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| Elevating the Political to Code-Red |
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Brad Evans
Brad Evans is currently completing his doctrate at the University of Leeds (funded by the E.S.R.C.). His research is focused upon the geneology of identity based networked forms of resistance. | |
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In order for us to begin to understand what are the actual and the possible future implications of the continued re-working of the Global War on Terror’s security framework, then we need to look no further than two less than eloquent statements presented by George W. Bush. The first that was given during his 2000 election campaign read, ‘it was a dangerous world and we knew exactly who ‘they’ were. It was us versus them and we knew exactly who ‘them’ was. Today we’re not so sure who the ‘they’ are, but we know they’re there’. And the second that was presented during his 2004 campaign simply stated that ‘The War on Terror is a War into the Future’. Whilst these seemingly simplistic and ambiguous statements could be read as yet another failed attempt by Bush to master the English language, I would like us to consider an alternative reading. Specifically, I want to put forward the suggestion that they also reveal the more pervasive and sophisticated nature of power, and the changing nature of political domination in today’s inter-connected world. If we refer more to what is being implied
rather than merely stated as matter of fact, then the not knowing of whom the ‘they’ are in Bush’s first statement is the fundamental point. The ‘they’ are nowhere and yet everywhere, potentially nobody and yet potentially everybody. ‘They’ in fact could represent all the political alternatives. Those subaltern ‘networked’ designs which can appear from within the social body without any prior warning. As such it is these alternatives in their actual or future/virtual form that can be presented as the enemies in a permanent war into the future. Where such enemies need to be securitised against and eliminated on the basis of ‘what if?’
Therefore within this language of security and fear there is clearly the possibility for a movement to at least connect all the political alternatives whether violent or otherwise Quite simply, within these two statements
alone we find that the language of global security has armed itself with a self-referential framework through which all alternative politics can become increasingly blurred into a global zone of in-distinction. Where as I will now illustrate, it is in this zone of in-distinction that all our anomalous political capacities, those abilities and potentialities we all possess to deviate from what is deemed to be standard, normal or expected that we are all possibly (depending upon our politics) becoming the object of de-legitimation and indeed elimination.
The Affects of Security
In a short article titled ‘Security and Terror’ that was published within days of the September 11th attacks, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben observed that ‘security’ is now becoming ‘the sole criterium of political legitimation’ to the point that it is actually resulting in a ‘gradual neutralisation of politics’. Such concerns relating the future of the political to the changing nature of security have also been voiced in a complimentary fashion by Bulent Diken and Carsten Laustsen. They suggest that the current tendency ‘to reduce all politics to security’ effectively transforms security into ‘a new religion’, where the spoken gospel can in some instances remove the eschatological truth and yet retain the absolute.These highly provocative and yet politically important statements clearly warrant our attention. For what is actually being suggested is that we should challenge one of the foundation stones of Western political thought.That is to move out of the realm of Thomas Hobbes that seeks to attribute an exclusively positive value to security in its endless quest to keep the barbaric hordes at bay, and wake up to what security actually implies.
This implication-based model for assessment calls for us to recognise that security technologies actually bring about affects. Through which systems of governance and domination can not only trace back to their
very origins, but which fully rely upon and can further manipulate the abstract calls ‘to be secure’ or ‘to be more secure’ to construct tyrannical systems of power that attempt to close down the alternative possibilities for life. From this standpoint, in its true nature the Leviathan should not be considered to be the
eye of the protective watch but the manipulative orchestrative machine of power. This is clearly what Michel Foucault had in mind when he commented that ‘right must, I think, be viewed not in terms of a legitimacy that has to be established, but in terms of the procedures of subjugation it implements.’
If we accept that security is one if not the main technology for establishing, maintaining and re-producing systems of power then we are clearly faced with some uneasy lines of questioning. At the very least, is it not time that we face up to a re-conceptualisation of security? Should we not open ourselves to an understanding that not only recognises its affective production, maintenance or reaffirmation of positions of domination and subordination, but equally recognises that since the language of security has now managed to consolidate its position to become the unquestionable given and the unchallengeable answer from which
technologies of global governance derive their modifications and solutions that we are necessarily facing the death of the political?
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