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From Anh Nguyen
I
NFO
-W
AR AS THE
I
NTERFACE
OF
B
IOPOLITICS
:
R
E
-
READING
F
OUCAULT WITH
V
IRILIO
S
AM
H
AN
Introduction
Among the collections of lectures at the College de France,
Society Must Be Defended
stands out as Foucault’s most forthright critical encounter with theories of war and racism. In it, he develops concepts that are highlyinfluential to contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, one of the most widely read theorists of recent years, who elaborates Foucault’s“biopolitics” in his treatment of the “War on Terror,” among other things.The state of exception, Agamben’s most oft-cited formulation, isinfluenced directly by Foucault’s overturning of Clausewitz’s originaldictum “But, after all, war is no more than a continuation of politics” to:“Politics is the continuation of war by other means.” Certainly, the crux of Foucault’s argument in
Society
, Agamben rightly highlights, is that thefunction of sovereign power is to “make live and let die.” In other words,the Sovereign is not simply a politico-theological entity that represents the polity (a power ordained from On High) but that which is able to govern atthe level of “life-itself” (Agamben 2005). This moment, when power begins to operate at the level of life and death, is what Foucault famouslydubbed the “biopolitical.”However, what he, and others who have followed him, leaves room for isan analysis of what Foucault in
Society Must Be Defended
calls the“technologies of warfare” that form the technological “ground” or basisupon which biopolitics can take shape and exist. The purpose of thischapter is to develop Foucault’s analysis of the machinery or technologiesof warfare by juxtaposing his work to that of the theorist of technologyand speed, Paul Virilio. Foucault’s later work has been taken in quite afew different directions in recent years. In my estimation, one of the mostinteresting has been the connection of Foucault’s work on war with what
Sam Han
341
he calls “state racism,” which has been wonderfully elaborated by AchilleMbembe (Mbembe 2003). Yet, very few have suggested a convergence of Foucault’s work, early or late, with the thought of Virilio, save for a fewauthors who are mostly Virilio scholars like John Armitage and SteveRedhead, but also Julian Reid (See Armitage 1999, Redhead 2004 andReid 2003). This is most prescient, I will argue, given the context of Virilio’s work on actual military technologies, such as satellite imagery,missile-defense and global positioning systems. In works such as
War and Cinema
(1989),
Pure War
(1997),
Open Sky
(1997) and
The Strategy of Deception
(2000), among many others, he provides a useful perspective onmilitary technology that compliments Foucault’s, principally because hetoo focuses on a shift from the Clausewitzian definition of war.Yet, for Virilio, the shift comes from the centrality of speed incontemporary war strategy, which he identifies as emerging with what herefers to as “human rights wars,” pointing specifically to the militaryinterventions in Kosovo. In such a situation, the strategy of pre-emptiveoffense overrides the strategy of defensive control in the name of human
life
or “humanity,” which Virilio aptly names “the integral accident.”Intervention no longer comes from without (as in a military attack) butfrom within. Again, few have made note of the similarities of this viewwith Foucault’s argument that the new technology of biopower isaddressed to “man-as-living-being” as opposed to “man-as-body,” in thatit multiplies a body to populations “as a political problem . . . that is atonce scientific and political, as a biological problem and as power’s problem.” Hence, we see the State, in many instances (in Europe in particular), acting as the guarantor of health only to institute the panoptical
dispositif
of discipline, as Foucault chronicles famously in
Discipline and Punish
. In picking up these themes from
Discipline
, Foucault argues in
Society
that this technique of power is politics—in other words, war, andthat it is immanent to the State.It is on this point that I suggest a reading of Virilio alongside Foucault isof unique importance. If the wisdom gained from Foucault’s interpretationof these classical thinkers can speak to our contemporary politicalmoment, there needs to be a reckoning with the technological and politicalchanges that have occurred, not only since the time of Hobbes,Boulainvilliers and Clausewitz (whom Foucault exhaustively interprets), but even since the lectures which Foucault delivered in the late-1970s. If war by other means is indeed biopolitics, as Foucault claims, biopoliticsmust surely look and feel differently now than it did in the past as the
Info-War as the Interface of Biopolitics
342
technologies and technics of warfare have changed drastically. It is the aimof this chapter to draw out the implications of such changes in militarytechniques and technologies for the understanding of biopolitics today.
War and Biopolitics
As I trust that many of my colleagues in this volume will have covered“biopolitics” as found in Foucault’s works, I will begin with a brief exposition of the relationship of war and biopolitics as found in
SocietyMust be Defended
, beginning with his engagement with Hobbes,Boulainviliers and Clausewitz.In his reading of these classical thinkers of war, Foucault jettisons thenotion that “civil peace” is the equilbrial operating
status quo
of the Statein favor of viewing war as its
central
facet, a point that is drawn, as Ialluded to earlier, from the classical theories of Hobbes, Boulainvilliersand Clausewitz. “It is not just
a
war that we find behind order, behind peace, and beneath the law. It is not
a
war that presides over the birth of the great automaton which constitutes the State, the sovereign, or Leviathan.” We are not at war as opposed to peace, but we are in whatHobbes specifically calls a “state of war” (Foucault 2003, 92), a phrasewhich Foucault could have easily amended to “State
of
war,” that is to say,war is the normative state of all States. “War,” writes Foucault, “is themotor behind institutions and order. In the smallest of its cogs, peace iswaging a secret war. To put it another way, we have to interpret the war that is going on beneath peace; peace itself is a
coded
war” (Foucault2003, 50).
1
Such changes in the relations between war, the State and politicsintroduces a fascinating problematic to Foucault’s master concepts— biopolitics and biopower. The moment of biopower, as Foucault readilynotes, is the moment when populations become the problem for power. Inother words, the biopolitical moment is that which war becomes coded,not as a generalized subjectivity framed within the binary terms of Us-versus-Them, but coded in terms of population.
1
It is this proto-digital language of Foucault (“code”)that I find to be fascinatingand significant for a comparison with Virilio, who confronts technologies,especially digital technologies, in a far more specific and rigorous way.
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Info-War as the Interface of Biopolitics: Re-reading Foucault with Virilio
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