“Homeland Security” and Societies of Control
‘I reminded them [House Republicans] that the most important job of government is to protect the homeland.” — George W. Bush, Thursday Sept. 14th New York Times
We need to begin asking questions about the origins of such questions of protecting homelands, since what is ultimately at stake is the militarization of space. It should go without saying what that sort of militarization would mean for the prospects of radical democracy.
The discourse of security that is in circulation today has a long history based in liberal thought. The liberal notion of security can most succinctly be traced back to Jeremy Bentham. Liberalism in Bentham’s time was a reaction to sovereign power: it contested the extent to which a sovereign could understand/manage social processes that were argued to be opaque to the sovereign gaze. These social processes (the economy, the bureaucracy, the family, the reasoning individual, etc.) were understood by liberals to be natural social phenomena outside the realm of sovereign power (who sought to make such processes transparent). Thus, the various disciplines of political-economics, political science, public administration, sociology, etc. were established to investigate and reflect upon these processes that were understood to be operative outside (though internally to) the transcendent state.
But, the question was eventually posed as to how to manage such processes within a territorially bound space, and how to make them productive for economic and state growth (hence the title of Adam Smith’s ” An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations”).
As Michael Dean discusses in his book “Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society,” Bentham sought to articulate four ’subordinate ends’ for state legislation in order to fulfill the utilitarian end of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” The ends, according to Bentham, were to provide subsistence, to produce abundance, to favor equality, and to maintain security.
According to Dean, “security, including security of person, honour, property and condition, was lifted to the top of the hierarchy of government for it is the ‘foundation of life’ on which everything depends.” Of course, this had to due with the economic relation between security and subsistence. Thus, security was first and foremost a disciplining mechanism: a mechanism to produce liberal subjects that exercised a particular type of freedom. In other words, the service of security had to be structured in such a way as to “lead indigent and other troublesome groups to exercise a responsible and disciplined freedom in the market and in the family (Dean).” Bentham’s liberty, argues Dean, is reduced to a branch of security. The detailed regulation of “men and things” thus involves “governmental interventions in the name of security [in order to] to produce forms of liberty appropriate to the participation in the market (Dean).”
How can we trace this liberal notion of security put forward by Bentham to the current predicaments of security that have risen in the aftermath of 9/11?
I think we have to think of the disciplining effects of the purposeful use of the word “homeland” prior to the word “security” when the Bush Administration speaks on the subject. The word “homeland” is a control mechanism that seeks to create what Hardt and Negri call a “differential unity” that must be managed. What do I mean by “control,” and further, what do I mean by “differential unity?”
My use of the important term “control” is borrowed both from the so-called “governmentality” literature, and from the essay “Postscript on control societies” by Gilles Deleuze, whereby a shift has occured from the society that disciplines subjects through institutions (factories, schools, barracks, etc.) outlined by Foucault, to a society where “one is always in continuous training, lifelong learning, perpetual assessment, continual incitement to buy, to improve oneself, constant monitoring of health and never-ending risk managment. Control is not centralized but dispersed; it flows through a network of open circuits that are rhizomatic and not hierarchical (from Nicholas Rose’s “Powers of Freedom”).”
To quote Rose at length:
“IN such a regime of control, Deleuze suggests, we are not dealing with ‘individuals’ but with dividuals: not with subjects with a unique personality that is the expression of some inner quality, but with elements, capacities, potentialities. These are plugged into multiple orbits, identified by unique codes, identification numbers, profiles of preferences, security ratings and so forth: a ‘record’ containing a whole variety of bits of information on our credentials, activities, qualifications for entry into this or that network. In our societies of control, it is not a question of socializing and disciplining the subject ab initio. It is not a question of instituting a regime in which each person is permanently under the alien gaze of the eye of power exercising individualizing surveillance. It is not a matter of apprehending and normalizing the offender ex post facto. Conduct is continually monitored and reshaped by logics immanent within all networks of practice. Surveillance is ‘designed in’ to the flows of everyday existence. The calculated modulation of conduct according to principles of optimization of benign impulses and minimization of malign impulses is dispersed across the time and space of ordinary life.”
Of course, this everyday existence with multifarious networks of practice should not be understood as a homogeneous existence. Quite the contrary. Operative power within the everyday should be understood as seeking to manage difference towards unifying ends. This is why we cannot understand power today as a return of fascistic tendencies. Fascism requires a homogeneous society with top-down control–a society with a hammer over its head. Indeed, this kind of power that assumes homogenous populations certainly still exists (e.g., in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, China, etc.). But, there is a marked difference between a fascistic sort of power, and the power operative today in the United States.
Instead of a homogeneous society where power is based on top-down fascist violence, power in the United States (and Europe) seeks security through a general economy of command: a management of the flows and networks of everyday existence that Deleuze identified above. This sort of neo-liberal operative power Hardt and Negri identify as “the management and hierarchization of differences;” in other words, it is a power operative through freedom: a subjective freedom that should be understood as participating in markets, taking care of the self, dividualizing, molecular, atomistic.
So when the Bush Administration speaks of “homeland security,” the word “homeland” needs to be understood as a unifying signifier: a signifier that seeks to unify differential and multiple networks into a productive hegemonic acquiescence. The goal is to have the effect of a subject saying “Yes, let us protect that territorially-bounded abstraction (the homeland), while I participate in my everyday over here.” In other words, let them take care of that over there, while I do this over here. The accumulation of the latter sorts of practices (”taking care of this, my own everyday, here”) is what needs to be understood as security. It is the detailed regulation of “men and things” identified above: the “governmental interventions in the name of security [in order to] to produce forms of liberty appropriate to the participation in the market.” That is the meaning of protecting the homeland. The act of articulation on the part of George Bush is a productive managing discourse.
This is a productive power operative through subjects, not on subjects (as in fascism)–subjects that can operate within and reproduce a market-friendly society of control.
Of course, I am here only dealing with subjects that imagine themselves to be participating in the abstract “homeland” of the United States.
–Oliver.
September 18th, 2006 at 7:52 pm
In response to what you say here, Oliver, I wonder about the legitimacy of distinguishing two eras with different styles of exercising power. It strikes me that power just happens in pretty nearly any setting in the two ways that you mention.
For instance, Mandy and I went to Louisville to protest Bush’s visit last semester. As the cavalcade came through, a soldier hung out each window with a machine gun. Machine guns are, I imagine, the paradigmatic instance of what you are referring to by “fascism” or a top-down exercise of power. They operate directly by either 1) instilling the fear in you that you will be killed or hurt or 2) actually killing or hurting you. In either case, you are eliminated as a political or personal threat. This sort of power is exercised consistently all over the United States and throughout Europe - think about the use of “microwave beams” mentioned in my previous entry. People are often actually hurt, beaten, stomped, or threatened throughout the “West.”
A police officer clearly operates by means of both kinds of power pretty consistently. If you turn out to lack the appropriate sort of discipline, you will indeed by shot or beaten. Nevertheless, most of us - especially we white middle class types - tend to be acted on affectively (take this in both senses) by means of the other more diffuse kind of power. When I am pulled over by a police officer I get very nervous. I begin to sweat and feel upset to my stomach. I’ve only recently learned to speak to them in a disrespectful tone - the only proper tone in my opinion. These are obviously ways that one is subconsciously and bodily set in order or disciplined long before a cop ever has to pull a gun or a night stick.
I don’t think that our culture is somehow distinct from so-called “fascist” societies in terms of how it exercises power or even why it exercises power. I think what distinguishes a “fascist” use of power from any other is the means through which the power is justified and, therefore, the ends to which it is put. Typically, as I understand it, the idea under a fascist regime is to effect and protect ethnic and national homogeneity. The idea of the state as a system of laws to which everyone must answer is displaced by the idea of the people whose unity and identity must be expressed through conquests, etc. and whose purity must be protected against the infiltration of “mixed or bad blood.” Insofar as there is such a thing as the “fascist state” it is intended to be the tool through which all this is effected.
As has been suggested on several fronts, there are obvious similarities between the nationalistic rhetoric of American security and the right to transcend the law in its name and the rhetoric of other fascist regimes. Coupled with all the debate on the right about “immigration” and the trend toward “deregulation” these things start to appear to be more than surface similarities.
Brandon