autonomous thought on the latest state of emergency

An Anarchist Analysis of the Detention of Immigrants and War, post 9-11

by Zen Dochterman

The War on Terror is the world's latest state of emergency. Why, long after the ebb of the attack, after the capture of hundreds of suspected terrorists, after the (non-terrorist) threats in Iraq, Syria, and North Korea have been bombed or lulled into extinction, can't we say we have reached normalcy again? Threats will continue to exist so long as American hegemony continues, and today such threats seem no more imminent than in the hijacking- and car bombing-laden 70's and 80's. The War on Terror is no longer a shift in foreign policy aimed to fight a supposed threat. Nor is it simply an economic expansionist effort on the part of the U.S. elite or its corporations. It is a systematic erasure of the category of normalcy that allows for force to replace legality. The first casualty of this expanded use of force is what we once took to be the "political". The new deployments of power post-911 provide the legal justifications for an extreme intensification of control over immigrants, asylum seekers, and non-whites the world over.

The State has assumed extensive control over a number of areas previously inaccessible to it or considered untouchable by international legal standards. The Bush regime has done everything to increase its capacity to indefinitely detain suspected terrorists and immigrants (solely on the basis of being immigrants from Moslem countries). It has taken measures to collect information without probable cause and suspend privacies (Patriot Act), as well as to try prisoners of war in military tribunals (Military Order on Detention and Treatment of Certain Non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism). It has extended regulation of surveillance into the libraries and other institutions (Patriot Act). The State legitimates these ends by instantiating a state of emergency that justifies every use of force. Not to use such force would "endanger" national security. Giorgio Agamben described this shift in sovereign power as the moment when "the state of exception thus ceases to be referred to as an external and provisional state of factual danger and comes to be confused with juridical rule itself" (138). The ultimate aim is to mask the "political" aspect of America's wars, legal changes, and detainments behind the veneer of "protection". For citizen to question political choices becomes a matter of suggesting that they do not value the "safety" of "security" of their country.

Force, beyond all law, is the basis of all law. It may be said that in its "normal" deployment, force is supposed to uphold law rather than be a law unto itself. However, this analysis misses the point. Force can only be exerted when the law is suspended. Cops can only arrest and beat people because they are beyond law. Or better, during revolutionary times, the military steps in to show that State power rests upon a violence that both exceeds and circumscribes the political order. Legitimized force is thus the privilege of the state. The "legitimized" use of force - and what constitutes that legitimacy - is spreading in new and unprecedented ways and infecting ever more innocuous areas of our existence.

The question anarchist and other radicals should be asking is not, "what's happening to our civil liberties?". This implies that we once had them and only want a nicer administration to restore them. Rather we should be asking how state-monopolized force is deployed and for whose protection. "Our" civil liberties or "our" human rights already implies that there are those who lack them, who can be stripped of them and only lent such rights through a certain type of government. To demand the restoration of civil liberties and of human rights as self-is an inevitable struggle that I have no doubt will benefit those most hurt by the current order. However, such reformism does nothing to undermine the order that can decide whose civil liberties to protect. In fact, it must be argued that it is only by stripping a great number of people of such rights that the political rights of others (citizens) can be ensured. Thus, operating within the discourse of civil liberties or human rights is a necessarily self-defeating project. Change must be more all-pervasive.

Agamben differentiates between the two ancient Greek words used to describe life, bios, in the sense of one's political/legal existence, and zoe, the pure biological being, or "bare life". The detainments of hundreds of immigrants in detention centers around the country, the indefinite imprisonment of "enemy combatants" and terrorist suspects at Guantanomo Bay demonstrate the racial character of this body without civil liberties or political rights, this bare life. Agamben argues that "[t]he camp is the space opened up when the state of exception begins to become the rule" (168-9). The camp, such as that at Guantonomo Bay, can "protect" the public by removing potential threats from the social realm, in a space beyond legality. It is precisely this extra-legal space in which sovereign force operates and it is the body of the immigrant on which it acts. 9-11 has provided a convenient excuse for the State to refine its demographic controls and shatter every guideline for the treatment of refugees outlined in Geneva Convention and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees (see the July 8th, 2002 letter from Guenet Guebre-Christos of the UNHCR to Edward Kennedy regarding the illegalities of the Department of Homeland Security or the April 15th letter to Rebecca Sharpless of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center regarding selective detainment and detainment as an immigration deterrent).

Besides Giorgio Agamben, Alain Joxe offers ways to understand the liquidation of the political in our times and the new movement towards an expansive sovereign force. In Empire of Disorder, he envisions a new state in which "military rationality, its political source, would disappear, replaced by something else, by a technique for constant management of a calculated massacre as an act at directly regulating, not politics...but demographics and the economy" (12). The new empire has the goal of "regulating disorder by means of financial norms and military expeditions and has no intention to occupy conquered territories" (14), thus refusing to provide some form of "protection" against armed groups, crime, and civil war. Witness post-war Iraq and Afghanistan. This is not to say that a neo-colonialism based on occupation rather than indirect rule is preferable. Instead we must see the ways in which the American empire erodes state protection abroad while refusing to provide it, leaving this task to the U.N. or N.A.T.O., or often worse, local racquets and armed groups.

We may also notice that in Joxe's formulation the empire sets itself primarily to regulating "demographics and the economy". This allows us a point of entry for uniting Foucault's and Agamben's notions of biopolitics with a more traditional Marxist/anarchist economic analysis. For Foucault, biopolitics begins during the 18th century as the regulation of the species life of human beings, their "propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy, longevity" (History of Sexuality, 139). He notes the role of demographic information and population control as essential factors in the deployment of biopolitics.
If we take Joxe's claim seriously about the demographic controls carried out by empire, we can see in the present moment the rearticulation of biopolitics, formerly in the hands of medical institutions and bureaucrats, by the war machine itself. Policing instances of ill health, sordid living conditions, human rights violations, and "rogue states" become an affair of the American state, the U.N., and N.A.T.O. as well as the N.G.O.s that follow quickly after them. The civil wars that empire produces (as in the Phillipines), now often melded into the rubric of "terrorism", thus provide more instances for America to go to war and regulate population flows and the material conditions of life, Westernizing what it can in the process.

Agamben's concern with the zoe (bare life) of the immigrant and refugee takes on a double significance. Empire's wars and global capital will increasingly displace people and provide for violations of so-called "human rights"; however, it is such displacement that comes to be the concern of the war machine itself. This type of analysis helps to explain the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, which without a clear short-term economic benefit (who thought Iraq would be "manageable" within a few months?) have more to do with extending empire's capacity for biopolitical control. When N.G.O.'s and humanitarian institutions step in to occupied countries, the biopolitical regulation of "births and mortality, the level of health and life expectancy" swings into full effect. Introducing such seemingly innocuous organizations can radically alter the bureaucratic and at times, the cultural constitution of a country, and must be seen as the first step in neo-colonialist projects by the West. This central fact illuminates the otherwise mysterious bombings of the U.N. buildings and attacks on health workers in Iraq. These attacks send the message that it is not a question of one master or another, however benign, but a total rejection of the system of global neo-colonialism in both its military and bureaucratic guises. Thus, sovereign force, manifest in the U.N., N.A.T.O., the American military and carried out by N.G.O.'s, humanitarian organizations and "peacekeeping" groups comes to have a direct relation to the bare life (zoe) of the people of other nations, their living standards and their health. This is a biological infection of the "outside" of Empire by Empire.

If globalization creates population flows and if such a radical transgression of national boundaries is a threat (rather than the act of "victims" with nothing left to do) to capital, perhaps the wars abroad and the war on immigrants in America through post 9-11 policy should be seen as two ways of denying the mobility of the thousands who escape the death of sedentary existence. But nomadism is vaster than a logic of simple escape. It is the glitter of Paris, New York, London. It is trains and drunkenness, the omnipresence of mortality and the surrender to chance. It is the elsewhere of possibility. It is what must be fought for in an age when globalization breaks down economic barriers to national sovereignty, but does nothing to undermine nations' monopoly on the legitimate use of force.

Our first effort must be to insist on the normalcy of this world. This will be a shock to both the left and the right. We are not in a state of exception, an emergency. First there have always been attacks on American interests; these are no more present today than in the past. Second, we are inhabiting a world of rampant force and violence. The right of the State (here I do not exempt Europe from the equation) to monopolize force has always preceded this way under capital. To pathologize it implies curing it rather than annihilating it. Our second effort must be to fight for the destruction of all barriers to free movement. It seems today we are further off from this goal than ever. However we need to reintensify our attacks on the use of force to detain and arrest people without cause, as the scale of such arrests is particular to the last two years. This will be the jumping point for a critique of the Statist appropriation of legitimized violence. As its most obvious and pernicious form, immigration policy is our best point for attack. It also provides the opportunity for trans-national alliances. Such alliances across national boundaries exist already, in a spectral and soon-to-be realized form.

Issue # 1 On the War with Iraq, Empire, Globalization, American Foreign Policy Since the Fall of the Soviet Union, Anarchy and the Black Blocs and Anti-Capitalist Revolt

Issue #2 On the Construction of the new American Homeland, the Imperialist Origins of Capital, Detention Centers, post 9-11 Immigration Practices and Burmese Experiences in Thailand