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notes
Today, one sees the beginnings of a society in which one proposes to apply to every
citizen the devices that had only been destined for delinquents. According to a
project that is already on the road to realization, the normal relationship of the State
to what Rousseau called the "members of the soveriegn" will be biometric, that is to
say, generalized suspicion.
Under the pressure of the growing depolitization of post-industrial societies, the
citizenry is progressively withdrawing from all political participation and seeing itself
more and more treated like virtual criminals. Thus the political body becomes a
criminal body.
The dangers of such a situation are obvious to all, except those who simply refuse
to see. One doesn't quite know if the photos that permitted the Nazi police forces in
the occupied countries to locate and record the Jews, thus facilitating their
deportation, were originally identity cards or professional cards. What will happen
when a despotic power makes use of the biometric records of an entire
population?
It is all the more worrisome that the European countries, after imposing biometric
supervision [controle] over immigrants, are now preparing to impose it on all of their
citizens. The reasons of security invoked in favor of these odious practices are not
convincing, because, if they can contribute to the prevention of recidivism, they are
certainly useless in preventing a first crime or act of terrorism. On the other
hand, they are perfectly efficacious for the massive control of individuals. The
day when biometric supervision has become generalized and surveillance by [video]
camera will be established along all the streets, all critique and all dissent will
have become impossible.
1ac
1ac biometrics
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 Collge 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-powerdemocracy/)
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
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 comits 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
published a book in which I tried to show precisely how the state of exception was becoming in Western democracies a normal
Greek verb crino; a medical and a theological one. In the medical tradition, crisis means the moment in which the doctor has to
judge, to decide if the patient will die or survive. The day or the days in which this decision is taken are called crisimoi, the decisive
what is essential
in both traditions is the connection with a certain moment in time . In the present
usage of the term, it is precisely this connection which is abolished . The crisis, the
judgement, is split from its temporal index and coincides now with the chronological
days. In theology, crisis is the Last Judgment pronounced by Christ in the end of times. As you can see,
course of time, so that not only in economics and politics but in every aspect of social life, the
crisis coincides with normality and becomes, in this way, just a tool of government.
Consequently, the capability to decide once for all disappears and the continuous
decision-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 dtat. 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 dtat. Governing the Effects This is why I
of the concept of security in the beginning of modern economy, by Franois 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 (suret) as the central notion in the theory of government and this in a very peculiar way. One of the main
liberalizing both internal and foreign exchanges. To govern retains here its etymological cybernetic meaning: a good kybernes, a
good pilot cant avoid tempests, but if a tempest occures he must be able to govern his boat, using the force of waves and winds for
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 (suret, in Quesnays 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
navigation.
military politics to the internal measures of police. We must realize that European governments today gave up any attempt to rule
be obliged to extend and multiply control. Causes demand to be known, while effects can only be checked and controlled.
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 meant to introduce
identification photographs and Galtons fingerprints are currently in use everywhere for ID cards. The De-politicization of Citizenship
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 eyes 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 students restaurants
But
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
It
is easy to imagine the dangers represented by a power 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
just the old armaments producers like Thales, Finmeccanica, EADS et BAE System, that have converted to the security business.
not dwell on this important aspect of the security problem. The reflections I would like to share with you concern rather the
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
transformation of political identity and of political relationships that are involved in security technologies.
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 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
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
Punir and in his courses at the Collge 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
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 did not want for the police to maintain order but for it to manage disorder.
1792 introduced thus into French legislation the notion of police de suret (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 Schelle, Gensonn) 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. Gensonn 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 take a
decision, nor prepares, as is usually stated, the judges decision. Every decision concerns the causes, while the police acts on
effects, which are by definition undecidable.
placing
itself under the sign of security, the modern state has left the domain of politics to
enter a no mans 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.
this definition: Police is the relationship of a state with itself. The hypothesis I would like to suggest here is that,
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 continuously trades, and have to be removed from life if its antipathy to
biopoliticised life cannot otherwise be adapted , correctedor contained. Behind the lifecharged 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'
One might say in Heideggerian fashion that life is the stuff of biopolitics. In the process of reducing life to stuff,
but note that there is no profanity without sanctity - immanence of 'happy life'.
well as new strategic options are bogged down in continual drone operations that kill more civilians than what may be deemed as
CCTV has dominated Londons cityscape with the aim to manage the unpredictable security environment. Amoore and Hall (2008)
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 (ORiordann). 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 Giulianis order maintenance policing that dealt with petty crimes in radical ways which
Lattimer politics 1lattimer politics 2 lattimer politics 3 Necessary Surveillance Understanding the role of surveillance technologies in
the WoT implies these technologies are a necessary component in undertaking practices for a war on terror. Developing the current
theme of this paper, I argue surveillance technologies have been necessary in fulfilling a particular political narrative casted by
President Bush and Prime Minister Blair in the WoT. The risk-society marks a transformation from military personnel commanding
threats in the Cold War to politicians managing risks in the 21st Century. Foreign Policy Nation-building has been a central part of
Bushs WoT foreign policy, with the intention to make major investments in post-conflict states and regions, both economically and
politically. Secretary of State Colin Powells once-you-break-it, you-own-it Pottery Barn Rule has become a major part of the political
narrative embedded in US Foreign Policy (Sperling, 2010). Nonetheless, the stabilisation of post-conflict territory has a darker and
cynical side to it performed through the usage of surveillance technologies at US operated checkpoints, including the Musayyib,
south of Baghdad. The Musayyib checkpoint serves as a demarcation between north and south Baghdad, with an aim of identifying
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 USs Foreign Policy are not concerned with economic and political reconstruction but
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 Americas 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 Surveillance technologies are necessary in fulfilling political goals through two-sided foreign policies in the WoT.
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
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
Facial
recognition technologies operationalise the liberal project of globalization ,
modernity, and 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
it did during the Provisional Irish Republican Army bombings, but an attempt to filter risks based on political criteria.
cameras is moving beyond the political narratives of Blair and Bushs 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
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
terrorism are driven by the profit motive. In a credit society, with more finance available, this leads to vast insecurity (ibid).
(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.
writes Levinas (2003, 67), and there is nothing more to be done, or anything to add to this fact that we have been entirely
delivered updelivered 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 persons biometric scans can often
bondage. To be truly oneself is ... to become aware of the ineluctable bondage unique to your body ... And then, if race did not exist,
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
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 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
emerge, then you're facing a real conundrum. If you wait for the emergence, you'll have waited too long -- too late.
terrorism. I'm only saying that the fact that their preemptive actions did in fact do that fits perfectly into the logic of preemption,
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
clear and present danger into a threat, then to hold the threat in abeyance, so that it continues to loom over the present indefinitely,
Preemption, by
suspends the present. It puts us and our actions in that conditional timeloop 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
so that it doesn't follow any action path back to the future. The aim of deterrence aim was to suspend threat.
contrast,
leads a foregone conclusion in any case. The word is tautological. The logic of preemption is a tautological logic. But that's just the
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 adjust the way the United States exercized that leadership. Yet these adjustments
between administrations and the changes on the level of explicitly stated doctrine. I will briefly go into how Bush's 9-11fueled-"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
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
The operative logic of preemptive is not only self-driving ; it is selfexpanding. 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
to turn space-filling.
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-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
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
"good war" and the right war. The right war overflowed to the wrong side of the border, into Pakistan.
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 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
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
case of Fallujah is not dissimilar to domestic homeland security initiatives and the securitization of borders and the bodies that
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 least, the untenable
differentiation between domestic and foreign policy. In this specific case, in much the same way that modern technology has
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 Agambens
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 Picassos
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 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
Schmitts 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
what gives the state of exception its permanence , and what are the
implications to the members of the political community in this normalized state of
exception? On the one hand, to follow Agambens lead, the state of exception arises at an
then, is
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
However, so called esoteric biometrics take not only the unique aspects of the body but the actual physiology, which, for lack of a
more suitable phrase, measures the bodys output. Esoteric biometrics include: facial thermography (the pattern of facial heat
caused by the distinctive blood flow under the skin); DNA; body odor (measuring rolatiles, the chemical substances that cause
odor); gait (measuring the distinctive manner of walking); and foot dynamics (considers not only the size of the foot, but dynamics,
such as pressure analysis relating to the shape of the foot, the foot geometric regarding timing of steps, and dermatoglyphics,
which uses the measurement of footprint ridges to measure friction) (Woodward et al. 2003: 115 36). The reason for offering some
examples of esoteric biometrics is not simply for its shock value, but to emphasize the vision and belief in the body as password
that permeates the 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 ones 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
after the events of 9/ 11 is a case in point. The 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 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 Coles 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
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).
policies influence international affairs, and vice versa (Ferguson and Mansbach 1996: 261). To this end,
Michael Brown grand jury 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
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
The expectation
that public protest in Ferguson might require the mobilization of state military forces
is precisely what seems to underwrite the justification of Nixons executive order. The
expectation of Americans coming together to express outrage does not justify intervention by the militia.3
rationale for the executive order is couched in the language of protecting peaceable assembly, protest and the protection of public
safety, civil rights and private business. However, the suspension of law to protect civil rights raises a disturbing prospect, one that
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 Agambens
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.
Stephen Graham highlights in his recent book Cities Under Siege: the New Military Urbanism. As Graham shows,
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
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
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
Foucaults 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 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 capitalism8 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 Foucaults
Boomerang: where explicitly
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 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 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?
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
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
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
forces on which it depends, finally therefore on the abolition of state power, a new historical epoch is founded.
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 Sal masters saying to their slaves: true anarchy is the anarchy of
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 of
all the rediscovery of a form-of-life, the access to a new figure of that political life
whose memory the security state tries at any price to cancel .
power. It is precisely
BC, Jerusalem was plundered by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar and the temple of the Jews destroyed. Many Jews died and the
rest were taken captive and brought to Babylonia. During the Babylonian exile, when they no longer had a temple and were
forbidden to practise their faith, the Jewish people focused on the study of their holy books. After the Persian king Cyrus defeated
Babylonia and issued a decree in 537 BC that the exiled Jews could return to their homelands and rebuild their holy sanctuaries,
40,000 Jews returned to rebuild the temple. But the religion of the Jews was already marked by exile and in 70 AD the temple was
again destroyed, this time by the Romans. The temple was not rebuilt and study has since then become the true temple of the Jews.
The Jewish religion is no longer focused on worship but on study. This gave the scholar a messianic significance (IP, 63). Talmud
means study; the original meaning of Torah is not law but instruction Mishnan, the set of rabbinic laws, is derived from a root
can aim at, a goal it can set. As far as etymology is concerned, the word studium is closely related to a root that indicates a
coffision, a shock or influence. Study and surprise are closely related in that sense. Whoever studies finds oneself shocked, amazed
and is, in a certain sense, stupid (cf. studium, stupefying). On the one hand, study is undergone and, on the other, undertaken.
Here Agamben sees a close affinity with Aristotles description of potentiality, which is
passive on the one hand an undergoing and active on the other an unstoppable drive to undertake
something, to do something, to engage in action. Study is the place where undergoing and
undertaking converge; it is a gesture (IP, 64). The rhythm of studying is an alternation between amazement and clarity, discovery
use or significance. Nevertheless, Benjamin contends that they have a major role to play: Among Kafkas creations, there is a clan
which reckons with the brevity of life in a peculiar way. The students who appear in the strangest places in Kafkas works are the
spokesmen for and leaders of this clan3 Agamben is in complete agreement with this view: [T]he latest, most exemplary
embodiment of study in our culture is not the great philosopher nor the sainted doctor. It is rather the student, such as he appears in
certain novels of Kafka or Walser. (IP, 65) It is precisely the apparent uselessness of the students and the hopelessness of study that
plays such an important role in the strategy they develop with respect to power. Kafkas useless students without Schrift So the
students operating in Kafkas stories have an important characteristic: their studies seem to be useless. In Amerika, Karl sees a
strange young man: He watched silently as the man read in his book, turned the pages and occasionally checked something in
another book that he always picked up at lightning speed, often making entries in a notebook, his face always bent surprisingly low
over it. Could this man be a student? He did seem to be studying. ... Youre studying? asked Karl. Yes, yes, said the man, using the
few moments lost to his studies to rearrange his books.3 (...) And when wifi you be finished with your studies? asked Karl. Its slow
going, said the student. ... [Y]ou can be happy about having given up your studies. I myself have been studying for years, out of
pure single-mindedness. It has given me little satisfaction and even less chance of a decent future. 32 Karl explains his problems
with Delamarche to the student. The student cannot really help him either; he does not offer Karl any insight in what he must do and
even advises him to remain with Delamarche absolutely33 Karl wonders where studying had got him [or her] he [or she] had
forgotten everything again.34 The most extreme example of a student, in Agambens view, is Melvills Bartleby, the scriber who
stopped writing. According to Benjamin, Kafkas students have also lost the Schrift. This can mean either that they have stopped
writing or that they have lost the Schrift in the sense of the Torah, the object of study. According to Scholem, the students have not
lost the Schrift or the Torah, but they can no longer decipher it (cited in HS, 51). Nonetheless, Benjamins genius is apparent,
according to Agamben, precisely in the fact that the students have lost the Schrift. Their commentaries on the Schrift, on the Law,
are notes in the margin of a blank page.35 Study does not lead to an a priori determined goal; Kafka does not attach any promises
to study that are traditionally attached to the study of the Torah. According to Agamben, the messianic tension of study is turned
around here. Or better: it has gone beyond itself. Its gesture is that of a power that does not precede but follows its action, which it
has left behind forever, of a Talmud that has not only announced the reconstruction of the temple but has already forgotten it. At
this point, study shakes off the sadness that disfigured it and returns to its truest nature: not work, but inspiration, the selfnourishment of the soul (IP, 65).36 Kafkas assistants are members of a congregation who have lost their house of prayer. His
students have forgotten how to write, have lost the Schrift. Now nothing stops them on their [u]ntrammeled, happy journey:37 The
study of the horse Bucephalus But the most enigmatic example of the student in Kafkas work may be Alexander the Greats horse
Bucephalus, who happens to become a lawyer to the surprise of his colleagues. We have a new lawyer, Dr. Bucephalus. In his
outward appearance there is little to recall the time when he was the warhorse of Alexander of Macedonia. ... I recently saw a quite
simple court usher with the knowing eye of a little racetrack regular marveffing at the lawyer as the latter, lifting his thighs high,
mounted step by step with a stride that made the marble clang. In general the bar approves the admission of Bucephalus. ...
Nowadays, as no one can deny, there is no great Alexander. To be sure, many know how to commit murder ... and many feel that
Macedonia is too narrow ... but no one, no one, can lead the way to India. Even in those days Indias gates were beyond reach, but
their direction was indicated by the royal sword. ... Today ... no one shows the way; many carry swords but only wave them in the air
and the gaze that tries to follow them grows confused. Perhaps, therefore, it is really best, as Bucephalus has done, to immerse
oneself in law books. Free, his flanks unburdened by the loins of the rider, by quiet lamplight, far from the tumult of Alexanders
that law is
set over against myth in the name of justice: instead of taking part in the mythical
(pre-law) struggle, Bucephalus devotes himself to law.39 Benjamin sees this as a serious misunderstanding of Kafkas
story. Indeed, the goal is to unmask mythical-juridical violence and human beings, like
the horse Bucephalus, must tame the mythical forces at whatever cost (SE, 63). But, according to
Benjamin, what is new about this new lawyer what is new for the legal profession , is
that he does not practice law but only studies it, reading in tranquil lamplight.
baffle, he reads and turns the pages of our old books.38 In his interpretation of this story, Werner Kraft concludes
Bucephalus is free: his flanks are no longer squeezed by Alexander the Greats thighs and he is no longer carrying the latter on his
The door to justice is not to employ law but to make it inoperative not
by practicing law (which would be a repetition of the mythical forces, given that law
is in force without significance), but by doing nothing more than studying it. The law
which is studied but no longer practiced is the gate to justice . Bucephalus strategy
against law is thus study. Agamben remarks that it is decisive that the law that is
back.
not practiced but only studied does not itself become justice but only the door to it .
The study of the law has no higher purpose that is why the law has
become inoperative.4 That which opens the passage to justice is not the
abolishment of the law but its deactivation and inactivity that is, another use of the
law (SE, 63). This is a law that is liberated from all discipline and all relation to
sovereignty. Bucephalus depicts a figure of the law that is possible after its link with
violence and power has been deposed , a law that is no longer in force and applied
(SE, 63-64), just as the study of doorkeepers by the man from the country makes it
possible to remain living outside the law. Agamben then outlines the following
picture of the future: 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. (SE, 64)
human, yielding to every demand by society, is cut off from his impotentiality, from his ability to do nothing. Just as we saw
previously, politics is a politics of the act, of the human individual being at work. The irresponsible motto of the contemporary
individual, No problem, I can do it comes precisely at the moment when he [one] should instead realize that he [one] has been
consigned in unheard of measure to forces and processes over which he [one] has lost all control (N, 44). This flexibility also leads
to a confusion of professions and callings, of professional identities and social roles, because people are no longer in touch with their
inability Agamben sees an example of this in Kafkas The Trial. In the last chapter, just before his death, two men enter through
Joseph Ks door. They are his questioners/executioners, but Joseph K does not recognize them as such and thinks that they are [o]ld
second-rate actors or opera singers?5 Agamben argues that, in Kafkas world, evil is presented as an inadequate reaction to
have the form of the demonic but that of being separated from our lack of power. Nothing makes us more impoverished and less
free than this estrangement from impotentiality. Those who are separated from what they can do, can, however, still resist they can
Those who are separated from their own impotentiality lose , on the other hand, first
of all the capacity to resist (N, 45) And it is evident, according to Agamben, from the example of Eichmann how right
Kafka was in this (CC, 32). Eichmann was not so much separated from his power as from his
lack of power, tempted to evil precisely by the powers of right and law (CC, 32). What should
still not do.
one do? A clash with activists At the end of 2009, Agamben gave a lecture in honour of the presentation of a collection of texts
written by the Tiqqun collective. This French collective has written several political manifestoes and in 2008 their compound was
raided by the anti-terrorist brigades. The charges were quite vague belonging to an ultra-left and the anarcho-autonomous milieu;
using a radical discourse; having links with Ibreign groups; participating regularly in political demonstrations. The evidence that was
found was not weapons, but documents, for example a train schedule. Although Agamben calls these charges a tragicomedy and
accuses French politics of barbarism6, in his lecture he emphasizes another important political value of the Tiqqun collective. This
collective embodies Foucaults idea of the non-subject. One of the latters greatest merits is that he thought of power no longer as
an attribute that a certain group had over another, but as a relation that was constantly shifting. A second merit of Foucaults
to do, what is there to be done? ... If someone asks me what action, it shows they missed the point because they still want me to
say: go out in the streets and do this? It has nothing to do with that. (OT) Inactivity as active resistance to the state was hardly
through gestures. The gestures of the people in the Oklahoma theatre and elsewhere in Kafkas work, the shame of Joseph K. and
the as not in Kafkas On Parables show us that there are other strategies, aside from active resistance, to reverse political
situations.
history in its pure differential and qualitative value. That is, in making present "human temporality in itself, the pure differential
appears to locate the law within the diachronic element of the "once . . . no longer, rather than within the synchrony of
for the disjuncture of past and present, Agamben argues, by reabsorbing diachrony into synchrony.
This production of a differential margin in the dialectic of rite and play is the condition of history; it is that which allows for the now.
As a toy and only as a toy, as an object of play, the rite of law contributes to the
revelation of the essential historicity of the human . The ritualistic dimension of law is important for
another reason as well. Agamben insists on the impossibility of the elimination of either diachronic or synchronic signification: in all
games and rites, the one remains a stumbling block for the other, thereby preventing the attainment of a pure state of diachrony or
synchrony. Thus, he writes, "at the end of the game, the toythe privileged signifier of absolute diachrony"turns around into its
playing
with law does not mean eliminating the law , for there is actually a sense in which
the law is rescued from its own obsolescence in play. Rather than being
maintained solely in a state of decay characterized by the simple lack of practicoeconomic value as law, it is given a new use. But this does not take the form of a
resacralization of the law and restoration of transcendental meaning or force .
Instead, the new use of law takes the form of its deactivation or deposition. Before saying
opposite and is presented as the synchronic residue that the game can no longer eliminate (IH, 79). This implies that
more of this, it is worth cautioning against the phrase "at the end of the game used above, for in what sense would the game in
which humanity plays with law have an end? To construe the game of playing with law as having an end would in fact push
Agambens conception of the messianic toward an identification with the eschatological, a conflation that he explicitly resists in The
Time That Remains.16 Thus, within his own characterization, it would be more accurate to insist on the endlessness of play. As with
deposed or deactivated law remains a law. In what sense is a deposed law still a law? Agamben suggests that it is this question of
the status and meaning of law after its messianic fulfillment that motivates Benjamins reflections on Kafka, in which law no longer
has force or application (SE, 63). However, this raises more questions than it answers, and in particular, it leaves open what a
postjuridical justice arrived at through studious play might look like. We can be sure that what Agamben means by justice does not
coincide with more standard jurisprudential conceptions as the proper application of law. Despite his concern with questions of law,
though, the concept of justice has played a small part in Agambens work to date (at least if considered at an explicit textual level),
and there is little overt indication of what it would amount to beyond this discussion in State of Exception. One point at which a
(slightly) more extended consideration of justice does appear is in an early fragment in which Agamben defines justice as the
handing on of the Forgotten and the transmission of oblivion (IP, 79). At first glance, this does little to clarify the concept of
justice that he employs, but it does point toward a path of elucidation.
is, of going back to the problem that Aristotle fleetingly posed in the Nicomachean Ethics (1097b, 22 sqq), when, in the context of
the definition of the object of episteme politike, of political science, he wondered if, as for the flute player, the sculptor, the
carpenter, and every artisan there exists a proper work (ergon), there is also for man as such something like an ergon or if he is not
instead argos, without work, inoperative. Ergon of man means in this context not simply work, but that which defines energeia, the
and beyond the concrete social figures that he can assume. Aristotle quickly abandons the idea of an argia, of an essential
inoperativity of man. I have sought on the contrary, reprising an ancient tradition that appears in Averroes and in Dante, to
think
man [one] as the living being without work , which is to say, devoid of any specific
vocation: as a being of pure potentiality (potenza), that no identity and no work could
exhaust. This essential inoperativity of man is not to be understood as the cessation
of all activity, but as an activity that consists in making human works and
productions inoperative, opening them to a new possible use. It is necessary to
call into question the primacy that the leftist tradition has attributed to
production and labor and to ask whether an attempt to define the truly human
activity does not entail first of all a critique of these notions . The modern epoch, starting from
Christianitywhose creator God defined himself from the origin in opposition to the deus otiosus of the pagansis constitutively unable to think
inoperativity except in the negative form of the suspension of labor. Thus one of the ways in which inoperativity has been thought is the feast [la festa],
which, on the model of the Hebrew Shabbat, has been conceived essentially as a temporary suspension of productive activity, of melacha. But the feast is
defined not only by what in it is not done, but primarily by the fact that what is donewhich in itself is not unlike what one does every daybecomes
undone, is rendered inoperative, liberated and suspended from its economy, from the reasons and purposes that define it during the weekdays (and not
doing, in this sense, is only an extreme case of this suspension)/ If one eats, it is not done for the sake of being fed; if one gets dressed, it is not done for
the sake of being covered up or taking shelter from the cold; if one wakes up, it is not done for the sake of working; if one walks, it is not done for the sake
of going someplace; if one speaks, it is not done for the sake of communicating information; if one exchanges objects, it is not done for the sake of selling
or buying. There is no feast that does not involve, in some measure, a destitutive element, that does not begin, that is, first and foremost by rendering
inoperative the works of men. In the Sicilian feast of the dead described by Pitre, the dead (or an old woman named Strina, from strena, the Latin name for
the gifts exchanged during the festivities at the beginning of the year) steal goods from tailors, merchants, and bakers to then bestow them on children
(something similar to this happens in every feast that involves gifts, like Halloween, in which the dead are impersonated by children). In every carnival
feast, such as the Roman saturnalia, existing social relations are suspended or inverted: not only do slaves command their masters, but sovereignty is
placed in the hands of a mock king (saturnalicius princeps) who takes the place of the legitimate king. In this way the feast reveals itself to be above all a
deactivation of existing values and powers. There are no ancient feasts without dance, writes Lucian, but what is dance other than the liberation of the
body from its utilitarian movements, the exhibition of gestures in their pure inoperativity? And what are maskswhich play a role in various ways in the
feasts of many peoplesif not, essentially, a neutralization of the face? Only if it is considered in this perspective can the feast furnish a paradigm for
thinking inoperativity as a model of politics. An example will allow us to clarify how one must understand this inoperative operation. What is a poem, in
fact, if not an operation taking place in language that consists in rendering inoperative, in deactivating its communicative and informative function, in
order to open it to a new possible use? What the poem accomplishes for the potentiality of speaking, politics and philosophy must accomplish for the
power of acting. Rendering inoperative the biological, economic, and social operations, they show what the human body can do, opening it to a new
these lines, Tronti alludes in an interview to the idea of a potere destituente without managing in any way to define it. Coming
from a tradition in which the identification of a subjectivity was the fundamental political element, he seems to link it to the twilight
of political subjectivities. For us, who begin from that twilight, and from the putting into question of the very concept of subjectivity,
political strike. While the suspension of work in the political strike is violent, because it causes (veranlasst, occasions, induces)
only an extraneous modification of working conditions, the other, as pure means, is without violence (Benjamin, 1977, page 194).
Indeed, this does not entail the resumption of work following external concessions and some modifications to working conditions,
but the decision to resume only a work completely transformed and nonimposed by the state; that is, an upheaval that this kind of
strike not so much causes (veranlasst) as realizes (vollzieht) (page 194). The difference between veranlassen, to induce, to
second anarchic (page 194). An example of a destituent strategy that is neither destructive nor constituent is that of Paul faced with the question of
law. Paul expresses the relationship between the messiah and the law with the verb katargein, which means to render inoperative (argos), to deactivate
(Estiennes Thesaurus suggests, redo aergon et inefficacem, facio cessare ab opere suo, tollo, aboleo). Thus Paul can write that the messiah will render
inoperative (katargese) all rule (potere), all authority, and all power (potenza) (1 Corinthians 15:24) and, at the same time, that the messiah is the telos
that is the end and fulfillment of the law (Romans 10:4): inoperativity and fulfillment coincide here perfectly. In another passage, he says of the believers
that they have been rendered inoperative (katargethemen) with respect to the law (Romans 7:5-6). The customary translations of this verb with to
destroy, to abolish are not correct (the Vulgate expresses it more cautiously with evacuari), all the more so because Paul in a famous passage declares to
want to hold firm the law (nomon istanomenRomans 3:31). Luther, with an intuition whose importance must not have escaped Hegel, translates
katargein with aufheben; that is, with a verb that means as much to abolish as to conserve. In any case, it is certain that for Paul it is not a question of
destroying the law, which is holy and just, but of deactivating its action with regard to sin, because it is through the law that the people know sin and
desire: I would not have known desire, if the law had not said: do not desire: taking impulse from the commandment, sin has made operative
(kateirgasato, has activated) in me every desire (Romans 7:8). It is this operativity of the law that the messianic faith neutralizes and renders
inoperative, without thereby abolishing the law. The law held firm is a law deprived of its power of commandthat is, it is a law no longer of the
commandments and of work (nomos ton entolonEphesians 2:15; ton ergonRomans 3:27), but of faith (nomos pisteosRomans 3:27). And in its
essence, faith is not a work, but an experience of the word (faith from the hearing and hearing through the wordRomans 10:17). On the other hand,
Paul, in a decisive passage of 1 Corinthians 7, defines the Christian form of life through the formula hos me (as not): But this I say, brethren, time
contracted itself, the rest is, that even those having wives may be as not having, and those weeping as not weeping, and those rejoicing as not rejoicing,
and those buying as not possessing, and those using the world as not using it up. For passing away is the figure of this world. The as not is a destitution
without refusal. To live in the form of the as-not means to deactivate every juridical and social property, without establishing a new identity. A form-of- life
is, in this sense, that which unrelentingly deposes the social conditions in which it finds itself living, without negating them, but simply using them. If,
writes Paul, in the moment of the call you found yourself in the condition of the slave, do not worry: but if you would also be made free, use (chresai) your
condition of the slave (1 Corinthians 7:21). Use names here the deposing potentiality in the Christian form of life, which destitutes the figure of this
world (to schema tou kosmou toutou). It is this destituent potentiality that both the anarchist tradition and 20th-century thought sought to define without
ever actually succeeding. The destruction of tradition by Heidegger, the deconstruction of the arche, and the fracturing of the hegemonies by Schurmann,
and what, on the trail of Foucault, I have called philosophical archaeologythey are all pertinent, but insufficient, attempts to return to an historical a
priori in order to destitute it. But also a good part of the practice of the artistic avant-garde and of the political movements of our time can be seen as the
attemptso often miserably failedto carry out a destitution of work that has ended instead with the recreation of powers even more oppressive
inasmuch as they had been deprived of any legitimacy. The destitution of power and of its works is an arduous task, because it is first of all and only in a
form-of-life that it can be carried out. Only a form-of-life is constitutively destituent. The Latin grammarians called deponents (depositiva, or, also,
absolutive or supine) those verbs that, similar in this regard to the middle voice verbs, cannot properly be called active or passive: sedeo, sudo, dormio,
iaceo, algeo, sitio, esurio, gaudeo. What do the middle or deponent verbs depose? They do not express an operation, rather they depose it, neutralize
and render it inoperative, and, in this way, expose it. The subject is not merely, in the words of Benveniste, internal to the process, but, having deposed its
action, it is exposed and put in question together with it. In this sense, these verbs can offer the paradigm to think in a new way not only action and
only through the exhibition and the deposition of the anomy that law has captured within itself in the state of exception. This is true
as well for the thought that seeks to conceive the a-demy, the absence of a demos or people that defines democracy (here I use
the term ademy because a people that must be represented is by definition absent). Only the exhibition of the ademy internal to
democracy allows us to depose the fiction of a people that it pretends to represent. In all of these cases, constitution coincides
without remainder with destitution; positing has no other consistency than in deposing. Defining the dispositif of the exception as a
there are vernacular figures of anomic communities that have a completely different character. When one wants to recover life, anarchy, anomy, and
ademy in their truth, it is necessary therefore first to release oneself from the form that they have received in the exception. This is not, however, only a
theoretical task: it can occur only through a form-of- life. By the term form-of-life, we mean a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which
it is never possible to isolate something like a bare life. A life that cannot be separated from its form is a life for which, in its way of living, what is at stake
is living itself, and, in its living, what is at stake above all else is its mode of living. What is at stake, then, is a life in which the single ways, acts, and
processes of living are never simply facts, but always and above all possibilities of life, always and above all potentiality [potenza]. Tiqqun has developed
this definition in three theses, stating that, (1) The human unity is not the body or the individual, but the form-of-life, that (2) each body is affected by its
it is
necessary to replace the ontology of substance with an ontology of how , an
ontology of modality. The decisive problem is no longer what I am , but how I
am what I am. It is necessary, in this sense, to radicalize the Spinozan thesis according to
which there is only being (substance) and its modes or modifications. Substance is not
something that precedes the modes and exists independently from them . Being is
not other than its modes, substance is only its modifications, its own how (its own
quomodo). Modal ontology makes it possible to go beyond the ontological difference
that has dominated the Western conception of being . Between being and modes the
relation is neither of identity nor of difference because the mode is at once identical
and differentor, rather, it implies the coincidencethat is, the falling together [cadere insieme]of the two terms. In this
form- of-life as by a clinamen, an attraction, a taste, and that (3) my form-of-life relates not to what I am, but to how I am what I amP] Here
sense, the problem of the pantheist risk is badly put: the Spinozist syntagma Deus sive (or) natura does not mean God = nature:
the sive (whether sive derives from the conditional and concessive si or the anaphoric sic) expresses the modalization, that is, the
neutralizing and the failure as much of identity as of difference. What is divine is not being in itself, but its own sive, its own always
to which all potentiality is, on the basis of the same and with respect to the same, impotentiality (Met.1046, pages 30-31)]. The
destitution of the being-in-work of the work (of its energeia) cannot be carried out by another work, but only by a potentiality that
remains as such and shows itself as such. Aristotle (De Anima 429b, pages 9-10) wrote that thought, when it thinks in act each of
the intelligibles, remains in some way in potentiality and is thus able to think itself.
tasks nor simply works: they name, rather, the dimension in which the linguistic and corporeal, material and immaterial, biological
and social operations are made inoperative and contemplated as such.
2ac case
2ac overview
Our role of the ballot is who best affirms an ethics beyond
sovereign violence
Agamben 2k (Giorgio Ph.D., Baruch Spinoza Chair at the European Graduate
School, Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Verona, Italy, Professor of
Philosophy at Collge International de Philosophie in Paris, and at the University of
Macerata in Italy, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, p. 93-95)
Exposition is the location of politics. If there is no animal politics, that is perhaps because animals are always
already in the open and do not try to take possession of their own exposition; they simply live in it without caring about it. That is
in pornographic photographs the portrayed subjects, by a calculated stratagem, look into the camera, thereby exhibiting the
awareness of being exposed to the gaze. This unexpected gesture violently belies the fiction that is implicit in the consumption of
such images, according to which the one who looks surprises the actors while remaining unseen by them: the latter, rather,
knowingly challenge the voyeurs gaze and force him to look them in the eyes. In that precise moment, the insubstantial nature of
the human face suddenly comes to light. The fact that the actors look into the camera means that they show that they are
simulating; nevertheless, they paradoxically appear more real precisely to the extent to which they exhibit this falsification. The
same procedure is used today in advertising: the image appears more convincing if it shows openly its own artifice. In both cases,
the one who looks is confronted with something that concerns unequivocally the essence of the face, the very structure of truth. We
may call tragicomedy of appearance the fact that the face uncovers only and precisely inasmuch as it hides, and hides to the extent
to which it uncovers. In this way, the appearance that ought to have manifested human beings becomes for them instead a
resemblance that betrays them and in which they can no longer recognize themselves. Precisely because the face is solely the
location of truth, it is also and immediately the location of simulation and of an irreducible impropriety. This does not mean,
however, that appearance dissimulates what it uncovers by making it look like what in reality it is not: rather, what human beings
hidden from them is not something behind appearance, but rather appearing itself, that is, their being nothing other than a face.
www.academia.edu/1111547/Undoing_Legal_Violence_Walter_Benjamin_s_and_Giorgio_Agamben_s_Aesthetics_of_P
ure_Means
This philosophical effort to describe non instrumental means is the basis for Agamben's political response to our `global state of
seen, views law as inherently violent in both its creation and preserva-tion in so far as it is conceived as instrumental. Agamben
argues that the state of exception extends this legal violence beyond its own boundaries by making it possible for extra-legal actions
Tracing the legal history of the term `force of law' (the title Derrida gave to an
Agamben describes those actions that, though not
legally authorized, nonetheless draw upon the violence that guarantees law's
dictates: `decrees, provisions, and measures that are not formally laws nevertheless acquire their ``force''.' What is peculiar,
and dangerous, about the state of exception is that its suspension of legal norms allows any action to
potentially acquire legal force. As such, in suspending the law, the state of
exception does not also suspend the violence that creates and maintains law, but
rather makes it available for appropriation by revolu-tionary groups, dictators, the police, and so forth: `It is
to acquire legal status.
as if the suspension of law freed a force ... that both the ruling power and its adversaries, the constituted power as well as the
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
What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that
precedes the law, but a new use that is born only after it. And use, which has been
contaminated by law, must also be freed from its own value. This liberation is the
task of study, or of play. In proposing this playful relation Agamben makes the move
that Benjamin avoids: explicitly describing what would remain after the violent destruction
of normativity itself. `Play' names the unknowable end of `divine violence'. Agamben himself may not be entirely
for good.
comfortable with this moment; in the final paragraph of State of Exception, he replaces this prediction with a question and a
only beginning from the space thus opened [that is, by law's deposition] will
it be possible to pose the question of a possible use of law after the deactivation of
the device that, in the state of exception, tied it to life . Playfulness disappears completely in The Time
possibility:
That Remains, where Christian love instead designates our relation to the fulfilled law: `once he divides the law into a law of works
and a law of faith ... and thus renders it inoperative and unobservable ... Paul can then fulfil and recapitulate the law in the figure of
whose inhabitants are busy celebrating rituals, and manipulating objects and sacred words, whose sense and purpose they have,
a transposition of Benjamin's often-cited account of the relation between the sacred and the profane in `The Work of Art in the Age
of its Technological Reproductibility': the unique value of the ` authentic' work of art always has its basis in ritual .This ritualistic
basis, however mediated it may be, is still recognizable as secularized ritual in even the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.
Agamben's toy is thus not opposed to, but the counterpart of Benjamin's `authentic' work of art. Furthermore, Agamben's claim that
law that has opened itself to play `no longer has force or application' depends upon the logic that, for Agamben, characterizes
Kantian aesthetics.
This negative definition of the figure of law as law minus force and
limited value, and may in fact create less safety, why have they become such a prominent element in national security? The article will proceed in several steps. First, it will consider the relationship between terrorism and complex
systems, turning to the work of organization theorists and the way in which they think about high and low risk technologies. Second, the article will consider biometrics as a response to these threats, both in theory and in its practical
application. Third, it will ask why biometrics has become such a prominent counterterrorist response, turning to organization theory and risk theory for possible answers. Finally, the article will conclude with a consideration of
alternatives to biometric control. In short: Will biometrics make people safer? If not, why is it being pursued? Are there any other alternatives? This is a world of complex organizations. In the modern industrialized world, the majority
of regular human tasks are made possible through an array of complex activities, routines, and patterns as part of a sophisticated political, economic, and social system. This process is not new; Max Weber was one of the first to note
the rationalization of the modern order nearly a century ago.2 However, this rationalization has rapidly expanded in the last half-century through such technological innovations as computerization and the networking of information.
As they have expanded, these complex organizations have become institutionalized. By institutionalized, the author means that these organizations are now valued as an irreplaceable part of society, to these extent that their
objective costs and benefits cannot be easily measured. Individually or collectively, for good or ill, modern life is imagined to be impossible without them.3 Complex organizations are the hallmark of modernity and thoughts of the
notion of progress. But this complexity has its own limitations and dangers. In some cases these are problems that are all too familiarthe growth of bureaucracy that stifles change, organizational politics that divert actors from their
original goals, or the emergence of groupthink among the leadership, shutting out alternative scenarios and critical analysis.4 Each of these may have the ability to limit an organization's range of action and its ability to adapt and
change in response to new opportunities and challenges. When carried to an extreme level, such limitations within complex organizations may lead to their inability to complete their core tasks. In other words, organizations may fail.
Among the various scholars who have focused on organizational failure, most notable is the work of sociologist Charles Perrow.5 Perrow has sought to understand how organizations differ in their core tasks and procedures, and how
this affects their ability to function flexibly and recover from crisis. For Perrow, organizations can be viewed along two axes. The first axis distinguishes organizations between linear and complex. Linear organizations are notable in
that their various components are segregated from one another and easily isolated if necessary. For individuals working within linear organizations, these various components or procedures are also widely understood, and different
components or routines may also be substituted for one another as needed. These are systems, as we understand the term, in the loosest sense. In contrast, in a complex organization each element is a highly specialized part of
an interconnected system. These components are not widely understood across the organization as a whole. But this is not the only element important in distinguishing organizations. In addition to linear and complex, Perrow also
distinguishes between loosely and tightly coupled organizations. Loosely coupled organizations are highly buffered or attenuated; in other words, there is a degree of slack, distance, and delay between one component within the
organization and others. Tightly coupled organizations, on the other hand, have components that are much more interdependent, relying directly on each other for their continued function. Here, as Perrow notes, what happens in
one directly affects what happens in another.6 It might be initially imagined that these two axes run parallel to one another, such that linear organizations are loosely coupled whereas complex organizations are tighter. But Perrow
notes that one can find different combinations of these two variables across organizations (see Figure 1). Figure 1. Interaction/coupling chart. (Adapted from Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies [New
York: Basic Books, 1984]) PowerPoint slideOriginal jpg (7.00KB)Display full size First, there are loosely coupled linear organizations. Here Perrow gives the example of a post office, with its relatively discrete components and loose
connections to the postal system as a whole. A personnel or technical problem need not close a post office, nor will it bring the system as a whole to a halt. Second, there are tightly coupled linear organizations, such as dams and (to
a lesser extent) power grids. There may be little buffering, such that a failure in one area may have a direct effect elsewhere. Still, their linear organization means that components are widely understood and can be substi-tuted if
necessary. Third, there are loosely coupled complex organizations. Extensive specialization and interconnection are found, but there is also buffering or slack between components. Universities are a good example: a problem in one
department or with a faculty member, although not easily resolved, does not automatically or necessarily jeopardize other faculty, departments, or programs. Finally, there are tightly coupled complex organizations. Nuclear power,
chemical plants, genetic engineering, and spaceflight are all relevant examplessystems that are highly specialized, interconnected, interdependent, and where operators only understand a small piece of the larger system. For
Perrow, the zone of tightly coupled complex organizations is the area of highest risk. Difficult technological processes require tight coupling and complex organizations in order to operate within highly inflexible margins of safety.
But these demands are difficult to satisfy. This is not because of operator error, or improper training or insufficient technology, as is often thought. Rather, under such systems the interplay of interconnectedness, interdependency,
specialization, and the limits of knowledge create conditions such that minor failures, errors, or accidents cannot be easily identified and remedied. Such organizations are prone to catastrophic failure because of their sheer opacity
and inflexibility. Unexpected errors and mistakes can combine in unpredictable ways. Each one alone may be unimportant or manageable, but in combination can have a synergistic effect and be difficult for operators to understand
and remedy. The cascading effect of these small errors can result in a massive system failure, what Perrow calls normal accidents. How does Perrow's model help with understanding modern terrorist tactics? On the surface, it is
evident that complex, tightly coupled organizations represent a tempting target for terrorist groups. Given their opacity and inflexibility, attacks on such systems are more likely to lead to catastrophic failure. Such organizations have
only a limited capacity to respond to failure that is endogenous to the system; adding an exogenous variable, like a bomb, may be far outside of the organization's already circumscribed battery of standard responses. In other words,
induce failure has been described by Thomas Homer-Dixon as complex terrorism, quite different from traditional attacks against
linear and loosely coupled targets. Under these conditions, terrorists
Because terrorists seek to provoke failure, they are able to transform the very
degree of complexity and coupling found within existing organizations. Perrow anticipates
accidents.
this in his discussion of dams: Some dams have considerable catastrophic potential, but while they are tightly coupled, so that
recovery from failure is extremely limited, they are not subject to unexpected interactions. Preventing accidents then is largely a
matter of preventing component failure including proper design and construction. There is, however, a possibility of system
accidents in the sense that unexpectedly a dam may become part of a larger system.8 What does Perrow mean when he says that
dams may become part of a larger system? Specifically, he is referring to the physical environment and the possibility that
earthquakes or landslides might occur. Such linkage to geography and geology means that dams may be more complex, depending
against the World Trade Center can be better understood. Perrow does not place buildings in his matrix, but let it be assumed that they are akin to dams: tightly coupled linear systems.
There is less specialization and greater understanding of the various components involved in its construction, but limited slack or buffering between these elements, such that a failure of
one component can cascade throughout the system and cause structural failure. The system can suffer catastrophic failure, but as Perrow notes in the case of dams, these can and have
been limited over time through proper design and construction.9 Unexpected and unanticipated interactions of various components are thus relatively rare, and even attempts to
provoke failures within the system itself turns out to be difficult. This was evident in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. In that case, engineers had constructed the building's
foundation to deal with the complex topography of the area and attendant earthquake risks that could undermine its stability, effectively limiting the impact of the truck bomb. Compare
the 1993 attack with that in 2001. Terrorists gained control over complex, tightly coupled technologies (aircraft) that could themselves be easily failed by overtaking the controls and
turning them into missiles. By weaponizing these planes, the terrorists intentionally created the conditions whereby, as Perrow puts it, systems not thought to be linked suddenly
are.10 Filled with fuel, the aircraft collisions subjected the World Trade Center to temperatures and structural damage that the engineers of the building did not anticipate, limiting any
effective response in terms of flexibility or slack. The result was a catastrophic failure, intentionally provoked from without. Since 11 September there has been increasing attention given
to the possibility of similar kinds of attacks against other complex systems, such as the power grid, chemical plants, or international shipping.11 In short, this kind of organizational
synergy creates a myriad of dangerous possibilities, because systems not typically thought of as high risk can be made so by the attackers themselves. It is the means of attack that sets
the parameters for catastrophe. For example, even an organization like a post office, which Perrow cites as a loosely coupled linear organization, is prone to such coupling and
complexity. The 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States subverted any linearity and loose coupling in the system, as the anthrax spores crossed through the system and the mail,
subverting buffers and preventing easy isolation.12 Such dangers are only likely to increase. With the ongoing move toward virtual complexity, more and more technologies are being
linked up as part of a larger networked system in order to increase efficiency, output and data transparency. Linear and loosely coupled technologies become more complex and tightly
coupled as they come to depend on a larger network for information and control. This raises the danger of cyberterrorism, whereby such attacks can cripple the normal operations of a
vast range of organizations.13 The implications of this argument are wide-ranging. The very nature of modernity is organization and complexity, tendencies that have only increased
exponentially over time. These organizations make for attractive targets, as terrorists have the ability to combine systems in unpredictable and dangerous ways. This is perhaps even
more disturbing than the long-standing concern over existing risky systems such as nuclear power stations, because the danger of catastrophic failure is well known and continuously
evaluated. Loosely coupled and/or linear organizations, widespread throughout society, can also be attacked, combined, and made to fail in complex ways with repercussions difficult to
anticipate. The failure of a single high-risk organization is one concern. But how can all the ways in which even low-risk organizations may be combined to catastrophic effect be
anticipated? Biometrics as a Counterterrorist Response: Promises and Problems Jump to section Complex Organizations and Complex Failure Biometrics as a Counterterrorist... Rush to
Add to this observation the notion of volition, that actors might intentionally try to provoke failure, and it is easy to assume that it is
hopeless to try and make these systems self-correcting in the face of a terrorist attack. If that is the case, counterterrorism must instead address the issue of securing access to organizations and technology, in order to limit the
chance that organizational failure could be induced by actors with malicious intent. How is it decided who can gain access and what they are allowed to do? There are, in fact, three separate elements that must be addressed:
identification, verification, and authorization. In these three areas, security policy must be able to distinguish individuals from one another (identification), verify that they are who they claim to be (verification), and from these allow
for varying degrees of access and power (authorization).14 This can be accomplished in a number of different ways, such as badges, tokens, or passwords. Another approach can be through biometrics. Biometrics can be defined as
the automatic recognition of a person using distinguishing traits.15 If access can be regulated by something you have, such as a security badge, or something you know, such as a password, then biometrics essentially controls
access by means of something you area measurable, distinct trait or characteristic. There are numerous biometrics, some which have been in place for a long time. For example, the personal recognition of others is a biometric,
identifying, verifying, and authorizing people as familiar or unfamiliar, friend or foe. Such a system is highly personalized, however, and with modern industrial societies biometrics have been increasingly embedded in technological
innovations that allow for independent and objective criteria whose confirmation is thus not reliant on any one individual. Over the past century this migration to objective biometric criteria has been found in the use of handwritten
signatures (and their analysis) as well as fingerprints. In recent years a number of new biometric technologies have been under development to increase the range of recognition. These include iris and retinal scans, facial and voice
recognition, and hand geometry, to name a few. Advocates of biometrics as a means to control access cite a number of advantages. First, they note that tokens and passwords are not particularly secure systems. Cards or badges
may be forged, and passwords stolen. As a result, these forms of security are easily transferred from one individual to another. In contrast, it is argued, biometrics are highly secure systems, as they rely on a individual trait or quality
that cannot be stolen in the way a password or badge can. In addition, biometric identifiers are convenient for the user, not subject to being lost or forgotten. Biometrics can be applied in a number of different ways, depending on
whether the objective is identification, verification, authorization, or some combination of the three. In the area of identification, biometrics has been touted as a way to seek out individuals who are wanted by law enforcement, such
as those suspected of involvement in terrorist organizations. One commonly cited example is closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV), already a common feature in high-crime or high-risk areas, combined with facial recognition
technology. Under this system, facial recognition software scans individuals in a given area, matching faces with an existing watchlist of suspected individuals. Such a system can be utilized across a wide area, eliminating the need
to manually screen each and every person entering a security zone. In the United States, such systems have already been implemented in limited forms in Florida and Virginia, most notably during the 2001 Super Bowl. It is also the
cornerstone of new regulations concerning travel into the United States. The US-VISIT program, begun in 2004, requires that most foreign visitors have their index fingers scanned and a digital photograph taken at the time of their
entry. These can then be compared against existing watchlists, or used as the foundation for future watchlists. Plans are to extend this identification to consular offices overseas, and to add additional biometrics in the future.16
Biometrics can also be used to verify that the individual is actually the person they claim to be. Biometric information of various kinds can be encoded into a form of identification, which can then be matched against the individual.
Should the ID be stolen, the biometric data would provide a reference point to compare against. This variation of biometric verification is decentralized, because it only matches the person to the ID. A more centralized version could
match the person to the ID and the ID to a database, which would provide an additional layer of information and could be updated independently of the ID card itself. The most common possibility here is a national biometric ID card
and passport. In both cases, the documentation can be used not only to identify a person, but also confirm that the person is who they say they are, by matching the biometric data in the ID card and the person to an existing
database. As with biometric identification, this area of biometric verification is being implemented in various countries and forms. European and other countries are working to include biometric data in their passports, spurred on by
impending U.S. rules that will require biometric data from all foreign citizens who do not require a visa. The United States is itself expected to incorporate biometric data in its passports in 2005.17 The United Kingdom is proposing
the implementation of a national ID card, with fingerprint and iris scan information, to be implemented in 2007 and made mandatory in 2013, and there are similar discussions across the European Union.18 By creating mechanisms
to identify and verify, such as those discussed earlier, biometrics can then be used to authorize. For example, ID cards or passports can be used to restrict or grant access, whether to a facility or an entire country. Similarly, the U.S.
Immigration and Naturalization Service Passenger Accelerated Service System, or INSPASS, already uses hand geometry as a biometric to allow frequent travelers to pass through immigration more quickly. For many advocates,
biometrics is the logical response to an increasingly complex and risky system. Relying on sophisticated measurements rather than tokens and passwords, the system secures access even while it increases the ease of use.19 Not
surprisingly, there are individuals who are skeptical of the claims of biometrics as a useful or constructive tool against terrorism. One common criticism is in the area of civil liberties. Critics of biometrics worry that such a system,
because it is usually predicated on the idea of a large centralized reference database, will lead to an erosion of personal freedoms. Worries are that the use of biometrics will inevitably expand once widely implemented, both in the
amount of data that will be collected and in the ways it will be used in everyday life.20 This is clearly an important issue, confronting the balance between liberty and security. However, this article is primarily concerned with the
actual efficacy of biometric security measures. For now, this article turns to the three areas already discussed: identification, verification, and authorization, although some comments shall be made on civil liberties later on. In the
area of identification, skeptics argue that biometrics are a poor instrument to this end. The most touted technology in this area, face recognition, suffers from a series of limitations that some believe makes it virtually worthless. The
first concern is that of accuracy. Critics charge that the majority of successful tests of face recognition technology are under controlled conditions, where individuals are matched up against images taken under the best possible
conditions. In the real world, however, identifying suspects, especially when combing for such individuals out of large groups, is extremely difficult. Face recognition systems often fail to identify individuals when confronted with
changes in lighting, suspects not facing cameras head-on, or suspects wearing face-obscuring objects such as glasses. Identification can also degrade with the age of the photo as suspects get older.21 A second problem is that of
comparable reference information. As noted earlier, in order for face recognition to work, authorities need a reference photo with which to begin. In the case of terrorists, often their identities are unknown until after the event. Among
the 11 September hijackers, for example, only 2 of the 19 were under surveillance by the CIA prior to 2001, complete with photographic records. Even in this case, these two were only placed on a watch list three weeks before the
attacks, when they were already inside the United States.22 This points to a related problem with face recognition, even when carried out under controlled conditions. Given that the 11 September hijackers entered the country on
legal visas, such biometric controls as the US-VISIT system would have done little more than document, not prevent, their entry. As Mary Ryan, former head of the State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs, testified in January
2004 before the 9/11 Commission, even under the best immigration controls, most of the September 11 terrorists would still be admitted to the United States today because they had no criminal records, or known terrorist
connections, and had not been identified by intelligence methods for special scrutiny.23 Third, there is the question of accuracy. As a number of critics note, even a system with a high degree of accuracy, which is not currently
promised by biometric technology, will necessarily produce a number of false positives. Bruce Schneier, a specialist on security issues, observes that even with a 99.9 percent accuracy rate, the result would be frequent false
positivesperhaps hundreds or thousandsat sites where there were large numbers of individuals, such as airports. In the end guards would come to disregard all hits, rendering the system useless.24 There are similar concerns
raised about biometrics as a means of verification. Recall that here this is verifying that a person is who she says she is. The claim of biometric supporters in this case should be much stronger, because rather than trying to identify
an unknown person, biometrics can be used to authenticate an individual using a set of measurements already on file. This would seem to make fraud difficult and identification easy given the degree of biometric control. Yet here too
there are problems. The issue goes back to the earlier discussion of identification. If dangerous individuals cannot be identified as such, then verification instruments are be largely meaningless, as suspects would be essentially
hiding only their intent, not their identities. As known, a potential terrorist may travel on a valid passport and visa, with all the rights those imply. Verification does not reveal motives, which are often available only after the fact. For
example, the 9/11 Commission noted in its report that in several cases the hijackers entered the United States with new clean passports, legitimately issued from their home countries, effectively erasing any international activities
that might have other-wise raised concern. Other passports were additionally doctored by Al Qaeda operatives to add or erase entry and exit stamps.25 In none of these cases would biometric identifiers have made any difference,
given that, as mentioned earlier, these individuals were not identified in advance by U.S. authorities as possible terrorists. But for the sake of argument, let it be assumed that threatening individuals are likely to travel under false
identification, and were their real identity known, their motives and the threat to security would be clear. Would biometric verification make this more difficult by making such fraudulent ID impossible? Here there are loopholes as
well. Just as identity theft is currently common, biometric data can also be stolen. Biometric data, for example, could be rewritten on stolen identification cards or passports, creating identifiers would match perfectly with the
individual. Of course, this could be thwarted through reference to a centralized database, with which the biometrics and passport data could be compared. But such a centralized database is only possible for a national population
over which a state has control and can gather and standardize information. It is unlikely that this would also incorporate relevant biometric and passport data for all citizens of other countries. Verification is thus limited by a state's
control over the original reference source, and countries will presumably have little to no control over foreign data because it rests under the jurisdiction of other states. An alternative might be to create an international database of
suspected terrorists, where even if a suspected terrorist were traveling under false identification, his biometric identifiers would match up in the system. This presumes, of course, that such a rich database of biometric information on
suspected terrorists would be possible. Fragmentary information would be more likely to simply generate a new source of false positives while failing to catch those terrorists who still are operating with essentially clean records. One
example that shows up the limits of biometrics in terms of verification is the case of Ahmed Ressam. Ressam, an Algerian living in Canada who had claimed political asylum, was arrested in 1999 on the U.S.-Canadian border with
bomb materials that he intended to use against the Los Angeles airport. In this case, Ressam was traveling on a Canadian passport that he had obtained by first purchasing a stolen blank birth certificate. As a result, Ressam was
able to acquire a legitimate Canadian passport, albeit under a different name.26 No inclusion of biometric identifiers in the passport would have made a difference, because the passport had not been altered in any way. If anything,
biometrics would only have strengthened the purported legitimacy of his claim, because Ressam and the passport's biometric data would have matched perfectly. Ressam was stopped only because he was acting suspiciously at
customs, not because his papers were not in order. Finally, biometric detectors can be physically thwarted. Studies have shown that iris and retinal scans and fingerprinting can be fooled through relatively uncomplicated means,
such as using a plastic mold to replicate a fingerprint or high-quality scans to reproduce facial and eye features.27 This article has not considered the ability to hack into databases and plant, remove, or steal identity data, a concern
country, take a domestic flight, or purchase and assemble the ingredients for a terrorist attack. So far this article has discussed the
shortcomings in biometrics as a counterterrorist tool, arguing that they are unlikely to create the kind of foolproof system many
believe. This is an important conclusion, but in fact it may not be the most important one, to which the article shall now turn. Recall
the earlier discussion about the nature of complexity and the potential for normal accidents. In the range between linear and
complex, tightly and loosely coupled organizations, Perrow and others have argued that
from highly complex, tightly coupled systems. Under these conditions there is little flexibility
or buffering, such that a small deviation in some part of the system can have
cascading effects that can lead to a system-wide collapse . Scholars have pointed to the dangers
inherent in such high-risk systems, and this article has noted the degree to which terrorists may seek to fail
these systems, essentially provoking their collapse. Importantly, this concern can apply to
counterterrorist technology itself. Although there are various competing forms of biometric technology in play at
this time, it is clear that for many advocates and policymakers the goal is a centralized system that brings various
criminal, immigration, and national ID databases together and links them to a system for
identification and verification.28 The objective, then, is the creation of a complex, tightly
coupled systemthe very system that organizational theorists believe is prone to
catastrophic failure. It is not difficult to imagine the ways in which such a system could be brought down. Some of
these have already been identified by the U.S. National Research Council's Committee on Authentication Technologies and their
airline check-ins, security clearance stations, police vehicles, and access points at high-risk public facilities such as power plants and
Identity theft by terrorists is already a major concern, and a biometric system may only provide more opportunities for such theft to
occur.30 Biometrics could give terrorists the ability to build sophisticated identities online, giving them unprecedented levels of
access. However, the National Research Council report mentions a less commonly anticipated danger. That is, if
verification
of identity required an online database query at airports, a handful of accidents at
key places around the country could cripple [damage] civil aviation and any other
commerce that required identity verification (for example, the purchase of guns or certain chemicals).31
This concern is completely consistent with Perrow's notion of tightly coupled, complex systems, where a failure at one
location can have cascading effects throughout the system as a whole. Such a
failure, the study notes, could be achieved either through a physical attack on the
infrastructure or a cyberattack. They note that especially in the absence of a costly dedicated network, such an
Internet-based system would inevitably be the target of malicious attacks as well as subject to unintentional or incidental
concerns, arguing that fears of an electronic Pearl Harbor are scare tactics peddled by government to a gullible media.33
However, this skepticism is not effectively bolstered by any particular evidence, other than the assertion that such attacks are too
difficult for terrorists to carry out. This, however, echoes similar criticisms made before 2001 that concerns over large-scale terrorist
attacks in the United States were deliberately overblown and hysterical.34 In contrast, a 2002 report from the Institute for Security
Technology Studies at Dartmouth on the security of the electric power industry concluded that this sector is vulnerable to cyber
impacts, and indications are that terrorists, hostile nation-states or malicious computer hackers pose a threat to the sector.35 Other
networked segments of the national infrastructure are presumably equally vulnerable. On closer inspection many critiques of the
possibility of cyberwar are predicated on the belief that the government is deliberately playing up the threat of cyberterrorism in
order to chip away at personal freedoms.36 This article makes a somewhat different conclusion. Evidence indicates that these
concerns are indeed real. However, the proposed solution, which is presented to the public as a necessary compromise of civil
liberties in return for greater security, will in fact generate less security and more opportunities for terrorist attack. In short, the
creation of a new complex and tightly coupled system creates a new target. The more dependent future security becomes on such a
system, the more serious the repercussions of its potential failure. Neither freedom nor security is thus defended. Rush to Failure?
Explaining the Appeal of Biometrics Jump to section Complex Organizations and Complex Failure Biometrics as a Counterterrorist...
Rush to Failure? Explaining the Appeal... Counterterrorism and Decentralization This article has outlined the nature of complex
are several possible explanations, and these center on the way in which society perceives and constructs both the risk of terrorism
and the solution to it. This article now deals with each of these in turn.
nuclear weapons could be balanced by a similar counterthreat, and new equilibria could be achieved, albeit on higher levels of
nuclear overkill. Under the new condition of uncertainty, no such rational balancing is possible since knowledge about actors, their
motives and capabilities, is largely absent. The second form of security policy that emerges when the deterrence model collapses
mirrors the "social probability" approach. It represents a logic of catastrophe. In contrast to risk management framed in line with
logical probability theory, the logic of catastrophe does not attempt to provide means of absorbing uncertainty. Rather, it takes
uncertainty as constitutive for the logic itself; uncertainty is a crucial precondition for catastrophies. In particular, catastrophes
happen at once, without a warning, but with major implications for the world polity. In this category, we find the impact of
meteorites. Mars attacks, the tsunami in South East Asia, and 9/11. To conceive of terrorism as catastrophe has consequences for
the formulation of an adequate security policy. Since catastrophes happen irrespectively of human activity or inactivity, no political
action could possibly prevent them. Of course, there are precautions that can be taken, but the framing of terrorist attack as a
question of who was responsible and whether it could have been prevented. This makes clear that under the condition of
uncertainty, there are no objective criteria that could serve as an anchor for measuring dangers and assessing the quality of political
responses. For example, as much as one might object to certain measures by the US administration, it is almost impossible to
"measure" the success of countermeasures. Of course, there might be a subjective assessment of specific shortcomings or failures,
but there is no "common" currency to evaluate them. As a consequence, the framework of the security dilemma fails to capture the
basic uncertainties. Pushing the door open for the security paradox, the main problem of security analysis then becomes the
question how to integrate dangers in risk assessments and security policies about which simply nothing is known. In the mid 1990s,
a Rand study entitled "New Challenges for Defense Planning" addressed this issue arguing that "most striking is the fact that we do
not even know who or what will constitute the most serious future threat, "^i In order to cope with this challenge it would be
essential, another Rand researcher wrote, to break free from the "tyranny" of plausible scenario planning. The decisive step would
be to create "discontinuous scenarios . . . in which there is no plausible audit trail or storyline from current events"52 These
nonstandard scenarios were later called "wild cards" and became important in the current US strategic discourse. They justified the
very beginning. False evidence was again and again presented and refuted, but this did not prevent the administration from presenting as the main
rationale for war the improbable yet possible connection between Iraq and the terrorist network and the improbable yet possible proliferation of an
improbable yet possible nuclear weapon into the hands of Bin Laden. As Donald Rumsfeld famously said: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of
absence." This sentence indicates that under the condition of genuine uncertainty, different evidence criteria prevail than in situations where security
problems can be assessed with relative certainty. Contemporary dynamics in the fight against terrorism seem to result from a clash of different logics of
probability. As Ulrich Beck has shown, terrorism has altered the meaning of space and time for the analysis of risk. Spatially, terrorist networks escape the
logic of the nation-state and "diplomacy." Networks are neither private nor public in the sovereign sense; they represent neither a domestic nor an
international "actor." Temporally, attacks always have a catastrophic element. They are simply faster than mihtary "threats" in the tradirional sense
because they happen without a contextual warning. In other words, uncertainries associated with terrorism escape the logic of risk as terrorism alters the
very contours of world politics: It represents a qualitative change that redefines the very game and reality that states face.^s However, by focusing
primarily on "sponsor states" and an "axis of evil," the current fight against terrorism attempts to reduce the interplay of those various logics to the
imperative of deterrence. It is the attempt to ignore categorical shifts and its associated uncertainties and replace it by "traditional security policy." In this
sense, the readdressing of terrorism to states that harbor terrorists is then an attempt to invoke the traditional vocabulary of deterrence and the logic of
the security dilemma. So when we look at terrorism as an issue of "systemic" importance, the fight represents an expansion of "uncertainty to risk"
reasoning to a phenomenon that, from its qualities, belongs to the realm of epistemic probability theory. Neither the assumption of well-defined problem
settings and repeatable events nor the fixation of the political vocabulary or the mutual formation of expectations based on "known" adversaries applies.
When read from the context of probability theory, the current endeavors are subject to a conflict between intersubjective epistemology and individualist
ontology that manifests itself as a conflict between universal validity of statements and the particularity of contexts. While the universality argument
points to the laws associated with the balance of power, of deterrence and pursuit of national interests, the contextual dimension points to (self-)
reflexivity and contingency of one's own position. What might be true here might not be true there. Accepting uncertainty would make it imperative to
understand the other's position and engage in a dialogue. However, in a sense, the current fight uses a universal method to fight a contextual problem.
The article proposed a framework of risk, uncertainty, and probability and argued that we experience an overall transformation from "insecurity" to
"uncertainty." The insecurity paradigm treats the notion of security as theoretically superior to that of uncertainty and risk. The primary task of security
policy is then the avoidance of risk. Starting from welldenned categories and games, this approach is constitutive for deterrence and dtente as two
modes dealing with contingency within preset games. Positions based on the uncertainty paradigm that sees a categorical differentiation between risk and
uncertainty leave the confines of the security dilemma behind.
politically unachievable. In this context, uncertainty describes an unstructured realm, where standard criteria of rationality do not
apply. Pointing to a possible- and multiple-worlds' semantic, this approach is interested in how actors actively structure or construct the world they live in.
From this perspective, the current problem is not insecurity deriving from the security dilemma, but uncertainty deriving from the changing categories of
our political vocabulary signifying unpredictable futures and inconsistent policies. At the same time, however, the current fight against terrorism is
structured in such a way as to reduce the various kinds of uncertainties and contingencies to the logic of deterrence. Hence deterrence has not lost any of
its actuality; however, by applying this logic in a context that challenges its constitutive boundaries, it seems as if the option of dtente has been lost. In
other words, what we see is that the logic of the security dilemma, and its particular semantics of threat, risk, and security, is used for the framing of
terrorism as a threat. As a consequence, we can identify three dynamics "driving" today's security policy that result exactly from the conflict between the
intersubjective constitution of threats and the individual ontology of the deterrence strategy as today's main strategy. First, as Aradau and van Muster
what is commonly known as the revolution in military affairs, introduces the same individualist ontology on the level of military
policy: It translates the catastrophic features of terrorism into a logic of deterrence by actively reshaping the spatial and temporal
conditions of military conduct. The strategy is to introduce technologies that can be remotely controlled without employment of
soldiers. The task is to be ready to "strike back," instantly and at any time from any place in the world. However, and thirdly, these
measures are based on an unnecessary necessity. Presenting terrorism as an objective threat that "exists" independent of practices
might produce a distance between oneself and "the other." However, it misses out the importance of context and other means of
"risk management" that would require a selfreflective analysis of how "us and them" are constructed in the first place.
small affirmatives were unstrategicteams rarely had solvency deficits to generic counterplans. It was already basically impossible
argued and judged, I suspect that the negative would win my ballot more than 95 percent of the time in a debate between two
teams of equal ability. But even if a soft left team did betterespecially by making solvency deficits and responding to the
specifics of the disadvantageI still think they would struggle. They could compete at the highest levels, but, in most debates,
The risk
would be small, but the magnitude of the impact would often be enough to
outweigh a higher probability , smaller impact. Or put differently: policy debate still
wouldnt be replicating a real world policy assessment, teams reading small affirmatives
would still be at a real disadvantage with respect to reality. . Why? Oddly, this is the unreasonable result of a
reasonable part of debate: the burden of refutation or rejoinder , the responsibility of
debaters to beat arguments. If I introduce an argument, it starts out at 100 percent
you then have to disprove it. That sounds like a pretty good idea in principle, right? Well, I think so too. But its
really tough to refute something down to zero percenta team would need to
completely and totally refute an argument. Thats obviously tough to do, especially since the other team is
judges would still assess a small, but meaningful risk of a large scale conflict, including nuclear war and extinction.
usually going to have some decent arguments and pretty good cards defending each component of their disadvantageeven the
one of the most fundamental assumptions about debate all but ensures
a meaningful risk of nearly any argumenteven extremely low-probability , high
magnitude impacts, sufficient to outweigh systemic impacts. Theres another even more subtle
element of debate practice at play. Traditionally, the 2AC might introduce 8 or 9 cards against a
disadvantage, like non-unique, no-link, no-impact, and then go for one and two. Yet in reality, disadvantages are
underpinned by dozens or perhaps hundreds of discrete assumptions, each of which
could be contested. By the end of the 2AR, only a handful are under scrutiny ; the majority of
the disadvantage is conceded, and its tough to bring the one or two scrutinized
components down to zero. And then theres a bad understanding of probability. If
ridiculous parts. So
the affirmative questions four or five elements of the disadvantage, but the negative was still clearly ahead on all five elements,
most judges would assess that the negative was clearly ahead on the disadvantage. In reality, the risk of the disadvantage has
been reduced considerably.
would pass, an 80 percent chance that political capital was key, an 80 percent chance that the
plan drained a sufficient amount of capital, an 80 percent chance that immigration reform was necessary to prevent
another recession, and an 80 percent chance that another recession would cause a nuclear war (lol), then theres a 32
percent chance that the disadvantage caused nuclear war. I think these issues can be overcome.
First, I think teams can deal with the burden of refutation by focusing on the burden of
proof, which allows a team to mitigate an argument before directly contradicting its
content. Heres how Id look at it: modern policy debate has assumed that arguments start
out at 100 percent until directly refuted . But few, if any, arguments are supported by
evidence consistent with 100 percent. Most cards dont make definitive claims . Even
when they do, theyre not supported by definitive evidence and any reasonable person should assume
theres at least some uncertainty on matters other than few true facts, like 2+2=4. Take Georgetowns immigration uniqueness
evidence from Harvard. It says there may be a window for immigration. So, based on the negatives evidence, what are the odds
that immigration reform will pass? Far less than 50 percent, if you ask me. Thats not always true for every card in the 1NC, but
think it would be nice if a good debate team would actually do the worktalk about what the cards say, talk about the unmentioned
debaters can make these observations at a meta-level (your evidence isnt certain,
lots of undefended elements) and successfully reduce the risk of a nuclear war or
extinction to something indistinguishable from zero . It would not be a factor in my decision.
stepsbut I think
Based on my conversations with other policy judges, it may be possible to pull it off with even less work. They might be willing to
summarily disregard absurd arguments, like politics disadvantages, on the grounds that its patently unrealistic, that we know the
typical burden of rejoinder yields unrealistic scenarios, and that judges should assess debates in ways that produce realistic
assessments. I dont think this is too different from elements of Jonah Feldmans old philosophy, where he basically said when I
assessed 40 percent last year, its 10 percent now. Honestly, I was surprised that the few judges I talked to were so amenable to
this argument. For me, just saying its absurd, and you know it wouldnt be enough against an argument in which the other team
invested considerable time. The more developed argument about accurate risk assessment would be more convincing, but I still
think it would be vulnerable to a typical defense of the burden of rejoinder. To be blunt: I want debaters to learn why a disadvantage
is absurd, not just make assertions that conform to their preexisting notions of whats realistic and whats not. And perhaps more
importantly for this discussion, I could not coach a team to rely exclusively on this argumentIm not convinced that enough judges
are willing to discount a disadvantage on its absurd. Nonetheless, I think this is a useful frame that should preface a following,
more robust explanation of why the risk of the disadvantage is basically zeroeven before a substantive response is offered. There
are other, broad genres of argument that can contest the substance of the negatives argument. There are serious methodological
indictments of the various forms of knowledge production, from journalistic reporting to think tanks to quantitative social science.
Many of our most strongly worded cards come from people giving opinions, for
which they offer very little data or evidence . And even when qualified people are
giving predictions, theres a great case to be extremely skeptical without real
evidence backing it up. The world is a complicated place, predictions are hard, and
most people are wrong. And again, this is before contesting the substance of the negatives argument(!)if deemed
necessary. So, in my view, the low probability scenario is waiting to be eliminated from debate, basically as soon as a capable team
tries to do it. That would open to the door to all of the arguments, previously excluded, de facto, by the prevalence of nuclear war
impacts. Its been tough to talk about racism or gender violence, since modest measures to mitigate these impacts have a difficult
time outweighing a nuclear war. Its been tough to discuss ethical policy making, since its hard to argue that any commitment to
philosophical or ethical purity should apply in the face of an existential risk. Its been tough to introduce unconventional forms of
evidence, since they cant really address the probability of nuclear war. Yes, the affirmative would still need to debate counterplans.
Sometimes, I get the impression thats a point of controversy, too. Quite frankly, I think counterplans are good. I dont think the
negative should only be forced to exclusively debate about harms. Theres no way we can have a fair topic about, say, prison
reform, if the negative can only defend the status quo. Thats especially true if you dont want to debate the political cost of the
actionwhich, in many instances, is the reason why the government hasnt made obvious policy changes. Yet at the same time, I
think its probably time to retire a few genres of generic counterplans. I think its time to retire the alternative actor counterplan,
which isnt a logical response to the affirmative. I also think its time to require that teams read evidence at a comprehensible
speed. Comprehensible in front of me would still be fast by non-debater standards, but it would make debate far more accessible,
it would solve the apparently rampant issue of card clipping, and, well, I dont really know why it wasnt required in the first place. I
still think judges should call for cards, but they should call cards for additional scrutiny, not to make up for the fact that they never
understood the content in the first place. Top policy judges and coaches should consider leading on this issues by writing and
endorsing a pact establishing norms for clarity. The standard should be simple: the relevant warrant and argument in the card
should be on your flow. There are certainly other problematic norms that I havent addressed. Id love to hear others comment on
specific norms and practices that they find problematic.
in countries like Britain to confine anti-fascism to opposing small neo-Nazi groups. In contrast, German antifa have long recognised
the parallels between the repressive practices (and even the personnel) of the current German state and those of the Third Reich; so
have radicals in Italy, Spain, Greece and Japan. It is only in countries like Britain and America, with no recent fascist past to compare
to, where the existence of a continuum between fascism and the deep state is something of a public secret, even among radicals.
of the state of exception as a permanent feature at a site in time and space intensifies the danger to people declared homo sacer.
Formerly, an outlawed person would be literally banished , becoming a wandering figure driven into
exile. Now, an outlawed person is not allowed to go into exile (think for instance of the immense efforts put into
catching high-profile fugitives), but rather, is put in a situation suspended between inside and
outside, constantly at risk of arbitrary power. For Agamben, camps differ from other disciplinary spaces
(prisons, asylums and so on) because in them, anything is possible, and the guard is absolutely
sovereign. The Nazi Holocaust marks a second turning point in which the horrors of the camp are revealed in all their
The Holocaust happened when and where it did for contingent, historical
reasons, but its real causes were the creation of a particular kind of space , the camp,
where people were defined as having lives not worth living , and as being vulnerable
to being killed with impunity. Auschwitz is the high point of the logic of sovereignty, showing its ontological nature in
monstrosity.
its realisation: it shows where the combination of biopolitics and sovereignty leads. Auschwitz marks the point of no return which
reveals the nature of sovereignty for what it really is. It thus marks the starting point for a new politics.
focus on the space of the exception as a determinate sociotemporal site, such as Guantanamo Bay. We argue that this focus on determinate spaces elides the
real spatializing work of the exception, which, we emphasize, is topological (see also Coleman
2007). The problem with focusing on a static geometry of exceptional spaces is that it
obscures the ways in which the exception operates as an unlocalizable process of
transformation. As Brian Massumi (2002:184) puts it, the distinction between topology and static
geometry is the distinction between the process of arriving at a form through
continuous deformation and the determinate form arrived at when the process
stops (see also Hannah 2006). Topologies, unlike topographies, do not map discreet locations
or particular objects. While it is true that we can identify operative spaces of exception ,
the exception also materializes ordinary spaces. As a topological figure that creates
the conditions for particular materialized sites, the exception is emergent, which is to say
that it is not a preformed category but a dynamic set of techniques of power . In this way,
2006). The result has been a
we emphasize Agamben's relationship with Foucault, an affinity that is often lost in various interpretations of his writings. The
implications of a topological and emergent understanding of the exception become clearer in the context of Agamben's idea of
sovereignty as potential and actual. At the same time, our intervention aims to show how a topological, emergent understanding of
empty space, that is, a suspension of all law for a certain time and in a certain space (Schmitt 2003:99). For Schmitt, therefore,
the decision on the exception performs a juridical and territorial ordering at the same time as it demarcates a specific spatio-
assigned to it from time to time) (Agamben 1998:19). Thus for Agamben the state of exception is the principle of
territorialization (ordering and orienting) but is itself essentially unlocalizable. While Schmitt explicitly renders the state of exception
as spatially and temporally bounded, Agamben's contribution to the theory of the exception is to reread Walter Benjamin's
engagement with Schmitt and to bring into sharp relief its contemporary relevance. For Agamben, this state inaugurates a rupture
within the Schmittian correspondence between order and orientation, between law and space. For Schmitt the decision on the
process of becoming, we use analytics of governmentality, which itself refers to the everyday emergence of power and control, to
think through how the exception works. For Foucault, governmentality refers to a field of everyday practices, organized by a
complex of techniques of power that govern and optimize processes immanent to a population. In this field, discipline, government,
and sovereignty are imbricated and indistinguishable, so that the exception operates as a potential (dis)ordering principle, a
potential technique of government (Foucault 1991:102). For Agamben, the declaration of the state of exception has gradually been
replaced by an unprecedented generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government (Agamben
If the topological character of the state of exception means that it operates at the edges of materiality, how should we make use of
Agamben's theories to understand the spatiality of the exception (and governmentality, for that matter)? We argue that
Agamben's limit case, the state of exception, is spatializing, not spatialized. When we say
that the exception is spatializing, we emphasize processes of transformation and emergence
(the topological) and fold the operation of spatialization into the field of potential .
The exception thus produces a governmental potential to link specific arrays of
discursive objects, procedures, and rationalities towards particular ends . Based on this
understanding of Agamben, which emphasizes the emergent spatialization of the exception rather than its determinate spaces, we
argue for foregrounding the idea of potentiality in geographical analyses of the
exceptional. Situated on the edge of materiality, the state of exception has the potential to materialize or not to materialize
actual spaces of exception. Potentiality, for Agamben, is the tension between actuality (materialization)
and the potential not to bethe faculty to say I can, without the action being
materialized (Agamben 1999:179). To have a faculty, argues Agamben, means to have a privation, ie the potential not to
be. This potentiality, argues Agamben, maintains itself in relation to actuality in the form of
its suspension; it is capable of the act in not realizing it, it is sovereignly capable of
its own im-potentiality (Agamben 1998:45). For example, in his discussion of sovereignty, Agamben poses
abandonment, the rationality of power that marks the exception, as topological in that it has the ability not to be: it is potential.
conjunction of sovereignty and governmentality in the analysis of late-modern power relations constitutes a contradiction, we must
of economic rationality to life itself, whereby life is conceived as a paradigmatic form of enterprise,12 and in this manner
expropriates the being-in-language that defines human existence and subjects it to the laws of exchange-value or, in Agambens
later works, exhibition value.13 Conversely, sovereign power expropriates the potentiality of human existence, transforming it into
the bare life that it then grounds itself in and applies itself to in the perpetual state of exception. The state does nothing more than
sustain the spectacle with its apparatuses of security, while the spectacle does nothing more than perpetually produce the degraded
forms-of-life that sovereign power can apply itself to.
While utopian thought easily pro- vides us with elaborate visions of a better future, it cannot really lead us there, since its site is by
that they avoid the specific dangers of utopianism and prophecy. Another possible line of objection is that anti-utopianism is
revolution from below, in which the participants attend to and deal with the radically new and unforeseeable conditions as they
utopianism. Where we claim that utopianism fails because it attempts to say how society should work, critiques of
left-wing thought as utopian tend to claim that left-wing positions are insufficiently
articulated, hence utopian because they cannot offer an alternative vision . We would
argue that utopianism is marked not by the absence of a utopian vision , but by its
presence. According to my argument, the inability to imagine how something would work is
no argument against its possibility, just as the ability to imagine how something
would work does not adequately demonstrate that it is actually possible ,
since the complexity of the social outstrips our ability to model society in our minds .
There is nothing utopian about saying that another world is possible , where this slogan is
raised without detailing what this world would look like. Badious own position is utterly non-utopian, because it is a matter of fidelity
to a truth event in the past that is neither about reviving the past situation nor aiming at producing any particular future situation.
it is
problematic to say that another world is not possible, that there is no alternative .
Such pronouncements are prophetic. The claim that communism is impossible has the same flaw
as the claim that communism is inevitable: we cannot know whether a determinate
form of social organization is either inevitable or impossible , possible or desirable, in
advance. Grand historical claims are prophetic, even if they are negative, like
Fukuyamas famous neo-Hegelian diagnosis of the end of history
Badious philosophy is one of profound openness which is inimical to utopianism as I have described it. Conversely, however,
is the reason why the modernising developmental politics of biopolitics go racist: "So you can understand the importance - I almost
said the vital importance - of racism to such an exercise of power." In racism, Foucault insists: "We are dealing with a mechanism
that allows biopower to work." But: "The specificity of modern racism, or what gives it its specificity, is not bound up with
In thus
threatening life, biopolitics prompts a revision of the question of life and especially
of the life of a politics that is not exhaustively biologised ; comprehensively subject to biopolitical
mentalities, ideologies or the lies of power. It is bound up with the techniques of power, with the technology of power."
governance in such a way that life shows up as nothing but the material required for biopolitical governance, whether in terms
nomologically for Agamben and biologically for Foucault, in biopolitics. Each foregrounds the self-immolating logic that ineluctably
applies in a politics of life that understands life biologically, in the way that Foucault documents for us, or nomologically, in the way
Ojakangas seems
threatens to elide the
intrinsic violence of biopolitics and its essential relation with correction and
death.
that Agamben's bare life contends. When recalling the significance of the Christian pastorate to biopolitics,
to emphasize a line of succession rather than of radical dissociation. One, moreover, which
body to biology. It is in these moves, among others, that he thinks beyond the initial provocation to political thought that he takes
from Foucault's biopolitics. Like any such response, the issue becomes less the degree of faithlessness than the worth of the
betrayal.
changes its character, undergoing political transformation as biopolitics re-inscribes death in the process of 'recuperating the death
Whereas no power can ultimately exercise power over death , biopower can
and does exercise power over life. One of the means by which it does so is via the biopolitical preoccupations
with mortality, morbidity, pathology and mutation. Concerned with death in terms of the vital signs of
life, biopolitics is also increasingly concerned these days with the re-inscription of
the vital signs of life in terms of code , both molecular and digital. Contra Ojakangas, then, biopolitics
does reclaim the death function, for a number of reasons and in a variety of changing ways. It must do so.
Reclaiming the death function is integral to its logic . It also reflects the changing operational dynamics
of biopolitics. In relation to biopolitical logic: "In the biopower system... killing , or the imperative to
kill, is acceptable only if it results not in a victory over political adversaries, but in the
elimination of the biological threat to and the improvement of the species or race ." It
function'.
is acceptable and biopolitically necessary to kill, if not necessarily in the nomological sense of being exposed to death formulated in
Agamben's thesis of bare life. In relation to the operationalisation of biopolitics: if biopolitics is to promote, protect and invest life, it
changing. It is changing now, for example, in response to what the life sciences are teaching about what it is to be a living
thing. It is changing as biopolitical investment analysts (politicians, risk analysts, governmental technologisers) also interrogate
where the best returns on life investment happen to be located in the manifold circulation and transformation of life locally and
globally. Life itself mutates in and through these very circuits, not least in relation to molecular biology and electronic
communication. We can broadly interpret life science now to range from molecularised biology, through digitalization, to the new
social and managerial sciences of development now prominent in the fields of global governmentality, global development policies,
human security and even military strategic discourse including, for example, 'Operations Other than War".
2ac framework/topicality
2ac binary da
The binary established by the AFF to differentiate between
who is and isnt the USFG is a biopolitical method of creating
an included class and an excluded class and reduces us to
bare-life
Agamben 2k (Giorgio Ph.D., Baruch Spinoza Chair at the European Graduate
School, Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Verona, Italy, Professor of
Philosophy at Collge International de Philosophie in Paris, and at the University of
Macerata in Italy, Means without Ends: Notes on Politics, p. 30.1)
Any interpretation of the political meaning of the term people ought to
start from the peculiar fact that in modern European languages this term always indicates
also the poor, the underprivileged, and the excluded. The same term names
the constitutive political subject as well as the class that is excluded de facto,
if not de jure from politics. The Italian term popolo, the French term people, and the Spanish term pueblo along with the
corresponding adjectives popolare, populaire, popular and the late-Latin terms populus and popularis from which they all derive,
designate in common parlance and in the political lexicon alike the whole of the citizenry as a unitary body politic (as in the Italian
people or in giudice popolare [juryman] as well as those who belong to inferior class (as in homme du peuple [man of the people],
rione polplare [working-class neighborhood], front populaire is more undifferentiated does retain the meaning of ordinary people
was claimed as a principle) is witnessed by the decisive role played in it by a sense of compassion for the people intended as the
excluded class. Hannah Arendt reminds us that:
compassion, and the term became the equivalent for misfortune and unhappiness le peule, les malbeureux
mapplaudissent, as Robespierre was wont to say; le peuple toujours malbeureux, as even Sieyes, one of the least sentimental and
most sober figures of the Revolution, would put it. But this is already a double concept for Jean Boldin albeit in a different sense
in the chapter of Les Six Livres de la Republique in which he defines Democracy or Etat Popular: while the menu peuple is that which
Such a widespread
and constant semantic ambiguity cannot be accidental: it surely reflects
an ambiguity inherent in the nature and function of the concept of people
in Western politics. It is as if, in other words what we call people was not actually a
unitary subject but rather a dialectical oscillation between two opposite
poles: on the one hand, the People as a whole and as an integral body
politic and, on the other hand, the people as a subset and as a
fragmentary multiplicity of needy and excluded bodies; on the one hand,
an inclusive concept that pretends to be without remainder while, on the
other hand, an exclusive concept known to afford no hope; at one pole,
the total state of the sovereign and integrated citizens and, at the other
pole, the banishment either court of miracles or camp of the wretched, the oppressed, or the
vanquished. There exists no single and compact referent for the term people
anywhere: like many fundamental political concepts (which, in this respect, are similar to Abel and Frueds Urworte or to
is wise to exclude from political power, the peuple en corps is intended as entitled to sovereignty.
Dumonts hierarchal relations), people is a polar concept that indicates a double movement and a complex relationship between two
that in the concept of people we can easily recognize the conceptual pair identified earlier as the defining category of the original
which it is a part as well what cannot belong to the whole in which it is always already include.
2ac surveillance da
Framework is a strategy of cultivating dispassionate subjects
who surveil and disclipline one another
Reeves 13 (Joshua Assistant Professor in Communication at the University of
Memphis, If You See Something, Say Something: Surveillance, Communication and
Citizenship in American Life, A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty of
North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of Doctor of Philosophy, 2013, p. 24-25,
http://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/ir/bitstream/1840.16/8762/1/etd.pdf)
An essential facet of the governmental process, then, is the set of actions by which
various phenomena are representedin other words, how they are rendered intelligible as problems to be
governed. Describing how rhetoric functions in the production of knowledge and thus makes possible governmental activities,
Greene points out that rhetoric allows for a governing apparatus to make
judgments about what it should govern , how it should govern, as well as offering
mechanisms for evaluating the success or failure of governing (1998, 22). Once human
tendencies and behaviors are given a stable life in the form of discourse (data, statistics,
diagnoses, expert opinions, etc.), their relationship to ideal or deduced norms can be addressed by
various interventionsthat is, by technologies of governmental correction. As Miller and Rose have
Ronald
pointed out elsewhere, these technologies of government are characterized by the complex of mundane programmes, calculations,
techniques, apparatuses, documents and procedures through which authorities seek to embody and give effect to governmental
ambitions (Rose and Miller 1992). As an instrument of representation, rhetoric takes form in discoursesincluding scientific articles,
police reports, and 9/11 calls reporting suspicious activitiesand thus sets in motion various governmental responses by health
show in chapter four, public address has long been used to enlist moral crusaders in the temperance cause, as preachers,
politicians, and others have encouraged individuals to police the immoral in their midst. Various other forms of deliberative rhetoric
such as publicly distributed pamphlets and one-on-one conversion effortshave played a similar role in constituting activist
rhetorical
strategies, such as public confrontations and violent attacks, have also been employed to discourage
certain disapproved activities and intimidate the offending individuals into changing
their behavior. In many instances, these two rhetorical stylesone liberal, and the other confrontationalcreate tensions
communities and guiding the moral entrepreneurialism of individuals in various sectors of the public. Other
among and within lateral policing institutions. As I show in chapters four and five, these different forms of being-rhetorical are often
a bone of contention within lateral policing groups, as factions disagree on rhetorical strategy. Immigration policing groups, for
example, have long been divided into factions of liberals and vigilantes, with the liberals insisting on surveillance and contacting
This division
demonstrates how deeply invested governing bodies are in cultivating certain
kinds of rhetorical subjects, and thus how different forms of being-rhetorical are
privileged within different configurations of governmental practice . In seeking to transform and
official law enforcement bodies, whereas vigilantes have arrested and abused immigrants and their enablers.
engage the conduct of certain activist sectors of the population, some groups have sought to cultivate patient, liberal, non-violent
rhetorical subjects who use reasoning to persuade others to change their lives and their communities (see Keith 2008); other groups
have encouraged activists to adopt the rhetorical subjectivity of the ax-wielding puritan who threatens pimps and saloon keepers
rise of switch-side debating within the Cold War, Greene and Hicks show how liberal American values of deliberation and empathy
were inculcated specifically as they contrasted with the autocratic values of the Soviet Union. While deliberation, citizen liberty, and
communicative entrepreneurship were purported to dominate the American cultural imagination, the Soviet Union was a place of
coercion and severe intellectual homogeneity. Relatedly, the various techn and programs of liberal government strive to cultivate
values of deliberation and communication instead of radicality and violence (see Oksala 2011). This is an important aspect of the
regime- and status quo-conserving inertia of contemporary liberal governmentality. However, while liberal citizenship is quite clearly
tied to these deliberative-communicative democratic values, the cultural logic that opposes violence with communication far
predates liberal government. Since Plato, in fact, we have often heard that philosophy is violences other. From Kant and Hegel to
Marx and Girard, and into the present with American liberals like Richard Rorty, we have come to define the philosophers task as
distinct from the rash violence of the politicians, generals, and revolutionaries (see Siebers 1998, 11530). At the level of
philosophical praxis, it must be kept in mind that discourse, of course, is the traditional medium and method of philosophy: to do
philosophy simply means to be-rhetorical about philosophy. Philosophy, in other words, is the coming-into-speech of a particular kind
of discourse. I say this not to colonize philosophy under the rubric of communication or rhetorica position I do not advocatebut
instead to illustrate how being-rhetorical, how being a speaking subject, is positioned against other ways of being, in the same way
that being philosophical has long been contrasted and defined vis--vis its competing ways of being-in-the-world. In other words,
being-rhetorical has frequently been endowed with certain political and social value, particularly as rhetorical practices contrast with
other ways of being-with-others. The speaking subject is thus a subject who speaks instead of carrying out other actsthe subject
who gives a stump speech instead of starting a riot; the subject who participates in an after-school debate program instead of selling
drugs or playing football; the subject who negotiates with his boss rather than tossing a Molotov cocktail through his or her shop
window; the wise, mild-mannered subject of today who settles disputes with his mind and mouth instead of with his fists. Let us say,
then, that at a certain level of praxis communication is violences other. It is this relationship to violence, in fact, that provides
communication/rhetoric with much of its cultural currency. We might consider the oft-bemoaned factoft-bemoaned in rhetorics
disciplinary circles, that isthat in public discourse mere rhetoric is often contrasted with action. A recent editorial in The Hill by
Kentucky US Senator Mitch McConnell regurgitated its variation on this theme: Job Creators Need Action, Not Rhetoric (McConnell
2011). While many communication and rhetoric scholars would be annoyed to see one of their colleagues repeat this nave
dichotomization, I would like to put aside the ontological status of rhetorical action for a moment in order to point out the rather
obvious fact that speechas a prominent cultural practicepossesses within our liberal democracy a special status among political
activities. One of the prerequisites of productive democratic citizenship is practicing speech rather than violencewe must discuss
how public and private institutions conspire to produce speaking subjects that eschew personal and political violence. However, this
divide between rhetoric and violence is not exclusive to contemporary liberal democracies. In fact, in an important sense this
contrast lies at the heart of rhetorical thinking throughout its history. For George Kennedy, rhetoric is not primarily a public activity
that developed in and around the democratic institutions of classical Greece; rather, it is a biological capacity that has been
hardwired into animals genetic makeup throughout most of our evolution on this planet. Kennedy offers the example of male red
deer stags competing for the attention of potential mates. Although the stags possess deadly antlers, they do not immediately
resort to physical fighting: instead, they approach one another and howl, attempting to intimidate the other into departing the
scene. This serves as a fight-orflight ritual in which the stags attempt to settle their differences with rhetoric rather than violence.
For Kennedy, We share a deep natural rhetoric (1998, 13) that finds expression in the stags posturing, a rhetoric that is deep
in the sense that it provides an evolutionary advantage to communities whose members attempt to persuade rather than devour
one another: it seems clear that nature has encouraged the evolution of rhetorical communication as a substitute for physical
precedents for this in classical Greek democratic and rhetorical theory: Lysias and Isocrates, for example, claimed that men
distinguished themselves from wild beasts through civic persuasion. Yet this old rationality of rhetorical practice has assumed a
different significance as the rhetoric/violence dichotomy has come to form a core element of the liberal political project. Contra the
democratic portrait that Lysias and Isocrates paint of rhetoric/violence in classical Greece, rhetoric is no longer solely or primarily
spraying, tazing, shooting, or otherwise incapacitating suspectsthey are given the task of calling 9-1-1, providing standard details,
The NEGs ideal rhetorical citizen is that of the communicativesurveillant officer who polices discourse
Reeves 13 (Joshua Assistant Professor in Communication at the University of
Memphis, If You See Something, Say Something: Surveillance, Communication and
Citizenship in American Life, A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty of
North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of Doctor of Philosophy, 2013, p. 168-172,
http://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/ir/bitstream/1840.16/8762/1/etd.pdf)
The moral and legal codes that constrain neighborhood watch today arise from a
peculiar historical juncture in which centuries of community-based policing tradition
is being transformed by relatively recent evolutions in sovereign privilege. Upon the
foundation of these tensions, certain actions are deemed morally and legally responsible acts
of citizenship while others are seen as threats to the social order . Surveillance and
communication are the privileged activities of todays neighborhood watch
volunteersa stark contrast, no doubt, from the days of watch-and-ward patrols and vigilante justice that characterized
policing during the colonial era and the settling of the western frontier. Until the early nineteenth century in the eastern United
States, most communities organized compulsory watch-andward policing patrols that were manned entirely by volunteers; and in
the Wild West and the vigilante South, of course, citizen justice prevailed throughout much of the nineteenth century, until
Wanted: Dead or Alive was transformed into Armed and Dangerous: Do Not ApproachContact Authorities Immediately.
As
suspects, but instead by watching their neighborhoods and producing highly circumscribed statements about their activities to law
enforcement authorities. The duties of the citizen-officerwho for centuries had manned every level of law enforcement and
criminal investigationwere integrated into this new governmental arrangement based upon what Foucault calls the formidable
rights of the sovereign (1977, 47), characterized above all by the sovereigns claim to the exclusive privileges of violence. As Kevin
Stenson has argued, a major task of the state police [is] to uphold the power of juridical authority, which remains the cement
binding governmental strategies together. It also involves the task of regulating the shifting boundaries between legitimate
community initiatives and illegitimate vigilanteism (1993, 385). As a result, the public at largeand particularly lateral policing
volunteers, such as those active in Neighborhood Watchhave been endowed with new responsibilities as specifically rhetorical
This
cultivation of rhetorical citizenshipwhich reinscribes the citizen officers zone of
practice within the bounds of the communicative-surveillantis a rather
straightforward illustration of the governmental mechanisms that the liberal order
requires in order to keep civil society civil (see Hay and Andrejevic 2006, 335). Primarily, this chapter gives
subjects: their new duties include reporting suspicious activities, calling 9/11, filing police reports, and so on.
an answer to Ronald Greenes (2009) challenge to theorize the conditions that give rise to special modalities of rhetorical
Protocols, commands, and anonymizing technologies dominate these citizen-officers speech experience, as they carry out the data
storage, processing, and transmission functions inherent to their mission as the eyes and ears of the neoliberal police apparatus. In
marked the ontological rift between humans and other animalshas given rise to divisions within human communities, as
biological resources valuable primarily as basic sensory extensions of police agencies. Deployed along a different governmental
apparatus than Greenes citizen-orators, these bare rhetorical subjects are, as we might say, a quite different animal. This chapter
will provide a historical overview of neighborhood-watch policingthat is, of policing that involves the energies and responsibilities
of local citizens rather than a sovereign professional police force. Then I describe the evolution from bounty justicein which
citizens were empowered to return suspects dead or aliveto the emergence of an exceptional sovereign power that demands for
itself the sole right to violence in law enforcement. At this stage the responsibilities of the citizen-officer shift: while still encouraged
now fulfills
his or her citizenship through rituals of surveillance and circumscribed
communication. Once oriented toward ideals of community protection and justicehowever flawed these ideals and
deprived by the sovereign of his or her traditional means of community-based justice and law enforcement,
their expressions might have beenthis citizen-officer now finds him or herself articulated to a governing apparatus that produces
very circumscribed acts of surveillance and discourse production.
2ac preemption da
Framework is a pre-emptive attempt to constrain and deter
different modes of rhetorical being
Reeves 13 (Joshua Assistant Professor in Communication at the University of
Memphis, If You See Something, Say Something: Surveillance, Communication and
Citizenship in American Life, A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty of
North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of Doctor of Philosophy, 2013, p. 207-210,
http://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/ir/bitstream/1840.16/8762/1/etd.pdf)
as Massumi observes, in the age of terror enemy epistemology has acquired a
new animating principle, as this logic of deterrence has been challenged and
complemented by a logic of preemption. For Massumi, this preemptive logic has a number of things in
Yet
common with deterrence: most importantly, they are both fueled by the unknown futurity of an imminent threat. Their primary
difference, however, is that the enemy epistemology of preemption is unabashedly one of uncertainty, and not due to a simple lack
of knowledge. There is uncertainty because the threat has not only not yet fully formed but . . . it has not yet even emerged. In other
words, the threat is still indeterminately in potential. This is an ontological premise: the nature of threat cannot be specified. It might
in some circumstances involve weapons of mass destruction, but in others it will not (13). The enemy, moreover, has become
unspecifiable: It might come from without, or rise up unexpectedly from within. You might expect the enemy to be a member of a
certain ethnic or religious group, an Arab or a Moslem, but you can never be sure. It might turn out be a white Briton wearing
sneakers, or a Puerto Rican from the heartland of America . . . . The situation is objectively one in which the only certainty is that
threat will emerge where it is least expected. This is because what is ever-present is not a particular threat or set of threats, but the
potential for still more threats to emerge without warning . . . . We are in a world that has passed from . . . the "known unknown"
(uncertainty that can be analyzed and identified) to the "unknown unknown" (objective uncertainty). (2007 13)
As the
enemy shifts from the known-unknowni.e., an enemy that can be addressed by traditional methods of risk
assessmentto the unknown unknown i.e., an enemy that can be anyone and anywhere, and which can never be
expunged because it exists only as a deferred, looming spontaneitythis epistemological shift becomes
palpable in evolving forms of governmental praxis . This strategy is especially visible
in the See Something, Say Something campaign and other domestic antiterrorism initiatives. The primary
public service announcement released by the See Something, Say Something campaign provides an excellent example of how
these discourses of categorical suspicion (see Marx 1988, 227) circulate in federal outreach materials (see also Docobo 2006). The
pedagogical voice that narrates this tenminute videowhich was released in a nationwide outreach campaign in 2011begins by
encouraging citizens to report activities that exceed their faculties of interpretation: Its not easy to put all the pieces [of an
unfolding terrorist threat] together, and we dont expect you to. Thats the job of law enforcement and intelligence analysts. But
homeland security is a shared effort and responsibility for each of us. When you see things that just dont seem right, that seem
somehow out of the ordinary, reporting what youve observed can be invaluable to the work of law enforcement and intelligence
analysts in this shared effort. Acts of terrorism against the United States can be large or small (USHomelandSecurity 2011a).
Citizens are thus encouraged to report unusual activities large and smallthat
defy their expectations of the ordinary . Illustrating a number of these ostensibly unusual, terroristsignifying
activities, the video presents a European-American man who appears to be in his late teens recording video under an overpass. The
video informs citizens that, before they strike, many terrorists watch and study their targets. The video then lists a number of
supposedly suspicious situations that warrant contacting authorities: warning that terrorists gather information, the scene shifts to
an outdoors caf, where a young, blonde EuropeanAmerican woman is speaking to a cop. According to the video, potential terrorists
also test security (a middle-aged African-American man in a red sweatshirt leaves something in his pocket as he goes through
airport security); acquire funds and supplies, often through criminal activities (two white vans are parked next to each other, as
two men transfer barely visible items between the vans); and rehearse their plans (a middle-aged EuropeanAmerican woman
leaves her purse under a bench in a bus station). After this lesson in the semiotics of terror, the narrator instructs the viewer, Any of
what we call these precursor activities might be observable and reportable by a vigilant member of the public. You are in the best
Operating on a
logic of preemption, virtually anything can be a precursor to terrorist acts as the video
position to spot these precursor activities as you go about your everyday activities in your community.
shows, taking photographs and speaking with cops can be precursor activities; and now, since the Boston Marathon attacks, walking
across a college apartment complex with a pressure cooker has become a precursor activity that warrants the scrutiny of vigilant
be based on a persons race, religion, or gender, but rather on behaviors that seem
suspicious . . . . So if you see something that just isnt right, report your observations to your state or local authorities
(2011a). While this assertion is standard politically correct fare, it should be identified within the larger trend toward governing
through ambiguity. While the logic of deterrence spawned knowledge-building enterprises aimed at understanding, containing, and
outsmarting the enemy, the logic of preemption is rooted in a more ambivalent epistemology: it is faced with the relative futility of
video reminds us, Homeland security starts with hometown security, and we all have a role to play. Working together, we can all
at: voluntary
Biometric surveillance is not something you can opt out of --its involuntary
Das 14 (Ravi owns a biometrics consultancy firm (Apollo Biometrics) based in
Chicago, Illinois, An Introduction to Biometrics, in Biometric Technology:
Authentication, Biocryptography, and Cloud-Based Architecture, p. 47)
The form of biometric technology that has been widely used with these types of surveillance activities has been and
continues to be facial recognition. Obviously, with surveillance, you want a contactless form of biometric
technology to be usedwhich is why facial recognition is the popular choice. Another biometric technology that can
be potentially used in surveil lance applications is iris recognition. It is also non-contact, and with the recent
advancements in iris recognition technology, iris images can be captured of people on the move and at even further
distances. Finally, another potential biometric technology that can be used for surveillance activities and which is
of an individual is based upon how they walk or their unique stride. A key point to be made here is that
the advantages that these biometric technologies offer to a particular type of surveillance application, all
surveillance activities suffer from a number of limitations, which are as follows:
in most
occasions when biometric identification or authentication is used , individuals are
not given any choice. This renders this justification irrelevant to most biometric applications.
could seek to justify its intervention into individual privacy by initiating a voluntary program. However,
2ac Ks
2ac derrida
Derrida only highlights the undecidability at the heart of the
law which doesnt affect it
Prozorov 10 (Sergei Professor of Political and Economic Studies at the University
of Helsinki, Why Giorgio Agamben is an optimist, in Philosophy Social Criticism,
Volume 36, Number 9, p. 1059-1060, November 2010,
http://psc.sagepub.com/content/36/9/1053.abstract)
Yet, how can this claim about the mutual reinforcement of the sovereign state and the society of the spectacle under the aegis of
biopolitical nihilism ground any optimistic disposition? It is precisely this totalized image that allows Agamben to claim that in the
Agamben refuses
both the possibility of reforming or even revolutionizing social life by re-engaging
with sovereignty, e.g. through the political struggle for hegemony along the lines of
Laclaus populism or the Habermasian formation of a more inclusive political
community through communicative action . Neither is there any point in a Derridean
deconstructive subversion of sovereignty in the name of the undeconstruc- tible
justice and democracy to come, which serves only to highlight the
undecidability at the heart of the law, which is essential to the latters existence.15 Since the
state of anomie is the constitutive outside of any nomos, it is bound to remain
inscribed within it irrespectively of the way the positive structure of order is
transformed. The state of exception and its product, the bare life of homo sacer, are
not a political problem to be resolved within any positive system, but rather a problem of the political itself .16
contemporary situation there is nothing to lose from a total halting of the machine.14 On the one hand,
Any search for a more effective, exception-proof positive order is entirely in vain, especially in todays condition of nihilism, in
which the vacuity of historical forms-of-life has brought the sovereign ban to the foreground as the sole substance of politics.
2ac wilderson
Wilderson and Agambens theorization of structural violence
are complementary and work best together
Johnson 14 (Paul Lecturer and Associate Director of Debate at the University of
Iowa, A Reading of Some of Frank Wildersons Red, White, and Black, Contra/Pro
Giorgio Agamben, in Sounding Rhetoric, 5-31-14,
http://soundingrhetoric.blogspot.com/2014/05/a-reading-of-some-of-frankwildersons_5930.html)
Wildersons argument has far reaching implications for those in communication studies who remain interested in rendering accounts
of how deliberative practices and institutional action do or do not succeed in achieving certain goals, either thought of in terms of
constituting material benchmarks through traditional metrics (legislative change, changes in legal interpretation) or in a more
Between Facts and Norms sense of moving the needle in terms of expanding the repertoire of forms and practices of argumentation
that civil society is capable of recognizing as political. Wilderson has no compunction about aligning himself with the academic
movement of what is called Afro-pessimism because in his view, the structural exclusion of the Black from society ensures that
efforts at expansionary inclusion emanating from the mass public serve only to confirm the authority of that public to judge while at
the same time routinely failing to address the structural conditions of exclusion. I am cheating a bit here by splitting them into two
functions, actually. It is really the case that the confirmation of the mass publics capacity to judge perpetuates the structural
conditions of exclusion. Despite Wildersons decision to place Giorgio Agamben in his crosshairs in the opening of his book, I believe
Agambens account of the distinction between bare life and political life offers an
elegant supplement that explains the rhetorical mechanisms for the production of
the process Wilderson identifies. In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life Agamben outlines his
case for how the dispossession of populations comes to function structurally as
opposed to contingently. Working from the Aristotelian distinction between life with the capacity for political speech,
that
political life, and life which is incapable of signifying, bare life, Agamben suggests political actors utilize a rhetoric that elevates the
good life, that is, life which exists above the realm of pure biological existence and into the realm of shared speech, politics.
Elevating political life, however, requires that political life be defined against some other
version of life, and that other form of life is bare life . Political philosophy has
defended Western political institutions on the basis not of their capacity to protect a
Hobbesian social contract, that is, the basis to secure bare life, but instead on the basis to provide for
the good life. Michel Foucault engineered this turn in thinking politics in The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, where he identified
emerging tendencies on the part of the government to rationalize interventions as means of enabling populations not just to live,
of vigilant military attack on these nations, attacks which created and intensified numerous political and infrastructural deficiencies
faced by countries which were often already struggling with developmental deficits that indexed not only the legacy of colonialism
but also their position on the periphery rather than center of the global order. Existing cultural differences, especially religious and
ethnic, were played up in media accounts of the conditions facing women in nations like Afghanistan.
that political rhetoric emanating from the West suggested that these nations were
politically bereft and thus in need of Western military intervention , sanctions,
international scorn, and that military intervention worked to verify the rhetorical
account of these nations as backwards and outside of the world of Western
political life. They were inside sovereignty only to the extent that they faced the
exercise of sovereign violence but constitutively excluded in all other ways . So the
question: would Wilderson recognize the strife between Western Europe and the populations in the East as a family quarrel
following Fanons analysis of the Holocaust? Would the position of Afghanistan be contingent in his view, i.e. occupying a position of
the Black but only until there comes to be a recognition of something shared between Afghanistan and the West? Would this
recognition depend upon what Wilderson, building on the work of Sadiya Hartman, would call the fungibility of the idea of violence
as applied to the black body? Those who are both geographically segregated from the West and also marked ethnically will probably
not be permitted to symbolically enter the West anytime soon. And if the soft, permanent electronic euthanasia of drone strikes is
any indicator, civil societys capacity to perceive the bodies of those like the son of Anwar Awlaki is seriously denuded. While some
Western theorists, chief among them Agamben, are capable of ascertaining similar characteristics in the Holocaust and the ongoing
war on terror, one would be hard pressed to identify this analogical mode of thinking as anything approaching dominant or
ascendant, which suggests a level of permanence to the position of bare life in the war on terror as constitutively excluded. This
Wilderson and Agamben both render the violence as ontological in the sense that it absolutely denies the humanity and agency of
that is, the fact that the relationship is established through tautology rather than through appeal to some kind of external authority,
suggests that the inability to distinguish between violence and the law is itself a
resource for political action, one that could demonstrate that emptiness.[9] Wilderson
on the other hand believes that the investment in authority for authoritys sake is
evidence that there is no chance for the slave to exist in the world because the
slaves existence is what makes the world possible . As he says it, No slave, no world because of both
how the physical labor of slavery makes our existing world possible and also how the symbolic figure of the slave secures, through
the
attitudinal difference between the two thinkers is much less than the shared
explanation both give for the way in which political action sediments hierarchies to
the detriment of bodies that have no access to those political worlds . Both Agamben
and Wilderson indicate that the authority of civil society is generated by tautological
exercises of sovereign power the ground themselves in their own assumption of
authority. Agamben suggests that sovereignty anticipates its own success to close off alternative perspectives while Wilderson
various and sundry means, the intelligibility of civil society itself. Above I mark the distinction as seeming because I think
argues that anti-blackness works as a paradigm by rendering a constitutively impossibility arguments and actions which might
testify to its own self-investment in authority. Wilderson and Agamben both outline theories of political exclusion that argue some
forms of life are given priority over other forms of life, and the unintelligibility of those other forms of life is the grist for the mill of
civil society and politics, respectively. Wildersons point regarding Agambens focus on the Holocaust is a necessary one, but
unsettled. This has been further complicated by the collapse of the clear international enemythe former Soviet
Union, further splintering possibilities of coherent organization through hatred of a common object. I take the notion
of citizenship as social standing from Judith Shklar. (1991) She argues that originally an important dimension of
marker. Citizenship then loses status and much of its social salience. Despite its location within a discourse of
equality, its connection with privilege gave citizenship much of its value. Shklar suggests that in the US as
citizenship ceases to mark social status, income emerges the primary source of determining worth and respect. This
accelerates the withdrawal from public life and intensifies the emphasis on individualism, earning and consumption
public sphere, as citizenship devolves into a means for protecting private material interests. Vast economic
inequalities corrode any sense of a life in common or of a shared public world, producing a vicious circle of
deepening estrangement and privatization. The ability of a few to go from "rags to riches" reinforces the mythology
of individualism. Individualism teaches us that social locations such as race/gender are purely contingent or matters
In the contemporary world such "contingencies" are often effects of what Foucault
calls biopower. Our inquiry into the production of privilege and unfreedom are blocked by sustaining this split
between noumenal and phenomenal selves. We cannot recognize the power relations that play out through bodies,
we cannot see how those "contingent advantages and accidental influences from the past" are socially constructed
effects of power, by fantasizing a disembodied mind. Without such inquiries, we are unlikely to reduce the injustices
race any more than genitals require an idea of gender. Once these categories exist and regulate the lives of
subjects, further expert knowledge emerges to justify them. Since all subjects must live within their constituting
knowledge/power networks, these categories are socially real. This transformation of bodies into social fact through
will not destroy the domination required to reproduce race/gender. While upheld by juridical power,
race/domination is not amenable to liberal, juridical solutions alone. We can see this
in the failures of law, especially Supreme Court decisions, to successfully resolve
matters of race/gender. The entire construction must be dismantled, not to create a "race blind" society
but one in which these categories cease to operate. Biopower requires us to rethink what counts
as "public" or "private" and the proper subjects of politics . This deconstruction cannot occur
without admitting that a particular set of relations were constructed. The categories and practices retain their
constituting effects. We cannot just pretend that race/gender does not shape us; that we are simply individuals. All
the effects of race/gender on American subjects and our institutions must be actively confronted and undone. This
is what necessitates affirmative action and why it is the site of so much anger and resistance. No defense can be
mounted of such a policy without explicit reference to a history that many Americans would like to declare
irrelevant or without current consequences. Appeals to abstract reason, such as Rawls's "least advantaged"
principle are counterproductive, because the race/gender subtext will not disappear. Discussion of contingent
determination in devising basic principles and approximating justice is required. Affirmative action acknowledges
that each subject's race/gender is relevant .
radically transformed. It is no longer an abstract, self-constituting and freely contracting agent. Instead, it is a
participating, shifting and resisting position within complex circuits of power .
A biopower perspective
reveals the social production of rationality. It exposes the discipline required to
shape beings who can think according to disciplinary norms . Rationality without a belief in
the objectivity and universality of disciplinary norms jeopardizes social order and ethical legitimation. If order
depends upon particular kinds of knowledge and power, its legitimacy is fragile. One solution to this conflict of
narratives has long been practiced in the United States. As Morrison argues, race/gender categories protect the
legitimating idea of the sovereign, rational subject. To preserve this subject, discipline and rationality are enacted
and distributed differently along race/gender lines.
can operate to mask the effects of biopower. Race/gender marks only certain
subjects as determined by social relations. Those who are not a lesser or marked
other can be undetermined by biopower; they can be abstract individuals. Despite biopower,
individualism remains a real possibility. The failure to achieve it lies in the defects of the others. This strategy
continually generates a category of the abject onto whom all heterogeneous determination can be projected and
blamed. Repeated attempts to rescue the fantasies that produce liberal individuals require a politics of hate. We do
not often think of communities bound by hate. Indeed the recent resurgence of "communitarian" writings ignores
these bonds altogether (Sandel, 1982; Bellah, et.al.,1985; Avineri and de-Shalit, eds., 1992). Yet, at least in
American history, these forces have been important sources of solidarity. Hate ties people to others in ways they
cannot consciously acknowledge. It generates a desire to destroy the other who so unrelentingly affects one's own
fate. As Fairbairn (1952) argues, such bonds are among the most difficult to break.
2ac marx
Permutation Do Both global capital and the sovereignty are
intertwined only through an elimination of the sovereign can
we solve for capitalism
Robinson, 11 (Andrew, In Theory Giorgio Agamben: destroying sovereignty,
Cease Fire, https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-giorgio-agamben-destroyingsovereignty/)//BW
The fact that states are
constrained by or even hybridised with other social forces does not necessarily
preclude them having their own logic or dynamic. To argue by analogy, capitalists
always seek to make profits, even if sometimes they have to rely on local kinship
networks to secure profits, or pay off local leaders to access resources. The profit
motive is inherent to capitalist motivation, even when this motivation enters into
hybrid combinations. Similarly, it is quite plausible that Agambens account of sovereignty describes
This doesnt necessarily mean that Agamben is wrong about sovereignty.
something inherent in the functioning of states. But nevertheless, the question of whether, to what extent, and
how the state is able to actualise sovereignty becomes dependent on its location
among other social forces. If it is suddenly acting more thoroughly on this logic, then it is quite possible
that it has not simply evolved cumulatively, but has either grown stronger relative to other forces, has seceded
from them and become unconcerned about its effects on them, or is benefiting from an enabling context which lets
interstate conflict has declined? Are states acting up because they fear their own loss of power to transnational
sovereignty reappearing in force because the state needs to redefine its own role to survive the decay of other
narratives (such as the state-as-arbiter and the state-as-distributor)?
close at hand" to attain a truly critical approach . What is at stake for Benjamin in this critique is that a
full understanding of the development of violence can give insight into "the breaking
of this cycle. the suspension of law with all the forces on which it depends as they
depend on it, finally therefore. the abolition of state power." Keep in mind, as we move from reading his philosophy of the
history of violence to his theses on the philosophy of history itself, that both concern themselves with this same break. The
realization of Benjamin's vision of state abolition is defined as a break with a
historical cycle in which violence creates law , preserves law, and in which "either new
forces or those earlier suppressed" violently overthrow the existent law in order to
"found a new law, destined in its turn to decay ." The possibility of a break from the
whole cycle rests on the recognition that if the existing law can be broken today , then
an attack on law itself can soon be made ; and that if there is "violence outside the law, as pure immediate
violence," then "revolutionary violence, the highest manifestation of unalloyed violence by man, is possible." Although the Critique
also points to another, more subtle task beyond this one, what we will keep in mind as we proceed is this concept of revolutionary
violence, since for him
recent attempts at rekindling the flame of the revolutionary general strike, in relation to which the discourse around violence has
appeared again as a trap on all sides. While the model of the strike is explicitly referenced in the "Critique of Violence it is absent
rather conspicuously from the "Concept of History In the former, he writes about the strike which appears in the class struggle as
understood that there will be a return to work once a demand is met. In what Benjamin calls the political general strike, a set of
politicians take this method beyond the demands particular to a workplace and apply it to a demand for them (the politicians) to
take power, at which point there will be a return to work. All of this bears only the most superficial resemblance to what Benjamin
describes as the form of the strike that takes place rooted "in the determination to resume only a wholly transformed work, no
longer enforced by the state. In contrast to the political general strike, this other "form of interruption of work,
the
proletarian general strike, is "pure means, "nonviolent, and "anarchistic. The reason that
these two forms are "antithetical in their relation to violence bears some further inquiry. To Benjamin the political general strike is
violent because it "causes only an external modification of labor conditions, which are in themselves violent, and has as its aim the
Case NEG
framework
Agambens Essentialism 8. Agambens conception of the task of thinking is deeply Heideggerian. It can be summarized in this way: the thinker isolates
ontological essences in which the common ground of apparently different, or even opposite, empirical and historical phenomena is revealed. The constantly reoccurring conceptual gesture in Agambens writings is that of
indistinction. Political power is the instigation of an indistinction between the state of exception and the normal legal order, between fact and law, nature and norm, animality and humanity, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion.
It must be noted that, paradoxically, this recurrent movement of indistinction that effaces conceptual and empirical differences runs counter to the Foucauldian distinctions and discontinuities. 9. Consistent with this foundationalist
essentialism, Agamben does not restrict indistinction to the conceptual or structural level, but extends it to empirical, historical phenomena. The archaic State is not substantially different from the modern one. There is no essential
difference between democracy before Auschwitz, the totalitarian States themselves, and democracy after Auschwitz between liberal democracies and dictatorships (Agamben 1998:10). In Auschwitz, there is no difference between
victim and executioner (Agamben 1999a: 21). No distinction between the sacred priest, the criminal banned from the archaic community and the modern citizen; no distinction between the bodies in Auschwitz and the bodies of
victims of car accidents in modern Europe (1998: 114); no distinction between the Muselmann in the extermination camp and the immigrant locked up by police in a hotel at Charles de Gaulle Airport (1998: 174), or between the
Muselmann and the overcomatose person (1999a: 156); no distinction between the Nazi extermination camps and the camps established in the former Yugoslavia. 10. On a general, philosophical level, the essentialist method that
leads to general indistinguishability would be questioned by other traditions of thought. The strongest critique would probably come from the Hegelian tradition, for which the essence is to be found nowhere but in its modes of
appearance, identity in differences. The conceptual imperative that ensues is the task of thinking precisely what appears as different, and not look for a transcendent "thing-in-itself" in which all differences are swallowed. If indeed
there are historiographical differences between democracy and fascism (1998: 10), then perhaps it should bear more weight in the theory, and not be blurred into indistinction. From a Hegelian perspective, Agambens conceptuality
looks very much like a Schellingian night where all cows are black. This in itself is obviously not a ground for rejection, as all theory starts from a theoretical decision which is itself ungrounded and the matter of pure freedom, as
Fichte demonstrated. Thought, like politics, is all about the decision and its implications. 11. In the case of empirical examples, the erasure of difference between phenomena seems particularly counter-intuitive in the case of
The Critique of Human Rights 12. In order to argue against fundamental rights as the normative
grounding of modern politics, Agamben presents the biopolitical thesis: the actual subject of the law is not the citizen, understood as a person vested with fundamental rights, but the human being as living creature. The actual
subject of power is bare life. 13. I want to consider this rejection of the principle of human rights from the angle of the emergence of biopolitics at the time of the declarations of human rights. Agamben accepts the well-established
distinction between ancient natural law, natural law under absolutism, and modern natural law (Strauss 1953). His narrative, however, runs counter to the usual one: It is almost as if, starting from a certain point, every decisive
political event were double-sided: the spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individuals lives with the state
order, thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from which they wanted to liberate themselves (Agamben 1998: 121). 14. This is a kind of dialectic of Enlightenment: the more individuals
liberate themselves legally from the shackles of authority, the more they subject themselves to power biopolitically. This dialectic enables Agamben to postulate a continuous line running from the first formulation of the Habeas
Corpus, through the Bill of Rights, to the 1933 Nuremberg eugenic laws: along this line we find the body of the individual directly exposed to the state of exception. In the different Declarations of Human Rights that signal the
historical birth of modernity, the subject becomes citizen that is bearer of sovereignty, solely on account of his birth, his natio, or nationality. Behind the citizen, man as bare life is hidden. This bare life exposed to sovereign power is
precisely the pure substance that the Nazi regime attempted to produce, which justifies the perception of continuity between modern democracy and the totalitarian State. 15. This reading of the French Revolution and of the
Declarations of Human Rights used as preambles to the different constitutions of the Rpublique is problematic. First of all, in the American Revolution, which in many senses was the model for the French, it would be difficult to find
the figure of homo sacer. The American declaration of independence, influenced by Lockes theory of natural law, places the origin of the rights of men in divine laws. Political power does not apply to individuals considered from the
point of view of their birth, their natio or nationality, but to individuals fully endowed with natural rights, as creatures of God (Kervgan 1995: 660). 16. Agamben is greatly inspired by Hannah Arendt. She is the one that explicitly
makes the "internment camp" a central figure of modern times (Arendt 1966: 276). In her, he finds a strong counter-objection to the remark above. In both the "American formula" that relies on the authority of God, and the "French
formula" that relies on philosophical justifications of natural law, the fiction of a universal essence of man is denounced by the factual helplessness of all the refugees and stateless people created by the turmoils of the 20th century.
17. Agamben quotes Arendts critical conclusion: the conception of human rights, based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the
first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships except that they were still human (Arendt 1966: 299; Agamben 1998: 126). But he fails to quote the very next line, which makes all
the difference: "The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of the human being" (Arendt 1966: 299). 18. What Arendt means is that only when they are realised in a political "commonwealth" do human rights have any
meaning. They are an abstraction otherwise. More important than the right to freedom or the right to justice is "the right to have rights", that is, to be the member of a political community. Arendt therefore asserts the opposite of
what Agamben wants to say: she believes that the political solution lies in what he considers to be a fiction, namely the citizen. Her point is that when man and citizen come apart, we realise that man never really existed as a subject
of rights. This is the exact opposite of Agamben for whom the citizen is just a travesty. 19. Despite this opposition, Agamben borrows Arendts critical interpretation of the French revolution and modernity in general, even though this
interpretation itself is not beyond doubt. The French declaration makes it clear that human rights lose all significance if they are not reinscribed within a political community that transforms them into constitutional principles, and the
American constitution also defines a clear link between individual freedom and a political order whose goal is freedoms protection. Yet, Agamben reads the first article of the Declaration of 1789, "all men are born and remain free
and equal in rights" as proof that modern sovereign power applies to bare life, here in the form of birth (Agamben 1995: 128). But this seems disingenuous. Birth here refers not to nationality, but simply to the fundamental fact of
the equality of all human beings in right. The term effectuates the radical break with ancient and absolutist natural law, a break that is synonymous with legal modernity. In ancient natural law, rights were associated with the social
position or the notion of a perfect cosmic order underpinned by God. 20. This emphasis on the rupture that the declarations consummate leads to the question of historical continuity. The Habeas Corpus is not necessarily a precursor
of modern declarations as it uses a non-egalitarian definition of freedom, reserved for the elite. It lacks the fundamental notion that is the mark of modernity, the universal equality of all. 21. Agamben does not emphasise equality,
but it could be argued that, above all others, even above the notion of right, it is this category that gives modernity its actual normative content. Modern man is therefore not first and foremost the national, but a universal being
liberated from the particularisms of traditional society. This amounts only to an empty universalism if no political project realises freedom and equality, but this is precisely a mistake that the American and French revolutions, for all
their ambiguities, did not commit. Agamben refuses to consider basic legal equality as the true content of declarations of human rights and instead focuses on the national aspect. In this he is faithful to Schmitt who rejects the
republican conception of popular sovereignty. Schmitt, Benjamin and the Violence of the Law 22. One of the most impressive aspects in Agambens oeuvre is the extent to which it has developed to such a high level of conceptual
sophistication, and how it delves to such a degree into philological, historical and conceptual detail, whilst remaining ever faithful to the letter and spirit of Walter Benjamins writings. This is true of his meditations on language,
literature, and the "end of experience". This especially true, however, of Agambens political writings. They can be read as the results of a systematic research undertaken with the goal of developing and giving substance to the
It is important to
approach Agambens theses on political sovereignty from this perspective because
their radical nature risks blocking access to their meaning and critical potential
insights put forward by Benjamin in his long forgotten and now famous 1921 article, "Critique of Violence", as well as the 1940 "Theses on the Philosophy of History".
. 23. The
second of the three volumes to be dedicated to the figure of homo sacer (Homo Sacer II, 1) studies afresh many of the key theses, concepts and references that were present in the first instalment (Homo Sacer: sovereign power and
bare life). The new genealogical and ontological analyses in this second volume make both the negative, critical, and the positive, programmatic, aspects of Agambens politics very clear. 24. By focusing on the paradox of
constituting power, the extra-juridical nature of the decision that founds the juridical field, the paradox of political sovereignty, which, in its normality and normativity, logically relies on the power to decree the state of exception, Carl
Schmitt has isolated the violent, anomic core of all juridical and political systems. In this sense, Schmitt tells the truth about the political, the truth about Western politics. For example, empirically, the world in which we live is a
Schmittian world, where the state of exception becomes the rule of even supposedly "democratic" governments. 25. But, to use Heideggers turn of phrase, that is only the guiding question, not the founding one. More importantly, in
their very accuracy, the Schmittian theses point to all that is wrong in Western politics, and thus, negatively, to another form of politics. With Schmitt, Agamben believes one can cut to the very essence of Western politics, beyond
illusory rationalistic and normative frameworks. Only after having reached that point, once the essence of all politics has been identified, can one hope to find the correct alternative. Any solution that would not confront the
Schmittian challenge would remain caught up in unending conundrums. The embracing of Schmitt is thus only a negative, propaedeutic step towards a positive political theory. 26. So what is wrong with Schmitt, according to
Agamben, and what political field opens up once we have crossed this ultimate threshold? In the central chapter of Homo Sacer II, 1, Agamben reconstructs the different stages of Schmitts theory of sovereign exception as a series of
responses to Benjamins fundamental challenge, the idea expressed in the 1921 "Critique of violence", and reiterated in the 1940 eighth thesis on history, of a "pure" revolutionary "violence" beyond all forms of law, which therefore
would not be violent, of a "real state of exception", the revolutionary one, that would replace the absolute violence of the state of exception "in which we live" (Benjamin 1991: 291[292]). 27. For Agamben, Schmitts theory of
sovereignty is the attempt to conjure up the threat of (Benjaminian) revolution, by tying up the anomy at the core of human action to the juridical order via the theory of exception. This gesture of tying up anomic violence to a
normative order is exactly isonomic to the metaphysical gesture that attempts to capture Being in the net of logos. This is why Schmitt, as the one who identified the pure elements of all legal orders, the anomic core of normal
legality, but continued to tie the two together, represents the true acme, both conceptually and for what he stood for historically, of Western politics. And this is why Benjamin, who had learnt from Schmitt about the exceptionality
forming the core of legal normality and normative legality, but perverted the Schmittian lesson by cutting the link between exception and law, shows the right way out of the political impasse of the West. The effective theory of
revolution is the messianic utopianism of Benjamin. 28. All this explains why Agamben chooses to focus on the decisionistic tradition (Hobbes, Heidegger, Schmitt). With it, he wants to isolate the pure essences of all juridical orders
and thus highlight the essential violence structuring traditional politics. Since the law essentially appears as a production and capture of bare life, the political order that enunciates and maintains the law is essentially violent, always
In Hobbes, the social contract, despite the absolute nature of the sovereign it
creates, also enables individual rights to flourish on the basis of the inalienable right to life (see Barret-Kriegel 2003: 86). 30. In Schmitt, the decision over the exception is indeed "more interesting than the regular case", but only
because it makes the regular case possible. The "normal situation" matters more than the power to create it since it is its end (Schmitt 1985: 13). What Schmitt has in mind is not the indistinction between fact and law, or their
intimate cohesion, to wit, their secrete indistinguishability, but the origin of the law, in the name of the law. This explains why the primacy given by Schmitt to the decision is accompanied by the recognition of popular sovereignty,
since the decision is only the expression of an organic community. Decisionism for Schmitt is only a way of asserting the political value of the community as homogeneous whole, against liberal parliamentarianism. Also, the evolution
of Schmitts thought is marked by the retreat of the decisionistic element, in favour of a strong form of institutionalism. This is because, if indeed the juridical order is totally dependent on the sovereign decision, then the latter can
revoke it at any moment. Decisionism, as a theory about the origin of the law, leads to its own contradiction unless it is reintegrated in a theory of institutions (Kervgan 1992). 31. In other words, Agamben sees these authors as
establishing a circularity of law and violence, when they want to emphasise the extra-juridical origin of the law, for the laws sake. Equally, Savignys polemic against rationalism in legal theory, against Thibaut and his philosophical
ally Hegel, does not amount to a recognition of the capture of life by the law, but aims at grounding the legal order in the very life of a people (Agamben 1998: 27). For Agamben, it seems, the origin and the essence of the law are
synonymous, whereas the authors he relies on thought rather that the two were fundamentally different. 32. Agamben obviously knows all this. He argues that it is precisely this inability of the decisionists to hold on to their key
insight, the anomic core of norms, which gives them the sad distinction of accurately describing an evil order. But this reading does not meet the objection to his problematic use of that tradition. 33. If the authors of the decisionistic
(Hobbes-Schmitt) and ethnonationalistic (Savigny-Schmitt) traditions do not want to emphasize the extra-juridical core of the law, but rather polemically establish the non-rationalistic and non-positivistic grounding of an otherwise
fully acknowledged normative order, then it seems as though Agamben makes them prove too much. If Hobbes, Savigny and Schmitt are intent, as much as their theoretical opponents, on shoring up the normative order, then they
cannot be used as proponents of an anti-normative essence of normativity. Conversely, a more serious engagement with the opposing traditions (mainly, natural law, positivism and rationalism) is required, since it is not the case that
the nationalistic-decisionistic one would be situated at a deeper level of analysis than its opponents. 34. This is illustrated in the passage in Homo Sacer II, 1 where Agamben analyses the justification-application dichotomy. The
passages on Schmitts theory of the state of exception show explicitly the hermeneutic slide in the reading of this key author. Indeed, "the state of exception separates the norm from its application in order to make the latter
possible". But Schmitts point is not what Agamben makes of it in the next paragraph, namely that, as a consequence, "it (the state of exception) introduces into the law a zone of anomy", in which "the two elements of the law" (the
norm and its application) "show their intimate cohesion" (Agamben 2003: 64). Instead, for Schmitt, the distinction between justification and application simply shows the political grounding of the legal moment. 35. But this grounding
in the political is just the result of a theoretical decision, and the alternatives should be confronted more explicitly. This lack of a substantial engagement with other legal alternatives becomes obvious a few pages later, when
Agamben analyses once more the specific problem of the application of the law. When he writes that "in the case of the juridical norm, the reference to the concrete case supposes a "process" that always implies a plurality of
subjects, and that culminates in the last instance in the enunciation of a sentence, that is to say, a statement whose operative reference to reality is guaranteed by institutional powers" (Agamben 2003: 69), he simply formulates a
classical distinction that can receive an entirely different treatment with no less plausibility. A recent philosophical solution to the gap between justification and application has been famously given by Habermas (1990 and 1996).
Chapters 5 and 6 of Between facts and norms in particular provide an excellent overview of plausible alternatives to Schmitts decisionistic theory of adjudication, from Kelsen to Critical Legal Studies. 36. But then Agamben cannot
simply use the fact that "the application of a norm is not contained in it" as leading directly to the theory of the state of exception, since from the very same premise another form of political grounding of the legal could be advanced,
one, for instance, that focuses on intersubjectivity and the institutionalisation of dissensus. The "violence" that realizes the statement is not necessarily "without logos". For Schmitt, it draws its authority from the political, that is, the
logos of the polis as ethnos; for another tradition, it would do so from the logos of intersubjectively constituted and essentially contested institutions. 37. Here, as in many other aspects of his thought, Agamben draws on Benjamin
for whom there is "something rotten in law" (Benjamin 1991b: 188 [286]), a fateful violence, "the destruction of which becomes obligatory" (199 [297]). There is undeniably a continuity in Benjamin, from the "Critique of Violence" to
the theses on the philosophy of history, that has to do with his fundamental vision of history as a series of catastrophes, a series of orders recurrently establishing themselves as forms of fate that unleash their violence, rephrased in
the language of the law, over the oppressed. But the other continuity in Benjamins writings is underplayed by Agamben. For Benjamin and his readers of 1921, the divine violence that is "law-destroying", and therefore - as negation
of the violent negation of law - no longer violent, is obviously the violence of the proletarian revolution, and there is no need, in 1921, to ask about its "logos", the normative source of its justification. This source is the "total condition
that is man" (Benjamin 1991b: 201 [299]), the "wholly transformed work" (1991b: 294 [292]), in other words, in a Marx-inspired vision of global revolution, however vague or heretic the reception of Marx. Again, in 1940, the theses
on history use historical materialism as their obvious background, though Agamben acknowledges this only in passing in Homo Sacer II (108), and appropriates Benjamin without reference to the background securing his
revolutionary messianism in Homo Sacer 1. Agamben acknowledges this only in passing in Homo Sacer II, 1 (2003: 108). Homo sacer I strikingly appropriated Benjamin without reference to the background securing his revolutionary
messianism. This means, however, that the new law beyond the law that no longer has the form of law is a lot more substantive than simply the "study" of, or "play with", the old law (Agamben 2003: 108-9). It is the immanent law of
the liberated community, whose book had already been written in extenso by another great German Jew. In other words, Benjamin indeed demonstrates the violent anomic core of law, but only to point to a new, normative law, the
new law of a community that has defeated fate. With this reference to Marx as the immanent normativity of Benjamins messianism, the notion of a politics of "pure means" becomes far more intuitively evident. Ontology of Politics,
Politics of Ontology 38. With the "Critique of Violence", Benjamin pursued the goal of a "politics of pure means" which would undercut the violence implicit in all articulation of morality and justice in (justified) means for (just) ends.
"The violence of an action can be assessed no more from its effects than from its ends, but only from the law of its means" (Benjamin 1991b: 195 [292]). Since the law of the legal orders means is the establishment of a violent fate
that captures bare life and produces guilt and punishment as forms of that capture (Benjamin 1991a: 175 [308]), the destruction of all forms of legality is "obligatory" before the advent of a just society. 39. Agamben takes up
Benjamins indication and engages in systematic research into the ontology of means and ends in order to show its absolute violent isonomy with the logic of sovereignty. To do this, Agamben borrows from Schmitt the definition of
sovereign power as the decisionary power over the state of exception, which he interprets as the paradoxical power to exclude and thereby include, or alternatively to include by excluding. 40. This formal model, he then shows,
following Heidegger, exactly corresponds in structural terms to the classical Aristotelian articulation of potentiality to actuality. Aristotle identifies two senses of potentiality. Potentiality is potentiality to be, and in that first sense, it is
directly related to actuality: potentiality as potentiality of actuality. Potentiality is therefore more truly itself in a second sense, as potentiality not to be. In this second sense, however, it also remains related to actuality. Indeed the
potential not to be, if reflectively turned onto itself, is again actuality. Not to be the power not to be is both being true to the nature of not being, and also to be in the most actual form of actuality. Impotentiality taken seriously is
both pure potentiality and as the impotentiality of the potential not-to-be, pure actuality. In other words, "pure potentiality and pure actuality are indistinguishable" (Agamben 1998: 47). 41. This conceptual indistinction, whereby the
potential is also the most actual form of actuality, is perfectly isomorphic with the sovereign structure if sovereignty is also defined as a power to suspend itself (potential not-to be) which is at the same time the source of itself and,
as normative power, the source of legal reality (actuality). 42. The conclusion is clear: if we want to move beyond biopolitics, beyond the violent politics of sovereignty, we have to develop an alternative ontology where the potential
is not always already recaptured by its own potentiality and thus forced to relate to its opposite, actuality. We have to think potentiality as pure or absolute potentiality, "beyond every figure of relation" (1998: 47). 43. Agamben thus
connects Benjamins "politics of pure means" with the alternative ontology articulated by Heidegger on the basis of his reading of Aristotles metaphysics. In his 1931 lectures on the Metaphysics (Heidegger, 1981: 114), in his
Nietzsche lectures (1980: 64-65), and in the Letter on humanism (1977: 220), Heidegger had tied the imperative of a "recovery of the question of Being" to a radical rethinking of the categories of modality in which Being is freed
from the productivist paradigm of actualitas. Only through a questioning of the modal logic operating within the onto-theological tradition could a free "ethos" be prepared as a genuine dwelling. Agambens thought owes just as
much to this fundamental inspiration as he does to Benjamin. How much Heideggers ontology of potentiality has exerted a fundamental influence on him is especially clear in the lectures at the Collge international de Philosophie
published under the title Lombre de lamour (1988: 44-46). 44. The description of the radical politics that emerges from the ontology of pure potentiality can be found in The Coming Community, and it is here that the full
consequences of Agambens problematic interpretation and reappropriation of Benjamin, Heidegger, Schmitt and Arendt become apparent. 45. In the notes that Benjamin was writing in preparation for his Theses on the philosophy of
history, one reads: "The messianic world is the world of overall and integral actuality" (Benjamin 1991e: 1235). The last expression is a self-reference to the 1929 essay on surrealism (1991d: 309, [1929]). Against Benjamins explicit
equation of the "real state of exception" (the state of liberated humanity), with actuality, Agambens coming community is a community of subjects that exist only as negative potentialities (actualities that are the possibility of notbeing, actualisations of potentiality), the "whatever singularities". Because he has severed the concept of the community from all normative ties, and has rejected all conceptual and normative distinctions (between state of nature
and civil state, law and violence, nomos and physis, normal state and exception, etc.), this community-to-come can only be ever described negatively, as beyond all forms of community, and accessed only in the flight from all
present and all immanence. It is difficult to avoid thinking that the assumed messianism of this radical politics is only a form of negative theology. Difficult not to think, also, that politics constructed as the "gigantomachy" (Agamben
thereby strongly distinguish politics from the police order viewed as the functional
management of communities (Rancire 1999), then it is possible to acknowledge the
normative break introduced by the democratic revolutions of the modern age
without falling into a one-sided view of modernity as a neat process of
rationalisation. What should be stressed about modernity is not primarily the list of
substantive inalienable and imprescriptible human rights , but the equal entitlement
of all to claim any rights at all. This definition of politics must be accompanied by the parallel acknowledgment that
the times that saw the recognition of the fundamental equality of all also produced the total negation of this principle. But this
parallel claim does not necessarily render the first invalid . Rather it points to a tension
inherent in modern communities, between the political demands of equality and the
systemic tendencies that structurally produce stigmatisation and exclusion . 48. One
can acknowledge the descriptive appeal of the biopower hypothesis without
renouncing the antagonistic definition of politics. As Rancire remarks, Foucaults late hypothesis
is more about power than it is about politics (Rancire 2002). This is quite clear in the 1976 lectures (Society must be defended)
where the term that is mostly used is that of "biopower". As Rancire suggests, when the "biopower" hypothesis is transformed into
a "biopolitical" thesis, the very possibility of politics becomes problematic. There is a way of articulating modern disciplinary power
and the imperative of politics that is not disjunctive. The power that subjects and excludes socially can also empower politically
simply because the exclusion is already a form of address which unwittingly provides implicit recognition. Power includes by
excluding, but in a way that might be different from a ban. This insight is precisely the one that Foucault was developing in his last
writings, in his definition of freedom as "agonism" (Foucault 1983: 208-228): "Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only
proposal rests on a logic that challenges Agambens reduction of the overcoming of the classical conceptualisation of potentiality
554). Hegel can lead the way towards an ontology of contingency that recognises the place of contingency at the core of necessity,
instead of opposing them. The fact that the impossible became real vindicates Hegels claim that the impossible should not be
necessity (Agamben 1999a: 148), but absolute contingency. The absolute historical necessity of Auschwitz is not "the radical
negation" of contingency, which, if true, would indeed necessitate a flight out of history to conjure up its threat. Its absolute
necessity in fact harbours an indelible core of contingency, the locus where political intervention could have changed things, where
politics can happen. Zygmunt Baumans theory of modernity and his theory about the place and relevance of the Holocaust in
modernity have given sociological and contemporary relevance to this alternative historical-political logic of contingency (Bauman
both the possibility, and the possibility of the repetition of, catastrophe, as the one heritage of modernity, and the contingency of
is why rights should not be taken for granted. But this does not imply that they
should be rejected as illusion, on the grounds that they were disclosed as contingent
in the horrors of the 20th century. Instead, their contingency should be the reason
for constant political vigilance. 52. By questioning the rejection of modern rights, one is undoubtedly
unfaithful to the letter of Benjamin. Yet, if one accepts that one of the great weaknesses of the Marxist philosophy of revolution was
politics that
define themselves as the articulation of demands born in the struggles against
injustice are better able to bear witness to the "tradition of the oppressed" than
their messianic counterparts.
its inability to constructively engage with the question of rights and the State, then it might be the case that the
Agamben does seem to reject Heidegger's problematic separation of Dasein, as a being that can see the
open, from the animal, poor in world, that cannot.45 Ultimately, Agamben appears to be
arguing that any negation of the machine cannot be accomplished on a philosophical
plane, but only in terms of practice. In the end, practice or human action, not philosophy, is what
counts. Ontology and philosophy are to be considered only to the extent that
they are political operators and, specifically, biopolitical weapons in the service of the
anthropological machine of sovereignty. In order to try to stop the biopolitical machine that
produces bare life, what is needed is human action, "which once claimed for itself the
name of 'politics'" (SE, 88). It is because there is no necessary articulation "between
violence and law, between life and norm," that it is possible to attempt to interrupt or halt
the machine, to "loosen what has been artificially and violently linked " (SE, 87). This
opens a space for a return not to some "lost original state" but to human praxis and political
action (SE, 88).
The state whether national like Britain or France, a supranational quasi-state like the EU, or imperial like the USA
is the framework within which conventional politics takes place . Now, it is arguable
states.
that the state is a limitation on human existence and we would be better off without it. It is arguable that without state systems of
government, bureaucracy, the police and the military, human beings would be able to cooperate with each other on the basis of free
agreement and not merely through obedience to law. It is arguable that interwoven networks of such cooperative associations might
begin to cover all fields of human activity so as to substitute themselves for the state. It is arguable that the vertical hierarchy of the
state structure could be replaced with horizontally allied associations of free, self-determining human beings. Such is, of course, the
eternal temptation of the anarchist tradition, particularly for someone like Kropotkin, and I will come back to anarchism in more
anarchosyndicalist or anarcho-communist action or through revolutionary proletarian praxis with the agency of the party. Within
classical Marxism, state, revolution and class form a coherent set: there is a revolutionary class, the universal or classless class of
the proletariat whose communist politics entails the overthrow of the bourgeois state. The locus classicus for this position is Lenin's
State and Revolution, a text that is, in my view, fatally sundered by conflicting authoritarian and anarchist tendencies. On the one
hand, in the name of the 'authentic' Marx, Lenin claims that the bourgeois state must be smashed and replaced by a democratically
centralist workers' state the dictatorship of the proletariat but, on the other hand, he claims that this is only a pre-condition
for the eventual withering away of the state in communism or what he calls the 'fullest democracy'. 29 The condition of possibility
for the Leninist withering away of the state is the emergence of a revolutionary class, the proletariat, whom Hardt and Negri seek to
update into the multitude. 30 Now, if class positions are not simplifying, but on the contrary becoming more complex through the
processes of social dislocation described in this chapter, if the revolution is no longer conceivable in a Marxist-Leninist manner, then
politics of indigenous rights discussed above, this is arguably a description of the sort of direct democratic action that has provided
the cutting edge and momentum to radical politics since the days of action against the meeting of the WTO in Seattle in 1999 and
subsequently at Prague, Nice, Genoa, Quito, Cancun and elsewhere. 32 In the face of the massive re-territorialization of state power
in the West after 9/11, this movement has continued in the huge mobilizations against US and UK intervention in Iraq, and in
numerous other protests, such as the opposition to the Republican National Convention in New York in late summer 2004.
attack has permitted the curtailments of traditional civil liberties in the name of
internal political order, so-called 'homeland security', where order and security have
become identified. Such is the politics of fear, where the political might be defined with Carl Schmitt as that activity which
assures the internal order of a political unit like a state through the more or less fantastic threat of the enemy. 33 Against this, the
task of radical political articulations is the creation of interstitial distance
within the state territory. The Mexican example of indigenous identity
discussed above is a powerful instance of the creation of such a distance ,
an act of political leverage where the invocation of an international legal
convention created the space for the emergence of a new political subject .
Similarly, political activism around the so-called illegal immigrants in Paris, the sans-papiers, is the attempt to create an interstitial
distance whose political demand 'if one works in France, one is French' invokes the principle of equality at the basis of the French
One works within the state against the state in a political articulation
that attempts to open a space of opposition. Perhaps it is at this intensely
situational, indeed local level that the atomizing, expropriating force of
neo-liberal globalization is to be met, contested and resisted. That is,
resistance begins by occupying and controlling the terrain upon which one
stands, where one lives, works, acts and thinks. This needn't involve millions
of people. It needn't even involve thousands. It could involve just a few at
first. Resistance can be intimate and can begin in small affinity groups . The
art of politics consists in weaving such cells of resistance together into a
common front, a shared political subjectivity. What is going to allow for the
formation of such a political subjectivity the hegemonic glue, if you will is an appeal to
universality, whether the demand for political representation, equality of
treatment or whatever. It is the hope, indeed the wager, of this book that the ethical
demand described above the infinite responsibility that both constitutes
and divides my subjectivity might allow that hegemonic glue to set into
the compact, self-aware, fighting force that motivates the subject into the
political action spoken of in the epigraph to this chapter.
republic.
h-triv
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Agamben trivializes and decontextualizes the Holocaust
Marion 6 (Esther SUNY Brockport, The Nazi Genocide and the Writing of the
Holocaust Aporia: Ethics and Remnants of Auschwitz, in MLN, Volume 121, Number
4, 2006, https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mln/v121/121.4marion.html)
I find it disturbing that Agamben, citing Benjamin to criticize the commodification of the body, evokes in
the same breath automobile accidents, an advertisement for stockings, and the
image and memory of the Nazi genocide as points of access to "whatever being." While
I am not suggesting that he recuperates or glamorizes atrocity, which he claims not to do, appropriating Holocaust
victims and "daily [human] slaughter" to call for anonymous being turns genocide
to pulp. In the stockings ad, "neither an image of the divinity nor an animal form, the body now became something truly
whatever." Rather than seeking "the whatever body," or "a resemblance without archetypein other words, an Idea" in images of
extermination camps, perhaps Holocaust memory should "link together image and body" in historical and human terms. Perhaps
"the double chains of biological destiny and individual biography" of Auschwitz should be reconstructed rather than gladly
what life is worthy of being lived, he elaborates the "zone of indistinction" between zoe and bios, between bare life versus qualified
life, and human versus animal life.18 This question, as we have seen, is developed subsequently in Homo Sacer III, Remnants of
Auschwitz, in which, however, Agamben departs from a biopolitical historical frame to transform the human/non-human dichotomy
into a philosophically [End Page 1018] grounded question of subjectivity in the "ethical subject," the survivor, who bears witness to
The problem in this conception of self lies in the tension that arises from
the historical life to which this self is consigned and the use of the Holocaust in this
paradigm that disparages the real. This may be felt most acutely at the end of Agamben's text. He argues that
the inhuman.
"Levi's paradox" (a phrase Agamben coins) and in fact all Holocaust testimonies "articulate a possibility of speech solely through an
impossibility, and in this way, mark the taking place of a language as the event of a subjectivity" (164). To say that the survivor
bears witness to the Muselmann, the name for that which cannot be said in language, and "speaks only on the basis of an
impossibility of speaking," Agamben relies on the historical silence of this figure to articulate his structure. In Agamben's formulation
of "Levi's paradox," "I was a Muselmann" (165) implies a direct contradiction of Agamben's model of the absolute, silent witness.
Considering Agamben's reflections in The Coming Community and Potentialities, it is clear that the model of the self he is putting
forth is embodied in his reading of the Holocaust survivor who like Bartleby and the messianic Aher exists as potentiality revealing
actual Muselmnner who bear witness to their experiences adds weight to his argument, their testimony does not articulate "this
question that arises when Agamben speaks of the poetic self presses here: What status is left for the historical self in a subject that
Positing the Holocaust as an ultimate rupture denies it a vital place in memory and
history, leaving a space of erasure rather than inquiry . Deconstruction has been
criticized in this vein for its ahistorical tendencies, fueled by the de Man affair, and has even been labeled "in
effect, though certainly not in intention, the highbrow version of Holocaust revisionism ."21
Writing in defense of de Man's silence, Derrida underlines the antitotalitarian face of deconstruction: "There can still be, and in spite
of them, residual adherences to the discourse one is claiming to combat. And deconstruction is, in particular, the tireless analysis
writing of which actualizes linguistic and subjective problematics taken up by deconstruction. Stanley Corngold writes that de Man
"is a great philosopher of the inhuman condition. This is, as he tirelessly repeats, a condition in which the important relations are
necessarily inhuman. It is no individual poet but "poetic language" that engages "in its highest intent [. . .]."23 This brings to mind
Agamben's text, which is problematic, however, [End Page 1020] not for its concern with "the inhuman condition,"
but for its dehumanization of the Holocaust to reach its end. The disabling of representation by a
subject-position overwhelmed by the rupture of this event threatens to prevent rather than preserve memory. The other end of the
pendulum can be seen in the attempts of certain participants in the Historikerstreit to normalize and contextualize the Holocaust.24
The dilemma, then, is how to preserve the singularity and atrocity of the camps without totalizing understanding, that is, how to
frame empirical facts without closure. LaCapra proposes such an approach: Rather, objectivity could be seen as a difficult, never
fully achieved objective that was not even desirable in its imaginary total state and that in its justifiable, desirable forms (related to
accuracy, meticulous empirical research, and rigorous argumentation) had to be elaborated by working through transferential
relations, resistances, denials, and repressions. Also required were the explicit acknowledgement and the possible transformation of
subject-positions as one engaged in historical research and self-understanding.25 Saul Friedlnder calls for a dynamic historical
consciousness to negotiate the tension between unsayability and a master narrative, while maintaining the excess of this event, its
limitations, both the message of its voice and the presence of the unknowable speaking to the future, [End Page 1021] in an effort to
negotiate new critical discourses joining ethical communication and unspeakability. "Try to Look. Just Try and See."28 Perhaps the
new ethical terrain opened by Auschwitz lies in the very challenge offered to its potential cartographers: to listen and forge
responsive and responsible approaches to the ethical and human weight of this past rather than to surpass it or to surrender to an
linguistic abyss in a messianic schema silences the pleas of testimony, witnesses and history in the name of "whatever being."
Perhaps what remains of Auschwitz demands not a rejection of but a revised engagement with "the name of ethics" (13), rather than
"the name of the name": we must bear witness to disaster.
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Anti-semitism is no joke --- reject them
Gerstenfeld 8 (Dr. Manrfed Austrian-born Israeli author and former Chairman of
the Steering Committee of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, founded and
directed the Center's Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism program, Holocaust
Trivialization, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 4-9-8,
http://jcpa.org/article/holocaust-trivialization/)
Holocaust comparisons for their ideological purposes want to exaggerate the evil nature of a
phenomenon they condemn. With the Holocaust symbolizing absolute evil for many, they use it as an instrument for
Those abusing
their purposes. Holocaust trivialization manifests itself partly in the growing use of language concerning a large number of disparate
events that have no connection to genocide. Other trivializers operate out of commercial or artistic considerations. Unlike in the
case of most other distortions of the Holocaust, the trivializers usually do not target Jews. Holocaust distortion has been increasing
in recent years. It manifests itself in a great variety of manipulations of history.1 Among the best known are Holocaust denial,2
Holocaust depreciation, and Holocaust inversion3-the portraying of Israel, Israelis, and Jews as Nazis. Most of these distortions aim
at harming Jews or Israel. Holocaust trivialization is a tool for some ideologically or politically motivated activists to metaphorically
compare phenomena they oppose to the industrial-scale destruction of the Jews in World War II by Germans, Austrians, and their
allies. Examples include environmental problems, abortion, the slaughter of animals, the use of tobacco, and human rights abuses.
None of these bear any fundamental resemblance to the manmade genocide of the 1940s. Those who abuse Holocaust comparisons
for their ideological purposes wish to exaggerate the evil nature of a phenomenon they condemn. With the Holocaust symbolizing
absolute evil for many, they use it as an instrument for their purposes and thus abuse the centrality of the Holocaust discourse in
contemporary society. The perceived evil to which they compare the Holocaust, however, does not share its major characteristics.
These include the systematic defamation, exclusion, torturing, and destruction of specific people in a society. Another element is
that all belonging to this category are targeted.
of
Jews, by abusing the memory of the murdered victims as well. Holocaust trivialization also manifests itself
partly in the growing use of comparisons of disparate events to elements bearing no resemblance to the Holocaust. Many trivializers
operate out of commercial or artistic considerations; others are just insensitive. Distortions Overlap Several Holocaust
trivializing
comparisons to the Holocaust are rarely elaborated on. This manipulation differs in its mode of distorting from
Holocaust denial, in part because the trivializers do not target Jews and also because it rarely develops any detailed
description of the murder of six people, and the author called it a holocaust. So, I have no words anymore.5 The
arguments about the Holocaust. One hardly sees statements explaining what the defining elements of the Holocaust were and how
the phenomenon metaphorically compared to it has all or most of the same components. This characteristic of the manipulation is
due to the fact that the desired effect is achieved mainly by the abusive mention of the Holocaust. The manipulation is therefore
relatively easy to expose, by pointing out that crucial criminal components of the Holocaust are lacking in what is being compared to
it. A consideration of some examples of trivialization, and reactions to them, indicates both the manipulative character of this
distortion and how it can be deconstructed. The Environmental Holocaust Environmentalists are one group among which Holocaust
trivializers are found. They often regard global warming as the main contemporary threat to humanity. Ellen Goodman, a Boston
Globe columnist, wrote that it is no longer possible to deny global warming. She invoked the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, which claimed it was 90 percent certain that global warming was the result of human activity. From there she moved on: I
would like to say were at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Lets just say that global warming deniers are now on
a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.6 Well-known talk-show host
Dennis Prager responded by castigating Goodmans statement. He first noted that it reflected the fact that most people on the Left
see their ideological adversaries as bad people. On the other hand, those on the Right tend to view their adversaries as wrong,
perhaps even dangerous, but not usually as bad. It might be inconceivable to Goodman, Prager observed, that one could disagree
with global warming forecasts without evil motives. He further asserted that contemporary liberalism would tend to question the
moral authority of Judeo-Christian religions or of any secular conservative authority, but not of any other authority such as the
United Nations. Prager also pointed out that If questioning global warming is on a par with questioning the Holocaust, how bad can
questioning the Holocaust really be? He added that while liberal and left-wing organizations had agreed with Goodmans
statements, none had condemned her Holocaust comparison. Prager concluded that Goodmans assertion marked the beginning of
what is becoming one of the largest campaigns of vilification of decent people in history-the global condemnation ofanyone who
questions global warming.7 Many others abuse the Holocaust to promote environmental aims. Bob Burnett, who defines himself as
a writer, activist, and Quaker, claimed in an attack on a televangelist who had written about the dirty politics of the environmental
movement that It took less than ten years for Nazi anti-Semitism to produce the death of six million European Jews. How long will
it take for the effects of global climate change to result in similar loss of life?8 It is similarly easy to claim that many people in the
world die as a result of poor health, malnourishment, and inappropriate diets. Given todays societal mood we may well read one
day about the diet Holocaust or the hamburger Holocaust. Al Gore Comparing potential ecological disaster to the Holocaust is
not a new phenomenon. On 19 March 1989, the then senator from Tennessee, Al Gore, published an op-ed in the New York Times
titled An Ecological Kristallnacht. Listen. Gore called upon all humankind to heed the warning: the evidence is as clear as the
sounds of glass shattering in Berlin.9 In 2007 Gore, by then a Nobel Laureate and former vice-president, continued to use Holocaust
imagery for environmental purposes. As part of his advocacy, twice in December 2007, he criticized many world leaders for ignoring
the threat of climate change in the same way that former British prime minister Chamberlain and other world leaders had ignored
the dangers posed by Hitler. Gore voiced the same sentiments as almost two decades earlier: Once again world leaders waffle,
hoping the danger will dissipate. Canadian Green Party leader Elizabeth May justified Gores remarks, explaining: Its not a literal
comparison that says somehow climate change is like Hitler. Climate change is not like Hitler. Hitler is an individual who managed to
construct a political party and then, through democratic elections, a nation that was prepared to go along with genocide. This is not
like that. But the moral failure of those who stand by-thats the comparison. A representative of an umbrella organization for
Canadian Jewish groups responded that Mays statements supported positions that were obscene and absolutely unnecessary for
anyone, even Gore.10 Opponents of Environmental Measures Opponents of environmental measures sometimes also refer abusively
to the Holocaust. In 2004 Andrei Illarionov, an economic adviser to President Putin, recommended that Russia should not sign the
Kyoto Protocol, which he called a death pact that would strangle economic growth and economic activity in countries that accept
the protocols requirements. He likened the protocol to Auschwitz.11 Glenn Beck, a television and radio host and author, compared
Gores campaign against global warming to elements of the Holocaust, saying: Al Gores not going to be rounding up Jews and
exterminating them; it is the same tactic however. The goal is different. The goal is globalization. The goal is global carbon tax. The
goal is the United Nations running the world. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) denounced Becks remarks and said they were
part of a troubling epidemic on the airwaves, where comparisons to Hitler and the Holocaust are becoming all-too facile. The ADLs
One of these was Pope John Paul II who, in his 2005 book Memory and Identity, compared abortion to the Holocaust. He wrote that
both abortion and the murder of six million Jews were the result of humans under the guise of democracy usurping the law of
God.13 Then-Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, claimed at the launching of the Popes book that the Pope was not
equating abortion with the Holocaust.14 In another incident involving the Catholic Church, the Archbishop of Cologne in Germany,
Cardinal Joachim Meisner, provoked much unrest when he put women who had had an abortion in a row with mass murderers like
Hitler, Stalin and Herod. He compares abortion to the Holocaust and the abortion pill with Zyklon B, the gas used by the Nazis in the
extermination camps. Condemnation came even from groups that some may have expected to be supportive. The ecumenical
movement Initiative Kirche told the press, Meisner has completely lost his authority as a bishop and has publicly done a great
wrong to the Catholic Church and to dialogue between Jews and Christians. Paul Spiegel, the then president of the Central Council
of Jews in Germany, said the cardinal had insulted the millions of victims of the Holocaust. He added that The Catholic Church does
not understand or does not want to understand that there is an enormous difference between mass genocide and what women do
with their bodies. Spiegel also linked the Popes remarks to the earlier statements by Cardinal Meisner.15 Jim Hughes of the
International Right to Life Federation told LifeSiteNews.com, In todays relativistic times, it seems the only evil which still touches
people whose hearts have grown cold are the atrocities of Hitler. The comparison not only fits like a glove, but is necessary to bring
people out of their blissfully ignorant slumber.16 On many other occasions abortion and other phenomena have been compared to
genocide and mass murder, rather than specifically to the Holocaust. The Associated Press reported that Displays of bloody
next to pictures of the collapsing World Trade Center, a black lynching victim hanging from a tree and corpses at a
concentration camp were among the disturbing billboards at the University of New Hampshire put up by a national antiabortion group, the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform.17 These billboards liken the genocide of the Holocaust to
abortion and victims of 9/11 and racism.
fetuses
terror da links
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Biometrics are key to checkpoint security
Gray 8 (Myra Director G-3/5/7 Biometrics Task Force at the US Department of
Defense, Terrorism and New Biometrics Technologies, in Security Magazine, 11-18, http://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/79463-terrorism-and-new-biometricstechnologies-1)
Implementing biometrics-based technologies has increased in recent years and is
helping to protect the nation and multi-national enterprises by keeping people
and assets more secure. New, lightweight, multimodal devices help make distinguishing
between an insurgent and a civilian in a war environment easier . Two such technologies, a
laptop-based system deployed as the Biometric Automated Toolset (BAT), and the Handheld Interagency Identity Detection
Equipment (HIIDE), capture fingerprint, iris and facial data. The BAT collects this biometric data and stores it on a central server in a
secure network. Currently, there are over 1,000 active BATs in Iraq. The HIIDE, similar in size to a large camera, connects directly to
the BAT and matches inputs against a biometric watch list of up to 10,000 individuals. The HIIDE is a shock-resistant collection and
identification device. Able to capture fingerprint, iris and facial images, almost 7,000 of these devices have been deployed in Iraq
Identification System (ABIS). This collection and storage system is compatible with the system used by the FBI so that matches may
be made between the two databases.
action and analysis. Biometrics standards conformance testing of these tactical devices is conducted by the Biometrics
Task Force (BTF). The BTFs mission is to lead DoD activities to program, integrate and synchronize biometric technologies and
capabilities. The BTF also operates and maintains the DoDs authoritative biometric database to support the National Security
Strategy. By creating and sustaining a biometric database, DoD not only has records of some known threats, but can help identify
biometric equipment will help enhance effectiveness and efficiency of those technologies.
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Biometrics could have prevented 9/11, stopped Osama Bin
Laden and have stopped numerous criminals from getting
away
Gorman 11 (Christine reporter at Scientific American, How Biometrics Helped to
Identify the Master Terrorist, in Scientific American, 5-2-11,
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-biometrics-helped-to-identify-masterterrorist/)
When the U.S. military attacked Iraq in March 2003, it brought to bear the most advanced technology then available for identifying
potential terrorists by their physical features. The equipment measured all sorts of physical featuresfrom fingerprints to images of
the irisbut it was not particularly easy to use. The apparatus weighed a hefty 50 pounds and consisted of a hardened laptop
compare people's faces against the images of many known or suspected terrorists. Dubbed the HIIDE, for Handheld Interagency
Identity Detection Equipment, the instrument looks like an overgrown camera and weighs between 2 and 3 pounds. In addition,
soldiers took tissue samples for use in DNA analysis that later confirmed the master terrorist's identity with nearly 100 percent
research conference in 2008. Debolt led the development of the identity assessment tool that the military started using in Iraq. In
the aftermath of Sept. 11, the U.S. Defense Department and the National Institute of Standards and Technology poured millions of
dollars into various biometrics research programs. The second impetus to change was the incredible boost in computer processing
power of the 1990s: increased speed allowed the devices to access the databases that lie at the heart of biometric identification
systems and compare thousands of features in fractions of a second, providing useful answers just after an individual has been
detained or while a person is still in custody. Even some of the centuries-old standards have benefited from the enhanced computer
processing power. Fingerprinting was first proposed as a crime-fighting measure in the late 1800s and Paul Revere used dental
records to identify the body of a Revolutionary War hero killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill. By the late 1990s, the FBI had
Iris scans have been widely used in Afghanistan to streamline the entry of construction workers and other laborers into military
bases. Iris scans can also return usable images from corpses for up to 12 hours after death, Higgins says, depending on the
condition of the body. But Osama bin Laden is unlikely to have sat still for an iris scan while he was alive in order to provide a
comparison image. As for civilian use, iris scans are reliable enough that they have been used in some European airports for a
couple of years now to automate passport control for frequent fliers who are willing to register a grayscale image of the front of their
eyes with authorities.* Several British airports are now going one step further and testing facial recognition software that allows
travelers to skip the immigration lines and process themselves into the country. As facial recognition software gets better and
better, concerns over privacy for ordinary citizens have mounted. The best results occur when the software can compare high-
millions of people
already have such images of themselves on file in their driver's licenses . In 2009, the
FBI used facial recognition software to nab a suspect in a double -homicide who
they believed had fled from California to North Carolina . The authorities compared a 1991 booking
definition images taken in standardized settingsnot a frequent locale for a shadowy terrorist. But
photo of the suspect against the 30 million photos that the North Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles had on file. Twenty-eight
marx links
1nc
Fear of the state allows neoliberal economics to fill in
Colatrella 11 (Steven taught at Bard College and the New School, and has
served as Chair of the Political and Social Sciences Department at John Cabot
University in Rome, and as President of the Iowa Sociological Association, Nothing
Exceptional: Against Agamben, in Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies
Volume 9, Number 1, http://www.jceps.com/wp-content/uploads/PDFs/09-105.pdf)//BW
As a logical deconstruction of the power of the state in relation to citizens, as a coherent explanation, with empirical
evidence drawn from the histories of every Western nation state over the past century or so, Agambens work has
already become classic. Conferences are dedicated to its insights and works by others seek to extend his theories
to both new acts of aggrandizement by state powers and new members of society - Roma, or immigrants - who
might fit his description of what Hegel might have called the concrete universal of the human condition. This essay
intends to show, however, that Agambens approach to understanding both state power and
the condition of the disenfranchised - both extreme poles of political life as understood in the titles of the two books
Agamben is warning us about. After a brief discussion of Agambens theories of state of exception and of homo
the use of
traditional categories of Marxism and historical materialism will better enable us to
understand the modern state, and its relationship to the political and legal
dispossession and even physical destruction of human beings under its authority (or
sacer - of the sovereign power and of the legally dispossessed that it represses - I will show that
at least its power). Further, will attempt to show that only by analyzing modern history through the key categories
show that by following a now decades-long approach of assuming the autonomy of the political and by basing his
work on influences that stem from various traditions of seeing politics as autonomous, ranging from the liberal
and State of Exception The Sovereign wrote Nazi lawyer and political theorist Carl Schmitt, is he who decides on
power in any case was never really limited by these legal restraints, even if this sovereign for their own reasons
abided by such formal limits for a time. In this case Schmitts sovereign is Hobbes Leviathan on steroids, though
the line of ancestry is clear, since once sovereignty is given over by people in a state of Hobbesian nature (where a
war of all against all predominates and life is nasty, brutish and short) Hobbes Leviathan state power likewise has
not a product of law, for either Schmitt or for Hobbes, but of a state where there is not law. The difference is
important however. For Hobbes it is the lawless state - presumably a one-time affair at least ontologically if not
historically - that leads to the creation of law which is the product of the sovereign. For Schmitt, that power is
always in a position to set aside all law and create new law. But creating new law is by definition an exceptional
moment, one that is an exercise of power and that steps over the bounds of all previously existing (and by
implication illusory) legal limits. What is remarkable is how influential this approach to sovereignty has been on the
political left for some time now. Already in the 1980s Telos magazine devoted an entire issue to Carl Schmitt. Work
by postmodern Marxist Toni Negri has used Schmitts concept of constituent power - of that political moment
when a force exists able to constitute a new constitutional/social order outside of all previous legal or constitutional
structures, the moment in which new structures or institutions or arrangements can be created - as
a strategic
2nc
Agamben doesnt account for class, and has no explanatory
power
Colatrella 11 (Steven taught at Bard College and the New School, and has
served as Chair of the Political and Social Sciences Department at John Cabot
University in Rome, and as President of the Iowa Sociological Association, Nothing
Exceptional: Against Agamben, in Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies
Volume 9, Number 1, http://www.jceps.com/wp-content/uploads/PDFs/09-105.pdf)//BW
Missing in Agambens work - and by extension given his influences, in Arendt, Schmitt, Foucault and
Nietzsche and their varying approaches to the autonomy of the political - is any understanding of the
relationship between politics and economics, or of class forces in historical
outcomes, and any link between civil liberties and guarantees to and control over
livelihood. This failure leads to the great weakness of any analysis based on the autonomy of politics - its total
inability to explain why something is happening rather than to show us that it is. The failure, in other
words, to explain the timing of political and social changes, and therefore to explain
them in any way that is useful. Why are some people being reduced to homo sacer now? And why those
particular people? Why is there a state of exception being declared in this country but not that one, and why now
and not later, or why once but not now, or why potentially but not in reality? Why is a discourse of biopolitics, or of
changing methods of social discipline and control emerging in a given century instead of in another? If it is the
result of modernity or the Enlightenment, how do we explain these in turn? I believe that asking such questions in
has presented itself over the past few decades as a rich era of theoretical
innovation, leads us to see that there has instead been an impoverishment of
historical and theoretical imagination and explanatory power . Further, I believe that it can be
shown that the idea of the autonomy of politics is at the heart of this impoverishment ,
stemming from reliance on Nietzsche, Arendt, and worst of all Schmitt as theoretical influences. If
democracy and liberation lack appropriate theoreticians and theories it is our job to
produce these, not to go looking for the possibility of an intellectual detournement
of the categories of misanthropic, Nazi or even in the more benign case of Arendt
liberal elitist approaches to understanding the modern world. Ones boredom with the
what
relative superficiality or lack of sophistication of say, Rousseau, Condorcet, or even Jefferson, and ones desperation
to escape the straight-jacket of an orthodox Marxism or the stifling dialectic of Hegel does not excuse the damage
done when we come to disastrous conclusions through mistaken analysis of the most vital political processes.
Instead, we have a responsibility to provide the best explanation we can for why something is happening, in the
interests not only of better understanding it, always valuable for its own sake, but also to answer that second
question I pose - the one that goes beyond the merely academic or intellectual - what can we do about it? This
question, which moves us from theory to practical action in the world, shows us the further value of the first
question and the importance of answering it well. It is true that a bad explanation could still result by luck or
through our good political experience or common sense individually or collectively in an adequate response in
action. But a good explanation is at worst going to do us no harm in enhancing our own understanding of what we
are faced with and we ourselves are doing in response, but may in fact help us in formulating strategy together so
that we can maximize our effect and even turn the situation to our advantage. I have taken the time and space
here to go through what should be obvious to any political activist and certainly to anyone remotely familiar with
Marxist traditions of politics and theory because I think that a theory like Agambens and for that matter like much
of the recent work of Toni Negri and Michael Hardt, or some influential ideas of even a more widely admired thinker
to the first question I pose, and therefore to present a better explanation for the increasing political repression of
our times, I will rely on the classic Marxist categories of enclosure and expropriation, or primitive accumulation. To
the
concept of class struggle and on a historical overview of the state and of
democratization. I think that understanding the accomplishments and the
limitations of democratization up to now, and the basis of democratization in class
struggle by workers, is the surest basis for seeing where to begin in best
understanding and addressing the root causes, the material bases of the political
repression of civil liberties that threatens us and in rolling it back .
address - I wont pretend I can answer it here - but at least to address the second question, I rely on
the world that is counter-productive: it takes work to describe humanity reduced to bare life and then fail to see it
South. Political
deracination is clearly related to economic deracination, or to use the, in my view
clearer Marxian terminology, expropriation and enclosure, or proletarianization. In
what way is Agambens homo sacer any different than the rightless and free
proletarian that has always existed under capitalism ? Hasnt it always been allowable to live
all around one in the form of the proletarian majority of every society, North and
and let die without remorse those unable to make a living, keep a job or income, provide for themselves or family
members, keep up rent or mortgage payments, pay for a meal? Shouldnt we see this as violence, as Zizek in his
knows well and does examine in detail, Europe and the US, and the Jewish Holocaust and Nazi regime, are flawed as
well? Despite her limitations, wasnt Arendt closer to the truth with her view that the genocide of Jews and Roma in
Nazi Europe, or even the slaughter of the peasantry under forced collectivization and the genocide in the Ukraine
under Stalin, that is, the results of the process she identifies, rightly or wrongly, as totalitarianism, had their roots in
the colonialist, imperialist and racist experiences? (Although Arendts analysis was likewise crippled by her
insistence on the autonomy of the political, and by her semi-apologetic discussion of imperialist racism). In ignoring
exception and homo sacer. The most important of these moments in the
expropriation of the peasantry of Europe was the witch trials of the 16th and 17th
centuries, as Silvia Federici has shown in her book Caliban and the Witch. Federici indeed shows the limitations
of Foucaults own analysis of the growth of control of the body by state and medical authorities, of biopolitics .
Foucault ignores the torturing to death of hundreds of thousands of women across Europe over several centuries,
and the role these horrors played in the construction of gender inequalities under capitalism and in dividing the
medieval and early modern proletariat. These divisions then made it possible to break up the village community
that had been the basis of defending common lands and customary rights and of advancing both against feudal
power. Foucault thus provides a faulty and misleading history of discipline, punishment and of the body. In ignoring
begun the process of showing us the implications in constitutional law and practice of political and juridical
His failure is that he does not connect this process to either economic
expropriation, as Peter Linebaugh does in his Magna Carta Manifesto, or to the imposition of neoliberal
expropriation.
economic policies as does Naomi Klein in Shock Doctrine . Legal rights need an economic basis as Linebaugh shows
Isabella Clough-Marinaro has , that the camps for Roma in Italy today are classic examples of homo sacer, right
neednt we try to
understand what these new horrors have to do with the rolling back of the welfare
down to publicly exposed showers on concrete enclosures surrounded by barbed wire,
state in Europe?; with the attack on employment and wages ?; with the intensified
exploitation that includes that of the undocumented immigrants and the public discourses demonizing them?; with
the increased law and order regimes, campaigns against crime that criminalize the Roma, the undocumented and
other minorities that have allowed the Italian military to be deployed in the streets to keep an eye on the
population; with the creation of such scapegoats to divide the working class exactly at such a time of attack on
hard-won social gains? Agamben, as Clough-Marinaro demonstrates, is indispensable to help analyze the camps in
the first place, but I would argue that he is of nearly no help at all to help us strategize about what to do about
them, because he doesnt understand what any of it has to do with class relations, relations of expropriation,
exploitation and class struggle against these. And that means he cant understand what the latter has already
accomplished and what it has yet to accomplish. To understand this, we need to understand the welfare state itself
issues, which I address elsewhere , a brief summary of my argument on democracy is useful to make clear my
differences with Agambens approach. Modern democracy is part of what Polanyi calls the double movement of
expropriation and the establishment of the self-regulating market and the efforts by society to defend itself from
Modern democracy is born from the English and French Revolutions , from
the anti-slavery movement in the US, and from the labor and socialist movements in
Europe . Mass democratic movements that have furthered this process have been
fought either to retard the separation of the people from the land and access to
means of production and subsistence, or to provide new guarantees of meeting
these needs and providing livelihood to those already expropriated and now
exploited. Put differently, the commitment of ordinary people to democracy comes from their need and desire to
this process.
use it to do something; democracy is an instrument of popular classes to defend and extend their interests. If, as I
have argued, citing various authors work to the point, the protection of individual rights, avoidance of becoming
homo sacer, and prevention of the state of exception required material foundations, those material foundations
needs of societys members, with all the contradictions and flaws that studies of the
welfare state have demonstrated but with all its benefits too: However, the more
enlightened part of the working class fully understands that the future of its class, and,
therefore, of mankind, altogether depends upon the formation of the rising working
generation. They know that, before everything else, the children and juvenile workers must be saved from the
crushing effects of the present system. This can only be effected by converting social reason into social force, and,
under given circumstances, there exists no other method of doing so, than through general laws, enforced by the
individual efforts .
case
no impact
The jargon of exception is depoliticizing and ignores social
reforms
Huysmans 8 (Jef Professor of Security Studies at the Open University, The Jargon
of ExceptionOn Schmitt, Agamben and the Absence of Political Society, in
International Political Sociology, Volume 2, Issue 2, June 2008,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-5687.2008.00042.x/abstract)
Agambens conception of the exception-being-therule for reconfiguring conceptions of politics in a biopolitical age comes at a serious cost, though. It inserts
both a diagnosis of our time and a conceptual apparatus for rethinking politics that
has no place for the category that has been central to the modern democratic tradition:
the political significance of people as a multiplicity of social relations that condition politics and that are
Deploying the jargon of exception and especially
constituted by the mediations of various objectified forms and processes (for example, scientific knowledge, technologies, property
on Agamben to highlight the importance of bodily strategies of resistance. One of the key examples is individual refugees protesting
against their detention by sewing up lips and eyes. They exemplify how individualized naked life resists by deploying their bodily,
biological condition against sovereign biopolitical powers (for example, Edkins and Pin-Fat 2004:1517). I follow Adorno and others,
such a conception of bodily, naked life is not political. It ignores how this life
only exists and takes on political form through various socioeconomic, technological,
scientific, legal, and other mediations. For example, the images of the sewed-up eye- lids and lips of the individualized
however, that
and biologized refugees have no political significance without being mediated by public media, intense mobilizations on refugee and
asylum questions, contestations of human rights in the courts, etc. It is these mediations that are the object and structuring devices
Reading the politics of exception as the central lens onto modern con- ceptions
politics, as both Agamben and Schmitt do, erases from the concept of politics a rich and constitutive
history of sociopolitical struggles, traditions of thought linked to this history, and key sites and
temporalities of politics as well as the central processes through which
individualized bodily resistances gain their sociopolitical significance.
of political struggle.
of
continuities
between early twentieth-century biopolitical discourse and the practices of the
welfare state in our own time are unmistakable . Both are instances of the disciplinary society and of
expertise) that pursues these same aims in often even more effective and inescapable ways.89 In short, the
biopolitical, regulatory, social-engineering modernity, and they share that genealogy with more authoritarian states, including the
state is not only formally but also substantively quite different from totalitarianism.
Above all, again, it has nowhere developed the fateful, radicalizing dynamic that
characterized National Socialism (or for that matter Stalinism), the psychotic logic that leads from
economistic population management to mass murder. Again, there is always the potential for such a discursive regime to generate
coercive policies. In those cases in which the regime of rights does not successfully produce health, such a system can and
limitations imposed by political context and the slow pace of discursive change, I think this is the unmistakable message of the
really very impressive waves of legislative and welfare reforms in the 1920s or the 1970s in Germany.90 Of course it is not yet clear
whether this is an irreversible dynamic of such systems. Nevertheless, such regimes are characterized by sufficient degrees of
autonomy (and of the potential for its expansion) for sufficient numbers of people that I think it becomes useful to conceive of them
as productive of a strategic configuration of power relations that might fruitfully be analyzed as a condition of liberty, just as much
subjectivity. And discourse is, as Foucault argued, tactically polyvalent. Discursive elements (like the various elements of
biopolitics) can be combined in different ways to form parts of quite different strategies (like totalitarianism or the democratic
welfare state); they cannot be assigned to one place in a structure, but rather circulate. The varying possible constellations of power
in modern societies create multiple modernities, modern societies with quite radically differing potentials.91
present-day
European societies have abolished capital punishment. In them, there are no longer exceptions. It
there neither has been nor can be a society that is entirely bio-political. Nevertheless, the fact is that
is the very right to kill that has been called into question. However, it is not called into question because of enlightened moral
present-day welfare society and, instead of homo sacer, the paradigmatic figure of the bio-political society
can be seen, for example, in the middle-class Swedish social-democrat. Although this figure is an object and a product of the
huge bio-political machinery, it does not mean that he is permitted to kill without committing homicide. Actually, the fact that he
eventually dies, seems to be his greatest crime against the machinery. (In bio-political societies, death is not only something
to be hidden away, but, also, as Foucault stresses, the most shameful thing of all.114) Therefore, he is not exposed to an
the bio-political
machinery does not want to threaten him, but to encourage him, with all its material
spiritual capacities, to live healthily, to live long and to live happily even when, in
biological terms, he should have been dead long ago.115 This is because bio-power is not bloody
power over bare life for its own sake but pure power over all life for the sake of
the living. It is not power but the living, the condition of all life individual as well as collective
that is the measure of the success of bio-power .
unconditional threat of death, but rather to an unconditional retreat of all dying. In fact,
law: the state of exception. Our legal culture is in radical decline, because we have not come up with an adequate theory of the
state of exception. We have been incapable of addressing the two forces at work: law and life. We have not been able to create an
open space where we can play with the elements and create new meaning of life and law. These accusations do not hold .
In
earlier reviews it has been correctly pointed out that lawyers are not silent and that
especially in court lawyers have raised their voice, which Agamben totally omits in
his thesis. Reference to those excellent reviews should suffice, if they would not have conceded already too much to
Agambens thesis.10 These misrepresentations (or outright omissions) of what lawyers are doing are not harmless or innocent
omissions. They constitute a dangerous move away from a contextual understanding of law as practice of practical reasoning.
Instead Agamben moves us to a kind of ontological and even metaphysical notion of law. To appreciate my concern one may simply
ask one question: what is left in concrete and practical terms -of the law if we adopt Agambens thesis? What are lawyers doing
when Agamben will have it his way?
this is clearly what was going on with the Bush government.12 By giving too much credit to the discourse of these governments and
taking this discourse as his starting point, there is no concern for him to deal with. The simple fact that violence is used could not
concern him as such. It may only worry him if there is a normative standard according to which this violence is wrong, unjust
illegitimate, or illegal. In other words,
From
the justices of US Supreme Court and professional human rights defence lawyers,13
law clinic students14, to Pentagon officials, and former military defence lawyers.15
The lawyers are equally talkative when it comes to theorising the state of exception .
detainees: lawyers of all ranks, affiliation and function have been fighting the violations of international and domestic law.
As Kanwar nicely shows, constitutionalist produced a great deal of legal writing on the issue, they may not have reached any
consensus on these issues, but that is not the same as remaining silent16 In short, as long as the legal practice can assert that
violations of law are taking place, the law has normative force. In other words, Agambens philosophical concern seems to vanish
and his first accusation has been proven false. VI.3 The Law Is Being Applied A gamben
may object to my
previous points that all those lawyers that are raising their voice are only referring
to a law that is formally in force but not applied : force-oflaw. Again, he is wrong from an empirical
perspective. The Supreme Court cases cited earlier show that gradually but progressively the Guantanamo practices are
invalidated.17 But let us, for arguments sake, concede that gross violations are taking place with impunity to the effect that the law
is actually not-applied. This empirical claim raises important methodological and normative issues. What is the level of compliance
needed for a law to be qualified as applied? What do we measure: the quantity or the quality of the compliance? Or do we only
account for even the most minimal features of a phenomenon he seeks to criticise, even revolutionise. Let me briefly illustrate how
ones definition of the functions of law matters to determining laws effectiveness.18 If the focus is on guiding behaviour, then
failure to comply with the law will sooner amount to its ineffectiveness. By contrast, if the function of the law is more a matter of
restorative justice then violations do not really affect its effectiveness. What matters is whether sooner or later the norms are ex
post enforced on the violators. Of course, law is more complex and may have a variety of functions. But this goes just to show that
one should distinguish between different branches of law, because often the functions change accordingly. Also, we must consider
the experience of the law with applying particular norms. For example, some human rights are quite old while others very recent.
One cannot expect the new right to be as effective as the older one.19 VI.4 Law Cannot Be Understood through a Paradigm and
Genealogical Inquiry Maybe I have overstated my fears for Agambens work. By the mere fact of using the instrument of the
paradigm and the method of genealogical inquiry he gives up any pretension of offering us a far reaching insight into the law.20 So
he is harmless after all. But just to be sure let me briefly indicate why Agambens methodology can tell us so little about the law
his enterprise is not at all sociological he has no regard for the actual
practice and contexts in which certain legal concepts were used. As a result he
cannot actually say whether a certain legal arrangement was actually seriously
practiced at all, let alone found relevant. For a genealogy this does not pose any problem. This also explains
(qua law). First, since
why Agamben can bring to the stage without any embarrassment extremely obscure legal arrangements such as the iustitium in
Similarly, the disregard for practice explains why he can omit one of the greatest practices of modern legal systems: judicial review.
The same
happens with all the authorities that do not fit Agambens paradigm. Rather than
questioning his paradigm he rejects the authority. 21 However, the grounds for the rejections are unclear
The reason is simple: because social facts do not matter only the aspects are withhold that fit the paradigm.
or rather absent. Often he cannot do better than etymology. In any event, the rejections cannot be based on a more plausible,
complex and contextualised understanding of the particular practice in which the legal concept was used. For practice does not
traced back to the state of exception. And since the law is defined as the state of exception and social facts are not to be accounted
the straw man of an outdated legal formalism, as if lawyers still believed that the application of the norm could be derived
exclusively from the norm. Hardly any legal positivist will hold this view. Of course there is a decision in both law making and law
applying. Big deal! You do not need Schmitt anymore to make this point. And you certainly need not jump from the decision to an
omnipresence of the state of exception.22 What matters is to see that even -or precisely -the decision is must be subjected to legal
constraints. The second straw man is a law confined to a simplistic struggle between law and life. Obviously, when presented with
such an arid and binary view of law, we need metaphysical constructs such as pure law and open space of human praxis. Instead,
if we put aside this straw man, and abandon a foundationalist and essentialist view of law, a myriad of actual legal concepts
surfaces.23 And each of these concepts can create constraints for governmental legal actions. Of course ,
none of these
concepts can rule out governments abusing the law and acting in bad faith. But
they make it difficult for them. And today our current legal practices can actually
hold the individual officials accountable.24 For sure, this takes time. But the law must hesitate and take its
time, for the law needs to make a multitude of connections. In fact, without the necessary hesitations the law may even become
suspect of coinciding with self-evidence and common sense.25
however engendered in the first place by his understanding of law as a mystic, monolithic, unilaterally productive,
and ahistorical entity. As
the legal field, paradoxes arise as a result of treating law as an object rather than a practice that is performed.
Behind the fear of law that Agamben shows when he says that an unprecedented biopolitical catastrophe is
awaiting us if we do not break with the current politico-legal rationality, is a representation of law as an object as
a machine standing outside history and affecting the course of events. Foucault has argued that if the state is
abstracted and hypostatized as a cold-blooded monster or the instrument of class repression it appears to be the
driving force behind all sorts of effects, which leads to the overvaluation of the state-problem and causes
inflationary effects such as statophobia. He reminds us that the state is nothing more than a flexible bundle of
juxtaposed practices (Foucault 2006, 112115). Similarly, law is not all too powerful or all too powerless; it is a
protean combination of law-producing and reproducing practices and does not have an existence outside of that.
Agambens way of treating law as a point of departure rather than as a the result of
complicated social processes and as the origin of historical power relations rather
than their effects is somewhat ironic since the crux of his argument seems to be
that law does not have an independent life. His point, after all, is that the hold that law has over life
can be broken and what is ultimately at stake in the state of exception, in legal production and decision-making and
in biopolitical matters, is extrajudicial (cf. Agamben 2005, 11, 8788). 41 Another example of such
he cannot see that bio-power can be exercised in ways radically different from those
of the Nazi-regime. It is not wholly accidental that the biopolitical decisions of market actors scenting
investment opportunities and those of us who quit smoking because we are acting in a biopolitically responsible
persevere through the foreclosure of other possibilities. Some contemporary political theorists concerned with injustice and the lack
of democracy also emphasize contingency, excess, and potentiality over determination, finitude, and acts.49 These theorists
1970s per mits us to see how neither justice nor democracy is served by excessive eco nomic duress or violence. Not only are these
contingencies unjust, but also their incapacitating effects prevent democratic practices of government where the latter necessarily
or democracy based on the wish to rid ourselves of the state once and for all are like George W. Bush claiming to be an
in the
here and now, there are urgent claims that demand finite acts that by definition will
be both divisive and less than what a situation demands .52 In the end, the state
remains. Let us defend this state of due process and equal protection against its ruinous
other.
environmentalist because he has proposed converting all of our cars so that they will run on hydrogen.5" Meanwhile,