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American politics is dominated by an axiom of security which combines unprecedented economic

liberalism with equally absolute police and state control

Agamben 14 (Giorgio – Ph.D., Baruch Spinoza Chair at the European Graduate School, Professor of

Aesthetics at the University of Verona, Italy, Professor of Philosophy at Collège International de

Philosophie in Paris, and at the University of Macerata in Italy, “From the State of Control to a Praxis of

Destituent Power,” transcript of lecture delivered by Agamben in Athens, 11-16-13, published on

Roarmag, 2-4-14, http://roarmag.org/2014/02/agamben-destituent-power-democracy/)

A reflection on the destiny of democracy today here in Athens is in some way disturbing, because it

obliges us to think the end of democracy in the very place where it was born. As a matter of fact, the

hypothesis I would like to suggest is that the prevailing governmental paradigm in Europe today is not

only non-democratic, but that it cannot either be considered as political. I will try therefore to show that

European society today is no longer a political society; it is something entirely new, for which we lack a

proper terminology and we have therefore to invent a new strategy. Let me begin with a concept which

seems, starting from September 2001, to have replaced any other political notion: security. As you

know, the formula “for security reasons” functions today in any domain, from everyday life to

international conflicts, as a codeword in order to impose measures that the people have no reason to


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accept. I will try to show that the real purpose of the security measures is not, as it is currently assumed,

to prevent dangers, troubles or even catastrophes. I will be consequently obliged to make a short

genealogy of the concept of “security”. A Permanent State of Exception One possible way to sketch such

a genealogy would be to inscribe its origin and history in the paradigm of the state of exception. In this

perspective, we could trace it back to the Roman principle Salus publica suprema lex – public safety is

the highest law — and connect it with Roman dictatorship, with the canonistic principle that necessity

does not acknowledge any law, with the comités de salut publique during French revolution and finally

with article 48 of the Weimar republic, which was the juridical ground for the Nazi regime. Such a

genealogy is certainly correct, but I do not think that it could really explain the functioning of the

security apparatuses and measures which are familiar to us. While the state of exception was originally

conceived as a provisional measure, which was meant to cope with an immediate danger in order to

restore the normal situation, the security reasons constitute today a permanent technology of

government. When in 2003 I published a book in which I tried to show precisely how the state of

exception was becoming in Western democracies a normal system of government, I could not imagine

that my diagnosis would prove so accurate. The only clear precedent was the Nazi regime. When Hitler

took power in February 1933, he immediately proclaimed a decree suspending the articles of the


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making process decides nothing. To state it in paradoxical terms, we could say that, having to face a

continuous state of exception, the government tends to take the form of a perpetual coup d’état. By the

way, this paradox would be an accurate description of what happens here in Greece as well as in Italy,

where to govern means to make a continuous series of small coups d’état. Governing the Effects This is

why I think that, in order to understand the peculiar governmentality under which we live, the paradigm

of the state of exception is not entirely adequate. I will therefore follow Michel Foucault’s suggestion

and investigate the origin of the concept of security in the beginning of modern economy, by François

Quesnais and the Physiocrates, whose influence on modern governmentality could not be

overestimated. Starting with Westphalia treaty, the great absolutist European states begin to introduce

in their political discourse the idea that the sovereign has to take care of its subjects’ security. But

Quesnay is the first to establish security (sureté) as the central notion in the theory of government —

and this in a very peculiar way. One of the main problems governments had to cope with at the time

was the problem of famines. Before Quesnay, the usual methodology was trying to prevent famines

through the creation of public granaries and forbidding the exportation of cereals. Both these measures

had negative effects on production. Quesnay’s idea was to reverse the process: instead of trying to

prevent famines, he decided to let them happen and to be able to govern them once they occurred,


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liberalizing both internal and foreign exchanges. “To govern” retains here its etymological cybernetic

meaning: a good kybernes, a good pilot can’t avoid tempests, but if a tempest occures he must be able

to govern his boat, using the force of waves and winds for navigation. This is the meaning of the famous

motto laisser faire, laissez passer: it is not only the catchword of economic liberalism; it is a paradigm of

government, which conceives of security (sureté, in Quesnay’s words) not as the prevention of troubles,

but rather as the ability to govern and guide them in the right direction once they take place. We should

not neglect the philosophical implications of this reversal. It means an epochal transformation in the

very idea of government, which overturns the traditional hierarchical relation between causes and

effects. Since governing the causes is difficult and expensive, it is safer and more useful to try to govern

the effects. I would suggest that this theorem by Quesnay is the axiom of modern governmentality. The

ancien regime aimed to rule the causes; modernity pretends to control the effects. And this axiom

applies to every domain, from economy to ecology, from foreign and military politics to the internal

measures of police. We must realize that European governments today gave up any attempt to rule the

causes, they only want to govern the effects. And Quesnay’s theorem makes also understandable a fact

which seems otherwise inexplicable: I mean the paradoxical convergence today of an absolutely liberal

paradigm in the economy with an unprecedented and equally absolute paradigm of state and police


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control. If government aims for the effects and not the causes, it will be obliged to extend and multiply

control. Causes demand to be known, while effects can only be checked and controlled.

Biometric surveillance of American citizens poses a grave threat to democracy and reduces citizens to

their biological identity






One important sphere in which the axiom is operative is that of biometrical security apparatuses, which

increasingly pervade every aspect of social life. When biometrical technologies first appeared in 18th

century in France with Alphonse Bertillon and in England with Francis Galton, the inventor of finger

prints, they were obviously not meant to prevent crimes but only to recognize recidivist delinquents.

Only once a second crime has occurred, you can use the biometrical data to identify the offender.

Biometrical technologies, which had been invented for recividist criminals, remained for a long time

their exclusive privilege. In 1943, US Congress still refused the Citizen Identification Act, which was


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meant to introduce for every citizen an Identity Card with finger prints. But according to a sort of fatality

or unwritten law of modernity, the technologies which have been invented for animals, for criminals,

strangers or Jews, will finally be extended to all human beings. Therefore, in the course of 20th century,

biometric technologies have been applied to all citizens, and Bertillon’s identification photographs and

Galton’s fingerprints are currently in use everywhere for ID cards. The De-politicization of Citizenship

But the extreme step has been taken only in our days and it is still in the process of full realization. The

development of new digital technologies, with optical scanners which can easily record not only finger

prints but also the retina or the eye’s iris structure, biometrical apparatuses tend to move beyond the

police stations and immigration offices and spread into everyday life. In many countries, the access to

student’s restaurants or even to schools is controlled by a biometric apparatus on which the student just

puts his or her hand. The European industries in this field, which are quickly growing, recommend that

citizens get used to this kind of control from their early youth. The phenomenon is really disturbing,

because the European Commissions for the development of security (like the ESPR, European Security

Research Program) include among their permanent members the representatives of the big industries in

the field, which are just the old armaments producers like Thales, Finmeccanica, EADS et BAE System,

that have converted to the security business. It is easy to imagine the dangers represented by a power


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that could have at its disposal the unlimited biometric and genetic information of all its citizens. With

such a power at hand, the extermination of the Jews, which was undertaken on the basis of

incomparably less efficient documentation, would have been total and incredibly swift. But I will not

dwell on this important aspect of the security problem. The reflections I would like to share with you

concern rather the transformation of political identity and of political relationships that are involved in

security technologies. This transformation is so extreme that we can legitimately ask not only if the

society in which we live is still a democratic one, but also if this society can still be considered political.

Christian Meier has shown how in the 5th century a transformation of the conceptualization of the

political took place in Athens, which was grounded on what he calls a “politicization” (politisierung) of

citizenship. While until that moment the fact of belonging to the polis was defined by a number of

conditions and social statuses of different kind — for instance belonging to nobility or to a certain

cultural community, to be a peasant or merchant, a member of a certain family, etc. — from now on

citizenship became the main criterion of social identity. “The result was a specifically Greek conception

of citizenship, in which the fact that men had to behave as citizens found an institutional form. The

belonging to economic or religious communities was removed to a secondary rank. The citizens of a

democracy considered themselves as members of the polis only in so far as they devoted themselves to


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a political life. Polis and politeia, city and citizenship, constituted and defined one another. Citizenship

became in that way a form of life, by means of which the polis constituted itself in a domain clearly

distinct from the oikos, the house. Politics became therefore a free public space as such opposed to the

private space, which was the reign of necessity.” According to Meier, this specifically Greek process of

politicization was transmitted to Western politics, where citizenship remained the decisive element. The

hypothesis I would like to propose to you is that this fundamental political factor has entered an

irrevocable process that we can only define as a process of increasing de-politicization. What was in the

beginning a way of living, an essentially and irreducibly active condition, has now become a purely

passive juridical status, in which action and inaction, the private and the public are progressively blurred

and become indistinguishable. This process of the de-politicization of citizenship is so evident that I will

not dwell on it. Rise of the State of Control I will rather try to show how the paradigm of security and the

security apparatuses have played a decisive role in this process. The growing extension to citizens of

technologies which were conceived for criminals inevitably has consequences for the political identity of

the citizen. For the first time in the history of humanity, identity is no longer a function of the social

personality and its recognition by others, but rather a function of biological data, which cannot bear any

relation to it, like the arabesques of the fingerprints or the disposition of the genes in the double helix of


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DNA. The most neutral and private thing becomes the decisive factor of social identity, which loses

therefore its public character. If my identity is now determined by biological facts that in no way depend

on my will and over which I have no control, then the construction of something like a political and

ethical identity becomes problematic. What relationship can I establish with my fingerprints or my

genetic code? The new identity is an identity without the person, as it were, in which the space of

politics and ethics loses its sense and must be thought again from the ground up. While the classical

Greek citizen was defined through the opposition between the private and the public, the oikos, which is

the place of reproductive life, and the polis, place of political action, the modern citizen seems rather to

move in a zone of indifference between the private and the public, or, to quote Hobbes’ terms, the

physical and the political body. The materialization in space of this zone of indifference is the video

surveillance of the streets and the squares of our cities. Here again an apparatus that had been

conceived for the prisons has been extended to public places. But it is evident that a video-recorded

place is no more an agora and becomes a hybrid of public and private; a zone of indifference between

the prison and the forum. This transformation of the political space is certainly a complex phenomenon

that involves a multiplicity of causes, and among them the birth of biopower holds a special place. The

primacy of the biological identity over the political identity is certainly linked to the politicization of bare


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life in modern states. But one should never forget that the leveling of social identity on body identity

begun with the attempt to identify the recidivist criminals. We should not be astonished if today the

normal relationship between the state and its citizens is defined by suspicion, police filing and control.

The unspoken principle which rules our society can be stated like this: every citizen is a potential

terrorist. But what is a state ruled by such a principle? Can we still define it as democratic state? Can we

even consider it as something political? In what kind of state do we live today? You will probably know

that Michel Foucault, in his book Surveiller et Punir and in his courses at the Collège de France, sketched

a typological classification of modern states. He shows how the state of the Ancien Regime, which he

calls the territorial or sovereign state and whose motto was faire mourir et laisser vivre, evolves

progressively into a population state and into a disciplinary state, whose motto reverses now into faire

vivre et laisser mourir, as it will take care of the citizen’s life in order to produce healthy, well-ordered

and manageable bodies. The state in which we live now is no more a disciplinary state. Gilles Deleuze

suggested to call it the État de contrôle, or control state, because what it wants is not to order and to

impose discipline but rather to manage and to control. Deleuze’s definition is correct, because

management and control do not necessarily coincide with order and discipline. No one has told it so

clearly as the Italian police officer, who, after the Genoa riots in July 2001 declared that the government


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did not want for the police to maintain order but for it to manage disorder. From Politics to Policing

American political scientists who have tried to analyze the constitutional transformation involved in the

Patriot Act and in the other laws which followed September 2001 prefer to speak of a security state. But

what does security here mean? It is during the French Revolution that the notion of security – sureté, as

they used to say — is linked to the definition of police. The laws of March 16, 1791 and August 11, 1792

introduced thus into French legislation the notion of police de sureté (security police), which was

doomed to have a long history in modernity. If you read the debates which preceded the vote on these

laws you will see that police and security define one another, but no one among the speakers (Brissot,

Heraut de Séchelle, Gensonné) is able to define police or security by themselves. The debates focused

on the situation of the police with respect to justice and judicial power. Gensonné maintains that they

are “two separate and distinct powers,” yet, while the function of the judicial power is clear, it is

impossible to define the role of the police. An analysis of the debate shows that the place and function

of the police is undecidable and must remain undecidable, because, if it were really absorbed in the

judicial power, the police could no more exist. This is the discretionary power which still today defines

the actions of police officer, who, in a concrete situation of danger for the public security act, so to

speak, as a sovereign. But, even when he exerts this discretionary power, the policeman does not really


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take a decision, nor prepares, as is usually stated, the judge’s decision. Every decision concerns the

causes, while the police acts on effects, which are by definition undecidable. The name of this

undecidable element is no more today, like it was in 17th century, raison d’État, or state reason. It is

rather “security reasons”. The security state is a police state, but, again, in the juridical theory, the police

is a kind of black hole. All we can say is that when the so called “science of the police” first appears in

the 18th century, the “police” is brought back to its etymology from the Greek politeia and opposed as

such to “politics”. But it is surprising to see that “police” coincides now with the true political function,

while the term politics is reserved for foreign policy. Thus Von Justi, in his treatise on Policey-

Wissenschaft, calls Politik the relationship of a state with other states, while he calls Polizei the

relationship of a state with itself. It is worthwhile to reflect upon this definition: “Police is the

relationship of a state with itself.” The hypothesis I would like to suggest here is that, placing itself under

the sign of security, the modern state has left the domain of politics to enter a no man’s land, whose

geography and whose borders are still unknown. The security state, whose name seems to refer to an

absence of cares (securus from sine cura) should, on the contrary, make us worry about the dangers it

involves for democracy, because in it political life has become impossible, while democracy means

precisely the possibility of a political life.


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Biometrics biologizes life, entrenching violent biopolitics

Muller 10 (Benjamin J. – Assistant Professor in International Relations and Political Theory at the

University of Western Ontario, Ph.D. from Queen’s University Belfast, Security, Risk and the Biometric

State: Governing Borders and Bodies, p. 22-23)

In exposing what he calls “virtual security politics,” Dillon notes the extent to which security measures

such as biometrics are not only charged with having to specify the attributes of their subjects, but also

indicate their own fallibility (Dillon 2003: 554). One could phrase this differently as follows: l ike all

security measures, the characteristics of the subject of security require description; however, the extent

to which the technological system itself is a potential threat must be recognized. In this political space of

biometrics where, as Dillon suggests, “the physical and the virtual meet,” there is a definite fortification

of “biological life” over political life and the further entrenchment of the biopolitical. Here, the

introduction of biometric technologies is a cogent example of Agamben’s suggestion that security is

imposing itself as the basic principle of state activity, leading to the gradual neutralization of politics

(Agamben 2002). Underscoring the extent to which the relationship between the collected data and the

subject of that collection is markedly different from traditional analogue procedures for data collection,

this discussion of the introduction of biometric technologies as constituent of virtual security (and thus,


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virtual borders), the move towards the state of exception as the rule, and the general biologization of

life, indicate a dramatic difference between digital data collection and analogue vis-à-vis security,

subjectivity and sovereignty. In fact, arguments insensitive to such phenomena – as exemplified in the

biometrics literature, the CIC forum, and to a lesser extent the European Commission report –

misleadingly focus on the policy of biometrics rather than the politics of biometrics.

The biologization of life and resulting calculability renders some fit to live and others fit to die

Dillon 5 (Michael – Professor of Politics and International Relations at Lancaster University, “Cared to

Death: The Political Time of Your Life,” in Foucault Studies, No. 2, p. 37-38, May 2005,

http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/viewFile/858/876)

One might say in Heideggerian fashion that life is the stuff of biopolitics. In the process of reducing life

to stuff, biopolitics must determine the quality of the stuff so that investment in its extraction,

promotion and refinement may itself be continuously assessed. It follows that some life will be found to

be worth investment, some life less worth investment, while other life may prove intractable to the

powers of investment and the demands it makes on life. Here, assaying morphs into evaluating the

eligibility and not simply the expected utility of life forms. Ultimately, some life may turn out to be

positively inimical to the circulation of life in which this investment driven process of biopolitics


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continuously trades, and have to be removed from life if its antipathy to biopoliticised life cannot

otherwise be adapted, correctedor contained. Behind the life-charged rhetoric of biopolitics, lies the

biologisation of life to which biopolitics is committed, the violence of that biologisation and the

reduction of the classical political question concerning the good life (and the good death) to that of the

endlessly extendable, fit and adaptable life. The good life Agamben refigures in terms of the pure - he

also says 'profane' but note that there is no profanity without sanctity - immanence of 'happy life'.

Biometric security technologies pre-emptively combat whom the powerful deem as a threat to society

Lattimer 13 (Connor – Undergraduate Scholar at the University of London, “The Politics of Surveillance in

a Risk Society,” in E-IR, 9-15-13, http://www.e-ir.info/2013/09/05/the-politics-of-surveillance-in-a-risk-

society/)

Obama’s desire to continue the WoT through sophisticated surveillance technologies, such as the MQ-1

Predator drone, imposes a strategic rationale for anticipatory defence or pre-emptive security. The US at

present deploys drones beyond the borders of Iraq and Afghanistan to anticipate the rise of future

threats, including Pakistan, North Korea, and Iran, which raises questions on whether distant (both in

time and space) risks should be left to lie, or woken up by military invasion. The information collected

through pre-emptive practices drive forward this new security culture as intelligence, is harnessed to aid

http://www.e-ir.info/2013/09/05/the-politics-of-surveillance-in-a-risk-society/http://www.e-ir.info/2013/09/05/the-politics-of-surveillance-in-a-risk-society/http://www.e-ir.info/2013/09/05/the-politics-of-surveillance-in-a-risk-society/http://www.e-ir.info/2013/09/05/the-politics-of-surveillance-in-a-risk-society/


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creative scenario-making by civil servants in Whitehall (De Goede, 2008). The new security culture

created by surveillance technologies becomes a risk, with pre-emptive policy often ‘boomeranging’

rather than achieving the desired outcome (Daalder, 2007, 2006; Bigo, 2002). For example, Obama’s

plans to create stability in the Middle East as well as new strategic options are bogged down in continual

drone operations that kill more civilians than what may be deemed as ‘terrorists’ (Harris, 2012).

Clausewitz’s scientific and rational, ‘means to an end’ military strategy is replaced by imaginative, risk-

based scenarios, driven by the political mind. Thus, war becomes an art; a way of doing politics

(Machiavelli, 2004[1521]). The role of surveillance technologies in facilitating a pre-emptive security

culture are not bound to the ‘Orient’ or so-called ‘rogue states’, but manifest themselves within banal

environments of homeland nations. CCTV has dominated London’s cityscape with the aim to manage

the unpredictable security environment. Amoore and Hall (2008) note the management of risk rests

upon identification and verification of the body, decided by security professionals who are based upon a

particular bio-politics. The body becomes the platform of political decision-making, as well as an

objectification of security practices by using technologies of risk (De Geode, 2005). Surveillance

technologies as a management of risk have significant political implications in that security professionals

and politicians view them as “inevitable structural threats” (Aradau et al, 2008:151). Security becomes


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filtered down to the everyday through the usage of CCTV, as well as biometric borders through systems

of data-surveillance to determine whether an individual is understood as a risk to the political narrative

of the state (Braverman, 2011; Foucault, 1997) (Plate 1). Security within the homeland, as well as the

Orient, relies on pre-emptive technologies that generate a priori information (Harraway, 2000).

Therefore, this new security culture is based upon a political imagination and those in positions of

power are able to re-inscribe the societal landscape by determining who and what constitutes as a

threat (not a risk). Surveillance technologies are furthering the change in a security culture towards pre-

emption and anticipatory logics within the risk-society, although such technologies have always been

and will continue to be powered by political decision-making. The security culture of pre-emption is

new, but the pre-emptive logic is not. Rooted within the environmental movements’ precautionary

principle, the risk-management approach was away of advancing action on climate change and

environmental issues before an evidence-base could be established (O’Riordann). The argument of

Lomborg (2001) suggests an evidence-base would take too long to collect, thus it would be too late to

deal with the risks from environmental change, and instead politicians were required to act now.

Furthermore, stamping on risks before they materialise into greater threats was also part of former

Mayor of New York City, Rudolph Giuliani’s order maintenance policing that dealt with petty crimes in


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suspicious individuals who may attempt to challenge the reconstruction of Iraq. Like Israel, Iraq has

become “a state of checkpoints” whereby the authority of two states becomes blurred and unclear

(Braverman, 2011:01). The Musayyib checkpoint is part of a larger policy in deploying the ultimate

panopticon, with little controversy in foreign territories. The Combat Zones That See (CTS) program aims

to network thousands of sophisticated cameras and UAVs with complex computer code located in

databases to monitor the entire City of Baghdad. The roots of the US’s Foreign Policy are not concerned

with economic and political reconstruction but militarisation and reconnaissance of foreign territory in

the anticipation of future risks. Foreign policy becomes part of the broader security culture of filtering

risks through pre-emption to prevent worse-case scenarios imaged by politicians. The role of

surveillance technologies in reconstructing post-conflict territory becomes a process of militarisation

with the aim to continuously monitor the future development of Iraq. Statesmen, such as Bush and

Obama, narrate a positive political narrative to the public, whilst using surveillance technologies to drive

forward the true purpose of reconstruction in Iraq. Shedding light on the truth of US Foreign Policy

obviously presents issues over America’s role as the ‘World Police’. The Republican senator Gary Hart

argues America is in a dichotomy of becoming an Empire when it is a Republic, through using

surveillance technologies as ways to practice neo-imperialism in the WoT (Hart, 2007). National Security


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Surveillance technologies are necessary in fulfilling political goals through two-sided foreign policies in

the WoT. Nonetheless, technologies have also become a necessary part in the national security

narrative, most loudly spoken by Prime Minister Blair. Blair harnessed CCTV beyond its capabilities of

detecting crime, to a technology that can work on algorithmic data to pre-empt acts of terrorism before

they are committed within homeland nations (Amoore, 2009). Nonetheless, from this discussion, it will

appear that surveillance technologies only become necessary in the WoT to carry out political doctrine.

Politics drives forward these technologies and gives them a purpose; an image of necessity in combating

international terrorism. Protecting London’s economic heart is the ring of steel with over 1,500 cameras,

10% of which have facial recognition capabilities able to detect facial characteristics from up to 20

meters away (Coaffe, 2004). Similar to US Foreign Policy, UK national security strategy attempts to

control and regulate territory through the deployment of the camera. The politics emerges out of the

classification in which is established based on sex, ethnicity, and age to inform security professionals

whether a decision should be made to arrest or interrogate an individual based on the grounds of pre-

emption. Unlike its former self, the ring of steel does not act as a deterrent as it did during the

Provisional Irish Republican Army bombings, but an attempt to filter risks based on political criteria.

Facial recognition technologies operationalise the liberal project of globalization, modernity, and


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identity in which the body becomes subjected to political debate and contestation of whether an

individual is a terror suspect (Reid, 2006). The role of facial recognition cameras is moving beyond the

political narratives of Blair and Bush’s rhetoric on protecting the homeland, to being used as a marketing

tool to decide what kind of advertising people receive based on the systems own criteria (Booth, 2012).

The politics of risk management, with regards to surveillance technologies, has blurred national security

with the profit-motive, which inevitably leads to a failure of the liberal project. In 2003, the CIA launched

a futures market for terrorism as a way to collect intelligence on where and when a terrorist attack

would happen. The belief was that future markets had proven incredibly accurate in anticipating

elections results, thus collecting information on terrorism could aid scenario making. The market would

become the rationality for future conflict and security, rather than relying on expert opinion or the

individual analyst (Daalder, 2007, 2006). Giddens (1998) argues that the risk society makes technological

necessary by becoming dependent on it in generating a diversity of possible futures. He argues that

having such surveillance technologies with capabilities of pre-empting bridges the gap between the

present and the future. Dillon (1996) argues that making security and war a decision of the market

actually leads to a paradox and generates greater insecurity rather than security. This liberal way

multiplies the reasons for making war, as acts of terrorism are driven by the profit motive. In a credit


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society, with more finance available, this leads to vast insecurity (ibid). Facial recognition cameras are

part of fighting the next war, but within the homeland, they aim to prevent risks from becoming threats

that cause domestic insecurity, as well as result in overseas conflict. Technological innovation “makes

the perceived demands of the future determine present action” which is no longer controlled by military

practices, but politics (Rasmussen, 2006:65). Technologies within the homeland extend the pre-emptive

narrative beyond the boundaries of Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing risk-management back to the

homeland as a way of fighting future wars.

This is exemplified in biopolitical racial profiling through biometrics

Pugliese 12 (Joseph – Professor and Research Director at Macquarie University, “Identity Dominance,” in

Biometrics: Bodies, Technologies, Biopolitics, Routledge, 2012, p. 98)

Biometric templates exemplify the post-biological, in silico networking of a subject who can no longer

govern or control the heterogeneous dispersal of her or his identificatory body-bits-as-template-proxies.

It is at this juncture that a disarticulation is enunciated, a disarticulation that vitiates a subject’s agentic

self-recovery and governance of her or his heterogeneous body-bits and identity proxies. At this

juncture, a subject’s biometric proxies may be mobilised, indeed, as agents of the biopolitical state

deployed to ensnare and convict the targeted individual. “We are there,” writes Levinas (2003, 67), “and


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there is nothing more to be done, or anything to add to this fact that we have been entirely delivered

up”—delivered up by our biometric proxies to the state. Malcolm Crompton (2002) has examined the

privacy implications of the biometric capture of bodily information, with a particular focus on the

manner in which a person’s biometric scans can often reveal a range of medical conditions. Within the

specific context of racial profiling, as deployed by both military and police forces, I want to emphasise

that a subject’s biometric body-bits may become precisely proxies for criminalisation. “When being

black (or Latino or Asian [or “of Middle Eastern appearance”] is used as a proxy for criminality or

dangerousness in a society in which relative few are criminals,” David Harris (2002, 106) notes, “profiles

based on or including race will always sweep too widely.” Within these political economies of biopower,

biometrics interweaves flesh with algorithms in order to “freeze” a subject’s identity regardless of his or

her permutations. At work here are the biopolitical operations whereby, to paraphrase Levinas, the

subject is riveted to the fatality of the biological, even as the biological is transmuted in silico: “The

essence of humanity is no longer in freedom but in a kind of bondage. To be truly oneself is ... to

become aware of the ineluctable bondage unique to your body ... And then, if race did not exist, it

would be necessary to invent it!” (Levinas cited in Rolland 2003, 31). The re-invention of race in the

context of this biometric riveting of identity to the body is clearly enunciated in these contemporary


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modalities of racial profiling and, as I discuss later, in the biometric surveillance and control of

geopolitical borders, refugees and asylum seekers.

The logic of pre-emption perversely brings threats into existence in order to eliminate them

Massumi 15 (Brian – Professor of Communication at the University of Montreal, “The Remains of the

Day,” in Emotions, Politics and War , Ed. Åhäll and Gregory, 2015)

This isn't just stupidity or faulty reasoning. There is a perverse logic to it. Because if you accept that it's

paramount to respond to threat, and that you have to act in response to it even if it has not yet fully

emerged, or even if it is hasn't really even begun to emerge, then you're facing a real conundrum. If you

wait for the emergence, you'll have waited too long -- too late. A terrorist threat can strike like lightning.

Like lightning it can strike anywhere and any time. But worse than lightning, it can strike anywhere at

any time in any guise. This time it might be planes crashing into buildings. Next time it might be an

improvised explosive device. Or a bomb in a subway. Or anthrax in the mail. No one knows. This only

makes the urgency of action all the more acute. Faced with urgent need to act in the face of the

unknown-unknown of a threat that has not yet emerged, there is only one reasonable thing to do: flush

it out. Poke the soft tissue. Prod the terrain. Stir things up and see what starts to emerge. Create the

conditions for the emergence of threat. Start the threat on the way to becoming a clear and present


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danger, and then nip it in the bud with your superior rapid-response capabilities. Make it real so you can

really eliminate it. I'm not saying that the Bush administration consciously decided to make Iraq a

staging ground for terrorism. I'm only saying that the fact that their preemptive actions did in fact do

that fits perfectly into the logic of preemption, and says something fundamental about what that logic

implies. It is fundamental to the logic of preemption to produce what it is designed to avoid. That is the

only way to give its urgent need to "go kinetic" in response to threat something positive to attack. This is

what distinguishes preemption from the logic presiding over the previous age of conflict, the Cold War.

The logic of the Cold War was deterrence: making something not happen. The goal, faced with the clear

and present danger of nuclear Armageddon, was to hold it in potential, to make sure the threat was

never realized, precisely by refraining from preemptive attack. What was fundamental to the logic of

deterrence was the impossibility of a first strike – exactly what preemption requires. Deterrence

exercises a negative power. In a way, it's logic is the inverse of the logic of preemption. Its aim is to

prevent the unthinkable from happening by transforming a clear and present danger into a threat, then

to hold the threat in abeyance, so that it continues to loom over the present indefinitely, so that it

doesn't follow any action path back to the future. The aim of deterrence aim was to suspend threat.

Preemption, by contrast, suspends the present. It puts us and our actions in that conditional time-loop


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of the would have/could have. It hangs us on a thread of futurity. It does this in order to make the

would-have-been/could-have-been a "will-have-been-in-any-case." The job of preemption is to translate

the unknown-unknown into a foregone conclusion. Preemption always will have been right, because it

exercises a positive power, a reality-producing power to make things emerge. There is a word for a

reasoning that is always right regardless of the objective situation, and that always leads a foregone

conclusion in any case. The word is tautological. The logic of preemption is a tautological logic. But that's

just the half of it. The logic of preemption is a tautological logic that has the power to produce the

reality to which it responds. In spite of being tautological, or because of the particular way it is

tautological, preemption works. It operates. It operationalizes the future of threat in a way that really,

positively produces a future. It is an operative logic. I call an operative logic that is positively productive

of what will really come to be, an ontopower – "onto-" meaning being. An ontopower is a power that

makes things come to be: that moves a futurity felt in the present, into a presence in the future. When

threat becomes effectively tautological, and power becomes ontopower, everything has changed. We've

entered a brave new world, a new regime of power, and a new political era And yes, the more things

change, the more they stay the same. In a recent book, Andrew Bacevich, a life-long military careerist

turned military critic, laments that "since taking office, President Obama has acted on many fronts to


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adjust the way the United States exercized that leadership. Yet these adjustments have seldom risen

above the cosmetic. … The global war on terror [begun by Bush has not only] continued [under Obama]

.. it has metastasized." It has turned cancerous. It has turned into a self-driving tendency that has swept

Obama up in it. The operative logic of preemption is not a logic he has – it has him. It has proven itself a

self-propagating historical force, an operative historical logic whose "rightness" is still, as always, a

foregone conclusion. It has proven its ability to continue, as a tendency, across the break between

administrations and the changes on the level of explicitly stated doctrine. I will briefly go into how

Bush's 9-11-fueled-"everything-changed" is now Obama's "more off the same," despite the differences

in doctrine, the change in the cast of characters, and the obvious differences in personal quality and

leadership style. But before I do that, I want to draw out a bit more some of the implications of the

recentering of war and politics on threat. On the way, I want to respond to an objection I've left my

account open to. The example of Al-Qaeda in Iraq that was central to my argument that preemptive

power is a productive power is just one example. In many eyes it might seem a weak one, since it could

be laid to unforeseen collateral effects, and dismissed as a mere anomaly or accident, or simply a

product of a miscalculation. The point I want to make is that in the operative logic of preemption more-

or-less unforeseen effects are precisely what is and must be produced. If the situation is really one full of


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unknown-unknowns, in a perpetually crisis-ridden, ungraspably complex, increasingly chaotic world,

then unforeseen effects will always accompany any action carried out according to any logic. That's a

corrollary of the foregone conclusion. What's particular about preemption is that makes a virtue of this.

It turns this problem into something positive as well. It turns it into a mechanism that fosters its own

continuation and proliferation. It can't make the unknown-unknown known. It can't pre-form or fore-

see the exact nature of the reality it will produce. But if it is ready with fast-adapting rapid response

capabilities, it can field the effects it brings into being, by immediately going kinetic in a follow-up

action. When it flushes out threat, it can contrive to keep the emergence within parameters it can

handle, more-or-less. There will be threat again. But if all goes well it will be in more controllable

parameters. Preemption can then re-legitimate itself affectively, and redeploy. In this way, to use the

military theory jargon, the operative logic of preemption "leverages" uncertainty. What preemptive

power must do is remain poised to go kinetic again and again, in serial response to the exercise of its

own ontopower. Every time it acts, it must already be poising itself to act again, with equal urgency. In

that way, each of its actions will contain within it the seeds of the next action, and that action, the

action after, so that the deployment of preemption cascades, bringing its affective legitimation by threat

with it, step by step. Preemptive action has become self-driving. It only stands to reason that if terrorist


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threat is ever-present and proliferates in unforeseen ways, then the power mobilized against it must be

similarly ever-present and proliferating. ow could anyone argue that we shouldn't be capable of fielding

uncertainty? We must always be poised for threat. We must assume the posture -- even if the stated

doctrine has changed. If we sit on our hands, all it will take to delegitimate a government would be

another terror attack that happened on its watch. No government can afford not to be in a posture of

preemption. We must assume the posture at every moment – we must be poised to go kinetic at a

moment's notice, whenever and wherever in the world that threat is felt to loom. Whenever and

wherever. The realignment on time I mentioned earlier ends up driving a a tendency for the logic set in

motion to turn space-filling. The operative logic of preemptive is not only self-driving; it is self-

expanding. We watched this happen. Iraq was in fact used as a terror training ground. Terrorist

techniques such as the improvised explosive device and suicide bombings were perfected there, then

carried to the other front, Afghanistan, where they fueled a resurgent insurgency. The preemptive

follow-up response on the part of the US was to expand the use of counter-terrorist tactics that

matched the IED attack in terms of their ability to strike by surprise with lightning speed, and to morph

themselves to the shape any kind of circumstance, taking any number of guises. The use of these

techniques by the US military exploded. Chief among them were targeted assassinations using rapidly-


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deployed special operations forces, and unmanned drone attacks. This escalation began under Bush, but

was taken to new levels by Obama, who had criticized the war in Iraq and called for its winding down

only in order to shift attention to Afghanistan, which he defined as the "good war" and the right war.

The right war overflowed to the wrong side of the border, into Pakistan. The blowback from US cross-

border drone attacks and special operations in Pakistan have energized activity elsewhere in the world:

in Somalia, in Yemen. Yet another proliferation. US drone attacks and special ops have followed.

Preemptive US military intervention has expanded to yet another continent. The invasions of Iraq and

Afghanistan may be winding down. But the preemptive military posture of the US has only spread. And

nowhere has terrorist threat stopped looming. Last month (July 2011) was the bloodiest for months for

US military personnel in Iraq, and terrorist attacks in Afghanistan picked up spectacularly with the

assassinations of the governor of Kandahar province and the mayor of Kandahar city. Even after the

"withdrawal" of US troops from Iraq, there will be a continuing US presence indefinitely into the future,

as Obama's Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put it, in order to "fill the gap in Iraqi Security Force

operations." This continuing presence will be in the form of five high-tech compounds outfitted for

drone operations and housing aircraft and armored vehicles for rapid-response forays. The withdrawal

from Afghanistan will similarly leave a permanent preemption-ready presence. That presence has


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unprecedented reach. According to best estimates, the US preemptive presence stretches across more

than 750 bases around the world. The less focused it becomes on outright invasion, the more spread-

out and tentacular it becomes. US special operations forces are now active in no less than 75 countries

around the world and carry out an average of 70 missions a day. The number of countries "serviced" is

slated to rise to 120. A key to advisor to General Petraeus, the commander of US troops in Iraq, then

Afghanistan, and now incoming CIA director, was recently quoted marvelling at the reach of this "almost

industrial scale killing machine". Preemption doesn't go away. It spreads its tentacles. Things change.

Boots on the ground may recede as drones advance, following the rhythms of public opinion and the

electoral cycle of politicians' engrossment in domestic affairs. Nation-building might get backgrounded

in favor of targeted assassination campaigns. But the operative logic of preemption only becomes more

widespread and insidious. The more it changes, the more it stays the same, ever-expanding. To the point

that it can be said to become the dominant operative logic of our times. Preemption octopuses on.

Ontopower rules.

Biometric technologies blur the line between wartime technology and domestic security, creating a

permanent state of emergency


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Muller 10 (Benjamin J. – Assistant Professor in International Relations and Political Theory at the

University of Western Ontario, Ph.D. from Queen’s University Belfast, Security, Risk and the Biometric

State: Governing Borders and Bodies, p. 104-109)

We argue here that the use of biometrics for the management of the population is constitutive of

contemporary securitized (exceptional) politics, and while more apparent, the case of Fallujah is not

dissimilar to “domestic” homeland security initiatives and the securitization of borders and the bodies

that cross them. Moreover, it speaks to an evolving global norm of securitized identity, emphasizing the

mutually constitutive relationship between domestic and foreign policy, or at the very least destabilizing

conventional notions about the separation between these spheres, regularly reified in the discourses

and disciplinary regimes/ knowledge of IR and Comparative Politics (CP). 3 Moreover, it speaks to an

attempt to exercise biopolitical technologies of power as forms of subjugation and control/

management, which in turn constitutes the subject under such “exceptional” circumstances as

Agamben’s homo sacer. The chapter begins by briefly revisiting the concept of “the state of exception,”

and the extent to which the introduction of biometric technologies is representative of a particular

politics of exceptionalism. As the chapter title indicates, we consider these securitizing moves, namely

the introduction of biometric technologies, as underscoring constitutionalizing trends, or at the very


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least, the untenable differentiation between domestic and foreign policy. In this specific case, in much

the same way that modern technology has rendered conventional articulations of space and time

anachronistic, the simultaneous use of biometric technologies as a part of both domestic homeland

security strategies and foreign policy objectives can begin to challenge articulated limits of identity and

place. We then examine the case of Fallujah, arguably an exemplar in the wider case of American

occupation practices subsequently replicated across Iraq and Afghanistan, wherein the struggle to gain

the biopolitical ascendancy of sovereign power is asserted by occupation forces in an effort to take

control of biopolitics – the management of life. As a result of the destructive violence executed by

occupation forces, identity is rearticulated on the principles of biometrics and, to draw on Giorgio

Agamben’s work, some Iraqis are articulated as homo sacer; namely the 15– 45-year-old males who

were not given the option of leaving Fallujah prior to the siege in November 2004 . In this sense, while

cognizant of the disturbing story of destruction represented in Picasso’s Guernica, 4 the story here is

much more about the destructiveness of reconstruction, and the struggle over sovereign power in its

biopolitical form. We conclude with some reflections on the arguments presented, and their wider

application in the Iraqi context. Homo Sacer and the State of Exception Drawing on the work of Nazi

constitutional theorist Carl Schmitt, but also a Hobbesian and Weberian heritage, the revival of


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deliberations over the state of exception is found in contemporary work by the Italian philosopher

Giorgio Agamben. Although many of those not beholden to the triumphalism found in post-1989

commentaries turned to Schmitt, some specific resonances were absent. In particular, one of the critical

points for Agamben regarding the state of exception becoming the norm sent many writers and thinkers

scrambling. In the wake of the events of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent introduction of anti-

terrorist legislation and homeland security strategies however, this contention is much less radical .

Specific pieces of anti-terrorist legislation such as Bill C-36 in Canada, the USA PATRIOT Act, the

Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (IRTPA), or even the American Homeland

Security Act of 2002, involve at a bare minimum certain “sunset clauses,” if not in fact subjecting the

entire piece of legislation to such a clause. Of particular importance is the way in which sunset clauses

give certain impermanence to exceptional or emergency powers. While the sovereign might indeed, to

borrow from Schmitt’s dictum, “decide the exception,” it is not intended to be carte blanche power. If it

were, exceptional powers would no longer be “exceptional” but the norm, or what is termed the

permanent state of exception. Historical powers of judicial oversight, constitutionality, habeas corpus,

and so on, have placed specific checks and balances on the power of the executive. The question then, is

what gives the state of exception its permanence, and what are the implications to the members of the


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political community in this “normalized” state of exception? On the one hand, to follow Agamben’s lead,

the state of exception arises at an intersection between the legal and political; a civil war, an

insurrection, an armed resistance (Agamben 2005: 1). Moreover, the state of exception is the result of a

“political crisis,” indicating that it should be understood in political terms and not on juridical-

constitutional grounds (Agamben 2005). For Agamben, what is particularly challenging about the state

of exception is the way in which it functions in a “zone of undecidability,” or what he and others have

referred to as a “zone of indistinction” (Agamben 1998; Edkins 2002). As the sovereign is both the law

and outside the law, with subsequent power to suspend the law, there is a sort of legal sanction to the

state of exception, which is extra-juridical. Therefore, as Agamben contends, the state of exception is

awarded a certain legal status, such as the notion of the “legal civil war” he explores (Agamben 2005: 2–

3). Furthermore, and perhaps most important to the transformation of the state of exception becoming

the norm, is the way in which exceptional powers, or permanent states of emergency, become

important technologies of governmental control. Here, as Agamben accurately notes, the state of

emergency is not always openly declared in a technical sense, yet statutory amendments and changes

that occur in the background speak directly to the permanence of the state of exception. 5 Moreover ,

the suspension of conventional legislative and judicial powers and the concentration of power in the


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hands of the core executive constitute the state of exception. The ways in which this creeps into hidden

statutes that lie in wait, ready to spring forward when required, and the general way in which this state

of exception seems to have become an effective technology of rule for contemporary governments

emphasize the permanence of the state of exception. Much of this speaks directly to Michel Foucault’s

point made in the collection of his lectures entitled Society Must be Defended, that modern politics is

biopolitics, in so far as sovereign power is preoccupied to a much greater extent with the “management

of life” as a particularly important technology of power (Foucault 2003: 239 – 64). As Foucault notes:

“Biopolitics deals with the population, with the population as a political problem, as a problem that is at

once scientific and political, as a biological problem, as power’s problem” (Foucault 2003: 245). For

Agamben, what is particularly important about Foucault’s thesis is the way in which one understands

the sense of this transformation towards biopolitics and the “management of life.” Hence, Agamben’s

dialogue about “form-of-life” and the power( s) that constitutes multiple forms of life as the “ form -of-

life .” In other words, it seems impossible to isolate “naked life” from the “form-of-life” that is political

life (Agamben 2000: 3 – 14): Inasmuch as its inhabitants [of the camp] have been stripped of every

political status and reduced completely to naked life, the camp is also the most absolute biopolitical

space that has ever been realized – a space in which power confronts nothing other than pure biological


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life without any mediation. (Agamben 2000: 41) In this “zone of indistinction” that is the political space

of the exception, homo sacer or sacred man becomes indistinguishable from the citizen. Hence, in the

same way as the “zone of indistinction” is exceptional – extra-juridical – the subjectivity of the

inhabitants is also extra-juridical, as they are deprived of rights and prerogatives to the point that

committing any act towards them no longer appears as a crime (Agamben 2000). In our analysis, if

Fallujah is indeed a space/ place of exception – as in broader terms we might argue that Iraq on the

whole is subject to a state of exception, as is the domestic space of the US under conditions of the war

on terror, or more specifically the border spaces and virtual borders, which further emphasizes the

mutually constitutive relationship between domestic and foreign policy – then to what extent are the

inhabitants homo sacer? In considering the specifics of the Fallujah case, while not all inhabitants are

articulated as homo sacer, certainly those perceived as most threatening by occupying forces are

constructed as such. Furthermore, our analysis emphasizes the extent to which the application of

biometric technologies by US-led forces is at the very least a contributing factor to this (re) articulation

of Iraqis or in this case Fallujahns as homo sacer, or indeed might be a necessary although not sufficient

condition for this particular (re) articulation. Before discussing the specific case of Fallujah, however,

some brief words on biometric technologies and the specifics of contemporary applications in Iraq and


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biometrics industry and the literature. It also exposes the industry and its advocates’ long-term vision ,

indicating both a belief in the sustained need for biometric technologies, and their suitably futuristic (re)

solutions of/ for these needs. The possible applications for biometrics, it would seem, are only limited by

one’s imagination . Biometric technologies have generally been employed in the private sector, such as

in high security sites like financial institutions, secure nuclear or chemical facilities, or for the security of

particular products, such as the narcotics necessary for anesthesiologists. Biometric technologies are

also not strangers to the panoptic sphere of surveillance and are consistently used to track the comings

and goings of employees in large institutions. Contemporary debates over the applications of biometrics

are subject to some very particular phenomena of both the contemporary information age and the post-

9/ 11 security context. The events of September 11, 2001 definitely had an impact on the biometrics

industry, if only to open a policy window for already supportive legislators. Doing much more than

preaching to the converted, however, the advocates of biometric technologies strategically presented

them as the panacea to the security problems of the post- 9/ 11 world. Caught in the paradox between

securing borders and bodies and the imperatives of the neoliberal global economy, states were attuned

to the representation of the “security problem ” that the biometrics industry was so quick to articulate.

Indeed, the Canada/ US Smart Border Declaration signed after the events of 9/ 11 is a case in point. The


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application of RM is championed, an embrace of particular identification technologies is applauded, and

the proliferation of programs and approaches from trusted traveler programs, to “no-fly lists” and

passenger prescreening lays the groundwork for the subsequent Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative

(WHTI) and the general proliferation of borders. The proposed applications of biometrics for the

purpose of securing borders and bodies are generally for biometric or biometric-ready passports, visas,

permanent resident cards, and national identity cards. The general emphasis is for machine readable

travel documents (MRTD), allegedly contributing to increased efficiency and heightened security, thus

satisfying the dual requirements of the imperative free movement of the global economy and the post-

9/ 11 supposed security imperatives. Throughout these debates , however, the (im) possibility of

securing bodies and borders generally appears to fall outside of the space of biometrics politics. As

Simon A. Cole maintains, based on its assumptions about the security of the body itself, this entire

project may in fact be misguided: Indeed, the body itself may become a rather antiquated way of

defining the individual. A wide variety of new technologies – sex reassignment, cyberspace, artificial

intelligence, cosmetic surgery, organ transplantation, and so on – all point toward the demise of the

nineteenth century notion of the body as solid, stable entity and the advent of some new conception of

bodies as mutable and flexible … We may cease to think of ourselves, or to identify ourselves, strictly as


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physically unique bodies and begin to think of ourselves as somewhat more ethereal entities for whom

bodies and body parts are merely resources. (Cole 2001: 310) While there are ways in which Cole’s

contentions might challenge the introduction and claims of biometrics, the introduction of biometrics

might also be interpreted as a contributing factor to this rather fetishized account of the body. In other

words, if the body becomes password, does it cease to be the body? 6 On such questions and others,

the literature, government commissioned reports, and public forums generally fall silent. Following on

from arguments made by Robert Putnam and others, Yale Ferguson and Richard Mansbach assert that

the separation between domestic and foreign policy is increasingly untenable; domestic policies

influence international affairs, and vice versa (Ferguson and Mansbach 1996: 261). To this end,

biometric strategies towards the (re) articulation of the body as password and the general

securitization/ criminalization of what Agamben refers to as “bare life,” or even homo sacer itself ,

appear mutually reinforcing in the spaces of both domestic and foreign policy. In the domestic space,

the new “normal” biopolitical relationship between the citizen and the state affords sovereign power

the ability to appropriate and register the biological life of bodies (Agamben 2004).

Urban zones of ‘indistinction’ fostered by the blur between political and biological identity manifests

itself in a police state which disproportionality affects minorities


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Jobe 14 (Kevin Scott, Doctoral Candidate in Philosophy at Stony Brook University, “Pre-emptive States of

Emergency: Martial Governmentality & the Crisis of Police,” in Critical Legal Thinking, 12-11-14,

http://criticallegalthinking.com/2014/12/11/pre-emptive-states-emergency-martial-governmentality-

crisis-police/)

Commenting on the investigation into the police killing of Luis Rodriguez in Moore, OK in February 2014,

an attorney for the Moore, OK police department declared, “In this country, it seems we are becoming

anti-police and that the tide has turned in respecting law enforcement.”1 In the wake of the Michael

Brown and Eric Garner grand jury verdicts, and the lack of any formal charges in the cases of Luis

Rodriguez and so many other victims of color of police violence just this year, it is easy to see why. In

this article, I focus on the pre-emptive state of emergency declared by the Governor of Missouri in the

Michael Brown case, and link this form of ‘martial governmentality’ to the apparent crisis of police in

their inability to control or suppress the revolts stemming from the Ferguson protests which seek to

shut down the normal operations of law and order. The militarization of American policing has received

much needed scrutiny in recent years by both academics and civil rights watch groups like the ACLU. In

the wake of anti-police protests from Ferguson to New York and around the globe, these analyses could

not be more timely. However with the growing unrest leading up to the Michael Brown grand jury

http://criticallegalthinking.com/2014/12/11/pre-emptive-states-emergency-martial-governmentality-crisis-police/http://criticallegalthinking.com/2014/12/11/pre-emptive-states-emergency-martial-governmentality-crisis-police/http://criticallegalthinking.com/2014/12/11/pre-emptive-states-emergency-martial-governmentality-crisis-police/http://criticallegalthinking.com/2014/12/11/pre-emptive-states-emergency-martial-governmentality-crisis-police/


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verdict, the state of Missouri saw something perhaps even more startling than a militarized police force:

a pre-emptive state of emergency. As Janai Nelson from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund reminds us,

governors have used their emergency police powers preemptively in the past in anticipation of eminent

natural disasters and, more recently, in the case of ‘potential’ Ebola outbreaks. But the preemptive state

of emergency issued in Ferguson by Governor Nixon, for example, signals the activation of a form of

governmentality which grants “…carte blanche to determine what actions are required throughout the

state in the name of public safety – despite the lack of any imminent threat.”2 Nelson calls attention to

the ‘preemptive’ declaration of emergency issued during World War Two by FDR and allowed in the

1944 Koremastu v. United States case which authorized the internment of Japanese-Americans. And

while the case of Ferguson is of a different order of magnitude, it nonetheless follows the same logic. As

Nelson writes, (I)t seems premised on the fearful notion that black people gathering in Ferguson to

protest perceived injustice is a state of emergency. But the expectation of Americans coming together to

express outrage does not justify intervention by the militia.3 The expectation that public protest in

Ferguson might require the mobilization of state military forces is precisely what seems to underwrite

the justification of Nixon’s executive order. The rationale for the executive order is couched in the

language of protecting peaceable assembly, protest and the protection of public safety, civil rights and


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private business. However, the suspension of law to protect civil rights raises a disturbing prospect, one

that Stephen Graham highlights in his recent book Cities Under Siege: the New Military Urbanism. As

Graham shows, there is an increasing coincidence of the discourses of policing, domestic security and

militarization in urban governance such that policing the city comes to look more and more like the

protection and organization of a military camp. Echoing Agamben’s thesis on the camp as internal logic

of the contemporary nomos, Graham writes, A priori incarcerations, bans, and a creeping mass

criminalization begin to puncture already precarious legal norms of due process, habeas corpus, the

right to protest, international humanitarian law and the human rights of citizenship. Increasingly, the

always – fragile notions of homogenous national citizenship fray and disintegrate as different groups and

ethnicities are pre-emptively profiled, screened, and treated differently. The rights of citizenship are

disaggregated or ‘unbundled: ‘Law’ is deployed to suspend law, opening the door to more or less

permanent ‘states of exception’ and emergency Systems’ of camps, militarized borders, and systems of

illicit, invisible movement now straddle nations and supranational blocs. The resulting transnational

archipelagos of incarceration, torture and death exhibit startling similarities to those that sustain global

geographies of tourism, finance, production, logistics, military power and the lifestyles of elites. The

‘enemies within’, the persons adjudged risky or worthless or out of place — the African-Americans of


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New Orleans, the troublesome inhabitants of Paris’s banlieues , the Roma encamped in the suburbs of

Naples or Rome, the favela dwellers on the edges of Rio’s tourist hot spots, the undocumented

immigrants, the beggars, the homeless, the street vendors everywhere — become increasingly

disposable, assaulted, forcibly excluded.4 Indeed, to the extent that “(L)aw is deployed to suspend law,

opening the door to more or less permanent ‘states of exception’ and emergency Systems’ of camps,

[and] militarized borders”, it is precisely the legal, civil and human rights that ‘law’ is supposed to

protect that is suspended and replaced with the logic of ‘camp’. The suspension law in order to protect

civil rights is thus the paradigm of the logic of the exception, a disturbing situation where martial law

becomes necessary for the protection of civil rights. In this way, justifying a state of emergency by

claiming that such a state is the best means to protect civil rights therefore implies the very possibility

Graham raises: the permanent state of exception or state of emergency that claims it is necessary to

protect civil rights. In Cities Under Siege: the New Military Urbanism, Graham documents the “…massive

global proliferation of deeply technophiliac state surveillance projects…[which] signals the startling

militarization of civil society – the extension of military ideas of tracking, identification and targeting into

the quotidian spaces of everyday life.”5 Situating the massive crossover of military discourses and

technologies into the governance of urban life, Graham argues that these military-style


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governmentalities “…represent dramatic attempts to translate long-standing military dreams of high-

tech omniscience and rationality into the governance of urban civil society.6 For Graham, these

movements to militarize urban policing and governance, most notably after 9/11, also signal the blurring

of the lines between discourses of State ‘homeland security’ and martial practices. Indeed for Graham,

what we are seeing is “(T)he dovetailing of state domestic security and military doctrines.”7 Graham

makes sense of the militarization of civil society through Foucault’s thesis about the ‘boomerang effect’

of modern state governmentality, whereby colonial techniques of genocide, discipline and social control

are appropriated by the State and applied internally on their own populations. This is a central thesis of

the book. Thus for Graham, the militarization of civil society can be understood as the internal

application of colonial and post-colonial models of social control, developed also in the Global South and

in the War on Terror, internally upon the domestic population. Graham outlines five key features of the

new military urbanism. First, Graham notes the expansion of the traditional language of ‘battlespace’

from the field to the city, such that everyday urban places such as subways, supermarkets, tower blocks,

industrial districts, and public spaces become reimagined as the site of urban warfare. Indeed,

“(E)veryday spaces of the city “…are becoming the main battlespace both at home and abroad.”8 In this

way, Graham states, Western security and military doctrine is being rapidly reimagined in ways that


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dramatically blur the juridical and operational separation between policing, intelligence and the military;

distinctions between war and peace; and those between local, national and global operations.”9

According to Graham, the ‘traditional’ understanding of ‘legal or human rights and legal systems based

on ideas of universal citizenship’ is being replaced within these new ‘battespaces’ with “…the profiling of

individuals, places, behaviors, associations, and groups….[and] assign these subjects risk categories

based on their perceived association with violence, disruption or resistance against the dominant

geographical orders sustaining global, neoliberal capitalism”8 This for Graham, the profiling of

individuals with regard to their risk or dangerousness is a feature of the new military urbanism. The

second feature of the new military urbanism has to do with ‘Foucault’s Boomerang: where “…explicitly

colonial models of pacification, militarization and control, honed on the streets of the global South, are

spread to the cities of capitalist heartlands in the North.”11 Internal colonization as mode of social

control. For Graham, the new technologies of militarization that are being deployed by local and state

government increasingly view urban areas as if they were a sort of post-colonial ‘military camp’ which

needs to be protected and walled in from outside invading forces. Indeed, for Graham, such

technologies, force people to prove their legitimacy if they want to move freely. Urban theorists and

philosophers now wonder whether the city as a key space for dissent and collective mobilization within


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civil society is being replaced…by camps which are linked together and withdrawn from the urban

outside beyond the walls or access-control systems.12

Rather than reading the resolution as a question of policy, we approach it from the political --- only our

affirmation of studious play can reclaim politics from the state of exception

Morgan 7 (Benjamin, University of California, Berkeley, “Undoing Legal Violence: Walter Benjamin's and

Giorgio Agamben's Aesthetics of Pure Means”, Journal Of Law And Society, volume 34, Number 1,

March,

www.academia.edu/1111547/Undoing_Legal_Violence_Walter_Benjamin_s_and_Giorgio_Agamben_s_

Aesthetics_of_Pure_Means

Giorgio Agamben's State of Exception paints an ominous picture. Agamben asks whether law can

regulate its own suspension not because this is an interesting, if abstract, legal problem, but because the

state of exception has become a worldwide `paradigm of government'. According to Agamben, a global

state of exception is the only way to explain our current state of affairs, in which: law can ... be

obliterated and contradicted with impunity by a governmental violence that, while ignoring

international law externally and producing a permanent state of exception internally, nevertheless still

claims to be applying the law. The state of exception enables this contradiction since it is neither inside

http://www.academia.edu/1111547/Undoing_Legal_Violence_Walter_Benjamin_s_and_Giorgio_Agamben_s_Aesthetics_of_Pure_Meanshttp://www.academia.edu/1111547/Undoing_Legal_Violence_Walter_Benjamin_s_and_Giorgio_Agamben_s_Aesthetics_of_Pure_Meanshttp://www.academia.edu/1111547/Undoing_Legal_Violence_Walter_Benjamin_s_and_Giorgio_Agamben_s_Aesthetics_of_Pure_Meanshttp://www.academia.edu/1111547/Undoing_Legal_Violence_Walter_Benjamin_s_and_Giorgio_Agamben_s_Aesthetics_of_Pure_Means


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nor outside law. On the one hand, it is not a `special kind of law' since it is `a suspension of the juridical

order itself'; on the other, it is not merely the absence of law, since law contains provisions for its

suspension. This topographical paradox means that law functions unusually within the state of

exception. The state of exception doesn't create chaos or anarchy; it sepa-rates the law's force from its

application. Law's purely formal applicability comes loose from its direct impact on life. As a result, acts

that are not authorized by any law can employ the force of legal action: in extreme situations `force of

law' floats as an indeterminate element that can be claimed by both the state authority ... and by a

revolutionary organization. Agamben argues that this ultimately makes law and life indistinguishable:

every action is potentially a legal action. Unfortunately, however, we can't simply return to a situation

prior to the state of exception: from the real state of exception in which we live, it is not possible to

return to the state of law, for at issue now are the very concepts of `state' and `law'. If we take

Agamben's claims about the reach of the state of exception seriously, we are left to grapple with the

odd solution that Agamben suggests. This solution is what I would like to interrogate here. Agamben

argues that to get beyond the state of exception we must do something more radical than modify the

law, since the exception has revealed that the normal functioning of law depends on violent force. As a

consequence, we must pursue ̀ the only truly political action ... which severs the nexus between violence


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and law'. But it is difficult to imagine how we might actually take this `truly political' action, which

Agamben calls `play': One day, humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not

in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good... . [T]his studious play

is the passage that allows us to arrive at ... justice. `Play' is a surprising answer to the problems that

Agamben has dramatically sketched: it seems simultaneously too abstract and not serious enough. But

can we take play seriously? Play might be able to counteract the law's violent application to life because

of its lack of seriousness: play suspends both instrumentality and normativity. In this sense, play

deinstrumentalizes what Agamben frequently calls the `machine' or `apparatus' of the state of

exception.

Traditional political dissent merely strengthens the security state --- we must instead expose and depose

of the security technologies the government employs







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Rediscovering a Form-of-Life But I would like to conclude — or better to simply stop my lecture (in

philosophy, like in art, no conclusion is possible, you can only abandon your work) — with something

which, as far as I can see now, is perhaps the most urgent political problem. If the state we have in front

of us is the security state I described, we have to think anew the traditional strategies of political

conflicts. What shall we do, what strategy shall we follow? The security paradigm implies that each form

of dissent, each more or less violent attempt to overthrow the order, becomes an opportunity to govern

these actions into a profitable direction. This is evident in the dialectics that tightly bind together

terrorism and state in an endless vicious spiral. Starting with French Revolution, the political tradition of

modernity has conceived of radical changes in the form of a revolutionary process that acts as the

pouvoir constituant, the “constituent power”, of a new institutional order. I think that we have to

abandon this paradigm and try to think something as a puissance destituante, a purely “destituent

power”, that cannot be captured in the spiral of security. It is a destituent power of this sort that

Benjamin has in mind in his essay On the Critique of Violence, when he tries to define a pure violence

which could “break the false dialectics of lawmaking violence and law-preserving violence,” an example

of which is Sorel’s proletarian general strike. “On the breaking of this cycle,” he writes at the end of the

essay “maintained by mythic forms of law, on the destitution of law with all the forces on which it


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depends, finally therefore on the abolition of state power, a new historical epoch is founded.” While a

constituent power destroys law only to recreate it in a new form, destituent power — insofar as it

deposes once for all the law — can open a really new historical epoch. To think such a purely destituent

power is not an easy task. Benjamin wrote once that nothing is so anarchical as the bourgeois order. In

the same sense, Pasolini in his last movie has one of the four Salò masters saying to their slaves: “true

anarchy is the anarchy of power.” It is precisely because power constitutes itself through the inclusion

and the capture of anarchy and anomy that it is so difficult to have an immediate access to these

dimensions; it is so hard to think today of something as a true anarchy or a true anomy. I think that a

praxis which would succeed in exposing clearly the anarchy and the anomy captured in the

governmental security technologies could act as a purely destituent power. A really new political

dimension becomes possible only when we grasp and depose the anarchy and the anomy of power. But

this is not only a theoretical task: it means first

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