but in fact the entire political wing of Hamas was placed on the list, regardless of whether or not the target was directly involved in operational planning. This method was referred to as opening the “hunting season.” The first leader to reveal himself would be the first to be killed. The stated intention was to weaken Hamas, but the action led to armed resistance against Israeli settlers, civilians, and the military and reinforced Fatah’s position in the Gaza Strip. The first one to be killed under these instructions was Ismail Abu Shanab, a relatively moderate political leader of Hamas who was targeted on August 21, 2003. On March 22, 2004, Israel assassinated the spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. A month later, on April 17, 2004, Yassin’s successor, Abdul al-Aziz Rantisi was killed. Dichter explained that the reason for these assassinations was to strengthen the position of Abbas and the moderates in the “Palestinian street.” At the beginning of 2006, when the “moderates” were ousted by the newly elected Hamas government, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz repeated the warning, promising that “no one will be immune” to assassination, including the Palestinian prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh.45 The logic behind these “decapitations” assumed that new leaders would not be as experienced as those who were killed and that the relative power of their organizations within the field

190 Eyal Weizman

of Palestinian politics would thus decline. “Killing,” according to Shimon Naveh, “injects energy into the enemy system, disrupting its institutional hierarchies.” Although, as Naveh has said, “there can be no precise prediction of the outcome of these killings,” the effect, according to the IdF, is a degree of institutional and political chaos that allows Israeli security forces to sit back and see “how the cards fall.” Not only assassination, but also its suspension, is being used as a weapon. Suspended credible threats of killing generate political effects regardless of the actual assassination taking place. The practical confirmation of this principle was paradoxically pronounced with its cancellation. In July 2007, as part of a package of gestures that the Israeli government “granted” to the Palestinian government of Mahmoud Abbas, Israel announced not only the release of Fatah prisoners (so that they could fight Hamas in the West Bank), but pardons as well for other activists who were on the target list. The IdF and the GSS offered, under certain conditions that included travel restrictions, to remove from the lists a number of Fatah activists and announced that there would be no attempt at arrest or assassination. The wanted Palestinians’ enthusiastic acceptance of the conditions imposed by the Israeli security forces to demonstrate the pressure that Palestinian militants felt from Israel’s death lists. At several other points during the intifada, Israel’s suspension of targeted assassinations was used as an incentive to reach a cease-fire on Israel’s terms. “Radical” Palestinian leaders could be assassinated to open the way for a more “pragmatic” politics. “Pragmatic” leaders could be assassinated in order to open the way for direct confrontation or to stave off a diplomatic initiative. Other assassinations could have been undertaken in order to “restore order,” others still to “create chaos.” Some assassinations would be undertaken simply because they could be undertaken and because no one happened to intervene to stop the assassination machine. Theorizing about the political effects of targeted assassinations has almost become an industry unto itself, heavily populated with intelligence analysts, game theorists, and other statistically oriented behavioral scientists—many of whom seem addicted to a jargon that is aimed at making unthinkable state behavior appear intelligent, responsible, rational, and inevitable. A considerable part of Israel’s security logic of assassination is grounded in the bias of Israel’s intelligence agencies toward personality analysis. The Israeli sociologist Gil Eyal demonstrated that the Israeli intelligence services,

Thanato-tactics 191

in accord with a long Orientalist tradition, have tended to seek motives for political developments, as well as for terror attacks, not in responses to a history of repression or in pursuit of rational political goals, but in the personal irrationalities, idiosyncrasies, and inconsistencies of Arab leaders.46 When undertaken, political and economic analysis has generally provided no more than a context for the work of psychological profiling.47 The natural consequence of this logic has been the belief that in killing, Israel’s security services remove not only a leader, but also the cause of a political or security problem. Understanding of the resistance to the occupation, in turn, has similarly been bound up with a focus on certain key figures, while the causes behind resistance have been ignored. Although so much effort has been put into modeling enemy behavior, and despite the fact that the security services remain confident in their methods, years of targeted assassinations have not managed to limit violence, nor have they reduced Palestinian motivations for resistance, strengthened President Mahmoud Abbas, or reinforced “the moderates in the Palestinian street.” On the contrary, assassinations have fed the conflict by seeding terror, uncertainty, and rage and by promoting social chaos, creating further motivations for violent retaliations and dramatically increasing Palestinian popular support for acts of terror. Assassinations have thus contributed to the actual emergence of the threat they were purportedly there to preempt. In this respect, Israel’s security organizations have not “restored order,” but have acted as the agents of chaos. Israeli order is preserved by the systematic destruction of Palestinian order. The power of targeted assassinations to affect politics has been most strongly felt within the Israeli political system itself. From the beginning of 2004, when the political debates regarding the evacuation of Gaza settlements began, to June 6, 2004, when the “disengagement plan” came to a vote and was authorized by the Israeli government, targeted assassinations were accelerated, leading to the death of thirty-three Palestinians. In anticipation of the evacuation operation itself, scheduled for August 2005, the level of assassinations increased again, making July 2005 the bloodiest month of that year. This bloodshed helped Sharon present himself as “tough on terror,” while pursuing a policy that was understood in Israel as left leaning. In this manner, targeted assassinations and the supposed ability of the Israeli Air Force to maintain a constant “surveillance and strike” capability over Palestinian areas paradoxically increased the support for “territorial compromise” embodied in the ground evacuation of Gaza. 192 Eyal Weizman

The “humaniTarian” War

The policy of targeted assassination continuously met with domestic and international criticism that generated technological and procedural innovations purportedly aimed at the practice’s self-moderation and reducing the deaths of bystanders. The transformation in the procedures and technology of airborne assassinations accelerated after the protests that followed the death and destruction caused by the 2002 attack on Salah Shehade and increased significantly following the announced refusal of several Israeli Air Force Reserve pilots to take part in such missions if called on to do so.48 On the one hand, the security forces sought to improve legal arguments and moral justifications for the assassinations, and on the other, they sought to improve the precision of intelligence and attacks so that fewer bystanders would get hurt. The first approach was exemplified by an IdF invitation to Asa Kasher, a distinguished professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University, to provide an ordered ethical defense for targeted assassinations. The resulting “principles of military ethics in fighting terror,” developed by Kasher and a team of officers from the IdF’s College of National Defense, exemplified the intersection of military efficiency with ethical considerations. It emphasized the standard of self- defense and outlined the military’s obligation to reduce the level of civilian casualties. Assassinations were argued for not as retribution for acts of terror already committed, but as responses to potential threats. Unlike acts deemed illegal under criminal law, airborne executions were to be considered legal (and moral) not in response to what a person has done, but to what he may do. The document has been approved by the chief of staff and accepted as the IdF’s standard ethical reference for these attacks.49 Around the time the document was approved, the air force began to employ operatives whose task was to minimize “collateral deaths.” Using cameras on auxiliary drones, they observed the surrounding context of an impending attack in order to judge the “safest” moment to launch missiles. These specialists have effectively become the “trigger” of the operation, deciding what level of danger Palestinian bystanders could be acceptably subjected to. As one of these operators explained to me, they see their work not as facilitating assassinations, but as saving lives, minimizing the slaughter that would undoubtedly have occurred were they not there to maintain vigilance.50 Three years later, responding to the widespread condemnation of an attack in March 2006 that killed a man and two children, the chief of the air force, Eliezer Shakedy, called a press conference at which he claimed that the air Thanato-tactics 193

force makes “superhuman efforts in order to reduce the number of innocent civilian casualties in aerial strikes.”51 To prove his claims, he projected charts that numerically “demonstrated” how the air force had reduced the ratio between the victims of aerial raids that it defined as “combatants” and those victims it was willing to concede were “noncombatants” or “uninvolved civilians.” The charts indicated the death of one “uninvolved person” for every target of assassination in 2002 and one civilian death for every twenty-five targets killed in 2005.52 Data collected by the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem show that the military figures were skewed—largely because the military included within the definition of “combatants” any adult man who happened to be in the vicinity of the assassination.53 But even according to their own studies, as well as Palestinian studies, the number of “noncombatant” victims has radically decreased. The change was due both to technological innovations in the warhead and the missile system, and to a change in the command and regulation of the attacks. Most technological developments were related to the mechanical level of the attacks, the design of the warhead. As part of its attempt to reduce unintended casualties, Israel’s Armament Development Authority, otherwise known as Rafael, developed the Spike missile to replace the U.S.made Hellfire, a laser-guided antitank missile, for the purpose of targeted assassinations. The Spike is a small, joystick-navigated “kamikaze” drone with an “optical head.”54 Rafael also developed the Firefly, a missile with an even smaller warhead.55 Clips from the “kamikaze” cameras on “smart missiles” and from other airborne sensors were routinely broadcast in the popular media to support IdF refutations of Palestinian accusations of indiscriminate killing, and to focus political and public resolve for the further application of this tactic. The images and videos from these munitions are as much a media product as they are “operation footage.”56 In the summer of 2006, a new type of explosive started to be used in missiles shot in targeted assassinations. The fact that new munitions were used became apparent when doctors in Gaza hospitals started receiving Palestinian victims with horrifying burn wounds, amputations, and internal burns never seen before. A former Israeli Air Force officer and head of the IdF’s weapons- development program, Yitzhak Ben-Israel, explained that these new munitions—referred to as “focused lethality munitions” or “munitions of low collateral damage”—were designed to produce a blast more lethal, but also of smaller radius than traditional explosives. “This technology allows [the military] to strike very small targets . . . without causing damage to by194 Eyal Weizman

standers or other persons.” Medical and forensic research led an independent Italian investigative team to believe that these munitions were dense, inert metal explosives, or dIMEs.57 At the end of November 2006, the Israeli government wanted to demonstrate, in response to local and international protests regarding the killing of civilians, that it was acting to further regulate targeted assassinations. It established a “legal committee” to rule on the assassination of individuals, with the assassinations of senior political leaders subject to the opinion of the attorney general. A few weeks later, on December 14, 2006, in response to petitions by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel and the Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment (known by its Arabic acronym, LAW), the Israeli High Court of Justice issued a ruling in which other regulatory directives were outlined: assassinations were to take place only when there is “well-founded, strong and persuasive information as to the identity [of the person targeted for assassination] and his activity”; only if assassinations could help curtail terror attacks; only if other more moderate uses of force, such as arrest, could not take place without gravely endangering the lives of soldiers; and only if the assassination does not lead to “disproportionate collateral harm to innocent civilians.”58 Regardless of whether these measures have reduced or will reduce the deaths of bystanders in targeted assassinations, a critical perspective cannot exonerate the practice of assassination. Instead, such a perspective must contend with the nature of the claims that these and other military developments in the technology, techniques, and proficiency of targeted assassination will eventually bring about fewer unintended deaths. Otherwise, one would have to accept the Israeli terms of a necroeconomy in which a “lesser evil” or “lesser evils,” represented by a lower body count, should be measured against an imaginary or real, present or future “greater evil,” in the form of more suffering and death on both sides.59 The problem of the lesser evil presents itself in situations where the available options seem to be limited. The conditions in which the choice between lesser and greater evil presents itself affirms an economic model embedded in the heart of ethics, and according to which various forms of suffering can be calculated (as if they were algorithms in mathematical minimum problems), evaluated, and acted upon. The articulation of the dilemma of the lesser evil has its origin in the classical philosophy of ethics and in theology, and it has been invoked in a staggeringly diverse set of contexts, from individual situational ethics to political choices to international relations. It has Thanato-tactics 195

recently been invoked in the context of attempts to govern the economics of violence in the context of the “war on terror” and to moderate the power of brutal regimes, but it has also been invoked to maneuver through the paradoxes and complicities of human rights and humanitarian aid. In relation to the “global war on terror,” the terms of this argument were recently articulated by the human rights scholar and now deputy leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, Michael Ignatieff. Ignatieff claims that in the war on terror democratic societies may need to establish state mechanisms to regulate the breach of some rights and allow their security services to engage in other covert and unsavory state actions—in his eyes, a lesser evil—in order to fend off or to minimize potential greater evils such as terror attacks.60 Ignatieff is even willing to consider Israeli targeted assassinations under conditions similar to those articulated by the Israeli High Court of Justice as “qualifying within the effective moral-political framework of the lesser evil.”61 For Alan Dershowitz, one of the most vocal apologists for Israel in the United States, “targeted assassination [is] the polar opposite of collective punishment” and is therefore not only legal, but, under the conditions stated above, ethical.62 In the terms of this necroeconomy, targeted assassinations are to be understood as the lesser evil, the alternative to possible greater evils that could befall Israelis, but that could hurt Palestinians as well. Israel, which undertakes these operations, would like Palestinians to understand that, beyond Israel’s protecting its own population, the use of targeted assassinations helps Israel restrain more brutal measures that would affect the entire Palestinian population, that targeted assassinations kill only—or mostly—the “guilty.” According to former chief of staff Ya‘alon, “Focused obstructions are important because they [communicate to the Palestinians that Israelis] make a distinction between the general public and the instigator of terror.”63 As I mentioned above, however, the intelligence necessary for targeted assassinations relies on “collective measures” such as mass arrests and the checkpoint-terminal system. However, as Adi Ophir has suggested, this conception of the lesser evil is problematic even according to the terms of its own proposed economy. This economy of violence assumes lesser evil means less violence, but questions of violence are forever unpredictable. The supposed lesser evil may always be more violent than the violence it opposes, and there can be no end to the challenges that stem from the impossibility of calculation. A less brutal tactic is one that may also be more easily naturalized, accepted, and tolerated.64 When exceptional means are normalized, they can be more frequently ap196 Eyal Weizman

plied. Elevating targeted assassinations into a legally and morally acceptable practice makes them part of the state’s legal options, part of a list of counterterrorism techniques, with all sense of horror lost. Because they help normalize low-intensity conflict, the overall duration of the conflict can be extended and a greater number of lesser evils can be committed, with the result that the greater evil is committed. Lesser evils can bring about greater evils, even according to the very economy they invoke. But because lesser evil arguments measure and compromise only Palestinian life and rights for the sake of Israeli security, which stands as a nonnegotiable or unmeasured absolute value, they cannot be understood as properly moral arguments and should simply be understood according to the Israeli utilitarian logic of warfare, the efficiency of that warfare, and the way it is mediated locally and internationally. Cases of colonial powers’ seeking to justify themselves with the rhetoric of improvement, civility, and reform appear throughout colonial history. An analogous phenomenon that can help clarify the paradox of the lesser evil can be observed in the IdF’s use of rubber- coated steel munitions. Soldiers believe that “rubber bullets” are nonlethal munitions and that their use demonstrates restraint in situations that are not life threatening. But this perception leads to their more frequent and indiscriminate use, causing death and permanent injury to many Palestinian demonstrators, mainly children.65 Similarly, the purported military ability to perform “controlled,” “elegant,” “pinhead accurate,” and “discriminate” killing can bring about more destruction and death than “traditional” strategies do, because these methods, combined with the manipulative and euphoric rhetoric used to promulgate them, induce decision makers to authorize their frequent and extended use. The illusion of precision, here part of a rhetoric of restraint, gives the militarypolitical apparatus the necessary justification to use explosives in civilian environments where they could not be used without injuring or killing civilians. The less violence a certain tactic is believed to effect, the more frequent its application tends to become. The lesser evil approach used to moderate Israel’s war on the Palestinians and to normalize Israeli control led the IdF to inaugurate, in the middle of 2003, the “Another Life” program, whose aim was to “minimize the damage to the Palestinian life fabric in order to avoid the humanitarian crisis that will necessitate the IdF to completely take over the provision of food and services to the Palestinian population.”66 This program has turned “humanitarianism” into a strategic category in Israeli military operations and has influenced Thanato-tactics 197

the design of its various instruments of control. Indeed, “humanitarian” has become the most common buzzword in various matters of occupation design, with the designation of “humanitarian gates,” “humanitarian terminals,” “humanitarian technology,” and “humanitarian awareness,” as well as—according to a procedure already put in effect since the beginning of the intifada—a “humanitarian officer” (usually a middle-aged reserve soldier) employed in checkpoints to smooth the process of passage and to mediate between the needs of Palestinians and the orders of soldiers. The paradox of the lesser evil further affects most practitioners who operate the various systems in the ecology of the occupation: the army commander who, according to international law, is responsible for the territories under his domination and who attempts to administer Palestinian life (and death) in an enlightened manner; the security agents who introduce new spatiotechnological means of domination (arguing those means are more humane) and who generate new types of powers; the Palestinian civilian who is the subject of this regime, sometimes assisted by human rights organizations and lawyers, lodging petitions challenging the legality of those means and powers; the human rights lawyer and campaigner who represents the struggle for human rights and civil liberties in those territories, but who affirms the logic of the system; the humanitarian agent providing life-sustaining substances and medical help and who thus sustains the occupation; the Palestinian administrator, the politicians, the intellectuals—and so on. Israel has learned to use the work of Palestinian, international, and Israeli organizations to fill the void left by a dysfunctional Palestinian Authority and to manage life in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. In spite of the fundamental moral differences between these groups, the logic of the lesser evil allows for moments of cooperation between organizations whose stated aims are widely different. Indeed, the urgent and important criticism that peace organizations often level at the IdF, that it is dehumanizing its enemies, masks another more dangerous process by which the military incorporates into its operations the logic of, and even seeks to cooperate directly with, the very humanitarian and human rights organizations that oppose it. Israeli theorist Ariella Azoulay has claimed that although the Israeli government has brought the Occupied Territories to the verge of hunger, Israel tries to control the flow of traffic, money, and aid in such a way as to prevent the situation’s reaching a point of total collapse because of the international intervention, possibly under a un mandate, that might follow.67 It is in this “pragmatic” approach that the principle of lesser evil justifies 198 Eyal Weizman

and naturalizes crimes and other forms of injustice, and masks political responsibilities. By accepting the necessity of choosing the lesser evil, oppositional and advocacy groups accept the validity of the systems that have imposed these choices, a choice blocking possible ways to struggle against and refute the logic of the governmental rationality that grounds them. Writing about the collaboration and cooperation of ordinary Germans (mainly those employed in the civil service, but also those employed by the Jewish councils set up by the Nazis) with the Nazi regime, Hannah Arendt explained that the argument for the lesser evil had become one of the most important “mechanisms built into the machinery of terror and crimes.” She explained that “acceptance of lesser evils [had been] consciously used in conditioning the government officials as well as the population at large to the acceptance of evil as such,” causing “those who choose the lesser evil [to] forget very quickly that they chose evil.” She further claims that the practical consequences of rejecting lesser evil are not so dire, if enough people refuse to participate in criminal state behavior, rather than engage in moderating it.68 Against all those who stayed in Germany to make things better from within, against all acts of collaboration, especially those undertaken for the sake of the moderation of harm, against the argument that the lesser evil of collaboration with brutal regimes is acceptable, Arendt called for individual disobedience and collective disorder. Participation, she insisted, communicates consent. Moreover, it hands support to the oppressor. When nothing else is possible, to do nothing is the least effective form of resistance, and the practical consequences of refusal are almost always better if enough people refuse. In her essay “The Eggs Speak Up,” a sarcastic reference to Stalin’s dictum that “you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs,” Arendt pleaded for “a radical negation of the whole concept of lesser evil in politics.”69 The moral principle of the lesser evil could be discerned in the legal category of “proportionality” employed by the High Court of Justice when it was called to rule on matters relating to “security” and “human rights” considerations in the context of the occupation. According to the principle of “proportionality,” the state must weigh alternative security measures in a way that balances security needs against the livelihood of the Palestinian inhabitants. Because of the constant international criticism of the occupation, it is always in the interest of the state to moderate its violence and take into account the “humanitarian issues” arising from occupation, thereby deflecting attention from the fundamental illegitimacy of the entire project. Although Thanato-tactics 199

the High Court of Justice often seems to adopt a profoundly adversarial position toward the government, by moderating the attitudes of the military and “balancing” rights against security, the court has effectively taken part in the very logic by which the occupation works.70 When, in the aftermath of the court’s rulings, the military began using the vocabulary of international law, principles such as “proportionality” started to become compatible with military goals such as “efficiency,” helping make military action more economical. In this sense, the lesser evil argument relates to the discursive nature of warfare and especially to the discursive nature of low-intensity war. Military threats can function only if gaps are maintained between the possible destruction that an army can inflict in the application of its full destructive capacity and the actual destruction that it does inflict. Restraint allows for the possibility of further escalation.71 A degree of restraint is thus part of the logic of almost every conventional military operation: however bad military attacks may appear to be, they could always get worse. At the moment when this gap between the possible and the actual application of force closes, war is no longer a language, and violence is stripped of semiotics and simply aims to make the enemy disappear as a subject.72 The promoters of the instruments, techniques, and rhetoric supporting such lesser evils believe that by developing and perfecting tactics of lesser evil, they restrain the government and the security forces, which would otherwise succeed in further radicalizing violence. Proponents of lesser evil believe targeted assassinations are the more moderate alternative to the military’s devastating capacity for destruction, to a full-scale invasion or the renewal of territorial occupation, should the enemy exceed an “acceptable” level of violence or breach some unspoken agreement in the violent discourse of attacks and retaliations. Confirming this logic only a few weeks before the June 2006 invasion of Gaza, air force chief Shakedy, arguing for targeted assassinations, explained that “the only alternative to aerial attacks is a ground operation and the reoccupation” of Gaza, that targeted assassination “is the most precise tool we have.”73 The reoccupation of Gaza starting in June 2006 and the Lebanon war from July to August 2006 demonstrated that more destructive alternatives are always possible, especially when the “unwritten rules” of low-intensity conflict are perceived to have been broken. From the June 28, the day an Israeli soldier was kidnapped in Gaza, until December 2006, over 500 Palestinians were killed, including 88 minors, and more than 2,700 were injured.74 Forty-six million dollars of infrastructure, including a power plant and 270 200 Eyal Weizman

private residences, was destroyed. This should be understood as an eruption of violence meant to sustain the threat of greater measures. In terms of their justification, targeted assassinations exist at the middle of the spectrum between war and peace. Naturally, I am not suggesting that greater evils should be preferred to lesser ones or that wars should be more brutal. Rather, I am suggesting that we question the very terms of the economy of evil, the system that has presented its choice as inevitable. The dilemma, if we are still to think in those terms, should not only be about which of the bad options to choose, but whether to choose at all, whether to accept the very terms of the question. When asked to choose between the two horns of an angry bull, Robert Pirsig suggested alternatives: one can “refuse to enter the arena,” “throw sand in the bull’s eyes,” or even “sing the bull to sleep.”75 The positioning of the lesser evil dilemma is integral to political militarism—a culture that sees violence as a permanent rule of history and thus military contingencies as the principal alternative available to politicians. Israeli militarism has always sought military solutions to political problems.76 Locked within the limits defined by degrees of violence, Israel continually forecloses the exploration of other avenues for negotiation and participation in a genuine political process. At the beginning of 2006, Chief of Staff Dan Halutz expressed this view that “the Intifada is part of an un-resolvable . . . permanent conflict between Jews and Palestinians that started in 1929.” The military, according to Halutz, must therefore gear itself to operate within an environment saturated with conflict, in a future of permanent violence. With this, he echoed a claim often recurring within the Israeli security discourse. In June 1977, Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan explained the presumption that Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians could be “solved” was fundamentally flawed. “The question,” for Dayan, was not, “‘What is the solution?’ but ‘How do we live without a solution?’”77 The lesser evil approach bolsters Israeli unilateralism, the perception that there is no partner, the idea of infinite conflict. Ground occupation is projected as a necessary evil in the West Bank, and assassinations as a necessary evil in Gaza. In the absence of both options—a political solution on the one hand or the possibility of a decisive military outcome on the other—the Israeli military merely “manages the conflict.” The ideology of the lesser evil, and the lesser evil occupation, has replaced a quest for justice. At the beginning of 2006, Halutz still thought that the precision methods of the Israeli Air Force would help keep the conflict “on a flame low enough for Israeli soThanato-tactics 201

ciety to be able to live and to prosper within it.”78 The projection of endless war will, in all likelihood, effect the war it projects. noTes

1. Ephraim Segoli (former commander, Palmahim Air Force Base), interviewed by author, May 22, 2006, Tel Aviv. 2. B’Tselem, “Statistics: Fatalities,” available at http://www.btselem.org/. 3. This study will update and revise my previous work on the subject. See chapter 9, Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007). 4. In “Necropolitics,” Mbembe follows Foucault to argue that sovereignty is located not only within the institutions of the geographically defined nation-state or, as postmodern thinkers suggest, within the operational networks of supranational institutions, but in the capacity of power to make decisions regarding life and death. According to Foucault, the other side of the politics that engages with the management of life (biopolitics) is the administration of death (thanatopolitics). See Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 25, and Mbembe, “Necropolitics.” 5. Segoli, interview. 6. See Raviv Druker and Ofer Shelah, Boomerang (Jerusalem: Keter Press, 2005), 161–216 (in Hebrew). 7. Aharon Yoffe, “Focus Preemption, Chances and Dangers,” Nativ 109, no. 2 (March 2006) (in Hebrew). See also Yedidia Ya’ari and Haim Assa, Diffused Warfare: War in the 21st Century (Tel Aviv: Miskal—Yediot Aharonot and Chemed, 2005), 37 (in Hebrew). The book is the summary of positions developed within the “Alternative Team” and under the influence of the Operational Theory Research Institute (otrI). Yedidya Ya’ari, the former commander of the Israeli Navy, and Haim Asa, a former member of a comparable Israeli Air Force think tank, directed the team. Affiliated with it were air force pilot Dror Ben David, Brigadier General Gadi Eisenkott, and Brigadier General Aviv Kochavi. General Benni Gantz was assigned to implement this study within the Israeli Defense Forces. The Alternative Team was operating in cooperation with the U.S. Transformation Group under the U.S. secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld. In 2006, the Israeli chief of staff, Dan Halutz, dismantled the Alternative Team. There was a large number of parallel and smaller teams with similar aims, such as the Military Research Centre for the Study of the Tactical Environment, directed by Gabrial Siboni. See Gabrial Siboni, “The Importance of Activity,” Bamahane (December 31, 2004): 14–18. Bamahane (meaning “in the camp”) is the IdF’s official journal, published in Hebrew. 8. Brigadier General (ret.) Shimon Naveh (former director of the otrI), interviewed by author, September 15, 2005 (by telephone), March 7, 2006 (by telephone), and April 11, 2006, and May 22 and 23, 2006 (at an Israeli Army Intelligence military base in Glilot, near Tel Aviv). All English transcripts and translations of the interviews were sent to Naveh for confirmation of their content. All quotes attributed to Naveh are derived from the above interviews.

202 Eyal Weizman

9. Former member of Unit 504, interviewed by author, May 2006. Interviewee preferred to remain anonymous. 10. Robert Fisk, “Death by Remote Control as Hit Squads Return,” Independent, May 13, 2001. 11. Neve Gordon, “Rationalizing Extra-Judicial Executions: The Israeli Press and the Legitimization of Abuse,” International Journal of Human Rights 8, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 305. In 2005, Ha’aretz, Israel’s liberal daily, started to publish, as a matter of policy, the names of Palestinians killed by Israel in all its military operations. 12. B’Tselem, “IdF Helicopter Missile-Fire Kills Four Palestinian Civilians and Wounds Dozens,” August 2002, available at http://www.btselem.org/. 13. Orna Ben-Naftali and Keren Michaeli, “‘We Must Not Make a Scarecrow of the Law’: A Legal Analysis of the Israeli Policy of Targeted Killings,” Cornell International Law Journal 36, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 234, n. 22. 14. See Naomi Klein, “Laboratory for a Fortressed World,” The Nation, July 2, 2007, wherein Klein notes, “Another star of the Paris Air Show will be Israeli defense giant Elbit, which plans to showcase its Hermes 450 and 900 unmanned air vehicles. As recently as May, according to press reports, Israel used the drones on bombing missions in Gaza. Once tested in the territories, they are exported abroad: the Hermes has already been used at the Arizona-Mexico border.” 15. In November 2002, a car traveling in a remote part of Yemen was destroyed by a missile fired from an unmanned Predator drone, killing six suspected members of al-Qaeda. While the U.S. administration did not publicly acknowledge responsibility for the attack, officials let it be known that the cIA had carried it out. The June 2006 killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the January 2006 attempt to kill Ayman alZawahiri were undertaken from the air. Previous strikes killed Mohammed Atef, alQaeda’s military chief, and Hamza Rabia, a senior operative in Pakistan. Currently, the U.S. military plans to double the number of Predator and Global Hawk drones used for surveillance and targeting. See Anthony Dworkin, “The Yemen Strike: The War on Terrorism Goes Global,” Crimes of War Project, November 14, 2002, available at http://www.crimesofwar.org/; Chris Downes, “‘Targeted Killing’ in an Age of Terror: The Legality of the Yemen Strike,” Journal of Conflict and Security Law 9, no. 2 (2004): 277–79. 16. Ludwig von Bertalanffy defines a system as a complex of interacting elements. Thus, a system’s problems, according to Bertalanffy, are problems of the interrelations of a great number of variables that occur in the field of politics, economics, industry, commerce, and military conduct. See Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications (New York: George Braziller, 1976). In military discourse, systems analysis originated after the end of the Second World War and was instrumental in the conception in 1982 of the U.S. military doctrine of “Airland Battle,” which emphasized targeting an enemy at its systematic bottlenecks— bridges, headquarters, and supply lines—in an attempt to throw an enemy’s system of operation off balance. It was conceived to check Soviet invasion in Central Europe and was first applied in the Gulf War of 1991. The advance of this line of thinking

Thanato-tactics 203

led to the development of the network-centric warfare doctrine in the context of the Revolution in Military Affairs (rMA) after the Cold War. (In fact, what the military refers to as “networks”—implying the nonhierarchical cooperation of dispersed parts—should technically be referred to as “systems,” which are distributed structures with a centralized command.) In the context of the IdF, systems analysis is used both for air and ground forces. One of the main promoters of systems theory and analysis is Shimon Naveh. (See note 8.) 17. The idea of people as infrastructure was developed in another context—that of African cities. See AbdouMaliq Simone, “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg,” Public Culture 3 (fall 2004): 407–29. 18. This logic was reflected in a March 2006 presentation to U.S. security personnel at the Washington, D.C., Brookings Institution by Avi Dichter, the former chief of the GSS. Dichter, the driving force behind the tactical success and frequent application of targeted assassinations, observed that “by eliminating . . . generators of terror through arrests (the preferred method) or by targeted killings (if absolutely necessary), a state can greatly disrupt the operations of terrorist organizations.” See Avi Dichter and Daniel Byman, “Israel’s Lessons for Fighting Terrorists and Their Implications for The United States” (Analysis Paper Number 8), March 2006, the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institute, Washington, D.C. 19. Naveh, interview. 20. Giulio Douhet, Command of the Air (1921; repr., London: Ayer, 1942). 21. However, an important distinction must still be maintained. The military tactics the IdF employs in Lebanon are strategically distinct from those employed in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. According to political scientist James Ron, Israel used degrees of violence in Lebanon that greatly exceed those used in the Occupied Territories, and consequently, casualty figures in Lebanon were much higher than those in the West Bank and Gaza. Ron explains that these differences in military approach are shaped by differences in degrees of control over territory and population. In the Occupied Territories, enclosed within Israeli- controlled territory, Israel still bears some responsibility for the welfare of the populations, whereas in Lebanon— which is completely beyond the state’s frontier—the civilian population could be attacked with ferocity without economic and other repercussions to Israel. James Ron, Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 22. Sven Linqvist, A History of Bombing, trans. Linda Haverty Rugg (New York: New Press, 2000), entry 101. 23. Philip Anthony Towle, Pilots and Rebels: The Use of Aircraft in Unconventional Warfare, 1918–1988 (London: Brassey’s Defence, 1989), 17; David Willard Parsons, “British Air Control: A Model for the Application of Air Power in Low-Intensity Conflict?” Airpower Journal (Summer 1994). 24. Quoted in Lt. Col. David J. Dean, uSAF, “Air Power in Small Wars: The British Air Control Experience,” Air University Review 34, no. 5 (July–August 1985). 25. Dean, “Air Power in Small Wars.” David Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control: The

204 Eyal Weizman

Royal Air Force 1919–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990). David MacIsaac, “Voices from the Central Blue, The Air Power Theorists,” in Makers of Modern Strategy, From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. by Peter Paret (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 624–47, especially 633. 26. Linqvist, A History of Bombing, entry 102. 27. Brigadier General Yair Golan, in a discussion with the research group for the study of catastrophization in the Occupied Territories at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, April 20, 2007. 28. Ronen Shnayderman, “Take No Prisoners: The Fatal Shooting of Palestinians by Israeli Security Forces during ‘Arrest Operations,’” B’Tselem, May 2005, trans. Shaul Vardi, available at http://www.btselem.org/. See also Al-Haq, “Indiscriminate and Excessive Use of Force: Four Palestinians Killed During Arrest Raid, May 24, 2006,” available at http://www.alhaq.org/. 29. David Kretzmer, “Targeted Killing of Suspected Terrorists: Extra-Judicial Executions or Legitimate Means of Defense?” European Journal of International Law 16, no. 2 (2005): 196. 30. Press briefing by Colonel Daniel Reisner, director of the International Law Department of the IdF Legal Division, Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, November 15, 2000, available at http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/. 31. The Israeli legal scholar Eyal Benvenisti claimed that the proper measure to judge whether Israel continues to be bound by the obligations of an occupying power is the facts on the ground: “If there were areas under Palestinian control, they were not subject to Israeli occupation.” See Eyal Benvenisti, “Israel and the Palestinians: What Laws Were Broken,” Crimes of War Project, available at http://www.crimesofwar. org/expert/me-intro.html. Charles Shamas, a Ramallah-based legal expert, joined others in claiming that since Israel still exercises effective control over movement between localities, over the supply of goods, and over access to natural resources, it has, in effect, authority over the enactment of Palestinian legislation and therefore continues to be bound by the duties of an occupying power. Compare, as well, Baruch Kimmerling’s notion of “system of control” in “Boundaries and Frontiers of the Israeli Control System,” in The Israeli State and Society: Boundaries and Frontiers, ed. Bruce Kimmerling (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 265–84. 32. Indeed, after the evacuation of Gaza, the IdF became even more willing to employ violence against the Palestinians. In 2006 alone, Israeli forces killed 405 Palestinians in Gaza, half of them civilians, including 88 minors. During the same year, Israel killed 22 Palestinians in targeted assassinations. Following a certain decline in 2007 (293 Palestinians killed in Gaza, approximately one-third of them civilians) the level of violence peaked again in the beginning of 2008. According to B’Tselem, in only one week, from February 27 to the afternoon of March 3, 106 Palestinians were killed in the Gaza Strip, at least 54 of whom were civilians. In June 2006, Israel bombed the electric grid in Gaza, cutting off 700,000 people from electricity, and has restricted electricity and fuel supplies to Gaza ever since. For data on causalities see, respectively, B’Tselem, “683 people Killed in the Conflict in 2006,” available at http://www

Thanato-tactics 205

.btselem.org; B’Tselem, “Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, 2007 Annual Report,” available at http://www.btselem.org/; and B’Tselem, “Contrary to Israel’s Chief of Staff, at least Half of Those Killed in Gaza Did Not Take Part in the Fighting,” press release, March 3, 2008, available at http://www.btselem.org/. 33. Ya’ari and Assa, Diffused Warfare, 9–13. 34. The last of the terms was coined in a joint program between the former commander of a fighter squadron, Dror Ben David, and researchers at the otrI. 35. Halutz constantly defended the technology behind his airborne assassinations, even though it has regularly taken the lives of many bystanders. When asked for his reaction to the death of many civilians in an operation of targeted assassination, he famously retorted, “If you want to know what I feel when I release a bomb, I will tell you: I feel a light bump to the plane as a result of the bomb’s release. A second later, it’s gone, and that’s all. That is what I feel.” See Vered Levy-Barzilai, “Halutz: The High and the Mighty,” Ha’aretz, August 21, 2002. 36. Israel Harel, “The IdF Protects Itself,” Ha’aretz, August 29, 2006. 37. Amir Rapaport, “Dan Halutz Is a Bluff, Interview with Shimon Naveh,” Ma‘ariv, Yom Kippur supplement, October 1, 2006 (in Hebrew). 38. Ofer Shelah and Yoav Limor, Captives of Lebanon (Tel Aviv: Miskal—Yedioth Aharonoth and Chemed, 2007), 199 (in Hebrew). 39. Darryl Li, “Gaza Consultancy—Research Findings, 20 to 27 August 2006,” draft submitted to B’Tselem, September 10, 2006, testimony number 3287, unpublished. 40. A Gallup Poll published in Ma‘ariv, August 10, 2001, revealed that 76 percent of the public polled supported assassinations. In later years, and as a result of the killing of many bystanders, public support dropped considerably. In June 2003, at the start of the campaign to assassinate the leadership of Hamas, an opinion poll by the daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth found that 58 percent of Israelis polled said the military should at least temporarily discontinue targeted killings. After the “disengagement” from Gaza and a persistent rocket shelling on neighboring Israeli towns and villages, support for assassination grew again. On January 6, 2003, Ha’aretz estimated support for shelling to be more than 80 percent. See Druker and Shelah, Boomerang, 216. 41. Ibid., 161. 42. “The IdF Published a List of Seven ‘Assassination Candidates,’” Ha’aretz, July 6, 2001. 43. Ya’ari and Assa, Diffused Warfare, 147. Druker and Shelah, Boomerang, 162, n. 96. 44. Officially called the National Conciliation Document of the Palestinian Prisoners, “the prisoners’ document” was written by Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. In it, representatives of Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (dFLP) tried to articulate policy positions that would reconcile the various factions. 45. Quoted in Amos Harel and Arnon Regular, “IAF Probe: Civilians Spotted Too Late to Divert Missiles in Gaza Strike,” Ha’aretz, March 7, 2006. See also Soha Abdelaty,

206 Eyal Weizman

“Intifada Timeline, September 30–October 6, 2004,” Al-Ahram Weekly Online, available at http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/; and Vincent Cannistraro, “Assassination Is Wrong—and Dumb,” Washington Post, August 30, 2001. 46. For many years, Yassir Arafat remained at the top of Israel’s Most Wanted list. The dibbuk haunting Israeli security services, Arafat and his “irrational character” were blamed for almost every political stalemate or outbreak of violence. Chief of Military Intelligence Amos Gilead, who developed a personal obsession with him, described Arafat: “Mentally, Arafat feels at his best when he is surrounded by a reality of flames, fire, suffering and blood.” Only an explicit promise extracted from Sharon by President George W. Bush prevented the IdF from doing what it really wanted, assassinating Arafat. Gil Eyal, The Disenchantment of the Orient: Expertise in Arab Affairs and the Israeli State (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2006), 290, n. 93, 189. 47. Eyal, The Disenchantment of the Orient, 183. 48. Chris McGreal, “We’re Air Force Pilots, Not Mafia. We Don’t Take Revenge,” Guardian, December 3, 2003. 49. The principles of the military ethics of fighting terror were developed by a team of the Israeli Defense Force College of National Defense, headed by Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, then commander of the college. The team included other officers with experience in such military activities, as well as experts in international law and ethics. The final document, produced by Yadlin and Kasher, was presented to the IdF chief of staff and to generals involved in fighting terror. The document was approved, and besides being used in different stages of the education of officers, is currently being used for the preparation of proposed explanatory guidelines for a variety of specific situations and operations. Kasher and Yadlin, “The Military Ethics of Fighting Terror: An Israeli Perspective,” Journal of Military Ethics 4 (2005). See also Kasher and Yadlin, “Assassination and Preventive Killing,” SAIS Review 25, no. 1 (2005): 41–57. 50. Israeli Air Force operator of unmanned drones, interviewed by author, April 2005. The operator’s name cannot be revealed. 51. Harel and Regular, “IAF Probe.” 52. Further data published in Ha’aretz state that between 2002 and 2003, 50 percent of people killed were uninvolved civilians, that in 2005, the number dropped to 3.5 percent, that in 2006, when attacks accelerated after the abduction of an Israeli soldier, it was 10 percent, and that in 2007, it dropped again to its lowest level, between 2 and 3 percent. Amos Harel, “Precise Military,” Ha’aretz, December 30, 2008. 53. Amos Harel, “Nothing ‘Surgical’ about Air Force Attacks in Urban Areas,” Ha’aretz, June 22, 2006. The B’Tselem figures are available at http://www.btselem.org/English/Statistics/Casualties.asp. 54. David A. Fulghum and Robert Wall, “Israel Starts Reexamining Military Missions and Technology,” Aviation Week, August 20, 2006. 55. Laura Blumenfeld, “In Israel, a Divisive Struggle over Targeted Killing,” Washington Post, August 27, 2006. 56. Indeed, during the 1991 Gulf War, the public was fed images of “kamikaze bombs”—

Thanato-tactics 207

smart bombs or laser-guided munitions—as proof of the technological superiority and surgical skills of the U.S. military. Harun Farocki, “War from a Distance,” lecture delivered at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, January 13, 2005. 57 Quoted in Meron Rapoport, “Italian tV: Israel Used New Weapon Prototype in Gaza Strip,” Ha’aretz, October 12, 2006. These weapons are made of a carbon-fiber casing filled with tungsten powder—a metal capable of conducting very high temperatures. Upon detonation, the tungsten particles are propelled outward in a relatively small (about four meters), but very deadly cloud, causing severe burns, amputated limbs, and internal burns. 58. HcJ 769/02, The Public Committee against Torture in Israel v. The Government of Israel. Previous petitions to the High Court of Justice against targeted assassinations (for example, HcJ 5872/2002, M. K. Muhammed Barake vs. Prime Minister and Minister of Defense) were dismissed. 59. “Evil” in this context is best understood, following Adi Ophir, as a category displaced from the realm of the divine or diabolical and relocated in a social order in which suffering and pain could have been but were not prevented. See Adi Ophir, The Order of Evils: Toward an Ontology of Morals, trans. Rela Mazali and Havi Carel (New York: Zone Books, 2005). “Evils can only be justified by appealing to more grave hypothetical evils that could have been caused if the prevention or disengagement actions would have taken place” (section 7.100, p. 339). “The justification displaces the discussion from one order of exchange, in which the one harmed tries to create a link between damage or suffering and compensation, to another order of exchange, in which the defendant tries to create a link between evils that occurred to possible evils that might have occurred” (section 3.432, p. 152). 60. Michael Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 61. These conditions are “applied to the smallest number of people, used as a last resort, and kept under the adversarial scrutiny of an open democratic system.” Furthermore, “assassination can be justified only if . . . less violent alternatives, like arrest and capture, endanger . . . personnel or civilians . . . [and] where all reasonable precautions are taken to minimize collateral damage and civilian harm.” Ibid., 8, 129–33. 62. Alan M. Dershowitz, The Case for Israel (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2003), 173. 63. Quoted in Amos Harel and Avi Isacharoff, The Seventh War (Tel Aviv: Miskal—Yedioth Aharonoth and Chemed, 2004), 343 (in Hebrew). 64. Ophir, The Order of Evils, section 7.100, p. 339; sections 7.2 and 7.3, pp. 327–29. See also, for example, section 7.335, p. 375. 65. Iris Giller, “A Death Foretold: Firing of ‘Rubber’ Bullets to Disperse Demonstrations in the Occupied Territories,” trans. Zvi Schulman, B’Tselem, November 1998, available at http://www.btselem.org/. 66. Harel and Isacharoff, The Seventh War, 343. 67. Ariella Azoulay, “Hunger in Palestine: The Event That Never Was,” in Territories, Islands, Camps and Other States of Utopia, eds. Anselm Franke, Rafi Segal, and Eyal Weizman,

208 Eyal Weizman

(Cologne: Walter Koening, 2003), 154–57. According to the chief of military intelligence, Amos Gilead, “Hunger is when people walk around with a swollen belly, collapse and die. There is no hunger in Palestinian territories.” Druker and Shelah, Boomerang, 329. Azoulay, “Hunger in Palestine,” 154–57. Since Hamas was elected to power in January 2006, Israel has used the weapon of economic strangulation as a means of political pressure, withholding all Palestinian tax monies—about $60 million a month—that it is legally obligated to transfer to the Palestinian Authority. Israel has also mobilized the international community to suspend aid until Hamas recognizes “Israel’s right to exist” and enters into a political process. However, the international boycott of Gaza residents to pressure the Hamas government has been counterproductive, with both Israel and donor countries desperately seeking a way out. The poverty created in Gaza is more threatening. 68. Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 36. 69. Hannah Arendt, “The Eggs Speak Up” (1950), in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2005), 270–84; see especially 271. Arendt claims that Stalin’s “only original contribution” to socialism was to transform the breaking of eggs from a tragic necessity into a revolutionary virtue. 70. David Kennedy, The Dark Side of Virtue: Reassessing International Humanitarianism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 235–323. See, in particular, the chapter “Humanitarianism and Force,” and especially 295. See also discussion of this issue and of Kennedy’s ideas in an article by his former student, Aeyal M. Gross, “The Construction of a Wall between The Hague and Jerusalem: The Enforcement and Limits of Humanitarian Law and the Structure of Occupation,” Leiden Journal of International Law 19 (2006) and Aeyal M. Gross, “Human Proportions: Are Human Rights the Emperor’s New Clothes of the International Law of Occupation?” European Journal of International Law 18, no. 1 (2007). 71. See Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir, “The Order of Violence,” in The Power of Inclusive Exclusion, ed. Adi Ophir, Michal Givoni, and Sara Hanafi (Cambridge: Zone Books, 2009). 72. Beyond their meaning in the total mobilization of society, “total wars”—marking the other limit of the conceptual spectrum—are wars that no longer allow any communication to take place. Colonial wars have often been total wars, because the “natives” were not perceived to share the same “humanity” as the colonizers and thus could not be considered a party capable of rational behavior and discourse. Terror is “total,” as well, because, most often, it places no legal or moral limits on violence and makes no distinction between innocence and guilt. Moreover, it acts to attack the very possibility of discourse. Degrees and distinctions are precisely what make war less than total. 73. Quoted in Harel, “Nothing ‘Surgical.’” 74. B’Tselem, “683 People Killed in the Conflict in 2006.” 75. Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (New York: Bantam, 1974), 229– 30.

Thanato-tactics 209

76. On Israeli militarism, see Uri Ben-Eliezer, “Post-Modern Armies and the Question of Peace and War: The Israeli Defense Forces in the ‘New Times,’” International Journal of Middle East Studies 36 (2004): 50. See also Uri Ben-Eliezer, The Making of Israeli Militarism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 1–18; Baruch Kimmerling, The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: Society, Culture, and the Military (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 209; and Michael Mann, “The Roots and Contradictions of Modern Militarism,” New Left Review 162 (March–April 1987). 77. Dayan’s quote is from “Sharon’s Enduring Agenda: Consolidate Territorial Control, Manage the Conflict,” Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories 14, no. 1 (January–February 2004). 78. Amir Oren, “The Tenth Round,” Ha’aretz weekend supplement, January 14, 2006.

210 Eyal Weizman

ann s. anagnost

stranGe circUlations

In the context of China’s economic reforms, new conceptualizations of value, in which the value coding of bodies produces very real material effects, reflect the dramatic polarization of wealth and poverty. This value coding takes discursive form in the Chinese term suzhi (quality), which becomes a measure of human capital produced through education and other investments in the embodied capacities of the neoliberal subject, who is now responsible for his or her own profits and losses. The body of the rural migrant becomes, in this formation, a body of low value, despite the fact that the exploitation of migrant labor is the hidden engine powering China’s economic takeoff. The discourse of suzhi is an inverse figure of value, in which it becomes something that must be invested in the body rather than something that emerges from the body’s capacity for labor. The migrant’s desire to be recognized as a body of value through the power to consume draws her into the market economy as a willing body for exploitation. The commodification of blood in Henan in the 1990s provides a stunning instantiation of the material effects of this cultural politics while revealing the changing terms of exchange between the country and the city. Blood purchased from peasant donors was used as a form of venture capital (and as a raw material) in a government initiative at the provincial level to build a biotechnology industry, a speculative form of development in the so- called knowledge economy. This wedding together of economic development and bio-

technological innovation has become central to visions of capitalism “beyond the limits.” As Melinda Cooper has pointed out: “It is becoming difficult to think about the life sciences without invoking the traditional concepts of political economy—production, value, growth, crisis, resistance, and revolution. At the same time, however, the expansion of commercial processes into the sphere of ‘life itself ’ has a troubling effect on the self-evidence of traditional economic categories, compelling us to rethink their scope in dialogue with the life sciences.”1 These complex crossings demand a radical reworking of the concepts of life and labor first put in place with the birth of biology and political economy as modern formations of thought.2 Such a reworking opens the possibility of a theoretical wormhole between Foucault’s late lectures on the neoliberal transformations of biopolitics and contemporary debates on Marx’s theory of value. As strategies of capital accumulation seek to find a new frontier, the generative capacity of life itself becomes financialized in a context of uneven development. “Financialization” refers to the assumption of risk in the hopes of an economic return on a speculative investment. Financialization brings together what was separate before. It disassembles “possessive relations between persons and things” and reassembles them as products better suited to further exchange (such as mortgage-backed securities and commodities futures or, more to the point here, blood, tissue, and body parts).3 Here we see the redistribution of life chances, in which the life potential of one population is extracted and grafted onto another. In this context, Marx’s concept of “surplus value” takes on the form of “surplus life.”4 Biotechnology produces new technologies that are profitable, but in its financialization of life itself we see how capitalism renews itself with a capacity that seems limitless. And yet, as we discover again and again, this capacity is an illusion. Capitalism’s renewal incurs a mounting debt that is displaced elsewhere and ultimately demands recognition through the very materiality of its claim. The Chinese notion of suzhi is a dynamic site through which to pursue this question of the changing relationship between life and labor. On the one hand, one could argue that suzhi is the discursive vehicle that conveys neoclassical conceptions of human capital in the Chinese context. Human capital was one of the objects of Foucault’s inquiry in The Birth of Biopolitics.5 It was posed by neoclassical economists as a corrective to the apparent inability of political economy to note the qualitative differences among different kinds of labor. It is therefore an implicit critique of Marx’s labor theory of value that

214 Ann S. Anagnost

does not directly engage Marx. The abstraction of labor in Marx’s analysis of capitalism is seen as a failure of theory rather than as a phenomenon intrinsic to the workings of economic relations in a capitalist market system. In China, suzhi has come to measure differentiated labor value, and therefore it not only regulates the wage price of labor, but it also plays a role in the cultural politics of embodied human worth and the distribution of life chances. Suzhi legitimates the return of inequality as something that is “good for society.” The gothic imagery of Marx’s Capital can be reanimated to critique the suzhi discourse as a kind of common sense in regimes of capital accumulation.6 Marx vividly used the image of blood-sucking in his discussion of workers’ struggles over the length of the working day. He took from Ricardo a concept of value that could be measured by “the expenditure of force in time.”7 For Marx, as well as for Ricardo, the limit point for extracting value as a time process was “the human being who spends, wears out and wastes his life.”8 However, there now appears the question of whether, in the postFordist reorganization of capital, value has become “without measure” because it is derived from the productivity of the human mind (the rise of the “knowledge economy”) or from the labor of human cells that multiplies life rather than diminishes it.9 And yet what this perspective ignores is that even these forms of labor are very much contingent upon conditions of uneven development. The labor of the so- called knowledge worker depends upon very material forms of labor for its reproduction—whether this be the “digital” labor of the nimble fingers of women factory workers or the clinical labor of research subjects in the Global South.10 But what are we to think when the figure of the vampire becomes more than just metaphoric? This is a question we are provoked to ask by the exposé of the spread of HIV through the sale of blood in the Chinese countryside in the 1990s, an effect of the “spectralization” of rural life.11 The countryside has been evacuated of any hope of providing a future for rural people. China’s economic reforms of the last twenty-five years have been, for millions of rural households, a kind of tease, luring them into a market economy with promises of increased autonomy and control over their surplus product. But these households also assume a much greater burden of risk. The bankrupting of the rural economy in China’s rapid turn to a market economy has contributed to the devaluation of rural life in two senses: as a meaningful form of social existence and in the value coding of the rural body as one of low quality. The economic reforms have, in effect, produced the Chinese country-

Strange Circulations 215

side as the constitutive outside of capitalist economic relations by making it bear the hidden costs in the reproduction of labor for a global labor regime. The countryside is the source for an apparently inexhaustible supply of cheap labor, and it is the place where workers are obligated to return when they become unemployed or injured.12 Moreover, the rural population offers the possibility of new forms of labor: blood donorship and as research subjects for clinical trials in a more deregulated environment where access to health care has become increasingly privatized. In this context, we see a shift in governmentality from the welfare provisions of the developmental state in which blood is envisioned as “a national preserve,” sequestered from the market and held in reserve as a form of security against catastrophic events, to a neoliberal mode that seeks to capitalize on “the life of the nation.”13 The question of whether reform- era China can be called “neoliberal” can be rather vexing unless we understand “neoliberalism” as a disparate series of projects that take on discrepant forms that are contingently shaped by the sedimented histories upon which they rest and the specific conditions under which they are integrated into global circuits of value.14 To refer to neoliberal projects (in the plural) is to emphasize their being a form of world-making activity projected into the future while also necessarily encountering the inevitable mutations of contingency, resistance, negotiation, and struggle.15 Neoliberal projects in China have privileged economic growth and the privatization of risk as a governmental program, but they have also contended with social forces demanding social responsibility that may, in some cases, draw on prior idioms of socialist morality but in other instances articulate with social movements that are transnational in scope (such as labor networks). An analysis of Henan’s blood economy suitably begins with a discussion of the film Ermo (directed by Zhou Xiaowen, 1994), which portrays the sale of blood in China in the early 1990s. Although it was made several years prior to the scandal of the HIV outbreak in Henan, the film depicts quite vividly the changed relations of exchange between the city and the countryside and the overturning of older conceptions of value in the shift from collectivization to market socialism. Ermo, who is the film’s eponymous heroine, sells her blood to purchase a large-screen television set. Her self-alienation in this exchange metaphorizes the subsumption of the rural economy, while also instantiating, in a stunningly material way, the global reorganization of the value of life itself.

216 Ann S. Anagnost

The seducTion of ermo

The film begins in a rural village in north China where Ermo, the young wife of the retired village chief, struggles to keep her young son from spending time at the home of Blindman and his wife, their more prosperous neighbors who have a large-screen television. The daily absence of Ermo’s son amplifies a sense of household decline, a decline caused by the loss of her husband’s political power due to reforms in rural government that have led to the former village chief ’s physical inertness, profound depression of spirits, and sexual impotence. The neighbors’ prosperity, founded on new opportunities opened by the economic reforms, figures as an inverse image of the village chief ’s decline— a triumph of market forces over the fading charisma of the party’s political authority. The large-screen television is an indexical sign of this reversal of fortunes. Not only does it become a potent status marker for Ermo, but it will also become a window onto a landscape of strange new desires and subjective enticements. However, for Ermo’s husband, building a new house represents a more conventional symbol of peasant prosperity that would guarantee the social reproduction of the household by attracting, at some future date, a bride for his son. He fails, at least at first, to recognize the possibilities that Ermo sees in the television’s potential to revitalize their lost social prestige. Consumer distinction would replace political authority as the logic of social positioning. The commodity’s power lies in its magnetic ability to attract back into Ermo’s sphere the physical presence of those who have abandoned it. Therefore, Ermo sees the television as an “apparatus of capture,” the presence or absence of which effects the filling up or emptying out of the peasant household. Here we see how commodity desire effects a restructuring of the biopolitical from below, a restructuring in which the household is transformed from a space of production and reproduction to a space of consumption. But this transformation cannot be effected entirely within the economic circuit of the local economy itself; it requires an infusion of cash from somewhere else. In this sense, the possession of the commodity indexes the power of the household to tap into new sources of capital that come from the market economy. A central focus of the film is the transformation of Ermo’s labor as it is deterritorialized from the sphere of household reproduction and redirected as migrant wage labor. In pursuit of her goal, she progresses

Strange Circulations 217

through successive stages in the alienation of her body, its capacity for labor, and even its very life force. In this respect, she becomes a paradigmatic representation of the course the economic reforms have taken in China’s rural hinterland. As Ermo first enters the market as a petty commodity producer making and selling noodles in the local marketplace, she embodies the figure of the entrepreneurial, peasant householder promoted as a new model for rural citizenship in the early reform period of the 1980s. Early in the film, we see Ermo at her noodle press as she turns the wooden screw to extrude the stiff dough into skeins of noodles that she will sell in the local market for cash. The camera hovers close to her body to convey the physicality of her labor. We see her muscles working and the drops of perspiration on her brow. We hear her sharp intake of breath and the sighs that accompany the effort she is expending. This depiction of her work is as intimate as that of sexual intercourse—a veritable pornography of the laboring body. Judith Farquhar suggests that the erotics of labor represents a displacement of desire from sexual intercourse onto the commodity that the labor will ultimately produce.16 But I would also argue that we as viewers are forced to confront labor as a form of physical expenditure. We can almost feel the articulation of our own bodies with the noodle press. Our muscle synapses fire off their charges in response to Ermo’s grunting as she toils. These images of her labor visually establish a structure of exchanges that negotiate uneven development in the idiom of contrasting technological regimes: the simple technology of the handoperated press with the invisible electronic labor of televisual communications. One scene shows Ermo with her family in their bed at night, their very dreams invaded by the sound of their neighbor’s television cutting through the night air as if to taunt them with their lack. When Ermo discovers that petty commodity production does not offer a means of accumulation rapid enough to satisfy the urgency of her desire, her neighbor Blindman, who is a long- distance trucker, introduces her to a job making noodles for a restaurant in the city. There she visits an electronics store where she stands among other gawkers whose gazes are fixed by a bank of television sets all turned to the same channel, broadcasting a scene of adulterous love from a foreign film, foreshadowing, if not establishing a necessary precondition for, Ermo’s subsequent seduction by her neighbor. She begins an imaginary relationship with the largest of these television screens, which she does not yet have the means to purchase but visits daily as if to reassure herself of its material reality. In her imagination, she has already 218 Ann S. Anagnost

begun to take possession of the television as she saves her money to purchase it. On one visit, she admonishes the shop clerk to turn “her” television off, despite the crowd of onlookers, for fear that it might be “used up,” as if the television set itself shared a similar economy of depletion with her own body. Ermo descends from the position of independent entrepreneur engaged in a regime of self- exploitation to the position of hired laborer, but this then leads to a more troubling form of self-alienation. When a fellow worker loses his hand while operating an electric dough mixer, Ermo accompanies him to the hospital to donate blood, only to discover that her blood can be exchanged for money. What she had given freely, albeit fearfully, as a gift appears to have economic value. This adventitious discovery leads her to become a frequent blood donor to supplement her wages as a laborer. As she sits in a noodle stall across from the clinic to wait for the nurses to change shift, Ermo drinks large bowls of salted water to replenish her bodily fluids so that she can evade the hospital rules and give blood again and again. Having finally accumulated the money for the television, Ermo bears the commodity home in triumph. As her neighbors help move the television into the house, it stands out as an alien presence among the objects of Ermo’s village home. Unsure of its proper position, they move the television from on top of the vat (but how will we ladle out the water?) to the trunk (but how will we get our things out?) to the bed (but where will we sleep?) where it finally comes to rest. Ermo’s noodle strainer is commandeered to serve as a makeshift antenna. Like the house itself, the use value of this humble but necessary domestic object is made over to accommodate a new order of commodity things. The television imposes a transformed economy of space within the household that is now reorganized around the practice of television viewership. The acquisition of this dream object magically reanimates Ermo’s husband from a state of passivity and inaction. He bustles around, much as he once did as a village official organizing a communal meeting, to arrange seating for the neighbors who gather around the television as if attracted to a magnetic power. In the final scene of the film, it is late at night and the neighbors have all returned home. Ermo, her husband, and son are asleep in their seats in front of the set as if they had been too mesmerized to move or even turn it off. The object has displaced them from their bed. As the programming for the day draws to a close, the weather report introduces an eerie simultaneity as it reports the daily temperatures in cities across the globe, each urban place visually represented by a rocket-like structure (Shanghai’s Pearl Tower, Sydney’s Strange Circulations 219

Opera House) symbolizing economic “takeoff.” Through the magic of the screen, Ermo’s spectralized village, deep in the Chinese hinterland, is linked to the phallic hypermodernity of the global city. After the end of broadcasting for the day, a pale glow of white static shimmers from the screen to play over the drained and enervated face of Ermo, her bare life expended in service to commodity fetishism. Transformed into a consuming subject, she is herself consumed.17 The specTraLizaTion of The ruraL

The narrative progression of Ermo parallels the history of China’s economic reforms. In the 1980s, peasants were lured into accepting the breakup of the agricultural collective with visions of entrepreneurial success, but little did they comprehend the potential costs of this restructuring.18 Ermo is initially empowered by the market, but in a way that ultimately renders her subject to an exploitation that is unimaginable in terms of what it extracts from the body. Yet she does it to herself. As a neoliberal subject, she is responsible for her own profits and losses. But her willingness to sell her blood is contingent upon a new bioeconomics in which rural life has been devalued and in which blood has become both a raw material and a form of venture capital. The early period of reform (1979–84) was one of increasing prosperity for many rural communities, due to the new market incentives offered to rural households following decollectivization and a rise in the price of agricultural produce. By the early 1990s, however, as the cost of agricultural inputs and other industrial goods began to rise, income from agriculture failed to keep up. Prices for agricultural produce stagnated, and agriculture’s share in state capital investment was decimated (from 10.7 percent in 1979 to 1.7 percent in 1994).19 Local governments, increasingly forced by changes in the national budget to finance themselves, placed an additional burden on farming households with the imposition of local taxes and fees for services. At the same time, access to education and basic health care diminished for rural households.20 A report posted on the China Labor Watch website shows the balance sheet from a “typical” rural family in Jiangxi Province, in which annual income was calculated to be less than the sum of taxes and other fees levied by government at all levels.21 The unprofitability of agriculture accounts, at least in part, for the willingness of rural people to seek employment in urban areas or, despite long hours and the risk of death or injury, in coal mines. Ermo’s seeking employment in the city also illustrates the new mobility between country and city. The restrictions on rural to urban migration that 220 Ann S. Anagnost

characterized the Mao years were relaxed in the 1990s, allowing rural migrants to leave home for the more economically developed regions of the coastal provinces. Despite this movement, the distinction between rural and urban residents continues to be managed through the household registration system, which denies urban resident status to rural migrants. Moreover, the distinction has been further marked through a discourse of population quality, which compares the “low quality” of rural migrants, the so- called floating population, to urbanites presumed to be more civilized, disciplined, and educated. This difference in quality references the expendability of the migrant, who is obligated to return to the countryside when not actively employed or when her youthful vitality has been used up or impaired through industrial injury.22 The widening of the rural-urban income gap in the 1990s has more recently been recognized as a crisis for China’s economic reforms, which are discursively referred to as the sannong wenti, the “three problems of the rural economy”: farming income, rural infrastructure, and agricultural development.23 Economic inequality has now grown to what some social scientists in China and the West consider a potentially destabilizing level. The Gini coefficient, which measures income disparities, circulates in the public discourse as an indicator of growing inequality.24 The annual statistical record compiled by the public security apparatus tracks the rising number of rural riots and demonstrations protesting unfair taxation and the seizure of collective land for private development schemes. In 2005, this number rose to 87,000, over 6 percent higher than the previous year.25 In these public security statistics, the ghost of Mao rises up to confront the present with the specter of peasant insurgency, despite the fact that many of these uprisings are directed at corrupt officials at the local level rather than against the central government and its economic policies.26 Concerns over peasant insurgency have led to renewed attention to rural development and a rural tax reform that began to be implemented in 2003, decreasing the burden on farming families. The spectralization of the countryside as a form of “death in life” has ideological and cultural dimensions, as well as purely economic ones.27 The countryside has become a wasteland in which young people can no longer imagine a future, while the city has become the privileged site for forming a modern subjectivity through the accumulation of body capital, a product of cosmopolitan experience and purchasing power. Those who remain in the villages cannot acquire, through agricultural work, the goods that invest their existence with dignity. These are obtained through remittances sent back Strange Circulations 221

to families from migrant workers in the city. Even within the village, the pathways to prosperity are not a level playing field. For example, Blindman’s prosperity rests on his purchase of an old truck that was most likely collectively owned prior to decollectivization. Those households that acquired a means of transport when the agricultural collectives were broken up were among the first to prosper under the economic reforms, due to the demand for transportation created by the increased circulation of goods in a market economy. While Blindman’s truck is redeployed for private gain, this transfer of resources is minor when compared to the looting of assets from statesector enterprises for conversion into entrepreneurial capital, as state-sector workers were laid off in the late 1990s and replaced with an eager reserve of labor from rural areas. The expendability of labor is mirrored by job insecurity for migrants, too, whose dependence on the rural economy continues in response to the fluctuating demands of the capitalist workplace. a vampiric economy

Ermo now seems prescient in noting the relationship between the title character’s commodity fetishism and the blood economy. The increasing commodification of blood in the Henan countryside during the late 1980s and 1990s led to the rapid spread of HIV infection rates in rural villages where donation had become an important source of household revenue. Provincial authorities found in biotechnology the illusory promise of big profits to revitalize a landscape devastated in the wake of the rural economic reforms. Beginning in 1992, the head of the Henan Provincial Department of Health used his political capital to set up a biological pharmaceutical company. In this scheme, blood was more than just a raw material for biotechnology and the production of biopharmaceuticals—industries that the central government had earmarked as a major focus of investment to foster the development of the national economy. Blood had also become a form of venture capital. Medical teams were sent to rural villages to collect blood, and this activity, in turn, spawned an underground industry of shady entrepreneurs who collected blood themselves or recruited donors for the official blood stations. In 2000, due to the heroic efforts of a retired woman doctor named Gao Yaojie, the global media picked up the story of widespread HIV infection in rural villages in Henan. Gao’s efforts to distribute information to people in the countryside about HIV transmission led to her persecution by the government for allegedly “affecting the investment environment” in Henan Province.28 The powerful provincial-level civil and military officials who were 222 Ann S. Anagnost

directly involved in the production and sale of blood products were also responsible for attempting to cover up the spread of HIV in the rural areas. According to an official internal document obtained by AIdS activist Wan Yanhai, who circulated it via the Internet, drug companies “blindly expanded the scope of production and raced to compete for supplies . . . completely ignoring the quality of the [collected] blood” in order to meet the commercial demand for blood products.29 According to this document, dated August 2002, the sale of blood had been supplementing low incomes in parts of southern Henan since the 1950s, but it had suddenly “become more profitable in the 1990s because of a ‘vogue’ among Chinese consumers for medicines containing blood plasma.”30 Human albumin has myriad uses in clinical care and drug therapies. However, there was also a growing domestic market for human albumin as a daily health supplement. Marketed as an over-the- counter drug, albumin was used in a new set of self-care practices ascendant during the disintegration of health- care benefits in rural and urban areas. Market projections for the future growth in the Chinese domestic market for biopharmaceuticals focus on preventive health products and have become of interest to transnational investors. For example, a 2001 Canadian government report on investment opportunities in the Chinese biotechnology market states, “Asian culture strongly encourages the use of preventive medicine. . . . The dietary supplements segment is considered to be the fastest growing segment of the Chinese health- care market. . . . A growing number of middle- class residents and rising income levels are also contributing to an increased demand for . . . products . . . perceived to have preventive health qualities. Chinese consumers are very active in their own personal health and well-being, contributing to growing demand.”31 Preventive health products, for those who can afford them, are increasingly becoming part of the “care of the self ” integral to a neoliberal regime in which the health of the body becomes an enterprise one must invest in to maximize health and vitality, and to offset the increasing costs of health care.32 The consumer becomes an anxiously seeking subject as the manager of his or her own well-being. If such biological products are understood to contribute to the physical quality, the suzhi of the middle- class body, then one must make note of the ironic circuit of value that ties the blood of rural poverty to urban self- care, a form of monstrous accumulation in which the very substance of the body is removed and grafted elsewhere. However, this case must also be set within a transnational circuit of value. Strange Circulations 223

The same Canadian government report warns potential investors that they should view China “as a collection of regional markets, each with [its] own unique trade practices, purchasing policies and regulatory environments.” What this calculation of regulatory environments suggests is that risk is, in a sense, off-shored to a space of underdevelopment that is being actively produced by the restructuring of the capitalist economy at its margins. The commodification of blood first arose because voluntary donations have long been difficult to obtain in China due to people’s fear of infection and the threat of bodily depletion. This problem led to a quota system imposed on urban work units for blood collection during the Maoist period when blood was still considered a national preserve and it was every citizen’s obligation to contribute. The reluctance of urban residents to donate blood is often due to the fact that China has had perhaps the highest donor-to- donor infection rate in the world (most blood-borne infections in the collection of blood are from donor to recipient). This high rate of transmission has to do with the reuse of needles, tubing, and blood collection equipment and, in some cases in the underground industry, the practice of pooling the remaining blood components after the desired elements have been filtered out and pumping them back into donors to minimize the depletion of their blood supply, in part to maximize the frequency of blood donation. These practices have resulted in high rates of HIV, hepatitis B and C, and syphilis infections among blood donors. In urban areas, the reluctance to donate has been overcome by fining work units that do not meet a government-imposed quota. Work units who come up short may hire paid blood donors to make up the deficit. Prior to the biotechnology bubble that drove up demand for blood products, blood had been set up as an object of exchange across lines of economic inequality by government policies. It would seem that the real scandal underlying this tragedy is the way in which the blood economy preyed on the economic disadvantage of rural people desperate for cash. The incidence of HIV, which is of course catastrophic for the individuals infected, is merely a by-product of a broader process redefining the value of life itself as a new domain for speculation and capital accumulation. The villages hardest hit by HIV infection rates due to the sale of blood appear to have been extremely poor. Henan, with a population of over 100 million people, is China’s most populous province, and its countryside is notoriously impoverished. In fact, the money from blood sales was not spent so much on consumer electronics, as in Ermo’s case, but to replace one-room thatched huts with mud-brick houses. It was spent on educating children, 224 Ann S. Anagnost

providing dowries for daughters, and paying back taxes and fines levied for out- of-plan births. The fact that blood money was used to pay household debts to the state is an especially stunning discovery that must be put into the larger context of an agricultural economy reduced to the point where the balance sheets of farming households are driven into deficits that can only be repaid with blood, as if blood were yet another form of “agricultural produce.”33 The internal document leaked by Wan Yanhai in 2002 states, “When peasants saw people who had sold blood building [new] houses and starting up businesses, they also began to enter the ranks. . . . Some peasants in [the village of ] Wenlou have admitted giving blood 11 times in two days, and the usual rate was once or twice a day.”34 As Lawrence Cohen has noted, the sale of body parts in the organ transplant industry in India has become a “fantasy of re-animating a family form experienced as stuck,” marking the “everyday articulation of one’s economic limit.”35 Blood, unlike internal organs, at least has the advantage of being a renewable resource. Wenlou Village, where the scandal was first revealed, had been officially designated as a “poverty village.” Many women sold their blood because, as Ermo noted, they would lose blood to menstruation anyway. Men’s blood was perceived to be less expendable and selling it would presumably have posed a threat to male vitality and, by extension, a man’s ability to support his household through agricultural labor. Therefore, the commodification of blood extends its circulatory system into a gendered family economy of bodily fluids, in which the “fantasy of sacrifice” falls predominantly on women.36 Although this blood collection industry would appear to be quite localized in Henan, scattered evidence suggests that it is much more widespread throughout China’s interior provinces. In any case, reports have mentioned that rural people would travel great distances to sell their blood, especially to Xinjiang where the payments were higher. Rural people from as far away as Sichuan have traveled to Henan to sell blood. This “floating population” of blood donors is often organized by professional blood “heads” who recruit donors for blood stations or, in some cases, collect the blood themselves. The sale of blood was made illegal by the Prc Blood Donation Law, effective October 1, 1998, and this has further driven underground the illegal sale of blood, now a part of organized crime. Even before the law, illegal blood collection stations were springing up in backyards and in buildings disguised as other kinds of enterprises, in one case as a disposable cigarette lighter factory and in another case, in Shaanxi Province, as a sugar processing plant.37 These Strange Circulations 225

illegal enterprises hide behind an illusion of legitimate economic development in rural villages still caught within a bankrupt agricultural economy. Other news reportage appears to blame these migrants for being “too willing” to sell their blood, for their complete disregard for their own health or that of others. This is the tone of a report that appeared in a Sichuan paper in which this “floating population of paid blood donors” was compared to “rivulets of blood joined to form a river that carried the viruses of [an] uncountable number of disease carriers.”38 This image of flow is commonly attached to the rural migrant population, as evidenced by the term liudong renkou. Although this phrase is usually translated in English as “floating population,” the meaning of liu (flowing) and dong (movement) is meant to convey a sense of unregulated circulation and a moving source of contagion (of social disorder, incivility, and now disease) from the country to the city. animaTinG The undead

The vampire can be deployed as a figure of critique to reveal not only the ways in which China’s economic takeoff has relied on the capacity of the countryside to absorb the hidden costs of the reproduction of a flexible (and expendable) migrant labor force. But this vampiric relation also sets up the conditions of possibility for the sale of body products. Mark Neocleous suggests that Marx used the metaphor of the vampire to capture “the rule of the dead over the living” in a capitalist economic system.39 Capital is the accumulation of dead labor that springs to life again through the draining away of the vitality of the worker. The dead becomes the undead, renewing its vitality, but at the cost of the body of the worker who is subject to “premature exhaustion and death.”40 Marx’s deployment of the vampire figure in Capital is most evident in his chapter on the extension of the working day. The intensification of labor in a capitalist regime hits its limit point in the needs of the body to replenish its energies. Bodily needs fall into the realm of reproduction, which includes not just biological procreation but the labor needed to return the worker to the factory floor day after day, the costs of which are always considered exogenous to the economic system. In the case of Ermo, her body’s capacity to renew itself is exploited in a new way, a way in which the vitality of the body itself, and not just its labor, is seen as a “standing reserve” from which value can be extracted. This objectification of the body requires a process of alienation. Ermo feels that it is only by means of the commodity that she can tell herself she is truly living. “The desire to live one’s life through commodities is the desire to live one’s 226 Ann S. Anagnost

life through the dead.”41 She lives through the dead in service to a commodity fetishism that invests in goods the power to grant the consumer the status of a body of value, a civilized being, and a modern subject. Ermo’s willingness to become a wage laborer, and then to become a seller of blood, does not, however, derive from a struggle for existence. In the relative scheme of things, peasant life has not been reduced to a state of want so much as a state of meaninglessness in which, due to the costs of production, agriculture is no longer a viable livelihood and a widening gap between rural and urban income levels has exacerbated a sense of being left behind in China’s prosperity and new constructions of consumer citizenship. Ermo’s family has to live in the shadow of a material deprivation that is increasingly registered through new modes of consumption. In Ermo’s desperation, we might find the answer to the two questions most neoclassical economists refuse to pose, much less answer: “Why do workers allow themselves to be exploited?” and “Why [do] people want goods?”42 The refusal to pose these questions relegates them to a separate realm of psychology, in the attempt to render economics a depersonalized system of natural laws. A critical political economy must attend to those factors that are deemed to be exogenous to the system. The rural way of life, which has been so denigrated in China’s modernization, can be revalorized by drawing attention to the externalization of costs, not only the costs of the reproduction of labor but also the costs to the workers of maintaining a flexible work force that can be downsized whenever the profit margin demands. Neocleous remarks that the emphasis on the “spectral” in recent theoretical discussions of Marx needs to be supplemented by Marx’s own use of the vampiric as a means of speaking back to the political economists’ focus on capital as the life-blood that circulates within the body politic as a source of its vitality.43 Perhaps we can use the vampire to critique another metaphor of circulation. The Chinese term liudong renkou, translated as “floating population,” more literally means a “flow” of population. Hairong Yan plays with this image, comparing it to the increasing commodification of water to emphasize the way in which the newly recruited migrant worker represents a more easily exploitable resource, due to her unwitting acceptance of how her labor is valued.44 This unwitting acceptance also makes the body of the worker expendable. Once she becomes a savvier negotiator of the terms of labor, she loses her value as a willing body. The rural becomes the spring from which capital can renew itself. It is the vitality that staves off the threat of capital’s annihilation Strange Circulations 227

through a falling rate of profit. The mythology that envisions the inexhaustibility of the supply of labor in the Chinese countryside masks the ways in which the rural village absorbs the hidden costs of capital accumulation. The countryside has a value, but it is a value that can never be recognized. Instead it is seen as radically segregated from the economic dynamism of the city, as if the two existed in distinctly different value regimes. The value of what the countryside offers to the city is derogated to deny costs that must be excluded from economic calculation. In China today, wealth is envisioned as arising from the unleashing of the successful individual from the constraints of a socialist economy. The liberation of this productive potential is celebrated in its individual form but reviled in its collective form as a mobile population that threatens social stability. Nonetheless, the circulation of labor between the country and the city is where the secret of the current regime of capital accumulation lies. If the vampire can be used as a figure for the way in which capital renews itself, it is all the more useful for exploring the workings of the blood economy. Commodity fetishism is the motive force in Ermo’s exploitation of her physical vitality. The word “exploit” is not used here in the classical Marxist sense, as a reference to the extraction of surplus value from labor, but in the more general sense of the extraction of value from nature, a sense in which nature is perceived as a standing reserve that can be brought into productive account through human endeavor. Heidegger’s notion of the “standing reserve” stresses the “orderability and substitutability of objects” that are thereby “on call for duty.”45 Moreover, he sees in “the talk about human resources” the possibility that “man himself belong[s] even more originally than nature within the standing-reserve.”46 The phrase “human resources” frames “human potential” as something that is latent and therefore waiting to be brought into presence. This is perhaps the essence of suzhi as an accumulated form of body capital. But it is not just the latent potential of embodied cultural capital that is in play here. With the emergence of biotechnology, the materiality of the body possesses a latent potential for improving and extending life itself, but at a cost to less valuable bodies.47 The widening chasm between the country and the city, and between intellectual and sweated labor, marks the divide between those bodies made valuable through capital inputs and investments of all kinds and those from which something is taken. Ermo’s story suggests how we might deploy the figure of the vampire in two different registers that are nonetheless complexly intertwined. First, it helps us shift our analysis from the “hidden abode 228 Ann S. Anagnost

of production” to that of “reproduction”—what Spivak calls the whole “dynamics of birth-growth-family-life reproduction.”48 Second, it enables us to think through the dangers of framing the body as a standing reserve in which its fertile processes of growth and regeneration become the means through which the dead labor of capital finds itself revivified as a form of therapy for a moribund economy through the extraction of biovalue. Biotechnology in itself is not necessarily bad, but conditions of social inequality give it the potential to become vampiric, to suck out the vitality of the living so that the dead may rise again. Nonetheless, Ermo exploits the bare life of her own body in service to commodity fetishism. As Susan Buck-Morss points out, Hegel critiques the capitalism of his time as a social world in which commodities attain the status of “ciphers” that establish the distinction between savagery and a civilized life by becoming “invested” in social meanings and personal desires far in excess of their utilitarian value.49 Here we see in Hegel an anticipation of Marx’s notion of the commodity as a “social hieroglyphic.” Marx saw this insatiable desire for goods as a virtually inexhaustible, not to mention monstrous, “internally agitated life of the dead.”50 But capitalism is not only the awakening of the undead, it is also a form of “monstrous accumulation.”51 This notion appears in the opening line from Marx’s Capital: “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist modes of production prevails presents itself as an ‘immense accumulation of commodities,’ its unit being a single commodity.”52 Thomas Keenan has pointed out that the German adjective ungeheuer (meaning “immense”), used above by Marx, conveys not only the idea of size but also the idea of a gigantic, misshapen animal. The wealth of capitalist societies is a monstrous accumulation, not just something vast in size, but something “assembled or collected in such a way that the parts don’t add up to a whole.”53 However, alongside this monstrous image is a ghostly figure. The commodity in the circuit of exchange becomes abstracted as a value; the thing as such becomes insubstantial. The value of the commodity can only be determined in relation to other values in a circuit in which it can be exchanged. The materiality of the thing is emptied out in order to transfer it to another place. In the words of Keenan, the commodity “carries, its ‘own’ vacancy; it holds nothing but a place, the site of a possible relocation.”54 The abstracted value of the commodity is as much a social phenomenon as is language (i.e., as an “economy” of sign value). Its emptying out not only gives the commodity a ghostly form as an “empty body” but also a monstrous one, when it becomes Strange Circulations 229

estranged from its place of production and grafted elsewhere onto an “immense accumulation”—the body of a monster. But what if the “stuff ” of this empty vehicle were in fact bodies and body parts, things that are not in themselves the products of “a human making” and yet were appropriated as if they were—estranged from their place of origin and transferred elsewhere, grafted onto this “body” of immense accumulation. Does not the monstrous in this case exceed Marx’s metaphoric use of it to confront us with an all-too-real materiality? The monstrous commodity reveals a scandal in that the process of commodification is not limited to objects of a human making. Commodification does not respect persons as free agents in exchange when their very bodies become the empty vehicles of value—that which can be appropriated in its various parts and grafted elsewhere. These transfers of value are important to remember in response to the neoliberal critiques of Marx’s labor theory of value that focus on Marx’s apparent failure to account for qualitative differences among different forms of labor. These critiques fail to take into account that the abstraction of labor is a necessary condition for capitalist market relations. Indeed, the idea of a “universal humanity” of all agents in an economic system is the necessary condition for the abstraction of their labor in the circulation of commodities. The monstrous commodity threatens the unquestioned assumption of shared humanity. It raises the possibility that some bodies may be understood as having more value than others, or that some bodies have value for others, but only when they are disassembled into their several parts and grafted onto other bodies. Some might assert that the figure of the monster is more applicable to the commodification of organs than blood as a body product that is readily renewable. But just as the length of the working day poses a limit point to the vitality of the worker, blood can also be subjected to the logic of marginal utility. We see this when Ermo forces herself to drink fluids to replenish her blood supply, a way of maximizing her profit by surreptitiously diluting the value of what is given, while nonetheless draining her vitality until she is a mere shadow of herself, a ghostly presence on which we see projected the white light of the television screen. Though she has freely entered into this exchange, she has been lured by forces that conspire to suggest that the sale of blood is a reasonable way to access a world of goods otherwise closed to her, an exclusion that also denies her the power to be recognized as a body of value by any other means.

230 Ann S. Anagnost

from producTion To reproducTion

The figure of the vampire attained a certain literary currency in nineteenthcentury England, one that Marx translated directly into his analysis of the commodity form. “Capital,” he writes, “is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.”55 Capital is nothing less than an accumulation of dead labor draining surplus value from the living. Marx is careful to locate this ghoulishness in the “hidden abode” of production, for “the truth of capitalist production lies not in the open market, but in the enclosed, secret lair or workshop, like all the best family skeletons and Gothic terrors.”56 Marx invokes the image of the gothic in an ironic repudiation of the bourgeois myth of his time that wealth is the reward for personal character, thrift, and inventiveness, something intrinsic to the individual, not unlike the exemplary tales of success in China today. However, prior to Marx, Adam Smith had already drawn attention to the stunting of the worker’s body through the division of labor in industrial production. “The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations . . . generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”57 Buck-Morss points out that “each real body is stunted in order for the social body to prosper. . . . The division of labor, upon which the wealth of nations depends, creates (against nature) a society of unequals.”58 This paradox (of producing wealth through the stunting of the worker) is only apparently resolved when the worker reappears in Smith’s analysis as a “well-clad consumer.” The worker gets back what he has lost in the form of “domestic goods,” made affordable through such economies of labor. Buck-Morss describes this shift in focus as a “sleight of hand”—a maneuver that makes thinkable Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” in the figure of a social body composed of “a web of commodities that connects people who do not see or know each other. These [commodities] make it a civilized body.” Commodities become the means by which workers can “console themselves.” Possession of the commodity produces the illusion for the possessor that he or she is “superior to much of the world’s population.”59 However, this desire for goods becomes something monstrous in its insatiability. The capitalist subject comes “to desire the pleasure of desire itself ”: the commodity becomes the “decoy” of happiness.60 But this is a desire that is blind and blindness here “is the state of proper action.” The composite

Strange Circulations 231

effect is the rationality of the market. This paradoxical twining together of narratives of production and consumption, labor and commodity desire, is captured by Buck-Morss as follows: “Self- discipline is required of the producer, and insatiable desire is required of the consumer; but since they are the same person the construction of the economic subject is nothing short of schizophrenic.”61 Ermo is drawn from her rural village to the city by the symbolic power of the commodity form. It is a repository for far more than just economic value in its power to shore up the eroding dignity of life in rural places. The transformations of value that mediate between the country and the city render the peasant body as ripe for exploitation, even when the peasant is exploited through her own “freedom of choice.” At the same time, strategies that promise sudden windfalls of value creation do so through the commodification of life itself. Ermo “chooses” to sell her blood when the economic processes of petty commodity production and wage labor do not yield a return that is fast enough to satisfy her desire. This desire is in itself fueled by social logics that for Ermo become increasingly urgent. She must objectify her body and its economy of fluids as an exploitable resource, a standing reserve. The body’s own life processes are thereby directly caught up in a calculus of “investment and return.”62 A strategy of self- development drives Ermo’s desire to become a consumer citizen in a society in which recognition as a body- of-value is increasingly focused on one’s purchasing power. But her process of self-objectification is matched at the macro level in the global spread of biotechnology’s promise to provide the motor for rapid economic development. If biotechnology is producing capital in new forms as biovalue, then it does so by articulating with other modes of production. The hype of biotechnology has been theorized as an important factor in attracting venture capital and stimulating market demand, but the gap between promise and fulfillment is also a well-known story.63 Yet biotechnology’s promise to extend life often appears to be blind to the question of who might benefit from these new technologies and who might be disempowered by them. Anthropological studies of biotechnology need to attend to how big science operates as a fantasy of regenerating economies that have been devastated by economic restructuring and the devaluation of rural life. If we are moving from a biopolitical regime to one driven by bioeconomics, as Nikolas Rose suggests, then biovalue is being produced out of the body’s own vitality and thereby becomes a new frontier in the logics of capital accumulation.64 232 Ann S. Anagnost

In thinking through the question of the constitutive outside of capitalism in the production of new formations of biovalue, Cheris Thompson has returned to a feminist critique of Marxism and its overemphasis on production at the expense of reproduction when it is the latter, she suggests, that is the primary generator of wealth, agency, and value.65 Capitalism has always been based on prior modes of production that become new sources of value production. These prior modes, or what Marx refers to as “the means of production already produced,” may perhaps be defined as reproduction, not just human birth and nurture, but the fertility of the soil.66 Land and labor are what Marx called “false commodities,” in that they do not spring from human making; instead they supply the means for a primitive accumulation through dispossession and the wage contract. Here, of course, we must be aware of feminist and anthropological framings of an artifactual nature, especially in the way that land and labor are now being rendered up anew for capital accumulation following the breakup of China’s socialist farming collectives. Taking the broader sense of reproduction to include the fertility of the soil, Hannah Landecker has remarked that biologists do not make dnA, organisms do.67 Hence we can speak of biopharmaceutical production as a kind of “pharming” (as agriculture in another form) due to the very biological nature of biological therapies. Landecker concludes that biocapital is not dependent on reproduction so much as it is constituted by it. The concern of many scholars doing critical work on the new life sciences is that bioproducts extracted from bodies may in turn confront those bodies in an alienated and possibly harmful form. The spread of HIV in Henan Province suggests that the active production of inequality has been both the condition of possibility for biotechnological development while also exacting a retroviral revenge. The punishment that was first imposed on Chinese HIV/ AIdS activists and health professionals who struggled to bring the epidemic to international attention, and the initial refusal of local government officials to take responsibility for the catastrophe, further suggests the extremes to which rural residents have been devalued. This situation would seem to approximate Foucault’s definition of the biopolitics of the disciplinary state as “the power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die,” but only to a point.68 With the financialization of life, we have a bioeconomy effected through a market mechanism that extracts a “surplus” of life from one sphere to enhance life in another. “With its vested interest in catastrophism, neoliberalism is . . . intent on profiting from the ‘unregulated’ distribution of life chances, however extreme.”69 One can hope, however, that situations such as the spread of HIV Strange Circulations 233

infection through the blood economy in Henan still have the power to reveal their monstrousness to us and that we can recognize them as a call to responsibility. Stories that depict China as monstrous, as if it were somehow outside the regulated circuits of international economic exchanges, must show how these practices are connected to logics of accumulation in which North American subjects are equally implicated, if only because just about everything that we use and wear has probably been made by Chinese migrant labor.70 The monstrous beckons the critic to engage in a hermeneutic project to force the “social hieroglyphic” that is the commodity to reveal its hidden meanings. Tracking value in a global network of exchanges would in effect dissolve Asia as an object organizing our inquiries and replace it with the idea of the value chain in which the logics that organize the production of biovalue in China’s blood trade are raised as a specter that haunts the normativity of our everyday encounters with the commodity form. noTes

An earlier version of this essay appeared in the journal Economy and Society 35 (4): 509–29. The author benefited from her many discussions with Shao Jing, whose writing on the blood economy gives a perspective much closer to the experience of those who must live with its consequences. 1. Cooper, Life as Surplus, 3. 2. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended; Cooper, Life as Surplus, 5–7. 3. Martin, Financialization of Daily Life, 11–12. 4. Cooper, Life as Surplus. 5. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. 6. Marx, Capital. 7. Cooper, Life as Surplus, 6. 8. Marx, quoted in Cooper, Life as Surplus, 6. 9. Hardt and Negri, Empire. 10. Dyer-Witheford, “Global Body, Global Brain/Global Factory, Global War.” Cooper, “Clinical Capital-Neo-liberalism and the Will to Experiment (China and the U.S.).” 11. Spivak, “From Haverstock Hill Flat to U.S. Classroom. What’s Left of Theory?” 12. More recently, this inexhaustible supply appears to have dried up, creating a labor shortage in coastal areas, especially around Guangzhou. This would have been inconceivable a few years ago. Either workers are “voting with their feet,” as Andrew Ross speculates, or the rural tax reform has made labor migration less of an imperative. See Ross, Fast Boat to China. 13. Cooper, Life as Surplus, 9. Cooper cites François Ewald, “Society gives life and pledges to protect it. What does it ask for in exchange? That one gives one’s life to society”

234 Ann S. Anagnost

(8). Foucault refers to the Beveridge Plan, which introduced Keynesian policies into government, as a pact of war. You exchange your military service for life-long employment security. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 216. 14. Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception. 15. Tsing, “The Global Situation.” 16. See also Farquhar, “Technologies of Everyday Life,” 172. 17. Jean and John Comaroff point out the play of the meaning of “consumption” between its nineteenth- century use to refer to a wasting disease as well as its current use to refer to commodity desire as the vital force of “millennial” capitalism. Comaroff and Comaroff, “Millennial Capitalism.” 18. See Anagnost, “Prosperity and Counter-Prosperity” and Yan, “Neoliberal Governmentality and Neohumanism” for discussions of how peasants were incited to entrepreneurial subjectivity in the early 1980s and mid-1990s, respectively. One cannot help but note the co-temporality of Ermo’s descent with the descent of agriculture in general. Nonetheless, one should be cautious of a hermeneutic of intentionality in the logics that set up the rural as the constitutive outside of capitalism. The bankruptcy of agriculture is the product of a contingent play of forces that have overdetermined results that may not have been entirely predictable. For discussions of overdetermination in rethinking “capital logics,” see Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It), and Mitchell, Rule of Experts. 19. Yan, “Spectralization of the Rural,” 585. 20. Gao, Gao Village, 65–66. 21. Li, “Chinese Peasants of Misery.” 22. Pun, Made in China; Yan, “Spectralization of the Rural.” 23. Cai, “Rural Urban Income Gap and Critical Point of Institutional Change,” 2. 24. Marc Blecher points out that from having one of the most egalitarian income distributions in the world, “China is now one of Asia’s most unequal societies.” In 2002, the per capita income in urban and rural areas had reached 3:1. Blecher, “Inequality and Capitalism in China,” 1–2. The Gini coefficient, an international measure of income inequality, has grown from a low of 0.33 in 1978 to approach 0.5 in the first quarter of 2005. China Daily, “Income Gap in China Widens in First Quarter.” 25. Cody, “In Face of Rural Unrest, China Rolls Out Reforms.” 26. There is a debate among policy makers as to whether the appropriate response to social unrest should be suppression or poverty alleviation. Blecher points out that the policies of reform still retain popular support despite the growing inequalities. Blecher, “Inequality and Capitalism in China,” 16. 27. Yan, “Spectralization of the Rural,” 584–85. 28. Pomfret, “China Blocks Trip to U.S. by AIdS Award Honoree.” 29. Gittings, along with many other sources, also reports that Wan Yanhai was subsequently detained by Chinese state security in Beijing for revealing a “state secret.” He was eventually released after an international outcry at his arrest. Gittings, “China Admits ‘Blood Stations’ Caused Steep Rise in AIdS.” 30. The practice of selling blood by rural people during the 1960s was the basis of Yu

Strange Circulations 235

Hua’s novel Chronicle of a Blood Merchant (1996), which was written prior to the exposure of the spread of HIV in Henan. For comparative purposes, see Waldby and Mitchell, Tissue Economies, for an account of the commodification of blood in the United States in the 1950s. 31. Market Research Centre and the Canadian Trade Commissioner Service of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, “The Biotechnology Market in China.” 32. On the “entrepreneurialization of the self ” in China’s neoliberal restructuring, see Anagnost, “The Corporeal Politics of ‘Quality’ (Suzhi ).” See also Farquhar, Appetites, for the links between food, health, and medicine. 33. Shao, “Fluid Labor and Blood Money.” 34. Gittings, “China Admits ‘Blood Stations’ Caused Steep Rise in AIdS.” 35. Cohen, “The Other Kidney.” 36. Ibid., 24. See Rosenthal, “In Rural China, a Steep Price of Poverty,” on the gendered nature of blood sales in Wenlou. Sui, “Chinese village riddled with AIdS left to die by government,” explains how the money was spent. 37. Zhao and Shang, “HIV among Shanglou District, Shaanxi Province Blood Donors.” 38. U.S. Embassy, Beijing, “Prc Blood Donors and the Spread of Rural AIdS.” 39. Neocleous, “The Political Economy of the Dead,” 683. 40. Marx, Capital, 376. 41. Neocleous, “The Political Economy of the Dead,” 683. 42. Douglas and Isherwood, quoted in Buck-Morss, “Envisioning Capital,” 461. 43. Neocleous, “The Political Economy of the Dead.” 44. Yan, “Neoliberal Governmentality and Neohumanism,” 516, n. 29. 45. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 3–35. 46. Ibid., 18. 47. Waldby and Mitchell, Tissue Economies, 187. 48. Spivak, “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value,” 163. 49. Buck-Morss, “Envisioning Capital,” 456. 50. Hegel, quoted in Buck-Morss, “Envisioning Capital,” 458. 51. Marx, Capital, 74. 52. Ibid., 35. 53. Keenan, “The Point Is to (Ex)Change It,” 157. Keenan excavates this etymological monstrosity from Wahrig, Deutsches Wörterbuch. See Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow, for a discussion of how the meanings of the monstrous include both the deformation of the body and its fragmentation into parts and reassembly into anomalous wholes. 54. Keenan, “The Point Is to (Ex)Change It,” 161. 55. Marx, Capital, 233. 56. Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow, 126. 57. Smith, quoted in Buck-Morss, “Envisioning Capital,” 448. 58. Ibid., 448–49. 59. Ibid., 450.

236 Ann S. Anagnost

60. Ibid., 452. 61. bid., 454. 62. Shao, “Fluid Labor and Blood Money.” 63. Rajan, “Genomic Capital.” 64. Rose, “The Politics of Life Itself.” 65. Thompson, cited in Franklin and Lock, “Animation and Cessation,” 7. 66. Ibid. 67. Landecker, “On Beginning and Ending with Apoptosis.” 68. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 241. 69. Cooper, Life as Surplus, 11. 70. See also Blecher, “Inequality and Capitalism in China,” 16.

Strange Circulations 237

Çag˘atay topal

necropolitical sUrVeillance

Immigrants from Turkey in Germany

Surveillance over immigrants from Turkey in Germany operates as a means of inclusion and exclusion, constructing those immigrants as “(un)suitable” foreign subjects. Since the first large-scale recruitment in 1961, surveillance of immigrants from Turkey has changed significantly. The characteristics of migrant workers and immigrants that are significant for the existing systems in Germany vary depending on the social context. Appearing to target the life chances of immigrants, surveillance practices have been reshaped to match the characteristics of immigrants and the changing system requirements of Germany. Since it encloses all aspects of immigrant life, surveillance has an inherently biopolitical character, addressing the life-productive capacities of immigrants. In this sense, biopolitical surveillance mainly refers to inclusive measures for immigrants. The focus here will be on the exclusionary side of surveillance associated with necropolitics. From the 1960s to 2000s, the meaning of death, as well as that of life, has been gradually redefined within a broader schema, and the scope of necropolitical as well as biopolitical surveillance has become more comprehensive. While this expanding scope seems to be solely inclusive, the exclusionary side of surveillance has also been increasingly strengthened and broadened. Within a broader exclusionary framework, death as a discrete, discontinuous category has evolved into a continuous process revealing conflicting produc-

tivities (created by immigrants) and possibilities (created primarily by the German state) that must be administered and concurrently coordinated. This concept of continuous death indicates that there is no clear-cut difference between inclusion and exclusion. Life, deaTh, immiGraTion, and surveiLLance

I use the term “life-production” to argue that the (re)production of life includes all aspects of life, the political, cultural, religious, gender, racial, educational, economic, and the like.1 Life-production indicates ethnic, cultural, religious, and gender productivities, in addition to economic productivities. As a spatial power relation, immigration contexts are differentiated by their respective regimes of power and production.2 As a result of immigration, spatial contexts interact with one another, creating an interactive space between the life-production regimes of the originary and destination contexts. Immigrants from Turkey search out a new life-production regime by subjecting themselves to the direction of German authorities. For the German government and German institutions, the role of immigrants from Turkey is to maintain existing systems. In the context of immigration, I conceptualize surveillance based on both classical and contemporary figures.3 Surveillance concerns the production and control, through registration systems, databases, counting, monitoring, and checking procedures, of knowledge pertaining to individuals and groups. Surveillance is linked to a decision-making system that Germany exploits to direct the capacities of migrant workers and immigrants from Turkey into appropriate spaces. It is the essential element of any practice of public and private institutions that aims to control migrant workers and immigrants from Turkey to ensure that they live within the limits of the lifeproduction regimes of Germany. Immigrants are subject to security- driven policing, discrimination, and exclusion, as well as to welfare policies, social services, and integration measures. Germany concurrently chooses “suitable” life-productivities and to a considerable extent leaves out “death-productivities.” Death-productivity is a counter-life-productive activity that potentially threatens the life-related discourses and practices of existing regimes in a given life-production context. This activity can be economic, cultural, religious, or ethnic in nature. This is to say that a life-production regime is simultaneously a death-production regime. Germany imposes its own conceptualizations of death-productive possibilities on immigrants from Turkey in order to constrain their deathNecropolitical Surveillance 239

productive capacities and, correspondingly, to preserve Germany’s own lifeproduction regimes as they are defined by the German state. Necropolitical production comprises strategies that regulate, limit, define, and reconstruct the death productivities of immigrants from Turkey, within the constraints of biopolitical production in Germany. Immigrants are embraced not only because they are worthy enough to be included in German society, but also because they are “worthless” enough to be “disposable.” Inclusionary surveillance functions in two ways: (1) in the biopolitical sense so that the life-productive capacities of immigrants can be captured and (2) in the necropolitical sense so that their life-productive capacities can be used in a disposable fashion. In the first case, inclusion occurs to include; in the second case, inclusion occurs to exclude. Likewise, exclusionary surveillance functions in two ways: (1) in the biopolitical sense so that the life-production regimes of Germany can be protected and (2) in the necropolitical sense so that the death-productive capacities of immigrants can be prevented from getting in. surveiLLance and necropoLiTics

Nikolas Rose argues that inclusion and exclusion are two crucial elements of modern control systems. However, modern surveillance promises more; some surveillance mechanisms aim to embrace “the excluded.” In the case that reinclusion is not possible, surveillance administers the excluded and reduces the effect of the danger attributed to those who cannot be reincluded. Rose defines inclusion as “circuits of security” and exclusion as “circuits of insecurity.”4 The individual whose identity is assumed to belong to the “circuits of insecurity” is regarded as a risk for the system. As Richard Ericson and Kevin Haggerty describe in their illuminating analysis, individuals are risky because they are described as such within institutional frameworks. Risk is an invention created within discursive institutional practices. Risk discourse, Ericson and Haggerty assert, promotes “insecurities” and enforces “expert knowledge of risk.”5 Surveillance mechanisms create the categories of death possibilities to exercise exclusion with the purpose of diminishing the “negative” effects of life-productive capacities of individuals in question. Risk is in fact a death possibility constructed within institutional discourses. The assumption behind a constructed death possibility is that there are death-productivities that make this so- called death—be it economic, cultural, or ethnic—possible and which must be under surveillance. It is assumed that these possibilities 240 Çağatay Topal

would be created through the possible inclusion of the excluded and would damage the host society. Consequently, death possibilities would turn out to be death productivities from the perspective of institutions that generate risk definitions. The position of institutions is plainly duplicitous here as they effectively and deliberately ignore the death possibilities they themselves produce for the included and even for the excluded. They define the capacities of individuals as potentially death productive while the capacities of institutions are identified as life productive. Seemingly independent institutions produce a type of interdependence that promotes a more effective and efficient surveillance. The result is a kind of surveillance alliance that has differentiated institutional objectives organized around a general goal of surveillance over individuals and a population. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Haggerty and Ericson use the phrase “surveillant assemblage” to describe this alliance.6 The assemblage enables a kind of rhizomatic expansion of surveillance. Individuals and social groups who are exempt from surveillance are increasingly included within the organs of the assemblage. More elements of life are absorbed into the processes of surveillance and, as a result, surveillance considerably intensifies.7 The emergence of the surveillant assemblage means that death, along with life, is increasingly defined within a complex institutional network. While the assemblage captures the fields of life, it simultaneously reconstructs the possibilities of death. The assemblage necessarily excludes the alternative definitions of life and death from its territories. The strong and pervasive cooperation between different institutions creates a cumulative surveillance effect in society. Surveillance capacities of institutions are multiplied when a new institution is embraced by the assemblage. Deleuze examines this trend by comparing the historical context of what Foucault refers to as “the disciplinary society” with what he calls “the society of control.” The disciplinary society, according to Deleuze, consists of enclosures that have their own rules and fields of operation. The society of control, on the other hand, uses open mechanisms that continuously change their forms. Individuals in the disciplinary society end with one organization and start with another. This is why, Deleuze asserts, disciplinary individuals produce discontinuously. Since each organization is the manifestation of “one and the same modulation,” individuals never finish anything in the society of control and they produce continuously within a network. Control is short term yet continuous in the society of control with rapid turnover rates. Discipline, on the other hand, is long term, infinite, and discontinuous.8 Necropolitical Surveillance 241

Since production is not a continuous activity in the disciplinary society, individuals are not under continuous surveillance. They are involved with production within a discontinuous network of public and private institutions that have distinctive realms of operation. Production is discontinuous in the sense that it continues for a certain time as individuals stay within enclosures for certain periods. Under such conditions, disciplinary surveillance can be said to be discontinuous. In the society of control, production is realized throughout the whole society. The increased degree of connection among institutions makes the functions of each institution more similar to one another. Production becomes a networked activity and gains a continuous character. In this case, individuals must be under continuous surveillance. According to Hardt and Negri, normalizing disciplinary apparatuses are generalized as their effect is intensified in the society of control. Disciplinary power evolves into biopolitical power, the mechanisms of which begin to embrace the entirety of social life.9 The target of this biopolitical power, as Foucault describes it, is life itself.10 The analyses of Foucault, Deleuze, and Hardt and Negri offer clarifications on the biopolitical character of contemporary surveillance mechanisms. Though they are subtle, the traces of necropolitical power can be seen in these clarifications. In the disciplinary phase, death is defined within enclosures and obtains definite meanings. The possibilities of death constructed within disciplinary enclosures are discontinuous. In the society of control, these possibilities are gradually constructed in a wider network of control mechanisms. As control does, control mechanisms spread across society. At this stage, death does not have definite meanings—it is uncertain and open; it is never finished or complete; it is beyond limits. In a way, death becomes biopolitical, and the boundaries between life and death blur. As life is subjected to continuous surveillance in the society of control, death is also rendered as the object of continuous surveillance. Death productivities may sometimes be more threatening to the existing regimes of the country than life productivities. Diffuse life-productive forces immediately produce diffuse death possibilities that are a big concern for the existing regimes. The continuation of a regime is firmly dependent on the maximization of life-productive capacities and the minimization of death-productive possibilities as defined by the regime itself. Decisions of inclusion and exclusion are based on the requirements of the mode of life production in a given context. In the context of the politicaleconomic characteristics of many immigrant-receiving countries, this mode 242 Çağatay Topal

of life production can be characterized as capitalist. The existing social context within which inclusion and exclusion are shaped carries the effects of death productivities along with those of the life productivities defined within the paradigm of contemporary capitalism. Accordingly, what is at stake is also the capitalist mode of death production. Both life and death productivities are embraced in such a way that they could be transformed in the direction that benefits capitalism. Capitalism does not only exploit life. It exploits death, too. Achille Mbembe argues that, in the biopolitical context, racism regulates the distribution of death so that the state can exercise its murderous functions.11 This is also true for the capitalist mode of death production, since capitalism is inherently racist during the era of biopolitics.12 Capitalism regulates the production and distribution of death in addition to those of life. Foucault argues that killing is not always murder. Killing involves “every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on.”13 Capitalism in Germany has subjected immigrants from Turkey to forms of indirect murder. It has produced various death possibilities throughout immigrants’ lives, and it has exercised diverse forms of necropolitical surveillance in order to impose death possibilities and deter the death capacities brought and created by immigrants. Since the early 1960s, the meaning of death for immigrants has been enlarged, becoming gradually less discrete and more continuous. Death has turned out to be something more possible. This indicates the strengthened necropolitical character of the developing surveillance, a necropolitical character that challenges the limits between the processes of inclusion and exclusion of immigrants. Germany in The posT–second WorLd War period

In 1947, there were about 10 million refugees and displaced people in Germany. Approximately 4 million of them were in the Soviet zone, East Germany. During the 1950s, 2 million people migrated from East to West Germany. Although the integration of refugees appeared to be an enormous problem at first, refugees actually provided cheap labor that was crucial for the developing West German economy. The economy was based on capitalist premises, while supporting low-income people. Marshall aid, the Korean War, the need for reconstruction, and the emergence of consumer goods were significant factors that helped to invigorate the economy. Until the 1960s, West Germany Necropolitical Surveillance 243

was a country of “economic prosperity, material wealth, political stability and relative security.” With the building of the Berlin Wall, West Germany began to experience difficulties in sustaining a sufficient labor force for its economy. The gap was filled with foreign workers, known as “guestworkers,” recruited in increasing numbers in the 1960s, except during a very short term of economic recession and unemployment in 1966. The oil crisis in 1973 led the West German government to stop the recruitment.14 According to Schmidt and Zimmerman, the period between the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and the recruitment ban in 1973 can be considered “the manpower recruitment phase.”15 With the establishment of the guestworker system, about 10 million immigrants came to West Germany. Of those, 3.7 million settled permanently. The government initially granted oneyear residence permits for migrant workers. Longer permits were granted conditionally, according to whether they would serve the interests of Germany. The government and employers saw the presence of guestworkers as temporary. Migrant workers were more concerned and occupied with the immediate events that could affect their lives than the long-term policies of the German government. The German government had no interest in integrating migrant workers into the larger German society. There was, however, an obvious tendency among foreigners to stay longer in West Germany.16 According to the recruitment agreement between Turkey and Germany, signed in 1961, potential workers from Turkey would be subjected to an extensive medical examination, literally from head to toe. The purpose of the extensive examination was to select the most productive recruits, those likely to create more economic surplus, and to select the healthiest, those least likely to carry epidemics from Turkey to Germany. The purely rationaleconomic evaluation made the German government disregard the cultural and religious affiliations of immigrants in the selection process. While the federal government allowed other countries’ workers to bring their families to Germany to reunite, this opportunity was not given to workers from Turkey. In fact, the accommodation conditions for immigrants from Turkey were poor; a survey in 1971 demonstrated that 40 percent of the accommodations of workers from Turkey did not meet appropriate standards. In North RhineWestphalia, 46 percent of workers’ houses were not suitable in terms of the amount of living space per person. There was only one shower for roughly every twenty workers, and one toilet for every ten workers. When arriving in Germany, immigrants from Turkey worked in “very noisy, hot and foulsmelling locations.”17 244 Çağatay Topal

A necropolitical perspective combined with biopolitical surveillance can be observed in the policies of the government and the living and working conditions of immigrants. The exclusion of workers’ families, the detailed medical test, the poor conditions of accommodations and workplaces illustrate how the German state unfavorably constructed life conditions of migrant workers from Turkey. The primary purpose of the medical examination was to decrease immigrants’ death-productive capacities. Yet, very poor living and working conditions demonstrated that the number of death possibilities the German state created for migrant workers was considerably high. Indeed, migrant workers were recruited precisely for working under such conditions, since German workers were not willing to accept those conditions. That is, migrant workers were included to be excluded. The Aliens Act of 1965 addressed only the issues of entry, temporary stay, deportation, and a few political rights for migrant workers. The terms of those rights remained rather broad and bureaucracies related to immigrant labor were expected to interpret and apply them. The Aliens Act granted a residence permit conditionally and only for a limited period. Such a permit might require migrant workers to live in a specific place or to work for a predetermined firm. If an immigrant’s actions were regarded as detrimental to German interests, the immigrant could be deported.18 The main necropolitical principle of the act was to compel migrant workers from Turkey to live and work at fixed places. In this way, their death productivities could be contained. The corresponding outcome of this containment was that employers and the German state were able to impose death possibilities—along with life possibilities—that they considered proper for migrant workers from Turkey. The state and employers had the ultimate authority to define death and “deadly” conditions that migrant workers had to confront. When Germany started to recruit foreign workers in 1953, it concurrently established a central database, the Central Foreigners Register or “Auslanderzentralregister” (AZr). The AZr was automated in 1967. Until 1994, the AZr had no legal basis. The law enacted on the AZr in 1994 legitimized the legal and technical status of the database. Each individual file includes “names, surnames, knowledge and writing ability on German law and language, other languages, former names, aliases, sex, nationality, date and place of birth, civil status, the numbers and further details of personal documents, last address in home country, nationality of husband or wife, every change of address, every entry or leaving of the country, status under the immigration or asylum law.” The files also include “reasons for denial of a visa, Necropolitical Surveillance 245

if a person has been denied naturalization, if a person is on the police wanted persons list for denial of entry, if there are reasons to believe that a person is suspected of having committed or planned to commit in the future an offence of trafficking of immigrants, trafficking of illegal drugs, membership, support or propaganda for a criminal or terrorist organization or another offence with a terrorist intention.”19 The AZr does not keep the data of naturalized foreigners. Data is kept for five years after a foreigner’s death and in the case that the foreigner has left the country for good, the data of the foreigner is held for ten years, commencing from the date his leaving.20 The very long list of data kept in the AZr signifies that the state has become concerned with almost everything about immigrants. The aim has not just been to differentiate between life-productive capacities of immigrants. The AZr also determines immigrants’ death-productivities. It identifies the characteristics and activities of immigrants that are potential threats to the so- called German lifestyle. This information must be available to state authorities managing death productivities. As the largest central database on foreigners, the AZr has been a crucial surveillance mechanism to match the life and death productivities of immigrants with the life and death possibilities of German society. The five-year hold on the data of dead foreigners shows that the AZr has a necropolitical function. This data is still regarded as significant for surveillance purposes. Immigrants are constructed through the processes of death, as well as life. In the post–Second World War period, German authorities and employers searched for simple data on immigrants from Turkey, data that was directly related to their economic productivities. Other aspects of their productive capacities were not as important as their economic productivities. The concern for the death productivities of immigrants from Turkey was also economic. The German state aimed to eliminate economic death productivities that might arise from immediate life processes that were assumed to threaten the economic processes of Germany. In this sense, the meaning of death was limited and certain. While striving to control and enclose these “threats,” the state and employers were reconstructing regimes of death for an exclusionary inclusion. Migrant workers were contained (included) within predetermined enclosures, so that they could be excluded from the rest of society. Consequently, the death possibilities to which they were subject were largely discontinuous.

246 Çağatay Topal

Germany durinG The poLiTicaL- economic resTrucTurinG of The LaTe TWenTieTh cenTury

In the late 1970s, West and East Germany were in a relatively stable relationship. The economy was functioning. Greens surfaced as a political force within this period. The Social Democratic government declared tax reforms in favor of industrialists and affluent sections of society, worsening the situation of middle- and lower-income citizens. But in the early 1980s, unemployment began to rise. In 1982, there were 2.5 million unemployed people in West Germany. The policies of a new conservative government deepened the economic crisis of the less well- off and the poor. The conservative regime cut unemployment and maternity benefits, restricted Christmas and holiday payments, and pushed for unstable working hours. Many Germans were unemployed and already working fewer hours. Unemployment was at 9.3 percent in 1988. In 1990, unemployment was lower but still high at 7.2 percent.21 The late 1980s saw some radical upheavals within Eastern European countries. Even in the Soviet Union, things were not the same. There was a strong tendency toward social transformation under glasnost and perestroika, and the desire to incorporate into the Western world. East Germany took part in this drama. On October 9, 1989, East Germans organized a peaceful rally in Leipzig, which was followed by the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. The official unification came into effect on July 1, 1990. After unification, many East German firms were closed down. This led to an enormous rise in unemployment. New nationalist movements, including neo-Nazis, found their voice. Economic and political divisions persisted. The government introduced a solidarity tax, which is still in effect, to rebuild East Germany. In 1993, the growth rate was negative and there were 4 million unemployed Germans, 10 percent of German workers, in 1994.22 Schmidt and Zimmerman call the period between November 1973 and 1988 “the consolidation phase.” But the recruitment ban did not stop migration. Members of German migrant families who had remained in their home countries continued to migrate. Furthermore, high fertility rates among migrants increased their numbers in Germany. The law on return migration enacted in 1981 did not help convince migrants to return. In 1988, there were about 4.5 million foreigners in West Germany. In 1989 the “German-German migration phase” started. This continued until the official unification in 1990. Some 1.5 million people migrated to West Germany from East Germany. About 980,000 of these immigrants settled permanently in the West.23 Necropolitical Surveillance 247

After the recruitment ban, additional restrictive regulations came into force. Immigrants were not allowed to move to or settle in the districts where the population of foreigners was more than 12 percent. Family reunification was possible only when migrant workers had an adequate housing arrangement for the whole family.24 In 1981 the conservative parties in Germany strongly resisted naturalization for second-generation foreigners. Because the conservatives came to power in 1982, the issue of naturalization was not on the government’s agenda until the 1990s.25 The conservative government brought the return law into effect in 1983.26 German citizenship was directly inclusive for ethnic Germans and exclusive for non-German immigrants before the 1990 Foreigners Law.27 The 1990 Foreigners Law allowed foreigners to apply for naturalization if they were between sixteen and twenty-three years old, if they were residents of Germany for at least eight years, and if they had continued their education in Germany for at least six years. Foreigners who received social benefits for more than three years, personally or through their families, could be deported. Basically, the law privileged foreigners who were deemed to have the capacity for full integration and were thought to pose no cost to the government.28 After the neo-Nazi attacks against immigrants from Turkey in the early 1990s, which claimed the lives of eight people, the government introduced and put into effect new restrictions on the constitutional rights of refugees.29 Germany’s necropolitical approach was reflected in regulations on the movement of immigrants, the spatial organization of immigrant districts, and immigration laws in general. The spatial limitations could be considered a necropolitical strategy, preventing immigrants from constructing their own enclaves, in which alternative life and death productivities could be developed. The isolation of immigrant communities was not welcomed by the state. The isolation of communities would, however, come with advantages for the state, for isolation also meant that the death-productive capacities of immigrants were isolated. This perceived advantage was evident in light of the increasing antiforeigner atmosphere and the unfavorable immigration policies of the German state. But this situation created significant obstacles for immigrants from Turkey in terms of their realizing their life-productive capacities and contributing to German society in their own ways. And they had to confront death possibilities created within the exclusionary dynamics of German society. Xenophobia was an important issue in the early 1990s. As a result of increasing xenophobia, on November 23, 1992, three immigrants from Tur248 Çağatay Topal

key were killed in their house in Mölln by neo-Nazis. On May 29, 1993, four Turkish women and a child were killed in an arson attack in Solingen. The political-economic transformations and antiforeigner mood during the 1980s created the conditions for the further targeting of immigrants. Immigrants from Turkey were unquestionably the most marked. Xenophobia is a product of the politics of death. Murders disclosed the kind of death possibilities immigrants from Turkey were and might be subject to. The attacks led immigrants from Turkey to keep their distance from the larger society, which increased their isolation. These murders were a crucial part of necropolitical surveillance strategies that imposed certain subjectification models on immigrants. The murders were obvious impositions of death possibilities constructed within German society. They were violent responses against the possible spread of cultural and religious lifestyles of immigrants that were regarded as death productive by some sections of German society. That is to say, death began to be defined with respect to cultural, ethnic, and religious realms, a redefinition that broadened the scope of the exclusionary inclusion of immigrants in addition to fostering direct exclusion. From the early 1980s on, the authorities that kept data on foreigners started electronic data processing. Electronically better- equipped authorities were sharing data with the AZr. Two significant databases were linked to the AZr: the database of the Federal Office of Criminal Investigation (BKA) and that of the Internal Intelligence Service (BVS). The BKA holds data on foreigners who are regarded as “a threat to public order and security” and those who are expelled and deported. But the BKA is not solely a database of so- called criminals. While the BKA removes the data of Germans after a short period, it keeps the data of foreigners for ten years, which means that the data in the BKA are basically about “unwelcome” immigrants. The BVS administers the primary database for information on politically active immigrants. The BVS implements twenty times more surveillance over immigrants than over Germans.30 The BKA and the BVS could be regarded primarily as immigrant databases that store information on immigrants’ life and death productivities. Necropolitical surveillance exercised over immigrants by means of these institutions is considerable. Along with the AZr, the BKA and the BVS have an important function to hold and make use of the data regarding the death productivities of immigrants. The information that German authorities were interested in during this period was not only economic. The economic capacity of migrant workers was still the primary concern, yet German governments considered cultural, Necropolitical Surveillance 249

ethnic, and religious attributes significant in terms of immigrants’ integration into German society. The state, employers, and German society began to be concerned with the cultural, ethnic, and religious death productivities of immigrants from Turkey. This trend shows that the meaning of death was defined within a larger discursive and institutional framework. The definition was more open than in the previous era. The restrictive and exclusionary measures furthered by the state during this period, the isolation conditioned by the dynamics of German society, and most importantly the attacks and killings by neo-Nazis revealed the new noneconomic concerns and the necropolitical character of surveillance regimes in Germany, regimes which were gradually extending their fields. While the field of exclusion was expanding, death possibilities imposed on immigrants were appearing less discrete and discontinuous, and more uncertain and continuous. Death began to be described religiously, ethnically, and culturally as well as economically and biologically. Germany aT The Turn of The TWenTy- firsT cenTury

Economic and social divisions in German society persisted in this phase. From 1999 to 2001, the Social Democrat–Green coalition introduced some reforms in favor of the less well- off. Yet these reforms helped little since the economic situation was still poor. In 2002, unemployment increased and taxes were raised again. The unfavorable economic conditions affected eastern provinces more. Economic problems provided a suitable ground for neoNazis to gain power, especially among unemployed East German youth.31 There was also a tension among East Germans as unification was actually seen as a “takeover” of the East by the West. The new citizenship law became effective on January 1, 2000, improving the rights of immigrants in Germany.32 In 2001, the German minister of interior affairs declared for the first time that Germany was an immigration country.33 Germany’s new immigration act came into force on January 1, 2005. The new law put much emphasis on the integration of immigrants, while promoting the immigration of highly skilled labor, especially in the information sectors.34 Under the new citizenship law effective since January 1, 2000, the Germanborn children of foreigners are able to keep dual citizenship on the condition that one of their parents had a lawful residence status for at least eight years or had an “unlimited residence permit” for at least three years. These children are to choose one type of citizenship—German or another—before their 250 Çağatay Topal

twenty-third birthdays. After eight years of legal residence, foreigners can apply for naturalization. In order to proceed with the application, they first have to pledge their loyalty to “democratic order” and the German constitution. Applicants must have residence permits and adequate financial means to support themselves without any social benefit. Applicants must also give up their previous citizenship. Finally, they must have no criminal record except minor offenses and must be able to speak and write competently in German.35 The new Immigration Act of Germany, effective January 1, 2005, determines two types of residence statuses: one conferred by a residence permit (limited) and the other conferred by a settlement permit (unlimited). The act maintains the recruitment ban, with some exceptions for qualified workers and for unqualified workers in some sectors.36 The act makes it essential for immigrants to have sufficient German-language skills and knowledge of the social and legal aspects of German life. Immigrants who come to Germany for the first time have to take integration courses. The federal government or the highest provincial offices can make a deportation decision if there is a real possibility of threat against the interests of the federal state. If deportation is not possible for political reasons, the immigrants in question may be required to go to the nearest police station every day to declare their presence. The immigrants’ rights of communication and free movement may also be restricted by the court.37 Both the 2000 citizenship law and the 2005 immigration act maintain the rationale behind the 1990 Foreigners Law. They exclude immigrants deemed unsuitable and include those considered suitable. Immigrants should have financially, economically, spatially, legally, socially, and even culturally suitable resources to be accepted fully in German society. This means that almost all death-productive capacities of immigrants must be tamed, if not eliminated. The aim of compulsory integration courses is the social and cultural transformation and harmonization of immigrants’ capacities, which will supposedly contribute to the decline of their death productivities. The German state is more concerned with the full integration of immigrants into the wider sphere of German life possibilities. The discourse of threat is utilized in both the citizenship law and the immigration act. Prospective immigrants are seen as potential threats to the public order and the constitution. The German state has once again attempted to eliminate or minimize the death productivities entering Germany. The economic characteristics of immigrants are not the only concern. The state has targeted almost all kinds of death productivities. Necropolitical Surveillance 251

The state claims a more comprehensive perspective than it had previously, giving more importance to the cultural, religious, and ethnic, as well as economic, death productivities. The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, led to the intensification of surveillance over Muslim immigrants in Germany and had a similar effect in other parts of the first world.38 Both immigrant individuals and immigrant associations were now under blind suspicion. The Tiergarten Peace Court ruled that thorough and systematic searches must be directed to social groups composed of Muslims, who create an impression of being innocent, who travel a lot, who are financially independent, and who take/took airplane piloting lessons, regardless of whether or not they are part of a fundamentalist group. Post- 9/11 conditions provided a suitable social context for the German state to accelerate the application of its necropolitical surveillance. Immigrants were increasingly defined by their assumed death-productive capacities. The rising power of risk discourses enhanced the effects of necropolitical surveillance. The rhetoric of the “war on terrorism” was utilized so that the death-productive capacities of immigrants could be enclosed or eliminated. The life experiences of immigrants were reconstructed more within the circuits of necropolitics. A Turkish imam was deported due to vague notions of “public security.” The ostensible reason for deportation was a hate speech the imam gave some ten years earlier. The speech was definitely a crime and subject to investigation. Yet, the government preferred to deport the Turkish imam.39 It is remarkable that this speech could be kept secret for ten years and that the police could discover it in the context of 9/11. In 2005, the Constitutional Court determined that the deportation order of the Turkish imam should be stopped and the Berlin Supreme Administration Court should reconsider the situation of the imam.40 While many immigrants were deported, some naturalized immigrants from Turkey lost their German citizenship. These immigrants were involved in illegal religious and ethnic organizations. Naturalization did not provide the same rights to immigrants that native Germans enjoyed. Although these immigrants, as German citizens, should have been able to utilize the justice and legal systems in the country, they were expelled from German citizenship instead. In fact, naturalized immigrants are not seen as truly German. Although the German constitution mentions that a German citizen cannot be expelled from citizenship, this does not apply to naturalized immigrants.41 The German state does not see any contradiction in expelling “its own” citi252 Çağatay Topal

zens. Even citizenship cannot guarantee a “secure” status for immigrants. This indicates that the necropolitical surveillance principally targeting “difference” or “irregularity” continues to exist for immigrants. Obtaining German citizenship does not necessarily decrease the degree of necropolitical surveillance. Immigrants may be treated as a threat to German society, since it is assumed that they still carry death-productive capacities. Germany has been interested in almost every kind of information on migrant workers and immigrants from Turkey at the turn of the twenty-first century. Besides immigrants’ economic capacities, their religious affiliations are especially important in the post- 9/11 context. Cultural characteristics are also crucial for integration purposes. Germany has introduced integration courses for immigrants to adapt to German culture and life. Strong references to the necessity of learning about and adapting to the German lifestyle, and the concrete consequences for failing to adapt, indicate that Germany is gradually developing a more complete approach toward immigrants than ever before. Under this inclusive approach, and in the aftermath of 9/11, the capacities that are seemingly death productive are identified within broader discourses. The concern is not only economic death productivity. The state targets almost all kinds of death productivities: religious, ethnic, and cultural. The definition of death is now uncertain, open, and networked. Along with the increasing biopolitical emphasis in immigration policies, the necropolitical features of the immigration process are more apparent. The state, employers, and German society strive to administer the processes of life, but also those of death. Indeed, these processes are more integrated than ever before. While the deaths of immigrants are defined more frequently within the biopolitical structure of German society, immigrants’ lives are more frequently defined in accordance with the necropolitical assumptions that construct society. Death possibilities that immigrants have to confront are now continuous. Death has obtained a truly biopolitical character. During the post–Second World War years, the necropolitical character of surveillance over immigrants from Turkey in Germany could be seen in the detailed medical test, the prevention of migrant workers’ families from coming to Germany, and the poor conditions of accommodations and workplaces. The thorough medical test and the prevention of families’ migrating were clear indications of necropolitical surveillance that aimed to eliminate the immediate death-productive capacities of immigrants. Migrant workers lived mostly in dormitories. They spent their time either in dormitories or at Necropolitical Surveillance 253

workplaces. In this way, the German state was able to enclose their deathproductive capacities while exploiting their life productivities in predetermined ways. The AZr aimed at matching immigrants’ capacities of life and death with the appropriate possibilities of life and death within the context of German culture and economics. The AZr still carries out this task with a more extensive database. During the 1960s, the concern of the German state was economic death productivities, just as the state had been interested in economic life-productive capacities of immigrants. Since immigrants’ life spaces were restricted, the meaning of death for them was limited as well. The death possibilities imposed on them by the German death-production system were discontinuous. However, necropolitical surveillance of immigrants was prevailing, since their living and working conditions reflected these discontinuous yet pervasive possibilities. Migrant workers were primarily included to be excluded. In the period of political-economic restructuring, the regulations on the movements and spatial existences of immigrants, isolation conditioned by state policies, xenophobia, murders of immigrants from Turkey, and the use of the BKA and BVS databases were among the factors that structured the necropolitical surveillance of the German state. The purpose of the state was again to minimize the death productivities of immigrants while inherently increasing the context-specific death possibilities that immigrants might have had to deal with. These possibilities turned out to be actualities in the early 1990s. Murders were utilized by the state not for emphasizing the problems that confronted immigrants but for further restricting their rights. In this period, since integration had begun to be a public issue debated within society, the German state became more interested in characteristics of immigrants other than their economic qualities. Thus, death began to be defined more broadly. Along with economic connotations, death, for immigrants, began to have ethnic and religious meanings, too. New circuits were included within the necropolitical diagram of society. The context of death was now more open and broader than it had been in the previous era. Death became more continuous and consequently more possible. The period from the mid-1990s to the present has witnessed the rising of strict regulations on immigration, policies toward the full integration of immigrants, and intensive and widespread surveillance. Claiming a comprehensive perspective, the German state targets all characteristics of immigrants. Such a standpoint is crucial for the success of a complete integration. Nevertheless, it is crucial at the same time for a complete exclusion. That is, 254 Çağatay Topal

death productivities are defined in terms of various attributes of immigrants, their religious, ethnic, and cultural characteristics. The major discourse used by the state is that of risk. The primacy of the risk discourse might indicate that there is a tendency developing within German state institutions to focus more on the death productivities than on the life productivities of immigrants. This paradigmatic shift means that death is defined within a much wider context than it had been previously. Death has truly become continuous. The society as a whole is reconstructed as the field of death. Death does not exist only in enclosures; it exists in and through networks. It is now open, uncertain, and incomplete. While it seems that the state enlarges the definitive areas of inclusion, it inherently and subtly extends the discursive and practical fields of exclusion. Every inclusive movement necessitates exclusionary measures, and corresponding necropolitical measures, for the newly inclusive definitions to be maintained. The difference between inclusion and exclusion is blurred. In fact, this blurring challenges the distinction between biopolitics and necropolitics. While life turns out to be a necropolitical issue, death gradually becomes a biopolitical matter. Surveillance is, in principle, a mechanism of producing life categories and of manipulating the lives of immigrants via these categories. But surveillance also subtly creates death categories. Germany selects and includes immigrants with suitable life-productive capacities. Yet, it concurrently eliminates death productivities. The problem is that Germany can never include all suitable life capacities and can never remove all death capacities. Every immigrant brings both life and death productivities. While immigrants may be economically life productive, they may also be death productive in a religious context. The state needs a powerful and extensive surveillance apparatus to control the complex networks constructed through the merging of the life and death productivities of immigrants. It has to capture both life- and death-productive capacities. The state also needs the apparatus of surveillance in order to expand its own life and death productivities. These productivities can be seen as life and death possibilities that may not suit the characteristics of immigrants. Biopolitical surveillance carried out by the state and employers administers the life productivities of immigrants in accordance with the life possibilities generated within German society. Necropolitical surveillance, on the other hand, controls immigrants’ death productivities within the limits of death possibilities created by the state, employers, and society. What is observed in the half- century-long immigration history of Germany is the gradual expansion and intensification of both biopolitiNecropolitical Surveillance 255

cal and necropolitical surveillance. There currently seems to be a tendency toward the use of more necropolitical strategies under the ascendant discourse of risk. Along with the expansion and intensification of surveillance, discontinuous, discrete, and closed meanings of death, as well as of life, give way to continuous, combined, and open constructions of life and death. What immigrants from Turkey are subject to is not inclusion or exclusion per se. The case of immigrants from Turkey in Germany reveals the incorporation of biopolitical and necropolitical surveillance. This incorporation increasingly complicates the calculation of inclusion and exclusion. Immigrants from Turkey have to deal with exclusionary inclusion and inclusionary exclusion. noTes

The fieldwork on which this article relies is part of my Ph.D. dissertation, “Surveillance over Migrant Workers and Immigrants from Turkey in Germany: From the Disciplinary Society to the Society of Control,” supervised by David Lyon. I would like to thank him for his guidance, the anonymous readers of Duke University Press for their critical insights, and Patricia Clough and Craig Willse for their generous help, endless patience, and sincere efforts toward this book. 1. Foucault, The History of Sexuality; Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”; Hardt and Negri, Empire; Hardt and Negri, Multitude. 2. On immigration as spatial relations of power, see Morris, “Globalization, Migration and the Nation-State”; Sassen, Guests and Aliens; Geddes, Immigration and European Integration; Bigo, “Migration and Security.” 3. Foucault, “Governmentality”; Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”; Lyon, Electronic Eye; Lyon, Surveillance Society; Haggerty and Ericson, “The Surveillant Assemblage”; Garland, The Culture of Control. 4. Rose, Powers of Freedom, 240, 253. 5. Ericson and Haggerty, Policing the Risk Society, 86. 6. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. 7. Haggerty and Ericson, “The Surveillant Assemblage,” 606, 610. 8. Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 4–6. 9. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 23–24. 10. Foucault, “The Political Technology of Individuals,” 160. 11. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 17. 12. See French, “In the Shadows of Canada’s Camps,” for an empirical analysis of the racist implications of the security policies and surveillance measures of the Canadian government. 13. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 256. 14. O’Dochartaigh, Germany Since 1945, 38–136. 15. Schmidt and Zimmerman, “Migration Pressure in Germany,” 214–15.

256 Çağatay Topal

16. Herbert, A History of Foreign Labour in Germany, 214–31. 17. Eryılmaz, 40 Years in Germany, 3. 18. Ansay, “The New un Convention in Light of the German and Turkish Experience,” 834–44. 19. A Statewatch report, November 2001, p. 4. 20. Weichert, “The German System of Aliens Control.” 21. O’Dochartaigh, Germany Since 1945, 137–50. 22. Ibid., 178–217. 23. Schmidt and Zimmerman, “Migration Pressure in Germany,” 215–16. 24. Rist, “Migration and Marginality,” 100–101. 25. Marshall, The New Germany and Migration in Europe, 144–45. 26. Mehrlander, “The Development of Post-War Migration and Refugee Policy,” 10. 27. Klopp, German Multiculturalism, 42. 28. Abadan-Unat, Bitmeyen Göç—Göçmen İşçilikten Ulus-Ötesi Yurttaşlığa, 60–61. 29. Ibid., 65. 30. Weichert, “The German System of Aliens Control,” 3–5. 31. O’Dochartaigh, Germany Since 1945, 206–37. 32. German Embassy in Ottawa, Germany’s Citizenship Law since 01.01.2000. 33. Stalker, “Migration Trends and Migration Policy in Europe,” 169. 34. European Security, German Immigration Act: Summary of Major Aspects. 35. German Embassy in Ottawa, Germany’s Citizenship Law since 01.01.2000. 36. European Security, German Immigration Act: Summary of Major Aspects. 37. Ibid. 38. See Topal, “Surveillance in Germany after 9/11,” for a sketch of surveillance practices used on Muslim immigrants in Germany after 9/11. 39. Zaman, “Sınır Dışı Edilen Türk İmam Alman Anayasa Mahkemesine Gidecek.” 40. ntVMSnBc, “Türk İmama Sınır Dışına Durdurma.” 41. Yücel Özdemir (journalist, Evrensel, Cologne), interviewed by author, June 15, 2005, Cologne. Özdemir’s focus is mainly on surveillance policies of the German government and German institutions that affects immigrants from Turkey. Evrensel describes itself as the newspaper of workers and laborers. Its political orientation can be defined as Marxist.

Necropolitical Surveillance 257

randy Martin

FroM tHe race War to tHe War on terror

Race is conventionally offered up as coming out of the past, a stubborn bodily difference ascribed to biology. Terror, as it is now generalized, seems to come from a future colliding with the present, an ever-anticipated risk made real by bodily detonation. Risk is borne by bodies and is the place where race and terror meet. But risk also figures as the persistent consequence of finance—that seemingly most disembodied, immaterial, fictitious of forms. To think beyond biopolitics is to imagine this conjuncture, the combinative moment, a dissecting slice through the present where what is past is lived on, and what is treated as being without body is given voice. To hear what capital might be when the flood of numbers by which it is represented silences us into submission, we must, after Marx, allow it to speak. A fable, one that tells of the life that passes through the inert and those left for dead, gives voice to capital. Once upon a time, capital had a dream of the future. For those with patience and fortitude, the new day would bring growth, progress, and the promise of a better life. For those workers of the world who could secure a seat on the bus, the trip to tomorrow would take them to a market utopia. While the past was littered with the corpses of colonialism, slavery, and genocide and the present offered endless toil, the future was a time apart. The fortunate would be freed from work in retirement and leave the earth secure in the knowledge that their kids would do better than they had. The passage of biological time between generations would be reinscribed as upward mobility,

giving the movement of time itself a positive connotation. Nations, often against their own heterogeneous histories, were conceived as ethnospheres, geographical containers of essential racial difference that would be anthropomorphized with the same bodily clock. The notion of development analogized peoples as biological persons. In this rendering of biopolitics, populations born from colonial reproduction into the national form of their paternal metropoles would start off as children. They would grow up, leave their old habits behind, become one with civilization. Needless to say, most of the world’s peoples—still awaiting their moment of development—never got to live the dream, or pursued another under the banner of socialism. For the last twenty-five years, those who might have been lulled by capital’s utopian chords have been subject to a rude awakening. The paradisiacal bird in the social compact has flown. While capital’s old ways of seeking popularity have frayed around the edges, which new and different ways will replace them are still very much open to debate. In the three decades since the utopian promises of the welfare state have beat their retreat, finance has been ascendant. Much has been said about what the regime of investment means for capital itself, but less focus has been given to the implications of finance’s rule for the experience of daily life.1 Finance asks people to imagine their future or, more specifically, to see the future as already at hand. Given how much capitalism had once staked on the future, the political implications of the new question finance poses merit careful attention, especially if we are to see in finance more than novel means of domination. The last time finance led the charge, at the end of the nineteenth century, it was called the age of imperialism. Today we suffer imperialism’s renaissance. The left has long observed that the consumptionist cornucopia was not all that it was cracked up to be. The neoconservative movement emerged with a mandate to reenchant capitalism by infusing it with neoconservatism’s own brand of liberation theology. Fueled by this evangelical impulse, freedom need not wait for the future—it can be had in the here and now. But emancipation has a price, a value with its attendant political economy. Patience and forbearance must give way to incessant aggressiveness in the face of evil and vigilant opportunism for the prospect of good. A future deferred reflects intolerable ethical indolence. For the future to come now, the present moment must be lived preemptively.

From the Race War to the War on Terror 259

derivaTive Wars

Preemption is where foreign and domestic policy meet, where the American Dream encounters the U.S. imperium, where the internal obstacles to joining the ownership society become entangled with the war on terror. The emphasis in state economic management has shifted from promoting growth to curbing inflation, from Keynesian pump-priming to the monetarist adjustment of prime interest rates. The future promises growth. But the specter of inflation makes growth uncertain for investors. Even the sunniest returns on securities will be clouded by inflation and make the multitudes too queasy to entrust their fate to a market metaphysic. That, at least, is the logic behind curbing inflation before it can begin, the logic of preempting uncertainty so that people can undertake risk in financial markets. In the late seventies and early eighties, the ascent of the monetarist state and financial capital launched the normalization of embracing risk. Domestic tranquility and a secure future, underwritten by corporate capital and the welfare state, would be traded for the sovereign self-management advertised by a governing coalition of neoliberals and neoconservatives. The former championed small government (deregulation) and big markets (privatization), while the later advanced an interventionist state (in affairs both private and international) and a moralizing economy (redemption through investment). No longer divided between labor and capital, society’s central cleavage would be played out along the lines of risk—the prospect of a return in excess of what was expected. Those capable of embracing risk, investors all, would be the managers, if not the masters, of their own lives. Those who could not would be cast as populations “at risk,” and be the targets of all manner of domestic wars. Whether the battle lines were drawn to engage poverty, drugs, crime, youth, or culture, domestic policies maintained a racial imaginary of moral deficiency or value impoverishment while they metaphorized war as a social good and mobilized federal policing powers to usurp local enforcement. In practice, this financialization of daily life did not banish labor, but elaborated it in the domestic sphere.2 The home would revert to its originary Greek status as oikos—the root of economy—now the scene where money, not flesh, would be constantly fondled, as all manner of futures (pensions, kids’ educations, debt disbursements, home mortgages) would be worked over into the wee hours. And capital, far from being democratized and distributed, was concentrated and reincarnated in a plethora of financial instruments. Local debts, such as home mortgages and car and consumer loans, 260 Randy Martin

were bundled together, repackaged as tradable securities (a process of securitization). Equities were disassembled into constituent elements (derivatives) to hedge the differential risks attendant on fluctuating currency or interest rates. Securitization and derivatives comprise processes of association and dispersion that drive financial accumulation and identify financial logic as a social process that permeates a whole range of sites and practices. The expansion of the economy of risk has been both financial and demographic. Financial markets trade more wealth in a month than is generated in the entire annual global gross domestic product. The derivatives markets alone circulate various risk-transferring contracts that function like tradable insurance premiums. Before the meltdown in 2008, derivatives traded directly between firms and on exchanges had a face or notional value over one quadrillion dollars.3 In the past twenty-five years, participation by U.S. households in the stock market has gone from under a tenth to over half. Pensions have changed from defined benefit plans (a percentage of final salary) to defined contribution plans (a percentage of current salary managed in myriad retirement accounts).4 As financial capital concentrates wealth (so much of cEo compensation bloat is in stocks and options), the burdens of risk have become more widely distributed. Guarantees of domestic security have been replaced with buy-ins to securitization. For those able to take the risk rather than be taken by it, the future comes crashing into the present. The risk- capable, epitomized by the now largely defunct day trader, are the poster children of neoliberalism. The “at-risk” became the human dart boards of the neocons. In 1983, the then secretary of education Terrel Bell issued the report that Ronald Reagan had commissioned in an effort to eliminate the federal Department of Education. Called, “A Nation At Risk,” it pointed to low test scores among public school children as a threat to national security compromising market competitiveness.5 A new regime of discipline and punish, with tightly controlled content standards, turned education into a battlefield that has become a cemetery called “No Child Left Behind,” where the fallen are buried before they can become full-grown threats. In 1981, President Reagan’s secretary of state, Alexander Haig, identified international terrorism—understood as one big family with the uSSr behind it—to be a rampant threat.6 The culture wars treated those artists who might create obscene work as a moral contagion that needed defunding. The war on drugs sanctioned the use of military intervention in domestic police activities, and made punishments more severe. The 1970 statute for combating organized crime (the antiracketeering rIco Act) was more frequently applied to politiFrom the Race War to the War on Terror 261

cal organizations in the 1980s. This legal framework for surveillance, property seizure, and the prosecution of “shadowy networks” would be folded into the uSA PAtrIot Act, passed shortly after September 11, 2001. In sum, these domestic wars would pave the way for the war on terror, an antagonism presented as unbounded in time or space.7 While anticommunism was metaphorized into spatial containment— involving impermeable boundaries between them and us, between friend and foe—today antiterrorism efforts eschew spatial differentiation for shared temporality, asserting that terrorists are among us and it’s only a question of time before they strike again. With foreign and domestic spaces commingling or securitized, so to speak, the terrorist has become the bad object of risk embrace, the one who places all good risk abiders at risk. This threat is itself inflationary, foretelling a flight from healthy speculative activity (prompting the advice on how Americans could help after 9/11: “go shopping”). The only plausible response to this generalized state of affairs is preemption. Hence, highly delimited wars against former client states Afghanistan and Iraq were restaged as fronts in a war without end. Certainly containment was but a cover for intervention—a berm to stop the growth of an alternate system with its own field of dreams. But combating terror is an instance of what the military calls “forward deterrence,” a snatching of antisystemic, unbounded future threats into the claws of momentary present gain. In this respect, the confluence of approaches to foreign and domestic policy, their coalescence around the figure of risk, is not one of coincidence or simple conjuncture. Instead, the political and moral economy of risk that constructs the neoliberal-neoconservative condominium is foundational to the present imperial complex that leaves us cataleptic. Risk and finance share a present tense. Yet, under the sign of the war on terror, imperialism returned full throated to the councils of international relations, but finance was rarely seated at the table. Historically, however, the link between finance and war was well understood. Rudolf Hilferding’s seminal Marxist formulation of finance understands it to be a hybrid of industrial and banking capital forged by a profit squeeze that finds release in imperial race war. Hilferding observes that geopolitical domination is naturalized along lines of racial difference: “The economic privileges of monopoly are mirrored in the privileged position claimed for one’s own nation, which is represented as a ‘chosen nation.’ Since the subjection of foreign nations takes place by force—that is, in a perfectly natural way—it appears to the ruling nation that this domination is due to some special natural qualities, 262 Randy Martin

in short to its racial characteristics.”8 The displacement of problems of economic monopoly into racial terms is an underlying continuity of imperial formations. Yet, the principles of territorial expansion and geopolitical domination have certainly changed over the past century, as have the commitments of the nation-state to a national population. It could be said that terror emerged as a geopolitical fissure precisely when race could not sustain the work of organizing international and intranational conflicts in the service of some unified national interest. In the penumbra of the war on terror, the financial meltdown appears without predicate or explanation, as yet another surprise attack. The present terror war joins the complex legacy of empire-making race war that Hilferding identifies, without the ability to sustain a unifying national effect. Imperial war provokes the national crisis it once claimed to resolve. Perhaps this is because imperialism is most commonly discussed as a feature of national (U.S.) or corporate (oil) interests. The problem with this convention is that it attributes both omnipotence and omniscience to capital—namely, that capital always does what is best for itself. Nearly a decade after Bush declared “mission accomplished” in Iraq, this claim is increasingly difficult to sustain, as is the notion that toppling foreign governments is the best way to secure access to oil. No doubt, capital seeks to make sense of the world in terms of itself, but the consequence of this has more to do with patterns of operation than certainty of outcome. The current imperialism is indebted to all the others, but can be specified in terms of how finance organizes (and disorganizes) a way of life. Finance is capital for others, the means by which the terms of mutual indebtedness are expanded and put into effect, the medium by which capital nestles and shrivels amid ever more intricate byways of human association. The twin formations of contemporary finance, securitization and derivatives, are more saliently understood as principles of movement: securitization forcing the association or assembly of disparate risks, debts, and productive capacities, and derivatives disassembling and dispersing established equities or entities. If war is an expression and not simply an instrument of imperialism, we should expect to find in its path traces of these financial logics. While thoroughly destructive of human life and all that it has created, war also needs to be examined for what it produces. The twin wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, prosecuted in the wake of the fallen towers, took on the logics of finance in their own organization as well as in their material efficacy. From the Race War to the War on Terror 263

The invasions and occupations of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 are the first fully realized applications of what is called the Revolution in Military Affairs (rMA).9 As a military policy (it is also a historical perspective on the relation between organizational and technological changes in ways of fighting), the rMA purports to eliminate the “fog of war.” By precisely coordinating intelligence about enemy positions with the delivery of munitions, the decision making in the heat of battle that results in needless casualties is eliminated. The made-for-tV versions of this scheme were “shock and awe” and “full spectrum dominance.” In practice, the rMA, or force transformation, applies risk management rubrics to the battlefield. Risk is to be transferred from U.S. combatants to civilians by the use of intelligence gathering and technologically sophisticated weaponry. The idea that enemy positions can be fully mapped and rationalized in a comprehensive, informational grid is consistent with the process of securitization. The use of special forces and limited troop deployments for key operations is intended to leverage high risk for widely dispersed effects, in a manner consistent with the derivative (a portion of the military capacity is cleaved from the entire force to maximize opportunity at a specific point of risk). The eighteen- day battle in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, in the winter of 2002 was the largest in the campaign, but only 200 U.S. troops were deployed. Baghdad was declared fallen after armored convoys (also with but a few hundred soldiers) drove through its downtown on April 4 and 7, 2003, in what were called “thunder runs.”10 Both mobilizations represented tactically successful instances of rMA principles that resulted in strategic failure. Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein both got away, extensive informatics produced failed intelligence, terror, as it came to be known, proliferated and was dispersed, and the unipolar supremacy that preemption sought to assure was cast in doubt. Three years after George W. Bush declared victory in Iraq, the national intelligence estimate dated April 2006 averred, “The global jihadist movement—which includes al-Qa’ida, affiliated and independent terrorist groups, and emerging networks and cells—is spreading and adapting to counterterrorism efforts.” The implication drawn from this collective judgment of U.S. intelligence agencies is that religious fundamentalism abroad fuels the possibility of secular assaults on the homeland. “Anti-US and antiglobalization sentiment is on the rise and fueling other radical ideologies. This could prompt some leftist, nationalist, or separatist groups to adopt terrorist methods to attack US interests. The radicalization process is occur264 Randy Martin

ring more quickly, more widely, and more anonymously in the Internet age, raising the likelihood of surprise attacks by unknown groups whose members and supporters may be difficult to pinpoint.”11 The war on terror, which occasioned the fuller integration of foreign and domestic intelligence agencies under the National Intelligence Directorate and federalized enforcement under the Office of Homeland Security, still imagines a global revolutionary left as its ultimate menace—even as those who make up these movements may worry over their significance. The problem of volatility unleashed by small but anonymously related investments, like those of a hedge fund, discloses a derivative logic at work in the war on terror that amplifies the salience of oppositional movements. Risk embrace, a value without reference, rewards the terrorist as much as the arbitrager and affords the left an efficacy beyond its assembled numbers. War, once meant to bring security to the homeland, now normalizes risk. The means by which war becomes the model of politics requires some explanation, especially if we are to think beyond it. foucauLT’s penduLum

According to the argument of the nineteenth-century Prussian military thinker Carl von Clausewitz, war is an extension of politics by other means. Driven by risk, the derivative wars at home and abroad reverse this dictum. Rather, politics, the sort brought by these imperial liberations, looks increasingly like war, and war is conducted as an exercise in managing risk. The fullest theorization of this reversal can be found in Michel Foucault’s formulation of biopolitics. Foucault establishes that Clausewitz himself inverted a formula for politics as war that had emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and was associated most closely with Hobbes’s arguments for the sovereign state found in Leviathan. “The primitive war, the war of every man against every man, is born of equality and takes place in the element of that equality. War is the immediate effect of nondifferences, or at least of insufficient differences.”12 Foucault suggests that for Hobbes, it is difference that leads to peace, as the strong and the weak will recognize that accounts have been settled rather than live with the uncertainty of imminent attack that springs from being constantly on guard against those who may be considered potential foes. The discourse of power to emerge from the seventeenth century rested upon a formalization of difference in the form of race, which now carries with it a biological threat that society must defend itself against in the form of state policies of purification. This race war—named but never theorized From the Race War to the War on Terror 265

by Hilferding—forms the internal dynamic of social order that generates an internal cleavage of population. Foucault tells us, The other race is basically not the race that came from elsewhere or that was, for a time, triumphant and dominant, but . . . it is a race that is permanently, ceaselessly infiltrating the social body, or which is rather, constantly being recreated in and by the social fabric. In other words, what we see as a polarity, as a binary rift within society is not a clash between two distinct races. It is the splitting of a single race into a superrace and a subrace. To put it a different way, it is the reappearance within a single race, of the past of that race. In a word, the obverse and the underside of the race reappears within it.13 The state elevates this management of bodies to a global strategy of racial conservatism, in effect, a condition of perpetual war. War is no longer the medium through which history is made, but conserves and protects society from threats born of its own body. “The idea of social war makes, if you like, a great retreat from the historical to the biological, from the constituent to the medical.”14 This new formation, emergent in the nineteenth century, is what Foucault terms “biopolitics,” an entire disciplinary regime that treats population as a political problem. This new field eclipses the sovereign form biopower “is in excess of sovereign right. This excess of biopower appears when it becomes technologically and politically possible for man not only to manage life but to make it proliferate, to create living matter, to build the monster, and, ultimately, to build viruses that cannot be controlled and that are universally destructive.”15 Racism is the governmental protocol for sorting population in response to the series of threats posed by the proliferation of forms of life. Government introduces a regulatory mode that ultimately discriminates between “what must live and what must die,” a discrimination Foucault terms “colonizing genocide.”16 This internal cleaving of population is highly mutable, and Foucault traces Marx and Engels’s own understanding of class struggle to their use of nineteenth-century French historians of race war such as Augustin Thierry and François Guizot.17 Foucault observed that the state had, by its own monopoly, ended the private wars associated with the nobiliary armies of feudalism, creating a paradigm in which “peace is waging a secret war.”18 What happens, however, when the secret is out, when the state reprivatizes war, when economy itself rebinarizes population? In part, the whole history of difference that 266 Randy Martin

the various risk categories reference and make equivalent now confronts a governmental regime bent on indifference. The neoconservative formation that brought on the derivative wars studiously, and perhaps disingenuously, presented race as making no difference. The neoconservative assault on affirmative action posits that the need for remediation of racial injustice is firmly behind us. By way of substitution, persons who stand for the claim that race makes no difference (Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas) are appointed to prominent positions of security management and the law. In these instances, race is to be silenced by its appearance, blanched through its public utterances. Even the breakup of the neoliberal-neoconservative coalition rode a species of the inversion of this logic into office, positioning biracialism as postracialism as it accommodated the difference that greater urgencies suggested could now be risked. Surely, these representations do not exhaust the racial imaginary, but they do indicate how binaries of risk and race might interact. The notion that the nefarious forces that had once threatened the social body could now be converted into productive risks is a significant departure from the idea of economy as homogenizing sovereignty. The bundling together of small packets of debt has a delocalizing effect consistent with nonsovereign forms of power. Shaving bits of these fractured commodities so as to leverage minor volatilities into substantial effects is a self-violating installation of the binary Foucault proposed. In static conceptions of class difference, the emphasis is on objective relations to the production of surplus value that would locate or position an individual within a given socioeconomic classification. In contrast, Foucault’s historicizing binary allows an active differentiation of population resulting in the production of an antagonism. The internal split of the risk divide marks a political agency in the midst of capital that notions of class struggle, typically prescribed by fixed interest, sought to articulate.19 The internal cleaving of race had a woeful but stabilizing effect on population. The splitting of population along the lines of risk refuses and disrupts those prior conditions of difference. Race does not disappear, but rather its effects can be renegotiated. Far from being an end state, death is something one can hedge against, invest in, benefit from. Financialization, brought into the realm of the everyday, interconnects all manners of personal credit and debt and makes publicly tradable what was once a domestic matter. The socialization of personal finance would seem to disturb the secret telos of the biological, trampling domestic intimacy and making the smallest decisions seem large and consequential. The local From the Race War to the War on Terror 267

is delocalized, interconnected with far-flung co-investors, subject to renewed state concern. If the ultimate realization of biopower is to bring to life what was once considered inert, then nowhere would this become more apparent than with respect to the economy. Foucault’s political genealogy of war moves from the savage exchange of the homo economicus (carried out in private war) to the historical force of society making (through state war) to the biological conservation of population (through race war). The warring ways that have emerged from the systems logics of finance and the Revolution in Military Affairs would now seem to play this genealogy in reverse. Morphing its terms of antagonism from race to state to private life, war now seems to be pressing the limit of the modern order of things. Privatization, the state’s internal war on behalf of a capital said to be able to manage itself, savages population, subjecting private matters to the public violence of the market. Privatization is thus a process of securitization, a means of making publics by amalgamating risk. Populations are cleaved by a ruthless state monopolization of history to affect the privatization of life control that goes by the name of risk. The present imperialism places this genealogical reversal on display for all to see. A “high-risk” presidency crashes and burns in tandem with its asymmetrical opponent, a bad risk well taken.20 The divide of the race war was universal, while derivative wars can let a few pass for the many and still leave open great swaths of population outside the lines of battle. Such relative surplus populations stand as the detritus of terror wars. The racialized boundaries surfaced when finance itself assumed the mantle of a weapon of mass destruction. The redlining so key to subprime foreclosure distributed along racial lines is now tranched simply as a factor of credit risk. The bait and switch of the subprime loan is that it is a way to market social pain. The move from exclusion to enclosure, signaled by the deregulation of redlining, distributed the unevenness by which greater gain could be extracted, while punishment fell to the newly speculative. Just to take New York City as an example: in Jamaica, Queens, with a black majority and a $45,000 median income, 46 percent of mortgages were issued by subprime lenders. For mostly white Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where the median household income is $50,000, the corresponding rate is 3.6 percent. For more affluent households the racial divide is even sharper. Twenty-four percent of non-Hispanic whites took out a subprime mortgage in 2006, while 63 percent of blacks did so.21 The welcome sign of the ownership society wrought havoc that came without an exit strategy. 268 Randy Martin

an empire of indifference

By historical measures, derivative wars make for a strange imperialism, indeed.22 Not that one would want to choose from among those wars. Compared to Britain’s civilizing mission in the nineteenth century, or even the United States’ interest in development in the twentieth century, the present incarnation of military dominance stands apart as an empire of indifference. This sorry state of affairs is not most usefully understood as simply being the result of incompetent leadership or the absence of vision—however much both are in evidence. Those earlier schemes for world-making yielded great wealth but also a mutual indebtedness to social life, on which capital has depended, but from which it also tended to flee. Cultivated populations and elegant cities—what could once be said of Baghdad or, for that matter, New Orleans—are both the basis for and a constraint upon the further expansion of capital. The two towns are, after all, linked by similar logics of reconstruction based upon risk management, now adopted as policy by the Office of Homeland Security, which oversees the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).23 Hurricane Katrina offered the ultimate naturalization of plausible deniability for ethnic cleansing supervised by military occupation. The at-risk were simply washed away. In Lebanon in July 2006, Israel undertook the massive bombing of a recently reconstructed country. Ostensibly to effect the return of two soldiers kidnapped by Hezbollah, Israel removed the at-risk in a similar manner. Just as Afghanistan and Iraq were, a sovereign Lebanon was transformed into a shadowy network that could be attacked and its undesirable elements purged regardless of what would have to be done to the medium in which they were found. State violence, in this account, is never disproportionate to the risk. The damage done to whole populations is collateral to the political-military objectives. Unlike earlier racisms that diminished populations in order to best make use of them, survival or failure is achieved on the basis of mastery of risk protocols. The history of capitalism is one in which enormous human diversity has blossomed and been socially articulated along lines of class, race, nation, gender, sexuality, and religiosity. Together, these attributes of population are captured by the term “difference.” An empire of indifference is a specific response to the multifarious discretions and capacities of life that, if not subjugated to the whims of accumulation, can squeeze capital’s conditions of possibility. The motives for war are not reducible to some putative imperative of capital any more than the pursuit of wealth for profit adheres to a predictFrom the Race War to the War on Terror 269

able rationale. Rather, when capital is treated as a social force, one that generates modes of life and politics that it ultimately cannot abide, the political terms and possibilities of the present become more expansively legible. As a social force, capital not only dispossesses people of old habits of life but attaches them otherwise. Likewise, imperial occupation does not only sow chaos but introduces certain demands and desires that are self-ordering. The U.S. occupation of Iraq deployed shocking and awesome weapons of mass destruction against a nation that had none and liberated a country to the theocracy, torture, and terror the United States cherishes for its own purposes but so dreads in the hands of others. The occupation disordered the social economy and cleaved the population from its productive resources. These nefarious achievements came through techniques of bellicose securitization and derivative war, leaving financialization in their wake. But financialization, like earlier imperial gifts, is a bit of a Trojan horse—something unexpected can still spill out. When wealth is stripped of any specific application and aggregated as a great, disposable mass, and when population is abandoned to be an end in itself, liberated from an obligatory history, very different futures are brought into the present. The regimes of finance profit from the volatility they create and are too vertiginous to provide a stable picture of what the future might look like. The realm of future possibilities comes crashing into the present arena of necessity, so that what seems compulsory is made volatile, evidently contingent, and is called into question. Even the brief career of polled U.S. public support for the Iraq war suggests that the popular appeal of imperial hubris now decays more rapidly than it had during the Vietnam War or other such adventures. The mandate Bush claimed after the 2004 election evaporated in the midterm elections of 2006, when the Democrats took control of both houses of Congress and donned the emblem of staying-the- course. Donald Rumsfeld subsequently tendered his resignation as secretary of defense. The 2008 election took its decisive turn when terror became indifference toward financial volatility and when the assertion of a postracial national face and space became the best remedy for economic crisis. McCain stumbled on pronouncing sound economic fundamentals, and Obama rode to office on a wave of Hawaiian reassurance. The bank bailout (the Troubled Asset Relief Program effected by the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008) was ushered in with the emergency of a terrorist attack while simultaneously dis-

270 Randy Martin

closing a vast $700 billion in social surplus in the form of public monies that would be tapped to fill investor’s coffers. When the state becomes the owner of massive debt and must price that debt and consider how to invest returns, the divide that separates the particular interest from the general will has been effaced. While the bailout places the separation of state and capital in jeopardy, it also severely compromises the prevailing narrative by which the left has understood the aims of governmentality, namely, neoliberalism. The paradox of neoliberalism is that, far from stripping away the inert body of the state and freeing the economy to pursue its true expression (what was called deregulation), regulatory activities of government became hyperactive. Just when it seems that the critique of sovereignty ushered in by the war on terror has run its course, a rebirth or translation opens up prospects for a new reception. Foucault’s prescient observations, written at the launch of neoliberalism, make legible a vital revision on the conception of the neoliberal apparatus. “The problem of liberal policy was precisely to develop in fact the concrete and real space in which the formal structure of competition could function. So, it is a matter of a market economy without laissez-faire, that is to say, an active policy without state control. Neo-liberalism should not therefore be identified with laissez-faire, but rather with permanent vigilance, activity, and intervention.”24 Nowhere could this be more evident than in the realm of monetary policy. Rather than await an annual budget cycle for the state to enunciate its economic design, the flow of money is constantly tended and modulated through the adjustment of prime interest rates by the central bank, overseen by the Federal Reserve Board. The intensity of this regulatory modulation, the infusion of price-making and reward-for-risk, was not simply a way of knowing economic truth but of constituting a fully invested economic being. This ontological shift is what Foucault terms “the enterprise”; when a fully fungible rationalization of what would become financial is inserted into actual and prospective social spaces. “This multiplication of the ‘enterprise’ form within the social body is what is at stake in neo-liberal policy. It is a matter of making the market, competition, and so the enterprise, into what could be called the formative power of society.”25 This elaboration of the active factor in price-seeking, now discernible as the volatility of financial markets, would require an abiding policy impetus. The migration of an economic logic, an enterprising subject to other realms, is where Foucault situates the birth of biopolitics, a turn that makes it possible “to recognize individuals at risk

From the Race War to the War on Terror 271

and the type of risk individuals incur throughout their life.”26 The thrust of Foucault’s analysis is to superimpose the basis for regulatory activism onto a screen on which the state as a passive body is projected. The present financial crisis turns the activist orientation of the state that calibrates price-making to risk-taking back on the state itself. The logic of the bailout features the state at the heart of a massive operation of arbitrage; its action is the turbulent intervention into modulations of price (like the derivative markets in credit swaps) by which different kinds of commodities (here, debt) are made commensurate with one another so that they can continue to move or circulate. Regulation has intensified to the point at which it becomes circulation, and circulation, the medium in which the value of the commodity is, as Marx said, realized, becomes primary to the process of production. The state commandeers the social surplus and redirects it from enhancements of population to financial flows. At issue, in the words of the rescuers, is not whether people have jobs or places to live, but whether people can access credit. If money moves, all else will follow. When the state becomes the body through which capital passes, for it acts as a giant holding company deciding when assets must be extracted from one enterprise and moved to another, it invites the body politic to view itself as an enormous capacity for disposing of wealth. These are the murmurs to be heard amid the urgent pleas of the rescuers. Act now or open us to other possibilities. Continue to treat us as sovereign as we trade rule for infinite debt. The financial crisis poses neither the end of capital nor societal collapse. Rather, the disclosure of trillions available for the rescue of society suggests a movement toward a reclamation of social wealth from those whose debt lies immediately in the future. The billions borrowed are suddenly materialized, not as impossible scarcity, but as a richness with which population can be reendowed. The indifference that this imperium directs toward others returns to haunt itself. The specter of capital’s inability to attend to the social life it depends upon poses anew the question of what this extensive expansion of wealth might be for. Without durable strategic justification or a future that can be readily extrapolated from present action, every moment appears to be discretionary, manageable, decidable. The idea that there are trillions of dollars of expendable surplus wealth aggregated for itself, and the notion that one nation has a capacity for geopolitical intervention of any kind, anywhere, and at any time, are equally unstable. The rule of indifference poses the conditions for a countermovement of difference and the political will and social wealth that would sustain it. The war on terror still battles the specter of communism 272 Randy Martin

that was proclaimed to have been exorcised, as it blanches race and insists it makes no difference. We may mourn the loss of utopian schemes that might have told us what the future could look like and even reengaged our creative energies and abilities.27 But a left cognizant of how capital works on us, and of what capital leaves to us, may be best placed to make something of the future that is already at hand. noTes

1. An institutional and historical map of the rise of finance can be found in Guttmann, How Credit Money Shapes the Economy. David Harvey provides the most incisive conceptualization of finance from a Marxist perspective in The Limits to Capital (Oxford: Basil Blackburn, 1982). 2. See Martin, Financialization of Daily Life. 3. Global derivatives are tracked by the Bank of International Settlements, which lists a notional value for June 2008 of approximately $683 trillion (up from $370 trillion two years before) for the then unregulated inter-firm contracts called over-thecounter. See Bank of International Settlements, “Amounts Outstanding of Overthe- counter (otc) Derivatives.” See also Lipuma and Lee, Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk. 4. For a recent synopsis of these changes, see Walsh, “More Companies Ending Promises for Retirement.” Data are collected by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, and are available at http://www.ebri.org/. 5. National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation At Risk. 6. See Gibson, Warrior Dreams, 270. 7. See Piven, The War at Home, and Grossberg, Caught in the Crossfire. 8. Hilferding, Finance Capital, 335. First published in 1910, Hilferding completed most of the work on the manuscript in 1906, as Tom Bottomore recounts in his introduction (5). 9. See Gray, Postmodern War; DeLanda, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines; Gray, Strategy for Chaos. 10. Instructive accounts and assessments from inside the military establishment are provided by Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. See Cordesman, The Lessons of Afghanistan; Cordesman, The Iraq War; Cordesman, The War After the War. 11. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, “Declassified Key Judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate.” The Office of the dnI is the umbrella intelligence agency created by George W. Bush that had sought to give the White House fuller control over agencies by integrating foreign, domestic, and military intelligence. 12. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 90. 13. Ibid., 61. 14. Ibid., 216. 15. Ibid., 254. From the Race War to the War on Terror 273

16. Ibid., 254, 257. 17. Ibid., 79. 18. Ibid., 50. 19. Illustrative here is the work of Erik Olin Wright, who sought to differentiate Marxist relational notions of class from conventional gradational ideas but remains caught in the hypostasis of interest, location, structure, and action. See Wright, Classes. 20. This has become an assessment within conventional political science approaches. Steven E. Schier assesses “the high risks for the Bush administration: it seeks to entrench a conservative regime among a public beset by even partisan divisions and without a stable Washington governing coalition.” See Schier, High Risk and Big Ambition, 9. 21. Manny Fernandez, “Study Finds Disparities in Mortgages by Race.” 22. For a sobering historical perspective, see the contributions gathered in Gardner and Young, The New American Empire. 23. Chertoff, “Remarks for Secretary Michael Chertoff U.S. Department of Homeland Security George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute.” 24. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 132. 25. Ibid., 148. 26. Ibid., 227. 27. Not to be missed in this regard is Fredric Jameson’s recent work on science fiction and utopia, Archeologies of the Future. My own reflection on these politics is elaborated in An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

274 Randy Martin

Una chung

“seeinG” spectral aGencies

An Analysis of Lin+Lam and Unidentified Vietnam

Lana Lin and H. Lan Thao Lam’s (Lin+Lam) multimedia installation piece, Unidentified Vietnam, was exhibited in Gallery 456, from September 14 to October 12, 2006. Gallery 456 is a facility belonging to the Chinese American Arts Council and is located on Broadway and Grand, at the intersection of Soho and Chinatown in lower Manhattan. Today, Chinatown is often perceived as a destination for visitors from near and far, where some hybrid of diverse “Chinese” and Chinese American cultures is preserved alongside a shopping mecca for the “democratic” distribution of cheap reproductions of desirable consumer goods. The history of Chinatown’s formation and existence throughout the twentieth century, however, suggests that the very notion of an ethnic enclave was constructed through a set of biopolitical mechanisms regulating migration, miscegenation, property ownership, public hygiene, and cultural assimilation. In our encounter with Lin+Lam’s Unidentified Vietnam, the provocation is this: How does one complete the transport of an archive of South Vietnamese propaganda films from Saigon to Washington, D.C., undertaken as the United States withdrew from South Vietnam in 1975, and then to the borders of New York’s Chinatown in 2006? How does one present the Library of Congress’s hold on the Vietnam/American War in the context of present- day U.S. foreign policy? How does contemporary art live in a time when biopolitics has risen contumeliously as the supreme form of art?

At the entryway of the gallery is a signage stand, which is similar in appearance to the one located at the entryway of the Library of Congress. Instead of a notice of the Library of Congress’s hours of operation, the stand displays a Washington Star newspaper clipping from May 7, 1975, whose headline reads: “South Vietnam Embassy Continues to Carry on in Diplomatic Limbo.”1 A portion of the article reads: “The State Department announced last week that although the United States will not recognize any Saigon government-inexile, it will continue temporarily to afford diplomatic status to the embassy here for assistance in dealing with refugees.” According to the article, the situation of Saigon was unresolved, but the exit of the U.S. was complete. The South Vietnamese embassy in the U.S. would not be recognized as a sovereign entity; there would be no Saigon government-in- exile. The embassy was no longer an embassy of a sovereign state, but an entity with temporary diplomatic status. Temporary diplomatic status did not correspond to a temporary state, yet implicitly suggested the effectivity of such political transience. The state that emerged to handle the transition to reunification of the territory south of the 17th parallel with Northern Vietnam followed a series of short-lived states: the State of Vietnam from 1949–56, the Republic of Vietnam from 1956–75, and the Republic of South Vietnam from 1975–76. The Republic of South Vietnam was not ideologically linked to its predecessor, as its raison d’être was to hand over its agency and to mediate the transition to its demise, rather than to govern or wage war. Nor was the Republic of South Vietnam directly linked to the spectral “South Vietnam,” upon whom existence had been conferred by the United States via temporary diplomatic status. The temporary status, without statehood, was solely a U.S. agency, whose existence was severed from any actual Vietnamese political entity, and whose primary function was to enable the maintenance of the stateless status of refugees. It was the spectral agency of a nonexistent South Vietnam that was conjured in the postwar transition. The war was seemingly over for the United States, but the political and economic transition of postwar Vietnam and U.S. involvement in the Cold War were not. The struggles of the newly unified state of Vietnam and the crisis of legitimacy for U.S. foreign intervention were neatly displaced from view by the activity of “dealing with refugees.” As a part of the closing of the South Vietnam embassy, an archive of South Vietnamese propaganda films was transferred to the Library of Congress. These films were shot in Vietnam, jointly by South Vietnamese and American military staff. The films were processed in the Philippines and were eventually 278 Una Chung

relocated to the South Vietnam embassy in Washington, D.C., before finally being transferred to the Library of Congress. The afterlife of South Vietnam will be ensconced in the Library of Congress as the South Vietnam Embassy Collection. The archive’s final transition will be to climate-controlled, sanitized spaces of preservation. The operational hours of the library neatly cover the messy temporalities, the radioactive half-life, of the Vietnam War and the biopolitical problem of dealing with refugees. Clearly posted hours when these archives are and are not available to the public impose a schedule on what is a far more complex temporality of war. The trope of transition and the image of a timetable do not begin to address the actualities of how one moves beyond war and colonial oppression, beyond the end of war and the persistence of empire. In 2006, Lin+Lam disrupt those precise allotments of working hours to reconstruct the final transition of South Vietnam into the archive. Their installation repeats the logic of transition, reproduces the space of transfer, and in so doing, lays bare the techniques of preservation and the violence engineered into mechanisms of reconstruction. There is no question of a particular (historical) method of art countering biopolitical governance: governmentality is the art of method.2 Art simply allows Lin+Lam the tenuous space to imagine one more transition, a supplement to what was meant to be a final transition, a finite yet effectively endless limbo in the United States. The space of art thus permits a virtual post-transition detour that takes us into the borders of Soho and Chinatown. With their installation of Unidentified Vietnam in Gallery 456, Lin+Lam bring the suspended life of the South Vietnam embassy to the edge of New York’s Chinatown, to a space associated with Chinese American and Asian American cultural politics. The Chinese American Arts Council was founded in 1975 “to meet the needs of an expanding immigrant population.”3 The council cosponsored the first all Asian American multimedia visual art show in February 1977. Gallery 456 opened in 1989 in order to provide a permanent space for such artistic efforts. By shifting a film archive from the Library of Congress to the Chinese American Arts Council, Lin+Lam reopen 1975 to potentialities other than the suspension of the stateless, even as Unidentified Vietnam attempts to lay bare the construction of the stateless. Lin+Lam show us how an archive, an installation of an archive, is constructed as the space of limbo. The spatial expansion of limbo is capable of eliminating multiple temporalities of transition, transience, transport, transfer, precisely by insisting on its own domain of liminality. Lin+Lam play with intermedial movement through photography, the still “Seeing” Spectral Agencies 279

image, the magnifying glass, the book, the typewriter, film, sculpture, performance, television, and video. All are assembled into five components: 24 frames = 1 second, Pupils of Democracy, Invisible Like Peace, Card Catalogue, and Library of Congress Cleaning Crew. Brought together on four walls, these media assemblages produce—surprisingly enough—a space of enclosure. As art, they exhibit an (impossible) installation of the in-between. The coexistence of different “outmoded” apparatuses not only raises the question of their historical emergence, but, more importantly, puts into direct contact their various modes, mechanisms, and technologies giving form to time. A developmental discourse of technological progress and obsolescence would not sufficiently account for the installation’s engagement with temporality, specifically the problematic of the spatial expansion of liminality. Michel Foucault argues that it is not “at the level of a speculative discourse” but “in the form of concrete arrangements” that two different techniques of power, discipline and control, are seen to cofunction as biopower in the nineteenth century.4 Similarly, Lin+Lam’s Unidentified Vietnam refuses an evolutionary narrative of new media and instead works with the space of installation to invoke assemblages that allow us to investigate the intermedial play of the diverse, outmoded archival technologies of transitioning, transferring, translating, and capturing. Technologies, in the form of specific media, may be written into obsolescence by a progressive, developmental history of technology symptomatic of the residual idealist tendencies unavoidable in such a formulation. The assemblage gives us various ways of moving between and across apparatuses, thereby suggesting—precisely where it is not possible to fully materialize—the multiplicity of time. Multiplicity quickly vanishes, however, in the subsequent production of a space of transition—a suspension that expands its visibility, duration, and mobility through the multimedia installation. The installation thus reproduces the technology of the archive: the production of the archive as the production of limbo, a spatialization of liminality. The necessary tension produced by attempting to install an assemblage provokes the question of how the timing of living is solidified into the age of biopolitics. Furthermore, as Patricia Clough suggests, it is by paying attention to “the timing and intensities of form,” rather than “mere interdisciplinarity,” that we move beyond a merely historical, narrative account of the archive and toward a genealogical reperception of the forces shaping the moment of closing, transition, and passing into knowledge.5 Lin+Lam move us to question anew where in time refugees and temporary states persist in suspended animation, and, conse280 Una Chung

quently, when in space we might perceive time altering itself. At the borders of Chinatown, we might wonder if the necessary next move is the assimilation of knowledge into U.S. archives and revitalization of the project of empire. Does the discourse of Asian America contain its own restrictive perspective on “what comes after”? Must we always read, “After Asia, America”? Foucault’s study of the history of sexuality is, in a sense, a case study of transition that complicates the very notion of transition. He states, “The fact of living was no longer an inaccessible substrate that only emerged from time to time, amid the randomness of death and its fatality; part of it passed into knowledge’s field of control and power’s sphere of intervention.”6 Transition is figured here as a mode of partial passing into the field of knowledge, which produces the regime of life, biopolitics. The sensing of an inaccessible substrate becomes partially diverted into a knowing of life, “the taking charge of life.”7 The sensing of life as inaccessible substrate, that which emerges “from time to time,” the intervals of life and death, an “older,” “other” sense of “body,” all disappear into the domain of power’s “access even to the body.”8 Biopolitics produces knowledge of this passing, this necessarily partial transition, at times seemingly a mere transfer of parts. It is in striving to grasp the sense of something one feels compelled to call an inaccessible substrate—a striving that is continued and repeated—that the sphere of the biopolitical is extended, expanded, and intensified. The “bio” of biopolitics comes to name a much larger number of things than those discussed explicitly by Foucault, not least the nonhuman and nonorganism regions of biological life and the realm of affect belonging to inorganic life. The expansion is theoretically infinite, only limited by the specific contours of the practices that actualize the passing into knowledge.9 The temporality of this passing does not passively narrate a transition but is itself materially altered by its mode of conveyance. Foucault’s analysis of sexuality does not aim merely at a correction of the repressive hypothesis, but rather diagrams the transition of older, other modes of sensing life in the politics of knowing bodies as such. The transition is a key method of biopolitics itself. In one of his prime examples, Foucault discusses the expansion of the “confession of the flesh,” which “attributed more and more importance in penance . . . to all the insinuations of the flesh: thoughts, desires, voluptuous imaginings, delectations, combined movements of the body and the soul.”10 The body is expanded to incorporate this trembling realm of “stirrings,” thus “shifting the most important moment of transgression from the act itself to the stirrings . . . of “Seeing” Spectral Agencies 281

desire.”11 The body passes into sexuality, through the incitement to examine (diligently, precisely, thoroughly) the soul, memory, understanding, will, senses, thoughts, speech, action, dreams. The transfer seems simple enough, an equation of identity; in Foucault’s words, the “bourgeoisie made this element identical with its body.”12 However, “this element,” in Foucault’s discussion, is a complex realm of affect; it is “that aspect of itself which troubled and preoccupied [the bourgeoisie] more than any other, begged and obtained its attention, and which it cultivated with a mixture of fear, curiosity, delight, and excitement.”13 This “aspect of itself ” is in fact not an element of the self, although it is what provokes the productivity of self-reflection. The passing of that aspect into knowledge of the self is a movement and a modal shift between incommensurables. Passing is not merely, nor necessarily, a transition. In a sense, transition is what is produced by (or as) the passing into knowledge of affect. In his essay “The Time of Affect, or Bearing Witness to Life” Mark Hansen emphasizes the significance of understanding affect as the source rather than the “derived modality” of subjectivity. He makes the important point that “we cannot hope to account for the technical contamination of subjectivity if we limit it to a derived modality.”14 However, in his reading of Bill Viola’s work, he treats affectivity as that which lies between the captures of affect in social time. Hansen thus reduces the incommensurable to transition. In the following passage, Hansen explicates affectivity through readings of Francisco Varela, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Gilbert Simondon: Far from being (merely) impressional, that is, the result of a uni-directional relation from object to consciousness, perception is relational because it occurs through a recursive correlation of the living present with the intentionalities (protentions and retentions) that “anchor [it] to an environment” . . . that locate it in a field that does not converge on a central I. This is why perception—and all its coessential modifications, including protention-retention but also retention-recollection and protentionprojection—must ultimately be rooted in the more basic operation of living presence (or simply life). Such a position is succinctly expressed by Gilbert Simondon, Merleau-Ponty’s student, when he claims affectivity as a mode of bodily experience that mediates between the individual and the preindividual, between the constituted body and its constituting virtual or ecstatic milieu . . . whereas perception appeals to structures already constituted in the interior of the individuated being, “affectivity indicates

282 Una Chung

and comprises this relation between the individualized being and preindividual reality; it is thus to a certain extent heterogeneous in relation to individualized reality, and appears to bring it something from the exterior, indicating to the individualized being that it is not a complete and closed set [ensemble] of reality.”15 Perception is understood not simply as the imprint of phenomena on an individual consciousness, but as a relational dynamic with a “field that does not converge on a central I.” Affectivity is what constitutes perceptual relationality, with the distinction that perception might be thought of as a capacity derived from the individual’s interior and affectivity as what appears to “bring it something from the exterior.” Affectivity both “indicates and comprises this relation between the individualized being and preindividual reality.” For Hansen, affectivity is relational rather than immanent; affectivity is itself always oriented toward capture, effectively defined by it. Thus he draws certain conclusions from his reading of Gilles Deleuze, which seem to counter the tenor of Deleuze’s own argument. For Deleuze, “What counts is on the contrary the interstice between images, between two images: a spacing which means that each image is plucked from the void and falls back into it.”16 This leads Hansen to suggest that by manipulating video technology—shooting at high speed and then playing back at low speed—what lies invisibly between two images might be made visible. He calls this the technological expansion of the in-between, which is made to live in our present, expanding our “now.” The in-between for Deleuze, however, is not simply the imperceptible but, most importantly, the incommensurable. Hansen suggests that in Viola’s work the still image can “represent a cut.” In the case of Viola, what is represented is not the existence of incommensurability but the accessibility of “our bodies.” What was for Foucault a sign of the rise of the biopolitical is for Hansen a sign of the capacity of technology to allow for “a fuller and more intense experience of subjectivity . . . a closer relationship to ourselves . . . a more intimate experience of the very vitality that forms the core of our being, our constitutive incompleteness, our mortal finitude.”17 Reading Hansen’s interpretation against the grain, we can see that Viola’s work is actually about the containment of affectivity for the sake of producing an image of self-affection. Thus self- containment appears as if it were synonymous with self-reflexivity. If there is still openness to a field not converging on a central I, it exists solely in transcendent relation—and for Viola, it is an auratic relation to the Old Masters. It is in order to reincarnate

“Seeing” Spectral Agencies 283

European Renaissance religious figures in the bodies of contemporary people that contemporary bodies are made to “slowly progress from neutral facial expressions through indeterminate affects to primary emotions (sorrow, pain, anger, fear, rapture).”18 “Viola’s intention here, as in the Passions project as a whole, is to capture the transitions between emotional states, what his inspiration, the Old Masters, ‘didn’t paint, those steps in between.’”19 It is not surprising, then, that in order to draw out the implications of selfaffection in Viola’s work, Hansen conjures up a spectral body of the spectator—“you”—in place of the social and political collective of the audience. “You” invokes a body attuned to a “normal video rate” and equipped with the “normal function” of perception and a set of normalized ways of capturing affect in language—the linguistic categories of “primary emotions.” The body of “you” serves to ground the register of a “normally imperceptible experiential modality.” If the in-between were merely that which is too fast or too subtle to be perceived, then affect would always already be contained by the normal technology of the human body. This again raises the question of the human body as a production of norms, which is the crux of Foucault’s critique of biopolitics. While Hansen elucidates the notion of affectivity in provocative ways, he leaves out of frame the many histories of technologies of bodies that have been written precisely in order to contest the political viability of deploying the body as you. It seems that the genealogical investigation of how differential populations are produced through biopolitical techniques or methods of governmentality is the point. Without these histories, we are left with technology and its double, a new universal of species life. Furthermore, much as Hansen’s phenomenological approach limits affectivity to an experience of the body, his approach to technology limits the technological to an extension of human perceptual capacities. This impoverishes our understanding of both technologies as bodies and humans as technological. In contrast, Lin+Lam’s installation does not produce the mesmerizing quality of Bill Viola’s work. Instead, Lin+Lam’s installation refuses an aesthetics of relationality on the grounds of an engagement with the politics of postcoloniality, that is, the politics of the incommensurable. Affectivity in Unidentified Vietnam is not coded into “primary emotions,” as it is in Viola’s Passions. Machines are not there to capture us, to name us, but rather to engage themselves in the proliferation of time. Lin+Lam ask us to consider two different kinds of transition—the geographical transport and political transfer of an archive of South Vietnamese propaganda films—in connection with the temporality of film editing in 24 284 Una Chung

24 frames = 1 second, Lin+Lam.

frames = 1 second. This piece is composed of a series of twenty-four film stills, each frame a reproduction of a wipe from among the 527 propaganda films in the South Vietnam Embassy Collection. The wipe is a particular form of film transition commonly used during a certain historical period but now considered outmoded. The wipe is a technique of transitioning between images or sections of film, often (as in the image above) a swish pan between black and white, or dark and light. The wipe spatializes the in-between of two images. The space occupied by the wipe gives duration and visibility to transition. The wipe calls attention to the existence of transition by calling attention to its spatialization, thus obscuring other temporalities of the cut. Gilles Deleuze, in his two-volume analysis of cinema, makes a sharp distinction between two types of editing cuts—the rational cut corresponding with the movement-image and the irrational cut with the time-image. The rational cut links two images according to a movement, which is not seen in totality but whose reconstruction rationalizes the cut as a mode of linking parts of a single movement. The cut itself has no duration but enables the viewer to see continuity of movement. To miss it is to see it, that is, to miss the cut is to see the movement. The irrational cut, on the other hand, links images abstractly, and the absence of sutured movement draws attention to “Seeing” Spectral Agencies 285

the cut itself, which becomes suddenly visible as a cut. The cut cannot be seen in itself as long as we insist that to see is to see space, that vision is the perception of space, whether in unbroken duration or in linkages of kinetic movement. To see the irrational cut is, however, to encounter a multiplicity of temporalities. Deleuze states that the “time-image puts thought into contact with an unthought, the unsummonable, the inexplicable, the undecidable, the incommensurable.”20 The putting into contact of thought with an unthought does not occur in the time of kinetic movement; rather the materiality of this “putting into contact” emerges in the interstice of incommensurable relations between images that are no longer associated (for example, through metaphor or metonymy). This interstice is precisely not a space of transition. To see the irrational cut is to be located elsewhere, rather than to be embedded in movement. One is no longer absorbed in identification with the naturalized twenty-four-frames-per-second time, and instead becomes aware of the time of the irrational or abstract. Time here does not passively follow the flow of kinetic motion but appears in the break of movement, the capture of emergence, the interstice of putting-into- contact, the sudden seeing of the unsummonable. The irrational cut is the materiality of changing time, whereas the rational cut is the rationalization of transition as natural human movement. Lin+Lam’s 24 frames = 1 second extracts and lines up twenty-four film frames of a wipe along a wall. The equation of twenty-four frames and one second questions the equivalence or commensurability of two different types of time. Historically, twenty-four frames per second was the standard speed for shooting and projecting 16 mm film. Although a variety of reasons might account for this historical fact, it is often claimed that twenty-four frames per second is also the speed that corresponds most closely to “normal” human perception of “natural” movement on film. The suturing of twenty-four frames per second by the human eye purportedly translates into smooth, continuous movement, which is further perceived as natural by the normal body. The equation invokes the process of naturalization, that is, machine time naturalized to human movement and perception and then utilized as a standard regulating the timing of norms of human perception—thus effectively fixing one machine as the human body. The editing cut introduces a higher order of suture whereby different segments of a film are stitched into an ideological whole, producing a new narrative unity, a consistency of meaning, or in this case, a particular interpretation of the South Vietnam–U.S. war effort. Images of fit soldiers’ bodies, elegantly uniformed female paramilitary 286 Una Chung

troops in training, and President Ngo Dinh Diem’s and Madame Nhu’s public appearances are wiped together into a rousing show of spirit, a mobilization of affect in the unity of one second. On the other hand, the equation also visibly separates the two items being equated, distributing them to either side of the equal sign, much as the twenty-four frames serially spatialize what is actually a collapse of multiple images into one second of film. The gap between images provokes the question of whether the images contained in Lin+Lam’s twenty-four frames actually fall sequentially within a one-second portion of a particular film; it seems entirely possible that, as presented, the individual images could have been taken from anywhere among the 527 items in the archive. In actuality, then, the twenty-four frames do not equal one second of moving image. The equation merely conjures the possibility of naturalizing or anthropomorphizing time. The wipe functions in this installation in the way coevality functions in the critique of anthropology—as the sign of an insufficient critique. The wipes, and their photographic presentation, effectively reduce the irrationality of the cut into a rational critique. This strategy is akin to the recovery of coevality in anthropology’s critique of allochronicity. According to Johannes Fabian, anthropology is a discourse that constructs its object through strategies of time, specifically by locating the object of study in a past relative to the present of the anthropologist. The relation of present and past is then mapped onto a cotemporaneous terrain of here and there, near and far, vis-àvis imperial center. Fabian argues that what is ignored and denied by the allochronic tactics of anthropological discourse is the synchronicity of the communication event itself. The coevality of encounter between anthropologist and native informant, the space of contact, disappears and reappears as the objectivity of anthropological discourse. It is in the transition from ethnography to anthropology, in the writing that passes from one genre to another, that synchrony becomes diachrony, and the informant is made to speak from the past to the anthropologist sitting among readers in the present. As Fabian puts it, the ethnographic appears to drop out of anthropology. Through this denial of coevality, he suggests, anthropology shares cognitive complicity with colonialism; living inhabitants are spectralized through the instrumental use of time, providing justification for material exploitation. With the “return” of coevality, however, we run the further risk of losing sight of the fact that coevality, too, imposes a violent notion of time and space, an aspect of postcolonialzed reason, rather than a description of the way of the world “Seeing” Spectral Agencies 287

“before” or “after” colonial domination. Coevality as a postcolonial destination is all too well equipped to participate productively in the project of global empire. The coeval conceptualization of time gives us the time of the equation, the time of the exchange of incommensurables, of global capital: the dominance of synchrony. Rey Chow proposes a shift from spatialized evolutionary time to the time of coevality, while recognizing that this is the beginning, not the end, of the problems of the colonial legacy of time. “Once the coevalness of cultures is acknowledged,” Chow states, the problem still remains: “Cultural translation needs to be rethought as the co-temporal exchange and contention between different social groups deploying different sign systems that may not be synthesizable to one particular model of language or representation.”21 Additionally, the in-between of cultures is understood “beyond verbal and literary languages to include events of the media such as radio, film, television, video, pop music.”22 The acknowledgment of coevality produces a proliferation of cultural descriptions that utilize tropes of time to express various contemporary situations (speed, displacement, nostalgia, etc.). These differences are, however, now able to be brought into “co-temporal exchange and contention” rather than colonial exploitation rationalized by evolutionary discourse. Chow’s description of sign systems that “may not be synthesizable to one particular model of language or representation” suggests that the acknowledgment of coevality may serve to proliferate the irrational cut and to produce temporal multiplicity, against the very logic of coevality itself. The expanded visibility of Lin+Lam’s wipes brings to view their performed self- critique of the ideological function of film editing. Consequently, what can no longer be “seen” is the violence of the suspension of transition itself. It is not simply the activity of war that is ended, but a new regime of development, immigration, assimilation that takes over and leaves in its wake the suspension of the stateless. The wipes force us to look at suspension as if it were a place of transit, an in-between point in the slowing down of war’s violent activity to a new day of peace. Yet, in fact, it is not the movement of transferring that is stopped; it is the potential multiplicity of the cut, the possibility of new time, new life, that is undermined through limbo—a limbo that pretends the suspension of life is nothing more than a gentle pausing of time, a space for deliberation and thought, rather than the enclosure of refugee camps and detention centers. This suspension is not the hiatus of a continuous motion; rather it might be described as the destruction of converging points of noncontact, the limit of postcolonial temporality. The expression of 288 Una Chung

a desire to move beyond what is caught in the linguistic hopefulness of “post” and is never met by “what comes after.” Lin+Lam’s wipes cover up—by in fact exposing, prolonging, and spatializing—the potency of the irrational cut. In this sense, then, the re-presentation of wipes as abstract art can show us that “power has passed into a non- organic life.”23 Lin+Lam’s sculptural assemblage, Pupils of Democracy, constructs passages for intermedial movement between film and several objects exterior to it (film projector, screen, table, books, magnifying glass) and several objects interior to the film (typewriter, miniature model of an office, human hand). As the short 16 mm film loop passes noisily through the Kodak Pageant film projector, we see a close-up view of the moving mechanism of a manual typewriter. The film shows individual typebars flying out of their tight assembly toward the paper. Inked characters slowly lengthen the line of text: “How do you feel the American effort here is being conducted?” In a progression of film images, we see the methodical construction, letter by letter, of the sentence that emerges several seconds later, without being able to hear the loud clacking sound marking each excessively visible strike of the keys. The unrecorded sound marking contact between paper and keys becomes the silence of contact between typewriter and film camera, which is supplanted by the noisy rattling of the sculptural contraption of projector, table, and screen. Between the two different modes of composition connected to typing and filming opens a passage for intermedial movement. This movement is unconnected to human physiology; “movement” refers here to affect, the interstice, the transversal motility implicit in the machinic assemblage. The explicit use of film in the installation, however, ignores such potentiality for the sake of producing a magnified reframing of the process of typing, that is, constructing the “American effort.” The time of the typewriter passes into the time of the film. Writing does not materialize through conversion into the movement of keys but passes into cinematic time, twenty-four frames per second. The magnification of the time of construction that we now passively view, following stroke by stroke a dance of keys, displaces any time for reading or responding to the sense of the question. Magnified vision collaborates with the question’s rhetorical emphasis on a description of conduct, which displaces the unstated question of whether the United States should sustain or cease the war effort altogether. The effort of typing the question becomes an extension of the American effort to sustain the war in Vietnam. The question of the U.S. presence in Vietnam is presented as the mechanics of English composition and the typewriter. To participate in this English lesson is “Seeing” Spectral Agencies 289

to participate in the American effort. Hannah Arendt argues that “education can play no part in politics,” that compulsory education for adults is a form of “coercion without the use of force.”24 Adult education is routinely linked to politics and citizenship in the context of the United States’ self-annointed identity as nation of so- called immigrants—land-appropriating and genocidal settlers, American-born descendants of settlers and newer migrants, naturalized citizens, noncitizen permanent alien residents, noncitizen temporary residents, temporary status refugees, green- card applicants, resident aliens without residency status, residents of enclosed autonomous areas, confined detainees of various statuses, etc. The role of educator is easily extended ideologically as a rationale for foreign intervention, reinvented as the biopolitical production of “pupils of democracy.” In the assemblage Pupils of Democracy the temporality of social and political change is converted into the time of democracy, materialized as an assemblage of schoolroom technologies. In this space of pedagogy, the political agency of those being converted into pupils of democracy is indefinitely suspended, looped through a rattling old projector. The film projector sits rather precariously atop a stack of books placed on a wobbly kindergarten table with foldable legs. The portable projection screen, with retractable legs, is positioned just a couple feet in front of the projector, so that the viewer must stand behind the projector to watch the film, the sculptural assemblage thus remaining in view. The only object lying between the projector’s lens and the screen is an opened paperback book, Michael MacLear’s The Ten Thousand Day War, with a magnifying glass positioned above the exposed pages. The selection within the area of magnification is bathed in intense light: “It is 105 degrees and rising,” the code for U.S. evacuation operative during the last months of the war.25 Changing the spectator’s angle of vision allows different selections of text to emerge in the space of magnification and light: “miniature atomic explosion,” “combat Marines,” “remaining American.” The enlarged and brightened letters are not to be read so much as decoded, converted into bodily movement, translated into flight, or the anticipation of the flight of others (vanishing Americans), or the transfer of the American effort to long-range violence, embargo, retrenchment into “remaining American.” Where does text become military code? At what point in the everyday do political expansions and halos of violence occur? Such questions are raised between apparatuses. The film loop also contains a series of images focused on a miniature model of the South Vietnamese president’s office. As cinematic time passes, 290 Una Chung

the tip of a brush enters the frame and descends toward the table in the model office, gently touching it. The fingers holding the brush also enter the frame, but no more than the hand is visible. The model of the office allows us a miniaturized and intensified view of the seat of power. Initially, this miniaturization of space produces an intensification of the space of power, which is then disrupted by the descent of the hand and the gentle brushing movement that recalibrate our sense of scale. We realize that the emptiness of the room does not presage the imminent entry of the South Vietnamese president. The space is clearly much too small to permit his appearance. The stillness we observe does not connect us with an anticipated glimpse of his life but opens to the workshop of the sculptor, the space of the hand’s reconstruction. Film does not function here as an organ of mass media, transmitting communiqués between the presidential house and the public, but as a mode of capturing the time of the sculptor’s hand. The double intensity of magnification and miniaturization, however, displaces the act of reading and the seat of the reading of the state. Chow tells us that “in the age of multimedia communication, transmissibility is that aspect of a work which, unlike the weight of philosophical depth and interiority, is literal, transparent, and thus capable of offering itself to a popular or naïve handling.”26 In Lin+Lam’s installation, a hand, and the work of the hand, appears in the place of such mediated handling, interrupting the transparency of transmission. The intrusion of the hand’s tactility, as well as its organic movement, cover the tracks of the handling of the “American effort.” Fabian speculates, “If machine time were, at some point, to replace (not just assist) human time . . . we would expect anthropology to disappear.”27 Even without anthropologists, however, the cognitive tendencies of the anthropological are incipient in the machine. The death of the anthropologist is also the renewed life of “nonhuman agencies that inhere in finite forces, speeds, and exposures that are productive of technonature and technoculture,” Clough explains.28 Indeed, in Unidentified Vietnam, such nonhuman agencies seem to mobilize the capture of media by other media. Between typewriter and projector, between miniature model and magnifying glass, passes an intermedial movement, which properly belongs to the temporality of the irrational cut. This passing might be a figure of the agency moving through “passages that head not toward the ‘original’ that is the West or the East but toward survival in the postcolonial world.”29 For Achille Mbembe, such a survival requires a more complex notion of time than that implicit in the dichotomy of preservation/change. As long as “Seeing” Spectral Agencies 291

the postcolonial subject continues merely to inquire “what comes after,” he or she will end up “postcolonized,” caught in the turning of backward/forward glances toward precolonial freedom and postcolonial liberation. To see this predicament is to be in “another space,” the space of “raw life.”30 In this space of half- death and half-life, one does not begin to attempt a “recovery of existence,” and is instead further compelled to ask, “Is that man still alive, or dead?”31 Rather than liberation, what comes after is an intensification, as well as a further proliferation, of the biopolitical techniques that had come before. Knowledge of bodies and knowledge of the self can productively utilize the polarization of time along the axis of backward/forward or preservation/change. Against such a notion of “passing time,” Mbembe proposes multiplicity: “emerging time,” “the time of existence and experience,” “time as lived,” and “the time of entanglement,” the interlocking of past, present, and future.32 Today, such multiplicity is constantly threatened by the possibility of passing into knowledge—the horizon of the biopolitical. To attempt to reclaim the ontology of multiplicity is to contest biopolitical transition. The most explicit materialization of survival in the postcolonial world presented in Unidentified Vietnam is to be found in the exquisitely terse performances of H. Lan Thao Lam, which appear in fragments of 16 mm films made by Lin+Lam. These are contained within the films of Pupils of Democracy (discussed above) and Invisible Like Peace, a video played on a wall-mounted television screen. In the film component of Pupils of Democracy, sequences of typing are intercut with three segments featuring an unidentified figure performed by Lam. In Invisible Like Peace, images of Lam appear after images of Ngo Dinh Diem and Madame Nhu and among a montage of clips from the South Vietnam Embassy Collection. With Lam’s body, what emerges is not Lam’s body proper. Lam gives us neither proper name nor identified Vietnamese body, but rather the emergence, “from time to time,” of an outside that is “farther away than any outside world.” Lam’s performances are austere, psychologically minimal, composed only of intense details, bare gestures. Lam’s performance in Pupils of Democracy might be transcribed as such: A figure facing forward appears with face cut out of frame; only a white jacket is visible, impeccably ironed, the white merging with the white of the screen; suddenly hands buttoning the jacket, in precise rhythm, even speed. A figure facing forward appears with face cut out of frame; puts on

292 Una Chung

a jacket with a few swift but unhurried moves, straightens the sleeves, smoothing them out with a few brushes of the hand. A figure in profile holds microphone in left hand and makes a sharp upward motion with the right hand and arm, extending them above the head, as the left knee bends to a half kneeling position. A figure with back toward the camera has right arm raised and moves the right hand left and right, quick repetitions back and forth. In Invisible Like Peace, images of Ngo Dinh Diem are followed by images of Lam in similar clothes, postures, and gestures: He, then she, in white suit, arms akimbo, glance slightly upward, slightly to the right. He, then she, in white suit, arms hanging gently to either side, lips barely forming a smile. The unidentified person in Pupils of Democracy wears a suit similar to Ngo Dinh Diem’s in Invisible Like Peace, and seems to flash between Ngo Dinh Diem as Ngo Dinh Diem and H. Lan Thao Lam as Ngo Dinh Diem. Who is the pupil of democracy? From whom is the pupil learning democracy? Why does the scene of learning become invisible, “like peace”? In Invisible Like Peace, images of Madame Nhu are followed by images of Lam in similar clothes, postures, gestures, and objects: She, then Lam, turns her head slightly toward the camera, then a subtle twist in the other direction, the barest of oscillations from side to side. She, then Lam, is framed as a bust, perfectly poised, gazing fixedly over a copy of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American held in front at arm’s length. In the former turning, Lam’s Madame Nhu is only framed from the neck up. The image is dominated by hair—the weight and bulk of it, the elaborate coiffure, its elegant sweep up—strikingly set off by the elongated neck. Every slight movement of the head seems to be led by the hair; its sculpted mass heightens the dramatic effect of turning the head, of turning to look at the camera. The violence of Madame Nhu’s tenure as “First Lady” is displaced by the massive character of her sculpted hair in Lam’s performance. Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu (née Tran Le Xuan) was the sister-in-law of unmarried president Ngo Dinh Diem and was commonly referred to as the First Lady. In exile, she railed bitterly against the United States for removing Diem, and thus also herself, from power in 1963. She was also infamous for her vicious

“Seeing” Spectral Agencies 293

attacks against Buddhists: “I would clap hands at seeing another monk barbecue show, for one can not be responsible for the madness of others.”33 Lam’s Madame Nhu is notably without hands—any clapping, literal or figurative, is cut out of frame. The source of all mobility and agency seems to be magnetically pulled into the immense beehive; the facial expressions and subtle motions of the face merely lag, pull, trail in the wake of the hive’s own movement. In the second of the two aforementioned images of Madame Nhu, her gaze is absorbed by a book, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. This novel is set in Indo-China in the early 1950s, during the war between the French and those colonized by the French. When the quiet American of Greene’s novel, Pyle, directly observes this war between France and the “coming community” of “Vietnam,” he is stirred to desire actively what he had previously only read about in York Harding’s The Role of the West: a putative alternative to both colonialism and communism. Pyle secretly begins to work at “arranging American arms for a Third Force” between China and France.34 It is precisely the age of a “third” regime, an age of U.S. imperialism and neoliberalism, that has arrived to block the way toward “survival in the postcolonial world.” Madame Nhu, played by H. Lan Thao Lam, holds this text with calm aplomb, as allied South Vietnamese and U.S. forces continue to wage war against the North Vietnamese, and as the United States continues to postpone its departure from Iraq—two “presents.” Between 1975 and 2006 lies 1955, the incommensurable. In the performances of Lam, we see the medium of the body as geste. Giorgio Agamben states, “What characterizes gesture is that in it nothing is being produced or acted, but rather something is being endured and supported. The gesture, in other words, opens the sphere of ethos as the more proper sphere of that which is human.”35 Lam’s body endures and supports the gestures of an unidentified “citizen” of an unidentified “Vietnam,” as well as of the two most visible South Vietnamese figures of the postcolonial preunification period. In contrast to the suspension of agency accompanying the transition of the film archive, Lam’s body provides a different kind of mediation: “the emergence of the being-in-a-medium of human beings . . . the ethical dimension.”36 The coming community of Vietnam will have to take into account the afterlife of South Vietnam and the spectral agency of the stateless, in order to fully engage the ethical dimension of nation-building. Whereas the suspension of media produces “the sphere of an end in itself,” Lam’s gestures open to “the sphere of a pure and endless mediality.”37 In 294 Una Chung

Invisible Like Peace, Lin+Lam, three photo stills.

Invisible Like Peace, Lin+Lam, woman with book.

effect, “the gesture . . . breaks with the false alternative between ends and means that paralyzes morality and presents instead means that, as such, evade the orbit of mediality without becoming for this reason, ends.”38 The gesture is the figure of a being-means, a means without end. The gesture thus provides an image of a kind of mediation that has the potential to avoid the flaws of both instrumentality and paralysis. Such a gesture might then also be capable of addressing the postcolonial dilemma of self-referentiality. In Mbembe’s analysis of the problems of producing knowledge about Africa, he points out the persistent thralldom exerted by two pernicious notions of time associated with colonialism—primitivism and developmentalism. He argues that what is needed is “an attempt to force Africa to face up to itself in the world,” and that articulating the “true historicity of African societies” requires an analysis of Africans’ “relation to nothing other than themselves.”39 What rhetorically appears here as self-relation is not an argument about the self as asset, that is, liberal self-possession or self-exploitation, but rather a strategy for articulating a cut in the linkage of “First World” and “Third World,” reproduced as such in discourses of primitivism and developmentalism. By linking one to oneself, colonial and postcolonized linkages are simultaneously pulled apart and a much fuller world map is allowed to surface. It is not “one” that is thus recovered, but the possibility of a relation of one to oneself, that is relation without end—the making 296 Una Chung

of collective agencies beyond “Fifth Column, Third Force, Seventh Day.”40 The rhetorical formulation of self-relation is, as it were, gesture. How else to make life appear, for one second, “without,” “before,” passing into knowledge? Self-referentiality, in this precise sense, refers to multiplicity produced by processes of self- differentiation. It is not what produces the self- contained space of enclosure, an ethnic enclave, an early twentieth-century Chinatown, a return of Old Masters, but what opens to multiplicity and incommensurability. Lam’s performances do not give us autoethnography. Gestures do not increase knowledge of individuals, produced by themselves for the sake of others; rather the bodily and the affective remain immanent, not passed into knowledge. The body of Lam only appears with the “link or knot of attitudes between themselves,”41 as “a perpetual self-distinguishing, a distinction in the process of being produced.”42 Gestures expose the “media character of corporal movements.”43 To claim the gesture is thus not a redemption of the body, neither a utopian return of human naturalness nor a heroic recovery of existence. The gesture belongs not to the timing of space but to an image of time, or more precisely, in Deleuze’s words, “the attitude of the body is like a time-image, the one which puts the before and the after in the body, the series of time; but the gest is already a different time-image, the order or organization of time, the simultaneity of its peaks, the coexistence of its sheets.”44 Lam’s performances, however, are further manipulated digitally in the editing of the film. Between images of Ngo Dinh Diem and of Lam as Ngo Dinh Diem, hands appear from above and below the screen, clap together and apart, a manual wipe. Between images of Madame Nhu and of Lam as Madame Nhu is the brief superimposition of both faces. These explicit visualizations of transition, what lies between the two sets of images, clash violently with what Lam’s performances already embody. Such transitions attempt to obfuscate what still persists as gesture, provocatively posing the questions: Is a wipe essentially a gesture of the hand? Are showing, looking, the direction of the gaze, and the direction of the film in the projector, essentially gestures of the face? Is the hand a technology of erasure? Is the face a guide toward memory? Lam’s reply: the face does not simply transition into film image, nor hand into film editing; face and hand can hold, or be held by, what cannot be merely handled, or dealt with. The question of medium here appears between gesture and apparatus, unable to link them progressively, as the geste refuses to relinquish its modality of holding to the apparatus’s mode of handling. “Seeing” Spectral Agencies 297

Lin+Lam’s Card Catalogue, mounted on a wall, attempts to put the archive into relation with itself. The catalogue is composed of index cards, on which are affixed excerpts from transcribed interviews with a wide range of people connected to the Vietnam/American War, including the recounting of facts, personal memories, gossip about other interviewees, and various printed images. The material on the cards is presented in undigested, unprocessed, and deliberately unorganized form. Rather than follow the Dewey Decimal System, or even simple alphabetic order, the cards are organized into seemingly random categories, such as “White Christmas,” “Different Title, Same Movie,” and “Take One”—which directly invite the mishandling of information by any passerby. Additionally, the contents are often repeated, making any form of linearity impossible. What is perhaps most striking about the card catalogue is the disjunction between the haphazard presentation of the cards themselves and the artists’ laborious work of conducting hundreds of hours of interviews with individuals in the United States and Canada. Lin+Lam interviewed a range of persons, from their own family members to former military and government officials, and transcribed the interviews into many pages of text—years of preparation to produce an installation lasting only twenty-nine days. Unable to distill or totalize the sum of the living memory of the war, Lin+Lam construct a catalogue of self-referentiality referring to nothing more than labor itself, the immense technology of archival production and preservation. In the last component, Library of Congress Cleaning Crew, Lin+Lam take us into the building that houses the archive, as film turns a free-standing gallery wall into a corridor of the Library of Congress, a long, empty corridor with heavy double doors at the end. In this silent, black and white film, a man pushing a mop steadily makes his way down the corridor as another man walks alongside him, periodically moving roadblock signs out of the way of the mopper’s forward progress. Occasionally, other employees dressed in suits walk across the corridor—brisk, hurried, rigid bodies, anticipating the two men mopping, but only awkwardly able to negotiate their differing speeds and rhythms. The walkers’ bodies form various gestures of slight contortion, indicating discomfort and irritation at the obstacles they must navigate, mixed with some gesture of apology for the obstacle that their own movements must pose to the working men, then disappear around the bend of an intersecting corridor. The bodies of the moppers never break from their steady movement, and as they seem about to reach the end of the corridor, the moppers seamlessly begin moving backward, returning to 298 Una Chung

their initial position, and then forward again and backward again, over and over, so that they repeatedly move toward and away, without ever turning to face the viewer standing in the gallery. Without break, without completion, the men unhurriedly and unhesitatingly continue their labor of cleaning the passageway. The moppers do not have direct access to the archive, although they are at the heart of its institutional location. They are not excluded at its exterior but are suspended within the passageway of its interior. Lin+Lam keep us in an approach to the archive, which neither ends nor progresses, but sustains itself in perpetual limbo. This is not a deferral produced by the inaccessibility of the archive, so much as a looping, a particular mode of repetition, marked by the time interval “4:44,” the length of a single iteration of the film, which repeats endlessly for the duration of the installation. The labor of mopping up that follows the formal end of war is here suspended and perpetuated interminably as continuous movement, perhaps also invoking Vietnam’s experience of prolonged warfare from 1946 to 1989. The national liberation war of 1946–54 led to ongoing conflicts between North and South, conflicts intensifying until 1965, necessitating U.S. involvement until the U.S. withdrawal in 1975. The conflict then extended into Cambodia from 1978 to 1989. The moppers’ actions seem without beginning or end, not only due to the repetition of the film but also the ambiguous direction of their movements. The mop could as easily be pulled backward as pushed forward; similarly the walking companion could as easily be placing cones after the passing of the mop as removing them before its approach. Either series of actions could appear to us as progressing forward in time. However, the bizarre faces and distorted gestures of the other employees caught mid-expression—at the point of reversal—tell us that the film is actually being played backward half of the time. In this sense, the walkers’ actions could be described as unidirectional and the moppers’ multidirectional. Although the camera captures all of their actual movements on 16 mm film, in dVd playback, this mode of mediating “natural” movement is altered through repetition and reversal, the construction of a continuous series. The consequences for moppers and walkers diverge. The moppers’ actions are seamlessly continued through the looping of film, in forward, nonprogressive continuation, while the walkers’ movements are abruptly interrupted and undone. The nonchronological time of the moppers becomes visible in contrast to the chronological time of the walkers. The moppers never enter or leave the corridor, whereas the walkers have always just entered or are about to leave. “Seeing” Spectral Agencies 299

Lin+Lam’s film uses the temporalities of different media to construct figures caught up in progressive temporality. The term “postcolonial,” in its idealist form, refers to both the end of colonialism and the advent of what comes after. In trying to embody the end and the beginning, postcolonial temporality simultaneously seeks to go beyond to a future free of the colonial past and to reach back into prehistory to recover an uncolonized state in order to use these two points as a measure of liberation. However wide the distance between the two states or two times, as long as one must look back in order to ascertain that one is indeed moving forward, one has not gone—nor will ever have gone—far enough. Postcolonial desire longs for rupture but is stalled in the space of transition’s liminality. Caught between past and future, the true present vanishes in a hopelessly prolonged wish for confirmation of rupture. With a twist of intermedial humor, perhaps, the anthropological temptation of empire is turned into mildly grotesque bodies switching backward and forward. The mopping body that drives persistently forward with the playing of the dVd survives the ruin of gesture, working somberly, faceless, with a certain dignity. In Provincializing Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty analyzes a “certain paradox that results precisely from the historian’s attempt to bring the histories of the subaltern classes into the mainstream of the discourse of history.”45 According to Chakrabarty, Ranajit Guha cannot help but run into this paradox in his attempt to write the 1855 rebellion of the Santals against the British and nonlocal Indians in Bengal and Bihar into modern history—how to account for “I did as my god told me to do,” how to account for the god Thakur himself ?46 The paradox reveals the incommensurable relation of the subaltern’s experience to the language of the modern historian: agency of supernatural beings is not equivalent to agency of insurgency. The irrational, supernatural, or religious, i.e., the life of the gods, cannot enter into the historian’s narrative, except as ethnographic alibi (that is, if the historian wishes to remain in the proper domain of history, recognized by the disciplinary institution). Subaltern historiography runs the risk of turning past itself into the subaltern (as opposed to the colonial anthropologist’s temptation to relegate contemporary subalterns to the past). Chakrabarty suggests that in order to maintain kinship with subaltern history the historian’s timeline must become intricately knotted: “To stay with the heterogeneity of the moment when the historian meets with the peasant is, then, to stay with the difference between these two gestures. One is that of historicizing the Santal in the interest of a history of social justice and democracy; and the other that of refusing to 300 Una Chung

historicize and of seeing the Santal as a figure illuminating a life possibility for the present.”47 The “time-knot” demands that the historian identify in historical chronology the incommensurable event of rupture, shift, and— in that cut—refuse this passing into knowledge, enduring and supporting, in one’s own body, that “life possibility for the present.”48 The historical dating of practices is necessary for the articulation of political action, yet it is in the living of present as multiplicity that we discover freedom as given. Lin+Lam are able to capture the disjunction between two different types of embodied time in a single film. They do not use two cameras, each of which would capture the activities of the corridor from a different angle or point of view, nor are the two groups of people filmed in different ways. The artistic focus is on the gestural, not the subjective, and on the time of entanglement, not the timeless comparison of difference. A single lens has captured the qualitatively different types of motion that belie the appearance of a single social setting: employees meeting in a shared space of a common workplace. The walkers are the ones, presumably, who have access to the archives, maintain and utilize their contents, at times even transport, alter, or destroy them. For the walkers, the corridor is merely a passageway, an empty transitional space integrated into larger aggregate goals relating to the archives, a larger trajectory of intended actions, within which this walk across the corridor plays a minute role, just one second of a day. The moppers, on the other hand, are instructed to wipe down the working space of others, then promptly depart, so as to enable others to carry on their work. The moppers work on the space without ever utilizing it themselves. They remain in the corridor without occupying it. The corridor holds these different workers in synchronicity but is not held in common by them, and thus cannot hold them to a common belonging. The qualitative disjunction in the motions of moppers and walkers demonstrates the paradox of their simultaneous separation and connection. They never truly encounter the other whom they perpetually approach; these bodies converge without touching, are entangled but never joined. In Lin+Lam’s film, time-image is also time-knot. Without the limit of the incommensurable, we could not describe the present condition of the potential for real, collective agency in social and political life. With the passing of film time the corridor becomes the moppers’ corridor. Corridor and mopping come to define the walkers’ projects, contrary to the usual order of things. The walkers’ plans are interrupted unendingly, if you will permit this paradoxical turn of phrase, the interruption not being merely repeated but also, simultaneously, ceaselessly perpetuated. The labor of the “Seeing” Spectral Agencies 301

moppers takes precedence; it is they who come to inhabit the corridor most fully with their steady unending actions, the only purposeful movements visible in the corridor. In contrast, the walkers repeatedly pause in the completion of their tasks as they cross the corridor. It is against the steadiness of the moppers’ motion that we come to assess the movement of the walkers as unstable. Mopping ceases to become a means to an end and instead becomes a means without end. The question of access to and control of the archives is repeatedly interrupted in the time of mopping. The corridor displaces the Library of Congress. Boundary lines stretch back into an unruly expanse of corridor. In the early 1800s, British colonialists and the Siamese Royal Court struggled over definitions of the border between Burma (then a new British colony) and Siam, a dispute due less to direct competition over territorial claims at that time than over the rationality of the map. Differences in language and thought caused the endless relay of messages between competing authorities over the question of what exactly constituted a “boundary” or “border.” In the Bangkok Thai language spoken at the Siamese court, there were many words meaning something similar to boundary—khopkhet, khetdaen, anakhet and khopkhanthasima, the prefix khop and khet meaning “edge,” “rim” or “fringe,” the word daen meaning “area” or “territory.” All the Thai words, however, tend to signify areas, districts or frontiers, not lines. They do mean a “limit,” but a limit as an extremity without a clear-cut edge and without the sense of division between two realms or powers.49 For the British, a border was unquestionably a line; but for the Siamese court, a border was a dense “corridor” of forests and mountains: “This was a border, but one without a boundary line—or at least the line was a very thick one.”50 This “thick” conception of the border was accompanied by overlapping, multiple sovereignties that were common in Siam before the nineteenth century. The specter of such border struggles in colonial invasions of the region of Southeast Asia haunts the coming to life of the corridor in Lin+Lam’s installation. Their corridor opens to multiplicity in our thinking of borders and sovereignty, a multiplicity that brings heterogeneous life possibilities back into the past and thus returns to life the dead present of transition. The departure of the French from Hanoi with the Geneva Agreement in 1954 resulted in a mass migration of over a million people between north and south regions of Vietnam. Migration had significant military, economic, 302 Una Chung

and social impacts in following decades, as the states strictly controlled migration programs, in order to regulate the effects of urbanization, national security in the highlands, and ethnic insurgencies. After 1975, people could, at last, so it seemed, move freely throughout all of Vietnam, and by the 1990s the roads would be full of buses and motorbikes, as well as the vanishing tracks of “boat people.” In 1986 the Vietnamese Communist Party adopted economic and social reforms called Doi Moi (renovation), which in many ways undid “much of the previous program of socialist construction.”51 Andrew Hardy emphasizes that Prime Minister Pham Van Dong “used an image of mobility to stress that it was not a monolithic policy.”52 In Pham Van Dong’s words, “We are going along a road without a map . . . every day and every hour resolving practical issues, problems full of complexities and unknowns.”53 On the other hand, Hong Kong, after 1988, would selectively screen “economic migrants” from “genuine refugees,” those pulled forward by what lies ahead and those chased out by what lies behind.54 If Lin+Lam give us, in 2006, a spectral South Vietnam that looks back to its 1975 transition into unidentified status and subsequent absorption into the United States’ cultural archives, it is not simply in order to ask how far a properly named and unified Vietnam has come along that road without a map, but also to wonder what else the time-knot might yield. noTes

1. William Delaney, “South Vietnam Embassy Continues to Carry on in Diplomatic Limbo,” Washington Star Times, May 7, 1975. 2. See Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. 3. Chinese American Arts Council’s homepage, http://www.caacarts.org/. 4. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 140. 5. Clough, Autoaffection, 184. 6. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 142. 7. Ibid., 143. 8. Ibid. 9. See Da Costa and Philip, Tactical Biopolitics, which includes discussion of artists going far beyond the more common, and rather crude, approach of using undigested quotations from Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer in a confused attempt to turn biopolitics into an object of representation. At a more sophisticated level are artists who become indistinguishable from technicians, as they absorb diverse methods and processes with which to produce their art, striving to allow the emerging technologies, knowledges, and political mechanisms to produce the artwork. Some even acquire graduate degrees in computer programming, molecular biology, etc., with the intention of producing art knowledge rather than merely becoming employed in the “Seeing” Spectral Agencies 303

industry. Such practices, however, suggest an absorption of art into the biopolitical, as art seems no longer capable of, or even interested in, insisting on its own selfdistinction. 10. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 19. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 124. 13. Ibid., 123–24. 14. Hansen, “The Time of Affect, or Bearing Witness to Life,” 610. 15. Ibid., 609. 16. Ibid., 590. 17. Ibid., 589. 18. Ibid., 611. 19. Ibid., 612. Emphasis added. 20. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 214. 21. Chow, Primitive Passions, 196–97. 22. Ibid. 23. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 214. 24. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 177. 25. A radio announcer would report, “It is a 105 and rising,” followed by Bing Crosby’s singing “White Christmas.” 26. Chow, Primitive Passions, 199. 27. Fabian, The Time and the Other, 93. 28. Clough, Autoaffection, 184. 29. Chow, Primitive Passions, 202. 30. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 197. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 8, 16. 33. “Letters to the Times: Mrs. Nhu Defends Stand,” New York Times, August 14, 1963. 34. Greene, The Quiet American, 63. 35. Agamben, Means Without End, 56. 36. Ibid., 57. 37. Ibid., 58. 38. Ibid., 56. 39. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 5, 14. 40. Greene, The Quiet American, 17. 41. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 192. 42. Ibid., 82. 43. Agamben, Means Without End, 57. 44. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 195. 45. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 102. 46. Ibid., 108. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 112.

304 Una Chung

49. Winichakul, “Siam Mapped,” 216. 50. Ibid. 51. Hardy, “State Visions, Migrant Decisions,” 107. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., 107–8. 54. Ibid., 119.

“Seeing” Spectral Agencies 305

amit s. rai

Here We accrete dUrations

Toward a Practice of Intervals in the Perceptual Mode of Power

Becoming isn’t part of history; history amounts [to] only the set of preconditions, however recent, that one leaves behind in order to “become,” that is, to create something new. This is precisely what Nietzsche calls the Untimely. —Gilles Deleuze, “Control and Becoming”

Here we accrete nonsequential, noncommunicating, resonant temporal layers. It is an experiment in heterochrony. The aim is to pursue a method of intuitive resonance, to produce a line of flight as a virtual generation of forces, to follow repetitive parallel processes and (un)bundle them. In December 2006, George W. Bush declared that the war in Iraq was winnable, but with tens of thousands more troops. I read this on NYTimes.com and then continued reading David Harvey’s Spaces of Global Capitalism as I listened in to my daughter giggling, watching the Colbert Report on Comedy Central (she’s three, but I think she likes the affect of absurdity). Fatah and Hamas had come to a temporary truce, as Abbas declared new elections and the American-Zionist stranglehold continued. The U.N. Security Council passed sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program, and I was thinking about how to teach Hamid Debashi’s recently edited book on Palestinian cinema, Dreams of a Nation, in an undergrad course called “The Theory and Practice of Human Rights.” In Bangalore, India, the multinational dot.com companies were moving to Mysore

three hours away because the city government officials could not be bribed enough to provide the basic infrastructure support for the rapidly expanding city, but also because of a new linguistic nationalist movement that had joined forces with some of the antiglobalization groups to resist and recoup the massive influx of Hindi-speaking, white- collar elites (even as local police uncovered what they insisted was an al-Qaeda cell in Mysore). In the previous year, I had traveled from Tallahassee, Florida (where I teach global media studies), to Bangalore, Mumbai, Naples, New York, Jerusalem, and Deir Al Assad (Israel), and back to this rapidly changing, sprawling, liberal, white, evangelical, segregated, deep South, African American college football town. The week I arrived back in the United States, in New York, at Ground Zero, workers erected a thirty- one-foot Freedom Tower with the flag on the wrong way. On Friday, February 27, 2009, Barack Obama declared a time frame for withdrawing American troops from Iraq, even as more troops and military resources were committed to an ever-expanding mission to oust a resurgent Taliban from Afghanistan. Obama will go on to insinuate American forces in the region, involving both economic and military vectors. All these time-spaces constellate together in the image center of contemporary empire; specific vectors, media, algorithms, memories, bodies, connect to form historically constituted basins of attractions that distribute populations more or less secured. Sound, tactility, vision: they have their maps, even when we know, as William Gibson does, that there are no absolute maps to these territories. So diagram how Movement returns to movement, as Henri Bergson reminds us in Matter and Memory.1 These vectorforces are not analogies or metaphors in a larger figuration or idea, such as a homo sacer, or the Terrorist Monster. Rather, they are topologically related, by which we mean, following Brian Massumi, working with a thought of “self-varying deformation.”2 I consider the attention technologies of contemporary biopower (such as the color- coded terror alert system, but also single-shooter war video games, mobile phones, new algorithms for data disaggregation and reaggregation) as elements in a topological image center. The image here is a motor- circuit between representation and matter, to recall Bergson again.3 To modulate, jam, and shock these sensory-motor circuits returns practice to planes of potential by unbundling the durations that constitute habituations and affective dispositions. These global shifts in military-media- capital relations produce regularities of human security. Every example of the “right now” represented above is reconstituted differHere We Accrete Durations 307

ently. The diagram of these shifting relations of motion presents us with the fundamental problem that Giorgio Agamben tackles in The State of Exception: on what basis, in what form, do we act politically today? These would be, no doubt, Untimely acts, some indiscernible, others unbearable, always informatized in the enfolding of a multiplicity, immeasurable but susceptible to control, as Antonio Negri characterizes affective labor.4 Retort usefully reminds us that Marx wrote the subjugated knowledge of primitive accumulation buried in “the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.” Retort argues persuasively that the war in Iraq, and counterterrorism more generally, is in fact a new wave of primitive accumulation rolling across the empire; that forced expropriation should be the global face of capitalist democracy, clarifies the permanent emergency in the everyday life of the oppressed. Perhaps we need to accede to a form of writing just slightly out of step with our state of emergency. This has nothing to do with disavowing our complicity in the emergency, but much to do with pursuing our complicity to the point of self- differentiation, to its immanence. There is a name for this method: counteractualization. We will move with vectors that progressively concretize this method in the pages, indeed in the years, that follow. For the moment, let us articulate the question of the right of rebellion (and its topographical parasite the state of exception) with another: What is the relation between the contemporary production of fear across heterogeneous populations and the critical “ontological/affective turn”?5 I open this question by thinking through the connectivities of contemporary media assemblages. This method aims to diagram sets of virtual-actual circuits and their serial transformations among irritable bodies, media platforms, and the potentiality of sensation. The relationship of affect to populations, ontology to epistemology, multiplicity to representation, is at issue in the context of an ethical experimentation with Untimely mutations. “As if,” writes Retort in response to the affective disposition of “ya basta!” or an absolute “enough” animating contemporary left politics, “all of us had sat brooding nightly over cnn, rolling the latest sound bite round our tongues, savoring it, entering deep into its banality and untruth, until an absolute negation had emerged for each demonstrator, shadowing the official slogans, parodying them, feeding on their emptiness, giving them monstrous form.” An absolute negation is, strictly speaking, inseparable from what we might call affirmative ontogenesis, or more simply “creative indetermination,” the vanishing-becoming point of power and agency. Thus the question of mutation today opens anew: What is the form proper to political excess 308 Amit S. Rai

given a permanent state of emergency? The work of many others has shown that this is less about a “state” and more about populations of processes that become resonant: disparate, parallel processes of an arbitrary, contentless machine for relative capitalist accumulation and neoliberal governmentality. If the virtual as a kinesthetic field of potentialities is formless, how does the production of new forms express this very field as method? How can this morphogenesis resonate within the diagram(mer) itself ? It is as if all these time-spaces, their molecular and molar movements, their nested timescales, become perceptible in the untimeliness of phase transitions. We hear Derrida, we feel Deleuze urging us awry: “The Time is Out of Joint!” Certainly in contemporary criticism we are witness to an ontological turning, as if in a time of war and dissolving rights, ecological deformations, a time of always emergent, seemingly necessary exceptions, when the time-space of global digital capital is undergoing massive topological shifts; we are returning to what really mattered. And what is that? No doubt an end to American Empire, the strengthening of organizing networks across nonelite populations and the participatory rejuvenation of discarded spaces, a pragmatic reengagement with liberation theology, the dismantling piece by piece, byte by byte, of digital capital’s possession of the ecological future. Thinking the ontological sheds new light on the nature of our present dilemma by helping us to pose new questions concerning autonomic and deliberative action. These new questions have to do with the changing nature of power and its networks across temporalities, time-space, and the affective subindividual. In other words, we are brought to think the kinds of individuations that are necessary in the contemporary moment to decisively shift the forces momentarily stabilizing our present basin of attraction. Brian Massumi writes on the American terrorist alert system as a form of perceptual power (the self-modulating of attention), “They were signals without signification. All they distinctly offered was an ‘activation contour’: a variation in intensity of feeling over time. They addressed not subjects’ cognition, but rather bodies’ irritability.” Carefully tracing the perceptual cues used to activate direct bodily responsiveness, he shows that the body’s irritability is prior to the reproduction of a form or the transmission of a definite content. “Each body’s reaction,” he writes, “would be determined largely by its already-acquired patterns of response. The color alerts addressed bodies at the level of their dispositions toward action.” Keep in mind that these patterns emerge from the reciprocal action of sets of parallel processes; unbundling, accelerating, or intensifying some processes will shift the specHere We Accrete Durations 309

trum of resonance and the immanent dynamic thresholds of the assemblage itself. Swerving slightly from Massumi’s (non)phenomenological concerns, I feel that the topological transformation of these patterns of response is both what must be situated historically, in terms of differently produced affective populations across a dissolving, reaggregated field of a human multiplicity, and in terms of the changes in the bodily habitations of counterterrorism. No doubt, the Bush administration’s alert system was introduced “to calibrate the public’s anxiety.” But Massumi recognizes this anxiety was never evenly distributed across this human multiplicity; indeed, for perhaps the first time, new racial-sexual groupings took hold in securing this very public, where a kind of anxious, affective connectivity brought together certain racial-sexual groups in a presumed solidarity of security while racializing and resexualizing other groups quite differently, as precisely the source and instrument of the threat.6 As Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues in Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics, “Control-freedom, which is intimately experienced as changes in sexuality and race, is a reaction to the increasing privatization of networks, public services and space, and to the corresponding encroachment of publicity and paranoia into everyday life.”7 A new temporality of everyday fear grips these heterogeneous populations, presenting habituation with new dispositions toward the past, present, and future: “In the aftermath of 9/11,” writes Massumi, “the public’s fearfulness had tended to swing out of control in response to dramatic, but maddeningly vague, government warnings of an impending follow-up attack. The alert system was designed to modulate that fear. It could raise it a pitch, then lower it before it became too intense, or even worse, before habituation dampened response.” For a population to pay the right kind of attention, such modulation-technologies must be folded discursively into various image centers, not as mediations of sensation but as intensive unfolding, and without losing any of their ontological power to tap directly into the body’s irritability. It is these foldings that concern me in terms of thinking of political action, as the temporality of attention technologies articulate with the archaisms of a militarized, remasculinized Orientalism: pay attention to your neighbors, track their movements, understand the nature of their threat, stay tuned. “Timing was everything. Less fear itself than fear fatigue became an issue of public concern. Affective modulation of the populace was now an official, central function of an increasingly time-sensitive government.”8 Such topological image centers activate bodily responsiveness (mutational emergence, a noncoinciding resonant unity, the body) by setting up 310 Amit S. Rai

sensory-motor circuits with older Oriental (or necropolitical) image regimes circulating uncanny, queer Arabs, South Asians, Muslims, etc.9 For the moment, it is worth working through Massumi’s ontological point in regard to this question of representation. His analysis certainly suggests that nothing naturally, essentially, or even genealogically links a given content to the activation, emergence, and modulation of affective dispositions (addressing proprioception, mesoception, and Mark Hansen’s affectivity).10 This modulation has the directness of touch. Or perhaps “itch,” is better: this modulation diagrams modes of irritation, an always active affective disposition or attitude that, developed through imperceptible stages, produces actions of spontaneous scratching across definite areas of the body, but is constantly dissolving back into a vague sensation of the intolerable. As Bergson has it: “Define attention as an adaptation of the body rather than of the mind and . . . see in this attitude of consciousness mainly the consciousness of an attitude.”11 Let’s attempt to think this direct mode of power in relationship to what Michel Foucault called biopolitical racism, and what Achille Mbembe has called necropolitics. Recall that for Foucault, in Society Must Be Defended, the biopolitical as a modulatory, or regulatory set of force relations comes in the eighteenth century to reinvest aspects of the disciplinary apparatus, and one key example out of many is insurance. (This line of thought has been traced out more specifically as a strategy of hype-hope in global biotech capital by Kaushik Sunder Rajan in his excellent Biocapital.) By the time we come to The Birth of Biopolitics in 1979, Foucault charts a very clear set of relations tying neoliberalism and the emergence of human capital as a form of control to overall evolution of biopolitical racism.12 In the contemporary analysis of post- 9/11 sovereignty, this articulation of the biopolitical and the disciplinary continuously throws up the aporias of the state of exception, new biopolitical settlements across reconstituted homelands, and the proliferating effects of a military- detention- consumption regime. This suggests a decisive move in the methodology of a media-assemblage analysis of global contagious capital in that we situate the genesis of forms through the circulation, modulation, and mutation of affect (the bodily capacity to affect and be affected). The movement of capacities across human multiplicities as virtual-actual events in a phylum of technological coevolution necessitates that media be understood biopolitically. Moreover, that this circulation of affect is a matter of the bio/necropolitical deployment of media assemblages implies a permanent state of emergency, as molar spectacle and molecular emergence. Such Here We Accrete Durations 311

a state of emergency is constituted in specific “phase spaces” of emergence, as Brian Massumi, Luciana Parisi, Patricia Clough, Elizabeth Grosz, and Sunder Rajan show in their different ways. In fact it is in the aleatory nature of emergence itself that the precise nature of the emergency becomes a question of the habituation of perception. In that regard, Foucault’s inability to think through the implications of a Deleuzian critique of representation that traces topographical transitions and distributed self- organizing networks beyond a representational paradigm of resemblance, analogy, identity, and contradiction that reaches a kind of apotheosis in Agamben’s metaphysics of the exception. But Massumi’s thought takes us elsewhere, toward thinking through topological image centers that pass thresholds of becoming, returning to the dynamism of incipience, or emergence. Let us pause and consider this proposition more concretely. In what way does a threshold between these different strata become dynamic? In what way could a habituation have a threshold? How does a habit “catch on,” or lose its effectiveness? To answer these questions would be to trace the incipience of a sensory-motor circuit, its own evolutionary or ontogenetic formation. An ontology of duration. Of course, habits may both catalyze or territorialize a given body’s capacities. In either case, something happens to the body’s capacities, because these capacities are constantly changing through the coupling and decoupling of parallel repetitive processes, heterochronous time scales (multiply nested)— biological endosymbiosis as much as “what’s in.” The method of diagramming duration ontologically is to follow the relations it enters into. Deleuze suggested that there are definite properties of duration. “Pulsed time and non-pulsed time are completely musical, but they are something else as well. The question would be to know what makes up this non-pulsed time. This kind of floating time that more or less corresponds to what Proust called ‘a bit of pure time.’ The most obvious, the most immediate feature of . . . non-pulsed time is duration, time freed from measure, be it a regular or irregular, simple or complex measure. Non-pulsed time puts us first and foremost in the presence of a multiplicity of heterochronous, qualitative, noncoincident, non- communicating durations. The problem therefore is clear: how will these heterochronous, heterogeneous, multiple, non- coincident durations join together.”13 A media assemblage is a noncoinciding, resonant unity; its consistency is produced through this “joining together” of duration yielding emergent properties. Through embedded time-scales, a nonpulsed time mobilizes self-organization, morphogenesis, and a virtual plane. 312 Amit S. Rai

Following Deleuze’s suggestion for a biological understanding of temporal cycles, DeLanda puts the problem thus: Thinking about the temporality involved in individuation processes as embodying the parallel operation of many different sequential processes throws new light on the question of the emergence of novelty. If embryological processes followed a strictly sequential order, that is, if a unique linear sequence of events defined the production of an organism, then any novel structures would be constrained to be added at the end of the sequence. . . . On the contrary, if embryonic development occurs in parallel, if bundles of relatively independent processes occur simultaneously, then new designs may arise from disengaging bundles, or more precisely, from altering the duration of one process relative to another, or the relative timing of the start or end of a process. This evolutionary design strategy is known as heterochrony.14 If heterochrony were the necessary condition of affective capacities, then sexuality as a circuit between action and dream (a Bergsonian praxis?) would find its noncoinciding incipience here as an ecology of sensation, in folded bundles of parallel processes that disengage, feed back, and mutate. It is this heterochronous duration that marks both the immensity of affect and its susceptibility to control. When the body’s affects (capacities) function in this mode of “excess” it both opens itself to its material capture and its own creative indetermination through habituating around specific basins of attraction. But these intensive processes are canceled out or covered over in extensity, uniformization, and homogenization, yielding what Deleuze calls an objective illusion. “It is not surprising that, strictly speaking, difference should be ‘inexplicable.’ Difference is explicated, but in systems in which it tends to be cancelled; this means only that difference is essentially implicated, that its being is implication.”15 Again, DeLanda is helpful in grasping this concept, through a method that focuses on . . . the concealment of the intensive under the extensive, as well as the concealment of the concrete universals (singularities and affects) which animate intensive processes. . . . [I]n the case of singularities the existence of the virtual is manifested in those situations where intensive differences are not cancelled. Similarly, in the case of affects it is the cases where an assemblage meshes differences as such, without canceling them through

Here We Accrete Durations 313

homogenization, that exhibit the open set of possibilities calling for an explanation in terms of virtuality. Conversely, allowing differences in intensity to be cancelled or eliminating differences through uniformization, effectively hides the virtual and makes the disappearance of process under product seem less problematic.16 There is nothing new in this thought, except an affirmation that it is in the intervals of differentiation where the new is born. Moreover, we can affirm that repeated media habituations are nothing but these intensive intervals (durations), although they are covered over by the regimes of representation, the imagistic-aural objects of little desiring machines in which “different relates to different by means of difference itself.”17 This is why the repetition of media habituation (the cliché) opens on to something profoundly creative, in the affective monstrosity of preindividual forces, in singular points that a diagrammatic thought counteractualizes into the Untimely, the topological, the Virtual. In other words, the perceptual mode of power can be a way of producing, implicating, proliferating, and distributing differences between populations. Isn’t that what the global marketing “revolution” of resegmenting audiences has already shown—that contagious, affective dispositions form new connectivities, thresholds, and feedback loops statistically (probabilistically) organized across quantitatively aggregated populations, but that emerge qualitatively in immeasurable sensations? The media refunctioning of the terrorist alert spectrum in, for instance, a Nickelodeon “black-oriented” cable tV show, aired on South Asian cable tV beamed to Bangalore, giving advice as to how to make your North American middle- class home bioterror-proof through a hip hop sequence ensconced between narrative segments shows how the perceptual mode of power, affect, is always an assemblage of both representation and sensation, individuation and population production. This refunctioning of durations, the continuous multiplicity (media assemblage) immanent in the terrorist alert system, points to another important facet of our contemporary moment. That the forms and technologies through which an event proliferates across borders (identitarian, national, domestic, epistemic, molecular) are “implicated in thought and sensation mutually and differently. Ideas are problematic or ‘perplexed’ multiplicities, made up of relations between differential elements. Intensities are implicated multiplicities, implexes, made up of relations between asymmetrical elements which direct the course of the actualisation of Ideas and determine

314 Amit S. Rai

the cases of solution for problems.”18 The crucial point in Deleuze’s definition of abstract machines as virtual-actual circuits is the necessary insistence that one not lose sight of the self- differing nature of multiplicities. The ontogenetic argument—to intuit the nonphenomenal nature of actualvirtual events in terms of an always emerging and dynamic topology—aims to break the “iron collars of representation: identity in the concept, opposition in the predicate, analogy in judgment, and resemblance in perception.”19 I feel compelled by this argument to find a line of flight from the same and the similar of representation, but does that mean that the perceptual mode of power is not also a mode of representation, not simply that representation is a capture or mediation of the spontaneity of affect (as Massumi has it)?20 This would enable us to return to what Deleuze meant by orgiastic representation, a mode of irritation that joins in the futurity of dynamic thresholds that it diagrams. Modes of irritation (Massumi’s topological image centers) resonate in assemblages of technologies, habitual predispositions, population resegmentations, and (anti)media events, and thus can also be levers of or in the actualization of an ontogenesis—orgiastic or chaotic representations that do not mediate between sensation and sign, but proliferate through contagion and shock. Foucault argues that sexuality is born at the intersection between the body and populations, in ecologies of sensation. It is on this subindividual plane that we are situating the (counter)terrorist perceptual mode, as a production of populations both transracial (not race transcendent) and queer (the forkings and foldings of motor- dream circuits). Massumi writes, “The selfdefensive reflex-response to perceptual cues that the system was designed to train into the population wirelessly jacked central government functioning directly into each individual’s nervous system.” The definition of population is at stake here, indeed the entire project of correlating the perceptual mode of power and practices of control and governmentality should be understood in relation to the historical birth of population as a virtual field (which seems in part the great lesson in Foucault’s seminars of the late 1970s). First, if the population is already heterogeneous, that is, heterogeneously targeted as well as disposed, then the intensity, effectiveness, and thresholds directly connecting government to any given nervous system would already be a question of modulating for these (perceived and actual) differences.21 Ecologies of this nature correlate difference with difference as a continuous multiplicity, a noncoinciding resonant unity. (As we shall see with the “Curious Case of the Flying Cell Phone,” regimes of sensation form clusters after a cerHere We Accrete Durations 315

tain density of connectivity inaugurates a phase transition, and the formation of a new basin of attraction for correlated parallel processes.) This correlation of difference with difference explains at least partly why certain communities were far more jumpy than others when these alerts came down. So the central nervousness that this heterogeneous population shared was the irritation of targeted, strategic differences in a human multiplicity. A mode of irritation, which is what I take the alert system to be, works by coordinating fear and hope across a human multiplicity. Hope is the content that fills the void of the self-generating autonomy of Massumi’s fear. Never merely the dialectical other of fear, hope enfolds fear and its instrumentation—the technology itself bespeaks the hopeful confidence of one nation under God—fear-hope is a target about to be neutralized, the Muslim terrorist and her queer psyche. In that sense, fear is connected to the production of specific targets. This is what makes it truly fascist: hope is another contagion of fear. The jubilation over Barack Obama notwithstanding, hope is as much to be feared as fear itself. A praxis of affectivity begins with a consideration of this multiplicity, this constant and regulated movement between action-perception and orgiastic representation, between fear and hope. An intensive politics would have to situate the death of the diagrammer within the diagram, a becoming imperceptible that marks one’s own vanishing point as the frame of reference, a limit to representation. In this view, subjectivity is the dispersive bifurcation point of a vector. Such diagrams can only provide tools when the “theoretical unity of their discourse is, so to speak, suspended, or at least cut up, ripped up, torn to shreds, turned inside out, displaced, caricatured, dramatized, theatricalized, and so on.”22 That would be a first conditionality. A second would be a rigorous refusal of a nonpragmatic binarization between ontology and epistemology. In that sense, if we are to break once and for all the seemingly natural bonding between being and truth the ontogenetic argument must yield to a thought of the assemblage’s multiplicity. In that sense, also, it helps us to pose better the nature of the “confusing” problem of action embedded in the perceptual mode of power. This would return us to Retort’s Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War. Despite a generally naive understanding of the nonlinear evolution of affective dispositions in and through media assemblages, Retort’s argument about the potentiality of the multitude (a term Retort borrows from those new Spinozists who have proclaimed a return to a virtual ontology) help us to think about forms of intervention. “Primitive accumulation is to 316 Amit S. Rai

be carried out in the conditions of spectacle: that is the new reality in a nutshell. And the spectacle itself, we have been arguing, is in the process of mutation. A new round of technical innovation has made alienation-intoa-realm-of-images a pervasive, banal, constantly self-administered reality.”23 What is resistance in this mutating image center, in the perceptual mode of power? Is it about rehabituating? Or refusing habituation as such? This is how Massumi ends his meditation on fear: “Confusingly, it is likely that it can only be fought on the same affective, ontogenetic ground on which it itself operates.”24 Whence this confusion? Retort suggests that disgust for the entire protocol of empire should be the aim of the left’s perceptual battle, and that this passionate disgust should be the potentiality from which mutated political forms take hold, catch on, and infect the image centers of (counter)terrorism. This is not a negation, but a counteractualization. As with all aspects of their argument, Retort’s disgust would emerge twined with a kind of satanic panache. To create an experience of the Untimely in the style of writing means pursuing a thought of nonlinear history as successive planes of potential with their own dimensions of change. Of course, for the writers of Afflicted Powers the struggle is still a question of changing consciousness, rather than developing a new sensorium. Massumi shows that without a sensory transformation, the very workings of this form of power will remain occluded, but that intervening in the sensory, since it is the site of a creative indetermination, will be fundamentally aleatory and volatile and always open to forms of capture in representation-for-habituation, hence the confusion. Biopolitical practices defend against even as they prod the self ’s nonhuman becomings as the decisive technology of global risk management in the time of counterterrorism.25 Agamben maps the zone of exception as internal to the logic of sovereignty, with the body of the quarantined detainee both the instrument and target of its operations.26 Deployed in 3d shading algorithms developed both for commercial video games such as Desert Storm II and military training software, such operations spatialize time, democracy, the human, and indeed the subject itself, effecting the quantification of qualitative difference as navigable space-play- data.27 Here we see a temporal dimension that challenges, indeed shocks, the subject affectively, and thereby launches new sensorimotor habituations. In such games, there is a predetermined shuttling, interruption, and suspension of subjectivity that defines the movement of the game. A player, assuming responsibility for a cohered military “swarm,” toggles from one character soldier to another, each with Here We Accrete Durations 317

definite racial and gender characteristics, but, more importantly, each has specific military capacities.28 Or within a character portfolio the player will shift between sets of weapons, different graphical user interfaces, all while moving from one war-torn state of exception to another—Kashmir, Chechnya, Colombia, South Korea—in a constantly changing network of expanding violence. This play is aimed at effecting law-preserving and law- constituting violence, as success in mastering the game also means being able to master the code and hack one’s way into encrypted game sequences.29 As such, the player comes to experience the game as an interval of interruption or suspension between identities, codes, states, bodies, through specific habituations. In such a process of strategic play, the sensorimotor violence between image, thumb, strategic map, and sound takes on the aura of divinity that Benjamin called sovereign violence.30 But—we must always come back to this question of the Untimely—what of the becomings spawned with the coming of the risky future, of the return of the body to its own neural zones of indetermination, its incipiencies? What of its mutations, its newness, its potentialities? Is the future a remainder that any self- constituting act of sovereignty must both calculate and insure itself against? What, finally, is the nature of the political, given the deformations of state of exception spaces in societies of affective control? Agamben suggests that this exception, exemption, and deathly sacredness be taken up in contemporary political praxis as an interval of suspension between language and the body, between law and war, between subjectivities, between borders, and in that process we may be able to turn our ear to the coming of something mutational, if not liberatory.31 One should distinguish this interval of the future anterior from the kind of revelatory danger that Heidegger talks about in his lecture on technology. As has been well rehearsed from Agamben to Žižek, the values that gather together in Heidegger’s zone of danger—propriation, truth, light, unveiling, enduring, etc.—secure a true path to the essence of technology, which “is nothing technological,” as Heidegger says.32 Now one line of critique of this system of propriation would proceed from Foucault’s analysis of the deployment of sexuality and race war in the nineteenth century. As I suggested above, in those lectures and published works, Foucault argues for race as a kind of caesura in the ordering of populations, as well as a technology of social hygiene at work in the convergence of control around sexuality, race, nation, the body, and population. But it is another aspect of this topography that Hansen develops into an original and creative investigation of the fram318 Amit S. Rai

ing capacity of bodily affect, or what he calls affectivity. In what way does Hansen’s framing function recall and commemorate the troubling standingreserve that Heidegger speaks of ? Let us briefly follow Hansen’s analysis of the politics of universal address in the digitizing of the racialized body.33 For quite some time now, Hansen has been involved in a singularly generative analysis of the body’s affectivity through its proprioceptive implication in the new media. His analysis of the framing of the body is decisive for researchers attempting to rigorously situate the dynamic thresholds that are taking hold both through new clichéd habituations—or sensorimotor circuits—in the affect economy as well as zones of creative indetermination that not only haunt those processes of habituation but materially potentialize them as well. To summarize Hansen’s argument, we could say that he attempts first to conceptualize and deploy media that does not subordinate the media example to preconstituted categories of identity and subjectivity.34 Second, Hansen privileges the modes of racial passing in cyberspace as key processes to help situate the deterritorialization of molar identity in new media. He argues, “Put bluntly, the generalization of ‘passing’ in online environments exposes the affective basis of racial signification, and more specifically, the radical disjunction between racial identity categories and the singularity of each body whose life is always in excess of any particular, fixed identity.” Notice that life is something superadded to fixed identity. But what if identity is the changing same of a topological image center? What if identity is thought of in terms of the movements of its intensive processes, first and foremost? By suspending the “constraint exercised by the body as a visible signifier—that is, as receptive surface for the markings of raced and gendered particularity,” online identity performance “insofar as it constitutes a prosthetic body that replaces the lived body,” can leave “no bodily residue that could be made visible or otherwise rendered culturally intelligible.”35 Hansen urges us to liberate the “body from its socially-imposed dependence on interpellation through preconstituted social categories of identity.”36 Drawing on Agamben’s analysis of biosovereignty, he asks “how can we use the new media to catalyze an experience—necessarily collective—of the singularity or impropriety that we all share as instances of ‘bare life’ or the ‘whatever body’ theorized by Agamben?”37 This collective catalysis of bodies would be a form of population caesura, in the sense that Foucault understood it. For his part, Hansen presents a reading of Keith Piper’s new media artwork “Relocating the Remains,” locating singular failures of identifying with stereotyped racial Here We Accrete Durations 319

images where an experience of incommensurability “sparks a movement beyond habitual feeling networks into an affective confusion, thereby opening the possibility to live new affects, ones commensurate to the singularity or impropriety of life.”38 Arguing against Deleuze’s typology of film, Hansen unveils affection as a “faculty” of our embodied singularity, and as such is produced as an “affective- overflow” in our bodies “when we are unable to correlate the sensations generated” by Piper’s deployment of black bodies. (It seems to me that Deleuze meant something intuitively related by his notion of mutation in Cinema 2.) Hansen calls this a crisis of the sensorimotor logic of the movement-image in which we are confronted with ourselves as affective subjects, defined by our own excesses rather than any actual state.39 This opens onto a domain of singularity beyond identity that for Hansen signals the death of a certain politics of recognition. At the very moment when the raced image has been emptied of its promise as the signifier of a positive difference (recall the hypervisibility of a black sports figure like Michael Jordan), it has become brutally effective as the signifier of racism. I would suggest that this coincidence is not in fact a coincidence, and that the current proliferation of racializing (and racist) techniques—including surveillance, profiling, and facial identification—can be linked directly to the emptiness of the (visible) raced image. Stripped of any positive meaning for the subjects that it would mark, the raced image can function all the more effectively as an instrument of control. For, having lost its power to interpellate subjects as raced subjects, the raced image can no longer broker processes of identity formation and struggles for social recognition, and in effect, remains in force solely as an instrument of social techniques for identification, classification and exclusion.40 Thus enters “bare singularity” as the new universal resistance to identity. For Hansen, “Such resistance takes shape not as an external struggle by an oppressed group, but as a collective individuation rooted in the exposure of the affective basis of life, the excess of bodily life in relation to itself. . . . For by exposing the incompatibility between social categories and the complex phenomenon of subjectivation, it will open the very gap in which we will still (and will always) be able to find bodily life.”41 If we are witness to the death of the exhibitionist politics of recognition—and this is by no means certain, by no means an accomplished fact— we should try to situate Hansen’s affective body in the broader system of 320 Amit S. Rai

relations between technology, human life, and the philosophy of revealing. A common reference in this regard, of course, is Heidegger’s 1953 lecture “The Question Concerning Technology,” a text that many commentators have shown is haunted by its own “skeletons.”42 In that lecture, Heidegger says: The revealing that rules throughout modern technology has the character of a setting-upon, in the sense of a challenging-forth. That challenging happens in that the energy concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is, in turn, distributed, and what is distributed is switched about ever anew. Unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and switching about are ways of revealing. But the revealing never simply comes to an end. Neither does it run off into the indeterminate. The revealing reveals to itself its own manifoldly interlocking paths, through regulating their course. This regulating itself is, for its part, everywhere secured. Regulating and securing even become the chief characteristics of the challenging revealing.43 In a way that seems to anticipate Hansen’s argument concerning human affectivity in the new media, Heidegger suggests that modern technology draws out and manipulates energy reserves for regulation and security, in other words, in the interests of an order that must master the future; later, he will call this ordering a kind of revealing that is a destining and an enframing. “Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We call it the standing-reserve.”44 We can appreciate the full force of this last sentence when we consider Hansen’s affectivity as an unlocking, a transforming, a storing, a distributing, and a switching about of forms of affect that unfold the universal humanness of the body. In that sense, affectivity both reveals and regulates, is both in excess of the body and a means of securing it precisely as a standing-reserve. Thus it is that, as Benjamin registered in his work on the gestural implications of photography, telephones, and film, every consumer habituation is also a profound affective shock.45 No habit catches on without shock. Hansen is certainly right to claim affectivity as the dynamic threshold on the far side of sensorimotor circuits, and its dynamism, its creative indetermination, emerges through the “ordering of the orderable” as Heidegger has it.46 What Hansen’s work has taught me is that these processes are topological, vibratory events of a surfeit of sensation.47 They in fact return to Bergson’s conceptual practice of the image as a circuit between motor and dream. Hansen’s desire to displace the visual regime in analyses of race Here We Accrete Durations 321

suggests that race is also a matter of sensation ecologies distributed across the irritable differences of a human multiplicity. We must develop diagrams that push Hansen’s insights away from its anthropocentrism, that, in other words, will be attuned to the mutational basis of posthuman life in bundles of durations, or as DeLanda (despite himself ) metaphorizes it, eddies within eddies. The story of the machinic phylum is not centered on the human, but on nonnarrative, diagrammatic flows of matter, energy, biomass, and information. Let’s pursue a different diagram. The neurological research on the brain– video game interface at the moment aims precisely at eliciting and formalizing affective excess as nonlinear dynamism, for instance by creating data from electroencephalogram (EEG) signals for users’ intentions; or by tracking users’ movements with a video camera and translating them into the movements of a mouse pointer on screen. A radically adaptive interface has been created in which the user chooses some specific biological signals (such as EEG or electromyogram [EMG] signals) and measurement configuration with respect to their preference and degree of physical disabilities.48 The user’s intention of operation is estimated from these biological signals using a probability neural network (Pnn) in which the differences in biological signals among individuals is covered by using adaptive learning.49 Stressing the adaptability of this probability neural network model, the creators of this last interface add, “In this interface system, a variety of biological signals can be used as input, and users can choose input signals with respect to their conditions, so that a lot more people are able to enjoy video games. Also, the users’ intention of operation is estimated from the input signals using a Pnn. Due to the adaptive learning capability of neural networks, a high level of discrimination accuracy is achieved. Moreover, video game machines can be easily changed, so that various amusement machines can be incorporated into the proposed system.”50 Recall that the mode of power specific to such media assemblages has been characterized by Brian Massumi as “the transitivity of intervals”: “The network distributes. Interlinks. Relates. The network is the relationality of that which it distributes. It is the being of collective becoming. Communicational technologies give body to relationality as such and as set in motion—as the passing on of the event. . . . Every ‘enclosure’ is encompassed by a pure immanence of transition. The medium of ‘communication’ is not the technology. It is the interval itself: the movability of the event, the displacement of change, relationality outside its terms, ‘communication’ without content, 322 Amit S. Rai

communicability.”51 The transitive mode of power—a pure immanence of transition—from one coding to another, from one event-space to another, calls us to attend to those incorporeal materialities that constitute the field of potential of such war simulation software. It allows a new thought of the interval as a mode of power that in itself proliferates by the contagions, or in what is another definition of the term, the sympathies of the media- event.52 For Massumi, in a Spinozist ethics, “Mind and body are seen as two levels recapitulating the same image/expression event in different but parallel ways, ascending by degrees from the concrete to the incorporeal, holding to the same absent center of a now spectral-and potentialized- encounter.”53 This is what is repeated then, in our intercalated habituations, in the farce of representation, in the sensations of the media assemblage, approaching “an extremity of difference,” a state of excess or phase transition, a primordial but always covered over difference that displaces and disguises, and “in turning upon its mobile cusp, causes them to return.”54 In understanding what a diagram of media assemblages can do, we should consider our method first of all as a way of engaging (being affected and affecting) an ecology of sensation traversed by gradients of intensity. Can one do an ethics of experimentation as a practice of justice? The answer is not clear, but has this question been well posed? I end these speculations with a narrative from my visit to Palestine in May of 2006. It concerns an Arabic-speaking, flying cell phone. This cell phone was flying across the room, thrown by the eldest son of the Arab Muslim family I was staying with in Deir El Assad, in the Galilee. Mahmud (age eighteen) had gone into a rage because his sixteen-year- old sister got a call from a boy in the village, her schoolmate. Abhir and her friend were discussing homework (she told me later), but for Mahmud that was merely a cloak for sexual abandon, even though he would never speak of such a thing in front of his mother, a strong-willed, hijabed beautician known throughout the village for her sharp eye, and sharper tongue. Fatima, more than anyone else, had been my guide through the fragile workings of this extended Arab family living the apartheid of Zionist exceptionalism. Fatima introduced me to a certain art of the everyday in an Israeli Arabic home, initially over zatar in the morning. She would finally say, “Khalas, Amit!” (enough!) when my questions became too much, were too frequent, or too stupid. She taught me how to see the village. The village consisted of ten thousand Arabs living in class- divided homes on the sheer face of a cliff, Arabs staring down pensively, at times sullenly, on the vast fields and orchards requisitioned by the Israeli Here We Accrete Durations 323

state for Jewish settlement expansion; the village where “Jenin” is but a whisper of something never to be forgotten, as well as never grasped, the village where eating red meat is a ritual of belonging, marking you as a native of the lions of the Old Monastery. This is Deir El Assad. Fatima’s brother-in-law was the local historian of the village, whose final battle of the archive resolved into uncovering the original, definitive farman given to his forebears, in recognition of service to the sultan, so that they and their descendants could rule over the area. Salah felt in his heart of hearts that the original farman was still extant, somewhere hidden in the village, but kept from him because it would prove that certain members of the village community had no legitimate claim to belonging. In a whispered passion, he would explain that he knew it was there, but would probably never see it before he died. But all that was palpable to me was my ignorance. It was my first trip to Palestine. I was on a Department of Education grant to explore the “arts of Peace” in Israel and Palestine, and I was expanding the notion of art to include the practice of everyday life, so to speak. I had met the famous actor and director Mohammad Bakri, whose family was from the Galilee. “Arabs,” he told me, “don’t yet know how to win the battle for media.” I thought it odd, coming from a man who as an actor and filmmaker had been able to bring the madness of the day into a kind of permanent crisis as a condition for media enunciation, not only in Palestinian theater and films, but in Israeli media as well. An uncompromising aura of the witness whose longing for the warmth of his lost friends breathed through his words, his gestures, as he said, “I’m fed up with this situation.” He suggested I visit him at his home, but I went to Jerusalem instead, and our paths did not cross again. In Jerusalem an unrWA worker (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for the Palestine Refugees) took me to the many refugee camps that encircle this burning city. Bethselem shared with me their media projects documenting the occupation and its effects. I walked through the Old City, from al-Aqsa to the Christian Quarter, to the always extending Jewish Quarter. I was stopped for my passport, and turned away from check points. And everywhere I felt the presence of surveillance cameras. Back in Deir El Assad, I attended to how saturated I felt the domestic spaces were with various forms of Arab (and sometimes South Asian) media. The cadences of Arabic transduced through radio, cell phone, tV, Internet, cd, dVd found a point of resonance with the background hum of these various machines throughout the house. High-speed wi-fi on the balcony looking out toward the sprawling, largely Russian-Jewish settlement Karmiel, cell 324 Amit S. Rai

phones in the car, dJ wedding parties in June, cable-satellite tV in male- only pool halls and in the drawing rooms, Arabic newsprint in the living rooms, radio in the kitchens and beauty parlors, dVd and VHS in the grocery stores, video games in the bedrooms, and amateur Islamic calligraphy at the pharmacy. The village was awash in this interminable flow of data, the hum of media machines. To this day, the regime of passage (institutions of media, representation, governance, and citizenship) modulates the directionality and volume of that flow. At stake in Zionist state policy is the theocratic and neocolonial organization of rights, since very few Arabs (other than the Druze) can actually study computer science in Israel because of “security concerns.” It is both a security concern and an acknowledgment of the contagiousness of contemporary media. Oddly, the same could be said of Mahmud’s response to Abhir’s cell phone conversation. Articulate an emasculated, paranoid masculinity (i.e., Arab Muslim heterosexuality under occupation: he often denounced bitterly what he took to be the impotence and collaboration of the Israeli Arab male) with security and contagiousness with domesticity, and the kind of disciplinedocility that undergirds such identity-scripts becomes discernible. How did Abhir respond? She left the house, with the various pieces of her cell phone in her hands, and walking to her aunt’s, she cried. She stopped communicating except in whispers, and then gradually she talked to her mother and sisters, and finally to her father. She avoided Mahmud. She argued with members of her extended family about the nature of the call and the injustice of such surveillance. The cell phone call from her classmate potentialized the lines of force traversing this occupied domesticity. (Recall that during the Israeli siege of the refugee camp Jenin in 2002, Iain Hook, a unrWA worker, was shot dead by an Israeli occupation soldier who “mistook the cellular telephone Mr. Hook was carrying for a weapon.”)55 The norm of domestic sexuality emerged anew after the transgressive connectivity. The connectivity—immense and immeasurable, but susceptible to biopolitical control—refunctioned the home, and gender positioning was freed momentarily from its habituated grids. A new set of intervals (ecologies of sensation) tied to the connectivity of the cellular-human interface is correlating the consumption practices of Arab teenagers with a transnational hip hop culture, a resurgent transnational Arab solidarity movement, new demarcations of masculinity and femininity, and the set of sensations appropriate to both. They are variously connected to struggles to end Israeli apartheid in both Palestine and Israel. Through these processes the ontogenesis of the perHere We Accrete Durations 325

ceptual mode of power becomes a topography of mutating subjective forms, imagistic regimes, and technobiological interfaces. noTes

1. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 99. 2. This passage should be recalled: “A topological figure is defined as the continuous transformation of one geometrical figure into another. . . . Topology is a purely qualitative science. It is not empirical, if empirical investigation is meant as progressing from description to prediction. It has no predictive value. Incapable of directly referencing anything other than its own variations, it is more analogical than descriptive. It is not, however, an analog of anything in particular. . . . Here there is no model. Only infolding and unfolding: self-referential transformation. The analog is process, self-referenced to its own variations. It resembles nothing outside itself. A topological image center literally makes the virtual appear, in felt thought [or intuition]. It is more apparitional than empirical. Sensation, always on arrival a transformative feeling of the outside, a feeling of thought, is the being of the analog. It is matter in an analog mode. This is the analog in a sense close to the technical meaning, as a continuously variable impulse or momentum that can cross from one qualitatively different medium into another. Like electricity into sound waves.” Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 134–35. 3. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 9. 4. Negri, “Value and Affect.” 5. My aim here is to understand the political implications of mixing analytical registers, the aporetic and the topological. By “aporetic” I mean, broadly speaking, the vast range of deconstructive texts that have so profoundly transformed the dynamic connections linking language, philosophy, and politics, but most immediately I am thinking specifically of the abject figure of homo sacer in Giorgio Agamben’s histories of the state of exception. Is homo sacer anything other than a mise en abyme? Isn’t homo sacer, the detainee in us all, as it were, the sensory-motor habituation of a monstrous state facing its own rigor mortis? By “topological” I mean the ontogenetic diagramming of continuous self- differentiation. So why combine these two forms of analysis? First, if something happens to the images of Abu Ghraib on the Internet or in Iranian graffiti (see Negar Mottaedeh’s posting on http://underfire. eyebeam.org/), then the abjection of homo sacer is also involved in the topological self- organizing of image centers that through representation, attention modulation, and sensory habituation refunction and revalue the aporia itself. This is not, by the way, an argument for or against human agency; in a very specific sense, consciousness, intentionality, and the subject are incidental aftereffects of the functioning of the affective mode of power. The agency of topological image centers is a question of affect itself. 6. Two events must be correlated here: the conditions of possibility of Barack Obama as president and the veritable quarantining and “exceptionalization” of Muslim and

326 Amit S. Rai

South Asian communities in Brooklyn and Queens, and other areas across the country. I am not saying that Obama came to power through the internment of Muslims; I am saying that the virulent response of the Bush administration to 9/11 realigned racial groupings and created zones of exceptions. Left criticism has yet to grasp the implications of these shifts. 7. Chun, Control and Freedom, 1. 8. Massumi, “Fear (The Spectrum Said),” 32. 9. What do we mean by “unity”? There is the well-known doubleness of the concept of unity in Whitehead’s Process and Reality. On the one hand, eternal objects participate in processes of indeterminate potentiality; on the other hand, these processes terminate in a unified, total, and binaristic “satisfaction.” Now, Deleuze and Guattari had something else in mind about unity when in A Thousand Plateaus they wrote, To begin with, a stratum does indeed have a unity of composition, which is what allows it to be called a stratum: molecular materials, substantial elements, and formal relations or traits. Materials are not the same as the unformed matter of the plane of consistency; they are already stratified, and come from “substrata.” But of course substrata should not be thought of only as substrata: in particular, their organization is no less complex than, nor is it inferior to, that of the strata; we should be on our guard against any kind of ridiculous cosmic evolutionism. The materials furnished by a substratum are no doubt simpler than the compounds of a stratum, but their level of organization in the substratum is no lower than that of the stratum itself. The difference between materials and substantial elements is one of organization; there is a change in organization, not an augmentation. The materials furnished by the substratum constitute an exterior milieu for the elements and compounds of the stratum under consideration, but they are not exterior to the stratum. The elements and compounds constitute an interior of the stratum, just as the materials constitute an exterior of the stratum; both belong to the stratum, the latter because they are materials that have been furnished to the stratum and selected for it, the former because they are formed from the materials. Once again, this exterior and interior are relative; they exist only through their exchanges and therefore only by virtue of the stratum responsible for the relation between them. For example, on a crystalline stratum, the amorphous milieu, or medium, is exterior to the seed before the crystal has formed; the crystal forms by interiorizing and incorporating masses of amorphous material. Conversely, the interiority of the seed of the crystal must move out to the system’s exterior, where the amorphous medium can crystallize (the aptitude to switch over to the other form of organization). To the point that the seed itself comes from the outside. In short, both exterior and interior are interior to the stratum. (55) What then is a unity? A machine for folding inside and outside topologically. Outside forces of futurity are active potentially, nascent, producing patterns of morphogenetic mutation. See Rai, “Burn Completely.”

Here We Accrete Durations 327

10. See Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media. Mesoception is sensation understood as proprioception plus viscerality. 11. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 100. 12. Foucault writes, “The new governmental reason needs freedom; therefore, the new art of government consumes freedom. It must produce it, it must organize it. The new art of government therefore appears as the management of freedom, not in the sense of the imperative: ‘be free,’ with the immediate contradiction that this imperative may contain . . . The liberalism we can describe as the art of government formed in the eighteenth century entails at its heart a productive/destructive relationship with freedom. Liberalism must produce freedom, but this very act entails the establishment of limitations, controls, forms of coercion, and obligations relying on threats, etc.” Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 63; quoted in Read, “A Genealogy of Homo Economicus,” 29. This critique of the practice of freedom under neoliberalism is tied directly by Foucault to new governmental mode through which people are governed and govern themselves. The operative terms of governance are no longer rights and laws but interest, investment, and competition. The state channels flows of interest and desire by making desirable activities inexpensive and undesirable activities costly, counting on the fact that subjects calculate their interests. Neoliberalism paradoxically governs without governing; that is, in order to function its subjects must have a great deal of freedom to act, to choose between competing strategies. See Read, “A Genealogy of Homo Economicus.” Read notes that as a “mode of governmentality, neoliberalism operates on interests, desires, and aspirations rather than through rights and obligations; it does not directly mark the body, as sovereign power, or even curtail actions, as disciplinary power; rather, it acts on the conditions of actions. Thus, neoliberal governmentality follows a general trajectory of intensification. This trajectory follows a fundamental paradox; as power be- comes less restrictive, less corporeal, it also becomes more intense, saturating the field of actions, and possible actions” (29). 13. Deleuze, “Making Inaudible Forces Audible,” 156–60, 157. 14. DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, 97. 15. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 228. 16. DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, 64–65. 17. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 299. 18. Ibid., 244. 19. Ibid., 262. 20. Massumi also suggests, in his analysis of the German video experiment, that representations can resonate with affective circuits, but in ways that usually proliferate semantic paradox. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 25. 21. This particular correlation of populations with practices of governmentality recalls Foucault’s lecture “The Birth of Biopolitics,” in which he argued that “Political economy reflects on governmental practices themselves, and it does not question them to determine whether or not they are legitimate in terms of right. It considers them in terms of their effects rather than their origins, not by asking, for example, what

328 Amit S. Rai

authorizes a sovereign to raise taxes, but by asking, quite simply: What will happen if, at a given moment, we raise a tax on a particular category of persons or a particular category of goods? What matters is not whether or not this is legitimate in terms of law, but what its effects are and whether they are negative. It is then that the tax in question will be said to be illegitimate or, at any rate, to have no raison d’être. The economic question is always to he posed within the field of governmental practice, not in terms of what may found it by right, but in terms of its effects: What are the real effects of the exercise of governmentality?” Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 15. 22. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 6. 23. Retort, Afflicted Powers, 187. 24. Massumi, “Fear (The Spectrum Said),” 47. 25. Deleuze, Bergsonism. 26. Agamben, Homo Sacer. 27. Manovich, The Language of New Media. 28. I have written about swarms elsewhere. See Rai, “On the Work of Art Today.” 29. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” and Agamben, Homo Sacer. 30. “Lawmaking is powermaking, assumption of power, and to that extent an immediate manifestation of violence. Justice is the principle of all divine endmaking, power the principle of all mythic lawmaking.” Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 248. “Just as in all spheres God opposes myth, mythic violence is confronted by the divine. And the latter constitutes its antithesis in all respects. If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law- destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood.” Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 249–50. 31. “The exception manifests a similar combining of law’s being determinant with its responsiveness to an exteriority beyond determination, even if the exception is a specific variation of that combining nexus, or a different ‘jurisdictional competence’ as Schmitt would have it (Schmitt 1985: 7). Looked at from the perspective of the norm, the norm as both the normal order and as a particular rule, it is obvious that this norm cannot be invariant. Instantiations of the norm always entail a transgression of what the norm had been, entail its becoming ‘other’ to what it was. The norm, in short, always subsists along with its own exception. The exceptional, again, is unexceptional.” Fitzpatrick, “Bare Sovereignty.” 32. See Žižek, Organs Without Bodies; Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 4. 33. Hansen, “Digitizing the Racialized Body or The Politics of Universal Address.” 34. Ibid., 108. 35. Ibid., 111, 113. 36. Ibid., 114. 37. Ibid. On Agamben’s “whatever” see Agamben, The Coming Community; see also Aracagök, “Whatever Image.”

Here We Accrete Durations 329

38. Hansen, “Digitizing the Racialized Body or The Politics of Universal Address,” 115. 39. Ibid., 122, 123. 40. Ibid., 126. 41. Ibid., 127. 42. See Athanasiou, “Technologies of Humanness, Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity.” 43. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 16. 44. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 324. “We now name the challenging claim that gathers man with a view to ordering the self-revealing as standing-reserve: Ge-stell [enframing].” 45. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 119. 46. Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 323. 47. For an elaboration of the topological, see DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, 15. As he goes on to argue, “Classifying geometric objects by their degrees of symmetry represents a sharp departure from the traditional classification of geometrical figures by their essences. While in the latter approach we look for a set of properties common to all cubes, or to all spheres, groups do not classify these figures on the basis of their static properties but in terms of how these figures are affected (or not affected) by active transformations, that is, figures are classified by their response to events that occur to them. Another way of putting this is that even though in this new approach we are still classifying entities by a property (their degree of symmetry), this property is never an intrinsic property of the entity being classified but always a property relative to a specific transformation (or group of transformations)” (17). DeLanda shows that when the group of transformations of one entity is a subgroup of the other, it becomes possible to envision a process that converts one of the entities into the other by losing or gaining symmetry. Needless to say, such processes have very little to do with excess as culturalist criticism understands it. 48. A graphic record of the electrical activity of a muscle as recorded by an electromyograph. 49. The “probably approximately correct” (PAc) learning paradigm as it applies to artificial neural networks. The PAc learning model is a probabilistic framework for the study of learning and generalization. It is useful not only for neural classification problems, but also for learning problems more often associated with mainstream artificial intelligence, such as the inference of Boolean functions. In PAc theory, the notion of successful learning is formally defined using probability theory. Very roughly speaking, if a large enough sample of randomly drawn training examples is presented, then it should be likely that, after learning, the neural network will classify most other randomly drawn examples correctly. The PAc model formalizes the terms “likely” and “most.” Furthermore, the learning algorithm must be expected to act quickly, since otherwise it may be of little use in practice. Martin Anthony and Norman Biggs, PAc Learning and Artificial Neural Networks available at http:// www.maths.lse.ac.uk/Personal/martin/arbib.pdf.

330 Amit S. Rai

50. Shima et al., “A Universal Interface for Video Game Machines Using Biological Signals,” 97. The authors are researchers at the Graduate School of Engineering, Hiroshima University, Japan. They go on to note, “Probabilistic neural networks (Pnns) are used for discrimination of operation from biological features. In the context of pattern discrimination, a large amount of research has been carried out using Pnns [9]–[13]. It is widely accepted that, due to the prominent nonlinear approximation capability, Pnns can estimate the posterior probability distribution of input patterns with arbitrary accuracy by training the network architecture and the weights appropriately. So far, Pnns have been used as an important tool for pattern discrimination, and have been proven to be efficient especially for complicated problems such as discrimination of biological signals” (90). 51. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 86. 52. On sympathy, see Rai, Rule of Sympathy, and Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues. “Contagion,” in the field of ecology, is defined as “a greater occurrence of the individuals of a species in an area than could be accounted for by random distribution, thus forming aggregations” (Oxford English Dictionary). 53. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 32. 54. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 304. 55. Abunimah, “Death and Lies in Palestine.” A Google search for “cell phone Palestinian occupation” yields many stories of the cell phone’s potentializing of lines of force in the context of the occupation.

Here We Accrete Durations 331

May Joseph

Fascia and tHe GriMace oF catastropHe

The face is the only location of community, the only possible city. —Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End

“Are some things unrepresentable?” asks Jacques Rancière in The Future of the Image.1 And if so, what might it mean to engage in the activity of representation at this point in history? In particular, the desire to represent the unrepresentable, to materialize the unthinkable through art, without reducing its affect to an excess? Rancière’s inquiry into the unrepresentable and the unthinkable opens up the dialectical space between intelligibility and erasure, between what is seen and what is inconceivable. The distinctions between voice and sight, between speech and vision, Rancière argues, is the liminal space between the unthinkable and the unrepresentable. It is the immeasurable space between the performer and audience, between art and its sublime possibilities. In this interminable expanse is the practice of “little perceptions,” as Rancière puts it, the place of knowledge-effects and pathos-effects, each an incomplete symptom of the totality.2 Rancière elucidates one such little perception, the “interrupted spectacle,” which he identifies as an “accident of representation” that unfolds unpredictably.3 The moment of the interrupted spectacle for Rancière lies in a prose poem by Stéphane Mallarmé about a dancing bear and a clown. In “Un spectacle interrompu,” Mallarmé portrays the scene of a dancing bear with a clown. The bear puts his

paws on the clown at a critical moment, thereby diminishing the distance between animal and human, introducing danger to the delicate balance of power between the clown and his counterpoint, his bear.4 The bear’s gesture erodes the distance between audience and the performer’s space. It contracts the arrangement between viewer and viewed. This unstable moment of action startles the calibrated distance between performer and audience, unexpectedly equalizing them on a continuum. In this gap between exhibition and signification, Rancière suggests, is the demarcation between action and reception. How much is seen, and how much heard, determines the distance between representation and the unrepresentable. Scale, temporality, and distance from the unthinkable impinge the perceptual trace of the disappeared. To see too much, but hear nothing, diminishes the scale of the unthinkable. To hear the unimaginable, and leave to the imagination its visualization, leaves the possibility of experiencing the sublime, a kind of sacred terror, the terror of the unrepresentable, for Rancière.5 Rancière’s inquiry into the ethical imperative to represent, or not to depict, devolves around the materialization of inconceivable events and the call for an art that marks the unthinkable. The predicament of recording “the trace of the unthinkable,” as Rancière puts it, poses infinite challenges. Arguing between the perils of forgetting and the excesses of materiality, such as are seen in the physical depictions of dead bodies in the concentration camps, Rancière opens up the conundrum of staging catastrophe and its irretrievability.6 Sophocles’s Oedipus embodies for Rancière the sublime experiment in the limits and excesses of theatricalizing catastrophe. To depict the distraught Oedipus, gouging his eyes out in grief, is to make visible the unrepresentable. Its materialization reduces absolute horror to a grotesquery on stage. Drawing upon seventeenth- century arguments favoring visual restraint in the staging of Sophocles’s Oedipus, an approach formalized in France through Corneille’s rewriting of the Oedipus play, Rancière demarcates the philosophical distinctions between the physicalization of an act of savagery and the visualization of extreme violence through speech. Using seventeenthcentury notions of decorum, Corneille’s Oedipus does not enucleate himself, marking a departure from Sophocles’s version of the tragedy. But, as Rancière underscores, to resist representing the primal scene in Oedipus’s diabolical catharsis is to partake in a double negative, to leave silent that which is unrepresentable and doubly erase it because of its unthinkability.7 Fascia and the Grimace of Catastrophe 333

Nowhere in recent American history has the ethical challenge of representing the unthinkable and portraying the unrepresentable been more debated and subject to maudlin sentiment than in the events following the gaping hole of Ground Zero. Contorted by the United States’ bombing of Baghdad in March 2003, the political underpinnings of each shred of metal pulled from the site compounded the grief and guilt of representation following the catastrophe of September 11, 2001. The event of catastrophe remains irretrievable. It is marked by an abyss. But an excess of affect followed the event, putting all efforts to document, capture, or memorialize the aftermath in danger of a surfeit of witnessing. The scale of the event made efforts at representing the unthinkable a literal expression of the intelligible. A surplus of visual images reduced the unimaginable to its edited materiality, a photogenic cornucopia of rubble and ruination. One was left shuddering, “The horror of it, the horror of it.” Searching for an intricate balance between a restraint of vision and the urgency to trace the disappeared, the performance artist Pia Lindman excavates the aftershocks of 9/11 as an “interrupted spectacle” between the city and its people. Through a series of performance acts in public sites around New York City, Lindman investigates the perceptual distance between performer and the passerby, between New York City and the world. Lindman’s gestural friezes are practices of “little perceptions,” to draw upon Rancière’s term. She skillfully examines visibility against the overdetermined backdrop of a surplus of seeing. Working against a public enervated with witnessing, Lindman demands the attention of those blinded by overexposure to the unthinkable, those numbed by repeated replays of the unrepresentable. Her work probes the interstices between literally living death (as Lindman worked next to Ground Zero in 2001, atop the World Financial Center, overlooking the World Trade Center site) and working through the fragments of death. emBodimenTs: Luxe GaLLery, neW york ciTy, 2006

In a compact, midtown Manhattan gallery, a simple theatrical space is set with three spotlights and a grey backdrop. Most of the audience stands around, some sitting on the floor. A woman in a grey pants suit takes her place and begins a series of slow-motion, freeze-frame poses. She huddles and crouches. Slowly transitioning to a standing pose, she stares askance in hopeless horror. Her body turns in profile, hands grasped, eyes tightly shut. She bends, convulses, contorts a grimace. She clenches fists in tor334 May Joseph

Tracing of a photograph found on the pages of the new York times, pia Lindman.

ment. She moves slowly to pick up a grey placard, holds it up, head upturned, stands erect, eyes angular, mournful. Standing with arms bent, her hands clasp the grey placard as one would a photograph, her arm supports the face, she stands still. Her face turns stage right, eyes closed, hands curled. She positions her leg on a grey cloth pile, arms akimbo at her sides, body leaning back, face upturned. Her mouth agape, face taut, eyes fearful, she throws her head back, exposing a tense torso, an angular spine. She hunches over, legs apart, shoulders hunched, grasping an infant swaddled in grey fabric. Her anxious body grips the bundle of grey fabric close to her face, the imagined body of the child held angular. Her hip is bent, her face desperate, initially fearful, then frightened, then upturned. She slowly stretches her mouth into a pained frown, a grotesque howl, a scream, her teeth bared. At the Luxe Gallery in New York City in February 2007, the woman in grey performs a series of embodied drawings reproduced from pencil drawings Fascia and the Grimace of Catastrophe 335

of freeze frames. She depicts in stop-motion poses scenes of grief collected from the pages of the New York Times over the course of 2002–2003. Her body journeys through physicalizations of extreme sorrow as shock, hopelessness, and anger congeal into the grimace of catastrophe. fascia of Grief

On a clear Manhattan day in downtown Foley Square in 2004, the woman in a grey pants suit howls in horror, her face distorted in grief. Another day in 2005 finds her in front of the Freedom of Expression National Monument in Foley Square, where she kneels bereft. Again in 2005, she squats in despair by Luis Sanguino’s 1981 statue The Immigrants, located in Castle Clinton, Battery Park. At a gallery called the Storefront for Art and Architecture in 2006, the performer enacts a single half-hour act titled 30-Minute Gesture, consisting of a figure in a black dress standing on a black box. A video performance titled Fascia plays alongside. In the duration of thirty minutes, she performs seven gestures, gradually moving her left arm from a vertical position pointing up to eventually realize a vertical position pointing down. Her body transforms from the Black Panther salute to the Hitler salute, from the blowing of a kiss to the making of a stop sign, from a handshake to giving the obscene middle finger, and finally to the painterly depiction of God banishing Eve in her naked shame out of the Garden of Eden. The nearly still figure moves imperceptibly. Her entire body and face glide from the Black Panther salute to the Statue of Liberty pose to a sequence of studies in skeletal mobility. The audience is drawn into an emotional journey by its own projected sentiments and the implied gestures of the performer. Detailed anatomical studies of the fascia of emotions transfix the spectator as the performer’s eyes transform from staring ahead to downcast and pensive, from raised and questioning to beckoning, from melancholic to fascistic, and from passionate to cynical. Her hands move from holding the torch of liberty to unclasping slowly, from a flat-palmed halt to the fascistic hail of Hitler’s era, to a beckon, to a flying kiss, a pause, a farewell, a blessing, an extended handshake, and a disillusioned withdrawal. urBan faciaLiTy and ThanaTos

New York performance artist Pia Lindman uses her body, pen and ink illustrations, and digital technologies to create public installations that investigate the public culture of grieving after September 11, 2001. Lindman’s explorations suggest that the events of September 11, 2001, triggered a new logic of 336 May Joseph

kneeling in front of the freedom of expression national monument in foley square, 2005.

pia Lindman, castle clinton, Battery park city.

Fascia, 30-minute Gesture, Black panther salute.

Fascia, 30-minute Gesture, hand outstretched.

gesture in New York City. This logic effects a nervous movement punctuated by resilience as much as by melancholia in response to a catastrophe whose symbolic import was cynically misused as a cause for an even more devastating sequence of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the surrounding region. In Lindman’s public portrayals, the unsettling momentum of war continues to shift and transform the way people inhabit the vertical imaginary of New York and its environs as wanderers and travelers, as dwellers in and dreamers of the city. For Lindman, the event of grieving triggered by the cataclysm has spilled into the larger arena of public mourning. Her anatomical portrayals open up the historicity of location and dying in public spaces. Her investigations detail the fundamentals of human gesture in states of tragic shock. The lunging body of terror, the last salute for the fallen soldier, the distraught mother and swaddled child, the squatting despair of the Holocaust survivor, the grieving elation of immigrants to the new world, these attitudes of pathos are figments of a larger history of morbidity and public spaces. At the core of Lindman’s work since September 11 is the idea that the United States is a culture at war and grief is the uncontainable symptom of the terrible melancholy of unsustainable modernity. Grief, Lindman suggests, is the most evocative staging of bodily habitation within space. It is the place of unexpected corporeal and somatic shock, performed in conditions of spatial vulnerability. Grief shrinks distance and distorts time in ways that exceed the bounds of the city, yet is shaped by the geography of the city. Her performances play in crowded public places, accosting passersby. How do we cope with grief in New York City, Lindman asks. Does the space of grief matter? Is grief a universal experience that can be pared down to its most minimal of structural gestures? Are experiences of grief the great equalizer, she queries. Lindman’s interest in the intersections between the body of the city dweller and the faciality of the city’s grief is a deeper investigation into the neural habitations of contemporary urban life. She is preoccupied with the nervous embodiments of living within a hardscape. Eyes askance, face taught, lips drawn apart, teeth exposed, Lindman embodies the restrained emotions of a damaged world city processing its neural pathways. At Foley Square, a body sits on its haunches in abject sadness. At The Immigrants, the performer lunges in fear. Another gesture has the performer holding her arms in the attitude of carrying a dead child. Evocative, imagistic, detailed, these extensive, close studies of pathetic gestures are culled from the New York Times during 2003, Fascia and the Grimace of Catastrophe 339

Black square drawing. Based on stills from the Lakonikon video of the artist reenacting gestures of grief she found on the pages of the new York times.

the year of “shock and awe,” when the United States began its strategy of rapid dominance over the city of Baghdad on March 20, 2003. The face of Lindman’s embodiments is both the physical space of the city and the emotive plane of the performer’s face. Faciality is a process of dwelling in which actual locations function as expressive triggers for the emotional life of a city. To this extent, Lindman’s choice of locations and her enactments of loss examine the gestural structures of melancholia embedded within the built environment of the necropolis of downtown Manhattan. The task of mourning is an ongoing practice, Lindman iterates. The muscularity of pathos, its underlying mess of nerves, sinews, bone, and tissue, stretch the face of the city open, muscle by muscle. Neck taut and tilted, eyes startled, skin drawn thin, hair tightly pulled back, cheeks distorted, lips distended in a grimace of horror, Lindman confronts her audience with the mechanics of faciality and death, of public space and private grief. Lindman’s anthropomorphizing of the urban landscape in a series of facial gestures has the effect of transforming her body into a flexible structuring entity of the built environment. Through her performances, the city is given many faces, and her body is transformed into a moving architectural 340 May Joseph

detail. Lindman’s hyperextended physiognomy unpacks the face of a city in pain, a city that shudders a grimace. movemenT and dWeLLinG

Movement within the built environment is a collaborative production of muscular activities and civic understandings. How we move in particular contexts, why we occupy the spaces we do in the manner we do, impacts the gestures of everyday life. These improvisations generate the sensibility of powerfully evocative and globally dispersed cities. In Lindman’s work, the city is larger than its mapped, planned, and plotted vectors. New York City’s perspectival axis and great buildings, its monuments and sweeping vistas, invoke aspects memorably captured in a photograph or in the mind’s eye. But for Lindman, it is in the compressed transitory gestures and provisional dwellings that capture the fleeting sense of what a city really is, and how life in a city connects nonlinearly with events and emotions experienced elsewhere. Through touch, movement, smell, and sound, life is indelibly etched as a memory, a taste, a shot of adrenalin. Lindman’s visual and sound environments excavate the unstable matrix of movement and dwelling. Her dramatic environments investigate compressed flows of information and raise the questions: How do people dwell in cities of distraction? How do they grieve? Asking a similar question in the aftermath of the Second World War, Heidegger writes, “What is the nature of dwelling in our precious age?” For Heidegger, the shape of cities and the density of populations within cities forced the perpetual concern of the modern era, the concern for housing, which was symptomatic of a deeper anxiety. “On all sides we hear talk about the housing shortage . . . the real plight of dwelling does not lie merely in a lack of houses. The real dwelling plight lies in this . . . that mortals . . . must ever learn to dwell.”8 This considerable challenge that mortals must “ever learn to dwell,” as a condition of modernity, underscores the escalating tension in Lindman’s performances, tensions between bodies and the built, between mortality and fatality, even amid catastrophe. Drawing from the international landscape of grief, pain, and public stagings of loss, Lindman digs into the city’s emotive structure. She forces the hardscape of the vertical city to an encounter with its own repressed traces, those past and lingering on the sidewalk today. In Foley Square, near city hall in lower Manhattan, Lindman captures the ghostly hauntings of the urban piazza. Foley Square is built over the old Collect Pond, a marshy, inclement terrain of swamp outside the boundaries of historic New Amsterdam that Fascia and the Grimace of Catastrophe 341

was used as a burial ground by slaves of African descent who were forbidden to bury their dead within the walls of the colonial Dutch city. Now a busy hub of court buildings, immigration offices, and city hall offices, this densely packed area is estimated to hold roughly 20,000 bodies of New Yorkers of African descent. During the nineteenth century, the area around Foley Square and the courthouse became part of the Five Points neighborhood, a notorious enclave of poor Irish tenements. Lindman’s stagings of grief at this locale remind onlookers of other histories of violence that haunt the space of performance, even as her contortions take spectators beyond the literal event.9 The city is simultaneously a burial ground and a theater of public mourning, a place for unexpected encounters and sudden departures, in Lindman’s art. She is interested in the membranes of civic forgetting. Her public acts of mourning in New York City overlay older histories of grief and death from the historic city onto the present city. Freeze frames disinter the harrowed spirits of those who were buried secretly, in the dead of night, outside the city walls of colonial New Amsterdam, and later colonial New York. Enslaved Africans, Jews, the Lenape and Munsee Indians, all spirits buried outside the walls of the colonial Dutch city, a boundary now plainly called Wall Street, haunt spectators through Lindman’s tactile permutations of loss. VIewInG PLatForm (2002)

Gesture forms the structural vernacular of Lindman’s documentation of wounding. It is a language of event and the built environment communicated through the human form and transformed by the materiality of flesh, bone, and blood. The detailed recording of grief and mourning in those first few months of posttraumatic dailiness foregrounds the condition New York City was very much in the grip of, and struggling to move beyond: the staging of public grief. Through her relentless camera lens and its distended, layered imagery, Lindman forces us to consider the modern preoccupation with the need to look, the need to perform grief rather than be in grief. The boundaries between melancholia and necrophilia are blurred. This very disturbing and scopophilic engagement with gaping at the scene of death is accompanied by the multiply situated, painful conversation on how to memorialize and honor the dead, a conversation on what sort of form the remembering should most suitably take in light of the impossible task of realizing a perfect memorial. In Viewing Platform, Lindman focuses on the structure built by the architects Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio that opened on December 30,

342 May Joseph

Viewing Platform (2002).

2001, to allow visitors to view the inconceivable gash of Manhattan, raw and still acrid. The Viewing Platform video was funded by a grant by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and World Financial Center for Arts and Events for the revitalization project of the Ground Zero area. It was a site-specific video installation that hung in the main thoroughfare of the World Financial Center’s corridors, located right next to Ground Zero in Battery Park. The video is a portrait of the architectural gesture of collective grief in all its troubling and empathetic manifestations. It was shot from the nineteenth floor of One World Financial Center, Tower One, overlooking Ground Zero at a time when the area south of Chambers Street was blocked off to traffic during the spring of 2002 and visitors were forbidden to photograph the Ground Zero area. A city injunction against recording images of the site went into effect as the video was being made. A static camera captures a blurry, layered image of crowds moving in double exposure on a makeshift viewing platform above Ground Zero. At first glance, there is nothing spectacular except for the high angle of the shot, a rare documentation of curious onlookers on a makeshift lookout at the former World Trade Center at a terrible moment in New York’s history. A layered, palimpsestic loop records the dense weaving of people hovering over

Fascia and the Grimace of Catastrophe 343

the cavernous chasm of Ground Zero and repeats its ghostly musings. The viewer is suddenly privy to a more ghastly, otherworldly scenario of spectral figures superimposed on more saturated human forms, coalescing and disappearing simultaneously. Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio’s World Trade Center Viewing Platform becomes an architectural embodiment of the collective gesture of mourning, as specters transform over time within the frame of the video. The spectator is confronted with the ghosts of loss wafting through the city. The installation at once dramatizes the impossibility of representation and the burden of an absolute monument to commemorate the event of catastrophe. The layered technique of multiply exposed, superimposed film, explores mournful daily life in all its voyeuristic minutiae. Throngs of individuals morph into a congealed moving mass of curious mourners. The viewing is constant, urgent, and somehow casual. The scene is transformed from a site of catastrophe, a ground made sacred by the murderous death of nearly three thousand people, to a disaster site to be visited. Lindman’s Viewing Platform confronts the public with the ambivalence of grieving as spectacular entertainment. It records the shift of Ground Zero from a space made ceremonial by the ravages of death to a cult destination for disaster tourists. The film’s enigmatic loop investigates the interstices between sudden death and the absent space of catastrophe. It focuses the viewer on the repetitious invocation of what the anthropologist Michael Taussig calls “the space of death.”10 The site of tragedy is transformed into the mutable space of the sacrificed citizen through the sacred figure of the dead as sacrifice. The installation marks the condition of those violently sacrificed but who will not be killed, for they will be mourned, commemorated, remembered, memorialized. It archeologizes the negative space of disappearance—the literal chasm of the gaping hole of the World Trade Center that is inverted into the proliferating space of commemoration.11 Viewing Platform (2002) was met with great consternation from the World Financial Center Arts and Events organizers as Lindman prepared the piece for the inaugural reopening of the destroyed Winter Garden Atrium housed in the World Financial Center. World Financial Center Arts and Events was alarmed by the spectral nature of the installation, and there were concerns that the video was too disturbing in its ghostliness. The original version was not permitted to be exhibited at the opening of the Winter Garden in fall 2002. Instead, a linear version of the video was made in real time, without 344 May Joseph

Lindman’s signature effect of the spectral haunting that the palimpsestic editing creates. phenomenoLoGicaL douBT

Viewing Platform (2002) is a technological investigation into the techniques of grieving. Lindman is interested in the process of grief. To produce Viewing Platform (2002), Lindman positioned a fixed camera focused on the Diller and Scofidio Viewing Platform constructed in December 2001 for the public. With digital editing software, she made the video footage transparent and cut it into one-minute segments. She layered these segments on top of each other and thus, during the duration of one minute the viewer sees the entire sixty-minute video in real time, but simultaneously as multiple layers. In the process, time and motion oscillate and create the illusion of disappearance. The extraordinary effect of spectral disappearance draws the spectator into a somatic shudder. It engages the viewer in a dialogue between dwelling, death, and the moving body. Using the techniques of photographic development and superimposition of negatives, Lindman examines grieving as a public ritual expressive of a larger sentiment of nationhood. She opens up the question of how time shapes the production of space, of how the technologies of visual manipulation reinvent memory over the course of a twenty-four-hour sequence. Her compressed editing of images over a sixty-minute period condensed to a one-minute loop asks searching questions about the spectacularization of catastrophe. Deploying gesture as a technique for documenting grief through movement and photography, Lindman’s vignettes offer an archive of the aftermath of catastrophe. Instead of offering grief ’s monumentality emptied of significance through memorialization, Lindman probes deeper into the comportments of loss. The spectator is distracted from the spectacle and drawn toward the intimate space of the encounter with calamity. To allow the residue of the encounter to emerge, Lindman introduces into her work what Vilém Flusser calls “phenomenological doubt.” “The act of photography is that of ‘phenomenological doubt’ to the extent that it attempts to approach phenomena from any number of viewpoints,” writes Flusser.12 In contrast to Flusser, who held that the deep structure of this doubt is determined by the camera’s program, Lindman is interested in that which exceeds the program of the technologies of documentation, such as the photograph, the video recording, the camera, the performance. She is preoccupied with the excess, the trace, in what is left over, in that which canFascia and the Grimace of Catastrophe 345

not be photographed. Lindman is interested in what Flusser describes as “the improbable images that have not been seen before.”13 The act of viewing, for Lindman, is a moment to witness: “It is not so important that you see the site, rather you need to symbolically bear witness to it, and to there execute some sort of ceremony, however small. The seeing is rather looking inside yourself.”14 Lindman’s hypnotic loop foregrounds the melancholic repetition of the grafting of trauma upon the built environment and comments on the arrest of mourning through the spectacularization of death. virTuosiTy, Grief, and memoriaLizinG

The New York Times performances presented in February 2007 at the Luxe Gallery in New York City are a series of embodied drawings reproduced from pencil drawings of freeze frames depicting scenes of grief collected from the front pages of the New York Times from 2002–2003. In these pieces, Lindman offers a glimpse into what escapes the camera’s program.15 Lindman’s technically virtuosic bodily gestures reinforce the interdependent histories of grief between there and here, between elsewhere and now, between wars and tragedies played out abroad and the lives bereft at home. Through her performances, grief exceeds the limits of the individual photographer’s program. Grief transmutes into a project of action, a process that requires an audience to exist. The displays of grief become, for Lindman, what Paolo Virno calls “an activity without an end product.” Virno observes, “The performance of a pianist or of a dancer does not leave us with a defined object distinguishable from the performance itself, capable of continuing after the performance has ended. An activity that requires the presence of others: the performance makes sense only if it is seen or heard.”16 Drawing upon Aristotle’s idea of political action or praxis, elaborated in The Nicomachean Ethics, Virno argues that performance is virtuosity, whereby the notion of virtuosity is a form of praxis “when the purpose of action is found [to be] action itself.”17 Virno contends that every political action is virtuosic, while all virtuosity is intrinsically political.18 He locates the fundamental model of virtuosity in the “activity of the speaker.”19 Extending Virno to Lindman’s articulations, the argument can be made that her virtuosic stagings of mourning demand a political engagement with the process of violence. Lindman’s perfectly modulated grimaces cut through the veneers of composure and demand a return to the unfinished project of

346 May Joseph

working through the experience of loss and public death within the space of the city’s imagination. At the crux of Lindman’s physiological excavations is a question that Judith Butler eloquently asks: What is a grievable life? Whose death matters more? What does it mean to grieve, and at what point in time is grief an accessible emotion to a public?20 Lindman’s unapologetic investigations into the structures of melancholia within public spaces of New York City critically interrogate the mechanics of becoming in a global city. Grief is not extraneous to quotidian city life. The reclamations of urban spaces haunted by grief and the iterations of city space as divorced from grief are articulated simultaneously. Lindman’s work investigates the numerous vernaculars of loss and mourning. Their translations as symbols of human worth are highly contingent on the winds of politics. Against the relentless backdrop of grievable landscapes and lives brutally eviscerated without a modicum of grief, Lindman’s deliberately depersonalized gestures of dehumanized states drawn from images across the world beg an ethical accountability for the memorialization of grief. Is public grieving a process of selective memorializing, Lindman’s performances of grief seem to ask. What makes a life worthy of memorials? And whose lives are extinguished silently, outside the spheres of the visible? Watching Lindman perform in New York City as the numbers of dead in Fallujah, Najaf, and elsewhere in Iraq grow, a result of the American-led invasion of Iraq, presents the dilemma of the inconceivable. Lindman’s movements hold the audience hostage to her disquieting questions: Can gesture make intelligible the unthinkable? Can performance actively engage the terror unfolding outside the spheres of the visible, without the raw truth of the photograph to document the garrulous casualties of war?21 Lindman’s actions ask those for whom grief necessitates memorializing to pause to question the premises of remembering and forgetting, of commemorating and eliding, to articulate that most tenuous of questions, what is a grievable life. ToWard a praxis of LiTTLe percepTions

Pia Lindman’s artistic practice is a public praxis. It is an invigorating instance of Rancière’s little perceptions, offering multisited analyses into the machinations of what she identifies as “doing grief ” rather than being in grief. It is Virno’s “political virtuosity,” as it uses found action to engage public reasoning. Lindman is critical of mourning and grief as acts of incapacitation. In-

Fascia and the Grimace of Catastrophe 347

stead, she proposes that such an anomaly of human affairs be transformed into an active state of political becoming, especially in a climate of endless war. For Lindman, the displaced physiological and neural imaginings of a city through violent derailment must be short- circuited to allow public engagement. Lindman’s interrupting spectacles generate a disturbance among passersby. These spectacles deflect the passer’s habitual path with sudden meaning. The little perceptions she offers are a call to reclaim the city as a space of the living, rather than to submit to its location as a memorial to spectacular death. A chilling backdrop to Lindman’s series of investigations into corporal morbidity from 2001–2007 is the inconceivable reversal of power from the right to make life, as Michel Foucault observes, to a right to take life.22 Lindman’s performances were taking place in New York City even as the writ of habeas corpus was being threatened by George W. Bush’s administration under the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Her performances around New York City from 2003 to 2007 foreground the underlying implications of staging the unrepresentable in a climate of visual censorship. In an unprecedented return to ideas of power reminiscent of the sovereign in early modern Europe, authority under George W. Bush specifically entailed the right to take life. This terrifying overreach of modern presidential power undergirds Lindman’s analysis of melancholia. The ancient writ first recorded under the Magna Carta of 1297 is one of the critical rights that predates the Bill of Rights. The move to eliminate, rather than limit, habeas corpus is a juridical-political departure from Foucault’s assumption that political modernity, as it is embodied through modern law, signals a move away from the savage excesses of the sovereign’s right to take life.23 Under George W. Bush, the rule of law was literally threatened with being set back 700 years, as GoP senator Arlen Specter remarked, despite proceeding to vote for the motion to eliminate habeas corpus. On June 12, 2008, the Supreme Court voted to restore habeas corpus, striking down key parts of the Military Commissions Act of 2006.24 Lindman’s refracted depictions of public grief from the global arena coincide with the impending demise of the right to produce the body before the law. Habeas corpus signals a shift from what Foucault delineates as medieval logic to the emergence of modern forms of governmentality based on concepts of public and individual rights. The threatened erasure of habeas corpus, as an inalienable right to be seen and therefore to be heard, is the trace

348 May Joseph

of the unthinkable that ultimately haunts Lindman’s investigations of public melancholia. Lindman’s performances interrogate a society hopelessly embroiled in the perpetuation of organized death through war. For Lindman, to grieve is to engage with the public repercussions of what it means to be in grief, to be a society at war. Activating the spaces of death through the powerful enunciations of “little perceptions” makes possible a shift in the relationship between individuals, and the silent histories of the places they traverse. The city is the place of unplanned encounters. It is a place of unstable power differentials between social imaginaries. In the city, subjectifying experiences transform into activating possibilities for political becoming. Lindman is ultimately interested in a dialectic between the silent spaces of organized and accidental death and the built environment, between citizens and the cities they inhabit. noTes

1. Rancière, “Are Some Things Unrepresentable,” in The Future of the Image. 2. Ibid., 121. 3. Ibid., 122. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 134. 6. Ibid., 132–35. 7. Ibid., 112–13. 8. Heidegger. “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 161. 9. Berlin and Harris, Slavery in New York. See Hansen and McGowan, Breaking Ground Breaking Silence. See also New York Journal of American History (fall/winter) 2005. 10. Taussig, “The Image of the Auca,” in Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man, 121. 11. See Agamben, Homo Sacer, 72, 73. Also see René Girard for an extended discussion on the relationship of violence and the sacred to the spaces of death through the figure of the scapegoat in Girard, “Violence and Magic,” in The Scapegoat. 12. Flusser, “The Gesture of Photography,” in Towards a Philosophy of Photography, 38. 13. Ibid. 14. Pia Lindman (artist), interviewed by author, February 7, 2006, New York City. 15. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography. 16. Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, 52. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 55. 20. Butler, “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” in Precarious Life. 21. See Kambar and Arango, “4,000 U.S. Deaths, and a Handful of Images.” The case

Fascia and the Grimace of Catastrophe 349

of the photographer Zoriah Miller who photographed the dead bodies of American soldiers in Iraq in June 26, 2008, and was censored by the U.S. military, brought to the fore the silence of images from Iraq since 2003. 22. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 248, 254–56. 23. Ibid., 248. 24. Greenwald, “Supreme Court restores habeas corpus, strikes down key part of Military Commissions Act.”

350 May Joseph

Fred Moten and stefano Harney

Blackness and GoVernance

1

There is an anoriginary drive whose fateful internal difference (as opposed to fatal flaw) is that it brings regulation into existence, into a history irregularly punctuated by transformations that drive imposes upon regulation. Those transformative impositions show up now as compensation and surplus—as the payment of a massive and incalculable debt by the ones who never promised, who have no credit and who are, in any case, the ones who are owed and bear the trace of being owned—and as the massive and incalculable range of labored living, “the thing realized in things . . . the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces, etc., created through universal exchange,” that Marx called wealth.1 That anoriginary drive and the insistences it calls into being and moves through; that criminality that brings governance into existence; that fugitivity that anarchically grounds the interinanimation of unpaid debt unfairly imposed and untold wealth unfairly expropriated; that fugal, internal world theater that shows up for a minute serially— poor but extravagant, as opposed to frugal—is blackness, which must be understood in its ontological difference from black people who are, nevertheless, (under)privileged insofar as they are given (to) an understanding of it.

2

Consider the following statement: “There’s nothing wrong with blackness.” What if this were the primitive axiom of a new black studies underived from the psycho-politico-pathology of populations and its corollary theorization of the state or of state racism; an axiom given, as all such axioms are, in “runaway tongues” that turn out to be of the native or the slave only insofar as the fugitive is misrecognized and in lives that turn out to be bare only insofar as no attention is paid to their artful persistence under the sign and weight of a closed question?2 3

The black aesthetic turns on a dialectic of luxuriant withholding—abundance and lack push technique over the edge of refusal so that the trouble with beauty, which is the very animation and emanation of art, is always and everywhere troubled again and again. New technique, new beauty. At the same time, the black aesthetic is not about technique, is not merely a technique or set of techniques, though a fundamental element of that terror- driven, anesthetic disavowal of “our terribleness” that certain folks in the art world dub the “post-black” is the eclectic sampling of techniques of black performativity in the interest of the unproblematically dispossessive assertion of an internal difference, complexity, or syntax that was always and everywhere so apparent that the assertion was a kind of self-indulgent, self- exculpatory superfluity.3 Such assertion amounts to an attempt to refute claims of blackness’s atomic simplicity that were never actually serious enough to refute (as they were made unfalsifiably, without evidence, by way of unreasonable though wholly and instrumentally rationalized motivations, in bad faith and dogmatic slumber). 4

The dismissal of any possible claim regarding the essence or even the being of blackness (in its irreducible performativity) becomes, itself, the dismissal of blackness. Differential or differentiating techniques are made to account and stand in for an absence. Appeals to internal difference are made in order to disallow instantiation. Abstraction of or from the referent is seen as an expression of its nonexistence. The techniques of black performance—in their manifest difference from one another, in the full range of their transferability, and in their placement within a history that is structured but not 352 Fred Moten and Stefano Harney

determined by imposition—are understood to constitute the “proof ” that blackness is not, or is irretrievably lost, or is interminable loss. In this regard, references to abstraction and performativity that are meant to bear and used to exert the same silly gravity that is supposed to attend standardized rejections of whatever claims regarding the (hyper- differentiated) authenticity or (super- entropic) unity of blackness become the refutation of blackness as such. Such invocations of technique are, themselves, techniques of governance. Meanwhile blackness means to render unanswerable the question of how to govern the thing that loses and finds itself to be what it is not. 5

Not in the interest either of some simple or complex opposition of Technik and Eigentlichkeit but rather in the improvisation through their opposition moves the black aesthetic. What is the content of (your) (black) technique? What is the essence of (your) (black) performance? An imperative is implied here: pay attention to (black) performances, since it is left to those who do also to retheorize essence, representation, abstraction, performance, being. 6

Notions of the “post-black” are expressions of a degenerative tendency inherent in the black radical tradition, a kind of inevitability that emerges from the pathologically autocritical force of a more genuine (anticipatory variant of ) enlightenment and the more basic—which is not but nothing other than to say base—desires that animate the ideology of uplift. The post-black is political instrumentality’s fugitive, though such fugitivity has a doubled, self- consumptive edge—the pathological drive of the pathologist, the fantasmatic end of an antiracism whose antiessentialism will have amounted to the disavowal of its necessarily interminable renewal and rerouting. Such instrumentality can very quickly turn sour or get turned out in the interest of empire (artists against art in the interest of gold, prefabricated knockoffs— with readymade provenances—of a certain New York intellectuality, an empire state of mind, a state mind, a mind of the United States of Exception, a mind of the ones who say everything is mine, the unoriginal gangsters of the American Century who stole modern art from the ones who stole away as modern art, the moving, motley, sculptural, animated, theatrical things).

Blackness and Governance 353

7

But blackness still has work to do: to discover the rerouting encoded in the work of art, in the anachoreographic reset of a shoulder, in the quiet extremities that animate a range of social chromaticisms, and in the mutations that drive mute, labored, musicked speech as it moves between an incapacity for reasoned or meaningful self-generated utterance that is, on the one hand, supposed and, on the other hand, imposed and, on the other hand, never posed as the question concerning the black and social arts of resistant incapacitation and something that Saidiya Hartman might still call, or perhaps would never have called in this particular way, a critical predisposition to steal (away) (either way, this predisposition is her gift).4 In those outside chances and changes that are always also transgenderings (as in Al Green’s errant falsetto or Big Maybelle’s bass—which is not but nothing other than basic—growl), and in between that impropriety of speech that approaches animality and a tendency toward expropriation that approaches criminality, lies blackness, lies the black thing that cuts the regulative, governant force of (the) understanding (and even of those understandings of blackness to which black people are given since fugitivity escapes even the fugitive) which, according to Kant, must clip the wings of the imagination in its “lawless freedom.”5 8

The work of blackness is inseparable from the violence of blackness. Violence is where technique and beauty come back, though they had never left. Consider technique as a kind of strain and consider the technique that is embedded in and cuts techniques—the (Fanonian as opposed to Artaudian) cruelty. The internal difference of blackness is a violent and cruel rerouting, by way and outside of critique, that is predicated on the notion, which was given to me by Martin Luther Kilson Jr., that there’s nothing wrong with us (precisely insofar as there is something wrong, something off, something ungovernably, fugitively living in us that is constantly taken for the pathogen it instantiates). This notion is manifest primarily in the long, slow motion—the series of tragically pleasurable detours—of the immediate (of improvisation, which is something not but almost nothing other than the spontaneous), a rerouting that turns away from a turning on or to itself. That apposition is an itinerancy that bridges life and blackness. Movement toward and against death and its specific and general prematurities and a willingness to break the law 354 Fred Moten and Stefano Harney

one calls into existence constitute their very relationality. But what’s the relation between willingness and propensity? And what’s the difference between flight and fatality? What are the politics of being ready to die and what have they to do with the scandal of enjoyment? What is premature death? What commerce ensues between what Jacques Lacan identifies as man’s specific prematurity of birth and what Ruth Wilson Gilmore (echoing Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan) identifies as the specific (and irreducible threat of ) prematurity of death in blackness?6 9

Addressing these questions demands some attempt to discover how blackness operates as the modality of life’s constant escape and takes the form, the held and errant pattern, of flight.7 So we’ve been trying to find out how the undercommons cuts the common sense—the necessarily failed administrative accounting of the incalculable—that is the object/ive of enlightenment, self- control; and trying to get with the utopian sensuality that animates this occupied dystopia that we occupy and with which we are preoccupied. It must be that in exploring the black market underside of this constant economy of misrecognition, this misery cognition, the funked-up here and now of this ethnocentric particularity, it will be possible to discover the content economy: because we’re in love with how the beat of this slum-like, deictic circle flies off the handle; how event music, full of color, blows up the event horizon; how the sound waves from this black hole carry flavorful pictures to touch; how the only way to get with them is to sense them. This information can never be lost without also being found; it is, rather, irrevocably given in transit. We could never provide a whole bunch of smooth transitions for this disorderly market of ditches and hidden spans. There’s just this open seriality of scarred terminals in off transcription. Some people want to run things, other things want to run. If they ask you, tell ’em we were flying. Knowledge of freedom is (in) the invention of escape, stealing away in the confines, in the form, of a break. This is held close in the open song of the ones who are supposed to be silent. 10

Whom do we mean when we say “there’s nothing wrong with us”? The fat ones. The ones who are out of all compass however precisely they are located. The ones who are not conscious when they listen to Les McCann. The Screamers who don’t say much, insolently. The churchgoers who value impropriety. Blackness and Governance 355

The ones who manage to evade self-management in the enclosure. The ones without interest who bring the muted noise and mutant grammar of the new general interest by refusing. The ones who bear the new general intellect by extending the long, extragenetic line of extramoral obligation to disturb and evade intelligence. Our cousins. All our friends. 11

The new general intellect is rich. And the new regulation wants to give you back what you got, publicly, which is to say partly, what can only be owed. This regulation is called governance. It is not governmentality, nor is it a governance of the soul. It must be described in its inscription in the criminality that doubles as debt, that doubles the debt, that twists in inscription, that torques. Nikolas Rose had it wrong, governance is not about government, and Foucault wanted to get it right.8 But he never found the priority of what he felt in North Africa. Governance is the wit of the colonial official, the cIA woman, the nGo man. Will we be in on the joke that we all know governmentality so well? We can all read it like a book. Nothing goes on behind the backs of the new cynicism (except we need gently to remind our comrade Paolo Virno of what always went on beyond cynicism, was always without home and shelter, was always outnumbered and outgunned).9 Will we be in on the joke of religion, of white trash, or the joke of development, of Marxism? When Gayatri Spivak refuses to laugh, she is told she wants to deny the workers their cappuccinos.10 She holds out for reduction against the insider trading of domination, she holds out for a reduction to the coercion that exploits what it cannot reduce to an invitation to governance. Still the invitations arrive through the smirk of governmentality by all, or on the severe and serious brow of democratization. Critique and policy. No wonder Rose thought governance was about government. Worse still, some say governance is merely a management neologism, a piece of old-fashioned ideology. Others think governance simply a retreat to liberalism from the market fundamentalism of neoliberalism in the present crisis. But we want to reduce it up to a kind of “state-thought,” a form of thought which for Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari supported the rendering and hoarding of social wealth. A thought that thinks away the private before the public and the private, but not exactly before, but rather a step ahead. Statethought says, “They burnt down their own neighborhood.” Not theirs, before

356 Fred Moten and Stefano Harney

theirs. But then nobody writes about the state anymore, because governance is too clever for that, governance invites us to laugh at the state, to look back at it, its political immaturity in the face of governmentality by all, its dangerous behavior, its laziness, its blackness. Which means really the exhaustion of blackness, thought by the state and the new a way to steal from the stolen, who refuse to give up the secret of thieving with their theft, the secret of their thieving of their theft. In the newest language of the social sciences we might say that governance is generated by a refusal among biopolitical populations. Or perhaps by the self-activity of immaterial labor. But maybe we would like to say it is provoked by the communicability of unmanageable racial and sexual difference, insisting on a now unfathomable debt of wealth. 12

Governance is a strategy for the privatization of social reproductive labor, a strategy provoked by communicability, infected by it, hosting and hostile. As Antonio Negri says, “The new face of productive labor (intellectual, relational, linguistic, and affective, rather than physical, individual, muscular, instrumental) does not understate but accentuates the corporality and materiality of labour.”11 But accumulating collective cognitive and affective labor from these highly communicable differences is not the same as accumulating biopolitical bodies that labor. Differences here matter not for order, but order matters for differences. The order that collects differences, the order that collects what Marx called labor still objectifying itself, is the order of governance. 13

But governance collects like a drill boring for samples. Governance is a form of prospecting for this immaterial labor. Immaterial labor is opaque to statethought until it becomes labor-power, exchangeable potentiality. Immaterial labor could easily be mistaken for life, which is why the biopolitical must take a new form. A form that provokes life to give up this new potential. Corporate social responsibility is sincere. The invitation to governmentality is made by way of transfer of responsibility, and immaterial labor is distinguished from the vitality of life, from its vessel, by the taking up of responsibility, and life is now distinguished by its overt irresponsibility. Since neither the state nor capital know where to find immaterial labor or

Blackness and Governance 357

how to distinguish it from life, governance is a kind of exploratory drilling with a responsibility bit. But this drilling is not really for labor-power. It is for politics, or rather as Tiziana Terranova suggests, it is for soft control, the cultivation of politics below the political.12 The slogan of governance might be that where there is gas, there is oil, but where there is politics there is labor, a kind of labor that might be provoked, in the words of critique, or grown, in the words of policy, into labor-power. But this labor as subjectivity is not politics to itself. It must be politicized if it is to yield up its labor-power, or rather we might say, politics is the refining process for immaterial labor. Politicization is the work of state-thought, the work today, of capital. This is the interest it bears. And interests are its lifeblood, its labor. 14

Governance operates through the apparent autogeneration of these interests. Unlike that in previous regimes of sovereignty, there is no predetermined interest (no nation, no constitution, no language) to be realized collectively. Rather, interests are solicited, offered up, and accumulated. But this is a moment so close to life, to vitality, to the body, so close to no interests that the imposition of self-management becomes imperative. That imposition is governance and its mark is the alienation of these interests in disinterestedness, the fully mature state of governance, where the abstract interest produces a radical contingency aimed at the fugitive planning of those without interests.13 15

Governance then becomes the management of self-management. The generation of interests appears as wealth, plentitude, potential. It hides the waste of the raw immaterial and its reproduction in the flurry of its conferences, consultations, and outreach. Indeed, within the firm, self-management is distinguished from obedience by the generation of new interests in quality, design, discipline, and communication. But with the implosion of the time and space in the firm, with the dispersion and virtualization of productivity, governance arrives to manage self-management, not from above, but from below. What comes up then may not be value from below as Negri calls it, but politics from below, such that we have to be wary of the grassroots and suspicious of the community.14 When what emerges from below is interests, when value from below becomes politics from below, self-management has been realized, and governance has done its work. 358 Fred Moten and Stefano Harney

16

The Soviets used to say that the United States had free speech but no one could hear you over the noise of the machines. Today no one can hear you over the noise of talk. Maurizio Lazzarato says immaterial labor is loquacious while industrial labor was mute.15 Governance populations are gregarious. Gregariousness is the exchange form of immaterial labor-power, a laborpower summoned by interests from a communicability without interest, a viral communicability, a beat. The compulsion to tell us how you feel is the compulsion of labor, not citizenship, exploitation not domination, and it is whiteness. Whiteness is why Lazzarato does not hear industrial labor. Whiteness is not merely a relationship to blackness, as we have tried to describe it here, but in particular a relationship to blackness in its relationship to capital, which is to say the movement from muteness to dumb insolence that may be by way of bringing the noise. But the noise of talk, white noise, the information-rich environment of the gregarious, comes from subjectivities formed of objectified labor. These are the subjectivities of interests, subjectivities of labor-power whose potentialities are already bounded by how they will be spent, and mute to their blackness. This is the real muteness of industrial labor. And it is the real gregariousness of immaterial labor. Governance is the extension of whiteness on a global scale. 17

nGos are the laboratories of governance. The premise of the nGo is that all populations must become gregarious. And the ethics of the nGo, the dream of governance in general, goes beyond representation as a form of sovereignty to autogenerate representation, in the double sense. Those who can represent themselves will also be those who re-present themselves as interested in one and the same move, collapsing the distinction. The nGo is the research and development arm of governance, finding new ways to bring to blackness what it is said to lack, the thing that cannot be brought, interests. People must speak for themselves, is the mantra of governance. They must enter a public composed of the privacy and privation of autogenerated interests.

Blackness and Governance 359

18

Governance is the putting to work of democracy. When representation becomes the obligation of all, when politics becomes the work of all, democracy is labored. No longer can democracy promise the return of something lost in the workplace, but rather becomes itself an extension of the workplace. And even democracy cannot contain governance, but is only a tool in its box. Governance is always generated, always organic to any situation. Democracy sits badly in many situations, and must be worked at, made to appear as natural as governance, made to serve governance. 19

Governance is the annunciation of universal exchange. It is the exchange through communication of all institutional forms; the only thing forms of exchange value in each other is the enunciation of governance. The hospital talks to the prison, which talks to the university, which talks to the nGo, which talks to the corporation through governance, and they talk not just to each other but about each other. Everybody knows everything about our biopolitics. This is the disinterested stance of interests. This is the perfection of democracy under the general equivalent. It is also the annunciation of governance as the realization of universal exchange on the grounds of capitalism. 20

Governance and criminality—the condition of being without interests— come to make each other possible. What would it mean to struggle against governance, against that which produces struggle by germinating interests? When governance is understood as the criminalization of being without interests, as a regulation brought into being by criminality, where criminality is that excess left from, because it is before, criminalization, a certain fragility emerges, a certain limit, an uncertain imposition by a greater drive, the mere utterance of whose name has again become too black, too strong altogether. noTes

1. Marx, Grundrisse, 488. 2. See Mullen, “Runaway Tongue.” 3. See, for instance, Golden, Freestyle, as well as its anticipatory rebuttal, Baraka, In Our Terribleness. 4. See Hartman, Scenes of Subjection.

360 Fred Moten and Stefano Harney

5. See Kant, “On the combination of taste with genius in products of beautiful art,” in Critique of the Power of Judgment, 197. 6. See Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” in Écrits, 4; Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 247; and Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression, 155–77. 7. See Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 143. 8. Rose, Governing the Soul. 9. See Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, in which something like a history of chattel slavery haunts the new conditions of the multitude unnamed and unsung. 10. Spivak, “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value.” 11. Negri, “Response to Pierre Macherey.” 12. Terranova, Network Culture. 13. Moten and Harney, “Planning and Policy.” 14. Negri, “Value and Affect.” 15. Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labour,” 133–47.

Blackness and Governance 361

BiBlioGrapHy

Abadan-Unat, Nermin. Bitmeyen Göç—Göçmen İşçilikten Ulus-Ötesi Yurttaşlığa. Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi University Press, 2002. Abu-Lughod, Lila. “Dialectics of Women’s Empowerment: The International Circuitry of the Arab Human Development Report 2005.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 1 (2009): 83–103. ———. “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others.” American Anthropologist 3 (2002): 783–90. Abunimah, Ali. “Death and Lies in Palestine.” Counterpunch. November 26, 2002. Available at http://www.counterpunch.org/abunimah1126.html. Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena, 515 U.S. 200 (1995). Adkins, Lisa. “The New Economy, Property, and Personhood.” Theory, Culture and Society 22, no. 1 (2005): 111–30. Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. ———. Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. ———. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. ———. The Coming Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. London: Routledge, 2005. ———. “Affective Economies.” Social Text 22, no. 2 (summer 2004): 117–39. Alliance of South Asians Taking Action. “Press Release: ASAtA Condemns World Trade Center Attacks and Anti-Arab Sentiments.” September 12, 2001. Available at http:// www.asata.org. Anagnost, Ann. “The Corporeal Politics of ‘Quality’ (Suzhi ).” Public Culture 16, no. 3 (2004): 189–208. ———. “Prosperity and Counter-Prosperity: The Moral Discourse on Wealth in Post-

Mao China.” In Marxism and the Chinese Experience: Issues of Socialism in a Third World Socialist Society, edited by Arif Dirlik and Maurice Meisner, 210–34. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1989. Ansay, Tuğrul. “The New un Convention in Light of the German and Turkish Experience.” International Migration Review 25, no. 4 (1991): 831–47. Anti-Defamation League. “AdL Offers Reward in Attack on Sikh.” May 23, 2003. Available at http://www.adl.org/. Aracagök, Zafer. “Whatever Image.” Postmodern Culture 13, no. 2 (2003). Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future. New York: Penguin, 1993. Arnoldi, Jakob. “Informational Ideas.” Thesis Eleven 89, no. 1 (2007): 58–73. Asians in Media. “Award Winning Documentary on Sikh Hate-Crime Comes to London.” Asians in Media Magazine, March 29, 2004. Available at http://www.asiansinmedia.org. Associated Press. “Man Sentenced to Death Receives 36 Years in Prison.” October 15, 2003. Associated Press. “Sikhs Coping with Apparent Hate Crime.” Casa Grande Valley Newspapers. May 22, 2003. Available at http://www.zwire.com/. Associated Press. “Sikh Shot at in Hate Crime Case.” Tribune (India), May 21, 2003. Available at http://www.tribuneindia.com/. Associated Press. “Anti-Arab Incidents Hike Number of Hate Crimes in Mass.” September 25, 2002. Associated Press. “FBI to Investigate Killing of Egyptian Grocery Store Owner as Hate Crime.” September 17, 2001. Athanasiou, Athena. “Technologies of Humanness, Aporias of Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity.” Differences 14, no. 1 (2003): 125–62. Aunger, Robert. The Electric Meme. New York: Free Press, 2002. Axel, Brian Keith. The Nation’s Tortured Body: Violence, Representation, and the Formation of a Sikh “Diaspora.” Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Baldick, Chris. In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth- Century Writing. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Bank of International Settlements. “Amounts Outstanding of Over-the-Counter (otc) Derivatives.” Table 19. Available at http://www.bis.org/. Baraka, Amiri. In Our Terribleness: Some Elements and Meaning in Black Style. New York: BobbsMerrill, 1970. Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Bell, Derrick, ed. Race, Racism, and American Law. 4th ed. New York: Aspen, 2000. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (1939).” In Selected Writings, Vol. 4, edited by H. Eiland and M. Jennings. Boston: Belknap, 2006. Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Translated by N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1988. Reprint, New York: Zone Books, 1991. Berlin, Ira, and Leslie M. Harris, eds. Slavery in New York. New York: New Press, 2005. Bigo, Didier. “Migration and Security.” In Controlling a New Migration World, edited by Virginie Guiraudon and Christian Joppke, 121–49. London: Routledge, 2001.

364 Bibliography

Bishnoi, Rati. “Hate Crimes Rise from Ashes of September 11 Attacks.” National NOW Times, spring 2002. Available at http://www.now.org. Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Blecher, Marc. “Inequality and Capitalism in China.” Paper prepared for the American Political Science Association Task Force Conference on Inequality and Difference in the Third World (2005). Available at http://www.apsanet.org/imgtest/ TaskForceDiffIneqDevBlecher.pdf. Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U.S. 497 (1954). Borradori, Giovanna, Jacques Derrida, and Jürgen Habermas. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Bremer, Paul L., III. “New Risks in International Business.” Viewpoint: The Marsh and McLennan Companies Journal 2 (2001). Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). Buck-Morss, Susan. “Envisioning Capital: Political Economy on Display.” Critical Inquiry, 21, no. 2 (1995): 434–67. Bush v. Vera, 116 S. Ct. 1941 (1996). Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso, 2004. ———. “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia.” In Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising, edited by Robert Gooding-Williams, 15–22. New York: Routledge, 1993. Cai, Fang. “Rural Urban Income Gap and Critical Point of Institutional Change.” Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Working Paper Series, No. 37 (2003). Available at http://iple.cass.cn/file/37.pdf. Campbell, Horace. “Beyond Militarism and Terrorism in the Biotech Century: Toward a Culture of Peace and Transformation beyond Militarism.” Radical History Review 85 (winter 2003): 24–36. ccru. “Digital Hyperstition.” Abstract Culture: Swarm 4 (1999). Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Cheah, Pheng, and Bruce Robbins, eds. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Chertoff, Michael. “Remarks for Secretary Michael Chertoff U.S. Department of Homeland Security George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute.” Washington, D.C., March 16, 2005. Available at http://www.dhs.gov/xnews/speeches/ speech_0245.shtm. Chhibber, Kavita. “Sikh Lives: The Sikh American Experience as Told by Those Who Lived It.” Available at http://www.kavitachhibber.com/. China Daily. “Income Gap in China Widens in First Quarter.” June 19, 2005. Chow, Rey. The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Bibliography 365

———. “Writing in the Realm of the Senses: Introduction.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 11, no. 2 (1999): i–ii. ———. Primitive Passions. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Control and Freedom. Cambridge: MIt Press, 2004. City of Richmond v. J. A. Croson Co., 488 U.S. 469 (1989). Clarke, Andy. “Where Brain, Body, and World Collide.” Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 127, no. 2 (1998): 257–80. Clough, Patricia Ticineto. “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia and Bodies.” Theory, Culture & Society 25, no. 1 (2008): 1–22. ———. Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Technology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Clough, Patricia Ticineto, Greg Goldberg, Rachel Schiff, Aaron Weeks, and Craig Willse. “Notes Towards a Theory of Affect-Itself.” Ephemera 7, no. 1 (2007): 60–77. Clough, Patricia Ticineto, with Jean Halley, eds. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. cnn. “Hate Crimes Reports Up in Wake of Terrorist Attacks.” September 17, 2001. Available at http://archives.cnn.com/. Cody, Edward. “In Face of Rural Unrest, China Rolls Out Reforms.” Washington Post, January 28, 2006. Cohen, Lawrence. “The Other Kidney: Biopolitics Beyond Recognition.” Body and Society 7, no. 2–3 (2001): 9–29. Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. “Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming.” Public Culture 12, no. 2 (2000): 291–343. Cooper, Melinda. Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. ———. “Clinical Capital-Neo-liberalism and the Will to Experiment (China and the U.S.).” GBrG Working Paper No. 18, 2007. Copjec, Joan. Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation. Cambridge: MIt Press, 2002. Cordesman, Anthony. The War after the War: Strategic Lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan. Washington, D.C.: cSIS, 2004. ———. The Iraq War: Strategy, Tactics, and Military Lessons. Washington, D.C.: cSIS, 2003. ———. The Lessons of Afghanistan: War Fighting, Intelligence, and Force Transformation. Washington, D.C.: cSIS, 2002. Da Costa, Beatriz, and Kavita Philip, eds. Tactical Biopolitics: Art Activism, and Technoscience. Cambridge: MIt Press, 2008. Damasio, Antonia. Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. New York: Harcourt, 2003. Dante. Inferno. Translated by Mark Musa. New York: Penguin, 2002. Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. De Genova, Nicholas. “The Production of Culprits: From Deportabiity to Detainability in the Aftermath of ‘Homeland Secuirty.’” Citizenship Studies 11 (2007): 421–48. DeLanda, Manuel. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. New York: Continuum, 2004. ———. War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. New York: Zone Books, 1991.

366 Bibliography

Deleuze, Gilles. “Making Inaudible Forces Audible.” In Two Regimes of Madness, translated by Amy Hodges and Mike Taormina, 156–60. New York: Semiotexte, 2006. ———. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. ———. Negotiations: 1972–1990. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. ———. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. London: Athlone Press, 1994. ———. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (1992): 3–7. ———. Bergsonism. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books, 1991. ———. Foucault. Translated by Séan Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. ———. Cinema 1. The Movement-Image. Translated by H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. London: Athlone, 1986. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. ———. Anti- Oedipus. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Dennett, Daniel. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York: Penguin, 1996. Derrida, Jacques. “Force of Law and the ‘Mystical Foundations of Authority.’” In Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, edited by D. Cornell, M. Rosenfeld, and D. G. Carlson, 3–67. New York: Routledge, 1992. Dibbell, Julian. “The Life of a Chinese Gold Farmer.” New York Times Magazine, June 17, 2007. ———. Play Money; or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot. New York: Basic, 2006. Donohue, Pete. “tA Edict Spurs Turban Tussle.” New York Daily News, June 24, 2004. Dyer-Witheford, Nick. “Global Body, Global Brain/Global Factory, Global War: Revolt of the Value Subjects.” The Commoner 3 (January 2001). Edelman, Gerald M., and Giulio Tononi. Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination. New York: Penguin, 2000. Eng, David L. “Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas.” Social Text 21, no. 3, 76 (fall 2003): 1–37. Eng, David L., and Shinhee Han. “A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia.” In Loss: The Politics of Mourning, edited by David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, 343–71. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Engelhardt, Tom. “John Feffer: The Piracy Problem.” TomDispatch.com, April 21, 2009. http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175062. ———. “Tomgram: The Presidency Shines.” TomDispatch.com. September 18, 2005. http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/22726/. Ericson, Richard V., and Kevin D. Haggerty. Policing the Risk Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Bibliography 367

Eryılmaz, Aytaç. 40 Years in Germany—At Home Abroad. Cologne: doMIt (Documentation Centre and Museum of the Migration from Turkey), 2002. European Security. German Immigration Act: Summary of Major Aspects. Available at http:// www.european-security.com/index.php?id=4744. Executive Order 13491. January 22, 2009. Available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_ press_office/EnsuringLawfulInterrogations/. Fabian, Johannes. The Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Farquhar, Judith. Appetites: Food and Sex in Postsocialist China. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. ———. “Technologies of Everyday Life: The Economy of Impotence in Reform China.” Cultural Anthropology 14, no. 2 (1999): 155–79. Fernandez, Manny. “Study Finds Disparities in Mortgages by Race.” New York Times, October 15, 2007. Fischer, Michael M.J. Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Fitzpatrick, Peter. “Bare Sovereignty: Homo Sacer and the Insistence of Law.” Theory and Event 5, no. 2 (2001). Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. London: Reaktion Books, 1983. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. ———. Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978. Edited by Michel Snellart. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. ———. Society Must Be Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976. Translated by David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003. ———. “The Political Technology of Individuals.” In Technologies of the Self, edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton, 145–62. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. ———. “The Discourse on Language,” in The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by Rupert Sawyer. New York: Pantheon, 1982. ———. “Governmentality.” Ideology and Consciousness 6 (1979): 5–21. ———. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1978. ———. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon, 1977. ———. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Memory, Counter-practice. Edited by D. F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. Franklin, Sarah, and Margaret Lock. “Animation and Cessation: The Remaking of Life and Death.” In Remaking Life & Death: Toward an Anthropology of the Biosciences, edited by Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock, 3–22. Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press, 2003. French, Martin. “In the Shadows of Canada’s Camps.” Social and Legal Studies 16, no. 1 (2007): 49–69.

368 Bibliography

Frieden, Terry. “Ashcroft Meets with Muslim, Arab Leaders.” CNN.com, October 16, 2001. http://archives.cnn.com/. Fulci, Lucio. Zombi 2/Zombie:25th Anniversary Edition. dVd. Secaucus: Media Blasters, 2004. Gao, Mobo. Gao Village: Rural Life in Modern China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999. Garden State Sikh Association. “Flier: Sikhs Are Not Muslims.” n.d. On file with author. Garden State Sikh Association. “Our Fellow Americans and President Bush Need Our Support to Win the War against Terrorism.” September 2001. On file with author. Garden State Sikh Association. “Post–September 11th Flier.” n.d. On file with author. Garden State Sikh Association. “Press Release.” September 14, 2001. On file with author. Gardiner, Sean. “Sikh Wants End to Turban Ban.” Newsday, March 11, 2002. Gardner, Lloyd, and Marilyn Young, eds. The New American Empire: A 21st Century Teach-In on U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: New Press, 2005. Garland, David. The Culture of Control. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Geddes, Andrew. Immigration and European Integration: Towards Fortress Europe? Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. German Embassy in Ottawa. Germany’s Citizenship Law since 01.01.2000. Available at http:// www.ottawa.diplo.de/en/04/citizenship_20law/ UB_20citizenshiplaw.html. Gibson-Graham, J. K. The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Gibson, James William. Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America. New York: Hill and Wang, 1994. Gibson, William. Pattern Recognition. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2003. Gierke, Otto. Natural Law and the Theory of Society, 1500–1800. Translated by Ernest Barker. Clark, N.J.: Lawbook Exchange, 2002. Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Gilson, Étienne. The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy. Translated by A. H. C. Downes. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991 (1936). Girard, René. The Scapegoat. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Gittings, John. “China Admits ‘Blood Stations’ Caused Steep Rise in AIdS.” Guardian, September 10, 2002. Gladwell, Malcolm. “Troublemakers: What Pit Bulls Can Teach Us about Profiling.” New Yorker, January 1, 2006. Golden, Thelma. Freestyle. New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2001. Goodstein, Laurie, and Tamar Lewin, “Victims of Mistaken Identity, Sikhs Pay a Price for Turbans.” New York Times, September 19, 2001, A, 1. Gotanda, Neil. “The Story of Korematsu: The Japanese-American Cases.” In Constitutional Law Stories, edited by M. Dorf, 249–96. New York: Foundation Press, 2004. ———. “Other Non-Whites in American Legal History: A Review of Justice at War.” Columbia Law Review 85 (1985): 1186–92. Gray, Chris Hables. Postmodern War. New York: Guilford, 1996.

Bibliography 369

Gray, Colin. Strategy for Chaos: Revolutions in Military Affairs and the Evidence of History. London: Frank Cass, 2002. Greene, Graham. The Quiet American. New York: Penguin, 2004. Greenwald, Glenn. “Supreme Court restores habeas corpus, strikes down key part of Military Commissions Act.” Salon.com. June 12, 2008. http://www.salon.com/news/ opinion/glenn_greenwald/2008/06/12/boumediene. Grewal, Inderpal. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Grossberg, Lawrence. Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics and America’s Future. Paradigm, 2005. Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003). Guterson, David. Snow Falling on Cedars. New York: Vintage, 1995. Guttmann, Robert. How Credit Money Shapes the Economy. New York: Armonk, 1994. Haggerty, Kevin D., and Richard V. Ericson. “The Surveillant Assemblage.” British Journal of Sociology 51, no. 4 (2000): 605–22. Hamad, Claudette Shwiry, ed. “Appendix: Hate-Based Incidents September 11–October 10, 2001.” Arab American Institute Foundation Report, prepared for the United States Commission on Civil Rights. October 11, 2001. Available at http://www .thememoryhole.org. Hanashiro, Robert. “Hate Crimes Born out of Tragedy Create Victims.” USAToday.com, September 11, 2002. Hansen, Joyce, and Gary McGowan. Breaking Ground, Breaking Silence: The Story of New York’s African Burial Ground. New York: Holt, 1998. Hansen, Mark B. N. “Digitizing the Racialized Body or The Politics of Universal Address.” SubStance 104, 33, no. 2 (2004): 107–34. ———. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge: MIt Press, 2004. ———. “The Time of Affect, or Bearing Witness to Life.” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 584– 626. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude. New York: Penguin, 2004. ———. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Harris, Cheryl. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1710–91. Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth- Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Harvey, David. The Limits to Capital. Oxford: Basil Blackburn, 1982. Haytock, Jennifer Anne. David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum International, 2002. Healy, Patrick. “3 Indians Attacked on Street and the Police Call It Bias.” New York Times, August 5, 2003. Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology.” In Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt, 3–35. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977. ———. Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

370 Bibliography

Henderson, D. A. “Disease and Terror: The swine-flu outbreak caught health officials completely by surprise—just as a bioterror attack would.” Newsweek, April 30, 2009. Herbert, Ulrich. A History of Foreign Labour in Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990. Hess, Gary R. “The Forgotten Asian Americans: The East Indian Community in the United States.” In The History and Immigration of Asian Americans, edited by Franklin Ng, 106–26. New York: Garland, 1998. Hicks, Scott, dir. Snow Falling on Cedars. dVd. Starring Ethan Hawke, Max von Sydow, and Youki Kudoh. Universal City, Calif.: Universal Studios, 2000. Hilferding, Rudolf. Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985. Hirschkind, Charles, and Saba Mahmood. “Feminism, the Taliban, and Politics of Counter-Insurgency.” Anthropological Quarterly, no. 2 (2002): 339–54. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan: With Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1668. Edited by Edwin Curley. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994. Howe, Marvine. “Sikh Leaders in U.S. Voicing Fear of Becoming Scapegoats.” New York Times, June 29, 1985. Hua, Yu. Chronicle of a Blood Merchant. Translated by Andrew F. Jones. New York: Pantheon, 2003. Hussain, Nasser. “Beyond Norm and Exception: Guantanamo.” Critical Inquiry 33, no.4 (2007): 734–53. IndiaExpress Bureau. “U.S. Sikhs.” August 10, 2002. Available at http://www.religion newsblog.com/. ———. “U.S. Sikhs’ Initiative to End Hate-Crime.” August 9, 2002. Available at http:// www.religionnewsblog.com/. Indo-Asian News Service. “White Hate Groups Target U.S. Sikhs.” Times of India, December 12, 2003. Irons, Peter. Justice at War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Isikoff, Michael, and Mark Hosenball. “The End of Torture.” Newsweek, January 22, 2009. IslamOnline and News Agencies. “Pakistani Grocer Shot Dead in Texas.” IslamOnline .net, September 16, 2001. Available at http://www.islam-online.net. Jameson, Fredric. Archeologies of the Future. London: Verso, 2005. Jewett, Christina. “Army Rules Deter Sikhs from Joining.” Sacramento Bee, February 27, 2004. Joseph, May. “Old Routes, Mnemonic Traces.” UTS Review 6, no. 2 (November 2000): 44–56. Juhasz, Antonia. The Bush Agenda: Invading the World One Economy at a Time. New York: Regan Books/Harper Collins, 2006. Kalra, Virinder S. “Locating the Sikh Pagh.” Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory 1, no. 1 (June 2005): 75–92. Kambar, Michael, and Tim Arango. “4,000 U.S. Deaths, and a Handfull of Images.” New York Times, July 26, 2008.

Bibliography 371

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kantorowicz, Ernst. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Keeling, Kara. The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Keenan, Thomas. “The Point Is to (Ex)Change It: Reading Capital, Rhetorically.” In Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, edited by Emily Apter and William Pietz, 152–85. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Kenneth Cole advertisement. New York Times Magazine, September 8, 2002. Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2007. Klopp, Brett. German Multiculturalism: Immigrant Integration and the Transformation of Citizenship. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002. Kong, Deborah. “Arabs, Muslims, and Sikhs Report Sporadic Hate Crimes as War Continues.” Associated Press. March 28, 2003. Korematsu v. U.S., 584 F. Supp. 1406 (1984). Korematsu v. U.S., 323 U.S. 214 (1944). Koshy, Susan. “Morphing Race into Ethnicity: Asian Americans and Critical Transformations of Whiteness.” boundary 2 28, no. 1 (February 2001): 153–94. KRAC.com. “Man Accused of Sikh Hate Crime Apologizes: Accused Says It Was an Act of ‘Senseless Patriotism.’” September 18, 2001. Available at http://www.krac.com/. Kryder, Daniel. Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State During World War II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Kutscha, Martin. “Polis Devletine Dogru.” Evrensel Avrupa, December 1, 2001. Lacan, Jacques. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960). Translated by D. Porter. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. ———. Écrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977. Land, Nick. The Thirst for Annihilation. New York: Routledge, 1992. Landecker, Hannah. “On Beginning and Ending with Apoptosis: Cell Death and Biomedicine.” In Remaking Life & Death: Toward an Anthropology of the Biosciences, edited by Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock, 23–60. Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press, 2003. Lapidos, Juliet. “Storage Company Ads Too Political for Some Tastes.” New York Sun, March 30, 2007. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Lazzarato, Maurizio. La politica dell’evento. Cosenza: Rubbittino, 2004. ———. “Immaterial Labour.” In Radical Thought in Italy, edited by Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, 133–147. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Le Goff, Jacques. “Head or Heart? The Political Use of Body Metaphors in the Middle Ages.” In Fragments for a History of the Human Body. Vol. 3, edited by Michel Feher,

372 Bibliography

Ramona Naddaff, and Nadia Tazi, translated by Patricia Ranum, 13–27. New York: Zone, 1989. Leonard, Christina, Jim Walsh, Charles Kelly, and Lindsey Collom. “Sikhs Voice Outrage over Mesa Hate Killing.” Arizona Republic, September 18, 2001. Li, Qiang. “Chinese Peasants of Misery.” China Labor Watch (2002). Available at http:// www.chinalaborwatch.org/reports/peseant.htm. Lipuma, Edward, and Benjamin Lee. Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967) Luong, Hy V., ed. Postwar Vietnam: Dynamics of a Transforming Society. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Lyon, David. Surveillance Society. Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001. ———. Electronic Eye. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Mahabir, Karen, and Raghuram Vadarevu. “A Cultural Torment: False Report Underscores Pressures on Young Sikhs.” The Record, March 14, 2004. Available at http://www .sikhcoalition.org. Mamdani, Mahmood. When Victims Become Killers. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Mangat, Satwinder. “Hate Crimes against Sikh Community.” Posting to xml- dev online discussion list of Xml.org. September 14, 2005. http://lists.xml.org/archives/xmldev/200109/msg00521. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Boston: MIt Press, 2001. Marchetti, Gina. Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Market Research Centre and the Canadian Trade Commissioner Service of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. “The Biotechnology Market in China.” November, 2001. Available at http://atnriae.agr.ca/asia/e3254.htm#MArKEt%20 oVErVIEW. Marshall, Barbara. The New Germany and Migration in Europe. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Martin, Douglas. “As Indian’s Ranks in Canada Grow, Old Conflicts Are Also Transplanted.” New York Times, June 26, 1985. Martin, Randy. An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. ———. Financialization of Daily Life. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. New York: Vintage, 1973. ———. Capital. Vol. 1. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. New York: International Publishers, 1967. Massumi, Brian. “Future Birth of the Affective Fact.” In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 52–70. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. ———. “Perception Attack: Brief on War Time.” Theory and Event 13, no. 1 (2010).

Bibliography 373

———. “Potential Politics and the Primacy of Preemption.” Theory and Event 10, no. 2 (2007). ———. “Fear (The Spectrum Said).” Special issue of Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 13, no. 1 (March 2005): 31–48. ———. Parables For the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Matsuda, Mari. “Looking to the Bottom: Critical Legal Studies and Reparations.” Harvard Civil Rights- Civil Liberties Law Review 22 (1987): 323–400. Maturana, Humberto R., and Francisco J. Varela. The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Boston: New Science Library, 1987. Mazzetti, Mark, and Scott Shane. “Interrogation Memos Detail Harsh Tactics by C.I.A.” New York Times, April 16, 2009. Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. ———. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. McMahon, Suzanne. Echoes of Freedom: South Asian Pioneers in California, 1899–1965. Library, University of California, Berkeley, online exhibition. October 3, 2001. Available at http://www.lib.berkeley.edu. Mehrlander, Ursula. “The Development of Post-War Migration and Refugee Policy.” In Migration and Economic Development, edited by Klaus F. Zimmerman, 201–30. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1992. Mitchell, Timothy. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Robin L. Riley. Feminism and War. London: Zed Books, 2008. Morris, Lydia. “Globalization, Migration and the Nation-State: The Path to a PostNational Europe.” British Journal of Sociology 48, no. 2 (1997): 192–209. Moten, Fred, and Stefano Harney. “Planning and Policy.” Social Text 100 (2009). Mullen, Harryette. “Runaway Tongue: Resistant Orality in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Our Nig, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Beloved.” In The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth- Century America, edited by Shirley Samuels. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Muneer, Ahmed. “Homeland Insecurity.” Social Text 20, no 3, 72 (fall 2002): 101–15. Naim, Tahir. “SABA: South Asians Being Targeted in Wake of Attack.” E-mail message forwarded to author. Received September 13, 2001. Nanda, Tanmaya Kumar. “Sikhs Become Targets of Ire in New York.” rediff.com. U.S. ed. September 12, 2001. http://www.rediff.com/. National Commission on Excellence in Education. A Nation At Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform: A Report to the Nation and the Secretary of Education. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1983. Negarastani, Reza. “Death as Perversion: Openness and Germinal Death.” Ctheory (October 15, 2003). Negri, Antonio. “Response to Pierre Macherey.” May 1, 2006. http://www.elkilombo .org/.

374 Bibliography

———. Time for Revolution. Translated by Matteo Mandarini. New York: Continuum, 2003. ———. “Value and Affect.” Translated by Michael Hardt. boundary 2 26, no. 2 (1999): 77–88. Neocleous, Mark. “The Political Economy of the Dead: Marx’s Vampires.” History of Political Thought 24, no. 4 (2003): 668–84. Newindpress. “Sher- e-Punjab Sponsors 92-Year-Old Sikh for nY Marathon.” September 26, 2003. Available at http://www.saldef.org. Nicholas of Cusa. The Catholic Concordance (De concordantia catholica). Translated by Paul Sigmund. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Niranjana, Tejaswini. Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Norris, Andrew. Introduction to Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, edited by Andrew Norris, 1–30. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. ntVMSnBc. Türk İmama Sınır Dışına Durdurma. March 3, 2005. Available at http:// www.ntvmsnbc.com. O’Dochartaigh, Pol. Germany Since 1945. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “Declassified Key Judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate ‘Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States.’” April 2006. Available at http://www.dni.gov/. Ong, Aihwa. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Paphitis, Nicholas. “Greek Government Points to Arson for Fires.” Guardian, August 28, 2007. Parasuram, T. V. “Indian Embassy Condemns Attacks on Sikhs.” rediff.com. U.S. ed. September 14, 2001. http://www.rediff.com/. Piven, Frances Fox. The War at Home: The Domestic Costs of Bush’s Militarism. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. Plato. The Republic. Translated by Desmond Lee. New York: Penguin, 2003. Pomfret, John. “China Blocks Trip to U.S. by AIdS Award Honoree.” Washington Post, May 30, 2001. Pradhan, Avanti A. “The Mourning After: Sikh Americans’ Cultural Awareness Campaign Following 9/11.” SAGAR: A South Asian Graduate Research Journal 9 (fall 2002): 79–94. “President Bush Delivers Remarks on Hurricane Katrina Recovery.” Washington Post, September 15, 2005. Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Pun, Ngai. Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Purewal, Sukhjit. “Threats, Snide Remarks Worsen the Pain of Bay Area Muslims.” rediff. com. U.S. ed. September 12, 2001. http://www.rediff.com/. Purnick, Joyce. “Transit Rules? Scratch Head, Covered or Not.” New York Times, June 10, 2004.

Bibliography 375

Rai, Amit S. “Burn Completely.” MediaEcologies.com. April 30, 2009. http://www .mediaecologiesresonate.wordpress.com/. ———. “On the Work of Art Today: Benjamin and the Machinic Phylum.” Available at http://www.mediaecologiesresonate.wordpress.com/. ———. Rule of Sympathy. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Rajan, Kaushik Sunder. Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. ———. “Genomic Capital: Public Cultures and Market Logics of Corporate Biotechnology.” Science as Culture 12, no. 2 (2003): 87–121. Rancière, Jacques. The Future of the Image. New York: Verso, 2007. Rasmussen, Steen, Liaohai Chen, David Deamer, David C. Krakauer, Norman H. Packard, Peter F. Stadler, and Mark A. Bedau. “Evolution: Transitions from Nonliving to Living Matter.” Science, February 13, 2004, 963–65. Read, Jason. “A Genealogy of Homo Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity.” Foucault Studies (2009). Regents of the University of California v. Bakke 438 U.S. 265 (1978). Retort. Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War. New York: Verso, 2005. Rist, Ray C. “Migration and Marginality: Guestworkers in Germany and France.” Daedalus 108, no. 2 (1979): 95–108. Roots in the Sand. Produced and directed by Jayasri Mujamdar Hart. 57 min. Center for Asian American Media. San Francisco, 1998. Rose, Nikolas. Powers of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ———. “The Politics of Life Itself.” Theory, Culture and Society 18, no. 6 (2001): 1–30. ———. Governing the Soul. London: Free Association Books, 1999. Rosenthal, Elisabeth. “In Rural China, a Steep Price of Poverty: Dying of AIdS.” New York Times, October 28, 2000. Ross, Andrew. Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade. New York: Pantheon, 2006. Saldanha, Arun. “Reontologising Race: The Machinic Geography of Phenotype.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24, no. 1 (2006): 9–24. Sanders, Eli. “Understanding Turbans.” Illustrated by Paul Schmid. Seattle Times, September 27, 2001. Sassen, Saskia. Guests and Aliens. New York: New Press, 1999. Schier, Steven E., ed. High Risk and Big Ambition: The Presidency of George W. Bush. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004. Schmidt, Christoph M., and Klaus F. Zimmerman. “Migration Pressure in Germany.” In Migration and Economic Development, edited by Klaus F. Zimmerman, 201–30. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1992. Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Edited by George Schwab. Translated by Tracy Strong. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Shao, Jing. “Fluid Labor and Blood Money: The Economy of HIV/AIdS in Rural Central China.” Cultural Anthropology 21, no. 4 (2006): 535–69. Sharpe, Jenny, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. “A Conversation with Gayatri Chakra-

376 Bibliography

vorty Spivak: Politics and the Imagination.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2 (2003). Shenon, Philip, and Robin Toner. “Immigrant Arrests: 75 in Custody Following Terror Attack Can Be Held Indefinitely.” New York Times, September 19, 2001. Shima, Keisuke, Nan Bu, Masaru Okamoto, and Toshio Tsuji. “A Universal Interface for Video Game Machines Using Biological Signals.” ICEC 3711 (2005): 88–98. Shukla, Sandhya. India Abroad: Diasporic Cultures of Postwar America and England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Sikh Coalition. “Press Packet: New Jersey Sikh Civil Rights and Civic Engagement Initiative.” Case Profile: Harvinder Kaur, Overland Park, KS, December 9, 2003. http:// www.sikhcoalition.org/. ———. “Please Participate in Candle Night Vigil.” Posting to Sikhupdate Yahoo group. December 7, 2001. http://groups.yahoo.com/. ———. “Allow Turbaned Sikhs to Serve as Officers in the nYPd.” Online petition to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the nYPd. n.d. Available at http://www .petitiononline.com/. ———. Sikhs. Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. n.d. Available at http://www.sikh coalition.org/. ———. “Your Rights and Avenues of Action as a Victim of Airport Profiling.” Fact sheet. n.d. Available at http://www.sikhcoalition.org/. Sikh Mediawatch and Resource Task Force. “Multi-Jurisdiction Meeting Held to Address California Sikh Cab Driver Shootings.” Press release. July 24, 2003. Available at http:// www.saldef.org/. ———. “SMArt Encourages Community Members to Educate Local Airport Security Personnel about Sikhs.” November 16, 2001. Available at http://sikhnet.com/. ———. “SMArt Initiates Airport Educational Campaign, Requests Community Involvement.” November 16, 2001. Available at http://sikhnet.com/. ———. “SMArt Calls for Action against Cooksey.” Press release. September 20, 2001. Available at http://www.saldef.org/. ———. “Sikh Americans Denounce the Terrorist Attack, Ask Americans to Unite.” Press release. September 12, 2001. Available at http://www.saldef.org/. Sikh Mediawatch and Resource Task Force, Sikh-Sewa (N.Y.), Sikh Youth Federation of North America, United Sikhs in Service of America, Sikh Heresy Regulation Board, Sikh Network, Sikh Sisterhood, and Columbia University Sikhs. “Americans of Sikhs [sic] Extraction Caution Indian Prime Minister.” Posting to Sikhupdate Yahoo group. September 19, 2001. SikhNet. “Federal Aviation Administration to Ensure New Security Procedures That Preserve and Respect the Civil Rights of All Americans.” November 19, 2001. Available at http://www.sikhnet.com/. ———. “Sikh Representatives Meet U.S. Congressional Leaders.” 2001. Available at http://www.sikhnet.com/. SikhNet, Sikh American Association, Sikh Coalition, Sikh Council on Religion and Education, Sikh Mediawatch and Resource Taskforce, and The Sikh Communications

Bibliography 377

Council. “Sikhs Respond to Representative Saxby Chambliss Bigoted Comments.” Press release. December 22, 2001. Available at http://www.sikhnet.com/. SikhWomen.com. “U.S. Department of Transporation (dot) Turban Policy.” Fact sheet and memorandum. May 2, 2002. Available at http://www.sikhwomen.com/. Singh, Amarajit. “Are Kashmiri Sikhs Next on India’s Hit List—Again?” Khalistan Calling newsletter, August 7, 2001. Available at http://www.khalistan-affairs.org/. ———. “35 Sikhs Murdered on March 20, 2000 in Indian Occupied Kashmir: Fingerprints of Indian Intelligence Agencies All Over the Gruesome Massacre of Sikh Innocents.” March 22, 2000. http://www.khalistan-affairs.org/. Smith, Andrea. “American Studies without America: Native Feminisms and the NationState.” American Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2008): 309–15. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “From Haverstock Hill Flat to U.S. Classroom. What’s Left of Theory?” In What’s Left of Theory?: New Works on the Politics of Literary Theory, edited by Judith Butler, John Guillory, and Kendall Thomas, 1–40. New York: Routledge, 2000. ———. The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. Edited by Sara Harasym. New York: Routledge, 1990. ———. “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value.” In In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, 154–75. New York: Routledge, 1988. ———. “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value.” Diacritics 15, no. 4 (1985). Stalker, Peter. “Migration Trends and Migration Policy in Europe.” International Migration 40, no. 5 (2002): 151–76. Stout, David. “Holder Tells Senators Waterboarding Is Torture.” New York Times, January 15, 2009. Street, Richard Steven. Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769– 1913. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Suan, Tara. “Suspension for Ceremonial Knives Slices Religious Rights.” Daily Californian, September 2, 1994. Sui, Cindy. “Chinese Village Riddled with AIdS Left to Die by Government.” Agence France Press, November 30, 2000. Swapan, Ashfaque. “South Asian Reporters Help Present Community’s Stories.” IndiaWest, October 4, 2001. Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. New York: Back Bay Books, 1989. Taubes, Jacob. The Political Theology of Paul. Edited by Aleida Assman and Jan Assman. Translated by Dana Hollander. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge, 1993. ———. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Terranova, Tiziana. “Futurepublic: On Information Warfare, Bio-racism and Hegemony as Noopolitics.” Theory, Culture & Society 24, no. 3 (2007). ———. Network Culture: Politics in the Information Age. London: Pluto, 2004.

378 Bibliography

Thomsen, Scott. “Arizona Man Accused of Killing Sikh: ‘I’m an American!’” Associated Press, September 28, 2001. Times of India. “Sporadic Violence against Ethnic Minorities.” September 14, 2001. Topal, Çağatay. “Surveillance in Germany after 9/11: The Case of Immigrants from Turkey.” European Societies 10, no. 5 (2008): 811–34. “Transcript: Obama’s National Security Team Announcement.” New York Times, December 1, 2008. Tsing, Anna. “The Global Situation.” Cultural Anthropology 15, no. 3 (2000): 327–60. United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 1923 U.S. LEXIS 2544. U.S. Embassy, Beijing. “Prc Blood Donors and the Spread of Rural AIdS.” 2000. Available at http://www.usembassy- china.org.cn/sandt/AIDSblood.htm. Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude. New York: Semiotext(e), 2004. Wahrig, Gerhard. Deutsches Wörterbuch. Munich: Mosaik, 1987. Waldby, Catherine. The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine. New York: Routledge, 2000. Waldby, Catherine, and Robert Mitchell. Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Walsh, Mary Williams. “More Companies Ending Promises for Retirement.” New York Times, January 9, 2006. Wan Yanhai. “China Health News and the Henan Province Health Scandal Cover-up.” Aizhi Action Program, January 20, 2002. Available at http://www.usembassy-china.org .cn/sandt/ChinaHealthNews- criticism.html. Weichert, Thilo. “The German System of Aliens Control.” “FORTRESS EUROPE?”: Circular Letter 36 (July/August 1995): 2. Weisberg, D. Kelly, ed. Applications of Feminist Legal Theory to Women’s Lives: Sex, Violence, Work, and Reproduction. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996. ———. Feminist Legal Theory: Foundations. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas. New York: Macmillan, 1978. ———. Process and Reality. New York: Free Press, 1978. Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. London: Free Association Books, 1989. William of Ockham. A Letter to the Friars Minor and Other Writings. Edited by Arthur Stephen McGrade and John Kilcullen. Translated by John Kilcullen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Winichakul, Thongchai. “Siam Mapped: The Making of Thai Nationhood.” Ecologist 26 (1996): 215–21. Wright, Erik Olin. Classes. London: Verso, 1985. Yan, Hairong. “Neoliberal Governmentality and Neohumanism: Organizing Suzhi/Value Flow through Labor Recruitment Networks.” Cultural Anthropology 18, no. 4 (2003): 493–523. ———. “Spectralization of the Rural: Reinterpreting the Labor Mobility of Rural Young Women in Post-Mao China.” American Ethnologist 30, no. 4 (2003): 478–596.

Bibliography 379

Yuskaev, Timur, and Matt Weiner. “Secular and Religious Rights: Ban the Croissant!” International Herald Tribune, December 19, 2003. Zaman. “Sınır Dışı Edilen Türk İmam Alman Anayasa Mahkemesine Gidecek.” March 25, 2005. Available at http://www.zaman.com.tr/. Zhao, Shilung, and Guangwu Shang. “HIV among Shanglou District, Shaanxi Province Blood Donors.” Southern Weekend, March 15, 2001. Žižek, Slavoj. Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences. New York: Routledge, 2004.

380 Bibliography

contriBUtors

ann anagnost teaches anthropology at the University of Washington. She is the author

of National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation, and Power (Duke University Press, 1997). Her current research is on the cultural economy of human capital formation in reformera China. Una chung is an assistant professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College, where she

teaches courses on Asian American literature and film, postcolonial theory, and new media. She is currently completing a book entitled “Contagion of Living: East-West Experimentations with Affectivity, Subjectivity, and Political Embodiment.” patricia ticineto clough is a professor of sociology and women’s studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and Queens College of the City University of New York. She is the author of Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (2000), Feminist Thought: Desire, Power and Academic Discourse (1994), and The End(s) of Ethnography: From Realism to Social Criticism (1998). She is the editor of The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (2007). She is currently working on Ecstatic Corona: Philosophy and Family Violence, a book-length ethnographic and experimental writing project about Corona in Queens, New York, where Clough grew up. steve Goodman is a lecturer in music culture at the School of Sciences, Media, and Cultural Studies at the University of East London, a member of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (ccru), and the founder of the record label Hyperdub. He produces bassdriven electronic music under the name “kode9” and is a member of the sound- art collective Audint. He is the author of Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (MIt Press, 2009). sora y. Han is an assistant professor in criminology, law, and society at the University

of California, Irvine. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her J.D. from the University

of California, Los Angeles, School of Law, with an emphasis in critical race studies. She is currently working on a book, “Letters of the Law: Race and the Feminine in Post–Civil Rights America,” which examines the intersections of racial jurisprudence and popular culture. Her general research interests include the literary imagination of constitutional law, psychoanalytic theory, critical prison studies, and racial and feminist politics. stefano Harney is chair in strategy, culture, and society at the School of Business and

Management, Queen Mary University of London. Fred Moten is associate professor of English and African and African American studies at Duke. Their collaborative work includes “Planning and Policy,” in Social Text (2009); “The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses,” in Social Text (2004); “The Academic Speed-Up,” in Workplace: A Journal of Academic Labor (1999); and “Doing Academic Labor,” in Chalk Lines: The Politics of Work in the Managed University (Duke University Press, 1998). May Joseph is a puppeteer, theater director, and the founder of Harmattan Theater in New

York City. She is an associate professor of global studies in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at the Pratt Institute, New York. Joseph has written widely on Indian Ocean cultural flows, globalization, urbanism, performance, film, and visual culture. She is the author of Nomadic Identities: The Performance of Citizenship (Minnesota University Press, 1999) and a coeditor of Performing Hybridity (Minnesota University Press, 1999). Her coedited volumes include an issue of the Journal of Space and Culture titled “City Corps” and issues of Women and Performance titled “Identities” and “Bodywork.” Joseph is completing a book on urban expressivity called “Metro Lives: Performing the City,” to be published by Duke University Press. randy Martin is chair of art and public policy at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. He is the author of An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management (Duke University Press, 2007). Brian Massumi specializes in political philosophy and the philosophy of experience, art, and media theory. He is the author of Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurent Arts (MIt Press, 2011), Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Duke University Press, 2002), and other books. He is the editor of The Politics of Everyday Fear (University of Minnesota Press, 1993) and A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari (Routledge, 2002). With Erin Manning of the SenseLab, Concordia University, he organizes a series of events and activities under the title “Technologies of Lived Abstraction” and edits an MIt Press book series of the same title. luciana parisi is the convener of the Interactive Media M.A. at Goldsmiths University

of London. In 2004 she published Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (Continuum Press). Recently, she has been writing on soft architecture and has completed a monograph on the metaphysics of computational culture (MIt Press, forthcoming). Jasbir puar is an associate professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers Univer-

sity. Her research interests include gender, sexuality, globalization, postcolonial and

382 Contributors

diaspora studies, South Asian cultural studies, and theories of assemblage and affect. She is the author of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Duke University Press, 2007), which won the 2007 Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. Puar has authored articles appearing in Gender, Place, and Culture; Social Text; Radical History Review; Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography; and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Her edited volumes include a special issue of GLQ titled “Queer Tourism: Geographies of Globalization” and a coedited volume of Society and Space titled “Sexuality and Space.” amit s. rai is an associate professor of film, media, and postcolonial studies at Florida State University. He is the author of Rule of Sympathy: Race, Sentiment, and Power (Palgrave, 2002). He has written on Indian masculinity in film, anthropologies of monstrosity, sympathetic discursive relations, and the swerves of media. His study of new media in India, Untimely Bollywood: Globalization and India’s New Media Assemblage, was published in May of 2009. His blog on media assemblages and the politics of perception can be found at http://mediaecologiesresonate.wordpress.com. He is presently in India researching the perceptual mutations involved in mobile phone networks in urban areas. eugene thacker is the author of After Life (University of Chicago Press, 2010) and Hor-

ror of Philosophy (Zero Books, 2011). He is an associate professor at The New School for Social Research. Çag˘atay topal holds degrees from Middle East Technical University (MEtu), Ankara,

Turkey. He completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Sociology at Queen’s University, Canada. His research interests include surveillance, information and communication technologies, immigration, and sociological theory. He currently teaches in the Department of Sociology at MEtu. craig Willse completed a Ph.D. in the sociology program at the Graduate Center of the

City University of New York. His research examines the neoliberal production and management of racialized housing insecurity in the United States. He has published on critical race theory and LGBt social movements and his writing has appeared in Economy and Society and Widener Law Review.

Contributors 383

indeX

9/11: hate crime following, 65–66, 75–77; political context after, 19, 47, 252, 310–11; public grieving after, 336, 339, 342, 346– 47; responses to racism following, 68, 72; racism in response to, 6, 65 abortion, 60 abstract machines, 315 Abu Ghraib, 92, 326 n. 5 the accident, 25; neoliberalism within, 40. See also antiaccident Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena, 133 n. 3 aerial occupation, 184; of Gaza, 187 affect, 49, 173; as context for biopolitics, 282; populations and, 53; representation and, 12 affect economy, branding in, 6 affective capitalism, 164 affectivity, 283, 316 Afghanistan war, 2, 263–64 African burial grounds, 342 Agamben, Giorgio, 165; account of sovereignty, 145; bare life, 33, 158–59, 165, 319–20; on the camp, 107–8; homo sacer, 110–12; state of exception, 4, 7, 14, 308, 317, 329 n. 31 Ahmed, Sara, 81–84 albumin, 223 American empire, 309

anthropology: coevality and, 287–88; implicatedness with imperialism, 287, 291 antiaccident, 26–27; neoliberalism within, 37; as singular-generic, 24–25; system and process within, 31–32. See also accident Antigone, 111–13 antiterrorism, 262 apparatus of security (dispositif ), 2, 152, 161 n. 21 Arendt, Hannah, 199 Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, 68 assemblage (machinic assemblage), 280, 310; gold farming as, 55–56; media technologies as, 13, 289–90, 311–16, 322–23; surveillant assemblage, 9, 74, 179, 241; terrorist assemblage, 6, 71–74; turban as, 87–91, 95–96 attention deficit disorder, 166 attention technologies, biopower and, 307 autoethnography, 13 AZr (Central Foreigners Register of Germany), 245–46, 249, 254 bank bailout of 2008, 270, 272 bare life, 158–59, 165, 319; bare activity and, 33; bare singularity and, 320. See also Agamben, Giorgio Bateson, Gregory, 169

Bergson, Henri, 170–72, 307 bin Laden, Osama, 75–77 biodefense, 158–59, 162 nn. 32–33 biopolitics, 1–2, 25–29, 233, 281; deathproductivity and, 239, 241–42; forms of racism, 5, 50–51, 243, 266–67, 311, 318, 352; as life-production, 238; Nazi regime as, 147; surveillance and, 239, 242, 255– 56. See also biopower; Foucault, Michel biopower, 2, 30, 174; attention technologies and, 307; death and, 164 bios, 158 biotechnology, 213–14, 232 biovalue, 232, 234 BKA (Federal Office of Criminal Investigation of Germany), 249 black aesthetic, 352 blackness, 14, 352–53, 359; death and, 354– 55; governance and, 5 black performativity, 352 blood: commodification, 213, 224; donorship, 216, 224–25; Prc Blood Donation Law, 225; trades, 216. See also Henan body politic, 140–42, 144–45, 151; disease and, 149, 152–54; monstrosity and, 146; natural body and, 143, 150; threat of multiplicity, 153–54 branding, 10, 61, 163–64, 173; affect and, 59; gender and, 48; memory and, 167; preemptive power and, 165–66 Bremer, Paul, 35 B’Tselem, 177, 180, 186, 194 Bush, George W.: Hurricane Katrina response, 19; militarization of National Guard, 21; war on terror and, 1, 20 Butler, Judith, 80–83 Capital, 226, 229. See also Marx, Karl catharsis, 113 Central Foreigners Register of Germany (AZr), 245–46, 249, 254 China: economic reform, 215; human rights discourse, 56–58; internal migration, 10, 220–21; media representations of, 55, 234; neoliberalism in, 216 Chinatown, 277 Chinese American Arts Council, 279 386 Index

Christ, as figure in political theory, 141–42, 144, 150 Churchill, Winston, 184 Clausewitz, Carl von, 265 coevality, anthropology and, 287–88 commodification, 230 commodity form, 229, 231; desire as, 218 consumption, 164 criminalization, 360 the cut, 285–86 cybernetics: culture of, 168–69; cyberfarming, 10, 49, 54–55; as form of capitalism, 6, 165; as form of power, 168; memory within, 170 data bodies, 73 death: in biopower, 164; blackness and, 354– 55; Foucault on, 9; Lacan on, 113–14; as productivity in surveillance, 239, 241–22 debt, 351, 356–57 déjà vu, 171 Deleuze, Gilles, 241, 283, 315; on cinema, 285–86; on duration, 312; representation and, 14 Department of Homeland Security, 21 derivatives markets, 261 Desis Rising Up and Moving, 68 diaspora, as affective homeland, 69–70 Dibbell, Julian, 54–56 dispositif (apparatus of security), 2, 152, 161 n. 21 Douhet, Giulio, 182 duration, 312, 314. See also Deleuze, Gilles East Germany, 243–44, 247–48. See also Germany Ermo, 216–20, 222, 226–27, 232 ethnography, 13 evil, concept of, 208 n. 59 faciality, 340 Fatah, 191 Federal Office of Criminal Investigation of Germany (BKA), 249 finance, 259, 262 financial capital, 260–61 financialization, 214, 267

Foucault, Michel, 29, 36, 328 n. 12; on biopower, 164; on biopower and biopolitics, 2–3; on biopower and disease, 152; concept of the state and, 165; discussion of death by, 9; history of sexuality and, 281, 315; power, theories of, 30; race war, 266 Fulci, Lucio, 156–57 Garden State Sikh Association (GSSA), 65 Gaza, 184, 186; reoccupation of, 200. See also Palestine General Security Service of Israel (GSS), 178– 79 Geneva Agreement of 1954, 302 Germany: Aliens Act of 1965, 245; citizenship law (2000), 250; economic restructuring, 247; Foreigners Law of 1990, 248; immigration to, 238, 246–48; immigration act (2005), 250–51; immigration policy, 244; refugees within, 243. See also East Germany ghostliness, 344 Gibson, William, 163 global warming, 23, 25, 42 n. 8 gold farming, 10, 49, 54–55 governance: democracy and, 360; labor and, 357; the state and, 357; as whiteness, 359 Greene, Graham, 294 grief, 339 grievable life, 347 Ground Zero, 334, 343 GSS (General Security Service of Israel), 178– 79 GSSA (Garden State Sikh Association), 65 Guantánamo Bay, 4 Halutz, Dan, 187, 206 n. 35 Hamas, 182, 189–90 hate crimes, following 9/11, 65–66, 75–77 Heidegger, Martin, 228, 318, 321, 341 Henan: blood economy in, 216, 222; HIV in, 215–16, 222–24, 233. See also blood Hezbollah, 180, 183 HIV, in Henan, 215–16, 222–24, 233. See also blood Holder, Eric, on torture in war on terror, 1 homo sacer, 110–12. See also Agamben, Giorgio

human security, as militarism, 47–48 Hurricane Katrina, 7, 15, 19–20; Bush response to, 30, 34–35 IdF (Israeli Defense Force), 8, 179, 181, 184, 186 IEd incident, 20 Ignatieff, Michael, 196 immaterial labor, 357 indeterminacy, 165 Inferno, 154–56 Internal Intelligence Service of Germany, 249 Iraq war, 263–64 Israel: Israeli Air Force, 178, 181; Israeli Defense Force (IdF), 8, 179, 181, 184, 186; Rafael (Israeli Armament Development Authority), 194; Unit 504, 179. See also targeted assassination Israel and Hezbollah war (2006), 183, 200 Japanese American internment, 4, 106–8, 121, 126, 132 Jim Crow segregation, 4, 108, 133 n. 9 Kasher, Asa, 193 Kenneth Cole, advertising campaign, 46–47 Keynesianism, 7 Korematsu v. U.S., 106, 109–10, 119–20, 122–27 labor theory of value, 10, 214–15, 230. See also Marx, Karl Lacan, Jacques, 112, 134 n. 16; on death, 113– 14 Lam, H. Lan Thao. See Lin+Lam Lawrence and Garner v. Texas, 69, 94 Lebanon, bombing by Israel of, 183, 200 lesser evil doctrine, 195–201 Leviathan, 140, 148–49, 265 Lin, Lana. See Lin+Lam Lin+Lam, 12–13, 277, 279, 284–89, 301 Lindman, Pia, 11, 334–36 logo, 163 machinic assemblage 280, 310. See also assemblage Manhattan Mini Storage, advertising campaign, 58–60 Index 387

Marx, Karl: Capital, 226, 229; labor theory of value, 10, 214–15, 230 Maturana, Humberto, and Francisco Varela, 169 Mbembe, Achille, 291; necropolitics, 9, 178, 202 n. 4, 311; on time and postcoloniality, 296. See also necropolitics media assemblage. See assemblage memory, 167; affect and, 173; capitalism and, 166 Military Commissions Act of 2006, 348 military ethics, 193, 207 n. 49 mnemonic control, 164, 167 multiplicity, 316 National Guard: deployment of, postHurricane Katrina, 19, militarization of, under Bush, 21 nature: conceptions of, 22–23, 27–28; natured nature, 28, 42 n. 11 Nazi regime, 199; as biopolitics, 147, concentration camps, 4, 107 necroeconomy, 195–96 necrology, 151, 153, 158 necropolitics, 9, 178, 202 n. 4, 311; concept of necro, 160–61 n. 19; necropolitical production, 240; surveillance and, 253 Negri, Antonio, 165 neoconservatism, 31, 33, 260 neoliberalism, 1, 260; biopolitics and, 233; in China, 216; as economy, 36; as governance, 2; governmentality and, 43 n. 22; neoconservatism and, 35, 38; political forms of, 2–3, 271; uncertainty and, 36 neo-Nazism in Germany, 248–50 neuroscience, 169–70; diagrams of power and, 322 New York Taxi Workers Alliance, 68 nGos, 359 Obama, Barack, 44–45 n. 25; Homeland Security and, 21; presidential campaign and discourse of change of, 15; relation to Bush administration of, 41; torture policy of, in war on terror, 1–2 Oedipus, 333 Ong, Aihwa, 7, 51 388 Index

ontopower, 7–8, 31; bare activity and, 34 Operation Defensive Shield, 185 Orientalism, 68, 192, 310–11 Palestine, 9, 322–23. See also targeted assassination paramnesia, 171 perceptual power, 309 phenomenological doubt, 345 plague, 152–55, 161 n. 20 political theology, 145, 153 population, 50–53, 328 n. 21, 357; in affect economy, 6; as object of biopolitical governance, 5, 315; racism and, 90–91, 352. See also biopolitics population racism, 5, 14, 50–51 post-black, 353 preemptive power, 30, 35, 39; branding and, 165–66; computation and, 166 probability, as technology of biopolitics, 51 Public Committee Against Torture, 195 The Quiet American, 294 race war, 263, 265, 268 racial profiling, 92–93 Rafael (Israeli Armament Development Authority), 194 Rancière, Jacques, 332–33 real subsumption, 164 representation, crisis of, 332–33 reproduction, 233 The Republic, 141 Retort, 308, 316–17 Revolution in Military Affairs (rMA), 264, 268 rIco Act, 261 risk, 240; finance and, 262; political configuration of, 260–61 rMA (Revolution in Military Affairs), 264, 268 SALGA (South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association), 67, 72 second intifada, 177, 184–86. See also Palestine securitization, 52, 261, 268

self-management, 358 Sharon, Ariel, 178, 187–88, 192 Sikh communities, 66 Sikh Mediawatch and Resource Task Force (SMArt), 66 singular-generic, 24, 29, 39; antiaccident and, 25–26; conceptions of nature and, 26–28 Snow Falling on Cedars, 106, 114–18, 128–31 society of control, 241 South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association (SALGA), 67, 72 South Vietnam, 278–79 sovereignty, 154, 165 state of emergency, 311 state of exception, 4, 7, 14, 308, 317, 329 n. 31. See also Agamben, Giorgio state racism, 5, 50–51, 243, 266–67, 311, 318, 352. See also biopolitics state-thought, 356 statistics: as risk management, 5; as technology of biopolitics, 51 strict scrutiny doctrine, 106, 120–21 subprime mortgage crisis, 268 surveillance, 238; biopolitics and, 239, 242, 255–56; toward exclusion and inclusion, 240; necropolitics and, 253 surveillant assemblage, 9, 74, 179, 241 suzhi, 10, 213–15 swarm, 178–79 system theory, 203–4 n. 16

topology, 326 n. 2, 326 n. 5, 330 n. 47; topological image and, 307 torture, 4; torture memos, 1 transitive power, 322–23 transvaluation, 53, 57–58 Troubled Asset Relief Program. See bank bailout of 2008 turban: as assemblage, 87–91, 95–96; history of, 78–79; political struggles around, 66, 74

targeted assassination, 18, 177–78, 188, 192; civilian casualties resulting from, 193–95; mechanical level of planning, 181–82; political level of planning, 182; systemic level of planning, 182. See also Israel terrorist alert system, 309–10 terrorist assemblage, 6, 71–74 Thind, Bhagat Singh, 74–75

xenophobia, in Germany, 248–49. See also neo-Nazism

unity, 327 n. 9 unlife, 165–66 uSA PAtrIot Act, 262 vampire, as figure in capitalism, 215, 226–28, 231 Varela, Francisco, 169 video games, 322. See also gold farming Vietnam/American War, 12, 277, 289 Viola, Bill, 282–84 virtuosity, 346 visibility, limits of, in relation to affect, 84 the visual, race and, 80 waterboarding, 1–2. See also torture West Bank, 184. See also Palestine Whitehead, Alfred, 172 whiteness, 359 World Financial Center Arts and Events, 344 World Trade Center, 11

Yanhai, Wan, 223 Yaojie, Gao, 222 zombies, 156–57 zone of exception. See state of exception

Index 389

patricia ticineto clough is a professor of sociology and women’s studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and Queens College of the City University of New York. craig Willse completed a Ph.D. in sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Beyond biopolitics : essays on the governance of life and death / Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse, eds. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBn 978-0-8223-5003-3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBn 978-0-8223-5017-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Biopolitics. 2. Death—Political aspects. 3. Life (Biology)—Political aspects. I. Clough, Patricia Ticineto, 1945– II. Willse, Craig, 1975– JA80.B49 2011 320.01—dc23 2011021933