Ghost in the Wire

But it doesn't end there. See, mother nature is out there, and her assaults will continue as well; she will continue to "challenge us," just as "evil men" will continue to commit their evil acts (we couldn't possibly get through a speech of this nature without the necessity of juxtaposing Katrina and 9-11, could we?). In effect, through this abnormally "perfect storm," we arrive at the failure of the norm that consequently justifies making permanent the state of exception upon which the norm is founded.

This is worth explaining a bit, and so I'll turn it over to Giorgio Agamben, who is certainly the leader in this discussion. In a recent book titled The State of Exception, he writes:

The juridical history of the West appears as a double structure, formed by two heterogeneous yet coordinated elements: one that is normative and juridical in the strict sense (which we can for convenience inscribe under the rubric potestas) and one that is anomic and metajuridical (which we can call by the name auctoritas). The normative element needs the anomic element in order to be applied, but, on the other hand, auctoritas can assert itself only in the validation or suspension of potestas. Because it results from the dialectic between these two somewhat antagonistic yet functionally connected elements, the ancient dwelling of law is fragile and, in straining to maintain its own order, is always already in the process of ruin and 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."

For Agamben, the state of exception, which always lurks at the heart of the legal order, works reasonably well and without significant danger as long as it maintains the fiction by which auctoritas and potestas are kept distinct. But when the two intermingle, like two primary colored paints, the result is something different, something dangerous, with the form of law strictly coinciding with the force of law. When the state of exception ceases to be exceptional, the relationship between the individual who is subject to the law and the possibility of violence done in the law's name increases dramatically. Perhaps invariably.

Agamben's a bit fast in assessing the nature of this danger, and a bit loose in thinking the nature of authoritarian regimes. His work on the state of exception centers on the thinking of Nazism, and thus on those concerned with the philosophical underpinnings of Nazism (Schmitt, Arendt, Benjamin), and so, to my eyes, he spends too much time concerned with charisma, in effect with thinking about how it is that the state of exception could have been normalized and governed by the figure of Hitler. The charismatic leader is indeed historically necessary for successful, final-stage fascist movements (i.e. movements that actually lay claim to political power). But there remains a more fundamental and contemporary pressing facist concern, an earlier stage in which the rhetorical structure of fascism is laid by celebrating (Robert Paxton's recent Anatomy of Fascism is quite good on this point) the necessary failures of liberal democracy to respond to the exigencies of the present day. For four years we have been told that a new type of war must be waged, that new types of laws must be passed (even if those laws short-circuit the freedoms they ostensibly protect), that the old conventions by which we fight illegalities and terrorism must be scrapped in favor of more proactive solutions. In effect, we have been told that the liberal democratic state was simply ill-prepared to handle the threat of terrorism, and so something else, something new, defined by a Bush doctrine and a rethinking of our constitutional protections, would be needed. Now we are told that the liberal state can no longer handle the constant challenges of nature, and that now, again, something new is needed: social militarization.

For the facist movements that eventually came to power in Italy and Germany, and that also surfaced in Spain, Poland, and the majority of countries, the supposed failure of liberal democracy became apparent with the ravages and duration of World War I, the Great War. Its intensity seemed so unfitting civilized society, so anethema to the vision of evolved, Enlightened, European culture. For the fascists, it was evidence that the liberal state was weak, that it lacked the necessary will to power to do right by it citizenry. I fear that history is repeating itself.

Perhaps it is, perhaps not. If this current social militarization marks something new, we may not understand its nature until the social is already too encircled, too embattled, too forgotten. It may be that social militarization offers one of the more effective hegemonic formations, which is to say, that social militarization is well suited to crafting the illusion of its own completion. Liberal democracy is not without its faults - my god, it has many - but its primaru saving grace is that those faults are so demonstrable, so open for exposition - in effect, so structurally incomplete. Liberal democracy, even with the pervasive thrust of Empire and the perversion of neoliberal economics, remains relatively open to antagonism (to use Laclau and Mouffe's term). But this openness seems to me to be predicated on the fictional distinction that keeps the form of law only tangentially related to the force of law, and that primes form over force as the dominant juridical order. This distinction between the two vanishes once the state of exception becomes normalized, and the relationship reverses, since within the permenent state of exception, the form of law is fully sublimated to the force of law, and as Agamben notes in Remnants of Auschwitz, the biopolitical easily segues to the thanatopolitical.