Atrocity Exhibition. Brad Evans
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this, however, is what actually lies behind: namely, the realization that societies of control are informed by a fundamental change in the biopolitical account of life, which, although affording life great potentiality, presents it in an altogether more dangerous light. This is what I would term the “liberal paradox of potentiality” — revealing contemporary liberalism’s irresolvable biopolitical aporia. On the one hand, the body liberated from the former disciplinary regimes is a body whose capacity to be free is assumed to increase exponentially — not implying that every situation presents a certain degree of freedom, or, for that matter, that one can simply “be free,” but that freedom is something which needs to be continually produced. And yet it is precisely because a body is now endowed with adaptive and emergent qualities — capable of becoming other than what was once epistemologically certain — that a life sets off more alarms. After all, who knows what a body is now capable of doing? Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza thus seems rather prophetic. For what a body is capable of becoming is the war cry heeded by contemporary security practitioners, which is reflected in recent developments in counter-terrorism. A marked shift is now clearly taking place in this field, which is moving us away from the traditional actions-based (punish after the event) or intentions-based (punish if intentions can be established) approaches, tending instead towards a more pervasive capabilities assessment (punish if one can establish the capability to strike).
MICHAEL HARDT: I find it interesting how the decline of the division between inside and outside does not undermine liberal rationality, as you say, from the perspectives or in the fields of international relations and security studies, although it does undermine the logic of a variety of liberal and radical democratic projects in the field of political theory. It seems to me that the collapse of a meaningful distinction between inside and outside is inimical to liberal democracy — or radical democracy — for these authors. For the critique and/or redemption of liberal democracy in political theorists such as William Connolly and Wendy Brown, a discrete and bounded space is required for the effectiveness of liberal rights, formal equality, freedoms, and representation. Ernesto Laclau’s notion of the people, Chantal Mouffe’s concept of hegemony, and Etienne Balibar’s idea of citizenship (even in a supranational context such as Europe) all similarly require a delimited sovereign space and a specific population. The focus in all these cases, it seems to me, is not on the outside or the conflict across the inside/outside border, but rather on the circumscribed nature of the inside. The people to whom these notions of liberal or radical democracy apply must be determinate and limited. That is not to say, I should repeat, that the projects of these political theorists require the definition of an enemy or focus on mechanisms of exclusion, but rather that they rely on a definite conception of the “inside,” that is, a coherent social body (such as a people) and a delimited sovereign space (whether national or not).
Perhaps this disjunction regarding the status of liberalism between International Relations and Political Theory is due, in part, to disciplinary differences that make it difficult to communicate between those fields. Perhaps it is due also to the ambiguous topological metaphor of inside and outside, which might be doing too much work here and thus leading to confusion. In addition, some difficulty certainly arises from the different meanings attributed to the term “liberalism.” We already have the problem of a primarily economic conception of liberalism (more prevalent in Europe) that refers to the freedoms of trade and markets, and a primarily political conception (more prevalent in North America) that emphasizes rights, the rule of law, constitutional freedom, and so forth. In your work, however, as well as that of Dillon and Reid, and perhaps more generally in the field of International Relations, there seems to me a somewhat distinct idea of liberalism, which is certainly based on juridical notions of the international rule of law but also highlights humanitarianism and the preservation of life as grounding principles. This is perhaps why the discourse of liberalism in International Relations moves so easily into questions of biopower — and also why the division between inside and outside is not necessary as a ground here. Tracing the meaning of liberalism across these disciplinary fields to separate the terminological differences from the differences in argument can certainly help clarify the question.
More interesting, though, is the possibility that the disjunction I’m highlighting is not merely explained by metaphorical ambiguities and terminological differences but really points to a conceptual and political conflict, which is revealed by looking at the issue and phenomena from different disciplinary perspectives. In other words, perhaps if political theorists were to adopt the disciplinary framework of International Relations scholars in this case, they would be forced to question their grounding in a coherent “inside,” that is, a determinate population and a circumscribed space of sovereignty, for liberal or radical democratic projects. In turn, such an exchange might force International Relations scholars to think more critically about what kind of democratic projects are possible in a context in which the division between inside and outside has declined.
BRAD EVANS: Agreed. There is a need for much greater cross-fertilization of ideas across the disciplines not only to permit more sophisticated meaningful critiques but also to have a more fruitful search for common political alternatives. To begin this process (with the intention of outliving it), I would suggest that we need to be more definitive about “What is liberalism?”. While it could be argued that the “many liberalisms” we can speak of show the richness of the tradition, one can speak the language of freedom and give juridical pronouncements without ever acknowledging the liberal recourse to war and violence. To my mind, the only way these various disciplines can be brought together is to insist upon an inclusive understanding of liberalism that factors in both its political and economic dimensions. How else could we assess whether the ideal matches reality? Such a “political economy” perspective will be resisted in many quarters, especially since it implies a need to show how the tremendous political power and moral suasion (that liberalism wields on a planetary scale) rests upon the power of economy. What is more, if we take a political economy perspective, liberal rationality is revealed as primarily driven by biopolitical imperatives, which, in turn, force us to acknowledge that notions of sovereignty/law are merely one generative principle of liberal formation. We can simultaneously appreciate that the juridical/emancipation story, with its definitive sense of grounding, assumes secondary importance behind the biopolitical task of making life live in productively compliant ways.
Looking at this from a global perspective, it could then be argued that the “nomos as camp” hypothesis, with its impending “states of exception,” makes no conceptual sense, especially given the collapse of those neat demarcations that once permitted the Schmittean decision. Foregrounding instead the internal problem of emergence — with emergence here associated with the propagation of all types of circulations — liberalism replaces the state of exception paradigm with an internal state of unending emergency, capable of leaving life “bare” within the remit of law. Not, then, the camp as nomos, which even some liberals have been glad to announce, but a nomos of circulation.
If we accept this new biopolitical security architecture, then it inevitably follows that the sovereignty over life becomes purely contingent. For not only are territorial integrities irrelevant when the political destinies of life are at stake, but, given the highly complex and adaptive strategic situation, there can be no universal value systems or grand blueprints to follow. This is especially acute in zones of instability, when not only is life subject to the forces of biopolitical experimentation, but the liberal commitment to democratic regimes and political rights becomes subject to contingent factors as well. There have been, for example, many occasions when the most sacred of rights (that to life) has been cast aside for the most speculative utilitarian calculations. What once was the surest litmus test of one’s democratic credentials — election victories — has in recent times had liberals scrambling for new methods of de-legitimation. My personal favorite here is the story of the “democratic coup.”
A logical corollary of this is the mixture of the strategic fields you mention. It is no coincidence today to find renewed priority being afforded to the insurgent. The RAND Corporation, for instance, has, for some time now, been calling for a more comprehensive and nuanced strategic paradigm that incorporates counterinsurgency into the wider remit of the Global War on Terror. I am reminded of a wonderful observation Foucault makes in a few incisive pages of Society Must Be Defended in which he identifies the three key figures that make up the modern condition: