Professional Documents
Culture Documents
It is perhaps possible at this point to look back upon the path trav- eled thus far and draw some provisional
their dialectic
World War One, through fascism and National Socialism, and up to our own
time. Indeed, the state of exception has today reached its maximum
worldwide deployment. The normative aspect of law can thus be obliter- ated
and contradicted with impunity by a governmental violence that while
ignoring international law externally and producing a permanent state of
exception internallynevertheless still claims to be applying the law. Of course,
the task at hand is not to bring the state of exception back within its spatially and temporally defined
boundaries in order to then reaffirm the primacy of a norm and of rights that are themselves ulti- mately
The state of exception is both the point of their maximum tension andas it
coincides with the rulethat which threatens today to render them
indiscernible. To live in the state of ex- ception means to experience both of
these possibilities and yet, by always separating the two forces, ceaselessly
to try to interrupt the working of the machine that is leading the West toward
global civil war.
homo sacer (Giorgio; awarded the Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize, teaches at
Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio; For a Theory of Destituent Power;
Chronos; 11/16/2013; http://www.chronosmag.eu/index.php/g-agamben-for-atheory-of-destituent-power.html)
A reflection on the destiny of democracy today here in Athens is in some way
disturbing, because it obliges to think the end of democracy in the very place
where it was born. As a matter of fact, the hypothesis I would like to suggest
is that the prevailing governamental paradigm in Europe today is not only
non democratic, but that it cannot either be considered as political. I will try
therefore to show that the European society today is no more a political
society: it is something entirely new, for which we lack a proper terminology
and we have therefore to invent a new strategy.
Let me begin with a concept which seems, starting from September 2001, to
have replaced any other political notion: security. As you know, the formula
for security reasons functions today in any domain, from everyday life to
international conflicts, as a password in order to impose measures that the
people have no reason to accept. I will try to show that the real purpose of
the security measures is not, as it is currently assumed, to prevent dangers,
another. Citizenship became in that way a form of life, by means of which the
polis constituted itself in a domain clearly distinct from the oikos, the house.
Politics became therefore a free public space as such opposed to the private
space, which was the reign of necessity. According to Meier, this specifically
greek process of politisation was transmitted to western politics, where
citizenship remained the decisive element.
The hypothesis I would like to propose to you is that this fundamental
political factor has entered an irrevocable process that we can only define as
a process of increasing depolitisation. What was in the beginning a way
of living , an essentially and irreducibly active condition, has now become a
purely passive juridical status, in which action and inaction, the private and
the public are progressively blurred and become indistinguishable. This
process of depolitisation of citizenship is so evident, that I will not dwell on it.
I will rather try to show how the paradigm of security and the security
apparatuses have played a decisive role in this process. The growing
extension to citizens of technologies which were conceived for criminals has
inevitably consequences on the political identity of the citizen. For the first
time in the history of humanity, identity is no longer a function of the social
personality and its recognition by others, but rather a function of biological
data, which cannot bear any relation to it, like the arabesques of the
fingerprints or the disposition of the genes in the double helix of DNA. The
most neutral and private thing becomes the decisive factor of social identity,
which loose therefore its public character.
If my identity is now determined by biological facts, that in no way depends
on my will and over which I have no control, then the construction of
something like a political and ethical identity becomes problematic. What
relationship can I establish with my fingerprints or my genetic code? The new
identity is an identity without the person, as it were, in which the space of
politics and ethics loses its sense and must be thought again from the ground
up. While the greek citizen was defined through the opposition between the
private and the public, the oikos , which is the place of reproductive life, and
the polis, place of political action, the modern citizen seems rather to move in
a zone of indifference beteween the private and the public, or , to quote
Hobbes terms, the physical and the political body.
The materialization in space of this zone of indifference is the video
surveillance of the streets and the squares of our cities. Here again an
apparatus that had been conceived for the prisons has been extended to
public places. But it is evident that a video recorded place is no more an
agora and becomes a hybrid of public and private, a zone of indifference
between the prison and the forum. This transformation of the political space
is certainly a complex phenomenon, that involves a multiplicity of causes,
and among them the birth of biopower holds a special place. The primacy of
the biological identity over the political identity is certainly linked to the
politicization of bare life in modern states. But one should never forget that
the leveling of social identity on body identity begun with the attempt to
identify the recidivist criminals. We should not be astonished if today the
normal relationship between the state and its citizens is defined by suspicion,
police filing and control. The unspoken principle which rules our society can
be stated like that: every citizen is a potential terrorist. But what is a
State which is ruled by such a principle? Can we still define it as democratic
other States, while he calls Polizei the relationship of a State with itself. It is
worthwhile to reflect upon this definition: (I quote): Police is the relationship
of a State with itself.
The hypothesis I would like to suggest here is that, placing itself under the
sign of security, modern State has left the domain of politics to enter a no
mans land, whose geography and whose borders are still unknown. The
Security State, whose name seems to refer to an absence of cares (securus
from sine cura) should, on the contrary, make us worry about the dangers it
involves for democracy, because in it political life has become
impossible, while democracy means precisely the possibility of a political
life.
constitutes itself through the inclusion and the capture of anarchy and
anomy, that it is so difficult to have an immediate access to these
dimensions, it is so hard to think today something as a true anarchy or a true
anomy. I think that a praxis which would succeed in exposing clearly the
anarchy and the anomy captured in the Security government technologies
could act as a purely destituent power. A really new political dimension
becomes possible only when we grasp and depose the anarchy and the
anomy of power. But this is not only a theoretical task: it means first of all the
rediscovery of a form-of-life, the access to a new figure of that political life
whose memory the Security State tries at any price to cancel.
necessity. Whether strictly legal or not, he declared, the measures he had adopted had been taken
under what appeared to be a popular demand and a public necessity in the certainty that Congress
would ratify them. They were based on the conviction that even fundamental law could be violated if the
very existence of the union and the juridical order were at stake (Are all the laws but one to go
unexecuted, and the Government itself go to pieces lest that one be violated? See Rossiter 1948, 229). It
is obvious that in a wartime situation the conflict between the president and Congress is essentially
theoretical. The fact is that although Congress was perfectly aware that the constitutional jurisdictions had
been transgressed, it could do nothing but ratify the actions of the president, as it did on August 6, 1861.
Strengthened by this approval, on September 22, 1862, the president pro- claimed the emancipation of the
slaves on his authority alone and, two days later, generalized the state of exception throughout the entire
territory of the United States, authorizing the arrest and trial before courts martial of all Rebels and
Insurgents, their aiders and abettors within the United States, and all persons discouraging volunteer
enlistments, resisting militia drafts, or guilty of any dis- loyal practice, affording aid and comfort to Rebels
against the authority of the United States. By this point, the president of the United States was the holder
of the sovereign decision on the state of exception. According to American historians,
during World
War One President Wood- row Wilson personally assumed even broader
powers than those Abraham Lincoln had claimed. It is, however, necessary to specify that
instead of ignoring Congress, as Lincoln had done, Wilson preferred each time to have the powers in
question delegated to him by Congress. In this regard, his practice of gov- ernment is closer to the one that
would prevail in Europe in the same years, or to the current one, which instead of declaring the state of
exception prefers to have exceptional laws issued. In any case,
approved a series of acts (from the Espionage Act of June 1917 to the Overman Act of May 1918)
that granted the president complete control over the administration of the
country and not only prohibited disloyal activities (such as collaboration with the enemy and the
diffusion of false reports), but even made it a crime to will- fully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal,
profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States. Because the
sovereign power of the president is essentially grounded in the emergency linked to a state of war, over
the course of the twentieth century the metaphor of war becomes an integral part of the presidential
political vocabu- lary whenever decisions considered to be of vital importance are being imposed. Thus, in
1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt was able to assume extraordinary powers to cope with the
Great Depression by presenting his actions as those of a com- mander during a military campaign: I
assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedi- cated to a disciplined attack
upon our common problems. . . . I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures
that a stricken Nation in the midst of a stricken world may require. . . . But in the event that the Congress
shall fail to take [the necessary measures] and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I
shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisisbroad Executive power to wage war against the emergency, as
great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe. (Roosevelt 1938,
1415) It is well not to forget that, from the constitutional standpoint, the New Deal was realized by
delegating to the president (through a series of statutes culmi- nating in the National Recovery Act of June
16, 1933) an unlimited power to regulate and control every aspect of the economic life of the countrya
fact that is in perfect conformity with the already mentioned parallelism between military and economic
emergencies that characterizes the politics of the twen- tieth century. The outbreak of World War Two
extended these powers with the proclama- tion of a limited national emergency on September 8, 1939,
which became un- limited on May 27, 1941. On September 7, 1942, while requesting that Congress repeal
a law concerning economic matters, the president renewed his claim to sovereign powers during the
emergency: In the event that the Congress should fail to act, and act adequately, I shall accept the
responsibility, and I will act. . . . The American people can . . . be sure that I shall not hesitate to use every
power vested in me to accomplish the defeat of our enemies in any part of the world where our own safety
emergency situations. If, as we have seen, the assumption of this title entails a direct reference to the
state of exception, then Bush is attempting to produce a situation in which the emergency becomes the
the very distinction between peace and war (and between foreign and
civil war) becomes impossible.
rule, and
The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, and Opus Dei: An
Archeology of Duty (Stanford UP, 2013) that I wrote this essay, which
shares some of the patterns I picked up along the way.
I.
A striking feature of Agambens work is its tendency to leap immediately from
the tiniest detail to the broadest possible generalization. In Homo Sacer, for
instance, we learn that the entire history of Western political thought was
always heading toward the horrors of totalitarianism, as we can tell by taking
a look at an obscure corner of ancient Roman law. Similarly, while his late
works boast increasingly large-scale ambitions, they are nonetheless written
in a fragmentary form and always make room for digressions and asides
(often in the form of notes inserted right into the middle of the text,
introduced by the Hebrew letter "aleph").
These idiosyncratic traits can, I believe, be traced back to Agambens two
most significant influences: Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger. Agamben
served as editor of the Italian edition of Benjamins complete works, which
consist primarily of dense essays and cryptic fragments, the majority of them
not published during Benjamins lifetime. Its clear that Agamben admires the
compression and vast interdisciplinary range of Benjamins work and aspires
to similar effects in his own writing. The link to Heidegger is perhaps even
closer: as a student in one of Heideggers postwar seminars, Agamben picked
up the great philosophers ambition to provide an overarching account of the
history of the West, and use that history to shed light on the contemporary
world. From both Heidegger and Benjamin, Agamben inherits, on the one
hand, a careful attention to philological detail and questions of translation,
and, on the other, a marked tendency toward conceptual abstraction.
(Heidegger, for instance, spent his entire career investigating the concept of
Being, while some of Benjamins most famous essays are devoted to the
broadest possible topics, such as violence, language, or history.)
It is not only Agambens methods that stem from these two thinkers, but
often his path of investigation as well. The entire Homo Sacer series can be
read as a follow-up on Benjamins suggestion, in his Critique of
Violence (1921), that someone really ought to look into the origin of the
concept of the sacredness of human life. His study of animality in The
Open is, by contrast, centered on one of Heideggers writings on that
question, and many of the chapters expand on Heideggers own key
references. Agambens work can be read in part as a series of footnotes to
the two great thinkers who have most inspired him, even if very few of his
writings presuppose detailed knowledge of either.
II.
At this point, one could rightly ask what in Agambens work is his own
aside, of course, from the aleph-notes. Some of his originality can be traced
to the way he brings together Heidegger and Benjamin, along with other
major figures such as Michel Foucault, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, and
its power in its rawest and most deadly form. As Agamben puts it in State of
Exception, when the state of exception [] becomes the rule, then the
juridico-political system transforms itself into a killing machine.
Border Link
Link-The border is a permanent state of exception.
Salter,
is true that the sovereign does not accept any obligation to accept (even)
citizens back into the territory especially if the sovereign decides that the
citizen constitutes a danger to the sovereign. The sovereign contract is
redrawn each time a citizen requests entry to a state, either his/her
own state or another state: the foundation is not an event achieved
once and for all but is continually operative in the civil state in the
form of the sovereign decision (2000: 109). Recall the form of the
passport, which the state also accepts no obligation to issue even to citizens
and in particular to citizens which it considers dangerous. 3 The inscription on
the passport is a statement by a representative of the citizens sovereign to
request and require in the name of the [insert sovereign] all those whom it
may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance and to
afford him/her every assistance and protection of which he/she may stand in
need (Salter 2003: 3-5). Entry into a foreign state is representative of the
interaction of two sovereigns not the traveler and any sovereign. In
essence, entry into another the jurisdiction of ones own or another
sovereign territory is a reaffirmation that the sovereign, and not the
citizen, is the seat of authority, rights, and politics. This is true even
when the decision at the border is made by a representative of the
sovereign. The raw decision to admit or expel an individual at the 4 border
takes place both inside a normal bureaucracy and outside the normal
condition of politics. Butlers argument that the state of exception is
normalized through the governmentality of bureaucracy is
particularly persuasive for everyday decisions at the border, as well
as sites such as Guantanamo Bay (2004). Part of the design of the
modern and neoliberal state in all its apparatus is to hide the functioning of
raw power and internal the panoptic gaze of the state but the border
renders this power naked. We must ask the sovereign for admittance. Even if
we have a previous contract, or can claim that we are subject to no other
contract and thus suppliant ourselves, there is no right of entry (only a right
to ask). The law is always suspended at the border, because the decision of
entrance to the territory and correspondent membership in the community is
irreducible to force. As Schmitt argues, the essence of the states
sovereignty [is] not the monopoly to coerce or rule, but the monopoly to
decide (1985:13). Agamben links the state of exception with the decision to
include or exclude from the law. In the construction of the
inside/outside, state/anarchy universe of political meaning, the
decision to admit to the safe haven of the domestic or expel into
the dangerous world is precisely a decision to include the subject to
the law or exclude the subject from the law. Agamben says the
relation of the exception is the relation of ban. He who has been banned is
not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather
abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which
life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable (1995:28).4 In his
writings on the ban, Agamben describes the figure of the exile as more
original than the Schmittian opposition between friend and enemy, fellow
citizen and foreigner. The estrarity of the person held in the sovereign ban is
Law Link
Law is violence
Auerbach, submitted paper to After 1968, 2007
The war supposedly to end all wars which ended in 1918 left Germany in a
state of political confusion and violence which we would sooner associate
with present-day Iraq than modern Europe. But it isnt the parallel with
another state which has recently suffered a military defeat, massdemobilisation and the deposition of an autocratic ruler which matters. The
question is, what is the possible relation between the abstract considerations
of violence with their legendary exemplars and the reference Benjamin
makes to contemporary European conditions (135) which would have
needed no illustration in 1921.
Benjamin was not alone in perceiving a historic chance when the ancien
rgime quit the scene. The Emperor abdicated on 9 November 1918, when
revolution threatened to succeed mutiny. Within hours, two republics were
declared, bringing the split over support for the war which had divided
German socialists in 1914 into an open, violent contest for the state. In an
attempt to forestall the revolutionary forces which might have been stirred by
the intended announcement of a constitutional monarchy, and to secure the
succession of the SPD, Philipp Scheidemann declared the first German
republic from the balcony of the Reichstag. This half-hearted republic was
Scheidemanns own initiative, but could not be revoked. Karl Liebknecht
meanwhile proclaimed a free socialist republic from the balcony of the Royal
Palace itself and pledged revolution. The showdown came in January 1919
with the so-called Spartacist Uprising, which proceeded, with KPD and USPD
backing, from the occupation of buildings by workers to mass demonstrations
and general strike. Without a clear plan, this revolution failed because of
disputes among the leadership concerning the use of violence and ultimately
because the workers were no match for the paramilitary forces unleashed to
crush them. The government deployed Freikorps troops mustered by former
army staff to suppress communist uprisings throughout Germany. The
Freikorps have been variously described as private armies recruited by former
generals, anti-republican paramilitary organisations, freelance right-wing
militias, gangsters of the extreme Right, and, the men who could not be
debrutalised after the war (according to Hermann Gring). They carried out
their (quasi-police) work with enthusiasm and savagery and without effective
political control. Famously responsible for the abduction, torture and murder
of Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg following the failed January Revolution
a failure still celebrated in Berlin today the Freikorps had a hand in
hundreds political murders perpetrated without fear of the law. In contrast,
left-wing militants were pursued and severely punished by the judicial
authorities as well as by right-wing thugs.
The SPD-led government signed Treaty of Versailles and thus got the blame
not only for the onerous and humiliating terms of the treaty, but for
Germanys defeat itself, which conservatives and militarists (who had started
and lost the war) attributed to a stab in the back. The government had no
power to disband the Freikorps militias as the peace treaty required and
indeed still relied on them to repress left-wing agitation. In 1920 the Freikorps
staged its own coup dtat the so-called Kapp Putsch which, when the
regular army refused to intervene, was answered by a general strike such as
the SPD had failed to call in 1914. Walther von Lttwitzs Marinebrigade
Ehrhardt which was the force behind the coup withdrew from Berlin
(apparently leaving a bloody wake) and was nominally dissolved. Freikorps
militias however continued to be active in suppressing left-wing activities
both on behalf of the government and on their own initiative. Many former
Freikorps soldiers graduated to the Nazi SA, which, though officially formed in
1921, has its roots in the reform of the Freikorps.
To this outline of major trends in political violence between 1918 and 1921
when Benjamin wrote his Critique could be added snapshots of economic
insecurity resulting from blockade, unemployment and the beginnings of
hyper-inflation which threatened workers and the middle-classes equally. In
the absence or crisis of legitimate authority and in the face of opportunity
for some and poverty and hunger for many, non-political violence and
criminality flourished. This was reflected at the extremes in the popularity of
lurid cultural expressions or celebrations of violence often with sadistic and
sexualised overtones and in cases of true-life Sweeny Todds.
Arguably, the confusion Benjamin perceived in contemporary conceptions of
violence (whose ramifications threatened him personally) has its roots in
Romanticism. Resistance to Romanticism is the oblique polemical force of
Critique of Violence, for it is Romanticism which unites the failure of
revolutions with the cult of death in a repetitious cycle without even
dialectical hope. The Romantic revolutionarys dreams are fulfilled in
martyrdom while the cult of death demands sacrifice, not transformation. The
failure of revolution is required and celebrated by the cult of death whose
hunger for victims is attested by the empty tombs which punctuate the urban
landscape of Berlin today.
NSA Link
The NSAs use of surveillance is killing politics the law is
continuously broken to save it.
Bauman 14 chair of sociology at the University of Leeds (Zygmunt;
Didier Bigo, Paulo Esteves, Elspeth Guild, Vivienne Jabri, David Lyon, B.J.
Walker; After Snowden: Rethinking the Impact of Surveillance; International
Political Sociology 8.2.121141; Wiley Online Library; 05/29/2014;
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ips.12048/full)
As the Snowden news is so recent, there is little in-depth analysis of people's
views on government-led mass surveillance, let alone post-Snowden
ethnographies of how people now organize their daily lives in relation to
online data. Given this, we have to fall back on broader and longer-term
probes into attitudes. Snowden's work has disclosed evidence of the extent to
which the NSA and related agencies rely on Internet companies and social
media platforms such as Facebook for access to transactional and
interactional data. But for most social media users, surveillance as
hierarchical power seems to have little salience unless they live in conflict
zones or in countries with overt political repression. Much more likely, they
engage in social surveillance (Marwick 2012) where, in Foucault's capillaries
of power, the power differentials of everyday interactions are more
immediately significant than whatever the NSA and its cognate agencies are
doing. This is not to say that awareness won't rise, particularly in relation to
global events such as the-day-we-fight-back coordinated online resistance on
February 11, 2014.
The broader context of the Snowden revelations is not merely the decline of
political participation within liberal democratic states but also, as Agamben
has suggested, the breakdown of politics itself. Agamben insists that
under the sign of security today's states have shifted from politics to policing
and from governing to managingusing electronically enabled surveillance
systemsthus undermining the very possibility of politics (Agamben 2013).
That this occurs simultaneously alongside the growth of all kinds of
surveillance, not just those associated with communications and transactions,
augurs badly for the chances of a revived politics, especially when, at a
mundane level, cultures of surveillance seem so innocuous.
Surveillance Link
Fixations on security and current surveillance practices
jointly cause the state of exception.
Lyon 15 - director of the Surveillance Studies Centre (David; member of the
Royal Society of Canada, received Lifetime Achievement Award from the
American Sociological Association Communication and Information
Technology Section, a Killian Research Fellow; The Snowden Stakes:
Challenges for Understanding Surveillance Today; Surveillance & Society;
http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-andsociety/article/view/snowden_stakes)
As mentioned earlier, security is becoming a key driver of surveillance,
not only at the national level but also in general types of policing,
urban security and in workplaces, transit systems and schools (Taylor
2013). This is of course, a key issue and one fraught with basic
problems of definition, which also relates to its status as a widelyused political rationale for a range of controversial measures. The
kind of national security that prompts increased surveillance
arguably has little in common with the kinds of securityfrom things
like famine, fear, even freedomthat many might think would benefit
their communities and families. Moreover, in practice, many current
attempts to procure national security seem to jeopardize the civil
liberties and human rights basic to democratic practice (see Zedner 2009). At
the same time, it must be acknowledged that not only security but also
some much more mundane motifs are significant in the development of
surveillance today. One is efficiency, that encourages the use of cost-cutting
policies and technology-intensive solutions and the other is convenience
that dominates much of the appeal of marketers to consumers. Under such
very ordinary and unremarkable motifs surveillance expands apace, as
evidence-producing technologies (as Josh Lauer calls them) are adopted for
reasons that are routine and everyday. Security, on the other hand, is still
supreme among these drivers. For philosopher Giorgio Agamben, the
security motif seen behind contemporary surveillance may be trumping not
only democracy but politics itself (Agamben 2013) and this insight may at
least serve as a theorem to be explored. At the same time, this trend must be
seen alongside another, the intertwiningand in some respects integration
of public and private agencies. The governmental and the corporate have
always worked closely together in modern times but the idea that they
inhabit essentially different spheres, with different mandates, is currently
unraveling. As Snowden revealed, telephone companies such as Verizon and
internet companies such as Microsoft work in tandem with state agencies
such as the NSA, in ways that have yet to be fully understood.
By the early 1990s, all of these debates had coalesced around the question of
whether the piecemeal codification of precautionary surveillance had led to a
paradigm shift that marked the end of classical police law.49 Such
criticisms focused on the erosion of procedural protections of
individual privacy rights in the name of more flexible and effective
prevention, the blurring or Entgrenzung of the institutional boundaries
that had been established to insure that police power did not again
degenerate into an instrument for totalitarian rule, and the
restructuring of the countrys security architecture.50 It is undeniable that
the central principles of liberal police law, which underlay the logic of state
limitation, have been eroded by the new precautionary surveillance
practices.51 Critics have argued that this partial institutionalization of the
precautionary principle in the security field entailed the normalization of the
state of exception, the unprecedented generalization of the paradigm of
security as the normal technique of government, and ultimately the
establishment of a postliberal form of social governance in which security
policy comes to colonize social policy and instrumentalize it for its own
ends.52 The surveillance state debate of the 1970s and 1980s drew its
energy and plausibility from an awareness of the ways in which [End Page
322] these developments were shifting the parameters of state action
and the fear that the expansion of police surveillance would be used
to repress legitimate social protest that could not be integrated
through democratic means.
does not simply hedge the privacy of enlightenment individuals but produces
new subjectivities and forms of action. The data that enable this activity are
produced by what Foucault called a dispositif:
A heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural
forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific
statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions. Such are the
elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that
can be established between these elements. (Foucault, 1980, quoted in
Ruppert, 2012)
This article argues that the apparatus is undergoing a significant shift in the
system of relations at several levels: in architectural forms (forms of database
structures), administrative measures (as algorithms), regulation (as
algorithmic regulation) and laws (as states of exception). The moral and
philosophical propositions will be considered at the end of the article where I
discuss potential means of resisting these shifts.
At the bottom layer of this stack of changes is the architecture of database
systems. For the last few decades, the Relational Database Management
System (RDBMS) has been a core part of any corporate or state apparatus.
The relational database transcribes between informational content and action
in the world. It stores data in flat tables of rows, each row containing the
same set of fields. Each table represents an entity in the world (e.g. a
person), and the fields are the attributes of that entity (which for a person
could be name, age, sexual orientation and so on). Each row in the table is an
instance of that entity in the world (so one table consists of many people),
and the relationships between tables model relationships in the world (e.g.
between the table of people and the table of families). Operations on the data
are expressed in Structured Query Language (SQL) which enables specific
questions to be asked in a computationally effective manner (Driscoll, 2012).
It is a powerful and efficient way to manage information at scale and up till
now has been well suited to the needs of organisations. However, it can be a
real challenge to restructure a relational database because new kinds of data
have come along or because there is too much data to store on a single
server. Under the pressure of social media and big data, new forms of
databases are emerging which drop the relational model and the use of SQL.
Commonly called NoSQL databases, their relative fluidity feeds into the social
consequences I am interested in understanding.
The structure of a relational database is an architecture of assumptions, built
on a fixed ontology of data and anticipating the queries that can be made
through its arrangement of entities and relationships. It encapsulates a moreor-less fixed perspective on the world and resists the re-inscription of the data
necessary to answer a completely new and unanticipated set of questions.
NoSQL dumps the neatly defined tables of relational databases in favour of
keeping everything in schema-less data storage (Couchbase, 2014). In
NoSQL, all the varied data you have about an entity at that moment is
wrapped up as a single document object it does not matter if it duplicates
information stored elsewhere, and the kinds of data stored can be changed as
you go along. Not only does it allow data to be spread across many servers, it
allows a more flexible approach to interrogating it. The data are not stored in
neatly boundaried boxes but can easily be examined at different
granularities; so, for example, rather than retrieving the profile photos of a
certain set of users, you can use an algorithm to search eye colour. These
dynamic systems can handle unstructured, messy and unpredictable data
and respond in real-time to new ways of acting on patterns in the data. Like a
shoal of startled fish, the application of this heterogeneous data can sharply
change direction at any moment. Throwing away the need to plan a database
structure beforehand or to think through the use and articulation of the data
leaves a free field for the projection of the imagination. In the next section, I
describe how this accelerates the established trend of data-mining and
prediction and feeds new ideas about possibilities for governance.
Algorithmic preemption
Data are transformed into propensities through algorithms, in particular
through forms of algorithmic processing known as data-mining and machine
learning. Data-mining looks for patterns in the data, such as associations
between variables and clusters, while machine learning enables computers to
get better at recognising these patterns in future data (Hastie, 2003). Hence,
there exists the possibility of making predictions based on inferences from
the data. In the pioneering days of data-mining, the interest was in the future
purchasing decisions of supermarket customers. But the potential for
empirical predictions is also attractive to social structures concerned with risk
management, whether those risks are related to car insurance or the
likelihood of a terrorist attack. For some, the massive rise in the means of
finding correlations is something to be celebrated, enabling decisions about
probable disease outbreaks or risks of building fires to be based on patterns
in the data (Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier, 2013). However, a probabilistic
algorithm will certainly result in some false positives, where it essentially
makes wrong guesses. Moreover, the reasoning behind the identification of
risk by an algorithm is an enfolded set of statistical patterns and may be
obscure to humans, even when all the data are accessible. As a result data
mining might point to individuals and events, indicating elevated risk, without
telling us why they were selected (Zarsky, 2002). Ironically, the predictive
turn introduces new risks because of the glossed-over difference between
correlation and causation. I show how this is amplified as decisions based on
correlations move into the social domain below.
The increasing use of prediction is colliding with our assumptions about
political and judicial fairness, through preemptive predictions forms of
prediction which are intentionally used to diminish a persons range of future
options (Kerr and Earle, 2013). A good illustration of preemptive prediction is
the no-fly list of people who are not allowed to board an aircraft in the United
States. The list is compiled and maintained by the US governments Terrorist
Screening Centre. People are usually unaware that they are on the list until
they try to board a plane, and face legal obfuscation when they try to
question the process by which they were placed on the list (Identity Project,
2013). The only way to tell if you have been taken off the list is to try to get
on a flight again and see what happens. The principle of fair and equal
treatment for all under the law relies on both privacy and due process, but
the alleged predictive powers of big-datamining are on course to clash with
the presumption of innocence. In Chicago, an algorithmic analysis predicted a
heat list of 420 individuals likely to be involved in a shooting, using risk
factors like previous arrests, drug offences, known associates and their arrest
records. They received personal warning visits from a police commander,
leading at least one person to worry that the attention would mis-identify him
to his neighbours as a snitch (Gorner, 2013). Defending themselves against
the charge that they were discriminating against the Black community, the
Chicago police officials referred back to the mathematical nature of the
analysis. Thus, preemptive measures are applied without judicial standards of
evidence and police are sometimes prepared to act on the basis of an
algorithm while asserting that they do not understand the reasoning process
it has carried out. While these cases may seem like outliers, the widespread
adoption of algorithmic regulation may embed the same process at the core
of regulatory action.
The concept of algorithmic regulation is being promoted as a mechanism of
social governance. One of the leading proponents is Tim OReilly, previously
credited as a spokesman for Web 2.0 and its strategy of basing online
services on user-generated data. OReilly and others use the term algorithmic
regulation to describe this computational approach to government. They
argue that the dynamic and statistical feedback loops used by corporations
like Google and Facebook to police their systems against malware and spam
can be used by government agencies to identify and modify social problems.
These processes are already at play in the private sector; if you agree to a
black box recorder in your car that tracks your driving behaviour, you will be
offered a hefty discount on your car insurance (Confused.com, 2014). For
policy makers, this promises a seamless upscaling of Thaler and Sunsteins
(2008) theory of the Nudge, where small changes to the so-called choice
architecture of everyday life alter peoples behaviour in a predictable and
desirable way. The resources available to governments have been thinned by
crisis-driven cuts and outsourcing, but big data bring a wealth of information.
The skills of commercial data-mining and machine learning are ready to
probe us for proclivities of which we may or may not be aware. Algorithmic
regulation seems to offer an apparatus with traction on obesity, public health
and energy use through real-time interventions. But, as we have seen, this is
made possible by a stack of social technologies with the tendency to escape
due process through preemption and justify actions based on correlation
rather than causation. How do we understand the implications of pervasive
yet opaque mechanisms where correlation becomes a basis for correction or
coercion? I argue that a useful lens is Giorgio Agambens ideas about the
state of exception.
States of exception
In his work on states of exception, Agamben (2005) examines the legal basis
of events such as a declaration of martial law or the introduction of
emergency powers, states of affairs where law, rights and political meaning
to life are suspended, of which an emblematic contemporary example is the
detention camp in Guantanamo Bay. Roman law allowed for the suspension of
the law in times of crisis through the idea that necessity has no law
(necessitas legem non habet). In modern times, the state of exception
emerged from the emergency measures of World War I and reached its
paramount manifestation in the Third Reich. Agamben interrogates the
juridical significance of a sphere of action that is itself extrajudicial to
understand the way it has been justified in a legal context and the broader
implications of that justification. Historically, the state of exception has been
brought within a juridical context by linking it with constituent power rather
than constituted power, in other words, linking it not with the existing legal
framework but with those forces that are the founding power of the
constitution. This ultimately leads Agamben to the conclusion that our
norms and rights are themselves rooted in the state of exception. We
are living in a kind of fiction, a really existing state of emergency, from which
we cannot return directly to the state of law for at issue now are the very
concepts of state and law. However, the application to the question of
algorithms comes to the fore through an intermediate part of Agambens
thesis, in the way that he identifies the topological structure of the state of
exception as being-outside and yet belonging and through his distinction
between the law and the force of the law. I suggest that being-outside and
yet belonging is the form of the spaces being created by the algorithmic
apparatus. While tied to clearly constituted organisational and technical
systems, the new operations have the potential to create social
consequences that are unaddressed in law. These experiences have been
prototyped in social media. When Facebooks algorithms decide that an
unlucky user has violated their Terms of Service, that person discovers he or
she has no recourse; there is no real explanation of why they were excluded,
and no one to whom he or she can appeal. No matter that they were
excluded simply for crossing some statistical confidence limit; or that their
long virtual labour in liking, friending and updating helped generate real
share value for the company; or that Facebook may have become an
important lever in their social life or in a political campaign (York, 2010). Their
prior agency and existence in this pseudopublic space has been
algorithmically suspended. Payday lending companies like Wonga now use
the full spectrum of heterogeneous data, including Facebook, to assemble
thousands of dynamic data points to make loan decisions (Deville, 2013).
Everyday life is becoming permeated by points of contact with algorithmic
systems that can influence the friction or direction of our experience. In the
1950s, redlining was used to describe the way people were charged more for
insurance and healthcare or denied services or jobs based on living in a
deprived (often racially identified) part of town. The potential with big data
and data-mining is a new and agile form of personal redlining (Davidow,
2014) that is dynamic and updated in real-time. Ambitious forms of
algorithmic regulation will combine with new forms of discrimination to apply
limits and exclusions. The effect will be to apply continuous partial
states of exception through algorithmically derived actions.
According to Agamben, the signature of a state of exception is force-of
actions that have the force of law even when not of the law. Software is being
used to predict which people on parole or probation are most likely to commit
murder or other crimes. The algorithms developed by university researchers
use a dataset of 60,000 crimes and some dozens of variables about the
individuals to help determine how much supervision the parolees should have
(Bland, 2010). While having discriminatory potential, this algorithm is being
invoked within a legal context. But the steep rise in the rate of drone attacks
during the Obama administration has been ascribed to the algorithmic
identification of risky subjects via the disposition matrix (Cobain, 2013).
According to interviews with US national security officials, the disposition
matrix contains the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against other
factors derived from data in a single, continually evolving database in which
Democracy Impact
The inevitable utilization of the state of exception leads
to the liquidation of democracy
Agamben 05, Giorgio Agamben, professor of aesthetics at the University
of Verona and author of ten books, titled: State Of Exception, pages 6-8
Tingstens analysis centers on an essential technical problem that profoundly marks the evolution of the modern parliamentary regimes: the
delegation contained in the full powers laws mentioned above, and the
resulting extension of the executives powers into the legislative sphere
through the issuance of decrees and measures. By full powers laws we mean those
laws by which an exceptionally broad regulatory power is granted to the
executive, particularly the power to modify or abrogate by decree the laws in force (Tingsten 1934,
13). Because laws of this na- ture, which should be issued to cope with exceptional circumstances of
necessity or emergency,
Switzerland). The book goes no further than recording a large number of case histories; nevertheless, in
the years following it) appear as a laboratory for testing and honing the functional mechanisms and
decadence and gradual convergence with totalitarian states in post-democratic spectacular societies
(which begins to become evident with Alexis de Tocqueville and finds its final sanction in the analyses of
Guy Debord) may well be rooted in this aporia, which marks the beginning of modern democracy and
taught those who lived there was precisely that calling into question the quality of man provokes an
almost biological assertion of belonging to the human race (Lespce humaine, p. II).
The idea of an inner solidarity between democracy and totalitarianism (which here we must, with every
caution, advance) is obviously not (like Leo Strausss thesis concerning the secret convergence of the final
goals of liberalism and communism) a historiographical claim, which would authorize the liquidation and
leveling of the enormous differences that characterize their history and their rivalry. Yet this idea must
nevertheless be strongly maintained on a historico-philosophical level, since it alone will allow us to orient
ourselves in relation to the new realities and unforeseen convergences of the end of the millennium. This
idea alone will make it possible to clear the way for the new politics, which remains largely to be invented.
In contrasting the beautiful day (euemeria) of simple life with the great difficulty of political bios in the
passage cited above, Aristotle may well have given the most beautiful formulation to the aporia that lies at
the foundation of Western politics. The 24 centuries that have since gone by have brought only provisional
and ineffective solutions. In carrying out the metaphysical task that has led it more and more to assume
zo? And first of all, does zo really need to be politicized, or is politics not already contained in zo as its
most precious center? The biopolitics of both modern totalitarianism and the society of mass hedonism and
until a completely
new politics that is, a politics no longer founded on the exception of bare life is at hand,
every theory and every praxis will remain imprisoned and immobile,
and the beautiful day of life will be given citizenship only either
through blood and death or in the perfect senselessness to which
the society of the spectacle condemns it.
consumerism certainly constitute answers to these questions. Nevertheless,
Drones Impact
Weaponized drones allow for unique states of exception
that reduce targets to Homo Sacer.
Andersen 15 Student at the Roskilde University (Anders Hgh, Caroline
Elmquist-Clausen, Mikkel Steen Dahlgaard, Patrick Schack; Governing the
Future: Risk, Armed Drones, and State of Exception; RUDAR Archives;
03/5/15; http://rudar.ruc.dk/handle/1800/18849)
SUMMARY The armed drone illustrates a political tool applied in the War on
Terror as a State of Exception in terms of being a space without law. In
demonstrating a political will and decision to use the technology of armed
drones to monitor and kill with contiguity exemplifies the State of Exception
in specific geographies. In homogenizing the enemy of the state into spaces
of exception, the political violence of the armed drone implies going down a
rabbit hole a chaotic space of confusion outside the normal law. The space
and life surrounding the terrorist is politicized as bare life that is implicit in
the State of Exception. Thereby the rights of identified terrorists and the
space they inhabit is no longer part of the politico-juridical space of the U.S.
Arguably, there are two spaces of exceptions: one that is imagined and where
legitimacy is created and one that is geographical where violence is
perpetrated. The armed drone appears to connect the two spaces in both a
political and technological way.
It is perhaps possible at this point to look back upon the path trav- eled thus far and draw some provisional
decay . The state of exception is the device that must ultimately articulate
and hold together the two aspects of the juridico-political machine by
instituting a threshold of undecidability between anomie and nomos, between life
and law, between auctoritas and potestas. It is founded on the essential fiction
according to which anomie (in the form of auctoritas, living law, or the force of law) is still
related to the juridical order and the power to suspend the norm has an
immediate hold on life. As long as the two el- ements remain correlated yet
conceptually, temporally, and subjectively distinct (as in republican Romes contrast
between the Senate and the people, or in medieval Europes contrast between spiritual and temporal
machine.
Genocide Impact
Utilizing the state of exception gives rise to genocidal
dictatorships Nazi Germany proves
Agamben 05, Giorgio Agamben, professor of aesthetics at the University
of Verona and author of ten books, titled: State Of Exception, pages 14-16
The history of Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution is so tightly woven into the
history of Germany between the wars that it is impossible to understand
Hitlers rise to power without first analyzing the uses and abuses of this
article in the years between 1919 and 1933. Its immediate precedent was Article 68 of
the Bismarckian Constitution, which, in cases where public security was
threat- ened in the territory of the Reich, granted the emperor the power to
declare a part of the Reich to be in a state of wa r (Kriegszustand), whose conditions and
limitations followed those set forth in the Prussian law of June 4, 1851, con- cerning the state of siege.
Amid the disorder and rioting that followed the end of the war, the deputies
of the National Assembly that was to vote on the new constitution (assisted by
jurists among whom the name of Hugo Preuss stands out ) included an article that granted
the president of the Reich extremely broad emergency [ eccezionali] powers. The
text of Article 48 reads, If security and public order are seriously [erheblich]
disturbed or threatened in the German Reich, the president of the Reich may
take the measures necessary to reestablish security and public order, with
the help of the armed forces if required. To this end he may wholly or partially
suspend the fundamental rights [Grundrechte] established in Articles 114, 115, 117, 118, 123,
124, and 153. The article added that a law would specify in detail the conditions and limitations under
resign. Instead, President Hindenburg granted him recourse to Article 48 and dissolved the Reichstag. From
the grand
coalition of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats passed a law for the
amendment of the constitution (Gesetz zur Ergnzung des Grundge- setzes) that
reintroduced the state of exception (defined as the state of internal necessity, innere
Notstand). However, with an unintended irony, for the first time in the history of
the institution, the proclamation of the state of exception was provided for
not simply to safeguard public order and security , but to de- fend the
Fed- eral Republic did not mention the state of exception. Nevertheless, on June 24, 1968,
Hegemony Impact
States of emergency destroy US credibility and
undermines hegemony, this turns the case
Bigo, professor, 2006
Didier, professor at Kings College London, 2006, Theorizing surveillance:
The panopticon and beyond, Willan Publishing, Cullompton, Academia.edu,
https://www.academia.edu/3102812/Security_exception_ban_and_surveillance
Critical security studies and surveillance studies have a lot in common, but
they rarely interact with one another. Surveillance studies is now a specific
field of research in sociology that has been initiated by sociologists such as
Gary Marx and David Lyon, which has expanded far beyond its original focus
concerning activities of surveillance and control of minorities by police and
intelligence services.1 Surveillance technologies, as well as attitudes towards
constant monitoring of activities, have shifted and greatly expanded to
become routines of everyday life, rather than exceptional practices. The idea
of an Orwellian society in the making, through a liberal agenda, has been
much discussed. Michel Foucault uses the term panopticon to describe both
the development of the Orwellian society and its transformation, as it moves
from a society of discipline to a society of management and monitoring the
life of populations encapsulated in a territorial container controlled by the
state. Critical criminology has engaged in discussion about the accuracy of
using Michel Foucaults dispositif2 notion of the panopticon, which some
authors view as too government-focused, to Deleuzes notion of the
assemblage (Haggerty and Ericson 2000). Kevin Haggerty and Richard
Ericson have developed the approach of the assemblage, and I have
discussed the limits of the Foucaldian notion of the pan-opticon in an earlier
piece by proposing the notion of the ban-opticon (Bigo 2005).
The notion of ban originates from international relations (IR) and critical
security studies and is on a parallel track with surveillance studies. The banopticon deconstructs some of the post-September 11 analysis as a
permanent state of emergency or as a generalized state of
exception,3 which reinstates the question of who decides about the
exception in the heart of the IR debate: who is sovereign, and who can
legitimately name the public enemy. The ban-opticon dispositif is
established in relation to a state of unease created by the United
States and its allies. The United States has propagated the idea that
there is a global in-security, which is attributed to the development
of threats of mass destruction, thought to be derived from terrorist
and other criminal organizations and governments that support
them. This has led the US to assert the need for a globalized security
that would render national borders obsolete and pressure other
international actors to collaborate. These developments have
created the field of unease management, which is the formation of
global police networks, policing military functions of combat and
criminalizing the notion of war. The governmentality of unease is
characterized by practices of exceptionalism, acts of profiling and containing
foreigners, and a normative imperative of mobility (Bigo 2005).
The ban attempts to show how the role of routines and acceptance of
everyday life protects some over others, or how the protection of these
others against themselves as the profound structure which explains the
moment of the declaration of exception.4 It also attempts to reveal the
judicial illusion that a specific moment declares the sovereign borders of the
political, which is so favoured in many analyses. This view needs to be
amended by a sociological stance that takes into account long-term social
processes and public acceptance of the routines of surveillance.
Its been less than a week since former National Security Agency systems
administrator Edward Snowden, through the reporting of The Guardian and
The Washington Post, lifted the curtain on the United States governments
vast surveillance apparatus. Snowden, who shed light on how the NSA
monitors the cell phone activity, credit card data, and Internet browsings of
millions of Americans, is responsible for one of the biggest national security
leaks in U.S. political history. And the American people dont really seem to
care.
More than half (56 percent) of the 1,004 adult respondents to a national
survey conducted June 6-9 by the Pew Research Center and The Washington
Post said that the NSA program tracking telephone records is an acceptable
way for the government to investigate terrorism. Forty-one percent felt the
practice was unacceptable.
The American public is somewhat more divided on the NSAs Internet
monitoring programs, with 45 percent of respondents agreeing that the
government should be able to monitor everyones email and other online
activities if officials say this might prevent future terrorist attacks and 52
percent disagreeing. Despite the Prism revelations, this isnt a drastic shift
from how Americans felt back in July 2002, when a Pew survey found that 45
percent of Americans were OK with the government monitoring Internet
activity in order to prevent future attacks (47 percent said it should not).
Pews researchers conclude from the latest survey that there are no
indications that last weeks revelations of the governments collection of
phone records and Internet data have altered fundamental public views about
the tradeoff between investigating possible terrorism and protecting personal
privacy.
How, exactly, does one get used to the threat of terror? Have Americans
become so habituated to domestic dangers (as opposed to, say, the faraway
theater of conventional war) that weve come to accept the continued
presence of the modern surveillance state, even when a someone like Edward
Snowden provides a glimpse as to how it intrudes on our everyday lives?
Its certainly possible. While terrorism is designed to demoralize and, well,
terrorize a target population, groups with regular exposure to ongoing
violence can develop a high tolerance for disruptions to civil society.
Some of the best research into this matter focuses on the psychological
impact of terrorism on Israelis following the outbreak of the Second Intifada in
September 2000. In a 2003 article in The Journal of the American Medical
Association, researchers Avraham Bleich, Marc Gelkopf, and Zahava Solomon
set out to determine the relationship between terrorist attacks and the
prevalence of traumatic stress-related symptoms and the public sense of
safety in Israel. They discovered a moderate level of stress immediately
following the outbreak of violence around Jerusalem from 2000 to 2002;
survey participants showed distress and lowered sense of safety, they did
not develop high levels of psychiatric distress, which may be related to a
habituation process and to coping mechanisms, according to the
researchers. This resonates with the reaction of U.S. citizens immediately
following 9/11. A national survey conducted just days after the attacks found
that 44 percent of the adults reported substantial stress symptoms.
But over time, the trauma caused by the Intifada became somewhat
normalized throughout the Israeli population. New York Universitys Ariel Y.
Shalev found in 2006 that PTSD levels eventually stabilized in various
neighborhoods throughout Jerusalem, regardless of whether theyd been
directly affected by terrorism or not.
A 2010 study in Economica on Israels experience with terror by Cornell
Universitys Asaf Zussman (and co-authored with Bank of Israel researcher
Noam Zussman and Dmitri Romanov of the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics)
examined happiness and psychological health among Israeli citizens from
2002 to 2004, the years immediately following those examined by Bleich et
al. In their econometric analysis of happiness among Israelis four years after
the start of the Intifada, Zussman and her colleagues found that terrorist
attacks had practically no effect on happiness levels. Zussman is careful to
note that this isnt a blanket habituation phenomenon for Israels entire
populaceArab Israelis experience a more negative reaction to terror attacks
than Jewish Israelisbut that the general tolerance for terrorism in the nation
remained high as the years passed from the initial outbreak of violence.
Overall, the level of happiness remained stable throughout the Intifada years
despite a large variation in the intensity of terrorism across time and
location, writes Zussman. The evidence thus casts a doubt on the
effectiveness of terrorism in achieving one of its main objectives
demoralizing enemy population.
But even if terrorism seems uncontrollable to the average citizen, why arent
more concerned with the level of surveillance undertaken by a state they,
theoretically, have some legal and political power in? Not only are programs
like Prism classified as top secret and their mention outlawed by the FISA
courts that authorize their usage, but the very architecture of surveillance is
designed to be unseen and unobtrusive. We only get riled up about violations
of our constitutional rights when theyre obvious, and immediate, like the
genital scrutiny of the Transportation Safety Administration. By contrast,
terrorism, despite its infrequency, is a still a highly visible and deeply
personal experience for Americans. Conor Friedersdorf draws out this
distinction with regards to September 11:
Most Americans don't just remember where they were on September 11,
2001they remember feeling frightened. Along with anger, that's one
emotion I felt, despite watching the attacks from a different continent. That
week, you couldn't have paid me to get on a plane to New York or
Washington, D.C. Even today, I'm aware that terrorists target exactly the
sorts of places that I frequent. I fly a lot, sometimes out of LAX. I've ridden
the subway systems in London and Madrid. I visit Washington and New York
several times a year. I live in Greater Los Angeles.
... As individuals, Americans are generally good at denying al Qaeda the
pleasure of terrorizing us into submission. Our cities are bustling; our
subways are packed every rush hour; there doesn't seem to be an empty seat
on any flight I'm ever on. But as a collective, irrational cowardice is getting
the better of our polity. Terrorism isn't something we're ceding liberty to fight
because the threat is especially dire compared to other dangers of the
modern world. All sorts of things kill us in far greater numbers. Rather, like
airplane crashes and shark attacks, acts of terror are scarier than most
causes of death. The seeming contradictions in how we treat different threats
suggest that we aren't trading civil liberties for security, but a sense of
security. We aren't empowering the national-security state so that we're
safer, but so we feel safer.
The national emergency state from which programs like Prism have
originated has outlived the national emergency. A strong executive isnt
necessarily alien in the American constitutional system in the event of an
emergency. The Prize Cases established that one of the core obligations of
that branch is to meet any exigency in the shape it presented itself, without
waiting for Congress to baptize it with a name, and subsequent Supreme
Court casesIm thinking Ex parte Milligan, Schenck v. U.S. (which
established the clear and present danger prerequisite for executive action),
and Brandenburg v. Ohio, in particularhave continued to define and
circumscribe the juridical spaces where the executive branch of the
government can act unilaterally to deal with a crisis.
PRISM/NSA Impact
PRISM and other NSA programs take away our 4th
amendment to stop the war on terror; this creates a state
of exception.
Kaminski, the executive director of the Information Society Project at Yale
Law School. 2013. (Margot, She is a graduate of Harvard University and Yale
Law School and a former fellow of the Information Society Project. While at
Yale Law School, she was a Knight Law and Media Scholar and co-founder of
the Media Freedom and Information Access Practicum. Following graduation
from Yale Law School, she clerked for The Honorable Andrew J. Kleinfeld of the
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She has been a Radcliffe Research Fellow at
Harvard and a Google Policy Fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Her
research and advocacy work focuses on media freedom, online civil liberties,
data mining, and surveillance issues. She has written widely on law and
technology issues for law journals and the popular press and has drawn
public attention to the civil liberties issues surrounding the AntiCounterfeiting Trade Agreement. PRISM's Legal Basis: How We Got Here, and
What We Can Do to Get Back. The Atlantic.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/prisms-legal-basis-how-we-gothere-and-what-we-can-do-to-get-back/276667/)
In the past two days, the press has provided unprecedented revelations of
how pervasive the secret surveillance state has become. Leaks reveal that
the FBI and NSA have received all Verizon Business Services telephone call
records , including geolocation data; and the NSA uses a program called
PRISM to access user content held by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple.
How can a country that constitutionally protects privacy permit its
government to spy on such a scale? The Fourth Amendment prevents
dragnet surveillance by requiring law enforcement to go to courts
and show probable cause. These dual requirements of court
oversight and a legitimate, targeted investigation ensure that
people will not be subject to general searches by an abusive
government. But intelligence-gathering that involves "the activities
of foreign powers" is treated differently, whether it occurs inside or
outside of the United States. Foreign intelligence is the exception
that has swallowed the Fourth Amendment whole. As my colleague
Anjali Dalal points out, people probably believe that foreign
intelligence law is " supposed to be going after foreign
intelligence ," but its impact on Americans is surprisingly broad. In
1978, Congress set up a system governing foreign intelligence surveillance.
The surveillance programs leaked in the past two days are the results of the
post-9/11 version of this system. The Verizon call records, which include
phone numbers, location data, and timestamps, were authorized as the
collection of "business records" under the PATRIOT Act. And the PRISM
program--which allows the NSA to access content such as emails,
search histories, and audio chats-- is authorized as part of "foreign
oversight did Congress actually provide? When Senators Ron Wyden and
Mark Udall asked whether communications by Americans had been gathered
under the law, the Director of National Intelligence responded that it was not
possible to identify the number of people in the United States whose
communications were reviewed. How effective can Congressional oversight
be if Congress does not understand the scope and nature of the programs it
has authorized? At the core of the problem is that the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court (FISA Court), which meets in secret and does not publish
its opinions, itself does not provide adequate oversight. When Congress
changed the standard for targeting foreign individuals in 2008 , it
abolished the ability of the FISA Court to evaluate whether the
government had any real cause to target an individual or group of
individuals. The Supreme Court itself disputes whether the FISA Court
enforces the Fourth Amendment. The "minimization procedures" touted by
the Director of National Intelligence as adequate privacy safeguards are
established by the government, evaluated by the government, and are
subject to review by a secret court--if review occurs at all. And as a general
practice, FISA "minimization" hasnot been true minimization: it occurs after
information is already acquired. The existence of PRISM and the Verizon
metadata program, both authorized by the FISA Court, confirms that a secret
court broadly authorized by an uninformed Congress will not adequately
protect the Fourth and First Amendment rights of American citizens
on American soil. So what can we do? The first instinct might be to look to
federal courts to protect our constitutional rights. But in February of this year,
the Supreme Court effectively closed that avenue of recourse at least with
respect to PRISM in Clapper v. Amnesty International. The majority of the
Court found that the group of lawyers, journalists, and human rights
advocates who challenged the constitutionality of the law that authorizes
PRISM could not show that they had been injured by it. The Court explained
that the alleged surveillance was too speculative; the group could not get into
court unless it showed that surveillance of its members was "certainly
impending." One might think that a new lawsuit could show that surveillance
is "certainly impending," because we now know that the PRISM program
exists. But this is not clear. Any plaintiffs would probably still face the
significant hurdle of showing that the government has spied on them in
particular, or their foreign correspondents. And while the existence of a
similarly pervasive spying program led the Ninth Circuit to find that a similar
lawsuit could proceed, that case came down before the recent Supreme Court
opinion. The best solution, then, is Congress. Congress must repeal the FISA
Amendments Act, which it regrettably reauthorized in 2012. Otherwise the
revelation that the government can and does spy on Americans through
Internet companies will chill expression, chill free association, and threaten
our society's growing reliance on cloud computing for everything from
intimate communications to business transactions. And Congress should
reevaluate the secrecy surrounding our entire foreign intelligence-gathering
system, because if the past two days have shown anything, it is that lack of
oversight leads to extraordinary abuses.
Rights Impact
Mass surveillance invokes the state of exception, since
basic human rights are disregarded in favor of security.
Lyon 14 - director of the Surveillance Studies Centre (David; member of the
Royal Society of Canada, received Lifetime Achievement Award from the
American Sociological Association Communication and Information
Technology Section, a Killian Research Fellow; Surveillance, Snowden, and
Big Data: Capacities, consequences, critique; Big Data & Society: Big Data &
Society On behalf of 2014 1; ResearchGate; January 2014;
http://www.researchgate.net/profile/David_Lyon10/publication/265965268_Big
_Data__Society_Big_Data__Society_On_behalf_of/links/5421d9e60cf238c6ea6
78102.pdf)
The main question addressed in this article is in two parts: One, in what ways
and to what extent do the Snowden disclosures indicate that Big Data
practices are becoming increasingly important to surveillance? The answer,
clearly, is yes, they are. Many of the major Snowden revelations, especially
those in which metadata feature prominently, indicate a reliance upon Big
Data practices. The second question, following on from the first, is how far
does this indicate changes in the politics and practices of surveillance? Are
new trends, or the augmentation of older ones, visible here? Again, the
evidence discussed here suggests strongly that Big Data practices are
skewing surveillance even more towards a reliance on technological
solutions, and that this both privileges organizations, large and small,
whether public or private, reinforces the shift in emphasis towards control
rather than discipline and relies increasingly on predictive analytics to
anticipate and preempt.
These questions were explored in respect to the capacities of Big Data, their
social-political consequences and the kinds of critique that may be
appropriate for assessing and responding to these developments. For the
first, I argue that size is not directly the issue but rather that, taken
together, the loose cluster of attributes of Big Data make a difference in
ways that are hard to generalize. Big Data practices echo several key
surveillance trends but in several respects they point to realities that have
perhaps been underestimated. One is that, within surveillance studies there
has been a general tendency to analyze multiple forms of surveillance that
are not directly linked with state-based, top-down surveillance of the kind
epitomized in George Orwells Nineteen-Eighty-Four. If this was understood by
some to mean that more generalized or, following Gilles Deleuze,
rhizomic surveillance spells less state surveillance activity, the Snowden
revelations are rapidly dispelling that illusion.
However, those revelations, which as I show above, indicate an increasing
dependence on Big Data practices, also lay bare in ways that were known
only hazily before just how far security and intelligence agencies depend on
data obtained from the commercial realm. These are consequences that cry
out for careful consideration. In a sense, this means that Orwells bleak vision
of what tendencies in post-war liberal democratic polities could lead to
authoritarian surveillance regimes were not mistaken so much as standing in
are suddenly authorized. Karl Meuli was the first to emphasize the connection
between these anomic festivals and the situations of suspended law that
characterize certain archaic penal institutions. Here, as well as in the
iustitium, it is possible to kill a man without going to trial, to destroy his
house, and take his belongings. Far from reproducing a mythological past, the
disorder of the carnival and the tumultuous destruction of the charivari reactualize a real historical situation of anomy. The ambiguous connection
between law and anomy is thus brought to light: the state of exception is
transformed into an unrestrained festival where one displays pure violence in
order to enjoy it in full freedom.
5. The Western political system thus seems to be a double apparatus,
founded in a dialectic between two heterogeneous and, as it were,
antithetical elements; nomos and anomy, legal right and pure violence, the
law and the forms of life whose articulation is to be guaranteed by the state
of exception. As long as these elements remain separated, their dialectic
works, but when they tend toward a reciprocal indetermination and to a
fusion into a unique power with two sides, when the state of exception
becomes the rule, the political system transforms into an apparatus of death.
We ask: why does nomos have a constitutive need for anomy? Why does the
politics of the West have to measure up to this interior void? What, then, is
the substance of the political, if it is essentially assigned to this legal
vacuum? As long as we are not able to respond to these questions, we can no
more respond to this other question whose echo traverses all of Western
political history: what does it mean to act politically?
This text is an extract from a lecture given at the Centre Roland-Barthes
(Universite Paris VII, Denis-Diderot) and an edited translation of 'Lo stato di
eccezione come paradigma di governo': the first chapter of Agamben's 'Stato
di eccezione. Homo Sacer II' (Bollati Boringhieri, May 2003, Torino).
State of Exception
The governments surveillance take away its citizens
liberties, the reauthorization of these programs create a
permanent state of exception. WE ARE ALL HOMO SACER.
Cardin, the editor of BORN TO FEAR: INTERVIEWS WITH THOMAS LIGOTTI and the academic
encyclopedias MUMMIES AROUND THE WORLD and GHOSTS, SPIRITS, AND PSYCHICS: THE
PARANORMAL FROM ALCHEMY TO ZOMBIES. 2013. (Matt, Teeming Brain founder and editor
Matt Cardin is the author of DARK AWAKENINGS, DIVINATIONS OF THE DEEP, A COURSE IN
DEMONIC CREATIVITY: A WRITER'S GUIDE TO THE INNER GENIUS, and the forthcoming TO ROUSE
LEVIATHAN. Americas post 9/11 surveillance state: Orwell mets Kafka in the
point out the really deep impact of these things on our collective
circumstance here in the U.S.A.: We are lurching from emergency to
emergency, living in a permanent state of exception . Margot Kaminski,
executive director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, puts
it nicely in The Atlantic: Foreign intelligence is the exception that has
swallowed the Fourth Amendment whole. This, I think, is the most
significant impact of Snowdens leak: not necessarily to expose
wrongdoing in the legal sense (since the sweeping dragnet of Prism
and the NSAs monitoring of Verizons phone records are technically
legal) but to take the abstract legal concepts outlined under our
emergency constitution and translate them into a political reality in
the minds of the American populace. I really want the focus to be on
these documents and the debate which I hope this will trigger among citizens
around the globe about what kind of world we want to live in, Snowden told
The Guardian. My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done
in their name and that which is done against them. The Pew/Washington
Post poll may indicate that people are comfortable with swapping
liberty for security, but that doesnt mean theyre comfortable with
an unaccountable, totally opaque, Kafka-esque security apparatus
that falls in the legal gray area of our ongoing state of exception. By
way of context, I ask you to recall what our old Teeming Brain friend James
Howard Kunstler said, and said very loudly, in his best-selling book The Long
Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First
Century, which was published way back in the prehistoric mists of 2005.
Writing in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and witnessing the craziness all
around him, Kunstler prophesied thus: It has been very hard for Americans
lost in dark raptures of nonstop infotainment, recreational shopping and
compulsive motoring to make sense of the gathering forces that will
fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life in our technological society.
Even after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, America is still sleepwalking into the
future. I call this coming time the Long Emergency. . . . [W]e are entering a
historical period of potentially great instability, turbulence and hardship. Or
actually that particular passage comes from a 2005 article by Kunstler in
Rolling Stone, likewise titled The Long Emergency. Kunstlers main focus in
that article and his book was not terrorism or surveillance but the seismic
shaking of industrial civilizations foundations by the dawning of the age of
scarcity for cheap and easy fossil fuels (a development that isnt belied but
confirmed by all of the recent talk about the new oil bonanza, which is the
result of massive investments in the kind of galactically complex and far out
alternative oil extraction maneuvers that were formerly inconceivable
because they were unnecessary). But his Long Emergency characterization
still clearly encompassed terrorism and the growth of a massive surveillance
state in America and elsewhere to complement the massive geopolitical
conflicts and at-home unpleasantness stemming from oil-fueled imperial
ambitions. Again, Kunstler said those things eight years ago. And he was
hardly alone. In other words, its as our transformation here in
America into an Orwellian and Kafka-esque surveillance state where
Bios/Zoe Alternative
The alternative is to end all sovereign attempts to call
politics to one order and the refusal to draw lines.
Jenny Edkins, professor of international politics at Prifysgol Aberystwyth
University (in Wales) and Veronique Pin-Fat, senior lecturer in politics at
cannot be a return to a politics that maintains the distinction between zoeand bios, or, in Agambens words: There is no return from the camps to
article.
Law/Life Alternative
The Alt is to loosen the artificial linkage between the
concepts of state and law failure to do so will result
in global civil war
Agamben 05, Giorgio Agamben, professor of aesthetics at the University
of Verona and author of ten books, titled: State Of Exception, pages 86-87
The aim of this investigationin the urgency of the state of ex- ception in which we livewas to bring to
light the fiction that governs this arcanum imperii [secret of power] par excellence of our time. What the
hand is not to bring the state of exception back within its spatially and temporally defined boundaries in
order to then reaffirm the primacy of a norm and of rights that are themselves ulti- mately grounded in it.
law. But if it is possible to attempt to halt the machine, to show its central
fiction, this is because between violence and law, between life and norm,
there is no substantial articulation. Alongside the movement that seeks to
keep them in rela- tion at all costs, there is a countermovement that, working
in an inverse direction in law and in life, always seeks to loosen what has
been artifi- cially and violently linked. That is to say, in the field of tension of our culture, two
opposite forces act, one that institutes and makes, and one that deactivates and deposes. The state of
exception is both the point of their maximum tension andas it coincides
with the rulethat which threatens today to render them indiscernible. To live
in the state of ex- ception means to experience both of these possibilities and
yet, by always separating the two forces, ceaselessly to try to interrupt the
working of the machine that is leading the West toward global civil war.
Responsibility Alternative
The Alternative is to unassume non responsibility? Im
not entirely sure if this could make a useful card, or if it
makes sense at all
Mills, author, 2008
Sovereignty Alternative
The alt is to destroy the sovereign authority
Kotsko, professor, June 4th, 2013
Agambens critical work always aims toward these kinds of strange, evocative
recommendations. Again and again, we find that the goal of tracking down
the paradoxes and contradictions in the law is not to fix it or provide
cautionary tales of what to avoid, but to push the paradox even further.
Agamben often uses the theological term messianic to describe his
argumentative strategy, because messianic movements throughout history
and here Agamben would include certain forms of Christianity have often
had an antagonistic relationship to the law (primarily, but not solely, the
Jewish law, or Torah). Accordingly, he frequently draws on messianic texts
from the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions for inspiration in his attempt
to find a way out of the destructive paradoxes of Western legal thought.
In his most recent book to appear in English, The Highest Poverty: Monastic
Rules and Form-of-Life (2011; 2013), Agamben conducts a detailed study of
Christian monasticism, which he believes to be essentially a messianic
movement. Not only was the movement founded and renewed by people who
were unsatisfied with mainstream institutions claiming to represent a
historical claimant to the title of messiah (namely Jesus), but they also
display a particularly paradoxical relationship to the law. On the one hand,
the monastic life is regulated down to the smallest detail, creating the
impression that it represents the strictest possible form of law (an impression
that is reinforced by the existence of detailed lists of punishments for
infractions). On the other hand, monastic thinkers have always insisted that
their rules are something other than laws. Where secular law aims to provide
boundaries to life through the imposition of prohibitions and punishments,
monastic rules aim to positively shape the life of the monks.
What is at stake in monasticism is thus not the enforcement of norms, but the
very form of the monks life. Agamben believes that this blurring of the
boundary between rule and life, to the point where they become
indistinguishable, is a concrete historical attempt to achieve something like
the state of study or play that he recommends in State of Exception. He
finds the Franciscan movement to be particularly radical in this regard, and
much of The Highest Poverty takes up the task of analyzing how the
Franciscans were ultimately brought into the mainstream of Christianity, so
that we can avoid the same pitfalls in our contemporary efforts to find some
way to escape the destructive killing machine we call the law.
IV.
Based on what Ive said so far, Agambens work may appear to be very
systematic and he reinforces that impression by elaborately dividing the
project that began with Homo Sacer into various volumes and sub-volumes.
What is most appealing about Agambens work to me, though, is not its
systematicity but its open-ended and exploratory nature. For instance,
in State of Exception, he notes how frequently modern governments have
declared a state of emergency due to economic conditions, and that
ultimately led him into his vast exploration of the concept of economy
in The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and
same. Both seek to overturn the denial of politics that has taken
place under biopolitics and to reinstate properly political power
relations , with their accompanying freedoms and potentialities. We
have discussed an example of what such contestation of sovereign power
might look like. Practices that challenge or refuse sovereign power are
apparent in many locations: whether in hunger strikes or street
demonstrations, creative ways of provoking sovereign power and
embroiling it into a political or power relation have been and are
being found, through the wire.
who were able to share this experience of oneness considered that they had
moved beyond religious morality and earthly authority. As one said defiantly
to his inquisitor, Those who are in this degree of perfection and in the
freedom of spirit are no longer obliged to obey men, or any precept, or the
rules of the Church: they are truly free (Vaneigem, 1998). The message was
one of a radical freedom through a direct immersion in the very ground of
being. Although heavily repressed, antinomianism frustrated the Inquisition
by frequently resurfacing and led directly to later currents of social change
such as the Levellers and Ranters of the English Civil War (Hill, 1991). We can
still experience some of their intoxicating irreverence through surviving texts
such as Abiezer Coppes (1973 [1649]) A Fiery Flying Roll, whose fiery
rhetoric is designed to punch through rational understanding. Antinomianism
as a philosophy and social practice fits Benjamins description of action from
the outside that neither creates nor preserves law. I suggest that we can hear
an echo of antinominianism in the contemporary social movement known as
Anonymous.
Anonymous is a social movement with roots in the taboo-breaking irreverence
of the online image board 4chan. It was constituted through Operation
Chanology, a set of actions against the Church of Scientology. While
Anonymous is difficult to pin down using any of the traditional categories of
ethics, sociology or history (Coleman, 2011), it draws its strength from a deep
immersion in the technical ground of the Internet and finds affinity through
the subcultural memes that move freely across the web. It rejects external
morality or constraints and features calls for absolute freedoms, especially
freedom of speech. The splinter group Lulzsec was a breakaway from
Anonymous that specialised in hacking into private security firms and state
surveillance agencies. It combined its online dumping of hacked data with
ranting statements filled with a sense of revelation about the state of the
world and the new apparatus. It was Anonymous at its most antinomian,
marked by a mocking contempt for worldly powers in the form of corporations
and governments. Lulzsecs (2011) final communiqu 50Days of Lulz is a
hacker version of Coppes ranter rhetoric. While experiencing its own version
of the Inquisition in the form of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) sting
operations, Anonymous has multiplied and spread offline, with the signature
Guy Fawkes masks visible at protests across the globe. Most importantly, for
the purposes of this article, the antinomian activism of Anonymous and
Lulzsec has been disruptive of the data-fuelled apparatus of prediction and
control. Lulzsec targeted agencies and companies who are avowedly spying
on us by hacking into their databases and, in a kind of ritual inversion of the
operations of those companies, releasing their data to the public. Anonymous
sought more broadly to disrupt the apparatus of control, for example, through
Distributed Denial of Service attacks that overloaded the websites of
organisations they saw as complicit. I suggest, therefore, that the
countercultures of the Internet are already generating forms of resistance
that disrupt algorithmic enclosure without themselves engaging in the cycle
of law-making and law-preserving.
Agamben makes it clear that only peoples own determination can be relied
on to challenge the state of exception. The task is not to confine the state of
exception by appealing to rights and norms that are ultimately founded on it.
To show law in its nonrelation to life and life in its nonrelation to law means
to open a space between them for human action (p. 88), Agamben (2005)
writes. The second historical example shows such human action in a form we
could call pure norms, that is, values that enact themselves with an internal
consistency that does not appeal to an already captured system. The events
in question are the 18th century food riots, as analysed by E.P. Thompson
(1993) in his book Customs in Common. Dispelling the food riots as an
instinctive response to hunger, he discovers that the central action is not
looting but setting the price. People collectively appropriated the grain from
farms and granaries to be sold at an affordable price. As the Sheriff of
Gloucestershire wrote in 1766,
They returned in general the produce (i.e. the money) to the proprietors or in
their absence left the money for them; and behaved with great regularity and
decency where they were not opposed, with outrage and violence where they
was: but pilfered very little.
Here, we have a picture of ordinary people intervening to correct what they
see as excess, without relying on a legal framework. Thompson referred to it
as a moral economy. I suggest that a similar re-assertion of normative
relations without an appeal to law is present in the practice of Cryptoparties.
The idea of Cryptoparty was conceived in August 2012, following a Twitter
conversation between Australian privacy advocate Asher Wolf and computer
security experts in the wake of the Australian Cybercrime Legislation
Amendment Bill (Blum-Dumontet, 2012), and the do-it-yourself (DIY)
movement quickly spread with Cryptoparties popping up in cities across
Australia, United States, United Kingdom and Germany. They are peerlearning events where people share their knowledge and skills to ensure that
private online chats stay private and that email and web browsing are as
secure and anonymous as possible. Rather than trying to explain the complex
mathematical concepts behind cryptography, cryptoparties encourage people
to look at the landscape of tracking and surveillance and to develop a sense
of how they can raise the barrier to big data collection from their online
activities. The shared ethos is a deep unease with the current direction of
travel revealed by pervasive corporate tracking and blanket state
surveillance. As Smari McCarthy has argued, the aim of easier-to-use
encryption is to raise the cost for the NSA and the other intelligence
agencies, by forcing them to use scarce human resources to apply specific
targeted techniques, or to use a lot of costly processing power to break the
encryption: They can scoop up the data of 2.5 billion internet users, making
the cost per person per day a mere 13 cents. My five-year plan is to increase
that cost to $10,000 per person per day. (McCarthy, 2014) Thus,
Cryptoparties can also be seen as an example of autonomous price-setting,
motivated by community norms acting in the space between law and life.
you please
observe through the wire/ I am sewing my feet
together/ They have walked about as far/ as they
ever need to go. The second stanza again calls on us to observe, and
tells how the refugee is sewing his heart together: It is now so full of
the ashes of my days/ it will not hold any more. The
final verse reiterates: One last time/ please observe/ I am
sewing my lips together/ That which you are denying
us/ we should never have/ had to ask for. Prem Kumar
Rajaran points to the way in which Al Assads poembuilds up to a final
demand, not of a beseeching other begging to be let in as an act of charity,
but a powerful demand from the other who has a fundamental claim: that
which you are denying us we should never even have had to ask for. The
subject is hostage to the other, is fundamentally entwined with the other.81
It is a challenge to the boundedness of territory and demonstrates
the harsh violence of sovereign power and the way in which it
produces intolerable distinctions.It is interesting how the poem calls
upon us, its readers, to observe through the wire. 82We may,
indeed, be on the other side of the wire, but the poem does not let
us remain there. It asks us to look through the fence that divides us
from the asylum seeker, and to recognise our radical relationality.
We are called upon to reflect on the lines (the wire) of sovereign
power, while at the same time being summoned to move beyond
them. Al Assad does not let us forget that we are implicated in the
distinctions that are made. We are denying entry to the asylum seeker:
it is with us, not with sovereign power, that the responsibility for
hospitality lies. Both citizen and refugee are their own bare life. Al
Assad calls for this to be acknowledged, and for sovereign power to be
displaced. The protests we have outlined above are examples of
challenges that assume bare life and thus transform bare life into
form-of-life . The act of going on hunger strike, sewing ones lips
and, in some cases eyes and ears, viscerally reveals and draws
violence themselves. This occurred in two ways. First, they were accused of
child abuse. Prime Minister John Howard remarked:Do you really imagine that
if an eight- or ten-year-old child begins to sew his or her lips together that a
responsible parent would do other than stop him or her? Im not going to
randomly brand people as child abusers. I dont think its responsible of me to
do that. But I do know this, that the children in the proper, positive care of
their parents dont sew their lips together, do they?87 Second, their action
was scripted as self-mutilation, or in other words, violence on their own
bodies: everything is mobilised in order to represent the violence that is
inflicted and extorted from the bodies of refugees as self-generated.88 The
violence of sovereign power is assigned to the asylum seeker in the
classic gesture of denial and transference.It seems, then, that the
asylum system attempts to remove the possibility of a properly
political power relation. The refugee, fleeing persecution elsewhere and
claiming a political right to asylum, clearly appears on the face of it as
politically qualified. Once refugees enter the UK, Australia or the
Netherlands for example, they are produced in the zone of
indistinction of the camps as bare life, life that is not politically
qualified. Even the successful are no longer a political voice telling of
oppression and mistreatment but only lives to be saved. By their actions, the
refugees we discuss demonstrate that this is the case and in doing so
attempt to claim back the possibility of speaking politically. When they sew
their mouths to give others a voice, that is, to demand that others
speak for them, or to insist that what they have been denied is
something they should not have had to ask for, they are assuming
the very bare life that sovereign power imposes on them in order to
demonstrate the relationship of violence in which they have been
placed. Like the non-violent demonstrator who puts his body on the line, this
strategy is particularly effective in showing clearly that sovereign power
does not willingly enter into a power relation but rather survives
though relationships of violence. To what extent are actions of the type
we have elaborated likely to be effective? Are they anything more than
individual acts of protest that can have little impact on collective politics? In
his analysis of the multiple readings to which the protest of the Australian
asylum seekers gives rise, Joseph Pugliese suggests thatwhile the act of
sewing ones lips together is, in one sense, about exercising a degree of
power, autonomy and control within the most desperately disempowering of
spaces, the prison, in another seemingly contradictory sense, the act of
sewing ones lips transcends the individual subject.... This singular act of
sewing the lips together is already double: it conjoins the
anguished body of the individual refugee to the larger corpus of the
nation in a complex relation of power and violence.89 The act of
sewing exposes the radical relationality of state and refugee. It demonstrates
how each is entangled within the other. Without sovereign power and its
distinctions there would be no refugee; without the refugee (the non-citizen)
citizenship itself would have no meaning. As we have seen, these acts are not
carried out invisibly. They are a demand addressed directly to those who
observe through the wire, not a demand made on the terms of sovereign
power. In taking on their life as bare life, the protestors call for a
direct, unmediated, visceral response, life to life.
power that founds itself ... on the separation of a sphere of naked life from
the context of the forms of life.40 Form-of-life, a life in which something like
naked life cannot be separated, is a life of power as potenza. Significantly,
Foucaults notion of relations of power contains within it a sense of
potentiality or possibility comparable to potenza. As we have seen, freedom
and resistance are a central part of Foucauldian power relations. A power
relation operates on the field of possibilities in which the behaviour of active
subjects is able to inscribe itself. It is a set of actions on possible actions.41
Power as potenza in Agamben is the realm of politics, or what we will call
later properly political power relations. Bare Life as a Life without Power
Relations In this section, we suggest that when the insights of Foucault and
Agamben are combined there are unexpected implications for the notion of
resistance, implications that are to be found in the depoliticised and
technologised administrative depths of the camp. We argue that both
Foucault and Agamben are gesturing towards the conclusion that bare life
is a life where power relations are absent, and, correspondingly,
that life constituted within biopolitics cannot be a political life . This
moves us then towards the somewhat surprising conclusion that far from
seeking to escape power relations, we should be attempting to reinstate
them, and with them the possibility (and possibilities or potentialities) of
politics.42 Sovereign power , despite its name , is not a properly political
power relation, we will argue, but a relationship of violence. For Foucault,
power relations are a very specific form of social relation: power relations ...
are distinct from objective capacities as well as from relations of
communication.43Power as a relation is distinct fromtechnical or objective
capacities. In addition, a power relation is to be seen as distinct from a
relationship of violence. Arelationship of violence acts immediately
and directly on others, whereas a relationship of power acts upon
their actions. 44 Slaves in chains, for example, are not in a power relation
but in a relationship of violence: Where the determining factors are
exhaustive, there is no relationship of power: slavery is not a power
relationship when a man is in chains, only when he has some possible
mobility, even a chance of escape.... At the very heart of the power
relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and
the intransigence of freedom.45 For Foucault power relations and freedom
occupy the same moment of possibility. Resistance is inevitable
whenever and wherever there are power relations. Without power
relations there is no possibility of resistance and no freedom. Taking
this insight from Foucault and turning the question of power on its head, we
can begin to ask what examples there might be, in practice, of a mode of
being where resistance is impossible, and hence where there is no
power relation. It can be argued, following Agamben, that the
concentration camp is such an example. In the camp the majority of
prisoners become what is termed in camp jargon Muselmnner. Primo Levi
describes these as the drowned:Their life is short, but their number is
endless; they ... form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass,
continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labour
in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really
suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death
death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to
understand.46 The drowned are bare life their concerns are limited to
where the next mouthful of food is coming from and they are also
homines sacri, sacred men: they can be killed at will by the camp guards,
without ceremony and without justification having to be offered or
provocation demonstrated. More significantly for the argument here, the
drowned offer no resistance. Indeed they are indifferent to their fate. They
are reduced to a state wherethey are unable even to commit suicide: they do
not have the possibility of killing themselves as, even if there were ways in
which they could engineer their own death, they no longer have the will
either to live or die. In Foucaults terms, then, for the drowned of the
concentration camp there are no relations of power, only relations
of violence. The camp then is an example of where power relations vanish.
What we have in the camps is not a power relation. All we have is the
administration of bare life. In the camps, for those inmates who reached
the depths, who faced the Gorgon, there were no relations of power, only
relations of violence. As we have noted, Agamben importantly argues
that what took place in the camp as a zone of indistinction has
extended in the contemporary world to encompass regions outside
the camp as well. In the face of a biopolitics that technologises,
administers and depoliticises, and thereby renders the political and power
relations irrelevant , we have all become homines sacri or bare life.
Jared, Jared Keller is a journalist living in Brooklyn, NY. His work has appeared
in the Atlantic, Bloomberg Businessweek, Al Jazeera America, the Los Angeles
Review of Books, and the Verge, 6/12/13, Why Dont Americans Seem to
Care About Government Surveillance?, Pacific Standard,
http://www.psmag.com/politics-and-law/why-dont-americans-care-aboutgovernment-surveillance-60011
The late political scientist Clinton Rossiter called this Americas
crisis government. The best description that Ive ever read for the
phenomenon comes from Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who
coined the term "the state of exception" to mean a position at the
limit between politics and law ... an ambiguous, uncertain,
borderline fringe, at the intersection of the legal and the political
where an executive acts extralegally in order to preserve an existing
legal framework, effectively superseding the rule of law in order to
save it.
But if terrorism and the resulting surveillance state have become accepted
features of American public life (which, according to the latest polls, they
have), then the apparatus the government deploys to adjudicate and
prosecute our war on terror should become normalized in our existing legal
regime. The Patriot Act and National Emergencies Acts that provide
the legal basis for the modern surveillance state were supposed to
be temporary "emergencies," but with their continued reauthorization by Presidents Bush and Obama, they have become the
norm.
We are lurching from emergency to emergency, living in a
permanent state of exception. Margot Kaminski, executive director of the
Information Society Project at Yale Law School, puts it nicely in The Atlantic:
Foreign intelligence is the exception that has swallowed the Fourth
Amendment whole. This, I think, is the most significant impact of Snowdens
leak: not necessarily to expose wrongdoing in the legal sense (since the
sweeping dragnet of Prism and the NSAs monitoring of Verizons phone
records are technically legal) but to take the abstract legal concepts outlined
under our emergency constitution and translate them into a political reality in
the minds of the American populace.
"I really want the focus to be on these documents and the debate which I
hope this will trigger among citizens around the globe about what kind of
world we want to live in," Snowden told The Guardian. "My sole motive is to
inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is
done against them." The Pew/Washington Post poll may indicate that people
are comfortable with swapping liberty for security, but that doesnt mean
all-powerful sovereign. "When a supreme will within the community," as Laclau asserts, "is not confronted
that captures far better the complicated sociopolitical reality and its hidden emancipatory
possibilities. Let us proceed with the second displacement: the full elimination of power. In the
essay "ber den Begriff der Geschichte," Walter Benjamin's last major work, Benjamin states enigmatically
in the eighth thesis: "The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the'state of exception' in which we live
is the rule."17 The exemplary space in which the internal principle of a juridico-political order is completely
materialized as the norm is a concentration camp, where life is "exposed to an unconditional capacity to
be killed."18 In the permanent state of exception, the operative principle of the juridico-political traditioni.e., the sovereign nexus between life and law embodied by homo sacer-comes into view.
Agamben too pessimistic he misses the point -sovereignties have risen and fallen,
Behrman, Expert in Law and works of Giorgio Agamben, 13
(Simon. Law School from Birkbeck, University of London, LLB and MRes., published
work on refugee law, policing and the use of force, and the work of Giorgio Agamben.
In recent years he has presented his work at academic conferences in the UK, USA,
Colombia, Egypt, Australia, India and Turkey. In 2008-2009 he was an intern at the
NGO Rights Watch (UK)., research scholar at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library
of Congress, Washington D.C., studying the US Sanctuary Movement and the SansPapiers in France., research interests include: refugee law; legal history; legal theory,
particularly the works of Evgeny Pashukanis, Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben;
the inter-relationship between law and politics; the history of policing, and the law
governing the use of force., publishing and work for a mental health charity. He has
spent many years as a political activist, Giorgio Agamben in Perspective.
International Socialism. 10-7-13. http://isj.org.uk/giorgio-agamben-in-perspective/)
mistaken. In Foucaults historical framework biopolitics represents a decisive transformation that comes
with the advent of modernity. Therefore, Foucault is able to historicise its development as concomitant with
with the
homo sacer Agamben sees the roots of biopolitics
stretching back much further to the early Roman
Republic or even earlier. The legal historian Anton
the transformation from one social form (feudalism) to another (capitalism). But
states of exception are by their nature seen as unfortunate but temporary departures from this norm,
necessary only for the defence of the system that guarantees the rule of law in the first place. But this
. The
rule of law that grants powers to the sovereign
includes within those powers the right of the
sovereign to decide, in certain circumstances, that
the rule of law must be suspended. The declaration of
a state of emergency is an essential element in the
exercise of sovereign power because of this
inseparable relationship between law and exception.
circularity is, in fact, an accurate reflection of the relationship between norm and exception
Schmitt celebrates this aspect of sovereign power as necessary for ensuring stability in periods of crisis.31
It is not surprising therefore that Schmitt was to end up as a jurist in the service of the Nazi regime. What
is surprising is that at the time he wrote Political Theology, and throughout the 1920s, he was a staunch
defender of the liberal-democratic Weimar Republic. As Agamben shows, Schmitts ideological trajectory
had more consistency than is often recognised. For in the legal sense, the Nazi state was not the negation
of Weimar but its continuation in extremis. Article 48 of the Weimar constitution allowed for the complete
suspension of fundamental rights in situations where security and public order were threatened.
Hitlers government used this article repeatedly throughout its rule, regularly suspending the rule of law so
that the situation was reversed: the state of emergency became the norm, and the rule of law the
exception. Yet the rule of law was suspended by legal means, using powers granted under the constitution.
It was therefore a form of legal lawlessness.32 It is instructive to note, as Agamben does, that Article 48
was also used repeatedly by governments of the Weimar period to deal with the crises brought on by
economic collapse and the threat of revolution.33 Thus, in terms of using bourgeois law as a means of
extreme repression, the Nazis merely followed the example of the Weimar Republic. The fact that the path
of Nazi power ended in the unique violence of the Holocaust has obscured the extent to which fascist rule
could be facilitated by the rule of law. But today capitalist democracies routinely use their own versions of
the Weimar Constitutions Article 48, without a crisis of political legitimacy of the scale of the 1920s and,
thankfully, without so far ending up with fascism. Of course, the present circumstances are volatile and it is
difficult to predict what course things will take. What is different today is the relative stability and
consistency that has been maintained over a significant period of time under de facto states of emergency.
A theory of the state of exception, albeit one outlined in the vaguest of ways, is also found in the work of
Walter Benjamin. In the eighth of his Theses on the Philosophy of History he writes:
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the
state of emergency in which we live is not the
exception but the rule. We must attain to a
conception of history that is in keeping with this
insight. Then we shall clearly realise that it is our task
to bring about a real state of emergency.34 It is
clear what Agamben takes from this aphorism, and
also what he fails, or refuses, to take from it. Like Schmitt,
Benjamin identifies the state of emergency as
immanent to law. But he goes further by saying that the state of exception has itself
become the norm. This insight, so fundamental to Agambens work, is bookended by two things that
Agamben ignores. For the eighth thesis is not a mere description of a state of affairs, but a call to action
informed by the tradition of the oppressed for the introduction of a real state of emergency.
At this
point it is worth reflecting on the most significant gap
in Agambens work: the absence of engagement with
ideas about possible resistance to, or transcendence
of, the various manifestations of sovereign power. In
the norm and the exception that ground the rule of law. The absence of resistance:
Foucaults work, for example, struggle at all levels of society is often present and critical to the
development of the new forms of power that he identifies, and moreover he frequently recognises the
modern age can be transcended. Agamben also stands apart from most of
the other celebrated critical thinkers of our time in this respect. Antonio Negri, Judith Butler, Alain Badiou,
Slavoj Zizek and Jacques Rancire all refer to concrete examples of resistance as well as being deeply
approach it sometimes appears the other way around where kings and popes merely assist the theologians
and philosophers in applying their ideas.) Agambens work therefore frequently offers a very pessimistic
domination
of one sort or another, tyrannical or not, has a better
chance of preventing the outbreak of war than a
system in which no one is really in charge; where no
one is the top dog, so to speak. That is why Columbia
University's Kenneth Waltz, arguably America's preeminent realist, says that the opposite of "anarchy" is
not stability, but "hierarchy." Hierarchy eviscerates
equality; hierarchy implies that some are frankly
"more equal" than others, and it is this formal
inequality where someone, or some state or group,
has more authority and power than others that
prevents chaos. For it is inequality itself that often creates
the conditions for peace. Government is the most
common form of hierarchy . It is a government that monopolizes the use of violence in a given
geographical space, thereby preventing anarchy. To quote Thomas Hobbes , the 17th century English
philosopher, only where it is possible to punish the wicked
can right and wrong have any practical meaning, and
that requires "some coercive power." The best sort of
inequality is hegemony. Whereas primacy, as Kang explains, is about preponderance purely through
military or economic power, hegemony "involves legitimation and consensus." That is to say, hegemony is some
form of agreed-upon inequality, where the dominant
University of Southern California, was a generally more peaceful climate in Asia than in Europe. The fact is that
power is expected by others to lead. When a hegemon does not lead, it is acting
irresponsibly. Of course, hegemony has a bad reputation in media discourse.
But that is only because journalists are confused about the
terminology, even as they sanctimoniously judge previous historical eras by the strict standards of their own. In fact, for
most of human history, periods of relative peace have been the
product of hegemony of one sort or another. And for many periods, the reigning hegemonic or imperial
power was the most liberal, according to the standards of the age. Rome, Venice and Britain were usually more liberal than the forces
arranged against them. The empire of the Austrian Hapsburgs in Central and Eastern Europe often protected the rights of minorities and
prevented ethnic wars to a much greater degree than did the modern states that succeeded it. The Ottoman Empire in the Balkans and the
Middle East frequently did likewise. There are exceptions, of course, like Hapsburg Spain, with its combination of inquisition and conquest. But
geopolitics than the demise of an empire. The collapse of the Hapsburgs, of the Ottoman Turks, of the Soviet Empire and the British Empire in
Asia and Africa led to chronic wars and upheavals. Some uncomprehending commentators remind us that all empires end badly. Of course
they do, but that is only after they have provided decades and centuries of relative peace. Obviously, not all empires are morally equivalent.
For example, the Austrian Hapsburgs were for their time infinitely more tolerant than the Soviet Communists. Indeed, had the Romanov
Dynasty in St. Petersburg not been replaced in 1917 by Lenin's Bolsheviks, Russia would likely have evolved far more humanely than it did
through the course of the 20th century. Therefore, I am saying only in a general sense is order preferable to disorder. (Though captivating
subtleties abound: For example, Napoleon betrayed the ideals of the French Revolution by creating an empire, but he also granted rights to
Jews and Protestants and created a system of merit over one of just birth and privilege.) In any case, such
order must
come from hierarchal domination. Indeed, from the end of World War II until very
recently, the United States has performed the role of a
hegemon in world politics. America may be democratic at home, but abroad it has been hegemonic.
That is, by some rough measure of international consent, it is America that has the responsibility
to lead. America formed NATO in Europe, even as its Navy and Air Force exercise preponderant power in the Pacific Basin. And
whenever there is a humanitarian catastrophe somewhere in the developing world, it is the United States that has been expected to organize
hegemony, in some aspects, seems to be on the wane. That is what makes this juncture in history unique. NATO is simply not what it used to
be. U.S. forces in the Pacific are perceived to be less all-powerful than in the past, as China tests U.S. hegemony in the region. But most
importantly, U.S. President Barack Obama is evolving a doctrine of surgical strikes against specific individuals combined with non-interference
or minimal interference in cases of regional disorder. Libya and Syria are cases in point. Gone, at least for the moment, are the days
when U.S. forces were at the ready to put a situation to rights in this country or that. When it comes to the Greater Middle East, Americans
seem to want protection on the cheap, and Obama is giving them that. We will kill a terrorist with a drone, but outside of limited numbers of
special operations forces there will be no boots on the ground for Libya, Syria or any other place. As for Iran, whatever the White House now
says, there is a perception that the administration would rather contain a nuclear Iran than launch a military strike to prevent Iran from going
nuclear. That, by itself, is unexceptional. Previous administrations have been quite averse to the use of force. In recent decades, it was only
George W. Bush and only in the aftermath of 9/11 who relished the concept of large-scale boots on the ground in a war of choice.
Nevertheless, something has shifted. In a world of strong states a world characterized by hierarchy, that is the United States often
enforced the rules of the road or competed with another hegemon, the Soviet Union, to do so. Such enforcement came in the form of robust
diplomacy, often backed by a threat to use military power. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were noted for American
leadership and an effective, sometimes ruthless foreign policy. Since the Cold War ended and Bill Clinton became president, American
leadership has often seemed to be either unserious, inexpertly and crudely applied or relatively absent. And this has transpired even as states
themselves in the Greater Middle East have become feebler. In other words, both the hegemon and the many states it influences are weaker.
Hierarchy is dissolving on all levels. Equality is now on the march in geopolitics: The American hegemon is less hegemonic, and within
individual countries Egypt, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Tunisia and so on internal forces are no longer subservient to the regime. (And states like
Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are not in the American camp to the degree that they used to be, further weakening American hegemony.)
Moreover, the European Union as a political organizing principle is also weakening, even as the one-party state in China is under increasing
duress. Nevertheless, in the case of the Middle East, do not conflate chaos with democracy. Democracy itself implies an unequal, hierarchal
order, albeit one determined by voters. What we have in the Middle East cannot be democracy because almost nowhere is there a new and
sufficiently formalized hierarchy. No, what we have in many places in the Middle East is the weakening of central authority with no new
SQuo world is an anarchic realm with each nationstate as an individual, pursuing interests freely war
between nation-states empirically prove anarchy bad
Politics and Metapolitics, 09 (Politics and Metapolitics. Political
science and literature blog, How Much Anarchy? 5/30/15.
https://arejaee.wordpress.com/2009/05/30/how-much-anarchy/)
An
international system exists; 2) The system is anarchic; 3)
States are sovereign and the primary units of the
system; 4) States seek power; and 5) States act rationally. While each claim
Realism and neorealism make five central claims about the international politics: 1)
complements the others, I believe that realisms understanding of anarchy is the nucleus of the traditions
analyses of interstate relations. In this essay, I explore the validity of the proposition that anarchy
determines the nature of state interactions in the system. Ultimately, I determine that realisms strict
definition of anarchy is a beneficial tool for understanding international relations in a broad historical sense
In order to protect
national interest, Waltz says, states will ally to negate
the ascending power of another. Once the power
equilibrium is restored, the allied states pursue their
interests independently, only to balance again in the
future when one state disrupts the distribution of
power.[1] International institutions do not play a role
in softening realisms anarchy because no
international body exists to extricate states from the
self-help principle. Basically, international institutions are a tool for enhancing national
explicates cooperations role in the realist framework.
interest against the welfare of other states. Thus, zero-sum competition is an enduring feature of the
international system. From the Treaty of Westphalias establishment of the nation-state as the primary unit
of international relations in 1648 to World War II, realisms anarchy offers a compelling longe duree
perspective of the motivations of states and interstate conflict. During that time, the insubstantial
information flows between nation-states exacerbated the question of other states policy intentions.
Realisms strict interpretation of anarchy, however, seems anachronistic considering the technological
advances of the mid- to late-twentieth century that connected nations and facilitated the integration of
national economies into the complex global economy. Contrary to the central assumption of neo-realism,
anarchy is not the sole determinant of state behavior in the modern era. One need only open the
newspaper for evidence that states are subject to formal and informal constraints. Liberal theorists like
Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye agree that the international system is anarchic but contend that
international economic institutions, though voluntary, reduce interstate tensions by linking economic
welfare a rational component of the national interest to stable and contention-minimizing relationships.
[2] In the liberal model, states are concerned with absolute gains instead of relative gains, thus
rationalizing anarchy as an opportunity instead of a burden. Institutions need not be located in brick and
mortar buildings; instead they can be norms widely accepted by the states in the international system. In
todays world, for example, virtually all states agree that war is only considered just if waged for
defensive purposes. By and large, the institution of just war restrains states from aggressively pursuing
military conquest. The question that then arises is whether the tempered anarchy of the twentieth century
is a temporary or permanent deviation from realisms rigid interpretation of anarchy. Some liberals insist
Another way to predict the degree of anarchy in the future is to question the effects of technological
progress through history. From steamboats and the telegraph to television and the Internet, human
innovation has created an increasingly interconnected and culturally homogenous world. As the globe
becomes smaller, institutions are utilized to mediate between disputant agents and formulate responses to
, anarchy may be
intensified by a myriad of factors ranging from
resource scarcity to violence perpetrated by nonstate actors. In todays world, it is not outlandish to
imagine a state attempting to protect its national
welfare from non-state militant groups by wantonly
the ills produced by the virtual elimination of spatial barriers. Conversely
that play a substantial role in creating norms in the international system either through their interaction, as
in a multipolar system, or their unrivaled power, as in a unipolar system. In the former case, the system is
likely to be more anarchical. Yet, if a single superpower dominates the system and promotes the idea of
absolute gains, as the United States does, then a challenger or coalition of challengers is less likely to
emerge. In other words, a loose, non-obligatory order built upon common norms and understandings
simultaneously sustains anarchy but also provides structure. The degree of anarchy in a unipolar system,
though, is contingent upon the identity of the great power. An aggressive great power with a zero-sum
interpretation of interstate events will plunge system into a hard anarchy. In sum, as long as sovereign
states remain the primary actors in the international system, anarchy will remain as the structure
influencing states action. However, the system can at times be more or less anarchic. The realist and
liberal arguments concerning anarchy are both correct when situated within an appropriate context.
Constructivists process-centric analysis of international politics reconciles these two schools
understanding of anarchy. It accepts the idea that hard and soft anarchies are variant conditions of the
system dependent on states socialization. To understand the international systems structure of anarchy,
one must look at the dominant institutions mediating state interaction.
There are four implications of this critique for political theory and the state. First, the modem state is
of government, I suggested, is the practice by which articulations between these institutions are forgedand non-state institutions are joined to this chain-and they are mobilized toward various purposes. The
plural nature of this ensemble is precisely what gives extension to the modem state. Second,
if
we treat the state as an ensemble of institutions, then the concept of a state
of emergency is poorly suited to understanding our political present .
Agamben rightly criticizes the USA PATRIOT Act in State of Exception. This law,
like most laws that are passed in an ongoing legal system, amends a
variety of other laws and sits on a foundation created by these other
laws, such as the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. The Antiterrorism Act created
the possibility of attributing guilt by association since it criminalized the provision of material support for
Political Theory organizations that the administration deems "terrorist"-provisions that the USA PATRIOT
apparatus that has been built through legislation like the National Security Act of 1947, through discourse,
In other words,
another state formation is struggling to emerge through the ruin of
liberal democracy in the United States, and this emergence (and
ruin) is hastened by those who seek to enhance surveillance and
and through the creation of stakeholders (the military-industrial complex).
presidential powers, while diminishing the power of courts and legislative oversight as a
response to September 11, 2001.
2AC No Impact
No Impact- Were already living in a state of anarchy
Caplan, Professor of Economics at George Mason University 09, (Bryan,
threatenedthelongestablishedeconomicmodelofmanyoftheindustriesthatmakeculture:music,booksandfilm.Forawhile,we
staredintotheabyssofarevolutionaryNapsterandYouTubefuture,andthenwepragmaticallybackedaway,bringingcopyrightlaw
if law can
regulate copyright for the entertainment industries, it
can and should regulate data for everyone else.
And it will.As the digital revolution proceeds, were
realizing that we have a right to demand that privacy,
security, expression, equality and other values we
fought so hard to get built into the democratic society
of the twentieth century get built into the digital one
of the twenty-first. In 2015, these developments will
kick into high gear, and law will start to catch up with
technology.
intothedigitalrealm.Manyofusbelievethatcopyrightlawactuallywenttoofar,buttheclearlessonisthat
Kingdom, the first Emergency Powers Act was passed in 1920 and used the following year
against the miners' strike; a state of emergency (which lasted eight months) was declared to
deal with the General Strike, and, most recently, during the Heath government, there were five
mentions an occasion when a iustitium was declared because people had given up going to
work to participate in the Bacchanalia. (The 2 January Bank Holiday in Scotland is a more
recent example.) Who then decides the exception ?