Necropolitics Kritik

Table of Contents
Necropolitics Kritik...............................................................1
1NC Shell....................................................................................2
1NC Shell................................................................................................... 3
Extensions..................................................................................8
Link China................................................................................................ 9
Link Iran................................................................................................ 10
Link Eco-Apocalypse..............................................................................11
Link Cyber-Security...............................................................................12
Link Apocalyptic Framing......................................................................14
Link Counter-Terror................................................................................ 15
Link Airplanes........................................................................................ 17
Link Warming Apocalypse.....................................................................18
Nodocentric Necropolitics........................................................................23
Generic Extensions.................................................................................. 43
Black Nihilism.......................................................................................... 49
Security.................................................................................................... 51

1NC Shell

1NC Shell
The Necropolitical sovereign state thrives on the ability to
determine life and death
Mbembe 03 Achille Mbembe, senior researcher at the Institute of Social
and Economic Research at the University of the Witwatersrand,
"Necropolitics," Public Culture 15(1): pg.
This essay assumes that the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a
large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who
must die.1 Hence, to kill or to allow to live constitute the limits of
sovereignty, its fundamental attributes. To exercise sovereignty is to exercise
control over mortality and to de ne life as the deployment and
manifestation of power. One could summarize in the above terms what Michel
Foucault meant by biopower: that domain of life over which power has taken
control.2 But under what practical conditions is the right to kill, to allow to
live, or to expose to death exercised? Who is the subject of this right? What
does the implementation of such a right tell us about the person who is thus
put to death and about the relation of enmity that sets that person against
his or her murderer? Is the notion of biopower suf cient to account for the
contemporary ways in which the political, under the guise of war, of
resistance, or of the ght against terror, makes the murder of the enemy its
primary and absolute objective? War, after all, is as much a means of
achieving sovereignty as a way of exercising the right to kill. Imagining
politics as a form of war, we must ask: What place is given to life, death, and
the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they
inscribed in the order of power? Politics, the Work of Death, and the
Becoming Subject In order to answer these questions, this essay draws on
the concept of biopower and explores its relation to notions of sovereignty
(imperium) and the state of exception.3 Such an analysis raises a number of
empirical and philosophical questions I would like to examine brie y. As is
well known, the concept of the state of exception has been often discussed in
relation to Nazism, totalitarianism, and the concentration/extermination
camps. The death camps in particular have been interpreted variously as the
central metaphor for sovereign and destructive violence and as the ultimate
sign of the absolute power of the negative. Says Hannah Arendt: There are
no parallels to the life in the concentration camps. Its horror can never be
fully embraced by the imagination for the very reason that it stands outside
of life and death.4 Because its inhabitants are divested of political status
and reduced to bare life, the camp is, for Giorgio Agamben, the place in
which the most absolute conditio inhumana ever to appear on Earth was
realized. 5 In the political-juridical structure of the camp, he adds, the state
of exception ceases to be a temporal sus pension of the state of law.
According to Agamben, it acquires a permanent spatial arrangement that
remains continually outside the normal state of law.

Adherence to the discipline of international relations

sacralizes a violent sovereignty reliant on its postcolonial
outside to maintain coherence the spectral violence of
the 1AC is the primary tool used to legitimize the
destruction of deviant bodies
Hansen and Stepputat 5 Thomas Blom Hansen, Professor of
Anthropology, Yale University. Finn Stepputat, Senior Researcher, Danish
Institute for International Studies, Copenhagen. "Sovereign Bodies: Citizens,
Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World". 2005. Pgs. 3-4. PWoods.
First, we suggest that sovereign power and the violence (or the threat
thereof) that always mark it, should be studied as practices dispersed
throughout, and across, societies. The unequivocal linking of sovereign power
to the state is a historically contingent and peculiar outcome of the evolution
of the modern state system in Europe since the West-phalian peace in 1648.
The discipline of International Relations has for decades assumed states to be
both normal, that is, with de facto legitimate control of their populations and
territory, and identical, that is, with similar interests, strategies, and expected
patterns of action.2 To become a normal sovereign state with normal citizens
continues to be a powerful ideal, releasing considerable creative energy, and
even more repressive force, precisely because its realization presupposed the
disciplining and subordination of other forms of authority. We suggest that
sovereignty of the state is an aspiration that seeks to create itself in the face
of internally fragmented, unevenly distributed and unpredictable
configurations of political authority that exercise more or less legitimate
violence in a territory. Sovereign power, whether exercised by a state, in the
name of the nation, or by a local despotic power or community court, is
always a tentative and unstable project whose efficacy and legitimacy
depend on repeated performances of violence and a "will to rule." These
performances can be spectacular and public, secret and menacing, and also
can appear as scientific/technical rationalities of management and
punishment of bodies. Although the meanings and forms of such
performances of sovereignty always are historically specific, they are,
however, always constructing their public authority through a capacity for
visiting violence on human bodies. Second, the chapters in this volume
foreground the ethnographic detail and the historical specificity in studies of
sovereignty and its correlate, citizenship and other forms of institutionalized
practices belonging to a state and/or a community defined by, but not
delimited by, a territory. All contributors, whether anthropologists or not,
focus on the historically embedded practices and cultural meanings of
sovereign power and violence, and the de facto practices of citizenship and
belonging in a wide range of contexts. The focus is unequivocally on the
performance of sovereign power within nations, and on the precarious
construction and maintenance of localized sovereign power through exercise
of actual or "spectral" violence--transmitted through rumors, tales, and
reputations. The issue at stake is de facto recognition of sovereign power by

local and discerning "audiences" who often pay their dues to several
authorities at the same time. Taken together, the contributions make it clear
that although sovereign power always seeks to project itself as given, stable
and natural, it never completely manages to achieve the status of a "master
signifier" that can stabilize a social order and a set of identities.3 Third, we
believe that the complex history of the reconfiguration of sovereign power
and citizenship in colonial and postcolonial societies demonstrates something
important, and uncomfortable, about the permutations of these concepts.
Colonial forms of sovereignty were more fragmented and complex, more
reliant on spectacles and ceremony, and demonstrative and excessive
violence, than the forms of sovereign power that had emerged in Europe after
several centuries of centralizing efforts. These differences were rooted in
indirect rule at a distance, to pragmatic reliance on local, indigenous forms of
rule and sovereignty, and tied to the efforts at asserting racial and
civilizational superiority. European states never aimed at governing the
colonial territories with the same uniformity and intensity as were applied to
their own populations. The emphasis was rarely on forging consent and the
creation of a nation-people, and almost exclusively on securing subjection,
order, and obedience through performance of paramount sovereign power
and suppression of competing authorities. Demonstrative violence and short
term economic exploitation were constitutive of colonial rule and took
precedence over long-term economic rationalities.4 As a result, the
configurations of de facto sovereign power, justice, and order in the
postcolonial states were from the outset partial, competing, and unsettled.

This is the necropolitical commission of lawfare the

underbelly of liberalism and the destruction of alterity
Comaroff and Comaroff 7 [John Comaroff, Professor of African and
African American Studies and of Anthropology, Oppenheimer Fellow in African
Studies at at Harvard, and Jean Comaroff, Professor of African and African
American Studies and of Anthropology, Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies
also at Harvard, Law and disorder in the postcolony, Social
Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2007) 15, pg. 144]
Nor is it just the politics of the present that are being judicialised. As we said earlier,

the past, too, is

being fought out in the courts. Britain, for example, is currently being sued for acts of
atrocity in its African empire (Anderson 2005; Elkins 2005): for having killed local leaders, unlawfully

By these means is
colonialism itself rendered criminal. Hauled before a judge, history is
made to submit to the scales of justice at the behest of those who
suffered it. And to be reduced to a cash equivalent, payable as the official tender of damage,
dispossession, loss, trauma. What imperialism is being indicted for , above all, is its
commission of lawfare: the use of its own penal codes, its
administrative procedures, its states of emergency, its charters and
mandates and warrants, to discipline its subjects by means of
violence made legible and legal by its own sovereign word . Also, to commit
alienated territory from one African people to another, and so on.33

its own ever-so-civilised forms of kleptocracy. Lawfare the resort to legal instruments, to the violence
inherent in the law, to commit acts of political coercion, even erasure (Comaroff 2001) is equally marked

As a species of political displacement, it becomes most

visible when those who serve the state conjure with legalities to
act against its citizens. Most infamous recently is Zimbabwe, where the Mugabe regime has
in postcolonies.

consistently passed laws to justify the coercive silencing of its critics. Operation Murambatsvina, Drive Out
Trash, which has forced political opponents out of urban areas under the banner of slum clearance has
recently taken this practice to unprecedented depths. Murambatsvina, says the government, is merely an

Lawfare34 may be
limited or it may reduce people to bare life; in Zimbabwe, it has mutated
into a necropolitics with a rising body count. But it always seeks to
launder visceral power in a wash of legitimacy as it is deployed to
strengthen the sinews of state or enlarge the capillaries of capital.
Hence Benjamins (1978) thesis that the law originates in violence and lives by
violent means; that the legal and the lethal animate one another. Of
application of the law of the land to raze dangerous illegal structures.

course, in 1919 Benjamin could not have envisaged the possibility that lawfare might also be a weapon of
the weak, turning authority back on itself by commissioning courts to make claims for resources,

Why the
fetishism of legalities? What are its implications for the play of Law
and Dis/order in the postcolony? And are postcolonies different in
this respect from other nation-states? The answer to the first question looks obvious.
The turn to law would seem to arise directly out of growing anxieties
about lawlessness. But this does not explain the displacement of the
political into the legal or the turn to the courts to resolve an ever
greater range of wrongs. The fetishism, in short, runs deeper than purely a concern
with crime. It has to do with the very constitution of the postcolonial
polity. Late modernist nationhood, it appears, is undergoing an epochal move
away from the ideal of cultural homogeneity: a nervous, often
xenophobic shift toward heterogeneity (Anderson 1983). The rise of neoliberalism
recognition, voice, integrity, sovereignty. But this still does not lay to rest the key questions:

with its impact on population flows, on the dispersion of cultural practices, on geographies of production
and accumulation has heightened this, especially in former colonies, which were erected from the first on

with growing heterodoxy,

legal instruments appear to offer a means of commensuration (Comaroff
and Comaroff 2000): a repertoire of standardised terms and practices that
permit the negotiation of values, beliefs, ideals and interests across
otherwise intransitive lines of cleavage. Hence the flight into a
constitutionalism that explicitly embraces heterogeneity in highly
individualistic, universalistic Bills of Rights, even where states are
paying less and less of the bills. Hence the effort to make human
rights into an ever more global, ever more authoritative discourse.
difference. And difference begets more law. Why? Because,

But there is something else at work too. A well-recognised corollary of the neoliberal turn, recall, has been
the outsourcing by states of many of the conventional operations of governance, including those, like
health services, policing and the conduct of war, integral to the management of life itself.

Bureaucracies do retain some of their old functions, of course. But most

21st century governments have reduced their administrative reach,
entrusting ever more to the market and delegating ever more
responsibility to citizens as individuals, as volunteers, as classes of
actor, social or legal. Under these conditions, especially where the threat of
disorder seems immanent, civil law presents itself as a more or less
effective weapon of the weak, the strong and everyone in between .
Which, in turn, exacerbates the resort to lawfare. The court has become

a utopic site to which human agency may turn for a medium in which
to pursue its ends. This, once again, is particularly so in postcolonies, where bureaucracies and
bourgeoisies were not elaborate to begin with; and in which heterogeneity had to be negotiated from the

the fetishism of the law seems over-determined.

Not only is public life becoming more legalistic, but so, in regulating
their own affairs and in dealing with others, are communities within
the nation-state: cultural communities, religious communities,
corporate communities, residential communities, communities of
interest, even outlaw communities. Everything, it seems, exists here
in the shadow of the law. Which also makes it unsurprising that a culture of legality should
start. Put all this together and

saturate not just civil order but also its criminal undersides. Take another example from South Africa, where
organised crime appropriates, re-commissions and counterfeits the means and ends of both the state and
the market. The gangs on the Cape Flats in Cape Town mimic the business world, having become a lumpen
stand-in for those excluded from the national economy (Standing 2003). For their tax-paying clients, those
gangs take on the positive functions of government, not least security provision. Illicit corporations of this
sort across the postcolonial world often have shadow judicial personnel and convene courts to try
offenders against the persons, property and social order over which they exert sovereignty. They also
provide the policing that the state either has stopped supplying or has outsourced to the private sector.
Some have constitutions. A few are even structured as franchises and, significantly, are said to offer
alternative citizenship to their members.35 Charles Tilly (1985) once suggested, famously, that modern
states operate much like organised crime. These days, organised crime is operating ever more like states.

the counterfeiting of a culture of legality by the criminal

underworld feeds the dialectic of law and disorder . After all, once
government outsources its policing services and franchises force,
and once outlaw organisations shadow the state by providing
protection and dispensing justice, social order itself becomes like a
hall of mirrors. What is more, this dialectic has its own geography. A
geography of discontinuous, overlapping sovereignties . We said a moment
ago that communities of all kinds have become ever more legalistic in
regulating their affairs; it is often in the process of so doing , in fact, that
they become communities at all, the act of judicialisation being also an act of
objectification. Herein lies their will to sovereignty, which we take to
connote the exercise of autonomous control over the lives, deaths
and conditions of existence of those who fall within its purview and
the extension over them of the jurisdiction of some kind of law .
Lawmaking, to cite Benjamin (1978: 295) yet again, is power making. But power is
the principal of all lawmaking. In sum, to transform itself into
sovereign authority, power demands an architecture of legalities. Or
their simulacra.
Self-evidently,

Extensions

Link China
The necropolitical control of the Chinese state has led to
the creation of the death world, a state in which the
sovereign controls who lives and who dies. This results in
the bare life of these denizens, and creates what Mbembe
calls the living dead.
Chung 09 | Jeanie Chung, December 22 2009, The Creation of
the Living Dead: North Korean Refugee Women in China, Feminist
Legal Theory Workshop
China and North Koreas policies have resulted in the creation of a deathworld, to use Mbembes terminology, and have rendered these North Korean
women members of the living dead. Underlying Mbembes theory of
necropolitics is the assumption that the ultimate expression of sovereignty
residesin the powerto dictate who may live and who must die. Indeed, at
a broad level, Chinas policies which render North Korean refugee women
statusless, as well as North Koreas punishment and hostile classification of
these women upon repatriation, essentially determine whether these women
live i.e., have enough food to eat, have shelter over their heads, have
clothing to wear, and have access to health services and medication or die.
Mbembe explains that necropolitics is a form of biopolitics with a strong focus
on the very creation of life and death at the hands of the state. He explores
necropolitics in a variety of contexts, from Nazi concentration camps where
inhabitants are divested of political status and reduced to bare life
(emphasis added), to colonial occupation and wartime, especially in Israel
and Palestine, noting that one component that enables states to engage in
necropolitics is the restriction of the right to move about freely. Mbembe also
applies Foucaults notion of the state of siege to necropolitics: Foucaults
state of siege is itself a military institution. It allows a modality of killing
that does not distinguish between the external and the internal enemy.
Indeed, the treatment of trafficked North Korean refugees by both China and
North Korea is similarly born out of wartime. North Korea is not only
technically at war with the United States, but also is at war with its own
people, as is evidenced by its presumption of disloyalty towards its citizens.
Forced labor camps, the locus of the punishment inflicted upon repatriated
refugee women, are indeed places where prisoners are divested of political
status and reduced to bare life: prisoners have no political or civil rights,
they are rarely fed, left to starve to death, and are forced to perform hard
labor, such as farming or construction work, for up to fifteen hours a day.

Link Iran

Link Eco-Apocalypse
Eco-crisis justifies violent states of exception
Matthew Nash 12, PhD candidate in Political Science and Government at
Colorado State, Review of Mick Smith, Against Ecological Sovereignty, New
Political Science. Sep2012, Vol. 34 Issue 3, p422-425. 4p.
the
contemporary sovereign state, which uses crises to legitimate states
of exception that reduce individuals to bare life through the
biological management of populations, already operates on the
fundamental exclusion of a more-than-human nature (p. 126). The states
In Against Ecological Sovereignty: Ethics, Biopolitics, and Saving the Natural World, Mick Smith argues that

exclusion of nature from ethical and political consideration ironically may lead to an intensification of the biopolitical

the
state of exception which has emerged out of the global war on
terror, may again be mobilized in the name of the Ecological
Crisis. The irony of this situation will be that in this particular crisis which
legitimates further technocratic interventions and further state
and corporate management of biological life, the crisis will emerge
as a result of sovereignty itself, from the way in which humanity has
defined itself on the basis of an excluded nature (p. 126). The
(re)productions of humanitys sovereign relation to nature in myths,
theory, and the institutions in which these forms are articulated, make up
the anthropological machinea series of interlocking ideas which
reproduce this sovereign relation and result in humanitys continued
reduction of nature to resource and standing reserve.
predicament in which the sovereign exception has become the norm. It is not far-fetched, Smith says, that

Link Cyber-Security
Traditional approaches to securitizing the internet fail.
The risk of a cyberattack is about the same as the risk of
Iraqi wmd- their apocalyptic framing produces the
conditions for massive wars
Brito and Watkins 11 (Jerry and Tate Jerry Brito is a senior research
fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and director of its
Technology Policy Program. Tate Watkins is a research associate at the
Mercatus Center http://www.wired.com/2012/02/yellowcake-and-cyberwar/)
ASherm
In last months State of the Union address, President Obama called on Congress to pass legislation that will secure our
country from the growing dangers of cyber threats. The Hill was way ahead of him, with over 50 cybersecurity bills
introduced this Congress. This week, both the House and Senate are moving on their versions of consolidated,
comprehensive legislation. The reason cybersecurity legislation is so pressing, proponents say, is that we face an
immediate risk of national disaster. Todays

cyber criminals have the ability to i nterrupt

life-sustaining services, cause catastrophic economic damage, or severely
degrade the networks our defense and intelligence agencies rely on, Senate
Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) said at a hearing last week. Congress needs to act on

evidence to sustain such dire warnings

is conspicuously absent. In many respects, rhetoric about cyber catastrophe
resembles threat inflation we saw in the run-up to the Iraq War. And while Congress
comprehensive cybersecurity legislation immediately. Yet

passing of comprehensive cybersecurity legislation wouldnt lead to war, it could saddle us with an expensive and

In 2002 the Bush administration sought to make the

case that Iraq threatened its neighbor s and the United States with weapons
of mass destruction (WMD). By framing the issue in terms of WMD, the
administration conflated the threats of nuclear , biological, and chemical weapons.
overreaching cyber-industrial complex.

The destructive power of biological and chemical weaponswhile no doubt horrificis minor compared to that of nuclear
detonation. Conflating these threats, however, allowed the administration to link the unlikely but serious threat of a
nuclear attack to the more likely but less serious threat posed by biological and chemical weapons. Similarly ,

proponents of regulation often conflate cyber threats. In his 2010 bestseller Cyber
War, Richard Clarke warns that a cyberattack today could result in the collapse of
the governments classified and unclassified networks, the release of lethal clouds of
chlorine gas from chemical plants, refinery fires and explosions across the country, midair
collisions of 737s, train derailments, the destruction of major financial computer networks, suburban
gas pipeline explosions, a nationwide power blackout, and satellites in space spinning out
of control. He assures us that these are not hypotheticals. But the only verifiable evidence he
presents relates to several well-known distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks, and he admits that
DDOS is a primitive form of attack that would not pose a major threat to national security. When Clarke
ventures beyond DDOS attacks, his examples are easily debunked. To show
that the electrical grid is vulnerable, for example, he suggests that the Northeast
power blackout of 2003 was caused in part by the Blaster worm. But the 2004
final report of the joint U.S.-Canadian task force that investigated the blackout found that
no virus, worm, or other malicious software contributed to the power failure. Clarke
also points to a 2007 blackout in Brazil, which he says was the result of criminal hacking of the power system. Yet
investigations have concluded that the power failure was the result of soot deposits on high-voltage insulators on

readers would no doubt be as frightened at the prospect of

a cyber attack as they might have been at the prospect of Iraq passing
nuclear weapons to al Qaeda. Yet evidence that cyberattacks and cyberespionage are real and serious
transmission lines. Clarkes

concerns is not evidence that we face a grave risk of national catastrophe, just as evidence of chemical or biological
weapons is not evidence of the ability to launch a nuclear strike. The Bush administration claimed that Iraq was close to

The evidence they did provide

Iraqs alleged pursuit of uranium yellowcake from Niger and its purchase of
aluminum tubes allegedly meant for uranium enrichment centrifugeswas
ultimately determined to be unfounded. Despite the lack of verifiable evidence to support the
acquiring nuclear weapons but provided no verifiable evidence.

administrations claims, the media tended to report them unquestioned. Initial reporting on the aluminum tubes claim, for
example, came in the form of a front page New York Times article by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon that relied entirely
on anonymous administration sources. Appearing on Meet the Press the same day the story was published, Vice President
Dick Cheney answered a question about evidence of a reconstituted Iraqi nuclear program by stating that, while he
couldnt talk about classified information, The New York Times was reporting that Iraq was seeking to acquire aluminum
tubes to build a centrifuge. In essence, the Bush administration was able to cite its own leakwith the added imprimatur

The media may be contributing to threat inflation

today by uncritically reporting alarmist views of potential cyber threats . For
example, a 2009 front page Wall Street Journal story reported that the U.S. power grid
had been penetrated by Chinese and Russian hackers and laced with logic bombs. The
article is often cited as evidence that the power grid is rigged to blow. Yet
similar to Judith Millers Iraq WMD reporting, the only sources for the articles claim
that infrastructure has been compromised are anonymous U.S. intelligence
officials. With little specificity about the alleged infiltrations, readers are left with no way to verify the claims. More
of the Timesas a rationale for war.

alarmingly, when Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) took to the Senate floor to introduce the comprehensive cybersecurity bill
that she co-authored with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), the evidence she cited to support a pressing need for regulation

Washington teems with people who have a vested

interest in conflating and inflating threats to our digital security . The watchword,
included this very Wall Street Journal story.

therefore, should be trust but verify. In his famous farewell address to the nation in 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower
warned against the dangers of what he called the military-industrial complex: an excessively close nexus between the
Pentagon, defense contractors, and elected officials that could lead to unnecessary expansion of the armed forces,
superfluous military spending, and a breakdown of checks and balances within the policy making process. Eisenhowers
speech proved prescient. Cybersecurity is a big and booming industry. The U.S. government is
expected to spend $10.5 billion a year on information security by 2015, and analysts have estimated the worldwide
market to be as much as $140 billion a year. The Defense Department has said it is seeking more than $3.2 billion in
cybersecurity funding for 2012. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, L-3 Communications, SAIC, and BAE Systems have all launched

defense contractors, such as Northrop Grumman,

Raytheon, and ManTech International, have invested in information security products and
services. We should be wary of proving Eisenhower right again in the cyber sphere. Before enacting
sweeping changes to counter cyber threats, policy makers should clear the air with
some simple steps. Stop the apocalyptic rhetoric. The alarmist scenarios dominating policy discourse
may be good for the cybersecurity-industrial complex, but they arent doing
real security any favors. Declassify evidence relating to cyber threats. Overclassification is a widely
cybersecurity divisions in recent years. Other traditional

acknowledged problem, and declassification would allow the public to verify the threats rather than blindly trusting self-

Disentangle the disparate dangers that have been lumped

together under the cybersecurity label. This must be done to determine who is best suited to
interested officials.

address which threats. In cases of cybercrime and cyberespionage, for instance, private network owners may be best
suited and have the best incentives to protect their own valuable data, information, and reputations.

Link Apocalyptic Framing

The emphasis on the impending apocalypse is an
effacement of every day violence the fiction of
uniqueness for their extinction impact can only be
actualized through a massive forgetting of what made
that violence possible
Omolade 84 (Barbara, sociologist and educator, dean at calvin college,
women of color and the nuclear holocaust, WSQ v12 n2, LB)
To raise these issues effectively, the movement for nuclear disarmament
must overcome its reluctance to speak in terms of power, of institutional
racism, and imperialist military terror. The issues of nuclear disarmament and
peace have been mystified because the y have been placed within a
doomsday frame which separates these issues from other ones, saying, "How
can we talk about struggles against racism, poverty, and
exploitation when there will be no world after they drop the bombs ?"
The struggle for peace cannot be separated from , nor considered more sacrosanct
than, other struggles concerned with human life and change . In April, 1979, the U.S.
Arms Control and Disarmament Agency released a report on the effects of nuclear war that
concludes that, in a general nuclear war between the United States and the
Soviet Union, 25 to 100 million people would be killed. This is approximately
the same number of African people who died between 1492 and 1890 as a
result of the African slave trade to the New World. The same federal report also
comments on the destruction of urban housing that would cause massive shortages after a nuclear war, as

for people of
color the world over, starvation is already a common problem, when, for
example, a nation's crops are grown for export rather than to feed its own
people. And the housing of people of color throughout the world's urban areas is already blighted and
well as on the crops that would be lost, causing massive food shortages. Of course,

inhumane: families live in shacks, shanty towns, or on the streets; even in the urban areas of North

the world as we
knew it ended centuries ago. Our world, with its own languages, customs and
ways, ended. And we are only now beginning to see with increasing clarity
that our task is to reclaim that world, struggle for it, and rebuld it in our, own
image. The "death culture" we live in has convinced many to be more
concerned with death than with life, more willing to demonstrate for "survival
at any cost" than to struggle for liberty and peace with dignity. Nuclear
America, the poor may live without heat or running water. For people of color,

disarmament becomes a safe issue when it is not linked to the daily and historic issues of racism, to the

Acts of war, nuclear holocausts, and

genocide have already been declared on our jobs, our housing, our schools,
our families, and our lands. As women of color, we are warriors, not pacifists. We must fight
as a people on all fronts, or we will continue to die as a people. We have fought in
ways in which people of color continue to be murdered.

people's wars in China, in Cuba, in GuineaBissau, and in such struggles as the civil rights movement, the
women's movement, and in countless daily encounters with landlords, welfare departments, and schools.

These struggles are not abstractions, but the only means by which we have
gained the ability to eat and to provide for the future of our people .

Link Counter-Terror
Terrorism is not located in one particular country or group
its a consequence of the new global order, which
creates constant internal violence. Their solution inspires
the terrorist imagination in each of us
Baudrillard, 03 (Jean, The Mind of Terrorism, 2003, CP)
All the speeches and commentaries made since September 11 betray a gigantic post-traumatic abreaction

moral condemnation anti the

sacred union against terrorism are directly proportional to the prodigious
jubilation felt at having seen this global superpower destroyed , because it was
this insufferable superpower that gave rise both to the violence now spreading
throughout the world and to the terrorist imagination that (without our knowing it)
dwells within us all. That the entire world without exception had dreamed of this
event, that nobody could help but dream the destruction of so powerful a
hegemon - this fact is unacceptable to the moral conscience of the West , and
yet it is a fact nonetheless, a fact that resists the emotional violence of all the
rhetoric conspiring to erase it. In the end, it was they who did it but we who
wished it. If we do not take this fact into account, the event loses all symbolic dimension; it becomes s
both to the event itself and to the fascination that it exerts. The

a purely arbitrary act, the murderous phantasmagoria of a few fanatics that we need only repress. But we
know well that such is not the case. Without our profound complicity the event would not have
reverberated so forcefully, and in their strategic symbolism the terrorists knew they could count on this
unconfessable complicity.It goes well beyond the hatred that the desolate and the exploited-those who
ended up on the wrong side of the new world order-feel toward the dominant global power. This malicious

The allergy to absolute

order, to absolute power, is universal, and the two towers of the World Trade Center
were, precisely because of their ideaticality, the perfect incarnation of this absolute order .
desire resides n the hearts of even those who've shared in the spoils.

Countless disaster films have borne witness to these fantasies, and the universal appeal of the images

the closer the entire system

gets to perfection or to omnipotence, the stronger the urge to destroy it
grows. When the world has been so thoroughly monopolized, when power has
been so formidably consolidated by the technocratic machine and the dogma
of globalization, what means of turning the tables remains besides terrorism? In dealing all the
cards to itself, the system forced the Other to change the rules of the game .
And the new rules are ferocious, because the game is ferocious. Terrorism is
the act that restores an irreducible singularity to the heart of a generalized
system of exchange. All those singularities (species, individuals, cultures) that have
been sacrificed to the interests of a global system of commerce avenge
themselves by turning the tables with terrorism. Terror against terror-this is no longer an
shows just how close the fantasies always are to being acted out:

ideological notion. We have gone well beyond ideology and politics, The energy that nourishes terror, no
ideology, no cause, not even an Islamic one, can explain. The terrorists are not aiming simply to transform
the world. Like the heretics of previous times, they aim to radicalize the world through sacrifice, whereas

Terrorists, like viruses, are

everywhere. There is no longer a boundary that can hem terrorism in ; it is at
the heart of the very culture it's fighting with, and the visible fracture (and the
hatred) that pits the exploited and underdeveloped nations of the world against
the West masks the dominant system's internal fractures . It is as if every means of
the system aims to convert: it into money through force.

domination secreted its own antidote. Against this almost automatic from of resistance to its power, the

Terrorism is the shock wave of this silent resistance . It is a

mistake, then, to characterize this as a clash of civilizations or of religions. It goes well beyond
Islam aria' America, on which one aright be tempted to concentrate in order
to create the illusion of a confrontation resolvable by force . There is a fundamental
antagonism at work. but it transcends the phantom of America (which is perhaps the
epicenter though not the incarnation of globalization) as well as the phantom of Islam (which
likewise is not the incarnation of terrorism). This is the clash of triumphant globalization
at war with itself. In this sense, it is accurate to speak of this as a world war-no: the third but the
system can do nothing.

fourth-and the only one that is truly global, since what's at stake is globalization itself. The first put an end
to European supremacy and to the era of colonialism; the second put an end to Nazism; and the third to
Communism. Each one brought us progressively closer to the single world order of today, which is now

a war of
fractal complexity, waged worldwide against rebellious singularities that , in
the manner of antibodies, mount a resistance in every cell. These confrontations are
nearing its end, everywhere opposed, everywhere grappling with hostile forces. This is

so imperceptible that it is occasionally necessary to resuscitate the idea of war by staging spectacular
scenes such as those in the Persian Gulf and now in Afghanistan. But World War IV happens elsewhere too.

It haunts all expressions of world order, all forms of hegemonic domination-if

Islam were dominating the world, terrorism would rise up against Islam. The
globe itself is resistant to globalization. Terrorism is immoral. The occurrence at the
World Trade Center, this symbolic act of defiance, is immoral, but it was in response to globalization, which
is itself immoral. We are therefore immoral ourselves, so

if we hope to understand anything

we will need to get beyond Good and Evil. The crucial point lies in precisely the opposite
direction from the Enlightenment philosophy of Good and Evil. We naively believe in the
progress of Good, that its ascendance in all domains (science, technology, democracy,
human rights) corresponds to the defeat of Evil . No one seems to have
understood that Good and Evil increase in power at the same time -and in the
same way. The triumph of one does not result in the obliteration of the ether ; to
the contrary. We tend to regard Evil, metaphysically, as an accidental smudge, but this axiom is illusory.

Good does not reduce Evil, or vice versa; they are at once irreducible, the one and the
other, and inextricably linked. In the end, Good cannot vanquish Evil except by
denying to be Good, since, in monopolizing global power, it entails a backfire of
proportional violence. In the traditional universe, there remained a balance of Good and
Evil, a dialectical relationship that guaranteed, for better or worse, the tension and equilibrium of the
moral universe. This balance was lost as soon as there was a total extrapolation of
Good-the hegemony of the positive over every form of negativity . From that
moment, the equilibrium was broken, and Evil returned to an invisible autonomy ,
increasing exponentially. Relatively speaking, this is a bit like what happened to the political order
after Communism disappeared and neoliberal forces triumphed worldwide. It was then that a phantom

percolating throughout the planet, rising up through all the cracks

in power. Islam. But Islam. is merely the crystallized form of this antagonism . The
antagonism is everywhere, and it is in each of us. Hence, terror against terror. But it
is asymmetrical terror, and it is this asymmetry that leaves the absolute
global power disarmed. It can do nothing but strike at its own rationale for the
balance of power, without being able to compete on the playing field of symbolic defiance and of
enemy arose,

death, having deleted that playing field from its own culture. Until now, this integrating power had
succeeded in absorbing and reabsorbing every attack, every negativity, and in doing so created a
thoroughly hopeless situation (not only for the wretched o' the earth but also for the privileged and well-to-

terrorists have started using their own deaths

offensively and effectively, based on a strategic intuition, a sense of their adversary's
immense fragility, of the system's quasi-perfection, of the explosion that would erupt at the
do in their radical comfort). But the

They succeeded in turning their deaths into an ultimate weapon

against a system devoted to the ideal of zero losses . Any system of zero
losses is a zero-sum game. And all methods of deterrence and destruction can
do nothing against an enemy who has already turned his death into a
counteroffensive weapon. (" Who cares about the American bombing! Our men are as eager to
slightest spark.

die as the Americans are eager to live!") Thus the imbalance of more than 3,000 deaths inflicted in one fell
swoop against a system of zero losses.

Link Airplanes
The conception of airpower allows for the all seeing eye of
the US military in order to eliminate any conception of
alterity in politics life becomes transformed into conflict
zones which ensure the destruction of all life
Mbembe 3 (Achille, senior researcher at the Institute of Social and Economic Research at
the University of the Witwatersrand. Necropolitics. Public Culture 15(1), LB)
For Weizman, these actions constitute the

politics of verticality. The resultant form of sovereignty

might be called vertical sovereignty. Under a regime of vertical sovereignty, colonial
occupation operates through schemes of over- and underpasses, a separation
of the airspace from the ground. The ground itself is divided between its crust
and the subterrain. Colonial occupation is also dictated by the very nature of the terrain and its topographical
variations (hilltops and valleys, mountains and bodies of water). Thus, high ground offers strategic assets not found in the
valleys (effectiveness of sight, self-protection, panoptic fornication that generates gazes to many different ends). Says
Weizman: Settlements

could be seen as urban optical devices for surveillance

and the exercise of power. Under conditions of late-modern colonial
occupation, surveillance is both inwardand outward-oriented, the eye
acting as weapon and vice versa. Instead of the conclusive division between two nations across a
boundary line, the organization of the West Banks particular terrain has created multiple separations, provisional
boundaries, which relate to each other through surveillance and control, according to Weizman. Under these

colonial occupation is not only akin to control, surveillance, and

separation, it is also tantamount to seclusion. It is a splintering occupation, along the
circumstances,

lines of the splintering urbanism characteristic of late modernity (suburban enclaves or gated communities).56 From an
infrastructural point of view, a splintering form of colonial occupation is characterized by a network of fast bypass roads,
bridges, and tunnels that weave over and under one another in an attempt at maintaining the Fanonian principle of
reciprocal exclusivity. According to Weizman,

the bypass roads attempt to separate Israeli

traffic networks from Palestinian ones, preferably without allowing them ever
to cross. They therefore emphasize the overlapping of two separate geographies that inhabit the same landscape. At
points where the networks do cross, a makeshift separation is created. Most often, small dust roads are dug out to allow
Palestinians to cross under the fast, wide highways on which Israeli vans and military vehicles rush between
settlements.57 Under conditions of vertical sovereignty and splintering colonial occupation, communities are separated

This leads to a proliferation of the sites of violence. The

battlegrounds are not located solely at the surface of the earth. The
underground as well as the airspace are transformed into conflict
zones. There is no continuity between the ground and the sky. Even the boundaries in airspace are divided between
across a y-axis.

lower and upper layers. Everywhere, the symbolics of the top (who is on top) is reiterated. Occupation of the skies
therefore acquires a critical importance, since most of the policing is done from the air. Various other technologies are

sensors aboard unmanned air vehicles (UAVs), aerial

reconnaissance jets, early warning Hawkeye planes, assault helicopters, an
Earth-observation satellite, techniques of hologrammatization. Killing
becomes precisely targeted. Such precision is combined with the tactics of medieval siege warfare
mobilized to this effect:

adapted to the networked sprawl of urban refugee camps. An orchestrated and systematic sabotage of the enemys
societal and urban infrastructure network complements the appropriation of land, water, and airspace resources.

Critical to these techniques of disabling the enemy is bulldozing: demolishing

houses and cities; uprooting olive trees; riddling water tanks with bullets;
bombing and jamming electronic communications; digging up roads;
destroying electricity transformers; tearing up airport runways; disabling
television and radio transmitters; smashing computers; ransacking cultural
and politico-bureaucratic symbols of the protoPalestinian state; looting
medical equipment. In other words, infrastructural warfare.58 While the Apache helicopter gunship is used to

police the air and to kill from overhead, the armored bulldozer (the Caterpillar D-9) is used on the ground as a weapon of

In contrast to early-modern colonial occupation, these two

weapons establish the superiority of high-tech tools of latemodern terror.59
war and intimidation.

Link Warming Apocalypse

Fear of catastrophic warming is rooted in the same
prophetic mode of discourse as Christian myths of the end
of days---the will to freeze the earth in at a static
equilibrium results in extermination of difference
Brad Evans and Reid 14, *Senior Lecturer in International Studies at the
University of Bristol, ** and Julian Reid, Professor of International Relations,
Faculty of Social Science, University of Lapland, The Art of Living
Dangerously, 161-5
[p. 161] Fundamental to the writing of apocalypse was this consciousness, this confidence, this absolute certitude of possession of the power
to be able to confront the disaster. Today, in the context of the widespread and deep-seated belief in the inescapably catastrophic nature of
the world, both economically and ecologically understood, such a consciousness and confidence in the abilities to confront it is liable to be
diagnosed as a form of, what we moderns call, madness. But perhaps that is the point. The apparent extremity of not just belief, but
confidence and even certainty in the possibility of apocalyptic division between [p. 162] worlds and between times, of present and future, is a
sign of how detached we have become from this particular mode of truth-telling. We cannot agree with Benjamin Noys, for this reason, when

the
question is not about some messianic totalitarianism; it is how to save and
reconstitute the power of a more confident vision in the context of our
widespread political submission to the ecologization of the political on which
neoliberalism thrives and the discourse of catastrophe has grown .31
he argues that the main problem facing the Left today is the excess of its apocalyptic tone.30 In effect the opposite is the case. For

The world we live in is a world of radical contingency, in which the future is

uncertain and impossible to calculate. Nevertheless, as human beings we are capable of
investing our futures with profound beliefs and senses of certainty as to what may and can happen. Indeed what does

climate science express other than a longing for a sense of certainty; claims to truth which
can be said to be beyond doubt? The scientific imaginary out of which the belief in the
incontestable nature of climate change emerged , the necessity and reality of its occurrence,
the impossibility of arguing with or over its reality, is an expression of that
longing. Such a longing is for a realm of certainty beyond the radical
contingency of the world; a radical contingency that many branches of
science itself now understand as the real. Climate science is constituted
by a subject who is dependent for its reproduction on the belief in the
existence of, as well as our abilities to see and speak of, such a world beyond the
real. In other words, it is structured by the very same ontology of time that structures
Christian Science and literature . And when we look at debates within climate science, and claims to
knowledge as to the coming of the Sixth Extinction , we are looking at a world
populated by prophets that operate within regimes of truth deeply similar to those occupied by the prophets
of Christianity. Climate science is a religion. [p. 163]
Our intention here is not to contest the truth claims of climate science and the
ideologues of climate change on the basis of their non-approximation to reality. It is to
point at the conditions of possibility for such claims; conditions of possibility
that are structurally similar to those that underpin prophesy in its Christian form.
Further, our intent is to point out that a political discourse which posits the
possibility of welcoming the coming of another world and another life beyond that
which is diagnosed as at risk of extinction in climate science, the world and
life of catastrophe as we experience it today, may have no less truth to it.
Climate scientists say that there is no way of escape from the dreadful and

fearful realities of climate change; while economists say that there is no alternative to the further
extension of the market in mitigation of the catastrophic effects of climate change. The Left meanwhile
castigates humanity for not having recognized and respected the parametric
conditions on which our existence depends. All such claims reproduce a
prophetic mode of truth-telling tied into a parrhesiastic mode of truthtelling
which predicts a future which is awful and diagnoses the faults and crimes of
human beings on account of which they must change their ways of living.
What is precisely missing here is a different vocabulary through which to
articulate the necessity and reality of climate change , while being able
to welcome this inevitable event as the process of passage to a new world
and new life beyond that which we have known up until now. It is to welcome the departure
of that which has conditioned our experience as a form of species life to date. Who ultimately knows what the future for life is beyond the

The Anthropocene is only just beginning. What we can know is

that life will take different forms. There will be, as there is always assumed to
be in irreducible thought, a division between present and future, and within
that a division between life forms. Not between the saved and the damned,
but between the life forms that will die off with the end of the Holocene and [p.
164] those that will emerge with whatever comes into existence after that time .
Consider, for example, the phenomenon of the Grolar bear; the cross between a Polar and
Grizzly bear born of the sexual encounter consequent upon the catastrophe
effects of climate change, specifically the breaking up of the Arctic sea ice. What is it about a
civilization or a culture that manages to turn the wondrous phenomenon of
the emergence of new forms of life, consequent upon these dramatic
changes in a milieu, into a problematic of insecurity and threat? A team of ecologists led
Holocene? Not one of us.

by Brendan Kelly of the National Marine Mammal Laboratory, in Alaska, argues that with this phenomenon of the cross-breed, so
endangered, native species such as the Polar Bear, from which the Grolar Bear is emerging, will soon disappear. Furthermore the speeding
up of evolutionary pressures, the forcing of animals into rapid adaptive modes, may not produce biologically favorable outcomes. Quoting

This
cult of mourning for the coming death of existing species life, consequent
upon the movement of the earth, and fear for the nature of the new forms of
life to come, expresses perfectly the ways in which the ancient fear for the
coming catastrophe is now coupled with a modern biopoliticized fear of
the transformative effects of lifes movement upon existing species.
Pure and native forms thus become threatened by the emergence
of impure, foreign, maladapted ones. Rather than simply accept the
injunction to fear processes of imminent global ecological catastrophe, as
well as accept claims as to the moral culpability of humanity for this
catastrophe, there is a need to recognize the ways in which our
understanding of this phenomenon are shaped for us by prophetic and
parrhesiastic modes of veridiction. From this more or less ancient combination of modes of veridiction follows the
injunction that the human must change itself in order to save itself and its world. In
these senses, the truths we tell ourselves concerning the [p. 165]
Kelly, from an interview with Live Science: This change is happening so rapidly that it doesnt bode well for adaptive responses.32

problematic of finitude remain embedded within modes of veridiction as old

and moralizing as Christianity itself. Submitting to the blackmail of global
ecological catastrophe is to submit to a combination of the very same modes
of veridiction that functioned in the Middle Ages to subject human beings to
absurd ideas such as the Kingdom of the Last Day and the Final Judgment. The modernity

of prophesy and parrhesia concerned with global ecological catastrophe

owes to the different ways in which they pose the problem of finitude . While in
the Middle Ages the legitimacy of theocratic rule depended on an offer of
security to humans from the costs of their finitude through the promise of eternal life,
peace and security in Heaven, today the offer is one of successful adaptation to the
costs of our having failed to understand the full nature of the problem of
finitude, in mitigation of the reality that as humans we have only just come to understand that we have no
preordained right to the earth, no providential history, or guarantee of security and development. The promise
held out to us should we be willing to submit to this new problematization of
the truth of finitude, and accept the need to adapt , is not one of eternal life,
nor even necessarily better life, but simply a little more life for our
species and those that we exist interdependently with.

STOP IF SHORT ON TIME

This is why, rather than submitting to the blackmail of the coming
catastrophe, we argue for the need to develop an alternative and more poetic
vocabulary by which to articulate a politics of the welcome in order for us to
confront the reality of what Paul Virilio names rightly the finitude of (human) progress.33
Why is it we fear that which is fundamental to the course of the world as well
as of ourselves? And what is to fear of an end? Fighting the debasements of
human potentiality, and moving beyond the impasses which political Lefts
and Rights have reached today, requires the development of a new regime of
truth (discursively, sensually, aesthetically and atmospherically) through
which to articulate the possibility of the coming catastrophe while being able
to welcome this event as the [p. 166] process of passage to a new world and life
beyond that which we have known up until now. A regime of truth that does
not demand of us that we learn to fear more the course of the world and its
transformative effects, with a view to being able to sustain ourselves for
longer in the forms and ways that we have come to know and depend on, but
which instils in us the confidence and courage to encounter and desire of it
the very transformations it renders possible of ourselves.

The 1ac deploys one of disaster capitalisms favorite

tactics: impacts describing senseless horror quickly fade
as we catch our breath and return to a state of normalcy.
However, a trace of that horror remains affectively
embedded within us, and voting aff sanitizes a
continuous, low-level fear of everything that hidden by
the 1ac. Prefer the affective alter-politics produced by the
1nc
Massumi 11 [Brian, political theorist, writer, and philosopher, Professor of
Critical Empiricism at the European Graduate School, Professor in the
Department of Communication Sciences at the University of Montral, April
15, 2011, The half-life of disaster, The Guardian]

The world watched in horror as the northeast coast of Honshu was shaken by an
earthquake of unimaginable magnitude, then razed by a tsunami of monstrous force. The
natural disaster struck with a suddenness defying comprehension . It is as if a body
blow to Japan had knocked the wind out of the world. The hit was so sudden as to leave one speechless.

The media
images showed all there was to say: the horror. The breathtaking, senseless
horror of it, surpassing the human scale of understanding. Then amid the
rubble, life began to stir again. The media lens zooms in to the human scale.
Language regains its descriptive traction . A family finds a loved one against all odds. A
One minute, a city; the next, twisted metal and rubble. Life one minute; death the next.

volunteer doctor travels 18 hours each way to spend a few precious hours of his weekend days off
ministering to the traumatised and wounded. A last survivor is pulled from the rubble days after all were
feared dead. The human stories apply a narrative balm to shock-raw nerves.
The shock is soon alloyed with admiration for the Japanese people's calm and fortitude in the face of the

An affective corner starts to be turned: from horror to heart

warming. Of course, nothing can ever expunge the horror . It will be archived.
The images of the disaster will be held indefinitely in store. For as long as
there is an internet, they will remain available for recirculation. It is not so much
that the horror is replaced by human warmth and its accompaniments. It is rather that it
"decays" in the media. The horror transmutes into a different affective element, its intensity halved,
then halved again, eventually reducing to trace levels. Globally, the event settles back into a
more stable range of the periodic table of collective emotion. What is the half-life of disaster in
today's global media? At most two weeks. The suffering on the ground
continues, and will continue for decades. World attention quickly shifts elsewhere.
disaster.

The Tohoku earthquake and tsunami were soon displaced from media attention by a next unforeseen

This progression is familiar by now. Hurricane in Louisiana,

tsunami in the Indian Ocean, flooding in Germany, flooding in Pakistan, fires in Greece,
earthquake in Haiti. Terrorist attacks in New York, Madrid, London, Moscow. Natural
disaster and terrorism define the poles of disaster. In between stretches a
continuum of disaster, a plenum of frightful events of infinite variety, at every
scale, coming one after the other in an endless series . The media plays its role of
shock: upheaval in Libya.

affective conversion with a regularity that is as predictable as each event in the series, taken separately, is

the affective strike of the event is instantaneously

transmitted, cutting a shocked-and-awed hole of horror into the fabric of
the everyday. The ability to make sense of events is suspended in a momentary hiatus of humanly
unbearable, unspeakable horror. Then comes the zoom-in to the human detail . Stories get
human traction. The horror is alloyed, its impact archived. Another event has been
shockingly unforeseen. First

affectively conveyed with irruptive, interruptive force, only to subside into the background of everyday life.

What remains is a continuous, low-level fear. This fear doesn't stand out
clearly as an emotion. It is more like a habitual posture, an almost bodily bracing
for the next unforeseen blow, a tensing infusing every move and every moment with a vague
foreboding. This trace-form anticipation this post-shock pre-posturing becomes the
very medium of everyday life. The environment of life is increasingly lived as a diffuse and
foreboding "threat environment". It is almost a relief when the next hit comes . It is
only another bout of disaster that will enable the narrative balm to calm again the collective nerves of a
humanity permanently on low-level boil. This fear defies a collective response. When
response is re-enabled, it is on the individual scale of the personal actions of "everyday heroes" carrying
out small deeds of voluntaristic support. At this becalming pole of the affective conversion circuit, human
agency is reasserted, but in the exemplary figure of individual actors exercising personal choice. By
contrast, the out-of-scale strike of the unforeseen event seems utterly inhuman, an "act of God' by which
is meant "nature". Any event that strikes like fate with a speed or at a scale beyond the ken of human

sense-making takes on the aspect of an uncontrollable force of nature. This applies even to wholly humancaused events, such as terrorist attacks. An association is established between "natural disaster" and
"national security threat", which discourages any response other than the cyclic, media-driven return to

That affective pattern becomes second

nature. The association between natural disaster and national security
becomes almost automatic. Shortly after Barack Obama's election as US president, his staff sent
the voluntaristic, individual human scale.

out a press release announcing the appointment of his national security team. It contained a tell-tale
typographic error. The American public was assured of the dedication and competence of its new "natural

Collective response does, of course, go on. But it

takes the privileged form of a growing state security apparatus . The antiterrorism doctrine of the US explicitly includes emergency response to natural
disaster in its purview. All suddenly striking, unforeseen events that defy human
logic and thus seem to substract themselves from the political sphere in its everyday
functioning are lumped together in the same category, and together fall under the jurisdiction of a
security" team. Three points stand out: 1)

security apparatus that is continually growing new arms and extending old ones, weaving itself into a

The network is designed to enable seamless relay from

civilian emergency response to military response . Hurricane Katrina, for example, was
complex, tentacular network.

used by the Bush administration to break down the historical prohibition against the domestic deployment
of national military force in America. A US National Guard was recalled from Iraq for service in Louisiana.
When the fires were ravaging Greece in the summer of 2009, the Greek government declared the
senseless, unforeseen disaster a terrorist threat, because it could not be ruled out that it had been the

Tendencies such as these blur the

boundary between the policing of civil society and the military
sphere, and between natural activity, criminal activity, and acts of war . The
distinction between civil society and the state of exception that is war is
operationally blurred by the exercise of a "full-spectrum force" that is every much
as diffuse and protean as the "threat environment" it purportedly secures. Measures suspending
civil and political rights are extended and multiplied, and increasingly
applied preemptively. The right to peaceful dissent suffers (witness the preemptive military-style
result of terrorist-connected arson. The army was called in.

tactics mobilised against peaceful demonstrators who had broken no law in Copenhagen at the climate

Collective action is further

restrained as the state of exception becomes the norm. The threat
environment becomes an open field for autocratic intervention and arbitrary
talks in 2009 and at the G20 meeting in Toronto in 2010).

exercises of power operating on a continuum with military force. True to form, the nuclear disaster
unfolding at the Fukushima reactor as a consequence of the earthquake and tsunami became "an
opportunity for this pacifist nation to rely on its military at a level unseen since world war two," as the
Japanese Self-Defense Forces are mobilised for civilian duty. Crucially, these developments are no longer
legitimated in terms of political reason or reason of state. The blurring of the boundaries between war and
peace, and the full-spectrum potential militarisation it fosters, is legitimated affectively, through the
media-driven affective conversion circuit just described. In that affective logic, against the allencompassing background of low-level fear, the tentacularly extending security apparatus appears as
"natural" and as fateful as the events it is designed to respond to or preempt. 2) The periodic
heartwarming return to the personal level and human scale obscures the reality that there is, in fact, a
strange complicity at work between the human-caused and the naturally occurring. Hurricane Katrina was
a "natural" disaster only if you fail to note the effects of climate change on the water temperatures of the
Gulf of Mexico, and the environmentally ruinous "management" by the US Corps of Engineers of the
Mississippi River floodplain. A similar complicity between causal factors of different orders, natural and
human, was at work at Fukushima: tectonic shift meets nuclear energy infrastructure. The natural and the
human are everywhere co-factors in disaster. They co-compose disaster in a way that can be fiendishly
complex. But they are not simply in fusion or confusion. The media-borne affective conversion circuit upon
which political power increasingly relies for its legitimation obscures the actual dynamics of this
interlinkage. The return to the human personal level short-circuits any collective response that is not
already either inscribed in the same logic of exploitative development that has brought the world to this
juncture, or in complicity with the national/natural security apparatuses of full-spectrum force that move
forcefully against those enacting alternate strategies of collective action in the name of alternate collective

The actual dynamics of the disaster-prone interlinking of the complex

systems just described involves a third complex system : the global
economy. As the crisis of 2008 illustrated once again, capitalism itself is a far-from-equilibrium system
eminently capable of generating its own endemic disasters. The financialisation of the capitalist
economy has taken it to a level of complexity defying logic or description not to
mention regulation. It is as if capitalism has extruded its own, dedicated threat
environment, in the form of abstract financial instruments operating on the
edge of chaos, permanently under the pall of the spectre of debt crisis. A portion of finance capital, of
futures. 3)

course, still comes down to earth as investment capital. But this is always done with a view to

maximising fluidity, in ways that fuel a perpetual self-destructuring of the

economy, compensated for by a continual , quasi-chaotic remodelling of it. This
is the aspect of capitalism that Schumpeter called its drive to "creative
destruction", and which Naomi Klein has suggestively named "disaster capitalism".
The quasi-chaos of the process only further feeds such phenomena as the
movements of migrant labour, which the nation-states are finding so
destabilising. It also gives rise, in angry reaction, to movements of
contestation which sometimes adopt, in desperation, exactly the kind of
"asymmetrical warfare" that national/natural security apparatuses categorise
as "terrorist", and which they fear above all things. As a counterweight to
the conditions of precariousness fostered by disaster capitalism itself, certain
key economic sectors are allowed to consolidate through mergers. These
quasi-monopolistic movements are tolerated, or even encouraged, in the name of securing the economy's

This has been significantly the case in the energy sector , with
policies friendly to centralised production and quasi-monopolistic ownership
designed, for example, to revive the nuclear power industry or to kick-start
capital-intensive pseudo-green "alternatives" like biofuels and the mythical "clean" coal
precisely the kinds of choices that will render the global situation even more
precarious in the long run by making a mockery of attempts to rein in global
warming, and by setting the stage for future generations' Fukushimas. As
long as disaster capitalism reigns which no doubt will be as long as capitalism itself
reigns the world will be caught in a vicious circle : that of responding by
increasingly draconian and ill-advised means to a threat environment
whose dangers the response only contributes to intensifying. The only way
out is to militate for an alternate interlinkage: between global
anticapitalist political contestation and a renascent environmental movement
with opposition to nuclear power at its heart . A political ecology up to the task
would embrace the human-nature hybridity, in all its complexity, but toward a
new alliance designed to step outside the vicious circle . Also required is a
realisation that the affective turn in the functioning of political legitimation
that has come with the media saturation of global culture is likely
irreversible. An ecological alter-politics must also be an alter-politics of
affect.
future stability.

Nodocentric Necropolitics
There was only ever one debate to be had, that of being
versus becoming. This card is extremely complicated and
if you even try to answer it you will lose.
Bataille 1985. Georges. "The labyrinth." trans. Allan Stoekl, Visions of
Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985) 5 (1985). The
Labyrinth (1930)
**This evidence is gender-modified pronouns are replaced in brackets

Negativity, in other words, the integrity of determination - Hegel

I. THE INSUFFICIENCY OF BEINGS

[Humans] act in order to be. This must not be understood in the negative
sense of conservation (conserving in order not to be thrown out of existence by death), but in the positive sense of a tragic
and incessant combat for a satisfaction that is almost beyond reach. From incoherent
agitation to crushing sleep, from chatter to turning inward, from overwhelming love to
hardening hate, existence sometimes weakens and sometimes accomplishes
"being". And not only do states have a variable intensity, but different beings "are" unequally. A dog that runs and barks seems
"to be" more than a mute and clinging sponge, the sponge more than the water in which
it lives, an influential [human] more than a vacant passerby .
In the first movement, where the force that the master has at [their] disposal puts the slave at [their] mercy, the master deprives the slave of a part of [their] being. Much
later, in return, the "existence" of the master is impoverished to such an extent that it distances itself from the material elements of life. The slave enriches [their] being to
the extent that [they] enslaves these elements by the work to which [their] impotence condemns him.

The fundamental
separation of [humans] into masters and slaves is only the crossed threshold, the
entry into the world of specialized functions where personal "existence" empties itself of its contents; a
The contradictory movements of degradation and growth attain, in the diffuse development of human existence, a bewildering complexity .

[human] is no longer anything but a part of being, and [their] life, engaged in the game of creation and destruction that goes beyond it, appears as a degraded particle
lacking reality. The very fact of assuming that knowledge is a function throws the philosopher back into the world of petty inconsistencies and dissections of lifeless organs.
Isolated as much from action as from the dreams that turn action away and echo it in the strange depths of animated life, [they] led astray the very being that [they]

"Being" increases in the tumultuous agitation of a life that knows no limits; it

wastes away and disappears if [they] who is at the same "being" and knowledge mutilates himself by reducing
himself to knowledge. This deficiency can grow even greater if the
object of knowledge is no longer being in general but a narrow domain, such as an organ, a mathematical question, a juridical form. Action and
dreams do not escape this poverty (each time they are confused with the totality of being), and, in the multicolored immensity of human lives, a limitless
insufficiency is revealed; life, finding its endpoint in the happiness of a bugle blower or the snickering of a village chair-renter,
is no longer the fulfillment of itself, but is its own ludicrous degradation - its fall is comparable to
chose as the object of [their] uneasy comprehension.

that of a king onto the floor.

At the basis of human life there exists

a principle of

insufficiency. In isolation, each [human] sees the majority

of others as incapable or unworthy of "being". There is found, in all free and slanderous conversation, as an animating theme, the awareness of the vanity and the
emptiness of our fellowmen; an apparent stagnant conversation betrays the blind and impotent flight of all life toward an indefinable summit.
The sufficiency of each being is endlessly contested by every other. Even the look that expresses love and admiration comes to me as a doubt concerning my reality. A
burst of laughter or the expression of repugnance greets each gesture, each sentence or each oversight through which my profound insufficiency is betrayed - just as sobs
would be the response to my sudden death, to a total and irremediable omission.

This uneasiness on the part of everyone grows and reverberates, since at each detour, with a kind of
nausea, [humans] discover their solitude in empty night. The universal night in which everything finds itself - and soon loses
itself - would appear to be the existence for nothing, without influence, equivalent to the absence of being, were it not for human nature that emerges within it to give a
dramatic importance to being and life. But this absurd night manages to empty itself of "being" and meaning each time a [human] discovers within it human destiny, itself
locked in turn in a comic impasse, like a hideous and discordant trumpet blast.
"

being" in the world,

That which, in me, demands

that there be

"being" and not just the manifest insufficiency of human or nonhuman nature, necessarily projects (at one time or

another and in reply to human chatter)

divine sufficiency across space,

like the reflection of an impotence, of a servilely

accepted malady of being.

II. THE COMPOSITE CHARACTER OF BEINGS AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF FIXING EXISTENCE IN ANY GIVEN Ipse

Being in the world is so uncertain that I can project it where I want - outside of me. It is a clumsy man,
still incapable of eluding the intrigues of nature, who locks being in the
me. Being in fact is found NOWHERE and it was an easy game for a sickly malice to discover it to be divine, at the
summit of a pyramid formed by the multitude of beings, which has at its base the immensity of the simplest matter.
Being could be confined to the electron if ipseity were precisely not lacking in this simple element. The atom itself has a complexity that is too elementary to be
determined ipsely. The number of particles that make up a being intervene in a sufficiently heavy and clear way in the constitution of its ipseity; if a knife has its handle
and blade indefinitely replaced, it loses even the shadow of its ipseity; it is not the same for a machine which, after six or five years, loses each of the numerous elements
that constituted it when new. But the ipseity that is finally apprehended with difficulty in the machine is still only shadowlike.
Starting from an extreme complexity, being imposes on reflection more than the precariousness of a fugitive appearance, but this complexity - displaced little by little
becomes in turn the labyrinth where what had suddenly come forward strangely loses its way.
A sponge is reduced by pounding to a dust of cells; this living dust is formed by a multitude of isolated beings, and is lost in the new sponge that it reconstitutes. A
siphonophore fragment is by itself an autonomous being, yet the whole siphonophore, to which this fragment belongs, is itself hardly different from a being possessing
unity. Only with linear animals (worms, insects, fish, reptiles, birds and mammals) do the living individual forms definitively lose the faculty of constituting aggregates
bound together in a single body. But while societies of nonlinear animals do not exist, superior animals form aggregates without ever giving rise to corporeal links;
[humans] as well as beavers or ants form societies of individuals whose bodies are autonomous. But in regard to being, is this autonomy the final appearance, or is it
simply error?
In men, all existence is tied in particular to language, whose terms determine its modes of appearance within each person. Each person can only represent [their] total
existence, if only in [their] own eyes, through the medium of words. Words spring forth in [their] head, laden with a host of human or superhuman lives in relation to which

Being depends on the mediation of words, which cannot merely

present it arbitrarily as "autonomous being," but which must present it profoundly as "being in relation". One need only follow, for a short time, the traces
of the repeated circuits of words to discover, in a disconcerting vision, the labyrinthine structure of the human being. What is commonly
called knowing - when a [human] knows [their] neighbour - is never anything but existence
composed for an instant (in the sense that all existence composes itself - thus the atom composes its
unity from variable electrons), which once made of these two beings a whole every bit as real as its parts. A limited number of
[they] privately exists.

exchanged phrases, no matter how conventional, sufficed to create the banal interpenetration of two existing juxtaposed regions. The fact that after this short exchange
the [human] is aware of knowing [their] neighbour is opposed to a meeting without recognition in the street, as well as to the ignorance of the multitude of beings that one
never meets, in the same way that life is opposed to death. The knowledge of human beings thus appears as a mode of biological connection, unstable but just as real as
the connections between cells in tissue. The exchange between two human particles in fact possesses the faculty of surviving momentary separation.

A [human] is only a particle inserted in unstable and entangled wholes.

These wholes are composed in personal life in the form of multiple possibilities, starting with
a knowledge that is crossed like a threshold - and the existence of the particle can in no way be
isolated from this composition, which agitates it in the midst of a whirlwind of ephemerids. This extreme instability of connections
alone permits one to introduce , as a puerile but convenient illusion, a representation of isolated
existence turning in on itself.
every isolable element of the universe always appears as a particle that can
enter into composition with a whole that transcends it. Being is only found as a whole composed of particles whose
relative autonomy is maintained. These two principles dominate the uncertain presence of an ipse being across a distance that
never ceases to put everything in question. Emerging in universal play as unforeseeable chance, with
extreme dread imperatively becoming the demand for universality, carried away to vertigo by the movement that composes it, the ipse being that presents
itself as a universal is only a challenge to the diffuse immensity that escapes its precarious violence, the tragic
negation of all that is not its own bewildered phantom's chance. But, as a man, this being falls into the
In the most general way,

meanders of the knowledge of [their] fellowmen, which absorbs [their] substance in order to reduce it to a component of what goes beyond the virulent madness of [their]
autonomy in the total night of the world.

being" is, par excellence, that which, desired to the point of dread, cannot be
endured - plunge humans into a foggy labyrinth formed by the
multitude of "acquaintances" with which signs of life and phrases
can be exchanged. But when [they] escapes the dread of "being" through this flight - a "being" that is autonomous and isolated in night - a
Abdication and inevitable fatigue - due to the fact that "

[human] is thrown back into insufficiency, at least if [they] cannot find outside of himself the blinding flash that [they] had been unable to endure within himself, without
whose intensity [their] life is but an impoverishment, of which [they] feels obscurely ashamed.
III. THE STRUCTURE OF THE LABYRINTH
Emerging out of an inconeivable void into the play of beings, as a lost satellite of two phantoms (one with a bristly beard, the other softer, her head decorated with a bun),
it is in the father and mother who transcend [them] that the miniscule human being first encountered the illusion of sufficiency. In the complexity and entanglement of
wholes, to which the human particle belongs, this satellite-like mode of existence never entirely disappears. A particular being not only acts as an element of a shapeless
and structureless whole (a part of the world of unimportant "acquaintances" and chatter), but also as a peripheral element orbiting around a nucleus where being hardens.

What the lost child had found in the self-assured existence of the all-powerful beings who took care of [them] is now sought by the abadoned [human] wherever knots and
concentrations are formed throughout a vast incoherence. Each particular being delegates to the group of those situated at the centre of the multitudes the task of
realizing the inherent totality of "being". [they] is content to be a part of a total existence, which even in the simplest cases retains a diffuse character. Thus relatively
stable wholes are produced, whose centre is a city, in its early form a corolla that encloses a double pistil of sovereign and god. In the case where many cities abdicate
their central function in favour of a single city, an empire forms around a capital where sovereignity and the gods are concentrated; the gravitation around a centre then

a more and more complex

movement of group composition raises to the point of universality the human race,
but it seems that universality, at the summit, causes all existence to explode and
decomposes it with violence. The universal god destroys rather than
supports the human aggregates that raise [their] ghost. [they] himself is only dead, whether a mythical delirium set [them]
degrades the existence of peripheral cities, where the organs that constituted the totality of being wilt. By degrees,

up to be adored as a cadaver covered with wounds, or whether through [their] very universality [they] becomes, more than any other, incapable of stopping the loss of
being with the cracked partitions of ipseity.
IV. THE MODALITIES OF COMPOSITION AND DECOMPOSITION OF BEING

The city that little by little empties itself of life, in favour of a more
brilliant and attractive city, is the expressive image of the play of
existence engaged in composition. Because of the composing attraction, composition empties elements of the greatest
part of their being, and this benefits the centre - in other words, it benefits composite being. There is the added fact that, in a given domain, if the attraction of a certain
centre is stronger than that of a neighbouring centre, the second centre then goes into decline. The action of powerful poles of attraction across the human world thus
reduces, depending on their force of resistance, a multitude of personal beings to the state of empty shadows, especially when the pole of attraction on which they depend
itself declines, due to the action of another more powerful pole. Thus if one imagines the effects of an influential current of attraction on a more or less arbitrarily isolated
form of activity, a style of clothing created in a certain city devalues the clothes worn up to that time and, consequently, it devalues those who wear them within the limits
of the influence of this city. This devaluation is stronger if, in a neighbouring country, the fashions of a more brilliant city have already outclassed those of the first city. The
objective character of these relations is registered in reality when the contempt and laughter manifested in a given centre are not compensated for by anything elsewhere,
and when they exert an effective fascination. The effort made on the periphery to "keep up with fashion" demonstrates the inability of the peripheral particles to exist by
themselves.
Laughter intervenes in these value determinations of being as the expression of the circuit of movements of attraction across a human field. It manifests itself each time a
change in level suddenly occurs: it characterizes all vacant lives as ridiculous. A kind of incandescent joy - the explosive and sudden revelation of the presence of being - is
liberated each time a striking appearance is contrasted with its absence, with the human void. Laughter casts a glance, charged with the mortal violence of being, into the
void of being, into the void of life.
But laughter is not only the composition of those it assembles into a unique convulsion; it most often decomposes without consequence, and sometimes with a virulence
that is so pernicious that it even puts in question composition itself, and the wholes across which it functions. Laughter attains not only the peripheral regions of existence,
and its object is not only the existence of fools and children (of those who remain vacant); through a necessary reversal, it is sent back from the child to its father and from
the periphery to the centre, each time the father or the centre in turn reveals an insufficiency comparable to that of the particles that orbit around it. Such a central
insufficiency can be ritually revealed (in saturnalia or in a festival of the ass as well as in the puerile grimaces of the father amusing [their] child). It can be revealed by the
very action of children or the "poor" each time exhaustion withers and weakens authority, allowing its precarious character to be seen. In both cases, a dominant necessity
manifests itself, and the profound nature of being is disclosed. Being can complete itself and attain the menacing grandeur of imperative totality; this accomplishment only
serves to project it with a greater violence into the vacant night. The relative insufficiency of peripheral existences is absolute insufficiency in total existence. Above
knowable existences, laughter traverses the human pyramid like a network of endless waves that renew themselves in all directions. This reverberation convulsion chokes,
from one end to the other, the innumerable being of [human] - opened at the summit by the agony of God in a black night.
V. THE MONSTER IN THE NIGHT OF THE LABYRINTH

Being

attains the blinding flash in tragic annihilation. Laughter only assumes its fullest impact on being at the moment when, in the fall that it unleashes, a

is not only the composition of elements that

constitutes the incandescence of being, but its decomposition in its
mortal form. The difference in levels that provokes common laughter - which opposes the lack of an absurd
life to the plenitude of successful being - can be replaced by that which opposes the summit
of imperative elevation to the dark abyss that obliterates all existence. Laughter is thus assumed by the
representation of death is cynically recognised. It

totality of being. Renouncing the avaricious malice of the scapegoat, being itself, to the extent that it is the sum of existences at the limits of the night, is spasmodically
shaken by the idea of the ground giving way beneath its feet. It is in universality (where, due to solitude, the possibility of facing death through war appears) that the
necessity of engaging in a struggle, no longer with an equal group but with nothingness, becomes clear. THE UNIVERSAL resembles a bull, sometimes absorbed in the
nonchalance of animality and abandoned to the secret paleness of death, and sometimes hurled by the rage of ruin into the void ceaselessly opened before it by a skeletal
torero. But the void it meets is also the nudity it espouses TO THE EXTENT THAT IT IS A MONSTER lightly assuming many crimes, and it is no longer, like the bull, the
plaything of nothingness, because nothingness itself is its plaything; it only throws itself into nothingness in order to tear it apart and to illuminate the night for an instant,
with an immense laugh - a laugh it never would have attained if this nothingness had not totally opened beneath its feet.<b>Georges Bataille</b>

The 1ac is merely an inversion of Clausewitz, in which political

substitutes for war are merely way by other means. The logics,
languages, and affects of militarism have become so normalized that
any attempt to distinguish between military and civic presence
militarizes life itself, producing a perverse investment in normalized
violence that maintains the global war machine
Evans and Pollard 14 Brad, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the
Global Insecurities Center, the School of Sociology, Politics and International

Studies, the University of Bristol, UK, and Tyler J., ABD Candidate in English and
Cultural Studies at McMaster University, "Education, the Politics of Resilience, and
the War on Youth: A Conversation with Brad Evans," Review of Education,
Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 36:3: 193-213
TP:

You make a key distinction between

speak to distinction between

and the spaces they occupy

financialization, and so on.

what you call soft and hard forms of militarism which, in many ways I think,

the soft and hard wars on youth .

are endlessly commodified

On the one hand,

young people

and turned over to ethically vacuous forms of marketization,

On the other hand, those young people

who, for whatever reason,

cant

fit the liberal consumerist script are funneled into one of the
multiple containment zones of the punishing state .

That said, your notion of soft and hard

militarism I think nicely addresses the ways in which militarization works throughout society on multiple levelsin the form of global, national, and domestic security, but
also insofar as military language, logics, and affects have crept ubiquitously into our everyday lives through a forcefully militarized cultural apparatus. Could you talk a bit
about how we might unpack and then extend these categories in ways that allow us to understand a bit better one of the most significant fronts in the war on youth? BE: I
think we need to start here by looking at the title of the Summer Institute, that is The War on Youth. How do we look at the discursive provocation of saying there is a
war on youth taking place? Weve had some discussion around whether

the term war itself is a metaphor

whether it is a diagnostic tool for really analyzing the conditions of the present.

The question

the term war function politically?

that is instantly raised

or

is how does

One thing we can say is that within military establishments, and certainly

within the political environment on popular media, the proliferation of the use of the term war has not been anything unique. Throughout the 1990s

every

form of social ill seemed to have a war waged on itthe war on

poverty, the war on drugs .
Fox News yesterday and they were talking about a war on Wal-Mart.

political way.

This goes into the war on terror, which becomes an openly declared war on all fronts. I was watching

This language

is emotive and

functions in a

certain

But also, it does reveal the way that people will diagnose the operation of power. First, an important start point here is that the

proliferation of the use of war doesnt open up into popular vocabulary within critical discoursesits actually touted by regimes of power.

A regime of

power will say a war needs to take place upon this particular social
problem . The proliferation around the meaning of war has been made into a
moral and ethical imperative, such that action needs to be taken because the
stakes are so high there will be casualties, and of course all wars produce
casualties. You then have to go into the question of saying: What is the use
value and function of appropriating the terminology of war and turning the logic
of war back against itself? One of the earlier and really sophisticated mediations
on this appeared in Michel Foucaults (2003) Society Must be Defended, where he
really appreciates the idea that power has always taken life as its object,
particularly since the beginning of modernity, and indeed, that war has always
taken life to be its object. This resonates with the Nietzschean idea that war is
the mode of modern societies, such that nihilism is also the motive of modern
societies. Situating this in the context of whats happening to youth today, if we
take power at its word, then youth are quite literally inserted within a war
paradigm. If we just take the post 9=11 moment, it was certainly a war paradigm
insomuch as youth overseas were deemed to be the troubling demographic
which could A Conversation with Brad Evans 211 Downloaded by
[174.114.20.221] at 17:56 03 July 2014 become radicalized and which could
become insurgents. Youth at home increasingly became profiled and analyzed on
their basis for radicality. This paradigm of war, insecurity, and profiling has

increasingly become normalized such that the academic setting itself has
become the front line of a war effort in the most militarized and crude policing
insofar as educators and academics in the UK and Europe now have to monitor
studentsattendance, performance, whether someone speaks in a way that
might raise suspicions of radical thoughts. We have openly talked for the last
tenfifteen years about this as a war for hearts and minds. In other words, how
could you even think to divorce education from a war for hearts and minds? Its
an integral element for the war effort and it continues to be an integral element
of a war effort that is, by definition, a war without end. There is no end to the
catastrophic condition of our times. TP: This is what you mean when inverting
Clausewitz; when you talk about politics today becoming a war by other means?
BE: Absolutely. And politicians have expressed this precise sentiment that we
need to see politics as the continuation of war by other means. Why? Because
conventional understandings of warfare have been all but eviscerated. There is
no clear sense anymore of who are our friends and who are enemies, who is
inside and who is outside, and when times of war and times of peace exist. These
categories have been all but eviscerated because neoliberalism has collapsed the
precise space-time continuum that once held modern politics together TP: Which
is why I think to deny that there is a war on youth is not just to misunderstand
whats happening to young people today, but its also to misunderstand the
changing shape of war in the contemporary moment. BE: Absolutely. And to
misunderstand the ways in which war has become normalized, to deny the very
terms that power uses. Power in itself openly declares a war upon youth
insomuch as youth and radicality are deemed to be dangerous. The peace effort
has to begin from the logical position that a war is taking place. And this war
takes children as its object. Why does it take children as its object? This is
because some ideas are liberatory, some ideas are dangerous, this is a war effort
which is very much taking place in conditions of normality such that the military
paradigm of society cannot be divorced from the civic. One of the inevitable
outcomes of this has been the shift towards what we can call entertaining
militarism. Not only we do entertain the military as a central element of global
civil society, but the idea that the military should simply exist in the barracks and
be brought out during times of exceptional crisis has been eviscerated
altogether. We had the military providing security for the London Olympics, we
have the military parading on talent shows as if its part of everyday
entertainment, military personal are being openly recruited into education
systems through Troops to Teachers programs, and so on. The lines between the
military and the civic have been so eviscerated that it is impossible to distinguish
between times of war and times of peace. Or, to put it another way, since peace
is now seen to belong to a bygone era and war has become so normalized then
the front line exists everywhere. It exists in what types of commodities you
purchase, it exists in whats permissible to teach, and it certainly exists in terms
of what types of subjectivities we are producing. 212 T. J. Pollard Downloaded by
[174.114.20.221] at 17:56 03 July 2014 TP: It seems that any logic of towards
perpetual peace has become perverted into towards perpetual war. BE: Well
this is one of the real great ironies of the revival of certain thinking around
perpetual peace, because what we have quickly discovered is that through
inaugurating perpetual peace what weve actually declared is global war. Global
war becomes the inevitable outcome of a peace that cannot be achieved other

than through militarism. A question that needs to be asked, and which Michel
Foucault always asks, is what type of political subjects do you produce if you say
that violence is necessary for their production? Of course, the type of subjects
you do produce are subjects that have learned to accept the normalization of
violence as integral to their very forms of life. TP: Subjects, in fact, which dont
simply accept violence, but which have been schooled into taking immense
pleasure in violence. BE: We have to look at the proliferation of spectacles of
violence today to see how violence operates not only through the pleasure
principle, but how, on the one hand, society and popular culture preaches that
the only way that you can really truly find empowerment today is through
violence; and yet, on the other hand, youre demonized on account of acting
upon those precise messages that popular culture deems the only way to find
empowerment, pleasure, and desire in the present moment.

The affirmative accelerates a global transition of communicative

networks towards nodocentric activism, in which necropolitical
feedback loops sustain a cruel optimistic investment in the global
ramifications of our decision-making

Nyongo 12 Tavia, associate professor of performance studies at New York

University, where he researches and teaches black diasporic culture and
aesthetics, feminist and queer theory, and popular music studies, "Queer Africa
and the Fantasy of Virtual Participation," WSQ: Womens Studies Quarterly,
Volume 40, Numbers 1 %26 2, Spring/Summer 2012

What explains the simultaneity of these messages on the web platform of a

single activist site? I don't wish to single out a well-meaning, multi-issue activist
organization for undue criticism, simply for faihng to keep a webpage updated.
The dynamic of the story is undoubtedly complex: the Bahati bill has wound an
unpredictable way through Uganda's legislative procedure, periodically appearing
to be on the verge of adoption before being semipermanently "shelved" in May
2011 (although its author vows to reintroduce a new version after elections due
in February 2012) ("Uganda's Anti-gay Bill 'Shelved'" 2011). Without unfair
criticism, I do want to point out how the Internet is shaping the communicative
strategy of humanitarian and human rights activism.* Technology theorist Jaron
Lanier (2010) calls these design "lock-ins," structures that become self-sustaining
because of mass adoption and the consequent nigh impossibility of conversion to
more optimal systems. Because of one such arbitrary structure of the web, for
instance, the call to action and the follow-up reports are on different webpages
(in this case not even hyperlinked to each other). The sharing mechanism of web
2.0 sites like Facebook and Twitter further isolate individual pages from the sites
they originate from, and add Queer Africa and the Fantasy of Virtual Participation

49 their own independent commenting and archiving that can perpetuate the life
of the page even if it is updated or removed on the original server. The rhythmic
urgency and delay produced by the series of action alerts and updates on the
Avaaz website can thus not exactly be mapped directly onto the chronology of
the Bahati bill's progression through Uganda's parliament. Because of the
peculiar temporality of alerting an indefinite number of people via the Internet,
Avaaz activists deliberately composed their alert to be chronologically
ambiguous. Rhetorically, the call combines temporal urgency with no specific
time frame.^ A webpage, instantly accessible globally at low cost, is best left
ambiguous, all the better to capture the marginal utility of the least committed,
least informed browser who can be convinced to chck a button and send an
email. The homepage ofAvaaz.org at any given point in time is a bewildering
array of flash points from that day's or week's media, drawn from all corners of
the globe. Encountering it, one is confronted with the prospect of the Sisyphean
task of involving oneself comprehensively, and with a peculiar kind of
indifference, to all issues equally. But the site appears to work best as a kind of
clearinghouse, where issues work more like nodal entry points, with no attempt
to discourage involvement with an exhaustive presentation (or integrated
analysis) of world crisis. As Ulises Mejia (2010) notes, such "nodocentrism" has
performative effects on the activism it ostensibly facilitates, shaping and
structuring what can be known and done even as it greatly magnifies and
accelerates the means by which such knowledge and action can occur. In
converting activism into a kind of informaticsthe crucial objective is the count
of signatures and the rapidity with which they can be gained and deployeda
specific kind of discourse is mobilized and, with it, another short circuit. This
raises questions regarding our easy convictions about the causative role of sheer
numbers in swaying decision makers, cast in the role of masters being confronted
with a demand to exchange reasons (a role I will return to and query in my
conclusion). The deliberate reduction of information in order to ease the
threshold of participation can actually have the effect, I argue, of disorienting the
subject in the process of mobilizing her or him to action. I mean here to go
beyond the quite familiar critique that information on the Internet is unreliable to
note how unrehability and affective intensity can enter into a negative feedback
loop, such that the less rehable information we can glean, the more we attach
ourselves to intensities that seem plausible insofar as they conform to imaginary
structures. This is what Zizek calls the 50 Tavia Nyong'o dechne in symbohc
efficiency. Jodi Dean comments on the idea in the following passage: Aiek's
notion of a decline in symbolic efficiency... highlights our perpetual uncertainty,
our sense that we never really know whether what we say registers with the
other as what we mean as well as our sense that we are never quite sure what
"everybody knows." ... Imaginary identities sustained by the promise and
provision of enjoyment replace symbolic identities.... Imaginary identities are
incapable of establishing a firm place to stand, a position from which one can

make sense of one's world.... The flip side of the multiplicity of imaginary
identities, then, is the reduction and congealing of identity into massive sites or
strange attractors of affective investment (2009,63-67). The subject of the urgent
action alert, we could hypothesize, is increasingly imaginary, rather than
symbohc. That is, she or he is mobilized by a presymbohc image of threat or lure,
one that proliferates independent of secure symbolically efficient knowledge.
Uganda becomes a strange attractor of imaginary identities gathered around a
"world outcry," and Ugandan queers are framed within an updated version of
what Anne McClintock calls "panoptical time," or "the image of global history
consumedat a glancein a single spectacle from a point of privileged
invisibihty"( 1995, 37). In this current case, Ugandan LGBT folk are depicted
through the metaphor of the closet, globally and transhistorically construed and,
through that metaphor, placed at a prior point in a historical development that
the West has already progressed through (see, for example, Gettleman 2010). As
McChntock's stresses, this is above all an optical effect that produces a fantasy of
the other as somehow occupying a different order of time. Outcry is organized
around what might happen or may already be happening in Uganda, that is,
around temporal uncertainty, and we are urged to invest affect to the extent that
we remain uncertain. How could it possibly hurt, after all, to quickly express our
indignation to President Yoweri Museveni for presiding over plans to execute
gays? It's less important that we truly understand the situation and beheve in the
efficacy of this action than it is to believe that someone believes in it. We are
thus yoked to our activism through a relation of interpassivity. The decline of
symbolic efficiency presents a challenge to more empirical approaches to the
study of human rights in Africa. The shock of the "Kill the Gays" bill as a strange
attractor of global affect could indeed be parlayed into a more sustained, deeply
historical knowledge of the situ- Queer Africa and the Fantasy of Virtual
Participation 51 ation in Uganda. Such a sustained ethnographic, historical, and
political engagement would place the recent events in the context of prior
controversies, going back to the 1990s, over Uganda's ABC (Abstinence, Be
Faithful, Condoms) HIV/AIDS education strategy. Uganda's approach was seen as
an outlier in the global mainstream, and its efficacy became the subject of sharp
ideological dispute as evangelical groups, among others, championed Uganda's
"just say no" approach (Hoad 2010). The sexual regulation of the citizenry had
thus been established as the basis of a displaced struggle over sovereignty well
before the Bahati bill had been introduced and provides the necessary context for
understanding how global action against it is perceived in Uganda. Once the bill
drew international censure, from the administration of President Barack Obama
and other foreign governments and agencies, it was drawn into the complex
diplomatic and political calculus of a regime balancing a variety of concerns. The
legal and moral proscriptions against homosexuality were hardly primary among
those concerns, given that Uganda's penal codederived from the British
colonial eraalready punishes homosexuality. Rather than a question of the

symbolic order of the law, as most activism assumed it to be, homosexuality

became a strange attractor for imaginary identities aggressively competing
within the communicative terrain of neohberalism, such as the evangehcal
scourge of the gay seducer, and the humanitarian angel swooping in to rescue
the endangered and helpless African queer. While such imaginary identities do
have real-world effects, their allure often encourages implausible leaps, such as
the miscategorization of a human rights violation as an imminent humanitarian
catastrophe, which the free-floating circulation of the term "genocide"
encouraged. The patient, retrospective, and time-consuming work of piecing
together the full picture of a situation is precisely what a politics organized
around rapid mobilization militates against, particularly when it is a single issue.
Interminable analysis is disparaged in situations where a decision is needed. It is
certainly the case that activists must act with less than total information. And
furthermore, activism is a performative agency designed to change a situation,
not merely to adequately understand it. But this does not answer the question of
how the decision actually operates under conditions of declining symbolic
efficiency. How do we know, in other words, that the outcry has worked, even if
we agree to participate in it? What chain of causation, exactly, links our
participation in the plight of queer Africa to the eventual decision (or
nondecision) to shelve the Bahati bill? 52 Tavia Nyong'o Who is the master to
whom we are addressing our demands, and does a figure like Giles Muhame
speak his discourse? Participation as a Neoliberal Fantasy Something tells me to
check out the Facebook page o Rolling Stone and its editors. That thing, I think,
is my memory that what originally got me active on Facebook was the realization
that all my extended cousins, aunts, and uncles in Kenya and its diaspora were
using it. Instantly I am cruising the pages of Giles Muhame and his colleague Cliff
Abenaitwe, recent journalism graduates of Makerere University, once a jewel of
African higher education that has been decimated, as George Caffentzis has
recently written, by World Bank structural adjustment pohcies designed to stripmine free pubhc higher education and foster in its place a system of paying
students and entrepreneurial-minded faculties competing for tuitions. The
entrepreneurial, opportunistic, and cynical affective tonality of the Rolling Stone
editors is thus not a symptom of African alterity, but of their subjectivation within
the uneven but singular landscape of neoliberaHsm (on cynicism as the affective
tonality of the neoliberal multitude, see Virno 2003). Students exiting the
neoliberal African university, Caffentzis writes are "a displaced, unemployed,
increasingly proletarianised, and potentially revolutionary class of'knowledge
workers'" (2010, 35). They are also part of the Facebook generation, if profiles of
Muhame and Abenaitwe are any indication. Those profiles are indeed
incongruous. Abenaitwe, while calling for the death of gays, also describes
himself as "a down to earth, caring, loving, friendly person." Giles Muhame spells
out his name in an acrostic: G is for "generous," I is for "intelligent," L is for
"lovin," and so on. Most intriguingly, for a man interviewed on CNN as agreeing

with the view that homosexuality is an abomination, Muhame hsts himself as

"interested in" both women and men. Another short circuit. Is this person near
from me, or far? Are we speaking the same language, using the same platform,
meshing through the same computer code, or not? In its very imagined proximity
and invitation to link, like, comment, and connect, Facebook enacts the
dissolution of symbohc efliciency into an eddy of imaginary identities that lack "a
position from which one can make sense of one's world." In the place of such
stable positions, we confront waves and oscillations of affect that buffet us into
opportunistic ahgnments. It is not necessarily a contradiction, I am arguing, for
Muhame to present himself as a "lovin'" person inter- Queer Africa and the
Fantasy of Virtual Participation 53 ested in both men and women on Facebook
and a dutiful protopatriarch calhng for the death of gays on CNN. Such cynicism
is the emotional tonality of the multitude under conditions of the decline of
symbolic efficiency. At one level, reading Dean alongside recent controversies
over homosexuality in East Africa might be taken for the famihar tactic of
showing how representations of the other actually reveal more about us than
about them. Africa becomes a kind of projection screen upon which the dechne of
participatory democracy, the rise of evangelicalism, and so on, in the United
States, can be mapped. But the power of a symptomatic analysis of democracy
as a neohberal fantasy, I argue, goes beyond this tactic. Rather than just
reflecting Western identity back upon itself, what the short circuits of
communicative capitalism do, under Dean's analysis, is expose the lack and the
split in that Western identity, reveahng how liberal democracy is not at all
identical to itself This, I think, is a much more arresting theoretical tactic. Rather
than fruitlessly rehearsing the argument of whether it is just or right to "export"
our values or democracy. Dean asks whether such values and democracy are
powerful self-deceptions, things we cannot give because they are things we do
not have. Dean insists that it is ruinous to take democracy (and I would add,
human rights) as the horizon of left politics, arguing that democracy under
neohberalism has become increasingly separated from the political and sutured
to the economic. That is to say, democratic participation is being rendered
increasingly isomorphic Vidth consumer choice, both because participation is
becoming more passive and, conversely, because consumerism is becoming
more active and widely available. The productions of nationally or globally
conscious individuals increasingly flow through the same channelsSkype,
Facebook, AT&T, Blogger.comthat any other lifestyle, interest, purchase, or
interpersonal relation takes. A gay activist in BerUn can post an irate comment
on the Facebook page of a homophobic journahst half a world away. Indeed,
many of the pictures of "Uganda's top gays" were scraped from social networking
sites like Facebook. All this furious, contestatory activity, whfle registering to us
as pohtical action, is registering to Facebook, and so forth, as "user-generated
content." To switch to a Deleuzean metaphor, such activist contributions are
inscribed upon the same recording surface of capital as that of all other forms of

postmodern production. They become subject to the logic of accumulation

through dispossession. This logic increasingly subtends all activismor simply
activitythat invests in the hope that a neoliberal order contains the resources
vthin itself to erect a world of greater freedom. But before we can even begin
that project, the moment of accumulation has occurred. Recall the almost
comically literal example of neoliberal globalization in the ad before the CNN
interview. Whoever CNN thinks I am, clearly it is someone whose interest in
international affairs might extend to investing in "free economic zones" in Korea.
Even before I have watched the video, in other words, my "eyeballs" have been
"monetized," in industry jargon. Even before I have been invited to share in the
CNN reporter's gaping astonishment at the barbaric African other, my
participation has already been short-circuited, its value accrued, and, at one
economic level, it doesn't matter whether what I see is misleading or not, the
entire picture or not. Information, advertisement, and affect are all brought
together in what Dean calls "a knot of hope and despair (2009,75-94). This is why
it's relevant to tell the story through the Twitter feed and the CNN website. The
ideology inheres to the mode of participation, in this case including the affective
labor of (a)BradNYC in posting the link, and mine to feel impelled to click it. As
Dean puts it, "Rhetorics of access, participation, and democracy work
ideologically to secure the technological infrastructure of neoliberalism"
(2009,23). In extending this argument to a transnational perspective, it is
important to keep in mind the structural unevenness of this infrastructure, pace
Thomas Friedman and his paeans to a "flat" world of global competition. One
symptom of the unevenness of these global effects is the complex way that the
biopolitical and necropolitical affect each other in a way that works against a
single horizon of human rights strategy. In their insistence on a binarism between
an able and ethical world community and a disabled and corrupt African
sovereignty, human rights interventions reveal their bio political basis, that is,
their hope to intervene at the level of life. This form of power is attached to the
Foucauldian dynamic of governmentality, which describes the modes of
increased surveillance, pastoral care, and subjectifying intervention that the
European state increasingly deployed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
This account is contrasted in the work of Mbembe by a necropolitics, in which the
state intervenes less to preserve life than to manifest its power over death. With
his concept of necropohtics, Mbembe points out the specificity of postcolonial
struggles over the terms of an African sovereignty characterized by a relatively
weak state power, in biopolitical sectors like health Queer Africa and the Fantasy
of Virtual Participation 55 care, education, sanitation, and civil engineering, in
contrast to a relatively stronger sovereignty in areas like the military,
paramihtary, pohce, and communications sectors. Hence the relative indifference
of the necropohtical to life, which is simply "permitted" to live, in contrast to
death, which is carefully organized, industriahzed, and deployed, whether in war,
genocide, or starvation. When Giles Muhame hotly denies inciting violence in his

interview with CNN, we see the dynamics of bio/necropolitics at work. His denial
seems to reflect less a humanitarian reflex in the face of the consequences of his
rhetoric than it does his negotiation for position within an authoritarian state that
reserves for itself the deployment of the power to make death. By participating in
a populist, public demand for gays to be identified and hanged, he can appeal to
the necropolitical state in terms that flatter its sovereignty, even if it outrages the
international community. But such a call tips into sedition if it leads to
unauthorized extralegal pogroms, so he must couch his protests against the
neoliberal immiseration and normlessness of Uganda in the very language of
patriarchy and gerontocracy that dominates people of his generation, making
gays and lesbians scapegoats for globalization. Rolling Stone's homophobic
aggression against tbe strange attractor of homosexuality cannot be read as
simply lining up with the patriarchal order of an authoritarian (and
nondemocratic) regime. It is, rather, symptomatic of the new inchoate subjects
formed by neoliberal globalization, which the canny trademark infringement of
the name of their enterprise should telegraph. Given the disqualification and
derogation of the university by neoliberalism, producing the roving and
opportunistic "knowledge worker," where should the traditionally constituted
university discourse intervene? The structural imbalances of neoliberahsm
militate against its dream of better knowledge supplied by native informants.
Indeed, the university discourse estabhshes a social bond based on its own
particular fantasy, which is of a public sphere founded in the exchange of
reasons. What evidence do we have that communicative capitalism is
constructing such a sphere? Activism displaces theoretical reflection in favor of
closer knowledge of what is reaUy happening on the ground. But no one is placed
in a position of cognitive privilege with regard to what is really happening on the
ground. Africans themselves lack fluency in the dozens of requisite languages
and colonial histories, or the abihty to navigate the continent's many borders
with the ease of high flying international experts, research- 56 Tavia Nyong'o ers
and do-gooders. A Kenyan colleague sighs as he relates being asked for his
expert commentary on the situation elsewhere in queer Africa, and clicking on
Wikipedia (Macharia 2010). The gay international, especially in its media
projects, seems to long for the return of anthropology's native informant (Massad
2007). But what if we now only encounter the digitally native informant? What if
everywhere we turn Africans are plugged into the same circuits of power,
knowledge, and enjoyment, albeit from a position of radical inequality? How then
is the stable binarism of us rescuing them possibly to be maintained? From
Postcolonial Hybrid to Neoliberal Pervert If it is foolhardy to enter into the naive
attempt to know the African subject completely, transparently and, as it were,
peer to peer, then it might be past time to revisit a famous, nigh, fabulous, figure
the postcolonial hybridand ask whether such a figure is sufficient to the task
of mounting a political challenge to the present neoliberal order. Homi Bhabha
developed a theory of postcolonial hybridity in The Location of Culture that is

based upon what he identifies as a "time-lag" and "temporal break in

representation" (Bhabha 1994, 274). It is through such time lag, he suggests,
that "new and hybrid agencies and articulations" emerge (275). In colonial and
postcolonial contexts, such a hybrid agency might be seen ia the unexpected
fluency of the colonized or formerly colonized in the terms of the colonial order.
But what happens in the neoliberal present when the compression of time and
space voids the possibility of lag? The postcolonial hybrid occupied a future
competence that the colonial order officially recognized, but temporally delayed
(we have all encountered the astonishment of the Western visitor, impressed that
the Ugandan speaks English 50 well). But now we see the uncanny specter of the
supposedly atavistic African with the Facebook profile, spelling out his own name
as a kooky acrostic like any daydreaming ninth grader from Omaha. Or my own
experience of flying to Nairobi to meet with young Kenyan queers, only to
encounter a room full of computers and cell phones, with one group of boys
huddled around a terminal displaying the Germany-based website GayRomeo.
When time lag is displaced by the short circuit, it is no longer clear that any
position enjoys a perspective from which to perceive the other as lagging.
Panoptic time is perturbed, which does not mean that it disappears as an effect,
just that the dislocation of colonial privilege Queer Africa and the Fantasy of
Virtual Participation 57 within the symbohc order produces more aggressive
imaginary efforts to resurrect it.

The process of liberal subject formation is the nexus point of modern

violence. Liberalisms defense of rights is easily manipulated into a
biopolitical protection of life itself, which then seeks to cleanse all the
areas of political difference. War is thus the essential feature of the
liberal encounter.
Evans 10. Brad Evans, Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Studies
at the University of Leeds and Programme Director for International Relations,
"Foucaults Legacy: Security, War, and Violence in the 21st Century," Security
Dialogue vol.41, no. 4, August 2010, pg. 422-424, sage

Imposing liberalism has often come at a price. That price has tended to be a continuous
recourse to war. While the militarism associated with liberal internationalization has already received scholarly attention (Howard, 2008), Foucault
was concerned more with the continuation of war once peace has been declared.4 Denouncing the illusion that we are living in a world in which order and peace have
been restored (Foucault, 2003: 53), he set out to disrupt the neat distinctions between times of war/military exceptionalism and times of peace/civic normality. War
accordingly now appears to condition the type of peace that follows. None have been more ambitious in map- ping out this warpeace continuum than Michael Dillon &

Liberalism today, they argue, is

underwritten by the unreserved righteousness of its mission. Hence, while there may still be populations
that exist beyond the liberal pale, it is now taken that they should be included. With liberal peace therefore predicated on
the pacification/elimination of all forms of political difference in order that liberalism might meet its own moral and
political objectives, the more peace is commanded, the more war is declared in order to
achieve it: In proclaiming peace . . . liberals are nonetheless committed also to making war. This is
Julian Reid (2009). Their liberal war thesis provides a provocative insight into the lethality of making live.

the martial face of liberal power that, contrary to the familiar narrative, is directly fuelled by the universal and pacific ambitions for which liberalism is to be admired
(Dillon & Reid, 2009: 2).

Liberalism

thus

stands accused

here

of universalizing war

in its pursuit of

peace: However much liberalism abjures war, indeed finds the instrumental use of war, especially, a scandal, war has always been as instrumental to liberal as to

geopolitical thinkers. In that very attempt to instrumentalize, indeed universalize, war in the pursuit of its own global project of emancipation, the practice of

rule

itself

becomes profoundly shaped by war.

liberal

However much it may proclaim liberal peace and freedom, its own

allied commitment to war subverts the very peace and freedoms it proclaims (Dillon & Reid, 2009: 7). While Dillon & Reids thesis only makes veiled reference to the ontotheological dimension, they are fully aware that its rule depends upon a certain religiosity in the sense that war has now been turned into a veritable human crusade with
only two possible outcomes: endless war or the transformation of other societies and cultures into liberal societies and cul- tures (Dillon & Reid, 2009: 5). Endless war is
underwritten here by a new set of problems. Unlike Clausewitzean confrontations, which at least provided the strategic comforts of clear demarcations (them/us,
war/peace, citizen/soldier, and so on),
outright

victory, retreating,

these wars no longer benefit from the possibility of scoring

or achieving a lasting negotiated peace by means of political compromise. Indeed, deprived of the prospect of defining

enmity in advance, war itself becomes just as complex, dynamic, adaptive and radically interconnected as the world of which it is part. That is why any such war to end

The project of removing war from the life of the species becomes a lethal and, in
unending process (Dillon & Reid, 2009: 32). Duffield, building on from these concerns, takes this unending scenario
a stage further to suggest that since wars for humanity are inextricably bound to the global life-chance divide, it is now possible to write
of a Global Civil War into which all life is openly recruited: Each crisis of global
circulation . . . marks out a terrain of global civil war, or rather a tableau of wars, which is fought on
and between the modalities of life itself. . . . What is at stake in this war is the Wests ability to contain and
war becomes a war without end. . . .
principle, continuous and

manage international poverty while maintaining the ability of mass society to live and consume beyond its means (Duffield, 2008: 162). Setting out civil war in these terms
inevitably marks an important depar- ture. Not only does it illustrate how

liberalism gains its mastery by posing

questions of life and death that is, who is to live and who can be killed disrupting the narrative that ordinarily
a globally ambitious
biopolitical imperative (see below). Liberals have continuously made reference to humanity in order to justify their use of military force
(Ignatieff, 2003). War, if there is to be one, must be for the unification of the species. This humanitarian caveat is by no
fundamental

takes sovereignty to be the point of theoretical departure, civil war now appears to be driven by

means out of favour. More recently it underwrites the strategic rethink in contemporary zones of occupation, which has become biopolitical (hearts and minds) in
everything but name (Kilcullen, 2009; Smith, 2006). While criticisms of these strategies have tended to focus on the naive dangers associated with liberal idealism (see
Gray, 2008), insufficient attention has been paid to the contested nature of all the tactics deployed in the will to govern illiberal populations. Foucault returns here with

forms of war have always been aligned with forms of

life. Liberal wars are no exception. Fought in the name of endangered humanity, humanity itself finds its most
meaningful expression through the battles waged in its name : At this point we can invert
Clausewitzs proposition and say that politics is the continuation of war by other means. . . . While it
renewed vigour. He understood that

is true that political power puts an end to war and establishes or attempts to establish the reign of peace in civil society, it certainly does not do so in order to suspend the
effects of power or to neutralize the disequilibrium revealed in the last battle of war (Foucault, 2003: 15). What in other words occurs beneath the semblance of peace is
far from politically settled: political struggles, these clashes over and with power, these modifications of relations of force the shifting balances, the reversals in a
political system, all these things must be interpreted as a continuation of war. And they are interpreted as so many episodes, fragmentations, and displacements of the
war itself. We are always writing the history of the same war, even when we are writing the history of peace and its institutions (Foucault, 2003: 15). David Miliband (2009),
without perhaps knowing the full political and philo- sophical implications, appears to subscribe to the value of this approach, albeit for an altogether more committed
deployment: NATO was born in the shadow of the Cold War, but we have all had to change our thinking as our troops confront insurgents rather than military machines like

mental models of 20th century mass warfare are not fit for 21st
century counterinsurgency. That is why my argument today has been about the centrality of politics. People like quoting Clausewitz
our own. The

that warfare is the continuation of politics by other means. . . . We need politics to become the continuation of warfare by other means. Milibands Foucauldian moment
should not escape us. Inverting Clausewitz on a planetary scale hence promoting the collapse of all meaningful distinctions that once held together the fixed terms of
Newtonian space (i.e. inside/outside, friend/enemy, citizen/soldier, war/peace, and so forth), he firmly locates the conflict among the world of peoples. With global war
there- fore appearing to be an internal state of affairs, vanquishing enemies can no longer be sanctioned for the mere defence of things. A new moment has arrived, in

the destiny of humanity as a whole is being wagered on the success of

humanitys own political strategies. No coincidence, then, that authors like David Kilcullen a key architect in the
formulation of counterinsurgency strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan, argue for a global insurgency paradigm without too much controversy. Viewed from the
perspective of power, global insurgency is after all nothing more than the advent of a global civil
war fought for the biopolitical spoils of life. Giving primacy to counter- insurgency, it foregrounds the problem
which

of populations so that questions of security governance (i.e. population regulation) become central to the war effort (RAND, 2008). Placing the managed recovery of
maladjusted life into the heart of military strategies, it insists upon a joined-up response in which sovereign/militaristic forms of ordering are matched by biopolitical/developmental forms of progress (Bell & Evans, forthcoming). Demanding in other words a planetary outlook, it collapses the local into the global so that lifes radical
interconnectivity implies that absolutely nothing can be left to chance. While liberals have therefore been at pains to offer a more humane recovery to the overt failures of
military excess in current theatres of operation, warfare has not in any way been removed from the species. Instead, humanized in the name of local sensitivities, doing
what is necessary out of global species necessity now implies that war effectively takes place by every means. Our understanding of civil war is invariably recast.
Sovereignty has been the traditional starting point for any discussion of civil war. While this is a well-established Eurocentric narrative, colonized peoples have never fully
accepted the inevitability of the transfixed utopian prolificacy upon which sovereign power increasingly became dependent. Neither have they been completely passive
when confronted by colonialisms own brand of warfare by other means. Foucault was well aware of this his- tory. While Foucauldian scholars can therefore rightly argue
that alternative histories of the subjugated alone permit us to challenge the monopolization of political terms not least civil war for Foucault in particular there was
something altogether more important at stake: there is no obligation whatsoever to ensure that reality matches some canonical theory. Despite what some scholars may
insist, politically speaking there is nothing that is necessarily proper to the sovereign method. It holds no distinct privilege. Our task is to use theory to help make sense of
reality, not vice versa. While there is not the space here to engage fully with the implications of our global civil war paradigm, it should be pointed out that since its
biopolitical imperative removes the inevitability of epiphenomenal tensions, nothing and nobody is necessarily dangerous simply because location dictates. With enmity

what becomes dangerous emerges from

within the liberal imaginary of threat. Violence accordingly can only be
sanctioned against those newly appointed enemies of humanity a phrase that, immeasurably greater than any
instead depending upon the complex, adaptive, dynamic account of life itself,

juridical category, necessarily affords enmity an internal quality inherent to the species complete, for the sake of planetary survival. Vital in other words to all human
existence,

doing what is necessary out of global species necessity requires a

new moral assay of life that, pitting the universal against the particular, willingly commits violence
against any ontological commitment to political difference , even though universality
itself is a shallow disguise for the practice of destroying political adversaries through the contingency of particular encounters. Necessary Violence Having established that
the principal task set for biopolitical practitioners is to sort and adjudicate between the species, modern societies reveal a distinct biopolitical aporia (an irresolvable
political dilemma) in the sense that making life live selecting out those ways of life that are fittest by design inevitably writes into that very script those lives that are
retarded, backward, degenerate, wasteful and ultimately dangerous to the social order (Bauman, 1991).

thoroughly modern

Racism

thus

appears here

to be a

phenomenon (Deleuze & Guattari, 2002). This takes us to the heart of our concern with biopolitical rationalities. When life

concerns itself with those biological

biopolitical assay of life
necessarily portrays a commitment to the supremacy of certain species types: a race
that is portrayed as the one true race, the race that holds power and is entitled to define the norm ,
and against those who deviate from that norm, against those who pose a threat to the biological heritage (Foucault, 2003: 61). Evidently,
itself becomes the principal referent for political struggles,

power

necessarily

threats to human existence (Palladino, 2008). That is to say, since life becomes the author of its own (un)making, the

what is at stake here is no mere sovereign affair. Epiphenomenal tensions aside, racial problems occupy a permanent presence within the political order (Foucault, 2003:
62). Biopolitically speaking, then, since it is precisely through the internalization of threat the constitution of

the dangerous Others that exist within

the threat that is now from

that societies reproduce at the level of life the ontological

commitment to secure the subject, since everybody is now possibly dangerous and nobody can be exempt, for political modernity to function one always has to be capable

;
entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the
name of life necessity; massacres have become vital. . . . The principle underlying the tactics of battle that one has to
of killing in order to go on living: Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone

become capable of killing in order to go on living has become the principle that defines the strategy of states (Foucault, 1990: 137). When Foucault refers to killing, he is
not simply referring to the vicious act of taking another life: When I say killing, I obviously do not mean simply murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder:
the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection and so on (Foucault, 2003: 256).

Racism makes this process of elimination possible, for it is only through the discourse and practice of racial
(dis)qualification that one is capable of introducing a break in the domain of life that is under powers control: the break between what must live and
what must die (Foucault, 2003: 255). While kill- ing does not need to be physically murderous, that is not to suggest that we should lose sight of the very real forms of
political violence that do take place in the name of species improvement. As Deleuze (1999: 76) duly noted, when notions of security are invoked in order to preserve the
destiny of a species, when the defence of society gives sanction to very real acts of violence that are justified in terms of species necessity, that is when the capacity to

political actions in all our names and for all our sakes becomes altogether more
, calculated, utilitarian, hence altogether more frightening: When a diagram of power abandons the

legitimate murderous
rational

model of sovereignty in favour of a disciplinary model, when it becomes the bio-power or bio-politics of populations, controlling and administering life, it is indeed life
that emerges as the new object of power. At that point law increasingly renounces that symbol of sovereign privilege, the right to put someone to death, but allows itself to
produce all the more hecatombs and genocides: not by returning to the old law of killing, but on the contrary in the name of race, precious space, conditions of life and the
survival of a population that believes itself to be better than its enemy, which it now treats not as the juridical enemy of the old sovereign but as a toxic or infectious
agent, a sort of biological danger. Auschwitz arguably represents the most grotesque, shameful and hence meaningful example of necessary killing the violence that is

modern
biopolitics is to constantly redefine the threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside, it is
within those sites that eliminate radically the people that are excluded that
sanctioned in the name of species necessity (see Agamben, 1995, 2005). Indeed, for Agamben, since one of the most essential characteristics of

the biopolitical racial imperative is exposed in its most brutal form (Agamben, 1995: 171). The camp can therefore be seen to be the defining paradigm of the modern
insomuch as it is a space in which power confronts nothing other than pure biological life without any media- tion (Agamben, 1995: 179). While lacking Agambens
intellectual sophistry, such a Schmittean-inspired approach to violence that is, sovereignty as the ability to declare a state of juridical exception has certainly gained
wide- spread academic currency in recent times. The field of international relations, for instance, has been awash with works that have tried to theorize the exceptional
times in which we live (see, in particular, Devetak, 2007; Kaldor, 2007). While some of the tactics deployed in the Global War on Terror have undoubtedly lent credibility

. Violence is only rendered problematic here

associated with some act of unmitigated geopolitical excess (e.g. the invasion of Iraq, Guantnamo Bay, use of torture, and so forth).
This is unfortunate. Precluding any critical evaluation of the contemporary forms of violence that take place within the
remit of humanitarian discourses and practices, there is a categorical failure to address how necessary violence continues to be
an essential feature of the liberal encounter. Hence, with post-interventionary forms of violence no longer
to these approaches, in terms of understanding violence they are limited

when

it is

appearing to be any cause for concern, the nature of the racial imperative that underwrites the violence of contemporary liberal occupations is removed from the analytical
arena.

That will to be a productive liberal subject sustains environmental

destruction while exporting the slow violence of global racism
Ahuja 15 Neel, associate professor of postcolonial studies at the University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill, "Intimate Atmospheres: Queer Theory in a Time of

Extinctions," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 21, Numbers 23, June 2015
To Kill Softly Media representations of climate change struggle to grasp the
enormity of killing. The planetary scale of carbon amplification, its association
with expanding bodies and displaced destruction, coincides with a spectacular
trauma of extinction: ecologically violent uses of land, chemicals, and carbon are
accelerating the sixth major extinction event in earths history. This event (if
we can stomach the cool rendering of mass death as a singularity) will commit
1835 percent of extant animal and plant species to extinction by 2050.19
Perhaps one million species will disappear, and countless billions of living bodies
will be denied the conditions of life or prematurely killed. Climate-related
disasters are accelerating threats to already precarious lifeways: Inuit nations
face melting Arctic ice; Maldivians and other islanders lose ground to rising seas;
vulnerabilities to infectious disease grow with shrinking water supplies; the
worlds agrarian poor face crop diseases, drought, desertification, and food price
instability; and all countries face increased weather disasters. The large number
of people who depend on subsistence agriculture are already living outside the
ecological boundary parameters that enabled the rise of modern human
societies.20 In this sense, we are already living the future of extinction. The
planetary presentnot some speculative futureexhibits a staggering scale of
reproductive failure, human and nonhuman. Yet small bodies and intimate
environments often get lost in big atmospheric narratives. Since its seventeenthcentury origins in English, the term atmosphere has signaled the fluid medium of
above-ground relations, its contradictory figuration as a space of geology and
life, and a background that forges exchange between social and physical
processes. Atmospheres can surround big and small bodies, and can shift as
bodies entangle and disentangle spatially. With industrial pollution, lower
atmospheric space abounds with plumes of toxic gases (methane, carbon
dioxide, and carbon monoxide) as well as noncarbon by-products (e.g., nitrous
oxide and ozone) that unpredictably concentrate in our bodies as we encounter a
busy street, a power plant, or a factory farm. In addition to rising to heights
where they can trap solar heat, these gases fix in soil and water, returning
unpredictable flows of toxicity to the lithosphere where plants grow. These
toxicities often concentrated in poor and minority communitiescontribute to
childhood asthma, lung disease, and the spread of various cancers. In an account
of living with toxic sensitivity to airborne heavy metals, Mel Chen describes
navigating and transforming unpredictable atmospheres and their conjoined
affective and spatial entanglements. The improvisational strategies for
prophylaxissuch as donning a particulate mask to avoid exposure to vehicle
emissions on a busy streetinevitably conjure public surveillance. Suited up in
both racial skin and chemical mask, writes Chen, I am perceived as a walking
symbol of contagious disease like SARS, and am often met with some form of

repulsion.21 Chens account points to how the materiality of everyday air

pollution subtly intertwines with the materiality of race. Race, according to
Renisa Mawani, might itself be understood as an atmospherics rather than a
social construction. Drawing on Fanons accounts of race and atmosphere,
Mawani explores race as an affective movement, a force rather than a thing, a
current that reconstitutes and reassembles itself in response to its own internal
rhythms and to changing social and political conditions.22 If race is not simply a
phenotypic characteristic but an ecology of affective movement and exchange,
the effects of carbon pollution disability, disease, forced migration, and
sometimes deathcan catalyze the emergence of xenophobic fears about
economic and ecological interconnection. Racialized climate reporting draws
affective power from senses of pervasive and inescapable environmental
pollution. Michael Ziser and Julie Sze detail the persistent geopolitical and racial
fears driving US responses to climate change. Contrasting the sentimental
domestication of the (white) polar bear in US media with persistent fears of the
cross-Pacific migration of Chinese air pollution, Ziser and Sze argue that climate
discourses conjure earlier racial panics about yellow peril and obscure primary
US responsibility for contemporary and historical emissions.23 While such
reporting contributes to an atmosphere of fear and crisis, the everyday
physicality of climate processes inscribes fear at the site of the skin. Atmosphere
names a space of unpredictable touching, attractions, and subtle violencesa
space at once geophysical and affective, informed by yet exploding
representation, a space where the violences of late-carbon liberalism subtly
reform racialized sensoria through shifting scales of interface. To explore this
further I suggest that we think with mosquitoes, mosquitoes both figural and real,
mosquitoes that bite, migrate, and feed on various bodies. These are parasites
like those in Narayans vision of gay plague; they are also strange kin in a
warming atmosphere. Mosquitoes excite colonial tropes in environmental
discoursefrom anthropophagic consumption (feeding on humans) to visions of
tropical contagion.24 In the vampiric image of female mosquitoes blood feasts
required for their sexual reproductionthere is a counterpoint to the carnivorous
virility that Carla Freccero attributes to liberal humanist visions of the subject. A
small body becomes a predator of the human, forcing strange ecologies of
attraction and feeling even as it poses risks of debility and death.25 But the
parasite turns out to be feeding on a parasite. Alongside the mosquito, a
universalized, waste-expelling human settler appears as the ultimate
atmospheric parasite in neoliberal climate discourse. Michel Serres puts the point
about scale this way: The human parasite is of another order relative to that of
the animal parasite: the latter is one, the former a set; the latter is time, the
former, history; the latter is a garden, the former, a province; to destroy a garden
or a world.26 An organic imperialist, the human colonizes ecologies, time, and
thought itselfan entire lifeworld. In the hands of late-carbon liberalisms human
settler, killing takes a form both massive and casual. This figuration is based on

some daunting facts of extinction. The everyday activities of carbon-dependent

industrial living connect ones bodily consumption and waste to the stranger
intimacies of a shared atmosphere, slowly threatening other far-flung bodies,
human and nonhuman.27 The effects of waste may kill softly, enmeshed in the
deep time and circuitous space of slow violence, a largely unintentional
ecocide.28 From this vantage, beyond its invocation of xenophobic rhetorics of
shape-shifting, virality, and contagion, the parasite suggests a problem of
knowledge about agency and causality. For this is a human defined by waste
rather than by romantic marks of sentience, feeling, or intentionality. To gloss
Berlant, inhabiting late-carbon liberalism produces myths, icons, and feelings
that may be profoundly confirming despite binding a person or world to
situations of profound threat.29 Rather than settle comfortably into the
assumption of species-derived powerof the destructive and universal human
geological agency of the Anthropocenewe might say that to recognize that
life is ambiently queer is to divest from spectacular temporalities of crisis and
transcendence that infuse queer theory and environmentalism alike. Queering in
this sense emerges by tracing an affective materiality that interrupts
anthropocentric body logics and space-time continuums rather than a sovereign
stance of negation in relation to Law, including the law of compulsory
reproduction. Thus I interpret queer inhumanism as an account of interspecies
entanglement and reproductive displacement, an inquiry into the unrealized
lifeworlds that form the background of the everyday. This requires thinking
askance the human and thinking death, animality, and vulnerability in an age of
many extinctionsextinctions of taxonomized species, to be sure, but also more
subtle orchestrations of racial precarity and quiet obliterations of histories that
could have been. In a time of extinctions, lateral reproduction suggests not some
transcendent space of queer negationor worse, an acceptance of Narayans
logic of plaguebut a problem of rethinking our casual reproduction of forms of
ecological violence that kill quietly, outside the spectacular time of crisis.

We advocate the theater of cruelty, a bolt of laughter in response to the

affirmatives will to meaning and productivity. Our passionate
expenditure should be preferred over economizing efforts to constrain
the totality of existence.
Gorelick 11 Nathan Gorelick is an assistant professor of English and literature at
Utah Valley University, where he studies and teaches courses on Restoration and
eighteenth-century British and French literature, Enlightenment philosophy,
contemporary literary theory, and Freudian psychoanalysis, "Life in Excess:
Insurrection and Expenditure in Antonin Artauds Theater of Cruelty," Discourse,
Volume 33, Issue 2, Spring 2011

A Life of Cruelty Derrida's elaboration of Bataille's concept of expenditure without

reserve provides one potential response to this economy of signification. In this
context, it is not life, but laughter that renders the totalizing pretentions of what
Artaud elsewhere calls "philosophical systems" ridiculous. The burst of laughter,
as far as Bataille's confrontation with Hegelian systematicity is concerned, is the
"absolute sacrifice of meaning: a sacrifice without return and without
reserves";21 it is the insistence of an excess against which no system of
intelligibility can avail, an avowal of the excess inherent in any act of
signification, and an abdication of the will-to-meaning with which Artaud himself
struggled, most famously in his correspondence with Rivire. Despite this affinity,
however, "La parole souffle" concludes with an accusation concerning Artaud's
seeming complicity with precisely those metaphysical structures against which
both Bataille's laughter the Theater of Cruelty are supposed to protest. Here,
Artaud's figuration of a theater somehow sanitized of both representation and its
attendant commodification exhibits, for Derrida, a misguided or impossible
nostalgia for purity of presentation - a self-destructive fantasy, in other words, of
representation without signification. In his slightly later essay on "The Theater of
Cruelty and the Closure of Representation," Derrida offers a more sympathetic
reading, bringing Artaud much closer to his interpretation of Bataille's burst of
laughter and thus toward a "general economy"22 of expenditure without reserve.
Just as laughter asserts a disruptive and unrepresentable force against the
incessant production of meaning, the Theater of Cruelty is "not a representation.
It is life itself, in the extent to which life is unrepresentable."23 If the Theater of
Cruelty might still be considered "work," this is nonetheless the work of
"affirmation," and affirmation is the insistent force of life, of that which "produces
affirmation itself in its full and necessary rigor."24 This is not a dialectical
affirmation; it does not invite a negation and an ensuing sublation. Rather, it is a
permanent force, the insistence of which refuses systematicity and thus cannot
be contained within any system of intelligibility. Here, affirmation should be
distinguished not from negation, but from repetition, from the iterability through
which meaning is constituted and maintained within any signifier, from that
which renders representation possible. Artaud suggests as much: from the
perspective of culture-in-action afforded by the Theater of Cruelty, "[t]he library
at Alexandria can be burnt down," since the archiving of knowledge (the
condition for the possibility of its repetition) stifles the creative energy of life
(10). In his "No More Masterpieces," the injunction is even more explicit: "an
expression does not have the same value twice, does not live two lives ... all
words, once spoken, are dead and function only at the moment when they are
uttered" (75). And since the theater is the space within which "the menace of
repetition" (Derrida's term) finds its greatest support,25 the radicality of Artaud's
affirmation is clear: rather than abandon the theater to this menace, he insists
that "the theater is the only place in the world where a gesture, once made, can
never be made the same way twice" (75). The Theater of Cruelty is therefore
theater as cruelty: the expression of life as a profound, incalculable, lacerating
intensity operating at, and defying, the limits of representation. As with his
commentary on Bataille, Derrida situates dialectics in this context as "the
movement through which expenditure is reappropriated into presence"; it is the
codification of "the economy of repetition" and the "economy of truth" against
which Artaud raises his protest: "Nonrepetition, expenditure that is resolute and

without return in the unique time consuming the present, must put an end to
fearful discursiveness, to unskirtable ontology, to dialectics." This new mode of
theatrical presentation must be structurally distinguished from representation
because it "leaves behind it, behind its actual presence, no trace, no object to
carry off."26 Such a formulation clarifies Derrida's earlier elaboration of an art
without work while also partially redeeming Artaud from what at first appears to
be a reassertion of the primacy of the metaphysics of presence. Artaud's art is
"neither a book nor a work, but an energy," the expression of which manifests
"expenditure without economy, without reserve, without return, without
history."27 The question of the efficacy of this art without work must account for
the specific processes and mechanics by which modern civilization deploys the
recuperative effects of a restricted economy of meaning. It is toward precisely
this concern that Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari direct their inquiry into the
radical potential of Artaud's concept of the body without organs, a notion that
appeared late in Artaud's life in the controversial radio play "To Have Done with
the Judgment of God." His original formulation is as follows: Man is sick because
he is badly constructed. We must make up our minds to strip him bare in order to
scrape off that animalcule that itches him mortally, god, and with god his organs.
For you can tie me up if you wish, but there is nothing more useless than an
organ. When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have
delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true
freedom.28 Here, god and "his organs" are posed as the two sources of the
individual's imprisonment, while the sickness that a body without organs might
cure recalls the "horrible sickness of the mind" about which Artaud wrote more
than twenty years earlier in his correspondence with Rivire. Thus, this provides
for Derrida the first answer to the question "How will the theater of cruelty save
me?"29 On Derrida's reading, God names for Artaud the structure of originary
theft that operates the economy of representation; correspondingly, the organ is
the figure of the modern civilized subject's constitution as a mirror image of the
language to which it is subject. The subject is organ-aed through the labor and
play of various body parts in their differentiation, such that God is precisely the
principle of signifying organization against which Artaud's life revolts. The
theater, then, is the site for the disarticulation and disassemblage ofthat subject.
The hegemony of meaning that operates the restricted economy of modern
civilization will be undermined by a theater that targets as its enemies the coeval
processes of signification and organization. Deleuze and Guattari take up these
two enemies in this context, as well. The organism - organized and (or as)
articulated - is "a phenomenon of accumulation, coagulation, and sedimentation
that, in order to extract useful labor from the BwO [body without organs] ,
imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchized
organizations, organized transcendences."30 Again, the struggle takes place
along the border dividing work, labor, function, or use, and a freedom from this
restricted economy, this imprisonment to sense. This is a "perpetual and violent
combat between the plane of consistency, which frees the BwO, cutting across
and dismantling all of the strata [those forms, functions, and rigid organizations
by which the subject is put to work], and the surfaces of stratification that block
it or make it recoil."31 But whereas Derrida only directly interrogates signification
and organization as what might be called two apparatuses of stratification by
which life's excision from experience is sustained, Deleuze and Guattari offer

subjectification as a third mechanism of restriction. Artaud's theater is thus

attributed with an explicitly political or social function: it is a strategy of
disruption because it is a practice of desubjectification, a means through which
life - the mysterious force that, for Artaud, compels existence - may be
experienced not in its overwhelming totality, but rather on a "continuum of
intensities."32 The theater thus gives way to the force of life, but only
momentarily and only through an extremely limiting set of methods; thus, in his
two manifestos on the Theater of Cruelty, Artaud outlines a substantial set of
rules that are to be followed in the production of this theater: spectacle, mise-enscne, language, musical instruments, lighting, costumes, the auditorium,
objects, the set, the actors - all are given a form and a rigorous methodology (9398). This tightly structured technique is one reason for Derrida's critical
conclusion to his first essay on Artaud: this new metaphysics of the stage reveals
a "fatal complicity" with the discourses of modernity, "a necessary dependency
of all destructive discourses: they must inhabit the structures they demolish."33
While his later emphasis on the incessant affirmation intrinsic to the Theater of
Cruelty complicates this disparaging position, Deleuze and Guattari also
recognize that the intensity to which Artaud bears witness cannot be glimpsed
through a total evacuation from the apparatuses of organization, signification,
and subjectification. On the contrary, "[s] taring stratified ... is not the worst that
can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented
or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever."34 It
is necessary to maintain "enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn,"
and one must maintain "small supplies of significance and subjectification, if only
to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it, when
things, persons, even situations, force you to." Put more simply, "Mimic the
strata. You don't reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency, by wildly
destratifying."35 Although the enthusiasm with which he insisted on the Theater
of Cruelty as a radical break with the stifling sicknesses of modern civilization
may distance him from the more moderate position outlined in A Thousand
Plateaus, Artaud also understood the political and social consequences of his
counter-representational project. The Theater and Its Double suggests that it may
be incumbent upon the theater to respond to nothing less than the violent or
terrifying excesses implicit within the totalizing systematicity governing our
modern civilization - and thus to frustrate contemporary culture's variously
horrifying efforts to confine life and all the unruly experience it enables to a
series of manageable calculations. A restricted economy, as Artaud, Derrida, and
Deleuze and Guattari all note, will always be frustrated by the burst of laughter,
the radical affirmation, the very excess of meaning inherent within any process of
signification; existence will never be contained absolutely.36 Artaud calls this the
"revenge of things" and notes the consequences of this insurrection: "[C]onsider
the unprecedented number of crimes whose perverse gratuitousness is explained
only by our powerlessness to take complete possession of life" (9). The struggle
for totalization, absolute authority, and control finds, in that which exceeds it, a
life that threatens the system and that must therefore be contained - or, what
inevitably amounts to the same thing, destroyed. Deleuze and Guattari
characterize this paranoid reaction of the system confronted with its own
insufficiencies as "demented or suicidal"; the extreme violence of which it is
capable is therefore anything but abstract or purely representational. The

catastrophic global consequences of the culture of modern civilization have all

manifested themselves, paradoxically, in the name of life itself - and the impulse
toward globalized, systematized suicide to which Deleuze and Guattari give
reference has only accelerated since "To Have Done with the Judgment of God."
The task of the Theater of Cruelty is thus at once terrifying and urgent, and the
struggle to awaken the sleeping intensity of life will be a struggle between art
and work, experience and representation, impossibility and reality. If the theater
is capable of instantiating the experience of a general economy of expenditure
without reserve, this will not effect an escape from civilization, but rather will
realign civilization and life, so that "true culture" becomes the expression of the
immutable insistence of life against all attempts to contain its immensity, its
energy, its cruelty. Conclusion: Contagion In "The Alfred Jarry Theater," Artaud
warns that, " [i]f the theater is an amusement, too many serious problems
demand our attention for us to be able to divert the least particle of it to
anything so ephemeral."37 One primary obstacle to the actualization of a
Theater of Cruelty - a theater that reaches beyond the tepid and irrelevant
theater of diversion - is the "inability to believe, to accept illusion."38 To
overcome this obstacle, to experience the force of this theater, is thus to
"reestablish communication with life instead of cutting ourselves off from it."39 In
the illusion lies the truth, the truth of a life obscured by the sedimented detritus
of instrumental reason that we call civilization. The failure to believe, meanwhile,
is symptomatic of the lifelessness characteristic of our modern cultural condition.
Insofar as a preoccupation with disease manifests itself throughout Artaud's
work, my choice of the term symptomhere is not merely metaphorical. Recall his
complaint to Rivire that "I suffer from a horrible sickness of the mind"; to film
director Abel Gance in 1927: "I have the plague in the marrow of my nerves and I
suffer from it"; in his "Fragments of a Diary from Hell," "[i]t is this contradiction
between my inner facility and my exterior difficulty which creates the torment of
which I am dying"; from a 1932 letter to the famous acupuncturist George Souli
de Morant, he complains of "total exhaustion ... on all levels and in all senses," a
"monstrous, horrible fatigue," and a constant struggle with "manifestly
pathological . . . breaks in thought"; in his notebooks and private papers, he
alludes to "[t]he wound, the dreadful hollowness of the paralyzed self."40 All of
this speaks not only to Artaud's personal struggle with madness, but also to the
more general struggle toward which his theater is aimed. The inability to believe,
as a symptom of the sickening malaise of modern life, is thus a kind of
inoculation against the life with which Artaud found himself to be infected, and
with which he wished to infect the world. He would turn to the sublime
destructiveness of the bubonic plague - a disease that single-handedly
eradicated one third of Europe's population between the thirteenth and
seventeenth centuries - as a real, historically concrete manifestation of the
radical disruption of which the theater would be capable were it not for the
stifling sanitization of experience imposed by a culture intent upon signification,
organization, and subjectification. We must insist, along with Artaud, that there is
nothing allegorical about this: "[T] he plague is a superior disease because it is a
total crisis after which nothing remains except death or an extreme purification"
(31). So, too, with the theater: [T] he action of the theater, like that of the plague,
is beneficial, for, impelling men to see themselves as they are, il causes the mask
to fall, reveals the Ue, the slackness, baseness, and hypocrisy of our world; it

shakes off the asphyxiating inertia of matter which invades even the clearest
testimony of the senses; and in revealing to collectivities of men their dark
power, their hidden force, it invites them to take, in the face of destiny, a
superior and heroic attitude they would never have assumed without it. (31-32)
The task of the theater is thus to infect modern culture with the immeasurable
force of social and psychic dissolution, with the realization of its own suicidal
incapacity to contain its irrational excesses: in short, with the contagious energy
of life.41 This, then, is Artaud's fantasy: "To describe the cry that I dreamed, to
describe it in living words, with the appropriate words, and mouth to mouth and
breath to breath, to make it pass not into the ear but into the chest of the
spectator."42 To give ourselves over, as carriers of this insurrectionist infection,
to the power that only a belief in the illusion of the theater makes possible is to
accept our positions not as sympathetic critics or passive observers, but as the
active participant-authence, spreading the revitalizing plague of intensity and
excess. This implies an imperative to undermine the inoculating tendencies of
modern culture, with its entirely digestive concerns, in the name of that sleeping
intensity. Once awakened, life promises to contaminate culture with the profound
and cruel insistence of a hunger without satiation, an affirmation without
negation, a body without organs, an experience without representation. If Artaud
imagined that the Theater of Cruelty could cure him of the sickening demands of
signification, organization, and subjectification, he suggested as much by
insisting that his theater would also cure modern civilization of its own
monstrosity: "Perhaps the theater's poison, injected into the social body,
disintegrates it, as Saint Augustine says, but at least it does so as a plague, as an
avenging scourge, a redeeming epidemic in which credulous ages have chosen to
see the finger of God" (31).

Generic Extensions
Necropolitics produces populations on the periphery
subject to endless exploitation that manifest itself in the
prison system, hazardous living conditions, and the
constant threat of death. This encounter seeks to
rearticulate humanity from the position of its excess
through the animation of bare life that ruptures the
optimistic narrative of the status quo
Tadir 07 (Neferti Xina M, Associate Professor in the Department of History
of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is currently
Visiting Associate Professor in the Women's Studies at Barnard College,
Columbia University, "By the Waysides of Globopolis," Ctrl + Pdf a Journal of
Contempary Art, Issue No. 5 January 2007, 2nd Edition, pages 8-12)~AC~
In the metropole, the global-political horizon appears to be drawn. Dystopic
visions of a world in the throes of death of modern civilization and democracy
abound everywhere, while a widespread acknowledgement that we are living
in a permanent, global state of exception, in which the distinction between
peace and war no longer holds and the sus- pension of the rule of law has
itself become the ruie, sweeps the ranks of the progressive intelligentsia.
Forty years before the U.S. decision to make homeland security and the
global war on terror the basis of its practice of government, in the midst of
Frances war against Algeria, Sartre tolled the death-knell of colonial Europe
and decried the fresh moment of violence" with which Europe answered the
decolonization of the Third World as the desperate attempt of Man to hang on
to the exclusive privileges of its racist hu- manity. In this realization pressed
upon Sartre by the raging struggles of the wretched of the earth, neo-coloniai
war was nothing less than a war for the West to remain human in the face of
the monstrous barbarism that the Third World revealed to be but the West's
own. Decolonization posed the question of what it might mean to become
human, in the wake of the destruction of colonial, racist humanism, a halfforgotten question for which history has yet to provide an adequate answer.
Today, neocolonial wars have resurfaced with a vengeance, in the name of
the civilizing influence of neoliberai democracy. These wars have renewed
long-waning metropolitan attention to the continuing legacy and
generalization of the politics of colonial sovereignty whose most
accomplished form Achille Mbembe argues can be found in the
contemporary, late-modern colonial occupation of Palestine, and now, one
would have to add, in the imperial U.S. occupation of Iraq.2 In these
exemplary contexts of what Mbembe calls necropolitics the subjugation of
life to the sovereign power of death where vast populations are subjected
to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead,"'the
problem of new forms of cordoned off humanity looms large. If such bare
life, or life that can he killed but not sacrificed, is, as Agamben argues, the
originary element of modern sovereignty, the exclusion of which founds the

city (polis) of men, it is not only in the security zones of miiitarized

occupation or extraordinary rendition where it exists; nor is it only
conventional weapons of mass destruction that produce contemporary forms
of disposable life.3 Widespread deracina- tion and economic dispossession
brought on by neoliberalist policies of structural ad- justment have created a
whoie other category of bare life" in the form of a global slum population
whose life-threatening conditions of poverty and hazardous and radically
uncertain settlement attest to their subjection to the ever-present threat of
death and their expulsion from the emergent global polis of the capitalist
world economy. Comparing the processes of neoliberal globalization t0 the
catastrophic processes that shaped a third world in the first place, Mike
Davis ponders the political future of this billion- strong surplus humanity
"warehoused" in slums, wondering whether this true global residuum of
disincorporated labor could possibly become part of a global liberatory
political project or whether it will merely regress to the politically-pliant
behavior of the pro-industrial lumpenproletariat. Or, Davis muses,
mimicking the prophetic tone of anti-colonial struggles of the last century, is
some new, unexpected historical subject, a la Hardt and Negri, slouching
toward the supercity?4 Embodying the very limit of contemporary global
politics, how could this surplus humanity not assume some apoca- lyptic,
beastly form? On the outskirts of the twenty-first century globopolis, in Metro
Manila, a metropolis somewhere between, in Davis terms, a megacity (more
than 8 million) and a hypercity (more than 20 million), we glean the outlines
of this catastrophic vision and worldly parable of bare life." What, here by
the waysides of the globopolis, does the Word, bare life, portend? In
Manilas phenomenal urban excess its floating popu- lation" of
unregulated, informal labor, their bodily presence, their settlements and the
artifacts of their activities we not only see the continuing history of todays
surplus humanity and its relationship to necropolitical power; in this human
debris of giobal sovereignty and modern, metropolitanist development we also
find races of living beyond disposable, bare life that recast the question of what
it means to become human as a question of how to survive and what it might
mean to thrive.

Current conceptions of the political are animated by a

process of deathmaking against those who fall outside of
modernity. Failure to reconceptualize the subject
guarantees endless violence
Mbembe 3 Achille Mbembe, senior researcher at the Institute of Social and
Economic Research at the University of the Witwatersrand, "Necropolitics,"
Public Culture 15(1): pg.13
The aim of this essay is not to debate the singularity of the extermination of
the Jews or to hold it up by way of example.6 I start from the idea that
modernity was at the origin of multiple concepts of sovereigntyand
therefore of the biopolitical. Disregarding this multiplicity, late-modern
political criticism has unfortunately privileged normative theories of

democracy and has made the concept of reason one of the most important
elements of both the project of modernity and of the topos of sovereignty.7
From this perspective, the ultimate expression of sovereignty is the
production of general norms by a body (the demos) made up of free and
equal men and women. These men and women are posited as full subjects
capable of self-understanding, self-consciousness, and self-representation.
Politics, therefore, is de ned as twofold: a project of autonomy and the
achieving of agreement among a collectivity through communication and
recognition. This, we are told, is what differentiates it from war.8 In other
words, it is on the basis of a distinction between reason and unreason
(passion, fantasy) that late-modern criticism has been able to articulate a
certain idea of the political, the community, the subjector, more
fundamentally, of what the good life is all about, how to achieve it, and, in
the process, to become a fully moral agent. Within this paradigm, reason is
the truth of the subject and politics is the exercise of reason in the public
sphere. The exercise of reason is tantamount to the exercise of freedom, a
key element for individual autonomy. The romance of sovereignty, in this
case, rests on the belief that the subject is the master and the controlling
author of his or her own meaning. Sovereignty is therefore de ned as a
twofold process of self-institution and self-limitation ( xing ones own limits
for oneself). The exercise of sovereignty, in turn, consists in societys capacity
for self-creation through recourse to institutions inspired by special social and
imaginary signications.
Our refusal of the States Necropolitics stops the estrangement of
the relationship between the other inside of the Death Penalty and
those outside of it

RASKIN 99
(Marcus, G Wash U, Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems, Fall)
As I have noted, world social categories and knowledge systems have changed so that they now

see the colonized as human beings. The shifting in social categories , often by those who are
the radicals and liberals of the privileged groups, created deep divisions between reality and
its description. But this has not necessarily resulted in fundamental affirmative change.
For those who were consigned to the role of slave, serf and oppressed by imperial Western nations, it may
be disconcerting, but pleasantly surprising, that some leading international lawyers and intellectuals

stand with those movements that take their strength from the dispossessed, wretched and
exploited, whether in war or peace. Even though these idealists are educated in Western and imperial
categories of social reality, they have, nonetheless, taken as their task the reconstruction and
transformation of international law as it is understood in the United States. The skeptical are permitted
their doubts, however. After all, what can those who represent the pain of others, and only indirectly
their own, do to ameliorate the pain of misery sanctioned by imperial law? What do such a band of

idealists dare to teach to those who suffer, especially when that suffering is often caused,
directly or indirectly, by the choices made by the very class of which these Western
intellectuals and lawyers are members? Why should the oppressed listen to those educated
in a language and thought-pattern which, beneath the honeyed words, are the egocentric and
ethnocentric doctrines of the [*524] dominator? Certainly until decolonization, the abstract
meaning of the words were employed as signifiers and killers of the culturally oppressed. The language of
description and the mode of argument, the very words themselves, were instruments of the colonizer.
Their very rules, laws, precedents and citations acted as a steel-belted noose to stifle the cries of the
wretched. And yet, these were the very lessons the colonized needed to learn in order to stand up to the

colonizer and survive. Not only did they survive, they pressed on to reform nineteenth and early twentieth
century imperial law using the UN, and the International Court of Justice. Most importantly, they effected
the consciousness of nations. Nevertheless, the wretched must wonder why, behind claims of universality
and universal human rights, our actions and thoughts have an often indeterminate or contradictory effect.
For Americans, the reason is a complex one. Americans seek identification with the victim in their dreams,
but the reality for the American political and legal class is somewhere between carelessness and
negligence of the oppressed worker, toleration for the destruction of other people's cultures for purposes
of extraction and commodification, exploiter of their lands, and executioner in counter-revolutions which
rain bombs of state and financial terror around the world So even when some in the United States

stand with the victim, they must always wonder, "Who are we that come forward with our
notions that speak of human affirmation? Who are we to tell the colonized when independence is a
drag on themselves and on others as well, possibly leading to war and internecine conflict?" And the
wretched can go further and say, "You have recognized our struggle, taken away our
language and substituted your words of understanding, but now what? How is freedom to be
sustained? We, the formerly marginalized, the indigenous and the merely wretched, have come
to recognize that what is presented by the West to humanity as conventional knowledge is a
betrayal."

In truth, it was a betrayal by intellectuals and all those who dared to suggest that the twentieth
century could be a time of liberation and freedom. Education and knowledge as mediated through
the colonizer's strainer has left humanity in worse shape than at the beginning of the
twentieth century. For some, the god that really failed them was education/knowledge, which,
through its institutions, set itself up as the emancipator. This failure, this sense of futility
where knowledge is an instrument of domination for the few, demands recognition.

Submitting to International Law destroys State

Sovereignty and in that restricts the Necropolitical
Power of the State
Mashahiro 15
Sovereignty and International Law MIYOSHI Masahiro Professor Emeritus of
International Law Aichi University, Japan,
https://www.dur.ac.uk/resources/ibru/conferences/sos/masahiro_miyoshi_pape
r.pdf
International law has developed through increased co-operation among
sovereign States in recent years as, for example, in the European Union.
International organisation is simply impossible without co-operation among
States. International co-operation does indeed depend on a degree of mutual
concession among the members of an international organisation, be it the
United Nations Organisation, the European Union, the Organisation of
American States, the African Union, or whatever. In the field of international
human rights law, as well as international environmental law, there is a
growing awareness that State sovereignty can be an obstacle to their
protection. This awareness has good reason in that human rights or the
environment can easily be victimised under an authoritarian administration of
a State which places primary importance on economic development, giving
priority to the expansion of the scale of economy or burning massive fossil
fuels for industrial operations thus polluting the air, rivers and coastal sea
waters. To prevent such abuses of human rights and environmental

conditions would logically require super-State controls, as advocated by some

human rights and environmental law experts. Indeed, as is aptly pointed out
by some authors, shifting relations between the promotion and protection of
human rights and sovereignty can be observed in three fields: (1) in the field
of international organisations, States accept that the organisations like the
United Nations or the European Union can take decisions on which they no
longer have a decisive influence; (2) in the field of regional and international
(quasi-)judicial institutions, States accept that individuals can turn to these
international bodies that have jurisdiction on human rights issues; and (3) in
the field of conflict and foreign intervention, States tend to accept
infringement on their sovereignty for the protection of individuals from grave
human rights violations.6 In other words, Matters which had formerly been
considered indispensable exclusive State functions are presently
accomplished by virtue of international cooperation in its various
instrumental modes and forms (international organisations; multilateral
instruments; integrated communities).7

Necropolitcs is the R/C of labor, not cap

Chen 12 (Mel Y. Chen, professor of linguistics and womens studies at UC
Berkeley, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, Duke U
Press, pg. 206-207) Kguy
Questions of the body become particularly complex when taking into
account the various mixings, hybridizations, and impurities that accompany
contemporary bodily forms, from genetically modified food to the cyborg
triumphed by Donna Haraway.12 What, indeed, becomes of life now that
Haraways vision has in some regard prevailed? Though her Manifesto for
Cyborgs is over twenty- five years old, it has proved eerily prescient in its
view of the ever- seamless integration of machines, humans, animals, and
structures of capital. Human bodies, those preeminent containers of life, are
themselves pervaded by xenobiotic substances and nanotechnologies.
Toxicity becomes significant now for reasons beyond the pressing
environmental hazards that encroach into zones of privilege, beyond late-t
ransnational capitalism doing violence to national integrities. Because of
debates around abortion (such as those about when life is technically said to
begin) and around the lifeliness or deathliness of those in persistent
vegetative states, not only can we not tell what is alive or dead, but the
diagnostic promise of the categories of life and death is itself in crisis, not
least when thinking through the necropolitics that Achille Mbembe proposes
for postcolonial modes of analysis.13 For when biopolitics builds itself upon
life or death or even Agambens bare life14much like kinship notions
that build only upon humans and hence fail to recognize integral presences of
nonhuman animalsit risks missing its cosubstantiating contingencies in
which not only the dead have died for life, but the inanimate and animate are
both subject to the biopolitical hand. Nan Enstad notes that toxicity forces us

to bridge the analytical polarization of global and local by placing the body
in the picture and to consider commodities in new ways in the context of
global capitalism, for instance, capitalisms remarkable success at infusing
lives and bodies around the world with its products and by-p roducts.15 Yet,
considering the reach of toxicity thinking described earlier, I would like to
expand her fairly concrete take on the body (for all the discursive
complication she admits) by suggesting that many bodies are subject to the
toxiceven toxins themselvesand that it is worth examining the toxicities
that seem to trouble more than human bodies. Indeed, it is one way for us to
challenge the conceptual integrity of our notions of the body. For
biopolitical governance to remain effective, there must be porous or even coconstituting bonds between human individual bodies and the body of a
nation, a state, and even a racial locus like whiteness. This is especially
salient within the complex political, legal, and medical developments of
immunity.

The telos of liberating the living subject to work freely

dogs Marxism its universal presupposition of the good
life dooms it to labor militarization and revolutionary
terror you solve nothing
Mbembe 03 (Achille Mbembe, senior researcher at the Institute of Social
and Economic Research at the University of the Witwatersrand,
Necropolitics, Public Culture 15(1): pg. 19)

Finally, terror is not linked solely to the utopian belief in the unfettered power
of human reason. It is also clearly related to various narratives of mastery
and emancipation, most of which are underpinned by Enlightenment
understandings of truth and error, the real and the symbolic. Marx, for
example, conflates labor (the endless cycle of production and
consumption required for the maintenance of human life) with work (the
creation of lasting artifacts that add to the world of things). Labor is
viewed as the vehicle for the historical self-creation of humankind. The
historical self-creation of humankind is itself a life-and-death conflict, that is,
a conflict over what paths should lead to the truth of history: the overcoming
of capitalism and the commodity form and the contradictions associated with
both. According to Marx, with the advent of communism and the abolition of
exchange relations, things will appear as they really are; the real will
present itself as it actually is, and the distinction between subject and object
or being and consciousness will be transcended.27 But by making human
emancipation dependent upon the abolition of commodity production,
Marx blurs the all-important divisions among the man-made realm of
freedom, the nature-determined realm of necessity, and the contingent in
history. The commitment to the abolition of commodity production and

the dream of direct and unmediated access to the real make these
processesthe fulfillment of the so-called logic of history and the fabrication
of humankindalmost necessarily violent processes. As shown by
Stephen Louw, the central tenets of classical Marxism leave no choice but
to try to introduce communism by administrative fiat, which, in
practice, means that social relations must be decommodified
forcefully.28 Historically, these attempts have taken such forms as labor
militarization, the collapse of the distinction between state and society,
and revolutionary terror.29 It may be argued that they aimed at the
eradication of the basic human condition of plurality. Indeed, the
overcoming of class divisions, the withering away of the state, the
flowering of a truly general will presuppose a view of human plurality
as the chief obstacle to the eventual realization of a predetermined
telos of history. In other words, the subject of Marxian modernity is,
fundamentally, a subject who is intent on proving his or her sovereignty
through the staging of a fight to the death. Just as with Hegel, the
narrative of mastery and emancipation here is clearly linked to a
narrative of truth and death. Terror and killing become the means of
realizing the already known telos of history.

Black Nihilism
Reform is just reactionary conservatism their
unwillingness to accept that systemic antagonisms cannot
be fixed means their project is permeated with whiteness
Haritaworn et al. 14, Haritaworn is an assistant professor of
sociology, Queer Necropolitics, http://www.deanspade.net/wpcontent/uploads/2014/05/Necropolitics-Collection-Article-Final.pdf,
NN
Critical race theorists have supplied the concept of 'preservation through
transformation' to describe the neat trick that civil rights law performed in
this dynamic (Harris 2007: 1539-1582; Siegel1997: 1111-1148). In the face
of significant resistance to conditions of subjection, law reform tends to
provide just enough transfonnation to stabilize and preserve status
quo conditions. In the case of widespread black rebellion against white
supremacy in the US, civil rights laws and colourblind constitutionalism have
operated as formal reforms that masked a perpetration of the status quo of
violence against and exploitation of black people. Explicit exclusionary
policies and practices became officially forbidden, yet the
disuibution of life chances remained the same or worsened with the
growing racialized concentration of wealth in the US, the dismantling
of social welfare, and the explosion of criminalization that has developed in
the same period as the new logic of race neutrality has declared fairness and
justice achieved. Lesbian and gay rights politics' reproduction of the
Inythology of anti-discrimination law and the non-stop invocation of'equal
rights' frameworks by lesbian and gay rights politics marks an .investment in
the legal structures of anti-blackness that have emerged in the wake of
Brown. The emergence of the demand for LGBT inclusive hate crime laws
and the accomplishment of the Matthew Shepard and james Byrd, Jr. Hate
Crimes Prevention Act as a highly lauded federal legislative 'win' for lesbian
and gay rights offers a particularly blatant site of the anti-blackness central
to lesbian and gay rights -literally an investment in the expansion of
criminalization as a core claim and desire of this purported 'frecdom'. 9 In
the context of the foundational nature of slavery in US political formation, it
is perhaps not surprising to see a political formation of white 'gay and lesbian
Americans' articulate a demand fOr fi-eedom that is contingent on the literal
caging of black people. The fantasy that formal legal equality is all that is
needed to eliminate homophobia and transphobia is harmful not only
because it participates in the anti-black US progress narrative that civil rights
law reforms resolved anti-blackness in the US (thus any remaining suffering
or disparity is solely an issue of 'personal responsibility'), 1IJ but also because
it constructs an agenda that is harmful to black queer and trans people and
other queer and trans people experiencing violent systems mobilized by antiblackness. Formal marriage rights will not help poor people, people vvhose
kids will be stolen by a racially targeted child welfire system regardless of

whether or not they can get married, people who do not have immigration
status or health benefits to share with a spouse if they had one, people who
have no property to pass on to their partners, or people who have no need to
be shielded from estate tax. In fact, the current wave of same-sex marriage
advocacy emerges at the same rime as another pro-marriage trend, the push
by the right wing to reverse feminist wins that had made marriage easier to
get out of and the Bushera development of marriage promotion programmes
(continued by Obama) targeted at women on welfare (Adams and Coltrane
2007: 17-34; Alternatives to l\!larriage Project 2007; Coltrane and Adams
2003: 363-372; Feld, Rosier and Manning 2002: 173-183; Pear and Kirkpatrick
2007; Rector and Pardue 2004). The explicitly anti-black focus of the attacks
on welfare and the mobilization of racialized-genclered images to do this go
hand in hand with the pro-marriage gay rights frame that similarly invests in
notions of 'personal responsibility', and racializecl--gendered family formation
norm enforcement. The articulation of a desire for legal inclusion in the
explicitly anti-black, anti-poor governance regime of marriage, and the
centralization of marriage rights as the most resourced equality claim of gay
and lesbian rights politics, affirms its alliance with anti-blackness. It is easy to
imagine other queer political interventions that would take a different
approach to concerns about parental rights, child custody and other family
law problems. Such approaches centre the experiences of queers facing the
worst violence of family law, those whose problems -will not be resolved by
samesex marriage - parents in prison, parents facing deportation, parents
with disabilities, youth in foster care and juvenile punishment systems,
parents whose children have been removed because of 'neglect' clue to their
poverty. The choice of seeking marriage rights, like the choice to pursue hate
crime laws rather than decriminalization, the choice to pursue the Uniting
American Families Act 11 rather than opposing immigration enforcement and
the war on terror, the choice to pursue military service rather than
demilitarization, is a choice to pursue a place fOr white gay and lesbian
people in constitutively anti-black legal structures.

Security
The 1acs security rhetoric propels a necropolitical project
tasked with managing life, disciplining bodies and
justifying death
Mutter 14
(Sam Mutter, University of London, The Securitization of the Body (Politic):
Biopolitical and Necropolitical Violence of the State - Literature Review,
https://www.academia.edu/10284521/The_Securitization_of_the_Body_Politic_
Biopolitical_and_Necropolitical_Violence_of_the_State_-_Literature_Review,
2014) CJun
Just as the nation-state is founded in this way through the violent practice of injuring and killing, injury and death may
also be the source of its un-founding, a process which Elaine Scarry (1985: 19) names un-creation. Thus, if forms of the
metaphysical have conducted the task of delimitation, then at the forefront of things-to-be-delimited has been the
phenomenon of death (Bogard, 2008; Laqueur, 2011): the materiality of the body, the questions of its decomposition, and

modernity has
instead rooted security by bounding the self within the physical confines of
the body, and thus establishing death as an absolute limit, beyond which
there is no life and no politics (Wilcox, 2014). Such a tendency of leaving limits un-thought reveals all
of its threat to the living (Foltyn, 2008). Without Christian salvation, the rational discourse of

work of security to be characterised by a deeply conservative logic (Dillon, 1996: 7). However, the manifestation of this
logic as actions upon the body has been far from uniform, as Foucault (1979; 2007; 2008; 2009) has emphatically shown. I
do not wish to retrace these genealogical steps, nor do I have the words to spare. Rather, my focus here is to gain some
greater understanding of the most novel methods of the state concerning the body, those particular to the neo-liberal
governmentality currently predominant in Western politics and international relations. I hope that, by taking the
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), or drone as my point of entry, I can clamber some way into the belly of the beast.

<HE CONTINUES> The corpse is a rationalisation of the dead body. So where Socrates alludes above to the
body politic the figurative link between the health of the individual and the order of the community this metaphor
develops certain thicknesses over time (Thacker, 2011: 147), until we reach a point where the figurative collapses into
the literal (ibid.: 152). Through an unprecedented cooperation between governmental agencies on the one hand, and
medical professions on the other, Foucaults (2007: 58-9)

apparatus of security produces the

corpse as an object which, unlike the uncertain and sacred dead body, may
be dissected. In other words because that word, dissection, is also a
modern creation the corpse is a dead body that can be subjected to a knife
without this being considered a violent act. Again, this is a particular kind of
knife: the scalpel, which renders the dissection of the corpse as an act for
which no retribution need be feared. In the same movement though, the figurative collapse also
produces, as Thacker says, the idea that the polis is a living body vulnerable to medicines own spectral forms: disability,
disease, and contamination. In a sense, this thing-that-remains (Thacker, 2011: 151) is no less dangerous. It is only that
this thing is no-longer sacred but profane; no longer the haunting of evil spirits but the lingering of bad bacteria; the

As a result, the discourse of security shifts its

focus towards the medical tasks of quarantine and immunisation
(Esposito, 2013). It is important to emphasise that these tasks of security have always
concerned the coexistence of multiple spatial logics: from borders,
in disciplinary societies, to the membranes distribution,
circulation, flow of our biopolitical societies of control (Deleuze, 1995;
cancerous tumours of insurgency.

Walters, 2004; Darling, 2011). As embodied beings, we are sensory-motor systems which move by the creation of excess
force (Lingis, 1994: 53). Thus, even in this very physical sense, we are by no means bounded creatures. It is in our very
nature to move beyond ourselves, beyond our supposed limits. Death is one such limit, and so it is in our nature to die.
Simultaneously of course, such a force may also come from the outside. Our body may be pushed towards death by
another body, or more accurately, by the excess of anothers body. For the violence we can inflict is also an excess. This is
fairly visible if we think of a direct act. In order to punch someone for instance, the energy must be summoned up and
then unleashed upon the other. Yet what if the act is unseen, or what if, as is now so often the case, the violence is
inflicted indirectly with the use of a tool? At this point violence becomes a matter of traces (Fassin, 2011). For violence

inflicted with a tool a hammer perhaps, or, increasingly, a mechanical tool: a gun or a missile the trace originally left
upon the perpetrator is displaced onto the tool-as-weapon. After a shooting, the murderer cleans the gun of prints and
throws it into the river. Previously of course, he would have been faced with the painful proposition of disposing of his own
fist. The displacement of violent traces is a chain of forces which it is the job of legal institutions to follow back to its
source, but, as the displacements multiply, violence becomes more diffuse, and the job becomes more difficult (Walters,
2014). Furthermore, the tools which are used as well as creating a greater distance between the body and violence are
increasingly immaterial tools; structures or networks rather than perceptible objects. As opposed to what Didier Fassin
(2011: 282) calls political violence then, we have a structural violence imposed more often by a conceptual tool
economic volatility, for example than a concrete one. What this terminology simultaneously alludes to and conceals is
that structural violence is also political. It is the desire of the politician that violence be considered purely structural; its
source lost in the way things are. It is, similarly, the desire of biopolitics to appear as if it has left death behind; to
portray itself as an innocent bystander to misfortune or tragedy, when the reality is that agents of biopolitics merely wash
the hands of the blood they spill. To make live and let die rather than make die and let live as the sovereign did
(Foucault, 2008; Michelsen, 2013): the difference between these two positions lies in nothing but a shift from responsibility
to responsiblisation (Ajana, 2005), the displacement of blame onto the injured individuals themselves (the central social

As death is
apparently excised from the political realm (Michelsen, 2013: 205) however,
this discursive shift hides an underlying legitimisation of unaccountable
killing. Whilst the sovereign staked the legitimacy of the decision to kill on his or her personal corporeal authority,
the agents of biopolitics take no such risk. Rather, legitimacy is outsourced to the realms of
science and economics; racism and efficiency, constructing the enemy as a
threat to species-health and development (Foucault, 2008). This technique,
whereby [d]eath is depoliticized [and k]illing takes place without
responsibility, celebration, or remorse (Dauphinee & Masters, 2007:
xiii. Quoted in Michelsen, 2013: 210) reveals the sinister underbelly
of biopolitics to be nothing other than a security obsessed with
death itself; a necro-political apparatus of security preoccupied
with death in the form of an administrative task (Mbembe, 2003;
Clough & Willse, 2011: 9). Since death is transformed into the various illnesses which contaminate
living bodies what Michelsen (2013: 215) refers to as endemic death it is immunisation which
becomes the task of politico-scientific administrative labour: the body must
be sealed off from the threats of its environment. Yet this returns us to the
primary paradox: the body requires its excesses; its leakiness, in order to
survive. [I]n order to escape death, we go through death, as Hlne Cixous
proclaims. Biopolitics finds resolution to this problem in its classification of the
population into sets of bodies, some of which are safe and thus permitted to
circulate; some of which are deemed suspicious or threatening and thus
subject to enclosure (Walters, 2004; Darling, 2011). It is these latter bodies that Joseph
doctrine of neoliberalism), or onto some external, natural, force (Braidotti, 2013: 112, 116).

Pugliese (2002) recognises in his account of the migrants detained at a camp in Woomera, Australia. Here, the body as
the site of violence shared in common with both power and its resistances (Foucault (2009) hosts the final act of
resistance; that performed when all else has been denied by domination, all tools confiscated (Fierke, 2013). We might
expect that these acts would seek exclusively to reverse the hermetic sealing of the body which biopolitical governance
performs, by opening up wounds or, in the case of suicide bombing, obliterating the borders of the body (Wilcox, 2014:
67). However, the case of Woomera, in which the refugees sealed their own bodies via the practice of lip-sewing, alerts us
to the fact that corporeal resistance, particularly in response to structural violence, entails not only retaliation but what
Edkins & Pin-Fat (2005), term assumption. That is, the reconstruction and restaging of violent traces traces which may
include silence itself upon the surfaces of the body. It is a response to the task of rendering violence subject to
aesthetics: the judgement of the senses (Keenan & Weizman, 2012: 24. Emphasis in original), the task of establishing
what I will call an aesthetic accountability.