Atrocity Exhibition. Brad Evans
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he argues, are a function of sovereign power. Existing beyond the constitutional pale, although sometimes penetrating with purely destructive intent, they represent those lives that show no respect for the constitutional order and, hence, have and should be afforded no moral or political value. Savages, on the other hand, are a function of biopolitical power; open to remedy and demanding engagement, they represent those lives which are capable of being redeemed. No great conceptual leap of imagination is required here to draw out meaningful connections between barbarians/terrorists and savages/insurgents. Indeed, in the theaters of war today, one can write of that all-too-familiar historical tendency of waging war by getting savages to fight barbarians in order to prove their civilizing credentials. Even here, however, the lines in the sand have been blurred. Terrorists no longer occupy a place of exteriority to the political realm; they are fully included within the biopolitical order. What is more, the ability to set out clear parameters between the terrorist and the insurgent has proved rather elusive. This is compounded even further by a realization that terrorists are no longer simply intent upon wanton destruction but have shown a willingness to actually cross over to become insurgents, posing a much wider social problem. This approach is clearly evidenced in the recent United Kingdom CONTEST II National Security Strategy (2009). What is particularly striking about this document is the style in which these threats are presented. Terrorists are now presented in a manner which is biopolitically fitting: like some cancerous cell, not only are they seen to be capable of damaging a vital organ within the body politic, but they also now hold the potential to infect the wider bodily terrain. The significance of this sovereign/biopolitical merger can be read in two ways. First, through this coming together, it is possible to detect a certain reprioritization of affairs in which the once familiar problem of the sovereign encounter can now be dealt with biopolitically. And second, given that the biopolitical is now tainted by the specter of terror, then the biopolitical becomes truly moralized in that the war to redeem savages is equally a war to expel evil.
MICHAEL HARDT: I find intriguing and very productive your translation of barbarian to terrorist and savage to insurgent, along with the correlate that, from the standpoint of the sovereign, the latter couple has the potential to be civilized or redeemed whereas the formal couple does not. It strikes me that what is at play here, in part, are two relations to the body. In the first years of the new millennium, at the inception of the “War on Terror,” I recognized in much of US military theorizing a fascinating doubling and inversion regarding the body of the terrorist and the body of the US soldier. On the one side stood the horrifying, barbaric figure of the terrorist, defined by not only its power to destroy others but also its acceptance of corporeal self-destruction, characterized paradigmatically by the absolute negation of the body in the act of suicide bombing. On the other side stood the body of the US soldier that, it was thought, could be kept at a safe distance from all danger by technological innovations and new military strategies associated with the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). Precise missiles, drone airplanes, and other devices could aid a military strategy aimed at no soldiers lost — at least, no US soldiers. So, I was interested in the way that these two figures — the barbaric body guaranteed destruction and the civilized body guaranteed preservation — arose at roughly the same time and seemed to be bound together in dialectical negation.
You are right that the insurgent body occupies an entirely different position. It does not threaten self-destruction or corporeal annihilation. The insurgent must be transformed through the mechanisms of biopower just as the savage must be redeemed and civilized. It is interesting, in fact, that at the same time (in the military and security discourses) there has been a shift from the barbaric terrorist to the savage insurgent, as you say, there has been a parallel move away from the dreams of bodiless military actions and the strategic principles of the RMA. Anti-insurgency biopower is aimed at the transformable body. This gives us another level, I suppose, to the relation between war, biopower, and liberalism that you were insisting on earlier.
BRAD EVANS: Exploring the relations you identify between war, biopower, and the transformable body is one of the most important critical tasks we face today, especially since these relations force us to directly confront the legitimacy of liberal interventionism. Military interventions can, of course, be rather easily assigned imperial ascriptions. The scene becomes more complicated, though, when we encounter humanitarian interventions, which tend to be presented in an altogether more benevolent light. And yet, if the history of civilizing missions teaches us anything, then surely war is taking place there, too, albeit on different terms. We can see this reflected today in the way violence is understood. Barbarian violence is always subject to the neat them/us, outside/inside, evil/good, unreasonable/reasonable marks of absolute differentiation. Theirs is a violence that by its very nature is always unjust. Savage violence, in contrast, is seen to be an internal problem that is subject to a progressive/regressive imaginary. It is the product of local conditions of underdevelopment. Hence, unlike barbarian violence, which offers no possibility to remedy the cause (aside from outright elimination), savage violence is marked out by modes of relative differentiation, in which the source of the problem can be identified and, with enough resource allocation, the causes of conflict alleviated. Clearly, each of these different problematizations has its own unique relationship to power. For instance, given that resistance/insurgent violence is the surest indicator of a local population’s capacities for their own (un)making, then it necessarily follows that more liberal engagement is required. What is needed is the ability to turn regressive violent economies into more productive and profitable local conditions of possibility. That people may be resisting liberal forms of biopower and its “wars by other means” (the “other” having a figurative as well as strategic use) is never entertained.
As you mentioned, something different is taking place here than with the RMA’s terms of engagement. Displacing the full spectrum spatial doctrine, which sought to dominate land, sea, air, and space, primacy now tends towards a life-centric full spectral doctrine which aims to capture the more complex terrain of hearts, minds, bodies, and souls (the latter referring not only to what a body is, but what a body is capable of becoming). Invariably, in order for such a war to be successful, it is necessary, as Colonel Rupert Smith argues in his book The Utility of Force, to wage “war among the people.” The concept of zero casualties thus becomes a misnomer, since warfare can no longer be fought at a distance; instead, military leadership relies upon the most intimate micro-specific knowledge — what the anthro-military establishments now term “mapping the human terrain.” Ironically, then, this more humane liberal approach does not translate into a lessening of the war effort in order to secure the global peace, pacifying all non-liberal elements; instead, war becomes a normalized biopolitical condition in which the attempted closure of geopolitical space merely proves to be an initial experiment at setting out the all-embracing political terrain. Importantly, within such terrains, not only does the inside/outside lose its strategic primacy, but the meaningful distinctions which once set out the citizen from the soldier also enter into a zone of indistinction. Everybody becomes part of the liberal war effort. I, therefore, agree with the claims you made in Multitude that “war has become a regime of biopower,” which is intimately aligned with the task of “producing and reproducing all aspects of social life.” Indeed, with global liberal rule shown to be shaped by a commitment to war (globally and locally), unending or permanent war become a very real condition.
So, as you suggest, the relations between war and the body provide us with another (perhaps the most incisive) opportunity to challenge that formidable school of liberal thought. Indeed, once we begin to recognize that the ultimate object for liberal war is the productive/transformable body, it then becomes possible to begin questioning the transcendental or divine principle which allows liberalism to draw out such an unreserved global will to rule.
I want to turn to a crucial aspect of your work in Empire. You single out Kant and Hegel for particular critical attention. While I share your anti-Hegelian sentiments (especially regarding the dialectical method’s suffocation of political difference), it is the intellectual heritage set by Kant that really troubles me. Zygmunt Bauman is correct to observe, in Society under Siege, that “These days, it is a hard task to find a learned study of our most recent history that would not quote Kant’s Universal History as a supreme authority and source of inspiration for all debate of world citizenship.” One could even go further to argue that if there is a modern “image of thought” (to invoke Deleuzian