Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
OF BIOPOLITICS:
RE-READING FOUCAULT WITH VIRILIO
SAM HAN
Introduction
Among the collections of lectures at the College de France, Society Must
Be Defended stands out as Foucault’s most forthright critical encounter
with theories of war and racism. In it, he develops concepts that are highly
influential to contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, one of
the most widely read theorists of recent years, who elaborates Foucault’s
“biopolitics” in his treatment of the “War on Terror,” among other things.
The state of exception, Agamben’s most oft-cited formulation, is
influenced directly by Foucault’s overturning of Clausewitz’s original
dictum “But, after all, war is no more than a continuation of politics” to:
“Politics is the continuation of war by other means.” Certainly, the crux of
Foucault’s argument in Society, Agamben rightly highlights, is that the
function of sovereign power is to “make live and let die.” In other words,
the Sovereign is not simply a politico-theological entity that represents the
polity (a power ordained from On High) but that which is able to govern at
the level of “life-itself” (Agamben 2005). This moment, when power
begins to operate at the level of life and death, is what Foucault famously
dubbed the “biopolitical.”
However, what he, and others who have followed him, leaves room for is
an analysis of what Foucault in Society Must Be Defended calls the
“technologies of warfare” that form the technological “ground” or basis
upon which biopolitics can take shape and exist. The purpose of this
chapter is to develop Foucault’s analysis of the machinery or technologies
of warfare by juxtaposing his work to that of the theorist of technology
and speed, Paul Virilio. Foucault’s later work has been taken in quite a
few different directions in recent years. In my estimation, one of the most
interesting has been the connection of Foucault’s work on war with what
Sam Han 341
Yet, for Virilio, the shift comes from the centrality of speed in
contemporary war strategy, which he identifies as emerging with what he
refers to as “human rights wars,” pointing specifically to the military
interventions in Kosovo. In such a situation, the strategy of pre-emptive
offense overrides the strategy of defensive control in the name of human
life or “humanity,” which Virilio aptly names “the integral accident.”
Intervention no longer comes from without (as in a military attack) but
from within. Again, few have made note of the similarities of this view
with Foucault’s argument that the new technology of biopower is
addressed to “man-as-living-being” as opposed to “man-as-body,” in that
it multiplies a body to populations “as a political problem . . . that is at
once scientific and political, as a biological problem and as power’s
problem.” Hence, we see the State, in many instances (in Europe in
particular), acting as the guarantor of health only to institute the panoptical
dispositif of discipline, as Foucault chronicles famously in Discipline and
Punish. In picking up these themes from Discipline, Foucault argues in
Society that this technique of power is politics—in other words, war, and
that it is immanent to the State.
342 Info-War as the Interface of Biopolitics
Such changes in the relations between war, the State and politics
introduces a fascinating problematic to Foucault’s master concepts—
biopolitics and biopower. The moment of biopower, as Foucault readily
notes, is the moment when populations become the problem for power. In
other words, the biopolitical moment is that which war becomes coded,
not as a generalized subjectivity framed within the binary terms of Us-
versus-Them, but coded in terms of population.
1
It is this proto-digital language of Foucault (“code”)that I find to be fascinating
and significant for a comparison with Virilio, who confronts technologies,
especially digital technologies, in a far more specific and rigorous way.
Sam Han 343
344 Info-War as the Interface of Biopolitics
geographical space has been shrinking with every advance in speed, and
strategic location has lost importance as ballistic systems have become
more widespread and sophisticated, [carrying] us into a realm of factious
topology in which all the surfaces of the globe are directly present to one
another. (Virilio 2004, 102)
Sam Han 345
4
For discussion of “just war,” see Walzer, Michael. Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral
Argument with Historical Illustrations. Basic Books, 2000, which various scholars
have labeled the locus classicus.
346 Info-War as the Interface of Biopolitics
I will now turn to the matter of “info war” beginning with some of the
technological conditions that form the ground of info war.
5
See Serres, Michel. The Parasite. University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
Sam Han 347
The war that is going on beneath order and peace, the war that undermines
our society and divides it in a binary mode is, basically, a race war. At a
very early stage, we find the basic elements that make the war possible,
and then ensure its continuation, pursuit, and development: ethnic
differences, differences between languages, different degrees of force,
vigor, energy, and violence; the difference between savagery and
barbarism; the conquest and subjugation of one race by another. (Foucault
2003, 59-60)
But, as he points out, the key aspect of biopolitical racism consists of the
fact that:
…the other race is basically not the race that came from elsewhere [as in
the case of the word “barbarian”] or that was, for a time, triumphant and
dominant, but that it is a race that is permanently, ceaselessly infiltrating
the social body, or which is, rather, constantly being re-created in and by
the social fabric. In other words, what we see as a polarity, as a binary rift
within society, is not a clash between two distinct races. It is the splitting
of a single race into a superrace and a subrace. To put it a different way, it
is the reappearance, within a single race, of the past of that race. (Foucault
2003, 60-61)
348 Info-War as the Interface of Biopolitics
war within a singular race, albeit one that results in a binary rift.
Nevertheless, this type of radical inclusion is akin to Virilio’s notion of
globalitarianism, except for the fact that for Virilio the “within” happens to
be the technologically globalized worlds. “Sovereignty,” Virilio argues,
“no longer resides in the territory itself, but in the control of the territory”
(Virilio and Armitage, 2000). As mentioned earlier, satellites are genuine
weapons in information war, and this allows for a rather interesting
strategy of offense. It does not mean invasion through direct mass
extermination of civilian populations but rather the permanent
development of a global arsenal (Virilio 2000, 44) and thus condition of
“total war” or more aptly virtual war, that is, in a Foucaultian vein, the
normalization of military technologies in everyday life. This was of course
the status quo during the long period of the Cold War, out of which
Kosovar conflict can be said to be a result.
Virilio contends that the Kosovar wars laid bare this type of
interventionism in geo-politics. Hence they are demonstrative of a new,
globalitarian scale of total war, within which info war is situated as an
integrated, “globally constituted accident.” To this, he draws an analogy to
the concept of systemic risk, which in the language of high finance is a
risk that is not only internal to the operation of the system but vital to it. If
investors and traders do not take risks, they are, in effect, hurting the
financial system at large. Advances in military technology have allowed
for war to be automated and thus integrated into everyday operations of
geopolitics. This was of course the argument presented in Virilio’s earlier
works especially Bunker Archaeology(1997), in which he argues that post-
war architecture throughout Europe had become a “city” of old, techno-
architecturally equipped for war.
For want of being able to abolish the bomb, we have decided, then, to
abolish the state, a nation state which is now charged with ‘sovereigntist ‘
vices and all ‘nationalist’ crimes, thereby exonerating a military-industrial
and scientific complex which has spent a whole century innovating in
horror and accumulating the most terrifying weapons—from asphyxiating
gases and bacteriological weapons to the thermonuclear device, not to
Sam Han 349
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