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Security and Terror. Eli Jelly-Schapiro
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isbn 9780520968158
Автор произведения Eli Jelly-Schapiro
Издательство Ingram
The New Deal and the “embedded liberalism” it helped entrench is one example of the second phase of what Karl Polanyi called capitalism’s “double movement”: first, the movement toward the liberation of markets and universalization of the commodity form; and second, the countermovement—encouraged by labor primarily but at moments in the twentieth century by capital as well—toward the amelioration of capitalism’s most alienating and destructive effects. Without the second movement, Polanyi contends, capital would completely destroy the “fictitious commodities” that are its foundation—land and human labor most of all—and thus destroy itself. The actual complete disembedding of the market—the dream of the market fundamentalists—is, Polanyi insists, an impossibility, as it would mean turning nature and people into pure commodities, and thus ultimately destroying nature and people.51
In embedded liberalism, the state recognizes this danger and responds by instituting various protective measures to guard against the violence and reach of the market. Neoliberalism, though, disregards the imperative of the second movement. According to neoliberal doctrine, the brutalities of the market are not to be counteracted. Indeed, neoliberal policy proceeds through the annihilation/privatization of the public institutions and services historically created in the moment of countermovement. In neoliberal order, emergency powers regulate not the stability of society at large—“there is no such thing as society,” Margaret Thatcher intoned—but the security of private property, and the security of the ongoing processes of commoditization and privatization that make up the first movement described by Polanyi. Whether the economic crisis that began in 2008 will provoke a new and sustained countermovement remains unclear. In the immediate context of the crisis, the U.S. executive used its powers of emergency intervention—outsourced, in large part, to the Federal Reserve—to bail out precarious financial institutions and to stimulate dormant credit markets. But tellingly, it did not—with the tentative exception of 2010’s healthcare reform legislation—“exploit the crisis” to buttress beleaguered social safety nets or establish new ones. And at the state level, the invocation and enactment of “emergency” enabled the imposition of anti-union legislation and other austerity measures. In Michigan, to cite just one example, Governor Rick Snyder oversaw in the spring of 2011 the passage of a law that gave him the power to remove elected officials, abrogate union contracts, and eliminate services in any municipality or school district declared by the state to be in a condition of “financial emergency.”52
New and Old States of Exception
The War on Terror was imagined by its neoconservative authors as a “forever war.” The interminable temporality of the conflict is implicit in the very idea of a struggle against terror, which is not a material entity that can be eradicated but an animating idea, a mode of representing a particular—if fluid in definition—form of violence or difference. The declaration of a War on Terror, in other words, explicitly posits the emergency as permanent. But as I discuss above, the emergency—and the war that it compels—has been a structural component of modern political order since its inception. And as Julian Reid and Michael Dillon put it, “when emergency becomes the generative principle of formation of community and rule” the political sphere is determined by the urgency, “the compelling political economy,” of war.53 This inherency is most visibly evidenced in the space of the colony and by colonial histories.54 The colonial rationality of the War on Terror thus betrays—even as it strives to obscure—the other, deeper, permanent war with which it is continuous.
The principal policy documents and laws of the War on Terror—the USA PATRIOT Act (2001), National Security Strategy of the United States of America (2002), and National Strategy for Homeland Security (2002)—introduced a series of terms and categories into the political lexicon, many of which are cited by critics as evidence of the “state of exception” within which we now live: “enemy combatant,” “battlefield detainee,” “extraordinary rendition.”55 These categories name the novel forms of liminal, rightless subjectivity produced by the extra-juridical mechanisms of the U.S.-led War on Terror and experienced in Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and untold secret prisons located throughout the world. The word extraordinary nicely captures the simultaneous newness and mundanity of the War on Terror’s emergency formations—extraordinary as exceptional, and extraordinary as extra ordinary (really ordinary). In the latter meaning, the vocabulary of “enemy combatant” and “extraordinary rendition,” the violence it names, represents an exceptionally acute manifestation of long-established norms, Manichean frames—civilization and barbarism, human and infrahuman—basic to colonial modernity.
It bears emphasizing here that my intention in this section is not to suggest any perfect congruence between this and that emergency formation; an emergency declared in response to a national disaster of course differs profoundly, in its political intention and effect, from an emergency declared in wartime or in the face of economic crisis. Rather, my purpose is to locate the contemporary proliferation of emergency—as a narrative and as a governmental form—within the longer history of emergency as a technique of state power. This argument about the politics of emergency mirrors the overall argument of this chapter, which sheds light upon the ways in which ostensibly discrete instances of security thinking and governance—Social Security and Homeland Security, for example—share a political genealogy and rationality, which can be traced to the advent of colonial modernity.
CONCLUSION
Summoning Walter Benjamin, and invoking as well the work of Giorgio Agamben, a common critical refrain insists that in the moment of the War on Terror the state of exception has become the rule.56 The ongoing state of emergency declared by President Bush in the immediate aftermath of September 11 stands as compelling evidence in support of this thesis. As I have argued here, though, the contemporary iteration of emergency governance is not in fact exceptional but proves or evinces the rule. The exemplary sites or subjects of the “post-9/11” state of exception, such as Guantánamo Bay or “battlefield detainee,” are contiguous with the longer history of modernity’s exceptional violence—a violence perfected in the space of the colony. The racial logics of the contemporary moment—the synthesis of outright exclusion and “differential inclusion”—can likewise be traced to the early modern moment, and in particular to the settler-colonization of the New World. And contemporary modes of neoliberal depredation—the production and subsequent seizure of devalued or non-commoditized spaces and entities—are genealogically related to originary forms of primitive accumulation.
The security project arose concurrently with and in support of the settler-conquest of the New World, the establishment of the modern state form, and the emergence of the capitalist mode of production. Centuries later, new and old technologies of dispossession continue to propel capitalism into new worlds both fictitious and real; new and old racisms continue to shape human social life, delimiting and structuring the space of political belonging; and new and old narratives of crisis and emergency—of nature, of war, of economy, of culture—continue to inspire the innovation and intensification of state and market power. Intrinsic to each of these processes, security—as a political ideal and governmental technique—is also one binding thread between them. So too is terror. From its inception, the imperial security project has labored to elide the terror of its foundation and extant form. The history and contemporary expression of that terror is taken up in the chapter that follows.
TWO
“A General Principle of Democracy”
TERROR AND COLONIAL MODERNITY
In the New World, as in Africa and the Indian subcontinent, the advent of colonial power was justified via appeal to the inherent terror of the “state of nature.” In the colonial imagination, the “state of nature” was a space imbued with the sublime—an unfathomable space, inhabited by infrahuman