The Event in Contrast to the Phenomenon
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
The first lines of Pynchon’s novel describe a World War II German V rocket attack in a manner that brings into a close and complex proximity two conceptual categories - the phenomenon and the event. The former, in being captured by a cognitive and conceptual apparatus, facilitates consciousness and knowledge; the latter on the other hand, as Bergson would have insisted, comes with a unique memory of its own. To distinguish between the two is to understand that which allows the screaming to recur in a calendar of disasters and at the same time, have an untimely and 'incomparable' aspect to it. A phenomenon is seen to offer a field of semblances that lend to an already existing coda of representation, which ensures its place in the order of things, and allows it to be repeated with or without differences. The event in contrast, is a singularity precisely because it explodes established correspondences between semblance and representation. It is important for us to understand these two categories better and disarticulate their habitual application before we begin talking about the US homeland disaster of 9.11.01.
A phenomenon can produce what we classically designate as a situation of crisis. As Gayatri Spivak has explained in a different context, crisis is discursively construed as a supplemental function, that which 'adds something' to the overall movement of signification controlled by the state (207). The state, in fact, always acknowledges the crisis because there is already in place a latent and prior narratological function to inscribe it into the diagram of power. Another way of saying this is the state never announces a crisis that it has not already solved or found a way to do so. Other benefits apart, such problem solving can always open up newer avenues of production, set up newer installations of power. In the aftermath of September 11, we have seen how the US government has met the crises with 'firm resolve' in plugging systemic gaps on
various fronts: war, surveillance, airport security, cabin doors, box-cutters, flight schools, and military intelligence. A world picture of crisis proposed, held together, revised and controlled by the state is possible precisely because "the modern view of the global sphere has a bipolar logic: language and state are coextensive, and the cosmopolitan economy of language is based on a state language’s becoming global." (Cochran, Literary 25). Ironically, it is perhaps because of this imperative of control that terror seems to be sublimated by the very prospect of the enemy being stateless and faceless, below the radar of a naturalized epistemology which is now global in compass [1]. 'Terror' is micropunctually distributed in 'cells', and not in
the body or the corpus that we have traditionally associated with the political. But despite the diffuse presence of al Quaeda in about sixty countries, the US federal government so far has largely conducted its retaliation based on specific, molar references of modernist self-other geopolitics, like Afghanistan, Iraq,
Iran, and North Korea. The dispersed presence of such antibodies of terror and the consequent crises in the global body-politic has so far been predominantly diagnosed in terms of identifying the 'host' nations as
arborescent formations that need to be destroyed. The spectacular profile of Osama Bin Laden is a reassuring world picture of evil, precisely because evil that cannot be represented cannot be governed.
The event is that which eludes such hermeneutics of plausibility. The essence of the event lies neither in the
application that accompanies it, nor in the different strategic and systemic scenarios that it creates and
upsets, but in the sheer force of multiplicity and potentialities that it brings with itself. The event
perpetually opens up the world instead of enframing it in a new world picture, or pointing out gaps or holes
in the old one. If an airplane were to be flown into a skyscraper again, the incident would not be a repetition
of the event, but of the pattern of systemic crises of experts have already talked about. However, one can
say that the state does claim to address and conquer the event, perhaps unwittingly, without understanding it at all, through a renewal of its long standing fantasy to capture the future and posit the scintillations of the
event irresistibly as part of its perpetually unfolding psychobiography. In doing so, it only reinforces the
commonplace misunderstanding of the event as a crisis phenomenon. In the aftermath of September 11, we have seen the US defense administration attempt to invest the horizon of potentialities by building an archive of chronicles foretold. This has been done by asking for and militarizing, acts of secular divination and speculative ‘minority reports’ from imaginative sources like Tom Clancy and Hollywood screenwriters. The state, by watching cropdusting planes, dirt-bomb suitcases, North Korean Fishing boats with large, rudimentary cruise missiles, belligerent killer satellites and such like, tries to ward off the multiple ripples of chance in a nontemporal future.
To begin thinking about the event, we need to first recognize that we do not yet have the concepts to do so;
which is why, to acknowledge the event as such is not to register support for this or that warring party. The event in other words, is not controlled by the world picture of al queda or any such contesting ideologies. It is only the subjection of phenomenal representation that accords the comfort of such easy translations, by which disaster in the west automatically becomes a triumph in the realm of the other. The point is to proceed in a direction that takes us away from a dominant bipolar logic of good and evil, from perverse symmetrical notions of justice that involve serialized exchanges between law making and law preserving violence. If indeed, thinking about the event calls for a Nietzschean transvaluation of values, that is, if such a task is to be considered a political imperative, it has to be seen as a politics of the community that is yet to arrive. It is this political impulse of thought that the state and statist violence of all kinds seek to prevent. We will not talk about the event as such for the rest of our discussion, but acknowledge, at every step the pure force of its potentialities. We will examine some emergency measures that have followed the incidents
of September 11 in order to demonstrate how, in intensifying the violence of its clichés, the state seeks to foreclose a political thinking of the new.
The State of Security
In a recent article, Georgio Agamben points out that the heated activity of crisis management that has followed on a planetary scale in the aftermath of September 11 has been largely informed by a consideration of security. Drawing from Michel Foucault's exposition on the political and economic practice of the physiocrats, Agamben points out that security is always opposed to discipline and law as instruments of governance. "While disciplinary power isolates and closes off territories, measures of security lead to an opening and globalization. While the law wants to present and prescribe, security wants to intervene in ongoing processes to direct them. In a world where discipline wants to produce order, security wants to guide disorder" (Security 1). In what has been called a post-disciplinary global society of control, where instead of classic disciplinary spaces of enclosure like the prison, the factory, or the school, power is micropunctually exercised in a borderless world through diffuse, fungible operations that erase traditional divisions between the inside and the outside (the factory is nowhere because it is everywhere)[2], security "seems to be the basic principle of state activity" (Agamben, Security 1). When the state withdraws from constitutive or even reformist politics and reduces itself to the police, "the difference between state and terrorism threatens to disappear" (Agamben, Security 2). According to Agamben, measures of security require a constant reference to a state of emergency. The Benjaminian underpinning of this formulation becomes clear when we understand the act of policing as that which effaces distinctions between law making and law preserving violence. The state of security, in the act of policing, aims to conquer space not by spreading its word as law or its mediating influence as contractual authority, but by
making its will immanent. It attempts to dominate time by suspending any legislative or investigative interval between the law and the fact. As Hannah Arendt puts it in her classic study of totalitarianism, the law in this case, becomes fact (394). The indistinguishable compact of the quastro juris and quastro facti produces the decree, with which the state continues its rule[3]. Under declared conditions of emergency, the 'normal' protocols of legislative mediation that establishes the rational-narrative relation between the law and the fact, the public exercise of reason that the order of western enlightenment demands from the functionaries of the Kantian-Hegelian state, is abridged into a specter of secrecy. The state, in other words, begins to practice secrecy in broad daylight. In making absolute its claim to life functions in a moment of danger, it demands a new coda of voluntaristic submission from the modern citizen. The movement from a horizontal distribution of civil procedures and a vertical transcendence of the state no longer remains a dialectical proposition; it is urgently secured by the absolute presence of what Terry Cochran has called a DOGMA of the west [4] - something that a mythic and violent fate seems to have imposed on peoples. The
citizen is required to partake in the total movement of Dogma in terms of a faith-based conformity of the imperiled patriot, abandoning usual liberal exercises of private reason prompted by education, culture, communication or consensus. The latter are replaced by the rapid action of emergency related tasks, the urgent investment money and research to effect a productive channelizing of disorder. As a bearer of the state’s will, the citizen has to reinvent herself as the patriot – as potential informer and vigilant shopper - who, in accordance with the exceptional situation, has retired from political praxis.
A casual glance through a short list of happenings in the aftermath of September 11 will give us a makeshift illustration of these formulations. It is important to understand that in the state of emergency, secret tribunals, wiretapping measures and unlimited detention without trial are not mere violations of civil rights and constitutional freedoms, but results of a situation in which the very distinction between legality and illegality has ceased to exist. Dogma does not seek to legitimize itself through graduated, narratological protocols of justice, but pronounces decrees in an instant. It is the absence of the usual need for logical progression and consistency in its discourse that allows the state to declare a ‘war’ against terror and then pronounce that the people interned in the subsequent battle do not qualify to be prisoners of war as per the Geneva Convention. In dogmatic articulation, the first postulate does not have any relation of 'obligation' with the second one, as is usual in legal procedures and narrative functions. Dogma does not declare that to be an Arab or a Muslim is a crime; it simply transforms these attributes into general, even fashionable vices that may or may not translate into evils of insecurity in a multicultural society. As Hannah Arendt reminds us, one can escape from the state of criminality by conversion or exile, but from a state of vice, there is no escape (86-87). Between Osama Bin Laden to John Walker Lindh and beyond, the Other is excluded not by setting up limiting walls between the inside and outside, but through a process of differential inclusion by
which the inside besieges the outside (Agamben, Homo Sacer, 18-22).
Before we move on to other matters, it is necessary to clarify that our purpose in elaborating on the state of
emergency devoted to security is not to mourn the irrational compromise of liberty, law and justice – the
great idealist pillars of enlightenment modernity of the west – but to understand how the liberal democratic state always serves the global interests of capital in a flexible manner, occasionally withdrawing from its hegemonic tasks involving the myth of consensus, and unleashing its power in reserve to exercise what we will later explain as a 'full spectrum' dominance.
Terror, Time and Space
It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it’s all theatre.
In Pynchon’s novel, the screaming comes from the sky and invents the landscape as the latter’s floor (1). The sky is the ontos of chance and discontinuity; as a figure of thought it must not be confused neither with the astronautical or astronomical sky that is a domain of the secular state, nor with the starry map of the
epic world that is the realm of the gods. The distribution of V rockets (once in the anarchy of the elements,
the projectiles change directions, sometimes even recoiling and hitting the Germans) orders London’s
metropolitan map in a manner that confuses the geometry and arithmetic of the traditional nation-state. The
map, "an ink ghost of London, ruled off into 576 squares, a quarter square kilometer each," once dotted
with markings of the air strikes and statistically ordered according to the classic Poisson distribution,
(assuming that each point has two states, wake or sleep, one or zero) yields the following result: every
metrical unit of space has a chance of 0.37 of suffering one hit, 0.17 of suffering two." (63). The question
of security can becomes one of despair and hopelessness precisely because there is no way to discern from the map places that are safest from attack. The mean density in the democratic distribution of chance remains constant. "That’s the Monte Carlo Fallacy. No matter how many have fallen inside a particular square, the odds remain the same as they always were. Each hit is independent of all the others. Bombs are not dogs. No link. No memory. No conditioning" (64). The terror bomb is thus the pure instance of chance that destroys what Deleuze and Guattari call the royalist geometry and arithmetic of the geopolitical nationstate (36-40), which is why perhaps in 'postmodern' military terminology, such attacks are referred to as 'asymmetrical' warfare. Especially since, as an instance of low-tech, low-capital planning that eludes an expensive, high-tech war machine and inflicts a disproportionately high level of damage, the improvised terror bomb can be seen as destructive to the basic investment principle of western scientific, financial, and military installations of power: that there should be an equation between wealth, efficiency and truth
(Lyotard 45). After September 11, it seems it is such an anarchy of numbers that has created the 'homeland' as the latest trope in international security and crisis management.
The state of emergency is marked not just by an inversion of the classic Clauszwitzian formula of war
being politics pursued by other means, but by a situation where, in terms of space, the imperatives of security extend the theater of war to that of politics so as to efface any fundamental distinction between the two, and in the register of temporality, render obsolete all divisions between time of war and time of peace. In order to understand this more clearly, we first have to examine the machinations by which dominant apparati of war in the modernist episteme have traditionally manufactured peace in the latter half of the twentieth century.
The cold war years produced a geometry of war that divided the world into two primary geopolitical theaters. The technological development of the war machine was channelized into improving the speed and precision of the projectile that could traverse intercontinental distances and hit strategic installations. In Paul Virilio's theorization, this fostered a catastrophic peace - a precarious balance of power that worked on a principle of 'defensive redoubt'. The creation of smooth space of war was achieved by systems analyses predicated on a striated ordering of ground traversed and a metrical computation of time; the ubiquitous compact of the vehicle and the explosive rendered all points potential targets and the fleet itself transformed its being from an actual to a virtual status. The radar electrified and abstracted the fortress form, making smooth the undulating topography of the old survey map. It is also fruitful to note that in this arrangement, emphasis shifted from old order imperialist occupation of territories to imperial control of space. The nation state stood to gain time by shredding ground, that is, by offering fewer geopolitically
dispersed targets in its strategic outlay. The technological perfection of this war apparatus involved a
minimization of reaction time under the specter of mutual destruction. In order to achieve this, the political decision making of the human was gradually replaced by the infallible retaliatory reflex of the machine [5].
But this instantaneous and automotive war impulse of the machine was informed by a bipolar, geostrategic
knowledge of the globe that offered a positive territorial division between the self and the other. The automotive trigger of ultimate firepower could be brought to life only after the death of politics, at an apocalyptic moment beyond life itself. The catastrophic contract of human peace was seen to be consolidated by the mutual assurance of machinic destruction on part of both parties.
It is in the light of these formulations that we can now construct a descriptive of the attacks of September
11. Following that, we will examine some prescriptions of the AAN (Army After Next) project being
developed by the US military establishment and also those of the New Military proposed by Defense
Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in the subsequent months.
Space and Semiology: The crisis in the governing semiology of the modern war apparatus we have just
described can be understood when one considers that the projectiles in this case were launched from within
US territory and bore the insignia of American civilian aircrafts. If the radar as virtual fortress is seen to be
telelocalizing the landscape in a manner conducive for the war machine to exterminate poets as well as
assassins, the September 11 incident can indeed be seen as one that confounds the secure arrangement of
words and things involved in this. Terror in this strategic sense is not defined by the attacks per se, but by the turbulence in the system that momentarily destroyed the algorithm of visibilities (the airplane as
opposed to a missile) and articulable statements of the law (the first is a civilian entity, the second a
military threat) that distribute, govern and distinguish between movements of peace and movements of war.
Time and Movement: The systemic crisis of September 11 was not that of knowledge, since in the
conceptual order of the modern, knowledge is always 'belated'. As Lyotard has pointed out, in postmodern
scientific systems, increase in knowledge can lead to more uncertainty and lowering of performance; control, thus, can be instead exercised more efficiently through a regulation of chaos -- a performative management of instabilities and variables, rather than through a negation of uncertainty through metaphysical invocations of truth [6]. The speed and veracity of data accumulation and knowledge processing on part of the war apparatus was apparent on September 11. The new innovation in the catalogue of weapons (airplane as warhead) was inscribed in the analytic and communication system with remarkable
speed, and indeed, fighter planes were dispatched to combat the third projectile heading towards the
Pentagon; but there was no time to prevent the disaster since this analytical maneuver, as usual, was a
belated one. Knowledge can only follow the event; the latter is 'untimely' precisely because it can instantaneously, without following the lineage of computed time and the striations of metrical space, deterritorialize the flight path of the civil aircraft into the trajectory of the warhead. The groundless, nontemporal instant of terror is that which destroys the epistemic regime of words and things by forging a
weapon out of the tool – the boxcutter becomes the instrument of guidance and detonation, the airplane
becomes the missile with firepower.
In such a situation of crisis, if the worship of security becomes the prime activity of the dogmatic state, it
has to actually withdraw from both war and politics and confine itself to policing the globe. The US government and other constable states in the NATO and beyond [7] are indeed, quite unequivocally, displaying that tendency at present. This is because it is only policing, as a form of producing security, that can bypass the contemplative interval that knowledge entails and work purely on the basis of information. We will get to this in a minute, but first let us try to understand why the order of emergency cannot reserve the time and space for either war or politics.
War: The three classic formative attributes of modern war machines are strategy, logistics and tactics.
Strategy is the plan of operations that must be in force before hostile armies or fleets are brought into
contact – it is the art of waging war on the map. A Clausewitzian revision of this formulation by Jomini
extends the concept to domestic politics, foreign policies, strategic alliances, production and distribution of civic resources. It is in this sense that war becomes politics pursued by other means; conflict gains a
rational definition in the light of peaceful interests. Logistics is the art of moving armies and ensuring free
flow of fuel and supplies from the home base to the battlefront. Tactics involve the art of giving battle -- the
actual maneuver and deployment of men and metal in the arena of combat (Mahan, Naval Warfare, 50).
The state of security captures and de-territorializes this classic war machine, liquefying it into one
unalloyed and absolute movement of matter that does not separate the moment of strategic revision (it is
permissible to shoot down a passenger airplane) from the consequent tactical maneuver that executes it. We
will try to see shortly how this dynamic transformation is accomplished by informationizing the war
machine and its conventional components. Strategy, logistics and tactics thus have to undergo a fluid
innovation beyond their geopolitical diagrams in a postmodern global theater where, to use a Borgesian
metaphor, the map is bigger than the land itself.
Politics: Just as absolute informationization reduces friction and noise in the channels of intelligence in the
hierarchical command structures of the war machine, it also seeks to minimize the parliamentary clamor of
constitutional liberal institutions. In the state of emergency, information has to flow in smooth,
micropunctual circuits of matter and energy. When the strikes took place on September 11, there was no
time to create a communicative interface between the judicial, the legislative and the executive organs of
the state to decide how the facts related to the law and pronounce a legal diagnostic of the situation. The
state of security tries to bypass this problem by obliterating the very difference between law and fact, by
making its will and not the ambiguity of its word immanent. Under legislative protocols of knowledge,
deviations in flight paths become, in differential degrees, matters of detection, examination and inference –
an overall analytical process tempered by checks and balances that judiciously may or may not announce a
clear and present threat at the end of its queries. On the other hand, as per the operative principles of
informationized militarization, deviation immediately and inseparably, becomes threat. The rigorous
geometry of security and preemption thus has to work on a monitoring calculus of movements and
departures rather than an analogical or indexical anchoring of signs into statements of law.
It is however, very important to understand that the state of security does not work by abandoning the
territorial war machine and the political and civil societies of the old nation state altogether. It in fact
urgently and flexibly recruits them for its own ends. In both cases, "the normativity of the laws is replaced
by the performativity of procedures." The state of security in fact, has to 'free' the war machine from legal
denominations to bring about what in Lyotardian language would be an increase in the latter’s capability to
act on variables with determinism (Lyotard 97). We have also seen in the recent past, that the liberal
democratic political machinery of the US government and its global allies, with its paraphernalia of
international treaties and diplomatic institutions, has been flexibly used to spread a Judeo-Christian
theology of just war between good and evil. In mystically enfiguring the terrorist as a "hater of our
freedoms" and denying him a political status, the state dismisses its own normative constitutional practices
by enforcing a dogma of emergency.
What is Information?
When the war machine is informationized by the state of security, it means that the cognitive faculty that
detects threat, gains intelligence and supplies battlespace awareness is no longer separate from the
administration of the weapon. There is no intervening authority to judge, legislate, and finally activate the
war machine with a ceremonial declaration of hostile intentions. The impetus therefore shifts from a tensile
maintenance of a dormant retaliatory impulse which would activate itself instantly during a momentous,
catastrophic outbreak of two theater nuclear war, to a dispersed, perpetually alive, preemptive bent of the
police. It is by maintaining this constant duress of informationization that the state tries to ward off the
event, or cut it short before the latter completes its devastating arc.
Information, unlike knowledge, has an instantaneous lifetime; hence, it can serve as fuel for the policing
war machine only for a very short period. Mapped in digital time and space, information is seen to change
into news after a critical point. The turbulent movements on that morning of September 11 were
information only till the planes completed traversing their divergent paths and hit their targets; from the
respective moments of impact, each became news. The latter as we know, is the object of knowledge and meditative human politics -- the Hegelian self-conscious subject can draw a concept from it only in
retrospect, when the phenomenon has already extinguished its life force. News can be the memory [8]
attribute that aids the education of the Kantian citizen, but is quite useless as fuel for the policing war
machine, since, in following the event, it can only present the map as aftermath. 'Terror', in terms of
informationization, is thus produced not in the absence of knowledge, but in the instantaneous interval
between the production and the immediate consumption of information. Reduction of this interval and
improvement in efficiency can thus take place only when the war machine is rendered 'free' from the
classical symbiotic arrangement of war and politics. Which is why, just as the state of security, in its
unceasing and absolute movement, posits peace as a brink rather than a telos, the logistics of information in
conditions of emergency construe politics only as a 'news based' distant afterthought of the human.
Informationized tele-localization of the globe can take place only when the realist prejudice of modern
knowledge systems, that the camera does not lie, gives way to a postmodern technological system
predicated on the efficiency coda that the camera has no time to lie. It is the coincidence of what war
theoretician Robert E. Scales calls the 'unblinking eye' and the 'instantaneous fist' of the war machine that
allows it to function on information – tendentially, the eye-fist assemblage tries to erase all temporal and
spatial distances between seeing threat and delivering firepower (Scales 137).
It is quite redundant to point out that the global flow of information, as an instance of production, is
paralogous to the circuitous movement of capital itself. Information creates value by minimizing circulation
time and, like the money form itself, ceases to be merely a medium of exchanges and measure of life
functions, acquiring an autonomous force of its own. What we are calling an extension of informationized
military space is thus of course also an emphatic institutionalization of capitalistic value and relations of
production. It goes without saying that war is just another contributing factor in the planetary securing of
capitalist mode of production, financialization without borders, and the dogmatic protection of private
property and commodity markets from any harm. What we have thus been calling the State of security so
far is thus not the sovereign nation state of yore, but the Super state -- a form of transnational
governmentality that facilitates free flow of investment capital across the globe, flexibly controlling
populations rather than disciplining and creating peoples, and expending a tremendous volume of bomb,
money and ether to open up and maintain markets. It is thus the present operational logic of what Foucault
calls bio-politics (Biopolitics (73-75), the governing principle of the population state rather than the
territorial one (Territory, 67-71), which calls for the punctuation of the cluster bomb with the food packet.
The metropolitan power center of a world governed by such measures of control is increasingly becoming
dispersed and diffuse in nature and the state of security called into being by elite interests of the globe is
perpetually informed by a wartime edge that is constantly at work to capture and confine the outside9.
Although the US national government is a prime terminal of this global network assemblage of power, it
must not be completely identified with the latter, despite the fact that, for understandable reasons, it is its
‘unilateralist’ stance that has been the cynosure of much debate.
The New Military
The transformations in the US military recently proposed by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld
suggest that the North American war machine has to shift from a threat based strategy to a capabilities
based one in order to effect what the 2001 US National Defense Review calls a ‘full spectrum dominance’
8 The digital memory of governance thus would that whose “odds were never probabilities, but frequencies
already observed” (Pynchon 243). This has to be distinguished from the Heideggerian figure of the
untimely Mnemosyne – daughter of the sky and the earth, bride of Zeus and the gatherer of thought.
9 Agamben (Homo Sacer, 18-22) has developed a thesis of modern sovereignty’s procedures of exclusion
through a differential inclusion from Maurice Blanchot’s notion of ‘great confinement’ – society’s attempt
to confine the outside. It is by confining the outside that the city attempts to conquer terror: “what if the City
were a growing neoplasm, across the centuries, always chang-ing, to meet exactly the chang-ing shape of
its very worst, se-cret fears?” (Pynchon 202).
8
on a global scale10. The objective, according to Rumsfeld, is to reinvent the US joint forces as a lighter and
more agile war apparatus, capable of inserting itself into and withdrawing from any position in the globe on
a very short notice. The chief task of the new military in the latest ‘new world order’ will be not to fight
and win wars, but “prevention and sometimes preemption.” (Rumsfeld 29). In the interests of security, the
operational stretch of the new military thus has to erase temporal distinctions between times of war and
times of peace, and spatial ones between the nation-state as geopolitical home and the world at large. Along
with a “good, solid, dead bolt” on the homeland’s front door, what is thus needed is a “police force to patrol
the (international) neighborhood and keep bad guys off the streets” (24-25).
Rumsfeld’s plan in large part coincides with the prescriptives of the Army after Next (AAN) project being
developed at the US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) headquarters. Major General
Robert H. Scales, one of the chief architects of the program points out that the US military establishment
required more than six months to set up the theater of war against Iraq in 1990. Scales exhorts an urgent
need for the military to shred metal, lose weight, and in contrast to the policy of distant punishment through
aerial strikes that has been the hallmark of US military engagements since Vietnam, declares that it is
imperative to control land in order to ensure a smooth, ground-level network of information supplying joint
action forces on land, sea and air11. A full spectrum dominance over a post colonial world full of what state
realist Fareed Zakaria calls Illiberal democracies and failed states12 seems to require intelligence and
instantaneous response at ground level. Stephen Metz, another West Point intellectual, envisions 21st
century warfares as resembling the civil wars and tribal conflicts that marked the gestative years of the
European nation states in the 18th century. According to Metz, policing transnational spaces in an ecology
of new medievalism calls for a mastery of a form of urban warfare by the first quarter of the new century
that concentrates on robotics and the use of non-lethal weapons (Metz 5-25). After all, controlling
populations is a task not best facilitated by molar instruments of de-populating firepower.
Translated in computational terms, what Metz is urging in terms of a ‘paradigm shift’ is the extended use of
robotic DEMON functions in urban policing networks. The efficient management of information traffic in a
computer network involves substituting a central structure of command by packets or colonies of software
that are allowed to make their own, on the spot decisions by trading data with other such units. In other
words, rather than being controlled by a master program, demons are “invoked into action by changes in
their environment13” (De Landa 120). They are thus a means of endowing a computer network to instantly
self –organize according to the data collected. In military terms, the demon principle creates an island of
10 Even before September 11, the U.S. defense planning was budgeted at more than $ 310 billion – roughly
ten times the British one, and considerably more than twice the defense spending of the rest of NATO put
together. The procurement budget for 2003 is $ 8 billion, a rise of 10%. It is expected to rise to $30 billion
by 2007. See Eliot A. Cohen, “A Tale of Two Secretaries.” Foreign Policy. May/June, 2002: 33-46. The
U.S purchases this dominance with only 3.5% of its gross domestic product.
11 See Major General Robert H. Scales, Jr. Future Warfare. Carisle Barracks: U.S. Army War College,
1999).
12 The figure of the ‘reluctant sheriff’ is of course highly motivated at the end by the fact that failed states
like Angola and Sudan have oil, and Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone have
diamonds and other minerals. For an elaboration on the term ‘Illiberal Democracy’, see Fareed Zakaria,
“The Rise of Illiberal Democracy.” Globalization and the Challenges of a New Century: A Reader. Ed.
Patrick O’Meara et al. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. 181-195.
13 This definition of the demon has to be distinguished from Laplace’s fiction of the demon that Lyotard
discusses in relation to systems theory. This entity, “knows all of the variables determining the state of the
universe at a moment t, and can thus predict its state at a moment t’>t. This fiction is sustained by the
principle that physical systems, including the system of systems called the universe, follow regular patterns,
with the result that their evolution traces a regular path and gives rise to “normal” continuous functions”
(Lyotard 55). Laplace’s demon, in affirming an evolutionary normalcy, rather than an ecological control of
‘anarchy’, is thus different from the trope we are discussing.
9
certainty by absolving itself of the traditional feedback loop between the headquarters and the rank foot
soldier. So far, the informative reflex of the demon has been restricted to surveillance tasks, as in the UAVs
(Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) successfully used in the Afghanistan war; Metz is advocating that it be given
more executive functions in terms of delivering punishment. For our present purpose however, the demon
of ‘future warfare’ can serve as a figure of thought that offers us the glimpse of the impossible – when
circulation time completes its tendential function and recedes to zero, infinitesimally below the threshold of
human mediation qua law, politics and justice. Rather than drawing up a simple binary between a natural
and an artificial order of things and lament yet again the philosophical death of the human in the age of
computerization, the urgent task of thinking is perhaps to understand how the dogma of the state of security
seeks to invest both human and machinic communities within the operative span of the demonic principle.
The Citizen Corps, the Neighborhood Watch and the TIP (Terrorism Information Program) initiatives
advocated by President Bush in his April 8, 2002 speech in Tennessee are only a few headline
announcements in the overall imagining of this diffuse distribution of power14. As a bearer of the state’s
algorithm of power, the citizen is merely the HUMINT (short for human intelligence) component in the
demonic organization of life worlds that is to take place on a planetary scale now.
The Demon that walks the earth
The demon thus is the operational unit that demonstrates an inhuman and total sensitivity to the skies. In
abridging the interval between the screaming and hearing, it seeks to ward off the event. In coinciding to
infinitesimal perfection the moment of the fact, the moment of the law and the moment of the execution,
the demon is the machine par excellance for the production and exploitation of information as fuel. Its
militarization is yet another instance of the state’s own hubristic desire to command the field of
potentialities through crisis management. We will end this discussion by making a couple of observations
that, at this point, can only be termed as errors, since our own understanding of the present cannot but be a
belated one.
In his excellent book “War in the Age of Intelligent Machines” Manuel de Landa charts the beginnings of
the modern “vacuum cleaner approach” to intelligence gathering in the Prussian Secret Service chief
Wilhelm Stieber’s preparation for the 1870-71 war against France (183). This involves a loose and random
pragmatics of accumulating a dust of particle signs we can call INFORMATONS, which can only produce
fog unless processed into information. De Landa also points out that historically, this method has been
overwhelmingly more effective for domestic policing than for international espionage. Perhaps an effective
distribution of demonic intelligences to police the metropolitan streets in the age of multinational capital
would mean to exonerate, under the mantra of emergency, all spaces from the nominal divisions that
demark the outside from the inside, the home from the world. The recent invocation of the category
‘homeland’ could ironically mean the global distribution of domesticity itself15. Besides the extension of
NATO beyond Russia and the geopolitics of Europe, the imperative of domestication could mean the
14 The chief sectors of recruitment in this seem to be utility workers and truckers. In his speech, Bush gave
the example of the lobstermen of Maine who were signed up by the FBI.
15 The recent proposals to revise the ordering of intelligence fostered by the National Security Act of 1947
can be seen in this light. The call to break down communication barriers between the FBI and the CIA is
actually, from the U.S. national perspective, to de-differentiate “domestic versus foreign threats, law
enforcement versus national security concerns, and peacetime versus wartime.” For instance, the provision
for wiretapping, previously reserved for the CIA by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has
been now extended, by Attorney General John Ashcroft’s office, to the monitoring of the domestic
populace. See John Deutch and Jeffrey H. Smith, “Smarter Intelligence.” Foreign Policy. January/February
2002: 64-69. Speaking in the interests of national security, Deutch and Smith also suggest that “artificial
distinctions” such as that between CIA sponsored covert action and military special operations should be
made irrelevant (66). Current law requires both a presidential finding and reporting to Congress of all CIA
covert action. No such rule governs covert military operations. There has also been talk to withdraw the
Ford administration’s 1976 executive order banning CIA assassination of foreign political leaders.
10
setting up of what we will call CONSTABLE regimes16, rather than colonies of old order imperialism or
satellite states of the cold war17.
16 As a parallel case marking an entirely different paradigm of warfare, we can consider the formulations of
the great late nineteenth-early twentieth century American naval strategist Admiral Alfred T. Mahan.
Speaking from a Jominian perspective that views strategy as that which “cannot be obtained under the high
pressure of war unless in peace the contingency of war has dictated its system,” (Naval Warfare, 115),
Mahan notes that the coming of the steam ship entailed a necessary imperial imperative for the American
navy. The domination of the ‘great common’ of the sea called for a network of coal and other logistical
supply bases throughout the Pacific and the Atlantic, since sea power for him is defined by the ability to
cross great waters and strike at the enemy’s home base. Mahan’s critique of American isolationism was
grounded on the assertion that “having no foreign establishments, either colonial or military, the ships of
war of United States will be like land birds, unable to fly far away from their own shores” (Sea Power, 83).
He mentions the industrious but exhausted France under Louis XIV in this regard, also noting that it is
naturally deficient nations like England that have the impetus for gaining great sea power.
17 For instance, according to figures supplied by Khalid M. Medani in “Financing Terrorism or Survival?
Informal Finance and State Collapse in Somalia, and the US War on Terrorism” in Middle East Report 223.
Summer, 2002:2-9, Operation Green Quest, launched on October 25, 2001, has frozen more than $34
million dollars in global assets linked to alleged terrorist institutions and individuals. 142 nations have
blocked $70 million within their borders, while 184 have expressed ‘support.’ In terms of sharing military
intelligence, one can cite the agreement reached by the U.S. administration with the ASEAN countries on
August 1, 2002 along with many similar ones. The ‘with us or against us’ decree issued by President Bush
on April 30, 2002, indeed has very little to do with liberal democratic communicative action and
‘consensus’. However, the regional support for the war on terrorism has not come cheap. According to a
statistical chart published in Middle East Report 222 Spring, 2002: 11, “the bulk of the “security
assistance” came in two chunks: the emergency supplemental appropriations bill of October 2001, which
gave the administration and the Congress $20 billion each to allocate, and the foreign appropriations bill
passed in December 2001.” The chief beneficiaries were Egypt (close to $ 2 billion under ‘foreign military
financing’ and ‘economic support fund’) and Israel (more than $3 billion in economic support and military
aid, including money to set up a US based production line for Arrow missile). Other major beneficiaries
have been Armenia, Azerbaijan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkey,
Turkmenistan, Tunisia, and Uzbekistan. The list however, does not include several new arms sales
currently in the offing to Egypt, Israel, Oman, Turkey and the UAE. President Bush’s 2003 budget request
promises significant increases in aid to Jordan, India, Oman, Pakistan, Yemen and others.
Works cited
Agamben, Georgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller Roazen.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.
---. “Security and Terror.” Theory and Event. 5:4. 24 Jul. 2002.
theory_and_event/v005/5.4agamben.html.
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1973.
Benjamin, Walter. “Critique of Violence” Reflections. Ed. Peter Demetz. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New
York: Shocken books. 1986.
---. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Ed.Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. London:
Fontana Press, 1991.
Cochran, Terry. Twilight of the Literary: Figures of Thought in the Age of Print. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press. 2001.
---. “Atta et al.” (unpublished paper.)
11
Our descriptive of the innovated war machine that the state of security puts to use replaces strategic
knowledge with an uninterrupted flow of logistical information. The proposed 379 billion dollar defense
budget demanded by Rumsfeld seems to conceive of such enduring transformation – the consolidation of a
lasting and violent mistake of the state that sees the event to be a node that can be closed between two serial
structures. It is in this light that another formulation by De Landa becomes interesting to us. When
information itself becomes fuel, the war machine has to disperse the variables and fog of war throughout its
network structure so that it does not cause an information explosion at the top. Set in terms of logistics, it
has to become a nomadic traveler across the globe, since the domestic supply base of information is not
enough to meet the massive scale of its planetary operations. The war machine has to travel and fight to
gain information fuel in order to be able to travel and fight again. The blur of speed and the calculus of
continuous motion is what can otherwise be called instantaneous presence and full spectrum dominance.
This aspect of warfare of course, is nothing new. As De Landa points out, historically, from the Mongolian
hordes to the clockwork armies of Maurice of Nassau or Frederick the Great to the organized modern
plunders in the initial weeks of World War I, whenever the fighting teeth of armies got bigger than their
logistical tail, they had to take war wherever there was food and fuel to sustain it (113). The point however
is when military innovation of the state of security calls for a supercession of planetary information as
virtual fuel over ‘real’- conventional ones like grain, fodder, oil, aluminum or plutonium, the war machine
becomes truly global in its aspirations.
De Landa, Manuel. War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. New York: Zone Books, 1991.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Nomadology. Trans. Brian Massumi. New York: Semiotext(e), 1986.
Foucault, Michel. “Security, Territory, and Population.” Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984: Ethics,
Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth. Ed. Paul Rabinow. Vol. I. New York: The New Press, 1997. 67-71
---. “The Birth of Biopolitics.” Essential Works. Vol I. 73-80.
Hardt, Michael. “The Global Society of Control.” Discourse 2:3 (1998): 139-152.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. London: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bonnington
And Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979.
Mahan, Alfred T. The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. Boston:
Little, Brown and Company, 1918.
---. On Naval Warfare. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1948.
Metz, Stephen. Armed Conflict in the 21st Century: The Information Revolution and
Post-Modern Warfare. Carisle Barracks: Strategic Studies Institute. 2000.
Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Bantam, 1973.
Rumsfeld, Donald H. “Transforming the Military.” Foreign Affairs May/June 2002: 20-32.
Scales, Robert H. Future Warfare. Carisle Barracks: U.S. Army War College, 1999.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography.” The Spivak Reader.
Ed. Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean. London: Routledge, 1996. 203-35.
12
The demon that looms in the horizon has killed the human; in a grotesque turn, it has assumed the visage of
humanity for itself while suppressing at the same time, the very figure of the human. It is impossible to read
the present historically because it always arrives late. What we have described so far is a tendency that
garners a character of emergency for itself by its very state of being in perpetual motion. Indeed, the state
of security needs to be reinforced at every step by a constant declaration of obsolescence and renewal, by
an incessant dynamic of abandonment and innovation, by an unceasing capitalization of crises and the
lifeworlds they involve. The latest influx of production and research money in the business of killing
people as a benign act of ‘creative destruction’, of course proceeds from a premise that inherited war
technology is already anachronistic. The promise of ‘enduring freedom’, of a tensile maintenance of a
global state of security, is that of an entrepreneurial movement in which “There will be no point at which
we can declare that U.S. forces have been “transformed.” ”(Rumsfled 27).
As we have seen, a large volume of left discourse in the aftermath of September 11 has been restricted to
conservative estimates of crises and in the process, a categorical separation and choice between documents
of civilization and those of barbarity. To think about the event on the other hand is to take intellection
elsewhere. This does not presume laissez faire relativism or a retirement to an ivory tower of angelic
ironies. Indeed, to break the dull intellectual inertia and enervating nihilism of our times, to think beyond
the conservative exchanges of violence that we are witnessing across the world, perhaps the first thing we
need to remember is that going beyond “good and evil” is not denying the distinction between the good and
the bad (Deleuze 141). The bad for us pertains to the exhaustive and nihilistic nature of a language that
always refers back to the state form and provides security to the species being that touts capitalism as his
only mode of existence. The good is that which affirms the event by opening up life forces to new
potentialities, and forges new social weapons and antagonisms for what Benjamin calls ‘divine violence’
(Critique, 297 ). It would be pertinent to end our discussion by invoking him and saying that to think
historically today, in a manner that involves “fanning the spark of hope in the past” calls for a conviction
that “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins” (History, 247).
*
[1] In a lecture titled "Atta et al." delivered at the University of Pittsburgh in the Spring of 2002, Terry Cochran pointed out that in denying themselves the secular dogma of modernity, in positing a postmodern belief in the rewards of afterlife, Atta et al. fell out of the modern without returning to the pre-modern. This violates secular covenant of the state that casts itself as the divinatory and the mediator between natural law and civil law. According to Cochran, this perpetual divinatory action that the state claims for itself was accompanied by the modernist suppression of the figure of the divine himself. Nevertheless, we would suggest that perhaps terror, in the present sense, is not defined by a natural or savage 'outside' to the naturalized episteme of the European anthropos. In other words, we are trying to disassociate the category from the Kantian sense of the sublime. Terror, as we shall see, is caused by inefficient capitalization of information, rather than an absence of phenomenological knowledge of the 'other'.
[2] See Hardt, 139-152, Hardt and Negri, 3-21, for an elaboration of this end of civil society argument.
[3] As Arendt points out, the Nazis never bothered to abolish the old Weimar constitution. They even left the
civil services more or less intact (374). When Stalin inaugurated the Soviet constitution in 1936, he declared it ‘provisional’ (394-95). The constitution thus, according to Arendt, was ‘dated’ from the moment of its issuance. It was never repealed. The state of emergency and the impulse of governance it tries to
enforce therefore do not necessarily call for widespread changes in the formal juridico-political apparatus
of the state bureaucracy.
[4] Cochran, “Atta et al.”
[5] This descriptive is a summary of the thesis developed by Paul Virilio in Speed and Politics. New York: Semiotext(e), 1986, and War and Cinema. Trans. Patrick Camiller. London: Verso, 1989.
[6] See Lyotard 53-60 for an elaboration of this difficult thesis. It is this formulation that distances him from
systems theorists like Niklas Luhmann.
[7] The 2002 Riga summit was attended by 10 NATO candidate countries: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania,
Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, and Macedonia.
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