The Liberal Way of War Killing To Make L

The Liberal Way of War
THIS BLURB IS UNDER DISCUSSION, DO NOT TREAT AS FINAL

In The Liberal Way of War: Killing to make life live, Michael Dillon and Julian
Reid argue that war under liberal terms has become biopolitical warfare, an act
committed to promoting peace in the name of species survival. This stands in
contrast to the traditional view of war as a geo-strategic struggle between inter-
national powers.
Dillon and Reid engage Foucault’s ideas about the centrality of security and
war to liberal biopolitics and to the maintenance of a modern political order.
Following Foucault, the authors analyse liberalism as a regime distinguished by
biopolitical techniques of power, or acts that aim to regulate forms of life. If the
traditional sense of sovereign warfare states that war is waged on behalf of the
sovereign self in relation to territory, nation or people, biopolitical war is waged
on behalf of the species.
The Liberal Way of War documents the complicity that exists between contem-
porary geo-strategic warfare and biopolitical war, and accounts for the advent of
‘humanitarian’ war, the advent of security complexes and the current global war
on terror.
A powerful and pioneering new understanding of war for our neoliberal times,
this text provides an important contribution to the continuing discussion of inter-
national warfare.
Michael Dillon is Professor of Politics at the University of Lancaster, UK. He

publishes widely in political theory, cultural theory and security studies and is the
author of Politics of Security (1996).
Julian Reid is Lecturer in International Relations at Kings College London, UK,

and Professor of International Relations at the University of Lapland, Finland.
Politics/Political Theory/Military Studies/International Relations
UNCORRECTED FIRST PROOFS

GLOBAL HORIZONS
Series editors
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and R. B. J. Walker, University of Victoria, Canada
We live in a moment that urgently calls for a reframing, reconceptualizing and

reconstituting of the political, cultural and social practices that underpin the en-
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While contemporary developments in international relations are focused upon
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GLOBAL HORIZONS is dedicated to examining these broader questions.
International Relations and the Problem of Difference

David Blaney and Naeem Inayatullah
Methods and Nations

Cultural governance and the indigenous subject
Michael J. Shapiro
Declining World Order

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Richard Falk
Human Rights, Private Wrongs

Constructing global civil society
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Rethinking Refugees
Beyond states of emergency
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Michael J. Shapiro

Killing to make life live
Michael Dillon and Julian Reid

Killing to make life live
Michael Dillon and Julian Reid

First published 2009
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The liberal way of war: killing to make life live/Michael Dillon and Julian
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Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978–0–415–95299–6 — ISBN 978–0–415–95300–9 — ISBN
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To Michael J. Shapiro

Mortuus aperit oculos viventis

Contents
Acknowledgements xi
1 Introduction: from liberal conscience to liberal rule 1
Part I
2 From the liberal subject to the biohuman 15
3 War in the age of biohumanity 34
4 Informationalizing life 55
Part II
5 Global triage: threat perception in the twenty-first century 81
6 Military transformation in the age of life as information 106
7 Biohumanity and its rogues: securing the infrastructures

of liberal living 127
8 Conclusion: good for nothing 147
Endnotes 157
References 163
Index 183

Acknowledgements
We both wish to thank James Der Derian and Larry George for their encour-
agement when the book was first proposed. We thank also the editing team at
Routledge, especially our editors Rob Tempio and Craig Fowlie, for their unstint-
ing support and remarkable patience.
Michael Dillon wishes to thank the following close friends and colleagues for
their constant intellectual inspiration and support: Paul Fletcher; Paolo Palladino;
Jenny Edkins; Arthur Bradley; Melinda Cooper; Samuel Weber; Miguel Vatter;
Luis Lobo-Guerrero; Manav Guha; and Caroline Croser. Each deserves a short bi-
ography for each is a one-off. Suffice to say that they know how much he needed
them. He also wishes to acknowledge the graduate students in the Department of
Politics at Lancaster University who took the MA in Security and War (2004–7),
and the colleagues with whom he taught the programme, Mark Lacy and Cindy
Weber, as well as his undergraduate students on Politics 329 The Politics of Glo-
bal Danger. Politics 329, especially, had more than its fair share of inspired young
talent as well as loveable rogues. Wherever you are, my thanks. The reflections
presented here were trialled at numerous meetings and seminars in the UK, the
US and Canada, as well as in Paris, Hamburg and Rovaniemi; thanks to all who
organized those meetings. Chapter 1 was also first given as a lecture to the Pontifi-
cia Universidad Católica de Chile (Instituto de Ciencia Política) in 2008. Thanks
to Vanessa Lemm and Miguel Vatter for organizing those meetings in Santiago de
Chile. He also wishes to acknowledge an ESRC Research Award (L147251007)
Knowledge Resourcing for Civil Contingencies, which provided an opportunity
to observe the UK security community first-hand during a formative moment in
its development, from the vantage point of The Royal Institute of International
Affairs, London, whose generous hospitality he also wishes to acknowledge. As
many of those who first encountered it will no doubt appreciate, this book is in
many ways a bastard child of that research and the insights it afforded. Finally,
Jamie Mackintosh will not like what he finds here, but it would be wrong not to
acknowledge his powerful impact also on the journey that brought Michael Dillon
here.
Julian Reid thanks his colleagues and students at King’s College London for
their support; in particular Leonie Ansems de Vries, Mervyn Frost, Vivienne Jabri,

xii Acknowledgements
Nicholas Michelsen and Doerthe Rosenow. The book benefited significantly from
the opportunities to try out some of the ideas on audiences in various places.
Thanks especially to Mika Aaltola for invitations to speak at both Helsinki and
Minnesota Universities as well as his tremendous hospitality while in Minne-
apolis; Asli Calkivik and Bud Duvall for their invitation to Istanbul as well as
their work within the Dismantling Security project; Michal Givoni and Adi Ophir
for the invitation to and the stimulation of the Power, Rule and Governmentality
workshop held at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem; Simon Philpott and col-
leagues for the invitation to and conversation at the University of Newcastle;
and Daniel Bunyard, former editor of Philosophy at Palgrave, for the invitation
to speak on occasion of the publication of the translation of Security, Territory,
Population at the Institut Français in London, as well as for pioneering the pub-
lication of those lectures which have been such an inspiration for this book. The
book was finished while Julian Reid was a Visiting Professor at the University of
Lapland, and he warmly expresses his thanks to the friends and colleagues that he
has had the pleasure of getting to know there; especially Petri Koikkalainen, Aini
Linjakumpu, Mika Luoma-Aho, Tiina Seppälä and Soile Veijola, each of whom
has helped make his stay in Lapland more than worthwhile. To Kosma and Miro,
he expresses more than thanks, for showing him the sheer joy of being alive. And
Laura, also, for both the giving of and sharing in the life they show.
We wish, however, to dedicate this book to Michael J. Shapiro, who has been
constant in his affection and intellectual encouragement to both of us. He sets the
standards in scholarship and friendship. We struggle to live up to them, and are
therefore grateful to have this opportunity to record our debt publicly.

1 Introduction
From liberal conscience to liberal
rule
What conclusions are we to draw from this melancholy story of the efforts of good
men to abolish war but only succeeding thereby in making it more terrible?
Michael Howard
Introduction
In 1977, the distinguished English military historian Sir Michael Howard, then
Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, gave a celebrated
series of Trevelyan Lectures at the University of Cambridge. The lectures were
entitled War and the Liberal Conscience (1978). Himself a deeply conservative
historian, and steeped in the modern geopolitical understanding of war, Howard
described George Macaulay Trevelyan, in whose honour the lectures were given,
as ‘the last of the great Victorian Liberal historians – perhaps the last of the great
Victorian liberals.’ Honouring the name in which he gave the lectures did not,
however, prevent Howard from delivering what has become a classic indictment
of what we intend to call more directly ‘the liberal way of war’.
In a discussion that ranges from Erasmus and Machiavelli in the Renaissance,
to the Atlantic liberalism of the eighteenth century, through to the utilitarian lib-
eral imperialism of the nineteenth century, on into the Wilsonian liberalism that
followed the First World War and, finally, the liberal crusade that characterized the
Cold War, Howard tracked the rise of what he called ‘the liberal conscience’ – ‘not
simply a belief or an attitude’, he says ‘but also an inner compulsion to act upon
it’ (1978: 11). Thus identifying several historical formations or manifestations of
the liberal conscience, Howard was to prefigure the argument of his lectures in
the very way in which his preface characterized the man in whose name they were
given. George Macaulay Trevelyan, Howard tells us, ‘was that not uncommon
phenomenon, a profoundly pacific and kindly man with a passionate interest in
military affairs.’ ‘War was for him,’ Howard continued, ‘the very stuff of history,
and he found no difficulty in reconciling it with his liberalism’ (1978: 10). But
he nonetheless did apparently find it difficult to understand the world in which
he was living. ‘I do not understand the world we live in’, Trevelyan confessed
privately in a letter that Howard quotes from 1926, ‘and what I do understand I do

2 Introduction
not like’ (1978: 10). The signposts of the past seemed to bear little resemblance
to the confused present and, Howard observes, Trevelyan was not alone among
liberals in being confounded by the ways of the world.
This character portrait sets the tone as well as the theme of Howard’s critique.
Liberalism is to be admired for its values but deplored for its idealism. Its propo-
nents are well-intentioned but their actions only serve to compound the troubles
of a world whose rules and dynamics they systematically fail to understand. In
proclaiming peace, Howard goes on to explain, liberals are nonetheless commit-
ted also to making war. The martial face of liberal power is directly fuelled by
the universal and pacific ambitions for which liberalism is to be admired. Unfor-
tunately, making those ambitions the standards by which you problematize and
prosecute war defeats the purpose. Not only has war remained common; not only
has it also become unimaginably more destructive: war being waged in pursuit
of liberal democracy and perpetual peace, the life of the species globally is now
wagered on its political strategies. This is the melancholy story to which Howard
refers in the epigraph that heads this chapter: the efforts of good men to abolish
war ‘only succeeding thereby in making it more terrible’ (1978: 130).
Howard’s ‘melancholy story’ is told by a figure who cannot easily be dismissed
as ideologically prejudiced against liberalism or nationally prejudiced against the
United States as the most powerful liberal state. Howard subsequently held the
Robert A. Lovett Chair of Military and Naval History at the University of Yale,
from which post he retired in 1993. The parallels between the war on communism,
to which Howard makes reference in his final lecture, and our current war on ter-
ror are too obvious to be dismissed. The ‘long haul’ against the moral challenge
posed by the Soviet Union announced in the Eisenhower doctrine of the early Cold
War is similarly also too reminiscent of the ‘long war’ now pronounced against
al-Qaeda, and its global terror networks, to be ignored. Neither can the alliance
between war preparation, science, technology and business threatening the very
power of liberal citizenship, together with its republican institutions and values, to
which Eisenhower referred in his farewell address, be said to have diminished as
the twentieth century drew to a close. The deep fundamentalist religiosity of the
liberal way of war – Howard observing that ‘the United States has always resem-
bled rather a secular church, or perhaps a gigantic sect, than it has the nation-states
of the old world’ (1978: 116) – has been equally evident in the liberal campaigns
of the twenty-first century as well. However diverse and heterogeneous liberal po-
litical theory may be, and however much the governmental mechanisms of liberal
regimes of power may also change, in addressing the liberal way of war we are
nonetheless also dealing with a long-established, if mutable and complex, histori-
cal phenomenon. We recall some of the details of Howard’s critique of the liberal
way of war by way of introduction here not because we agree with all of it. Indeed
in offering a differently grounded critique, we depart from its very essentials. But
it is a classic and insightful critique that provides us with an entry into our topic
as well as a means of differentiating our critique from his.

Introduction 3
War and the liberal conscience
Howard began his indictment of liberalism by reviewing the traditional realist
account of the rise of the modern state system, the attempt to monopolize force
by the state, the codification of a new international system of states through inter-
national law, and the acceptance of war as a device of policy. The modern concep-
tion of force as a necessary instrument in preserving an orderly system of states
was only beginning to appear ‘in the most shadowy of forms’, Howard tells us,
‘in the work of Machiavelli’ (1978: 16). By the middle of the seventeenth century,
however (the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, always marking the point of significant
difference in this traditional narrative), European society was being organized in a
system of states in which war was accepted as an inescapable process for the set-
tlement of disputes between states in the absence of any higher authority than that
of the state.1 That being the case, Howard says, ‘it was a requirement of humanity,
of religion and of common sense alike that those wars should be fought in such a
manner as to cause as little damage as possible’ (1978: 18). Soon the details of this
philosophy were documented in the works of the great international lawyers of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Grotius, Pufendorf and Vattel. If war could
not be eliminated from the international system – indeed it had been installed as
the principal mechanism of that system – then the best that could be done was to
‘codify its rationale and civilise its means’ (1978: 18). In the work of the Prussian
strategist Carl von Clausewitz, geopolitical analysts maintained that the political
instrumentalization of war by the state had also found its supreme strategic codi-
fier (Clausewitz 1993).2 If the European state system had made wars necessary
– they not only served to resolve disputes in the absence of a higher authority but
were instrumentally useful also in maintaining the checks and balances of power
necessary, it was said, to prevent one state from becoming dominant – they had
also made war limited; to rationally calculated political ends, it was claimed.
As this geopolitical rationale for the very necessity and instrumentality of
war developed into the twentieth century – it was not a fall from grace, it was
an instrument of politik – the deterrent effect of military capability was added
to the adjudicating, balancing and political restraints of war as an instrument of
state policy. Regulation of a system that had made wars necessary, if restricted
to political ends and confined to the actions of states, gave rise to the arcana
imperii of raison d’état, realpolitik, high politics, strategy, diplomacy and state-
craft (Meinecke 1997). Howard indicts the liberal critique of this system on the
grounds that liberals were too nice and pious – Trevelyan was his key trope – to
understand properly how it functioned; a charge laid, of course, with much greater
philosophical sophistication and force by the inter-war jurist and political theorist
Carl Schmitt, a figure who also haunts Howard’s text (Schmitt 2007; Schmitt
2003; Schmitt 1985). As Schmitt argued with force, liberalism proceeds on the
errant understanding that man is simply good whereas the state is evil. The classic
formulation, by that great agitator and pamphleteer Thomas Paine, is that ‘society
is the result of our reasonably regulated needs, government the result of our wick-
edness’ (Schmitt 2007: 61).

4 Introduction
In laying bare the liberal critique of war Howard, like Schmitt before him,
chose Paine as the exemplification of the liberal doctrine on politics, power and
war. ‘Tom Paine’s synthesis . . . in The Rights of Man’, Howard argues,
provided a gospel which was to be preached virtually without alteration by

many western liberals until our own day. According to this doctrine mankind
would naturally live in a state of perfect harmony if it were not for the vested
interests of governments.
(Howard 1978: 31)
It would become a staple of liberal political philosophy that, as Paine argued,
each government accuses the other of perfidy, intrigue and ambition, as a

means of heating the imagination of their respective nations and incensing
them to hostilities. Man is not the enemy of man but through the medium of
a false system of government.
(Paine quoted in Howard 1978: 30)
Paine did not, however, simply propagate the view that the problem of war was a
problem of wicked systems of government. He also helped lay the foundation for
the view that if there was to be war its only proper objective was that of universal
human emancipation, sanctioned by an international community premised on the
freedom of natural rights. ‘The cause of the general poverty and wretchedness of
mankind’, Paine wrote,
lies not in any natural defect in the principles of civilisation but in preventing
those principles having universal operation: the consequence of which is, a
perpetual system of war and expense that drains the country and defeats the
general felicity of which civilisation is capable.
(Paine quoted in Howard 1978: 29)
By the second half of the nineteenth century the English Liberal Prime Minis-
ter, William Gladstone, inspired by ‘a humane concern for suffering humanity’
(Schreuder 1970: 483), concurred that self-interest alone could not justify resort
to war. In 1882, he explained his conduct in authorizing the bombardment of the
Port of Alexandria, by the British Mediterranean Fleet, and the subsequent occu-
pation of Egypt, on the grounds that:
We should not discharge our duty if we did not endeavour to convert the
present interior state of Egypt from anarchy and conflict to peace and order.
We shall look during the time that remains to use the co-operation of the
Powers of civilised Europe. But if every chance of obtaining co-operation is
exhausted, the work will be undertaken by the single power of England.
(Gladstone quoted in Howard 1978: 56)

Introduction 5
Thus it was that the American liberal conscience of the 1950s, Howard continues
after moving through the experiences of the First World War and the inter-war
period, ‘tutored by its European mentors of the thirties,’ he says with the hauteur
of an English gentleman, ‘could understand and support either a just war or per-
petual peace, and it appreciated that the former might be necessary to achieve the
latter’ (Howard 1978: 126).
In bringing his story up to the Cold War, Howard finally detailed what he
thought was most dangerous and mistaken about the liberal way of war; especially
as it manifested itself in the international politics of his day. His target was the
way in which the liberal universalization of war in pursuit of perpetual peace
impacted on the heterogeneous and adversarial character of international politics,
translating war into crusades with only one of two outcomes: endless war or the
transformation of other societies and cultures into liberal societies and cultures. In
arguments which directly echoed those of Schmitt, Howard maintained that lib-
eral wars ‘dehumanised the adversary’ (1978: 128). He ceased to be ‘a party with
fears, perceptions, interests and difficulties of his own; one with whom rational
discourse was possible’ (1978: 128). This had profound implications which were
as much strategic as they were moral and political. Speaking of the Cold War in
general, and the Vietnam War in particular, Howard observed how:
Any opposition from any quarter to United States power was traced back to
the manipulation of Moscow; and ‘world communism’ was seen as a single
monolithic, subtle, patient and powerful adversary . . . those who made trou-
ble for America’s allies . . . all tended to be seen as clients of Moscow; an
attitude which proved all too often a self-fulfilling prophecy.
(Howard 1978: 128)
Once ‘every state and every regime whose interests coincided with those of the
United States automatically became part of the free world, honorary democracies
whatever the nature of their political systems’, the criterion of freedom rapidly
ceased to be that defined by liberal political theory and became instead ‘acces-
sibility to American influence and willingness to fall in with the wishes of the
United States’ (Howard 1978: 128). Howard’s criticisms apply with equal force to
the present-day war on terror.
The outcome of Howard’s critique was an insistence on two insights ‘which
most liberals preferred to ignore.’ The first was what Howard called ‘the cultural
heterogeneity of the world,’ which demanded either some form of peaceful co-
existence or the responsibilities and provocations of, ‘cultural imperialism . . .
conquest and re-education.’ The second was that ‘wars conducted by democracies
are seldom ended by moderate negotiated peace’ (1978: 83). ‘Far from abolish-
ing war’, liberalism, he argues, ‘brought into it an entirely new dimension of
violent passion to which advances in technology could, unfortunately, give full
rein’ (1978: 131).
Howard thus provides a summary dismissal of the classic liberal critiques of
war as he indicts liberalism itself for its own commitment to war-making. War is

6 Introduction
not simply a result of the machinations of elites, he insists, for it often expresses
real material conflicts of interest between nations and communities. Commerce
will never replace war because not only is war fought for commercial advantage
but the logic of commerce also mimics that of war. In any event freeing people
from the yoke of tyrannous regimes will not automatically abolish war because
free peoples, possessed by national and emancipatory fervour, are just as willing
as arms-trading merchants of death, or aristocratic elites plotting in the chancel-
leries of great powers, to promote war. Wars of national liberation prove as long
and bloody as wars fed by strategic rivalries.
This is a familiar story. We hardly need draw attention to the way it reso-
nates with the policies and rationalities of liberal imperialism today. Gladstone’s
concern, like that of his present-day American and British counterparts, Bush
and Blair, was that war needed to be justified by reference to a common interest
of humanity over and above the maintenance of the security of the state, or the
maintenance of a stable balance of power; and that if the international community
was unable or unwilling to grant that sanction then liberal powers had the duty to
assume that responsibility themselves. In the course of doing so they de-humanize
the enemy, treat cultural difference as threat, conflate all manner of differences
in their global friend/enemy distinction and imperiously discount the financial as
well as human cost of war on the grounds of its moral necessity.
But the liberals have at least one other potent response to Howard’s dismissals.
Strictly speaking, the response is not in fact a liberal argument at all. It is a matter
of simple historical record, although it was embraced and forcefully expressed by
liberals. It arose with the First World War, was confirmed by the experiences of
the Second World War and seemed unassailable with the introduction of nuclear
weapons and the continuous dissemination of these, and other, weapons of mass
destruction by liberal as much as other states throughout the second half of the
twentieth century. That response is as follows.
However much realists and geostrategists claim that war is not only inevitable,
because it reflects the originary cupidity of humanity, but also necessary, because
it also serves so many useful political purposes in constraining that very cupidity,
the violent experience of the twentieth century has fatally subverted this modern
geopolitical rationale for war. Restricting war by limiting it to the ends of state
politics works only if the political ends, as well as the technical means, of war
themselves remain limited. It is not liberals alone who threaten to get themselves
into unlimited and species-threatening wars. The last century was distinguished
by the fact that unlimited military means for unlimited political ends became the
order of the day. If it is not only inevitable and necessary, as realists teach us, war
has nonetheless also begun to price itself out of the political market place. An
historical threshold in relation to war was crossed in the twentieth century, the im-
plications of which may not have fully materialized yet, but it was crossed never-
theless. Not only have the political ends of states regularly become unlimited and
incalculable, but with its many weapons of mass destruction modern war is now
also capable of threatening the very habitability of the planet. In potentia, at least,

Introduction 7
every war, and there remain of course many, is a Sarajevo (1914). Globalization
compounds this historical transformation; it does not diminish it.
There is little to choose, then, between the liberals and the geostrategists on the
grounds advanced by Howard, and others, that liberal wars are unending crusades
whereas geostrategic wars are limited jousts between rationally calculative politi-
cal subjects. Wars of the twentieth century gave the lie to that geopolitical claim.
So also did all the evidence, accumulated during the crisis management debates
of the Cold War for example, that, whatever the political motivations concerned,
once the threshold of violence is crossed a dynamic is released that exceeds the
control of all political actors, geostrategic and liberal alike (George 1991; Wil-
liams 1976).
This last point, concerning the ways in which the industrialization and massifi-
cation of warfare crossed a historical threshold in the account of war as an instru-
ment of state policy, during the course of the twentieth century, was nonetheless
well made by liberals after the First World War, although it did not prevent them
from joining the crusade against fascism. It was put again, with the added force of
nuclearization, by the liberal peace movements of the Cold War, although it did
not prevent them from signing up for local wars of global emancipation once the
Soviet bloc disintegrated. A curious and revealing symmetry thus emerges here
between the geopolitical account of war, which Howard employs to mount his
critique of the liberal conscience, and the liberal problematization of war itself.
However much liberalism abjures war, indeed finds the instrumental use of war,
especially, a scandal, war has always been as instrumental to liberal as to geopo-
litical thinkers. In that very attempt to instrumentalize, indeed universalize, war
in pursuit of its own global project of emancipation, the practice of liberal rule
itself becomes profoundly shaped by war. However much it may proclaim liberal
peace and freedom, its own allied commitment to war subverts the very peace and
freedoms it proclaims (Reid 2007; Reid 2005; Reid 2004b).
Reproblematizing the liberal way of war

Liberalism’s relation to war appears paradoxical only if one ignores the drivers
of the liberal way of rule. In effect this is what Howard does. He elides the prob-
lematic of liberal rule by foregrounding the bumbling character of the archetypal
liberal, George Macaulay Trevelyan. Hence his target becomes an idealist liberal
‘conscience’ rather than a systemic regime of liberal power relations. It is a clever
rhetorical device but it does not sustain a sufficiently searching interrogation of
the drivers of the liberal way of war as such. Liberals are no more epistemically
or politically naïve than geostrategists. Epistemically they are often much smarter
since many of them, especially these days, recognize the constitutive effects of
power and do not cling to the onto-theology of sovereign subjectivity as an article
of faith in the way that realists are fated to do. Similarly, however willing they
also seem to be to make war, they do at least recognize that humanity has got to
the stage where it can no longer afford war. We do not mean to imply that war

8 Introduction
will therefore end. Affordability has never been a reason for giving something
up. Just because you cannot afford something does not mean to say that you will
find a way to escape your dependence on it. Such an interrogation does, however,
require that we go beyond liberalism’s own self-serving account of itself, as well
as Howard’s depiction, by interrogating the liberal way of rule, how it necessarily
correlates with its own brand of war-making and what distinguishes both liberal
ways of rule and war. For the liberal way of rule is as much shaped by its commit-
ment to war, and the exigencies not simply of war-making but of the continuous
state of emergency and security as well as constant preparedness for war, which
characterize liberal rule as such. Indeed, although the politics of the modern pe-
riod has long taught that war is readily instrumentalized to realize political goals,
the experience of the modern period very much teaches the reverse.
Other historians, historical sociologists and military sociologists have persua-
sively argued that wars make states and societies as much as societies and states
make war (Elias 2000; Hart 1993; Mann 1986 and 1993; Downing 1992; Kennedy
1989; Giddens 1985; Dickson 1967; Weber 1947). This historical observation is
impossible to contest and it profoundly subverts the position taken by liberals
and realists alike, since, if wars make states as much as states make war, then one
cannot safely assume, as, albeit differently, liberals and realist both do, that in
reflecting some primal truth about political actors and their universal behaviour
(real or ideal, pessimistic or optimistic) war itself can be effectively instrumental-
ized in the pursuit of political ends. Here the experience of history, and the insight
of philosophy and sociology, is that the instrument shapes the subject; indeed
that instrumentality, rather than reason or will, defines the modern subject; which
is why post-war theorists such as Michel Foucault, for one, observed that being
or becoming a subject is a matter of being subjectified by complex processes of
power relations. The subject is an object and a mechanism. One doesn’t come
born a subject, one is shaped into becoming a subject. Power relations revolve
around this very process (Foucault 2005; Foucault 2001).
War, especially, has been directly instrumental in making the political subjects
of states and civil societies alike the very subjects that they are. No state, no
society, engaged in war is unformed by its experience of violent conflict. In their
universalizing of war on behalf of human emancipation liberals would do well
to recognize the point, for it also explains how liberal war-making also regularly
fails to realize its emancipatory goals. If wars make states and societies, as much
as societies and states make war, then liberal war-makers are likely to fare no
better than geostrategists in pursuing their ambitions militarily. All states and all
societies that experience war, which are also involved in continuous war prepara-
tion, are profoundly transformed by that experience. The unintended – indeed
the strictly incalculable consequences – of war simply overtake the supposedly
rational risk-taking of strategists as much as they do the universal ambitions of
emancipatory liberals. That is clear. But our argument will go one beyond this
otherwise well-grounded observation. It is not only the contingencies of war, as
such, but the logic of liberal war in particular, that, instituted by the very dynam-
ics and imperatives of liberal peace making, in their turn profoundly shape the

Introduction 9
institution of liberal peace. Before we do that we first wish to elaborate the more
general point which we have just made.
War forms and transforms governmental institutions and practices as much as
it does political rationalities and civic cultures. It stimulates constitutional change,
transforms law and creates new departments of state. War also provides a testing
ground for new micro-mechanisms of social, scientific and economic planning,
organization, audit and control (Downing 1992; Foucault 1991: 135–69; Pearton
1982). From the emancipation of women, the collapse of empires, the birth of new
states and nationalisms as well as the establishment of social welfare schemes and
managerial ideologies, the First and Second World Wars, for example, did more
to transform the social, economic and political landscape of the globe, as well as
that of Europe and North America, than did all the political activity of social and
political reformers combined. Equally, war transforms economies – someone has
to produce the engines of war. It also excites and mobilizes financial revolutions
– ways have to be found to pay for war (Bonney 1999; Bonney 1995; Stone 1993;
Brewer 1989; Dickson 1967). Finally, not only does it refigure the very economies
of science and technology, it reshapes the very ensembles of power/knowledge
upon which all modern political regimes of whatever ideological persuasion rely.
War not only impacts on culture, it is itself a complex cultural phenomenon deeply
sutured into modern institutions and practices, indeed into the very modern politi-
cal and economic imaginary. Thus does the very logos of war extend deep into
the structures and practices of civil society even in the absence of armed conflict.
These and other effects reach out across the entire terrain of civil society – the
concept and institution of civil society itself was very much an historical product
of the revolutionary and civil wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
in both Europe and North America – re-forming and re-constituting the weft and
warp of power relations which constitute civil life. However much it defined itself
in terms of removing the scourge of war from civil society, the task of instituting
this domain of domestic peace remains a violent project for modern state politics
rather than a done deal in which so-called civil society itself is under constant
formation and re-formation. These forces are as powerfully at work today as ever
they were in the wars and cold wars of the twentieth century. Via its proliferat-
ing mechanisms of security, and its continuous military preparedness, as well as
through the wars in which it is also currently engaged, the liberal way of rule is
a war-making machine whose continuous processes of war preparation prior to
the conduct of any hostilities profoundly and pervasively shape the liberal way
of life.
But it does not take a historian or a political sociologist to teach us these les-
sons. ‘Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any
of my predecessors in peace time’, noted one political observer of the post-war
United States who was better positioned than most to make the point:
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments
industry [sic]. American makers of ploughshares could, with time and as
required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency

10 Introduction
improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a per-
manent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a
half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establish-
ment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all
United States corporations.
‘This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms in-

dustry is new in the American experience’, he continued:
The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city,
every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the
imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its
grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is
the very structure of our society.
He ended:
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or
democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and
knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge indus-
trial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals,
so that security and liberty may prosper together.
This was, of course, Dwight Eisenhower in the Farewell Address which he

delivered to the American people on 17 January 1961 (Eisenhower 1961). He
concluded: ‘we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence,
whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex. The potential
for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.’ Such political
sentiments sound almost incendiary today.
Shortly before the invasion of Iraq, to take a contemporary example which
haunts these observations, George Bush’s economic adviser Larry Lindsey es-
timated that the war would cost $200 billion. ‘Baloney’, Donald Rumsfeld is
reported to have fumed, and offered a figure of $50–60 billion instead. Joseph
Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes now report that the conflict will most likely cost some-
where around $2.65 trillion for the United States alone (Stiglitz and Bilmes 2008:
56). For a multitude of reasons it is of course hard to reckon it up since cost
always seemed to figure least in the apology for a calculus which preceded the
conflict in the first place. In March 2008 in the United Kingdom, as well, the
House of Commons Select Committee on Defence asked why the annual opera-
tional costs of British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan had suddenly doubled to
more than £3 billion p.a. (House of Commons Defence Committee 2008). Some
of the net political outcomes of the Iraq war to the American led coalition thus
far also include a directly increased global terrorist threat; the elevation of Iran
into the region’s most powerful state, while pretty well ensuring that it will also
go nuclear as well; further compounding of the enduring crisis of Palestine; and

Introduction 11
contributing to the greatest financial crisis since the 1930s. The cost to the liber-
ated people of Iraq is simply incalculable; not only because it is impossible to
put a measure on the suffering caused, but because the coalition forces refuse to
attempt any comprehensive account of it.
In none of these instances – and the examples could be multiplied – was the
outcome what the Bush and Blair administrations promised, expected, or prob-
ably wanted. In the case of these two political leaders, as in so many others, it is
however hard to distinguish between the liberal idealist and the strategic analyst.
And if war is a wager – which given the contingencies that surround it, and the
unintended outcomes which always characterize it most, seems to be very much
the case – it would be hard to tell who was the worst and most addicted gambler
of the two.
The interrogation of the liberal way of war has therefore to move beyond the
trope of the liberal conscience to the logics and imperatives of liberalism as a
distinctive regime of power relations. To do that we have to attend to the correla-
tion of liberal rule and war, and to the foundation of that correlation in the liberal
commitment to making life live.

Part I

2 From the liberal subject to the
biohuman
The art of war deals with living and moral forces.

Carl von Clausewitz
Introduction
It has not therefore been the necessity of war which has ultimately divided liber-
als from geostrategists. For war has been as instrumental to liberalism as it has to
power politics. Neither, in fact, has it been a matter of strategic savvy. Strategists
only ever get it right in books, on the sand table or after the event. It has been a
question, instead, of which wars were said to be necessary and why. Which peace
those wars were fought to win, and on behalf of what kind of political subject or,
indeed, on behalf of what understanding of humanity, they have been said to have
been fought.
Forms of war and forms of life are therefore always intimately correlated. That
goes as much for the ancients (Bahrani 2008), as it does for the moderns with
whom we are concerned. Hence, wars have always been fought in the name of
whatever different forms of life have held sacred. Some are fought for honour,
some for glory, and some out of loyalty to an Emperor, King or Leader. Yet others
have been fought for a religion, nation, class, ideology, race or people; and some
for freedom, albeit freedom interpreted in many diverse ways. Simultaneously,
however, all wars are also fought for some kind of material gain. As geo-econo-
mists will tell you, war is an economy that is always also fought for an economy
of some description (Luttwak 1999). The point is ‘some description’. People
value different things and the material they seek to gain comes in diverse forms.
Symbols and beliefs, for example, are as material as anything else. In other words,
war does not exist outside the complex discursive institutions and practices that
constitute a certain form of life; and forms of life revolve around different refer-
ential objects of concern. They are constituted by different fields of formation.
Central to those fields of formation, and the institutions and relations of power
which comprise them, are problematizations of fear, threat and danger as well as
strategic accounts of who it is permitted to kill and under what circumstances.
Different people (different peoples) fear different things, at different times and in

16 From the liberal subject to the biohuman
different places. Some will kill and die for one thing. Others will kill and die for
another. They often also find each other’s motives in these respects bizarre and
inexplicable – which they are according to their own scheme of things (Dillon
2008a). Whatever it might be, every such formation has, in other words, some
rationale or calculus of necessary killing.
The liberal way of war, therefore, very much directly reflects the liberal way
of rule and the referential objects around which liberal regimes of power revolve.
In other words, the liberal way of war reflects the way in which the liberal way
of rule problematizes politics, power and danger. As George Bush put it, in his
indictment of Al-Qaeda, the referent object of the liberal way of rule is life itself
(Bush 2004).1 While Bush was being rhetorical he was not being inaccurate. Aris-
ing out of a revolutionary break with the feudal triangulation of Church, Empire
and Kingship (Kantorowicz 1997), liberal politics developed as a regime of power
which aligned power with domains of conduct which it posited as autonomously
governed by their own natural laws. These included, classically, the modern econ-
omy and civil society.2 But the basic referent object was life itself (Foucault 2008;
Foucault 2007; Foucault 2003). Despite the early liberal attacks on scholasticism
(Kahn 2004), this was in fact life construed in the traditional Christian scholastic
way; a humanity in possession of a dual nature both animal and divine (Manent
1998; Dupré 1993; Le Goff 1992; Le Goff 1986; Le Goff 1982). For early liberal
theorists, such as both Locke and Hobbes, man’s natural reason and rights were
divinely endowed and his animal nature was accessible to the reason divinely
granted, but also rightly used, for the promotion of its welfare (Kahn 2004; Hunter
and Saunders 2002; Hunter 2001; Tuck 1993; Skinner 1988).
Embracing the material progress of mankind, liberalism never merely expressed,
therefore, the values of divinely endowed natural rights, alone, in teaching how
men should be governed. It simultaneously also embraced the instrumental char-
acter and promotion of species life through superior knowledge of its properties.
Locke, for example, was a physician and a botanist – a natural philosopher – as
well as a political theorist.3 Indeed, he would not have recognized any significant
conflict of interest between the two professions.
The liberal way of war has thus followed the liberal way of rule in that it, too,
has been distinguished by liberalism’s commitment to the promotion of human-
kind as much as that of natural freedom. Indeed, from a liberal perspective, the
two are linked in as much as expression of natural freedom was thought to be
inseparable from the promotion of the general welfare of the species. In short, the
liberal subject appeared to be endowed with a dual biological and divine nature
from its very conception in early liberal thought and practice. Thus Locke, for
example, teaching that, when God made the earth, created species and differenti-
ated man from other species, argued that Adam, alone, was not the prototype of
rule. What God gave was an original grant of government and dominion ‘given as
it was to the children of men in common’ (Locke 1990: 136).4
Since liberalism problematizes rule in terms of this original grant of govern-
ment and dominion in common, it must always return to the properties of this
‘grant’, not only to resolve the problematic of rule posed by the need to institute

From the liberal subject to the biohuman 17
a civil society by founding a constitution, but also to resolve the everyday regula-
tion of the conduct of conduct which life in civil society necessarily also posed.
For the original grant of government and dominion could not specify entirely,
of course, how dominion was to be conducted and governmentally organized.
Rather, it set conditions. These conditions were composed of the different proper-
ties of the dual nature of the liberal subject itself, to which liberal government had
to return when rule confronted the exigencies and contingencies of the everyday
conduct of conduct. And not because these properties were fixed, for they were
not, but because they were the point of reference from which liberal rule sought
its inspiration. The very experience of liberal rule was also, of course, to modify
each point of reference significantly.
Consequently, where natural law left off, positive law took over. Where law
itself left off, however, micro-practices of liberal governance took over. If natural
law could not cover all the juridical exigencies and contingencies which con-
fronted the operationalization of the social contract legislatively, neither was law,
alone, sufficient to discharge the task of rule which liberalism posed. Although
positive law was, therefore, required to supplement natural law, governance was
required to supplement law as such (Foucault 1991c; Burchell et al. 1991). The
purpose of the constitution of civil society was precisely to make the positive law
for which natural law could not always and everywhere provide; not least, and in-
deed most importantly, to establish and secure property, since God unaccountably
failed to mention private property in his grant of dominion and governance ‘in
common’ (Locke 1990). Equally, however, law itself, natural and positive, never
claimed to be able to cover every governmental eventuality; not least, also, the
maintenance of proper standards of individual and collective discipline, decency
and civil behaviour. In sum, the liberal subject was not only the beneficiary of a
grant from God; it simultaneously also belonged to a species comprising a wealth
of instrumental properties, purposes and ambitions created, it was said, by God. If
it was to be organized constitutionally by reference to its providentially endowed
property of natural rights, everyday governance of the liberal subject had also to
be organized by reference to its biological properties as a species as well.
If forms of war and forms of life and rule are therefore correlated, different
problematizations of rule give rise to different problematizations of security and
war. Different forms of rule are made up, foundationally, of different discourses
of danger (Dillon 1996). Different discourses of danger revolve around different
referent objects of security and war (Dillon 2008a; Dillon 2008b). Different refer-
ent objects of rule giving rise to different referent objects of security and war do
not, however, simply give rise to different forms of war. They give rise to different
ways of conceiving the entire problem space of warfare: the reasons why people
fight as well as the ways in which they fight; what they fight for; whom or what
they fight against, as well as what they fight with. And their governance critically
revolves around these discursively constituted imperatives.
In the dual nature of the liberal subject we, therefore, appear to have two differ-
ent referent objects for politics, security and war. The one is composed of biologi-
cal properties, knowledge of which is changing. The other is composed of natural

political rights, knowledge of which, at least in theory, is supposed to be fixed,
because they are ‘natural’ in as much as they are a boon granted by God; specifi-
cally the scholastic God, the God of the philosophers otherwise known as the God
of metaphysics (Bradley 2004; Bulhoff and ten Kate 2000).5 In its possession of
rights and reason the liberal subject was made in the image of this sovereign God;
sovereign self-creating and self-legislating ground of being. As this God of onto-
theology slowly receded from the scene, however, the subject came to occupy the
sovereign position once modelled as God.
The biopolitics of liberal rule and war

The dictates of biology do not automatically ally, of course, with those of political
theology, political theory and political ideology; or at least they may do so only
within a cosmos ordained by a divine creator, a benign one at that. Albeit that
natural freedom was always said to favour the well-being of the species, there is
no doubting that governing by reference to the biological properties of the species
entails mechanisms quite different from those instituted to govern on the basis of
the natural rights of subjects. For one thing natural rights are said to be universal
and immutable, whereas species life, especially these days as we shall see, is said
to be nothing if not complex, adaptive and changing. Moreover, biology knows
of no divinely endowed subjects: ‘[N]o one designed and built the biosphere,’
declares one contemporary biologist, ‘[t]he biosphere got itself constructed by the
emergence and persistent coevolution of autonomous agents’ (Kauffman 2000: 3).
Biological being is said, instead, to be governed by observable biological dynam-
ics, laws and patterns of behaviour. If the domain of subjectivity is supposed to
be composed of reason and will, that of species existence is composed of ‘driv-
ers’ (Bateson 2006), and, after Darwin, co-evolutionary dynamics and patterns
of long-term historical transformation and change in the constitution of biologi-
cal entities as well as in their relation with the environments that they inhabit.
Whereas we learn about natural rights through political theory, and the ideological
teachings of liberal regimes of power, we learn about species existence through
the life sciences.
In short, we are dealing with differing conceptions of the real here: different
statements about the very origin and nature of the real – of the nature of nature
itself – which have very material political entailments as well as scientific effects.
In philosophical and theoretical terms such statements are called ontologies or,
more generally, metaphysics. Since the idea of divinity is also deeply vested in
such accounts – that is to say the idea that the nature of the real leads back to
a sovereign self-creating and self-legislating principle of absolute presence, to
which the name God has been given – such statements are also more precisely
called onto-theological. There is no politics without some account of the real,
however deeply buried it is in the taken-for-granted world of political discourse,
institutions and practices. A changing ontopolitics of species existence, as well as
a political anthropology of sovereign subjectivity endowed with natural rights,
therefore, also underwrites the liberal way of rule and its allied liberal way of

war; indeed, as God receded, biological being increasingly eclipsed the political
anthropology of God’s creatures, which had provided the original reference from
which early modern political thinkers had taken their cue in reflecting on the
problematics of rule and law.
Something, in other words, has happened to the story which liberal political
theory and ideology tells about the nature of the real, and specifically about the
liberal subject; or, at least, its emphasis very much shifts progressively from the
subject to the species. As J. G. A. Pocock and others have regularly observed,
the political crisis of the seventeenth century was, among other things, as much a
theological as it was a political crisis, ‘since authority had disintegrated, and God
had withheld his word as to where it was now lodged’ (Pocock 1995: 55). Indeed
much of the political crisis found its expression in theologized political discourse
(Kahn 2004). Subsequently, to use Nietzsche’s expression, with the death of the
God which had divinely endowed it, the liberal subject began to suffer the same
fate as its supernatural benefactor. One cannot easily subscribe to a divinely en-
dowed subject, which itself came to occupy the space left by the divinity, when
the divinity that underwrote it lost all purchase on the very political and govern-
mental imagination which first derived from it.6
This contradiction had its corresponding impact on the liberal account of po-
litical reality. The demise of the subject, consequent upon the demise of the divin-
ity which once guaranteed it, has exposed the fundamental reliance of the liberal
way of rule on the material properties – contingencies and exigencies – of species
existence. This shift in the grounds of the liberal ‘real’ had a profound material
impact, also, on the political and governmental entailments of the liberal way of
rule. Its metaphysics of the subject was increasingly replaced by the metaphysics
of the species, and liberalism was thereby exposed in all the rigorous technology
of rule to be derived from power/knowledge of the political economy, and its
instrumental utilitarianism, of species existence. In the process, the death of both
God and subject was also much exaggerated. Or, at least, divinity became radically
footloose and subjectivity became mercilessly mechanized. The divine began to
turn up in the most profane of places, its presence invoked there by the most
diverse of discourses; not least, as always, those intended to rationalise economy
and war (McKinley 2007). Subjectivity was rigorously governmentalized as a
technology of self-auditing and policing; ‘man’ appearing in ‘his ambiguous posi-
tion as an object of knowledge, and as a subject that knows; enslaved sovereign,
observed spectator’ (Foucault 1997: 312).
Describing the rise of interest in ‘population’ by the polizeiwissenschaft of
absolutist regimes, and later of demographic interest by liberal regimes, during
the course of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Foucault observed
that this shift took place, especially, when men are no longer called ‘mankind (le
genre humaine)’ and begin to be called ‘the human species (l’espèce humaine)’
(Foucault 2007: 45). Stripped of its divine endowment, the liberal subject, gov-
ernmentally, is a biological being defined instrumentally in terms of its species
properties, the early referent object of which was population: ‘from one direction,
then, population is the human species, and from another it is what will be called

the public.’ Foucault was, ‘not putting forward a solution here, but a problem’
(2007: 76). Moreover, it was one which did not arise in the field of government
alone but ‘in a whole series of knowledges’ (2007: 76). Thus:
The population is everything that extends from the biological rootedness

through the species up to the surface that gives one a hold provided by the
public. From the species to the public; we have here a whole field of new
realities in the sense that they are the pertinent elements for mechanisms of
power, the pertinent space within which and regarding which one must act.
(Foucault 2007: 75)
Liberalism universalizes war, then, not simply in the name of human life, but in
promotion of a quite distinct form of ‘biohumanity’. Committed to promoting
and securing the life of the biohuman means, indeed, that liberal rule must be
prepared to wage war not so much for the human, but on the human. It does so by
seeking, among other things, to globalize the domesticating power of civil society
mechanisms in a war against all other modes of cultural forms, invoking horror at
other cultural, as well as tyrannical, political practices as its generic casus belli;
practices it nonetheless also often finds useful, on occasion, to patronize rather
than demonize. In terms first introduced by Foucault, in the lectures from which
we have been drawing, the liberal way of rule is therefore biopolitical; its referent
object is biological being and its governmental practices are themselves, in turn,
governed by the properties of species existence; properties which are the subject
of many ‘domains of knowledge (savoirs)’ (2007: 76). The same goes for the
liberal way of war, which, waging war on the human in the name of the biohu-
man, systematically also now demonizes human being, from the individual to the
collective, as the very locus of the infinite threat posed to the biohuman by the
diverse undecidability of the human as such.
Something of equal, if not much greater, significance has however also
happened to the story of life beyond that of the shift from le genre humaine to
l’espèce humaine or être biologique (Foucault 2007: 75–6). The properties of spe-
cies existence change. They have changed among other things with the story told
about them, as well as with the adaptation of species existence to its governance
as well as its changing circumstances of rule and life. Note also, however, that
Foucault had observed that this problematic of the human species, and its allied
modes of governance, had arisen in a wide variety of knowledges (savoirs). It
was to continue to do so. Many sciences, from early political arithmetic through
statistics to demography and population studies, for example, as well as biology,
concerned themselves with all the very many different aspects of species being.
Here, then, is a way of understanding how the liberal biopolitics of both rule and
law finds expression differently depending on both how the changing properties
of species being are specified and the science of species life doing the specifying;
since there is not one but a manifold of life sciences competing to tell truths about
the behavioural characteristics and properties, as well as the internal structures,
of species life.

The story of the life sciences, what they teach that life consists in, and, indeed,
also how they themselves are also constituted epistemically, including therefore
not only the biological sciences but also, and most critically for our general argu-
ment, the information sciences, computing, digitalization and the so-called sci-
ences of complexity as well, has therefore not only changed substantially during
the course of the last three centuries. It has, in particular, changed dramatically
during the course of the last 50 years. Notwithstanding the continuing significance
of the ever-expanding problematic of population, the summary conclusion about
those changes which we both outline and employ in this text, in order to give an
account of the contemporary nature of the life around which the liberal way of
rule and war now increasingly revolve, is as follows. We do not simply exist in
the age of information, as military strategic thinkers of the so-called Revolution
in Military Affairs (RMA) of the last 20 years, along with so many other manage-
ment and social scientists, have proclaimed. We have entered the age of life as
information.
This informationalization of life first required a massive and successive reduc-
tion of language to the utilitarian demands of ‘communication’, ‘information’ and,
finally, ‘code’. By this informationalization of life we refer not simply, therefore,
to that overwhelming emphasis which is now given to the ways living entities ex-
change information, or even to the widely accepted (albeit not unquestioned) view
that information comprises the very organization or composition of living things.
As we will record, at least in summary form, all this has indeed taken place. With
the work of the biologist Cuvier, function replaced organ and thereby opened
up a new space of living being (Foucault 1997: 264). Analogously, we argue, so
also has information as code come to replace function in defining what a living
thing is currently said to be. In its turn, this whole-scale informationalization of
life has therefore also opened up a new space of living being, introducing what
Foucault would call new empiricities and positivities, for example of programme,
memory, protocol, experimentation and design, into the way living material is
both processed and understood; indeed into the way materiality as a whole, and
the very understanding of order as such, has been newly ‘vitalized’. If the German
philosopher Martin Heidegger (in)famously described language as the house of
being (Heidegger 1971a; Heidegger 1971b), that very capacious understanding
of language as the means of disclosing the truth of being has been ruthlessly
instrumentalized and technologized via the reduction of language to code; a re-
duction which mediates the ruthless reduction of the human to the biohuman.
It is precisely this move which marks the significance not only of the digital or
molecular revolutions of the twentieth century but of the confluence of these two
revolutions, to the common effect of informationalizing life and order (however
problematic information and code may also be said to be); a move which does not
so much penetrate the mysteries of life as expose it further to a logic of relentless
manipulation and re-formation.
Here, too, then, a critical development in regard to the analytic of biopolitics
also takes place, and a revision of the Foucauldian question – what happens to
power and politics when they take species life as their referent object – follows.

Just as the nature of the biological was re-problematized by the molecularization
of biology, so also was the nature of life re-problematized by the confluence of the
digital and molecular revolutions. Être biologique can no longer be considered,
therefore, outside the generic informationalization of life to which the informa-
tional as well as the biological sciences have so critically contributed during the
second half of the twentieth century. For, now, it is not only a matter of species
life, understood in the informational terms of genetic code, becoming something
that can be informationally re-formatted in ways that mean life itself can be con-
structed in laboratories. Neither is it simply the case that life itself can be put to
work microbiologically in ways that were literally inconceivable 50 years ago,
allowing also for the genetic enhancement of life in ways that exceed the imagina-
tion of historical genres of science fiction. Nor is it only that the very ontology
of biological life has shifted to the ground of ‘information’, in response to the
astonishing techno-scientific and epistemological impact of the molecularization
of biology in particular; a seismic shift now impacting on our very ways of living
life as well as our relation to it. More even than that: in consequence of the reduc-
tion of what it is to be a living entity to information as code, the very boundaries
which long distinguished living from not living, animate from inanimate and the
biological from the non-biological have been newly construed and problematized
as well.
When what it is to be a living thing is defined in terms of information as code,
and when the code has been cracked, such that living material is amenable to being
recoded, not only to produce new living material but also to effect novel outcomes
in the domain of living things, then it becomes possible not only to re-conceive
but also to re-combine material in newly vital ways. Machines, for example, also
become life-like when they are construed and constructed informationally; cyber-
netics first taught us this. Machinic ensembles of the biological and the mechani-
cal become possible in ways hitherto not conceived as well; cyborg life taught us
this. Computers once confined to inert silicon are now being constructed chemi-
cally and biologically; the next generation of computer-mediated information and
communication technologies are beginning to teach us this. Hence, the sciences
relevant to the understanding of what it is to be a living thing, and to the techno-
scientific construction of newly vitalized assemblages, have expanded to include
the informationally driven sciences as well. These also do not simply interrogate
the nature of existing living forms but seek ways, along with those pursued by
molecularization, of creating new life-forms: biological and cyborg; human, hy-
brid, and machine. In short, just as population arose, according to Foucault, as
a novel problematic for many knowledges in the eighteenth century, including
that of the power/knowledge of government, so also does life arise today as a
problematic common to a very wide variety of sciences, most importantly those of
the molecular and digital revolutions. When life is thus reduced informationally
to a coded structure, the key to which is said to been found and then re-applied to
the material world, materiality as such goes live. What was therefore once thought
to be securely biological – life – is no longer so simply understood, or secured,
biologically either.

In as much as the liberal way of rule has been profoundly affected by the many
ways in which these and other outcomes of the confluence of the digital and mo-
lecular revolutions have transformed what it is to be a living thing, so also has the
liberal way of war. Indeed, the revision of the liberal way of rule and war which
we describe in this book has explicitly embraced and applied life as information
to its very conception of both war and martial corporeality; in its re-structuring,
for example, of its military body. Foucault’s question thus remains as productive
and provocative as it ever was. It simply has to be adapted now to the age of life
as information.
What happens to politics and power relations, we therefore ask, when they
come to take life as information for their referent object of rule and force? In an
early essay we speculated that biopolitics then goes recombinant (Dillon and Reid
2001). This book pursues that thought into the contemporary liberal way of war.
Concerned, therefore, to interrogate the liberal way of war, we are especially con-
cerned to do so by focusing on these latest developments in liberal biopolitics. In
particular, and in as much as politics, power and war revolve around the properties
of species being as what we call being-in-formation (forgive the pun), you will,
in particular, get the informationalization and biologization of the language and
practices of politics, power and war.
Something dramatic therefore happened to life, in the account given of life
which emerged during the second half of the twentieth century. The life sciences in
general, biology in particular in combination with information and communication
technology, increasingly furnished the grid of intelligibility through which liberal
biopolitics sought better purchase on its referent object of power; ‘life’, but life
newly understood in its complex changing material instrumentality as ‘being-in-
formation’. That informationally framed material instrumentality of species being
has – like the natural environment itself – become subject to techno-scientific, po-
litical and economic power more than it determines such power relations. The life
process, itself, then became less that which set instrumental determinants for the
species and more yet another domain open to remorseless instrumentalization via
power relations which revolved around the governance of the species; not least,
also, through the interpellation of the species with other ‘non-biological’ forms
of materiality. Here, we reflect also on what this further development teaches
us about the shifting ontopolitics, or ‘reality’, of the liberal way of rule and war,
since they have impacted so profoundly on the ontology – ontopolitics – of what
it is to be a living thing as such.
In other words, a shift of these dimensions expresses itself not only at the level
of the base assumptions, but also in the very imaginary of a way of rule. Here,
now, the liberal way of rule and war pursues the biopolitical vocation of making
life live beyond the diverse forms which life takes, into the heterogenetic proc-
esses by which living form itself is created. To make life live has increasingly
thus become a novel matter of informational organization and creative design. If
population and reproduction was thus as important as representation to early mod-
ern liberal biopolitics (Cassedy 1969), morphogenesis and recombination through
informational command of life-making processes themselves is equally important

to contemporary liberal biopolitics as natural rights or universal freedoms. This
book seeks to specify how, in respect of the ways liberal rule is contoured by
liberal war.
The political economy of liberal rule and war

Once life operates as the principle of formation around which the problematiza-
tion of security and war revolves, the politics of security and war are transformed.
Most notably, they become subject to the changing ways in which the life sciences
specify what life is. The discourses and practices of liberal war have, therefore,
never simply revolved around the idealism to which Sir Michael Howard ob-
jected. Howard simply turned George Macaulay Trevelyan into a cliché of realist
rhetoric: the pious, but unworldly figure whose liberal war-making is well-inten-
tioned but ill-advised.
We also depart from Howard in other crucial respects. We do not rely on
the claim that liberal politicians or liberal theorists are ignorant of foreign and
defence policy matters, or that liberalism inclines democratically empowered
peoples to be ‘suspicious and xenophobe, prone to paranoia, and passionately
vindictive’ (Howard 1978: 131). Such clichés are often also the prelude to the
reassertion of realist arguments about war from which we also dissent. Neither do
we agree, however, that war is too serious a matter to be left to democratic forms
of accountability. The problem is precisely the abject weakness of democratic
forms of accountability in liberal regimes of power. Had Bush and Blair been even
minimally accountable to the advice of their professional advisers, alone, conflict
with Iraq would have been handled quite differently. We are also less concerned
with hackneyed arguments to the effect that popular passions liberated by liberal-
ism constrain decision makers, on the one hand, or drive them into ill-considered
military adventures on the other, than we are with the biopolitical dynamics fuel-
ling the liberal way of war. Nor, finally, do we join in long-established Marxist
denunciations of liberal ideas and practices as mere ‘ideological notions’ serving
the expansion of a world-dominant bourgeoisie concerned with realizing an ulte-
rior set of predetermined, and materially driven, capitalist ambitions (Althusser
2003: 141).
Economy is nonetheless central to biopolitics. Foucault stated as much: ‘this
I believe is the essential principle in the establishment of the art of [biopolitical]
government; introduction of economy into political practice’ (Foucault 1991: 92;
see also Foucault 2008; Foucault 2007). There is no doubt, either, that capitalism
furnishes the generative principles of formation for economy today locally and
globally. But, like Foucault, we dissent from the idea of the historical subject
and historical teleology upon which traditional Marxist accounts of the political
economy of liberal rule and war once relied so heavily. The relation between
biopolitics, economy and capital, as well as the nature and role of ‘species’ in that
account (in other words money and classification, as well as biology) also remain
to be fully interrogated. Foucault began to pursue some of the issues involved
in The Order of Things (1997), where his later preoccupation with biopolitics is

so clearly prefigured. The problematic of economy was, however, central also
to The Birth of Biopolitics (2008), a lecture series given by Foucault in the late
1970s in which he documented the rise of the modern Homo oeconomicus, the
irreducibility of that figure to the subject of rights, and the new problematization
of rule posed by it, to which liberal governmentality was the response.7 Here, as
elsewhere, Foucault’s primary preoccupation was less with class and the teleol-
ogy of history, which occupied traditional Marxists, than with the emergence of a
novel problematization of rule, and a new form of governance, whose organizing
principle was that of political economy:
You can see that this critical governmental reason, or internal criticism of
governmental reason, no longer revolves around the question of right and the
question of the sovereign’s usurpation or legitimacy. It will no longer have
that kind of penal appearance that public law still had in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries when it said: If the sovereign breaks this law, then he
must be punished by a sanction of illegitimacy. The whole question of critical
governmental reasoning will turn on how not to govern too much. The objec-
tion is no longer to the abuse of sovereignty but to excessive government.
(Foucault 2008: 16–17)
So, he says, with political economy we enter an age whose principle could be
this:
A government is never sufficiently aware that it always risk governing too

much, or government never knows too well how to govern just enough. The
principle of a maximum/minimum replaces the notion of natural equilibrium,
or ‘equitable justice’ that previously organised the prince’s wisdom.
(Foucault 2008: 17).
Foucault thereby documents how the rise of ‘political economy’ in the eight-
eenth century posed a new problematic of rule, a new metric of governance. Econ-
omy, as we currently understand it in terms of capitalist modes of production and
exchange, progressively also emerged as one of those domains whose autonomous
nature governance itself had to respect in its governance of ‘the economy’. Even,
here, with economy, as Foucault argues in relation, for example, to Ricardo:
economics refers us to that order of somewhat ambiguous considerations

which may be termed anthropological: it is related, in fact, to the biological
properties of a human species, which, as Malthus showed in the same period
as Ricardo, tends always to increase unless prevented by some remedy or
constraint; it is related also to the situation of those living beings that run the
risk of not finding in their natural environment enough to ensure their exist-
ence; lastly it designates in labour, and in the very hardships of that labour,
the only means of overcoming the fundamental insufficiency of nature and of
triumphing for an instant over death.
(Foucault 1997: 257)

In sum:
Homo eoeconomicus is not the human being who represents his own needs
to himself, and the objects capable of satisfying them; he is the human be-
ing who spends, wears out, and wastes his life in evading the imminence of
death. He is a finite being: and just as, since Kant, the question of finitude
has become more fundamental than the analysis of representation . . . , since
Ricardo, economics has rested, in a more or less explicit fashion, upon an
anthropology that attempts to assign concrete forms to finitude.
(Foucault 1997: 257; emphasis added)
Note the shift, therefore, which Foucault records from a political as well as eco-
nomic anthropology governed by representation – Man in the theistic cosmologi-
cal order of things for example – to a political and economic anthropology ‘that
attempts to assign concrete forms to finitude.’ Species life, rather than everlasting
life, the analytics in particular of its finitude – a newly configured correlation of
life and death no longer construed within a providentially ordained cosmos – be-
comes the frame of reference within which political and economic anthropology
begin to discover the governmental positivities and empiricities of human exist-
ence.
The rise of the modern conception of political economy was intimately allied,
also, of course, with the rise of civil society. Explaining how Homo oeconomicus
is irreducible to the original juridical subject of rights, thereby also posing a new
problematic of governance as such, namely that of the political rationalities and
governing technologies to apply to this new referent object of rule, Foucault ex-
plained that:
for governability to preserve its global character over the whole space of
sovereignty, for it not to be subject to a scientific and economic reason which
would entail the sovereign having to be either a geometer of the economy
or a functionary of economic science, for the art of governing not to have
to split into two branches of an art of governing economically and an art of
governing juridically, in short to preserve the unity and generality of the art
of governing over the whole sphere of sovereignty, and to keep the specificity
and autonomy of the art of governing with respect to economic science, to
answer these three questions, the art of governing must be given a reference,
a domain or field of reference, a new reality on which it will be exercised, and
I think this new field of reference is civil society.
Economy is always related to a wide variety of ‘quasi-transcendentals’ (Mond-

zain 2005). For Foucault, preoccupied with the rise of the modern political
economy, these began to include history, finitude, species and labour. These were
themselves expressions of the new attempts to assign concrete forms to finitude.
More precisely, Foucault says, the problem posed by the ‘simultaneous and cor-

relative appearance’ of the problematic of the market, of the price mechanism, and
of homo oeconomicus, fundamentally revised the problematization of rule:
The art of government must be exercised in a space of sovereignty – and it is

the law of the state which says this – but the trouble, misfortune, or problem
is that this space turns out to be inhabited by economic subjects . . . if we
take things literally and grasp the irreducibility of the economic subject to the
subject of rights, then these economic subjects require either the sovereign’s
abstention, or the subordination of his rationality, his art of governing, to a
scientific and speculative rationality.
The rise of the modern economic subject thus posed, in other words, a problem
to sovereign regimes of power; note that these regimes are not superseded in
Foucault’s scheme but have somehow to find a new governmental modus vivendi
with the appearance of new principles of formation governing new subjects of,
in this instance, the emerging economic rationality of the market and of market
pricing; that of Homo oeconomicus.
What could be done, he asked of the changes taking place during the course of
the eighteenth century, ‘to ensure that the sovereign does not surrender any of his
domain of action and that he is not converted into a geometer of the economy?’
(294). The answer, he says, was that ‘A new plane of reference is needed,’ which
will envelop both the subject of rights and the economic subject in a new field of
governability subject to new arts of governance. That new field of governability
was civil society and the new arts of governance it required were those ‘charac-
teristic of the art of liberal governing’ (295).
In sum, Foucault’s analytic of economy framed economy within the wider
problematization of changing practices of rule in which political economy, espe-
cially, played a dual role. It was both a metric by which to measure the effective-
ness, rather than the legitimacy, of rule, but also itself progressively regarded as
an independent domain of behaviour governed by its own autonomous ‘nature’.
How then, from our perspective, does this analytic of the new problematic
of governing posed by the introduction of political economy relate also to the
biopoliticization of liberal rule? Following Foucault, a substantial part of the an-
swer is provided by Melinda Cooper (2008) in her acute account of biotechnology
and capitalism under contemporary neoliberalism. Cooper first traces how it was
precisely here, in the birth of modern political economy, that Foucault himself
began the interrogation of the alliance between the economic and the biological
which has had such a significant historical impact on the liberal way of rule and
war, and which is currently undergoing another significant mutation in response
to changing understandings of each of the key, and intimately correlated, terms of
life and economy. In The Order of Things (1973), Foucault first insisted that the
development of the modern life sciences and classical political economy should
be understood as parallel and mutually constitutive events. Locating the decisive
turning point at the end of the eighteenth century, when the classical sciences of

wealth (from mercantilists to the physiocrats) were replaced by the modern sci-
ence of political economy (Adam Smith and David Ricardo), Foucault also traced
how the natural history of the classical period (Buffon and Linnaeus) gave way to
the ‘science of life itself’ (Bichat and Cuvier).
As Cooper notes: ‘Prior to this, Foucault argues, there was no “life” in the
modern, biological sense of the term, nor was there any conception of “labour”
as the fundamental productive force underlying the exchange of money’ (Cooper
2008: 5). Here, in the concept of ‘inorganic structure’ to which the life sciences
of the nineteenth century, especially, gave rise, lies the initial point of articulation
between modern political economy and the life sciences, since, in the concept of
organic structure, biologists discovered a principle which ‘corresponds to labour
in the economic sphere’ (Foucault 1997: 227) As Cooper also explains, just as
the economy begins to grow in the nineteenth century ‘so also does life come to
be understood as a process of evolution and ontogenetic development’ (Cooper
2008: 7). Hence, Foucault observes, ‘[the] organic becomes the living and the liv-
ing is that which produces grows and reproduces; the inorganic is the non-living,
that which neither develops or reproduces; it lies at the frontiers of life, the inert,
the unfruitful – death’ (Foucault 1997: 232). Cooper concludes:
As both Malthus and Marx make clear in their different ways, the question
of population growth thereby becomes inseparable from that of economic
growth. Henceforth political economy will analyse the processes of labour
and of production in tandem with those of human biological reproduction
– and sex, and race, as the limiting conditions of reproduction will lie at the
heart of biopolitical strategies of power.
(Cooper 2008: 7)
By the end of the twentieth century, and directing her attention to the ways in
which American capital, in particular, was allied to the life sciences under a series
of reforms, initiated by the Reagan administration, which were designed to mobi-
lize a state-funded ‘revolution’ in the correlation of the life sciences with public
health and biomedicine, a model followed subsequently in the war on terror in
a comparable alliance between biotechnology and Homeland Security, Cooper
demonstrates how contemporary attention consistently focuses now on ‘the emer-
gent possibilities of the life sciences and related disciplines’ (2008: 3; emphasis
added). Also working with but beyond Foucault, Cooper explains how, as the
realms of biological (re)production and capital accumulation moved closer to-
gether in the last decades of the twentieth century, not only did it become difficult
to think about the life sciences without invoking the traditional concepts of politi-
cal economy, ‘production, value, growth, crisis, resistance, and revolution’ (2008:
3), but novel accounts of both life (the molecular and digital revolutions) and of
economy (neoliberalism) began to newly problematize each other once more.
Simultaneously, therefore, she shows how from the 1980s onwards ‘the expan-
sion of commercial processes into the sphere of “life itself” has a troubling effect
on the self-evidence of traditional economic categories, compelling us to rethink

their scope in dialogue with the life sciences themselves’ (2008: 3). In sum: ‘The
biotech era poses challenging questions about the interrelationship between eco-
nomic and biological growth, resurrecting in often unexpected ways the questions
that accompanied the birth of modern political economy’ (2008: 3). In ways that
directly recall our own questioning of the relationship between the liberal way of
rule and war in the age of life as information, ‘[w]hat is the relationship,’ Cooper
asks, ‘between new theories of biological growth, complexity and evolution and
recent liberal theories of accumulation?’ (2008: 4). In response she argues that
‘the life sciences have played a commanding role in America’s economic and
imperialist self-reinvention’ (2008: 4). Albeit Cooper emphasizes the specifically
national character of the developments in the US, her argument accords with the
wider argument that we are pursuing, here, in respect of the generic relationship
between liberal rule and war. ‘Over the past few decades,’ she explains, for ex-
ample, ‘the U.S. government has been at the center of efforts to reorganize global
trade rules and intellectual property laws along lines that would favor its own
drug, agribusiness, and biotech industries’ (2008: 5). Such developments were
also paralleled by the many ways in which the US defence–industrial complex
championed the transformation of military strategic discourse, operational con-
cepts and doctrines, as well as force deployment and equipment acquisition poli-
cies, throughout the Atlantic basin, in both traditional military strategic as well
as terrorist-inspired Homeland Security and national and international resilience
policies, in allied biological terms as well. We trace these military strategic devel-
opments in Chapter 6: ‘Military transformation in the age of life as information’.
Whereas Homo oeconomicus and Homo biologicus are intimately allied in the
liberal order of things, therefore, the question now is what is becoming of both in
the age of life as information and, in particular for us, how has the changing nature
of each impacted upon the liberal way of rule and war?
Under conditions of its biopoliticization, human life thus becomes remorse-
lessly confined; confined to relating to itself only in terms of its species properties,
one of the primary expressions of which becomes economy. Modern economy
does not, therefore, precede the biopolitical analytics of finitude which arises in
this Foucauldian schema of the order of things; it is a primary expression of the
finitude of the biopolitical. Better to say that the biopolitical is precisely an ex-
pression of attempts to assign concrete forms to finitude in the realm, especially,
of both government and governance.
Here, then, it also becomes clear that the biopolitical is an order of politics and
power which, taking species existence as its referent object, circumscribes the dis-
course of what it is to be a living being to the policing, auditing and augmenting
of species properties. In its relation to itself, life is confined to considering itself,
speaking of itself, talking to itself, addressing itself and its infinite worlds, in the
political economy of species terms alone, whatever those terms might be; and, as
we will show, they are subject to change. In the process of thus being confined to
history as the history of this remorseless struggle of existence with its finitude,
a finitude circumscribed by both birth and death, such that in making life live
biopolitics refigures both, Foucault further explains that:

History exists . . . only in so far as man as a natural being is finite: a finitude
that is prolonged far beyond the original limits of the species and its immedi-
ate bodily needs, but that never ceases to accompany, at least in secret, the
whole development of civilisations. The more man makes himself at home
in the heart of the world, the further he advances in his possession of nature,
the more strongly also does he feel the pressure of his finitude, and the closer
he comes to his own death. . . . his anthropological situation never ceases its
progressive dramatisation of his History, never ceases to render it more peril-
ous, and to bring it closer, as it were, to its own impossibility.
Here, in particular, Foucault’s insight presages the hyperbolicization of security

and the remorseless instrumental biostrategization of every conceivable aspect
of living being which now characterize, indeed constitute, the political life of
biohumanity.
Conclusion: the martial adjudication of species life

Our aim has, however, to remain much more modest here. It cannot take up all
of the salient issues raised by the analytics of the interplay of the finite and the
infinite, and the newly configured and instrumentalized correlation of chance and
necessity, in the life of the biopolitical, including especially that of its changing
political economy. It can only note them in passing, because the target of our en-
quiry is to amplify and explore how biopolitical imperatives concerning certain
contemporary understandings of life as such impacted on the liberal way of rule
and war, especially as these have been revised by the current emphasis on the
informationalization of life: what we also call being-in-formation.
In The Rights of Man, Paine claimed that, with the American and French Revo-
lutions, there was a
morning of reason rising upon man on the subject of government that has not
appeared before. As the barbarism of the present old governments expires,
the moral condition of nations with respect to each other will be changed.
Man will not be brought up [Paine predicted] with the savage idea of consid-
ering his species as his enemy.
(Paine 1995: 595)
One way of expressing the core problematic that we pursue in this book is, there-
fore, in the form of a question posed back to Paine on account of that definitive
claim. What happens to the liberal way of rule and its allied way of war when lib-
eralism goes global in pursuit of the task of emancipating the species from war, by
taking the biohuman as its referent object of both rule and war? What happens to
war, we ask, when a new form of governmental regime emerges which attempts to
make war in defence and promotion of the entire species as opposed to using war
in service of the supposedly limited interests of sovereigns? For the liberal project

of the removal of species life from the domain of human enmity never in practice
entailed an end to war, or to the persistence of threats requiring war. Paine makes
this clear in his original formulation. Under liberal regimes, Paine observes, war
will still be defined by relations between the human and its enemies. The enemies
of the human will simply no longer be ‘its species’ (Paine 1995: 595). What that
means, in practice, is that the liberal way of rule will have to decide what ele-
ments, and what expressions, of human life best served the promotion of the spe-
cies. Those that do not are precisely those that most threaten it; those upon which
it will be called to wage war.
Deciding on what elements and expression of the human both serve and
threaten is the definitive operation by which liberalism constitutes its referent
object of war and rule: that of the biohuman. Whatever resists the constitution
of the biohuman is hostile and dangerous to it, even if it arises within the spe-
cies itself. Indeed, as we shall show, since life is now widely defined in terms of
continuous emergence and becoming, it is a continuous becoming dangerous to
itself. The locus of threat and danger under the liberal way of rule and war pro-
gressively moves into the very morphogenic composition and re-composability of
living systems and of living material. The greatest source of threat to life becomes
life. It is very important to emphasize that this discourse of danger is precisely not
that which commonly arises in the political anthropologies of human cupidity of
early modern political theory going back classically, for example, to Hobbes and
Locke, which was nonetheless still formulated in a context still circumscribed
by the infinity of divine providence, however obscure this was becoming, and
however much this obscurity helped fuel the crisis of their times. The analyt-
ics of finitude, rather than the analytics of redemption, circumscribe late modern
discourses of governance and danger now, instead. Biology, one might therefore
also say, itself arose as a science of finitude; of the play of species life and death
outwith the play of human life and redemption. The same might very well be said
for modern ‘political science’.
Biology does not, of course, recognize cupidity. Cupidity arises in a differ-
ent, anthro-political, order of things. These days, especially, biology recognizes
only the dynamics of complex adaptive evolutionary emergence and change of
living systems, whose very laws of formation it increasingly understands in in-
formational terms. These, additionally, empower it to re-compose living material
according to design rather than nature in order to rectify the infelicities of nature,
or, indeed, pre-empt its expression by positively creating new nature, rather than
merely negating existing nature. Pre-emption here is not negative, it is positive. It
is not precaution, so much as creative production. The discourse of danger being
elaborated throughout the liberal way of rule and war, in the age of life as infor-
mation, is therefore related to the possibility that complex adaptive emergence
and change can go acerbic. The possibility of catastrophe lies, immanently, in
the very dynamics of the life process itself. Neither is this a discourse of danger
which revolves around traditional othering practices alone, however pervasive
and persistent these politically toxic devices remain. This is a discourse of danger
which hyperbolicizes fear in relation to the radically contingent outcomes upon
which the very liveliness of life itself depends.

Biohumanity – itself an expression of the attempt to give concrete form to
finitude politically – is therefore both threat and promise. The corollary is there-
fore also clear: enemies of the species must be cast out from the species as such.
‘Just war’ in the cause of humanity here – a constant liberal trope (Douzinas
2003) – takes a novel turn when the humanity at issue is biohumanity. For just
war has constantly to be waged for biohumanity against the continuous becoming
dangerous of life itself; and less in the form of the Machiavellian or Hobbesian
Homo lupus than in the form of continuously emergent being, something which
also prompts the thought that Foucault’s analytics of finitude might itself have to
be revised to take account of the infinity of becoming which now also character-
izes the ontology of the life sciences. Since the object is to preserve and promote
the biohuman, any such war to end war becomes war without end; thus turning
Walzer’s arguments concerning the justification of liberal war inside out (Walzer
2000: 329–35). The project of removing war from the life of the species becomes
a lethal and, in principle, continuous and unending process. In a way, as a matter
of its biopolitical logic, there is little particularly startling about this claim. Im-
manent in the biopoliticization of liberal rule, it is only a matter of where, when
and how it finds expression. As the very composition and dynamics of species life
become the locus of the threat to species life, so the properties of species life offer
themselves in the form of a new kind of promise: war may be removed from the
species should those properties be attended to differently. Consider, for example,
Kant’s ‘Idea for a Universal History’:
if he lives among others of his own species, man is an animal who needs a
master . . . he requires a master to break his self-will and force him to obey a
universally valid will under which everyone can be free. But where is he to
find such a master? Nowhere else but in the human species.
(Kant 2005: 46; emphasis added)
‘Nowhere else but in the human species.’ Here Kant, too, discloses the circum-
scription of his reflections by the analytics of finitude.
Put simply, liberalism’s strategic calculus of necessary killing has, then, to be
furnished by the laws and dynamics, the exigencies and contingencies, derived
from the properties of the biohuman itself. Making life live becomes the criterion
against which the liberal way of rule and war must seek to say how much killing is
enough. In a massive, quite literally terrifying, paradox, however, since the biohu-
man is the threat it cannot, itself, adjudicate how much self-immolation would be
enough to secure itself against itself without destroying itself. However much the
terror of the liberal way of rule and war currently revolves around the ‘figure’ of
Al-Qaeda, the very dispositif of terror which increasingly circumscribes the life
of the biohuman at the beginning of the twenty-first century is the fear induced by
its very own account of life.
No specific manner or form is proper, then, to the biohuman other than this: its
being continuously at work instrumentally reassigning itself in order, it is said, to
survive, but in fact to secure itself against its own vital processes. Within the com-

pass of this biopolitical imaginary of species existence, the biohuman becomes the
living being to whom all manner of self-securing work must be assigned. The task
thus posed through the liberal way of rule and war by its referent object of rule
and war – the biohuman – is no longer that, classically, of assigning the human its
proper nature with a view to respecting it. The proper nature of the biohuman has
become the infinite re-assignability of the very pluripotency of which it is now
said to be comprised, against the threat of that very pluripotency itself. This is the
strategic goal of the liberal way of war because it has become the strategic goal of
the liberal way of rule. From the analytics of finitude, politically, has thus arisen
an infinity of securitization and fear.

3 War in the age of biohumanity
If God grants me life, after madness, illness, crime, sexuality, the last thing that I
would like to study would be the problem of war and the institution of war in what
one could call the military dimension of society.
Michel Foucault
Introduction
The modern idea that politics and war constitute autonomous domains of exist-
ence subject to their own laws of development first originated in the Renaissance.1
War, especially, was newly conceived as an art defined by its own rationalities,
disciplines and economy (Wolin 2004: 197–200). The sovereign’s task was to
master these. ‘A prince’, Machiavelli, for example, insisted, ‘ought never to have
out of his thoughts this subject of war, and in peace he should addict himself more
to its exercise than in war’ (1993: 112). What is modern about modern war is this
conviction that war is subject to its own independent and universal dynamics, and
that these rationalities and technologies are accessible to human reason.
In other words, the modernization of war refers to the process by which war
itself was assumed to be a referent object of philosophical as well as epistemic
analysis, existing independently of the subjects that make war; i.e. that the very
‘reality’ of war could be accessed by reflective thought and that reliable knowledge
of it could be systematically formulated as military science. Power/knowledge of
war therefore sought to access the principles of war – principal amongst which
according, for example, to Clausewitz was radical contingency: ‘No other hu-
man activity is so continuously or universally bound up with chance’ (Clausewitz
1993: 985). Strategists regularly enjoin statesmen as well as military commanders
to heed these principles. The difficulty lay, however, in finding principles which
turned out not to be so qualified that they amounted to little more than cliché
and maxim. In the light of changes in information and communications technol-
ogy (ICT), as well as in the wider biopoliticization of war with which we are
concerned, today’s neo-Clausewitzians, exponents of the contemporary arts of
network centric warfare, information warfare and effects-based operations, have
all but abandoned the pursuit of principle, now, for the rule of contingency instead

War in the age of biohumanity 35
(Dillon 2007a; Reid 2003; Dillon 2002; Dillon and Reid 2001; Libicki 1997). In
that sense radical contingency, which in his own distinctive way Clausewitz pro-
claimed as the defining feature of war, has become the primary rationality of war
in the age of life as information. Our analysis will explain why. Suffice it to say,
here, that since species life is the referent object of the liberal way of war, and that
contingency is now said to be the principle feature of species life, a contingency
compounded more generally now also by life as information, it therefore follows
that war-making will become increasingly preoccupied with the new sciences of
contingency as well; and so it did.2 We detail how in our later chapters.
Understanding the liberal way of war, however, and in particular its ambition
to wage war in promotion of the life of the biohuman, entails engaging with a
quite different problematization of war – figuring the whole problem space of
war – from that which distinguished the classically modern problematization of
war. In the first instance, this very vocabulary already marks the shift.
To talk in terms of problematization, as such, is already to presume that prob-
lems or fields of activity do not simply present themselves. They are presented.
We inherit how they are presented and we respond to those presentations. Prob-
lematization is an active and interactive business in which the world is construed
one way or another. In the process power relations are always already in play
(Foucault 2001b). To speak of a problematization of war is to speak of a prob-
lematization of violence, its character, organization, authorization and legitimiza-
tion. To speak of a problematization of war as presenting a problem space is also
to recognize that such a deployment of violence entails many things, including
the formation of political entities and the fears and dangers to which it will also
be said that they are exposed.3 When the modern state claimed the monopoly of
the legitimate use of force in a given territory, which the great German sociologist
Max Weber said defined it, the state simultaneously also sought to monopolize
the problematization of fear and danger to which the deployment of force always
also refers. In talking of war in this way we are, therefore, already departing from
the traditional modern analytic of war. Specifically, in talking about the liberal
problematization of war, we are referring also to the ways in which the liberal way
of war comes to rely on quite different kinds of power/knowledge from that of the
supposedly universal principles of war which first inspired the modern approach
to war.
From the perspective of problematization, therefore, all political discourse and
all political practice have their entailments. One of these entailments is the organi-
zation and use of violence. Thus war is a political entailment of any and every
form of political rule. Liberal political discourse and liberal political practices are
no different. That is why the liberal way of rule is contoured also by the liberal
way of war. As the biopolitical character, in particular, of liberal rule asserted
itself, so also did the biopolitical character of the liberal way of war. In both
instances – rule and war – liberal practitioners and theorists alike looked to the
properties of the species for their guide to the rationales for war and, in the latter
half of the twentieth century especially, when life became informationalized, for
their ways of preparing for, as well as waging, war.

The biopoliticization of war
All biopolitical analysis is deeply indebted to the work of Michel Foucault (Brat-
ich, Packer and McCarthy 2003; Dean 1999; Rose 1999; Osborne 1998; Barry,
Osborne and Rose 1996; Simons 1995; Dean 1994; Burchell, Gordon and Miller
1991). Our account of the liberal way of war, of the biopoliticization of liberal
war along with the biopoliticization of liberal rule, is no different. But the un-
derstanding of what it is to be a living thing has changed, and so also have the
very life experiences of national and global populations, indeed of the species
as whole, since Foucault first analysed the introduction, during the course of the
eighteenth century, of what he called the ‘birth of biopolitics’ (2008). Pursuing
the contemporary expression of biopolitics today, most especially seeking to pick
up the interrogation of the biopoliticization of war and rule where Foucault left
off, we are obliged to theorize with Foucault beyond Foucault. For Foucault only
initiated the problematic of the biopoliticization of both rule and war as he inter-
rogated the early advent of modern politics, security and war in the revolutions
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the process of doing so, Foucault
departed from the edifying and self-serving narratives on which liberal interna-
tionalism relies, in the tradition of Paine and others, about life, rule and war. As in
Foucault, so also in our account, the problematization of life, rule and war – the
very problematization of political modernity, of what it is to be politically modern
– is posed quite differently.
The story which liberal internationalism has traditionally told about life, rule
and war is itself a certain recounting of the story of political modernization. In it,
politics revolves around the ways in which the more or less self-evident interests
not only of individual political subjects but also of the species as a whole have
been repeatedly frustrated by the sovereign power and geopolitical machinations
of states. From its outset, liberal internationalism has sought to determine how the
sovereign powers of states might be constrained, even overcome, in order to allow
the natural properties, rights and freedom of the human to govern instead. How,
it asks, can the scourge of war be removed from the life of humanity so that its
account of man-as-species might flourish? The story is not without merit. States
– at least their leadership cadres, and not least those in charge of liberal states
– are often reckless, self-interested and violently benighted. Wars, in particular,
also occur and recur in this story through repeated failures to overcome state
sovereignty, and the privileged international status of sovereignty. The target has
always been the ways in which states frustrate the emancipation of the species by
violently pursuing their own self-interested goals, in the process treating popula-
tions merely as material with which to fuel the game of sovereign rivalry. Once
more, there is some merit in the point. States, self-proclaimed progressive states
included, regularly treat populations as cannon fodder even as they also treat them
as enemies of the species as well as enemies of the state.
We therefore wish to be very clear here. One is not obliged to side with state
sovereignty or political realists when taking fundamental issue with the liberal
way of war. To indict the liberal way of war for its contribution to the predicament

of the very subject – biohumanity – in whose name it wages war is not to overlook
the horror for which states, among other actors, have regularly been responsible.
Neither is one obliged to dissent from the idea of emancipation. However ascend-
ant it may currently be, the liberal account of emancipation is only one historically
powerful version. It is to contest the reduction of the human to the biohuman and
the grounding of emancipation in the mere properties of species existence. For
Foucault, it is therefore not emancipation as such which is in question. He would
no doubt have been the first to say that it is absurd to object to emancipation as
such. In this, as in other things, he always advised that the moral blackmail of ap-
pealing to ‘enlightenment’, as if enlightenment itself were not a field of contest, be
avoided by following the practice of asking ‘which one?’ Which subject? Which
form of power? Which account of emancipation? It is therefore of the entailments
of emancipation construed in species terms, specifically the violent entailments
of emancipation construed in species terms, that Foucault makes an issue; and
he does so, in particular, by problematizing what happens to emancipation when
species existence becomes the referent object of power and politics. His acute
instinct for the casuistries of modern power/knowledge, operating in the everyday
micro-practices of power, surpassing that of any late modern thinker, is allied
here to a capacity also for raising awkward questions, which means enlightening
questions, which few have equalled. ‘If genocide is indeed the dream of modern
powers,’ he thus observed, ‘this is not because of a recent return of the right to
kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species,
the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population’ (1990: 137).
Foucault’s interrogation of the relations between life, rule and war is, therefore,
quite different from that of liberal internationalism, and for a whole variety of
reasons. To account for all those reasons would require a study of Foucault. Theo-
rizing with, but beyond Foucault, this is, however, a study of liberal war rather
than a study of Foucault’s theoretical and philosophical oeuvre; of which there
have been many. We pick up and pursue Foucault’s line of questioning instead;
one which tends always to ask not only about the truth-telling practices of modern
power relations, of which liberalism is a currently dominant example, but also
about what we can call the collateral effects and affects of power. For the exercise
of power makes a world in which different forms of valuing (and every world is
an economy of value) take place; people both suffer and enjoy such a world.
Specifically, for our purposes here, in trying to unravel the relations between
liberal rule and war, Foucault is helpful for his detailed analysis of the liberal
way of rule. Among other things, he notes that it is not only a certain constitu-
tional form of rule but also a limited and epistemic form of rule. It seeks, also,
for example, to govern by limiting its rule to what can be known about referent
objects of rule – such as the modern economy and the operations of civil society:
‘if there is a nature specific to the objects and operations of governmentality, then
the consequence of this is that governmental practice can only do what it has to do
by respecting this nature’ (Foucault 2008: 16). Pace Foucault, this was in effect
what all early modern political thinkers were also saying. The difference which
Foucault detects is less a move in principle. The very idea of modern politics

arises, arguably with Machiavelli, as a domain less determined by God than sub-
ject to its own natural laws. Those laws were, in addition, said to derive from dif-
ferent accounts of the ‘nature’ of the object to be governed – ‘Man’ – and the ‘state
of nature’ in which he was said to exist. What Foucault detects is a revision of that
principle; a radical shift, instead, in the sciences of the nature of ‘Man’ from that
articulated in terms of God’s creature to that articulated in terms of species exist-
ence: ‘Nature is something that runs under, through and in the exercise of gov-
ernmentality’ (2008: 16). The point is that the understanding of nature changes,
the attachment of nature to the Christian God is severed and a whole variety of
new regional ontologies of natural being emerge, subject, it was said, to their own
rationalities and laws of formation: ‘If . . . [governmental practice] was to disrupt
this nature, if it were not to take it into account or go against laws determined by
this naturalness specific to the objects it deals with, it would immediately suffer
negative consequences’ (2008: 16). The metric of government – how government
is assessed – shifted thereby from questions of legitimacy to questions of success:
‘success or failure, rather than legitimacy or illegitimacy, now become the criteria
of governmental action’ (2008: 16). The cry of ‘unfair’ thus has to contend with
the reply, ‘it works’. Thus:
the greatest evil of government, what makes it a bad government, is not

that the prince is wicked, but that he is ignorant. In short, through political
economy there is the simultaneous entry into the art of government of, first,
the possibility of self-limitation, that is of governmental action limiting itself
by reference to the nature of what it does and of that on which it is brought
to bear.
(2008: 17)
Similarly liberalism also, therefore, seeks to rule by encouraging subjects/

objects of rule to rule themselves. It seeks to govern, in other words, through
the freedom of self-rule since it is more likely that ‘the success’ of rule will be
achieved if it is done by the very referent objects of rule themselves. The very idea
of self-governing systems was, therefore, lodged deep in the political imaginary
of liberal governmentality long before it was embraced by network theorists and
articulated in the form of complex adaptive and emergent systems. Little wonder,
in fact, that such a discourse should have been so readily adopted throughout
liberal forms of life towards the end of the twentieth century. In both instances –
objects and subjects of rule; and subjects are themselves, of course, also objects of
rule in this schema – the referent objects of liberal power relations are supposed
to precede the operations of power itself. What can be known about them char-
acterizes the epistemic emphasis one finds in the liberal way of rule. The liberal
way of rule is not, thus, the mere exercise of sovereign will. More commonly
it operates through complex and continuously developing forms of truth-telling
practices which Foucault called power/knowledge. What this sleight of hand of
truth-telling power systematically elides is, however, the manifold ways in which

power relations simultaneously also constitute the very subjects and objects of
rule which are said to be independent of power relations.
Liberal power relations are only one class of power relations for Foucault.
They are the ones in which he ultimately becomes most interested, not least be-
cause they are so insidiously and successfully powerful in the ways in which they
positively and productively circumscribe the modern imaginary of what it is to
be a subject, to be free, to be enlightened or emancipated and to be powerful:
themes which also intensely concerned Foucault beyond their circumscription by
modern power relations. In the course of interrogating the many ways in which
the palimpsest of modern power relations operates (S. Dillon 2007), Foucault
thus went on to ask what happens to politics and power when the husbanding of
species life became the foundational preoccupation of politics; as it first did in
the polizeiwissenschaft of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in continental
Europe, and the absolutist concern with a new empirical referent object of power:
‘population’ (Foucault 2007; Foucault 2003). Although Foucault did not entirely
abandon his interest in ‘police’, and it remains a contemporary issue (Neocleous
2008; Dubber and Valverde 2006), his attention focused increasingly on the dif-
ferent ways in which liberal politics and governance also took species life as its
referent object of power.
These enquiries therefore broached a burgeoning terrain of ethical as well as
political concern whose ramifications now extend beyond the relatively small
amount of attention that Foucault was able to devote to them. As one of us has
argued elsewhere: Paul Patton is not alone in wondering just how important
biopower is given the relatively scant attention Foucault paid to it after having
first broached the idea (Dillon and Neal 2009; Patton 2007). As our earlier ref-
erences to The Order of Things, in particular, demonstrated, however, Foucault
devoted more attention in fact to these questions than Patton and others have war-
ranted. However that may be, the significance of Foucault’s concept of biopower
should nonetheless be seen to lie less with the attention he gave to it than with
the extraordinary power of the questions which he was able to pose through it,
in particular those concerning life and war, politics and economy, and security
and governmentality. We paraphrase the biopolitically oriented questions which
Foucault posed in terms of what happens to power relations, what mechanisms of
power emerge when species life – être biologique – becomes the referent object
of power? What is most important for us here is that he also cast these enquiries
into the character of modern power relations in terms of an enquiry also into the
complex correlation of politics, economy, security and war (Dillon and Neil 2009;
Reid 2007; Foucault 2007; Foucault 2003; Foucault 1990).
While Foucault’s later works began to focus directly on this whole complex en-
semble of modern security, politics, economy and war, they therefore also increas-
ingly linked biopolitics, especially, to war (Dillon and Neal 2009; Dillon 2007a;
Dillon 2007b; Dillon 2002; Reid 2007; Reid 2006a; Reid 2005; Reid 2004b; Reid
2003; Dillon and Reid 2001; Dillon and Reid 2000). Why was it, Foucault asked,
with increasing force and focus, that war became so extraordinarily ‘vital’ (1990:
137) as liberal regimes became established and power relations began to revolve

around the properties of species life in pursuit of the political ambition of making
life live? Why was it, during a time increasingly concerned with removing war
from the life of the species, that the violence of war not only increased but began
to be waged on behalf of the species? Was it not precisely, he asked in The His-
tory of Sexuality, ‘as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so
many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be
killed’ (1990: 137)? Indeed, he concluded, because with the biopoliticization of
politics and rule – ‘the entry of life into history, that is, the entry of phenomena
peculiar to the life of the human species into the order of knowledge and power,
into the sphere of political techniques’ (1990: 141–2) – wars are
no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended, they are
waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobi-
lized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity:
massacres [have] become vital.
The liberal way of war has made its own distinctive contribution to thus raising
the stakes of modern war to the point where the life of the species is wagered on
military–political strategies said to advance the cause of peace and prosperity on
behalf of the species.
This paradox is an aporia: a condition irresolvable in the terms it sets for itself.
It is an impasse into which a civilization has got itself. A political aporia such
as the waging of war on the human to liberate the biohuman from war does not
immobilize the liberal way of rule and war. It is instead its most powerful provo-
cation. A necessary outcome of a political logic, that of the biopolitics of liberal
rule and war, the liberal way of rule and war acts out this aporia in all manner
of micro-specific practices of economy, governance and rule as well as macro-
political practices, rationales and legitimizations.
It was Foucault’s intention to pursue this interrogation; he proclaimed during
the course of his final illness that
if God grants me life, after madness, illness, crime, sexuality, the last thing
that I would like to study would be the problem of war and the institution of
war in what one could call the military dimension of society.
But however much he broaches the issues in his Lectures at the Collège de France
– Society Must Be Defended (2003) and Security Territory Population (2007) es-
pecially – as well in The History of Sexuality (Dillon 2007a; Reid 2006a; Hansen
2000) the project was never in fact systematically pursued.
However much he was therefore responsible for initially posing it, the interro-
gation of the correlation of liberalism’s way of rule, with its way of war, does not
itself, therefore, depend entirely on Foucault. If the text escapes the finite horizon
of the author, so also does the question escape the finite horizons of the questioner.

The question also travels, and it, too, acquires a life of its own. Indeed, examin-
ing the legacy of Foucault for continental philosophical thought has to involve a
tracing of the manifold ways in which the posing of this question resounded with
a host of thinkers writing after him: most importantly Gilles Deleuze, Paul Virilio,
Jean Baudrillard and Antonio Negri.4 Foucault was well aware that he had raised
an issue which was, as it were, not his. He was equally well aware that liberal-
ism alone was not responsible for this predicament; which does not mean to say
that via its biopoliticization, in particular, it had not become deeply implicated
in this complex predicament in its own distinctive ways. He wished to disclose
that implication. Modestly, we also wish to pursue it here. This book is therefore
intended to be a contribution to pursuing the path opened up by Foucault. How-
ever, it cannot do that unless, beginning with Foucault, it goes beyond Foucault.
Historically speaking, for example, whereas Foucault challenges the traditional
depiction of a dialectical struggle between the sovereign powers of states and
species life, his historical horizons are limited – to Europe, and largely to the
domestic affairs of France and England. Imperial struggles for global hegemony,
which played such an integral part in shaping the domestic affairs of all European
as well as North American states, are largely ignored. Similarly ignored is the
impact of non-governmental agencies; for example, the great Dutch, British and
French trading companies.
Our concern in this respect is however a political rather than an historical one.
We do not intend to make good Foucault’s historical analysis so much as inter-
rogate some of the current ways in which the liberal way of war in its changing
biopoliticization has been informationalized on account of its being biologized
(the biological itself having been widely informationalized) in direct reflection,
also, of the liberal way of rule. For that reason alone, in fact, we need to go be-
yond Foucault since the story which is now told about species life, and the global
experience of the species as such, has gone beyond anything that was imagined
during the course of the eighteenth century when Foucault first observed the birth
of biopolitics. But we nonetheless begin with Foucault, where Foucault began,
in the eighteenth century. We do so by opening with an account of how liberal
political thinking concerning the biohuman emerged in complex correlation with
the new knowledge of species being promulgated by the rapidly developing life
sciences, since we wish to emphasize how deeply historical is that epistemic debt
and affiliation. Each and every liberal political thinker and philosopher was a
man of his age and, in giving expression to a liberal account of the world during
the course of the last 300 years, they too absorbed what the newly emerging life
sciences were to teach about the character and properties of species life of which
the liberal subject had always also been said to be comprised.
The biohuman: violent correlates of species emancipation

Key liberal philosophical thinkers such as Kant, Bentham, Hume, Rousseau and
Paine, among many others, all indicated in their own ways that the solution to
the problem of war was to be found in the properties of the species itself. Spe-

cies life would emancipate Man by constituting him anew as the biohuman freed
from the scourge of war. Beyond philosophy, however, there also developed new
forms of scientific knowledge which did not simply seek, like counsellors (them-
selves often liberal), to speak to sovereign power in order to empower it, or, like
revolutionaries (liberal and illiberal), to speak back to sovereign power on behalf
of those subject to it; two common tropes in the political discourse surrounding
modern politics and war, both critical and real. Rather it simply addressed the
condition of the species. A discourse of politics and war therefore arose which
took its cue, instead, from the sciences of the properties of the species. These, it
was regularly claimed, would teach government a new art of politics and war: one
which revolved around the properties of the biohuman rather than the sovereign,
the subject or the people.
If the species was to fulfil its emancipatory promise, if the threats to that eman-
cipation were to be identified and met, and if a new relation between the human
and its species life were to be forged to promote biohumanity, then those theoriz-
ing and philosophizing on behalf of species emancipation also had to learn from
those who had something scientific to say about the very nature of species exist-
ence. The species had to come to know itself if it was to liberate itself. Removing
war from the life of humanity requires knowing what constitutes biohumanity and
the threats to which it is exposed. Such peace-making on behalf of the biohuman
entails the identification and removal of biothreats. We should make it clear that
such threats first emerged as biothreats not in the narrow technical sense of de-
ploying bioweapons but in the wider biopolitical sense that they form an obstacle
or danger of some sort to the promotion of species life. Specifying the properties
of species existence necessarily also therefore entailed specifying what was dan-
gerous to species development. In other words, a biopolitical discourse of species
existence is simultaneously also a biopolitical discourse of species endangerment.
As a form of rule whose referent object is that of species existence, the liberal
way of rule is simultaneously also a problematization of fear and danger involving
threats to the peace and prosperity of the species. Hence its allied need, in pursu-
ing the peace and prosperity of the species, to make war on whatever threatens
it. That is the reason why liberal peacemaking is lethal. Its violence a necessary
corollary of the aporetic character of its biopolitical mission to foster the peace
and prosperity of the species; to ‘make life live’ as Foucault put it, in particular
by removing threats to the life of the species through instituting a form of govern-
ance of the species – that of the liberal way of rule – via which war would, as a
rule, be eradicated. Making life live in this way does not in fact eradicate either
death or war. As Foucault observed, in relation to the birth of biopolitics: ‘There
has been a parallel shift in the right of death, or at least a tendency to align itself
with the exigencies of a life administering power and to define itself accordingly’
(Foucault 1990: 136). Thus it simply refigures death as well as war and subjects
them to different forms of problematization; in consequence a whole variety of
different questions, demands for knowledge, and policy imperatives begin to as-
sert themselves around death as much as they did around war (Palladino 2009;
Franklin and Lock 2003; Cooper 2002).

Thus, while it governs through the freedom of the subject (Joyce 2003; Dean
1999; Rose 1999), liberalism also governs through the properties of the species.
If, for example, you wish to make life live, as Foucault teaches us that liberalism
does, you must embark upon a rigorous and continuous assaying of life. What are
the properties of the species? Which properties are compatible with the welfare
of the species? Which properties endanger the species? How do life processes
work? Since there is always death, disease and pathology in life, what aspects of
the life process entail death, disease and pathology? How are these to be detected?
How are death, disease and pathology to be dealt with? What individual as well
as population surveying, scanning and surveillance measures, for example, are
required to give early warning of danger? Can such measures detect trouble even
before it manifests itself in symptoms? Is it possible to apply what health prac-
titioners, for example, now call ‘asymptomatic intervention’ (Macintyre 1999):
interventions which take place before symptoms occur? Here danger is thought to
arise not because some action has been committed or threat issued: danger arises
in relation to features, traits and so on, which may be said to indicate potential,
possible or probable danger. Albeit he didn’t use these terms, Foucault identified
such a shift in the very nature of danger and threat from the actual to the virtual in
his account of what he called ‘the dangerous individual’ (Foucault 2003b).
In short, liberal governance requires a constant auditing and sorting of life to
determine which life forms are productive and which not; indeed to determine
how life processes themselves work so that you can empower yourself by align-
ing yourself with them or intervene to pre-empt, prevent and otherwise forestall
developments which may on the contrary threaten life (Bowker and Starr 2000).
Following this logic of the way in which war gets problematized biopolitically, it
is easy to see that pre-emptive war, for example, is no simple or wicked departure
from the laws and norms of war. Neither, on the other hand, is pre-emptive war a
self-evidently sensible thing to do. As the Iraq war and other such demonstrate,
time and again, pre-emptive or preventive action may very well excite, inten-
sify and extend the dangers which it seeks to pre-empt. Pre-emptive wars are not
simply, or not only, the product of wicked machination and the desire to inflict
strategic surprise on geopolitical rivals (Gray 2005). Pre-emptive war is a natural
corollary of the biopoliticization of the liberal way of war. It follows logically
from the very grid of intelligibility which biopoliticization brings to rule and war.
For it very quickly becomes clear that not all living things are productive for life
and not all living processes – cancer cell development, for example – are support-
ive of life. Certain life processes may systematically endanger life, just as certain
forms of life may endanger life. As a biopolitical form of rule, the liberal way
of rule has to educate itself into discriminating between which life processes are
good and which life processes are bad; and it is continuously suspended between
governing them too little and governing them too much. It must similarly educate
itself into discriminating between which life forms are good and which life forms
are bad. According to this logic, it is itself therefore dangerous to assume that
every life form and every life process is benign. It is in fact similarly dangerous
to assume in advance that you know which are good and which are bad, because

life forms and life processes change their character; their properties are not fixed,
they continually mutate and change. What was once benign can readily also be-
come malign. Biopolitics of security and war therefore find themselves dealing
with a moving, mutable, mutating and metamorphosing target. Here, there is no
Schmittean existential enemy defined, in advance or by what Schmitt calls the
miracle of the decision, by its radical otherness (1985: 36). No such existential or
epistemic comfort is available to the shifting challenges and dilemmas with which
liberal strategists are confronted. There is, instead, only a continuously open and
changing field of formation: the very continuous and contingent emergency of
emergence of life as being-in-formation; becoming dangerous.
The liberal way of war thus evolves directly in response to the continuously
changing topography of rule which necessarily arises in consequence of prob-
lematizing the task of governance around the promotion of species existence.
Here, too, we also see emerging the strategic calculus of necessary killing which
comes to characterize the liberal way of war. It revolves around the threats to
species existence which arise within the very processes of life itself. It is not only
concerned with differentiating the good from the bad in life processes and among
forms of life. It must look to control the heterogenetic processes of life production
itself. For the one sure way of ensuring that threats do not arise in life processes is
to learn how to manipulate life processes in advance of any such threats material-
izing: to ensure that they do not in fact materialize. But the strategic calculus of
necessary killing which begins to emerge with the biopolitics that characterizes
the liberal way of war is by no means confined to negative tasks: to preventing
unwanted things from emerging. Quite the contrary: it is very much also a positive
and productive task which, for example, now seeks to enhance species properties:
to think better, to see better, to hear better, to sense better, to move more quickly,
to evade more skilfully, to adapt more generally and so on. The biopoliticized
military body itself seeks its own such corporeal self-enhancement as it pursues
the task of warring against the threats which arise through the very production
and emergent characteristics of species life itself (Dillon 2002; Dillon and Reid
2001).
Liberal strategizers refining the strategic calculus of necessary killing which
governs the liberal way of war do not, therefore, simply seek to anticipate the
future. They must necessarily look to control the very process of morphogenesis
itself by means of which the future of living things is engendered. They are, there-
fore, not only interested in asking which forms of life are good, bad or indifferent.
Neither are they confined to asking which life processes may acerbically threaten
life. Ultimately, they are concerned not simply to know what constitutes a living
thing: how life processes operate. They are compelled to ask what kind of living
things we might prefer to have, and how they can be formed. It is precisely here
that the goal of emancipating the species exceeds the business of the species, as
it is, and enters the business of species ‘transformation’: what it might become in
the future. As life itself becomes the battlespace, so also does the battlespace, too,
become defined not simply in terms of the future, but in terms of the ‘transforma-
tion’ required of species being in order to secure a future held out for it (Owens et
al. 2003; Suresh 2001).

It is here, also, that instead of asking what needs to be done the question mu-
tates into asking what might be done. Instead of a mere field of formation said
to be responding to the expressed interests and wills of subjects, the biopolitical
character of liberal rule and war opens up a field of ‘transformation’ explicitly
designed to excite novel dreams, desires and monsters. It cannot simply be rep-
resentative of individual or collective will, since it must tutor that will. Neither
can the tutoring be confined to satisfying extant interests and demands. It must
necessarily tutor in possibilities, novel appetites and unimagined desires. Affects
as much as effects come under the rubric of transformation. Feelings as much as
outcomes fall under the rule of emergence and governing through contingency.
The real here thus very much includes a newly emerging biopolitical imaginary of
power and not merely currently existing forms of power relations.
As we document some of these and other related developments in subsequent
chapters, we will have travelled a long way from the ontopolitical theology of
the original liberal subject divinely endowed with reason and rights. The subject
died with the divinity that endowed it, in the sense that hardly anyone seriously
believes in them but one is nonetheless ritually compelled to invoke them since
they remain the burnt-out horizon of the modern.5 This is no mere game of rep-
resentation in which the will of the subject rules through the application of its
sovereign reason. This is a techno-scientific world of militarized and commercial-
ized production of living entities in which ‘life’, whatever composite information
exchange processes may be said now to constitute life, is reduced to the complex
of transactions that constitute both the organization of the living entity as well as
its informationally mediated intercourse with its environment; the better to sub-
ject the constant transformation and change, which accompanies its processes of
emergence, to the remorseless audit and adjudication of biopolitical forms of rule
in pursuit of the imaginary of a thoroughly domesticated species, continuously
endangered nevertheless by the vital threat of the very life force which animates
it (Reid 2007).
Here, one requires, for example, a knowledge and understanding of the condi-
tions under which the rule of species life and its benign evolution breaks down.
The development of such forms of knowledge was and continues to be of indis-
pensable value to the liberal project. Without it, pursuit of the ideal of removing
war from the life of the biohuman literally makes no sense. Once more it is impor-
tant to add a rider, as we did to the observation in the previous chapter in respect
of the crossing of an historical threshold in regard to war during the course of the
twentieth century. There we added that just because you cannot afford something
– to continue to sanction war in a world characterized by the spread of weapons
of mass destruction capable of precipitating ecological as well as human catastro-
phe – does not mean you will find a way to stop it. Similarly here, removing war
from the life of the species ultimately entails securing knowledge not simply of
forms of life but of life processes themselves. It does not follow that because you
will require such knowledge that you will secure it, or that it will secure you; that
the knowledge you do acquire will realize your goal. More likely, the more that
knowledge of life processes allows direct intervention into them, the more likely

it is that life goals themselves will change. The more likely it is that the ‘nature’
involved will itself be reinvented, rather than merely represented. Indeed, such is
already taking place on a massive global scale in response to the confluence of
the digital and molecular revolutions; from the near ubiquitous introduction of
computer-mediated information and communication technologies, to the emer-
gence of whole new global bio-economies and the transformation of traditional
economies through not only the introduction of ICT but also the more recent in-
troduction of bioinformation and bioproductive processes (Cooper 2008; Waldby
and Mitchell 2006; Jasanoff 2005). It is indicated also in the revival of interest in
human enhancement via liberal eugenics (Harris 2007; Mills 2006; Agar 2004).
Whereas liberalism’s biopolitical task was that of learning how to rule in align-
ment with the properties of species life, it was not liberal political theory, political
science or international relations that contributed most to teaching liberal regimes
how to rule biopolitically. It is instead the life sciences themselves, broadly con-
ceived, which have taught liberalism most about the task in particular of species
governance. It is in the emergence of the life sciences, most classically the life
science of biology, that the search to understand the conditions for species secu-
rity was most earnestly conducted from the late seventeenth to the late twentieth
century. In turn it was in these sciences that the possibility arose of being able
to distinguish between life forms and life processes productive of life and those
inimical to life: processes and organisms which threatened life, brought death into
life, and warred against life and the realization, especially, of its potential. Here
liberalism would learn how to pursue and realize the full emancipatory possibili-
ties of species existence, the material prospering of species life, and in that very
process refine the strategic calculus of necessary killing which would simultane-
ously also govern the war it would have to wage against the very forces within life
which threatened the prospering of life: forces which turn out in deathly paradox
to be integral to the life force itself. The impact of these same life sciences can be
traced directly in the thinking of liberal philosophers throughout the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries as much as the twentieth.
Kant’s account of the prospects for establishing perpetual peace, for example,
was predicated, crucially, on prior claims concerning the distinctiveness and unity
of the species derived from the shift then occurring from natural history to the life
science of biology. Kant considered himself only a novice in this new field of sci-
entific investigation (Zammito 2006: 43), but such was the force of their attraction
in late eighteenth-century Europe, Prussia especially, that he became a willing
proponent of some of the central claims of its earliest pioneers. Novel distinctions
produced by the advent of biological thought, such as that between species and
race, were adopted by Kant and put to use politically and philosophically. Influ-
enced by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, in particular, a scientific contemporary,
Kant sought to distinguish between those characteristics universal to the species
from the ‘degenerative’ attributes of races, said to represent deviations from the
common stock of humanity (Zammito 2006: 41). In turn Kant placed high em-
phasis on the development of ‘pragmatic knowledge’ concerning the human as
a particular expression of species life, differentiating it from ‘knowledge of the

races of men’ which ‘as produced by the play of nature is [only theoretical and]
not yet . . . pragmatic’ (Shell 2006: 65). Only through the biological determination
of the distinctions between properties essential to the species and the degenerative
attributes of races, Kant argued, could the political potential for perpetual peace
be realized.
Writing in the same period, Paine echoed and elaborated Kant’s thinking about
the links between the biological constitution of the species and the peaceful and
secure constitution of states and societies. Securing the species from war required
transforming the principles and practices of government, Paine argued, so that
they would promote the life of the species rather than conserving practices and
principles, especially war, that threatened it with death. ‘Government is for the
living, and not for the dead’, he quipped (1995: 441). Governing for the living
meant, for Paine, chiefly freeing the species from unnecessary impositions on its
generative capacities. Uncannily echoing Foucault’s account of how early bio-
politics of the eighteenth century prioritized circulation (Foucault 2007; Foucault
2003), Paine observed that governing for the living meant enabling ‘the unceasing
circulation of interest, which, passing through its million channels, invigorates
the whole mass of civilized man’ (1995: 553) and which creates ‘that great chain
of connection which holds it together’ (1995: 551). Likewise, however, it also
meant defending the species from those forms of life that exist ‘separated from the
general stock’, and which in so doing inhibit the circulatory vigour of the species,
even threatening it with a ‘tendency to degenerate’ (1995: 480). In Paine’s work,
the Jew and the aristocrat were singled out as exemplary models of the type of
enemy with which the species must be prepared to do battle (1995: 480). In seek-
ing to conserve the interests of such degenerative forces, wicked governments
not only govern against the species, Paine argued, but act on behalf of ‘the beast’
(1995: 582).
We cite Kant and Paine rather than the more explicit biologically driven doc-
trines of the nineteenth-century utilitarians merely to emphasize our general point
about liberalism’s preoccupation with learning how to rule by attending to the
properties of species being. Establishing the generative essence of the species
was a necessary corollary of the ways in which liberal political philosophy be-
gan conceiving the subject in biohuman terms. It was essential also for the ways
in which liberal states governed as well as how they became governmentalized.
As the Paine and Kant references illustrate, biological thought shaped a newly
conceived type of enemy: one which did not simply make designs on your ter-
ritory, resources or people but which threatened the degeneration of the species
as a whole; a logic which Foucault conjugated in the last lecture of Society Must
Be Defended when he observed how race was a necessary sorting category for
biopolitics (Dillon 2009; Reid 2006a; Foucault 2003).
It was at this precise historical juncture, in the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries, and in precisely those continental European states and societies
where liberal thought was becoming newly operational in driving revolution-
ary change, that life was to be mobilized en masse to wage war on behalf of
l’homme nouveau. The life sciences flourished in the early years of republican

rule in France especially. The Revolution demoted physics, while creating 12 new
chairs in biological science, making possible the age of comparative anatomy
and establishing the French tradition of experimental biology (Gillispie 1959: 3).
Literary theorists have also noted the influence of discourses concerning ‘genera-
tion’ and ‘regeneration’, deriving from natural history and biology, in the literary
works which celebrated the advent of the republican regime (Sainson 2001). Bo-
naparte, too, was to assume the vocabulary, describing himself as the agent for a
‘universal regeneration which Nature herself demanded’ (Lasky 1976: 481). The
emancipation of the species from war via the advent and procreation of republican
virtue and rule in Europe demanded mobilization of the species on a scale hitherto
unprecedented; with a loss of life which was similarly also historically new. Just
as in Machiavelli’s time, revolutionary war on behalf of the people quickly gave
way to imperial war fuelled by population, and it was hard, as ever, to tell the
difference between the two (Hörnqvist 2004; Pocock 2003).
International relations in the age of emergence

Representatives of liberal internationalism in International Relations, following
on from their philosophical predecessors such as Paine and Kant, claim a special
analytical competence in relation to the allied problematics of peace, security and
war. They trace that competence back through the liberal philosophical tradition.
Its special ambition was to detail the dangers and injustices of the state system by
strengthening international legal and non-governmental institutions expressing a
community view independent of state agencies as a counterweight to the machi-
nation and oppression of states. The development of this ideal can be identified in
the rise and fall of the League of Nations, and the subsequent institutionalization
and growth of the United Nations. Along with this vocation went the desire more
generally to promote the ethos and institutions of liberal representative and ac-
countable government. It was assumed that such institutions not only gave more
just expression to the voice of individuals and groups but thereby also contributed
to the eradication of war. The more states and societies look like liberal states and
societies, the democratic peace movement, for example, has maintained, the less
war there will be; and they have documented how, although liberal states may
war savagely with other states, they do not appear much to war with each other
these days (Russett 2001; Maoz and Russett 1993). It is a simple argument: the
more you remove difference the more you will remove the sources of enmity. If
we were all the same there would be no one to fight and nothing to fight over.
But, as Kant and Paine illustrated, that internationalism also had its biological and
racializing side.
In the twentieth century, and despite their widespread popularity in liberal as
well as fascist societies before the Second World War especially, biologized so-
cial doctrines, eugenics in particular, were radically discredited by the genocidal
racism of the Nazi regime. What the Nazis did was to take the long-established
idea that, because some racial groups claimed to be superior to others, inferior
racial groups could be swept away so that the stronger could prevail. That way,

too, the overall life of the species would be promoted because its stock would
be improved. These arguments had, however, been the ‘stock in trade’ of liberal
biopolitics from the seventeenth to the early part of the twentieth century. They
were the standard popular and political discourses of the European empires, both
liberal and autocratic, as much as they remained characteristic of certain aspects
of American domestic politics up to and long after the war between the states.
They also helped impel and rationalize its early imperial ventures into the rest of
the Americas as well as across the Pacific.
Whereas Foucault demonstrated that racism was a logical consequence of bio-
politicization (Dillon 2009; Reid 2006a; Foucault 2003), other historians have
regularly observed also how it widely characterized liberal and other imperial-
isms. Familiar in the seventeenth-century plantations of Ireland, the destruction
of indigenous peoples in the Americas and the colonization of Africa and Asia,
from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries (Stoler 1995), race was a well-
developed discursive, political and socio-cultural practice also in the polizeiwis-
senschaft of Europe itself (Dillon and Neal 2009; Foucault 2003). Adding intense
nationalism, economic collapse and geopolitical rivalry following defeat in war,
industrialization of death and the peculiarly vicious and historically rooted tradi-
tion of European anti-Semitism along with modern mass means of mobilization
and propaganda to the mixture completed the extraordinarily toxic intensification
of racialized biopolitics which led, in the Germany of the 1920s and 1930s, to the
holocaust of the 1940s.6
Consequently, although species life nonetheless remained a vital referent ob-
ject for liberal idealism, especially in its international policy after 1945, different
ways of formulating the properties of species existence had to be found: specifi-
cally how it held the common fate of biohumanity, rather than that of a favoured
race, in its grasp. In other words, if species properties were to remain the referent
object of government, they had to be construed differently and the governance
following from them had to be formulated differently. Liberal biopolitics had
therefore somehow to elide the ways in which all biopolitically driven regimes,
including those at one time of liberal imperialism itself, are disposed to favour
some aspects of the species over others, as a necessary consequence of seeking
to promote the life of the species. Irrespective of the force of other racial driv-
ers – there have been and remain very many – biopolitics installs its own. For
you cannot make life live without exercising discrimination in favour of those
forms of life, and those life processes, which you judge to be more beneficial to
the species, over those which are not. Indeed, we are arguing that the liberal way
of war is governed, in part, by the very exercise of such discrimination and the
application of lethal violence to it. Rather than terminally discrediting the confla-
tion of politics with animal husbandry, however, the horror into which European
civilization plunged between 1914 and 1945 prompted renewed efforts to revivify
the project of species emancipation without falling into the trap of racializing it.
Its lack of success arises not only from the degree to which plural sources of rac-
ism are deeply inscribed in the cultural experience of Atlantic societies, but also
from the logic of the biopolitics which widely characterizes its political traditions,

institutions and ambitions. Race, under one guise or another, is an ineradicable
entailment of biopolitics.
In December 1949, a prestigious group of biologists met under the auspices
of the United Nations Education Science and Culture Organization (UNESCO)
in Paris. They began their deliberations by declaring: ‘mankind is one . . . all
men belong to the same species’ (quoted in Baker 1974: 65). UNESCO had been
established in 1945 with the express purpose of preventing the future abuse of
scientific knowledge, especially biological and medical knowledge, for political
purposes (Finnemore 1993: 77). Tasked with the role of internationalizing sci-
ence and bringing it under the auspices of the United Nations, UNESCO helped
institute a new optimistic departure in the liberal project. Its insistence that the
species was a unity was widely proclaimed in international politics after 1945 and
the objective of removing war from the life of the species was reaffirmed.
UNESCO in short exemplified the way in which the unity of the species was
explicitly embraced once more as a transcendental object of rule for post-war
liberal internationalism. In this respect, species-talk became common talk in dis-
courses concerning the future governance of the international system globally.
As in the past, so in the years following the Second World War, the destiny of
the species was claimed to lie in the biopolitics of liberal rule nationally and
internationally. Julian Huxley, the first Director-General of UNESCO, eloquently
articulated the new biopolitical zeitgeist of the post-war world. Writing in 1963,
he observed that ‘the explosive growth of scientific and historical knowledge in
the past hundred years, especially about biological knowledge and human evolu-
tion, coupled with the rise of rationalist criticism of established theologies and
ancient philosophies had cleared the ground’ for a ‘revolution in thought’ (1992:
246). Huxley looked towards how the burgeoning new knowledge of what it is
to be a living thing might advance that enlightenment of the species to which
liberal thinkers, pamphleteers and propagandists had always appealed. Here was
the prospect of a science that might truly deliver the human from the fate of being
reduced to the ‘cannon and bomb fodder’ of sovereigns, tyrants and crazed dicta-
tors – of whom it had had more than its fair share. Here, Huxley proclaimed, was
the opportunity, finally, to wrestle authentically with ‘the fundamental question of
human destiny – What are people for?’ (1992: 246).7
Predicting an end to the geopolitical threat of mutually assured nuclear de-
struction, upon which the peace of the age was then precariously founded, Huxley
looked forward to the development of a global project that would realize a truer
‘fulfillment’ for the species through new global institutions like the United Na-
tions. ‘We want,’ he demanded,
more varied and fuller achievement in human societies, as against drabness

and shrinkage: We want more variety as against monotony. We want more en-
joyment and less suffering. We want more beauty and less ugliness. We want
more adventure and disciplined freedom, as against routine and slavishness.
We want more knowledge, more interest, more wonder, as against ignorance
and apathy.
(1992: 246–47)

In common with his liberal predecessors, Huxley expressed optimism that greater
self-knowledge would emancipate the species, advancing it beyond ‘the threshold
of another major revolution, involving a new pattern of thought and a new ap-
proach to human destiny and its practical problems.’ This would usher in ‘a new
phase of human history which I like’, he proclaimed, ‘to call the Evolutionary
Age’ (1992: 243).
Of all the practical problems Huxley urged upon the United Nations, there was
one that he addressed in detail. ‘Above all’, he argued,
we need a world population policy . . . we want every country to have a popu-
lation policy, just as it has an economic policy or a foreign policy. We want
the United Nations to have a population policy. We want all the international
agencies of the UN to have a population policy . . . if we fail to control the
forces of our own reproduction, the human race will be sunk in a flood of
struggling people, and we, its present representatives, will be conniving at
its future disaster.
(1992: 247–50)
Saving the species required, Huxley urged, constituting a new target for interna-
tional governance, that of ‘world population’. Thus did Foucault’s early biopoli-
tics of population begin to go global (Foucault 2003). In the advent of two, then
new and distinct, developments, one of which he named ‘the ecological revolu-
tion’ and the other ‘the Humanist revolution’, Huxley identified a new security
strategy for the species. Via the ecological revolution, the species would establish
a new ‘science of relational adjustment’ (Huxley 1992: 244), which he predicted
would in time become ‘the basic science of the new age’ (1992: 245). Allied with
it, the Humanist revolution would then realize the species’ ‘duty and destiny . . .
to be the spearhead and creative agent of the overall evolutionary process on this
planet’ (1992: 246).
The enthusiasm with which Huxley correlated ‘human destiny’ with the ‘fu-
ture of the species’ was a widely shared and historically well-established trope of
liberal biopolitics. Yet it also marked a profound shift in their development after
1945. For liberals of the early modern era, such as Kant and Paine, the life sci-
ences, and biological thought especially, were a tremendous but disorganized and
semi-concealed conceptual resource which was plundered in a more or less ad hoc
manner to furnish novel philosophical claims concerning the nature of the species,
and to advance political programmes of national and international reform. When
it came to engaging in species-talk for political or philosophical purposes, neither
Paine nor Kant made much direct reference to the impact of life science on their
thinking. In contrast, the life sciences were explicitly embraced by liberals after
1945. Indeed they became ever more central not simply to its articulation but
also to its material practices. Increasingly, the life sciences were to provide the
grid of intelligibility according to which liberal rule developed in the post-World
War II era, both nationally and internationally; not least, as we will detail in the
following chapters, in respect of the liberal way of war. UNESCO in particular

was an international lynchpin in building a more strategic relationship between
the life sciences and the institutions and practices of international governance, its
constitution stating that by advancing ‘the educational and scientific and cultural
relations of the peoples of the world’ it would pursue the ‘objectives of interna-
tional peace and of the common welfare of mankind’ (UNESCO 1949).
Huxley’s prediction that ecology would prove to be the ‘basic science’ for
a new age in international relations, with the UN governing the political proc-
esses by which its laws would be applied internationally on behalf of the life of
biohumanity, has proved close to the mark. But while ideals of human destiny
and species security have remained an integral part of the lexicon of liberalism,
the implications of ecological conceptualizations of the nature of species life,
the predicaments and dangers it is said to face, and conceptions of the strategies
through which it might secure itself, have altered quite considerably the forms
that post-1945, and especially post-Cold War, liberalism has taken. The forms of
biological thought that were so influential for the constitution of early modern
liberal discourses concerning ‘man and his species’ have been to a large extent
superseded. The laws that pertain to the biological life of species are no longer
considered distinct from the laws that pertain to other non-biological life forms.
The development and security of any given species is now understood as being
dependent on the relations of that species to its wider environment, including not
just its relations with other instances of species life, but all organic and even non-
organic forms of life. Governing in accordance with the interests and needs of the
species, therefore, involves a significantly expanded remit from that assumed by
more classical forms of liberalism, informed as they were by more parsimonious
understandings of the conditions for species development and security. Liberal-
ism’s early account of the biohuman here now rapidly progresses into accounts of
the ‘posthuman’ (Hayles 1999; Haraway 1991).
Conclusion
Contemporary debates in International Relations continue to proceed as if ques-
tions concerning the nature of the ‘human’, especially the human-as-species, its
needs, interests and potential futures, were essentially settled. Modern interna-
tional relations remains generally conceived as a centuries-old drama in which
liberal attempts to promote global conditions for advancing human peace and
prosperity perennially run into conflict with the interest of states protecting their
sovereignty and pursuing their traditional aggrandizement in an anarchical realm
grandly titled ‘the international’. Thus the contemporary development of liberal
internationalism, in particular, continues to follow the line laid out by Paine cen-
turies earlier. It continues to tell a foundational story, of a species in pursuit of
self-evident forms of emancipation in contest with sovereign states which regu-
larly frustrate that interest. The experience of the twentieth century in particular
– the fate of the League of Nations and collective security as much as that of the
United Nations – is written so as to give that story a contemporary gloss.
Liberal internationalism reached its zenith in the period following the dissolu-
tion of the Cold War. But even here it is said that states continue to frustrate the

march towards liberal peace. This story is not fantasy. States do continuously
pursue self-interested and even wicked policies, while proclaiming the best of
intentions. States, liberal states especially, often also seem to be at least as much
devoted to the interests of global corporations as they are to the principles of rep-
resentative and accountable government. Societies fallen into civil war also suffer
grievously from the absence of recognized authorities as much as other societies
suffer grievously from the predations of recognized ones. Achieving hegemonic
status, and violently committed to its retention, liberal states such as the British
Empire in the past and the American Empire of the twenty-first century are regu-
larly also said to betray the liberalism they were constituted to promote: a liberal
jeremiad, founded in what Pocock called ‘the Machiavellian moment’, which
goes back to at least the eighteenth century (Hörnqvist 2004; Pocock 2003).
This story takes little or no account, however, of the biopolitical drivers his-
torically at work in liberal politics. No account is taken of the entailments which
follow from organizing politics and power around the referent object of ‘species’;
in short, from making biological existence the foundation of political existence.
Currently more popular Schmittian critiques of liberal regimes often also attack
the ways in which liberal regimes hijack the interests of ‘humanity’ to disguise
their supposedly more material geopolitical ambitions. However, these critiques
also rarely question the biologized account of the human at stake here (for exam-
ple Chandler 2006; Zolo 2002); what follows when species existence becomes the
referent object of political being. As in Marx’s works, also, the question of what is
understood by species, and the dangerous drivers which are installed when mak-
ing species life the referent object of politics, remain to be seriously questioned
(Althusser 2003: 85–154).
Here, then, is a real paradox. By focusing on the structural limits imposed on
the possibilities for species emancipation by the institution of state sovereignty,
critics of liberalism act only to disguise the ways in which the subject of this
supposed struggle, that is to say the exigencies of species life itself, shapes the
very ambitions and forms of rule said to be restraining it. When species existence
becomes foundational to, and pervades the operation of, political existence, in
theory and in practice, the properties of species life will begin to dictate the terms
under which the authority and legitimacy of states will also be expressed, and
state power exercised locally and globally. Rather than species life restrained by
states, contemporary politics, both local and global, is more rigorously determined
than ever, at the micro as well as the macro level, by species criteria and modes of
political discourse which express themselves in terms of the currently hegemonic
informationalization of species existence.
Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the contemporary liberal way of
rule and war. To the degree that the state still defines much of politics locally and
globally, and to the degree that states have been governmentalized biopolitically,
precisely this increasing alliance of sovereign states with species life as, itself,
the primary engine of continuous liberalization helps define the liberal way of
rule and war biopolitically, and we analyse it further in the following chapters.
We do so next by documenting the informationalization of life. Thereafter, we go
on to demonstrate how, in conducting detailed audits of life required to specify,

in novel ways and through novel complexity discourses derived from the infor-
mationalization of life, what was required to make life live locally and globally,
the regime of global liberal governance which succeeded the bipolarity of the
Cold War simultaneously also contributed towards specifying the discourse of
biopolitical endangerment which has fuelled the liberal way of war from the turn
of the century to the present.

4 Informationalizing life
Life is no longer that which can be distinguished in a more or less certain fashion
from the mechanical; it is that in which all possible distinctions between living
beings have their basis . . . [a] transition from the taxonomic to the synthetic no-
tion of life.
Michel Foucault
Introduction
Historically, the account of what life is and how it is said to be constituted has
changed, especially in the last 150 years; and particularly in the last 50 years. We
do not intend to rehearse the well-known story of the transformation of biology
through Darwin’s Origin of Species, or the epic story of the informationalization
of life biologically through the gene and the discovery of the genetic code, or
the moves toward industrial replication of the polymer chain reaction and other
molecular processes for the recombination and production of genetic material
(Cooper 2008; Rabinow 1996; Olby 1994). There are as many stories to be told
about cybernetics, complexity and the digital revolution, through which language
and information were electronically reduced to code, as there are stories to be
told about DNA, through which biological life was also reduced to code: the one
binary, the other chemical. Equally, there are as many stories to be told about
how the reduction of language and information to electronic code revolutionized
understandings of living systems as there are stories about how the reduction of
life to genetic code revolutionized the biological understanding of life. This is a
curious and complex historical confluence of both thought and practice. Its impact
on our civilization has been profound, and, in respect of the molecularization of
biology in particular, has probably only just begun.
The confluence did not occur simply as the result of the transfer of metaphors,
although to some degree it did: Jacques Monod, for example, refers to ‘the in-
tracellular cybernetic network’ (Monod 1997: 119). Neither did it come about
simply through the scientific and intellectual borrowing by which key terms and
concepts travelled from one domain to another, although to some degree it did that
as well. As François Jacob explained: ‘The [genetic] programme is a model bor-

rowed from electronic computers. It equates the genetic material of an egg with
the magnetic tape of a computer’ (Jacob 1989: 9). It did not come about, finally, as
a mere accidental coincidence (Canguilhem 1991). The confluence of the digital
and molecular revolutions was a complex historical conjuncture in which many
of the individuals, schools and institutions involved directly engaged with one
another, went to conferences together, and learned from one another at a distance
as well. Even more practically speaking than that, the molecular revolution could
not have developed into the widespread techno-scientific industrial, and increas-
ingly economic and commercial as well as medical, revolution, which it is well
on the way to becoming, if it had not been for digitized information and commu-
nication systems. We do not mean to conflate these developments, or the various
accounts of information and code which they are still in the process of refining
and debating. Nor do we set ourselves up to adjudicate between them in terms of
their respective claims to tell the truth about life. We are not interested in telling
the truth about life. We are in no position to tell the truth about life.
Since there is no single, simple or complex truth to tell about life, and since all
truth-telling necessarily also entails power, so life must relate to itself in ways that
are able to adjudicate both its truth-telling and the power such truth-telling pre-
supposes. For, albeit they are different projects, power is as much an entailment of
truth-telling as truth-telling is an entailment of power, and the truths which power
tells are what makes it idiomatic, the form of power that it is: in this instance
biopower, or the power which, taking life as its referent object, seeks to tell the
truth about life in reducing life to the kind of material which can bear the imprint
of biopower and express biopolitical demands such as those of, for example,
self-disciplining, self-empowering, self-organizing, self-regeneration and so on.
In telling part of the story of how, in their biopoliticization, liberal rule and war
helped reduce life to species existence and, subsequently, also helped to reduce
the truth about species existence to information and code, it is not our intention
to do the same. We are not saying that species life is all that there is to say about
life. Quite the contrary: we would not be concerned to provide this critique of the
liberal way of rule and war, as an expression of biopolitics, if we did not subscribe
to the view that there is more to life than species existence, as well; in fact, that
there is also more to species existence than information and code.
That said, just as the truth of species existence has always been central to
the liberal way of rule and war, so also did the reduction of species existence to
information and code become central to the contemporary expression of liberal
biopolitics. Ours is therefore a biopolitical analysis, not a history of science; al-
though the history of science should be compulsory reading for students of poli-
tics, both local and global. Albeit each of these domains – cybernetics, complexity
and molecularization – continues to be a changing site of controversy about life,
our concern is, instead, to detail how life became informationalized through these
domains; because the informationalization of life, which they helped institute,
has had such an extensive impact on the liberal way of rule and war, especially
since the dissolution of bipolarity, the advent of global liberal governance and
the hegemony of neoliberalism. Especially, but not exclusively, because these

Informationalizing life 57
developments are composed of many other dynamics and have been decades in
gestation as well.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the life of biopower had, however,
become the life of information mechanically as much as biologically. One of the
most important observations to be made about the influence of the digital and
molecular revolutions on the biopoliticization of rule and war is, in fact, the way
in which it ushered in a new domain of mechanics: of life as mechanism and of
mechanisms as life. As Monod explained:
living beings are chemical machines . . . the functional coherence of so com-
plex a machine, which is autonomous as well, calls for a cybernetic system
governing and controlling the chemical activity at numerous points . . . the
organism is a self-constructing machine . . . It shapes itself autonomously by
dint of constitutive internal interactions.
(Monod 1997: 45–6)
François Jacob concurred: ‘biology belongs to the new age of mechanism’ (Jacob
1989: 9; see also Hull 2001). In the process, certain salient shifts took place which
construed this referent object of liberal rule and war in ways that changed the
very discourses and practices of liberal rule and war. Life, thus newly figured as
informational power-object, posed new questions and challenges for biopower:
‘new objects have become accessible to investigation’ (Jacob 1989: 14); new pos-
itivities and empiricities, Foucault would say, were opened up. Biopower’s early
preoccupation with circulation, contingency and connectivity was, for example,
massively amplified by the biological and information sciences: ‘modifications
in the programme occur at random. It is only afterwards that a sorting operation
takes place, by the very fact that every organism which appears is immediately
put to the test of reproduction’ (Jacob 1989: 5). We would emphasize also here
that in the informationalization of life it was never simply a matter of elevat-
ing contingency alone; a new account of the ancient correlation of contingency
and necessity (Vuillemin 1996) emerged in which, although contingency itself
became necessary, the very originary contingency of the biosphere and of the
human was nonetheless newly encased in iron laws of evolutionary and genetic
programming:
Once incorporated into the DNA structure, the accident – essentially un-
predictable because always singular – will be mechanically and faithfully
replicated and translated: that is to say, both multiplied and transposed into
millions or billions of copies. Drawn out of the realm of pure chance, the
accident enters into that of necessity, of the most implacable certainties.
(Monod 1997: 118)
In the process, circulation did not only go universal and global in novel ways,
considered by Foucault largely in local terrestrial terms; it has now gone molecu-
lar as well as global. Indeed, the molecular provided another version of the global
in terms of ‘the biosphere’.

If, chemically, the components are the same and are synthesised by the same
processes in all living beings, what is the source of their prodigious mor-
phological and physiological diversity? . . . We now have the solution to this
problem. The universal components – the nucleotides on the one side, the
amino acids on the other – are the logical equivalents of an alphabet in which
the structure and consequently the specific associative functions of proteins
are spelled out. In this alphabet can therefore be written all the diversity of
structures and performances the biosphere contains. More, with succeeding
cellular generation it is the ne varietur reproduction of the text, written in
the form of DNA nucleotide sequences, that guarantees the invariance of the
species.
(Monod 1997: 104)
In the form of the connectivity of networks, circulation was related to connectiv-

ity, the claim being that the more you circulate the more you connect information-
ally. In the process, contingency was also ontologized; not mere luck, accident or
uncertainty, contingency was widely recognized as the very nature of being. In
all this there were profound epistemic as well as ontological shifts that followed
in the political as well as the scientific account of species life, and in the relative
priority accorded to bodies and relations, which were to have a widespread impact
on biopolitical forms of rule and war. The implications for international politics
will be dealt with in the following chapter, where we will see how, in the advance
of network thinking, it rose to prominence as a sine qua non of effective govern-
ance both locally and globally.
Scientifically speaking, the truths being told about life changed their emphasis.
In truth, much of what was announced as new, exciting, and novel had done the
rounds before.1 In truth, the elevation of relationality over pre-formed bodies, for
example, goes back philosophically and politically to the dawn of the modern
age: witnessed for example in Hobbes but systematized most spectacularly in
Kant’s Copernican revolution philosophically (Meillassoux 2008). In truth also,
however, a huge amount in biology and in the information and communication
sciences, especially, was also radically new, with far-reaching social, economic
and political as well as cultural effects.
Relationality, for example, was not simply elevated over bodies, it was con-
strued as informational. In this informationalization of the mode of relating,
the generative principle of formation which governed the mode of relating – in
internet-speak one would, for example, now say protocols (Galloway and Thacker
2007; Galloway 2004) – bodies became bodies that were continuously in forma-
tion through the very ways in which informational exchange with one another was
organized and excited adaptation and change: ‘We are aware that any phenom-
enon, any event, any cognition implies interactions which by themselves generate
modifications in the elements of the system’ (Monod 1997: 100). Such processes
became prized and prioritized economically, politically and socially as much as
they were biologically.

In our vocabulary, prioritizing the anteriority of radical relationality as infor-
mationalized exchange prized for its adaptive properties meant that the world
was no longer seen to be composed of pre-formed bodies with fixed attributes. It
became instead a world said to be composed of many different modes of relating
operating according to their own informational protocols, the effects of which
were the engendering of bodies-in-formation with continuously adaptive, emer-
gent and changing properties. Securing liberal rule followed suit; the ‘security’ of
liberal rule followed suit. The liberal way of rule and war hyperbolicized security
and became near paranoid politically as it governed thus through contingency,
preoccupied with monitoring the complex infrastructures of circulation and con-
nectivity upon which it increasingly depended because they were precisely the
mechanisms which also circulated new dangers and threats so effectively as well,
and fearful, finally, of the very bodies-in-formation whose adaptive properties
they so much extolled, because these too could go acerbic, causing unintentional
as well as intended catastrophe. While they instigated new formulations of threat
and danger, and engendered new types of enemy from terrorism to viral life, so
also did circulation, connectivity and contingency open up the prospect of mak-
ing war differently. Unless we at least sketch some of the modern genealogy of
this progressive informationalization of life, however, these developments would
appear, in the ways their champions regularly present them, as reified accounts
of life rather than socio-technical realizations of discoveries and developments
whose life histories not only could have been different but are currently still in
process as well.
Contingency
The universe was not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man. Our
number came up in the Monte Carlo game. Is it any wonder if, like the per-
son who has just made a million at the casino, we feel strange and a little
unreal?
Jacques Monod
Accounts of species being have not only undergone historical change since the
Aristotelian account which dominated the Christian world was overtaken by early
modern science (Lennox 2001; Monod 1997; Jacob 1989). The very nature of
living things themselves has been reconceived as a historical rather than a divine
phenomenon. Since Darwin, at the very least, living entities have been recon-
ceived not as fixed, but as mobile and mutable; their very composition under-
stood as subject to historical transformation and change. Increasingly also it has
come to be seen that such entities not only interact with each other and their en-
vironments, exhibiting often profound evolutionary shifts in their very biological
composition and behaviour; said to be internally composed, also, of a myriad of
chemical and other interactions and transactions, their very organization has come
to be figured as consisting of information or code. Historical, mutable, adaptive

and composed of informational exchange processes, while simultaneously also
mediating the continual environmental intercourse which also characterizes their
existence, these defining features of what is involved in being a living thing are
also said to determine their most distinguishing feature. Living entities are con-
tingent. Contingency here means that no external law governs their appearance,
and no external law governs their continuous adaptive emergence. Laws there are,
but these laws are said to be different from traditional causal laws. First, they are
immanent, sutured into the very composite structures of living things as infor-
mational exchange systems in constant information transmission, processing and
reception, through which means they are also said to exhibit non-linear adaptation
and change. Second, they are not simply causal in the sense that Newtonian laws
were said to be; they are widely regarded, for example, as probabilistic (Daston
1988). Third, one of their single most distinguishing features is non-linearity. Fi-
nally, they in turn give priority to programme, architecture, memory and design:
‘The organism . . . [is] the realization of a programme prescribed by its heredity’
(Jacob 1989: 2). Jacob stated the implications of this informationalization of life,
and its operation according to informationally mediated immanent laws of forma-
tion, reformation and design, in the most extraordinarily pithy way: ‘The intention
of a psyche has been replaced by the translation of a message’ (Jacob 1989: 2).
Non-linear means that the changes which living things exhibit cannot simply
be read off from the extrapolation of their previous behaviour or from the per-
manence of their fixed properties. Unlike Newton’s celestial bodies, not only do
living things exist in time and place but time and place make a difference to the
behaviour they exhibit and also to their very composition. Time and place are
therefore not fixed parameters within which living entities subsist. Time and place
are operators which help determine how well, or ill, they exist, as well as what
they actually consist in. Remove a living body from one habitat to another and
you will not only change its behaviour; you will also change its very composition,
in terms for example of how well it will thrive, whether or not it will starve or
run to fat, ruin its arteries, destroy its kidneys, or pickle its liver. Of course, time
itself is an equally if not even more peculiar foundational phenomenon than life.
Life and time nonetheless go together, which does not mean to say that we know
exactly what each is or how precisely they do go together, but, certainly, no time,
however it is described, means no life: ‘An organism is merely a transition, a
stage, between what was and what will be’ (Jacob 1989: 2).
In short, biology now teaches us that, over time, the properties, the very com-
position, of living entities are not fixed but are adaptive. So also is their behaviour.
Their historical complex adaptive emergence also exhibits unpredictable shifts,
mutations and change. Contingency, therefore, does not simply mean uncertainty
and unpredictability, nor mere luck or crude accident. It is said to be the locale
of immanent laws of becoming. Such laws, it is also said, can be observed in
different ways and knowledge of them can also serve their better governance:
their resilient adaptation, their compositional and behavioural re-structuring, re-
generation and re-modelling, for example, to provide bodies-in-formation that we
prefer rather than those which we do not.

No preformed and complete structure pre-existed anywhere: but the architec-
tural plan for it was present in its very constituents. It can therefore come into
being spontaneously and autonomously, without outside help and without the
injection of additional information. The necessary information was present,
but unexpressed, in the constituents.
(Monod 1997: 87)
That is the point about immanent laws. On the one hand they are as tyrannous
as externally issued commandments, since they cannot be ignored or disobeyed
without catastrophic consequences. On the other hand, unlike laws issued exter-
nally, by some supreme creator for example, immanent laws of becoming offer
the prospect of becoming differently should one learn how to play with them
correctly. As it became newly conceived in the modern period – a process which
many first date to Pascal (Hacking 1990) – contingency was progressively ontolo-
gized in what became a new modern account of the play of chance and necessity.
Biology had as much as statistics to do with this development; indeed, as Monod
and Jacob observe, we would not have the biology we have if it had not been al-
lied with mechanical statistics (Monod 1997; Jacob 1989).
Even its very origination, the molecular biologist Stuart Kauffman among oth-
ers now emphasizes, is the outcome of contingent correlations and circumstances.
Such contingency is no mere arbitrary uncertainty. Said now to be foundational
to life, it proves instead to be a novel epistemic object as well: a newly emergent
domain of calculability. Life’s composition and governance is contingently deter-
mined by the correlation of all manner of transactions, interactions, correlations,
circumstances and events. These themselves are, however, observed to display
their own laws, for example of probability, and life itself becomes amenable to
governance through, rather than despite, its radical contingency (Dillon 2007a).
Likewise, the liberal political discourse of governance and order has also changed.
Thus the claims that liberal regimes have made historically on behalf of the politi-
cal needs of the species have developed, as Foucault observed, like the biological
sciences as a whole, ‘in contingency’ (1991b: 12).
Biology – and ‘biology is not a unified science’ (Jacob 1989: 6) – has thus
always been and remains central to the scientific understanding of how life works.
This account of how it works not only shifted from the Aristotelian to the modern
account; within the modern period itself, the biological account of life has shifted
from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century as well.
But, when we refer to the life sciences, we are also referring to a wide range
of other scientific enquiries into the operation of life-like systems: into how non-
organic material may, for example, also be said to display life-like properties. As
we have indicated, perhaps the single most important developments here was that
concerning the way in which ‘information’ came to prominence as the vital sign
of life across a whole variety of new domains of scientific enquiry and technologi-
cal advance (Thacker 2004; Doyle 1997 Kittler 1990; Poster 1990). For, once the
transactions and interactions concerning biological and other forms of life-like
systems were construed in terms of information exchange, then the transactions

and interactions concerning all manner of ‘systems’ – mechanical and electronic
as well, for example – also came to be analysed in terms of life. What emerged
there, as Katherine Hayles noted, was ‘a theory of communication and control
applying equally to animals, humans and machines’ (Hayles 1999: 7).
Connectivity
To live is to collaborate.
William Burroughs
If you are connected you’re fucked.

K. W. Jeter
Such a radically posthuman, and indeed postorganic, theory of communication

and information had its origins in the development of wartime and post-war cy-
bernetics. We recover that history a little here for several reasons. In the first
instance it illustrates how connectivity of living systems was first conceived in
informational and communicative terms, and how this proceeded under the very
impetus of war and of military strategic demands and funding, which continued
unabated throughout the years following 1945. It also reveals some of the origins
of the terms ‘network’ and ‘emergence’, for example, which were to come to such
prominence at the end of the twentieth century. In addition, it also details how
language was first reduced to communication and communication to information
in ways which sought to mathematicize and objectify them by rigorously exclud-
ing the very subjects who were in communication, as well as the undecidability of
language as such; excising everything of significance in relation to the production
and circulation of ‘meaning’, for example, which had then to be reintroduced,
albeit in re-engineered form, later. Thus this history also shows how, at first ex-
cluded, subjects in communication had to be brought back into play, for example
as ‘audience’, in what we call second-order cybernetics, if the theory and sci-
ence of information was to break out of the narrow confines imposed upon it by
first-order cybernetics; a science indebted to Norbert Wiener’s wartime work. In
the course of these developments, the phenomena of deviance, non-linearity, and
breakdown began to be considered less as simple catastrophic failures of informa-
tion and communication and more as information-rich sites for communicational
analysis. Finally, we bring the story of cybernetics up to what we call third-order
cybernetics, in which the cybernetic story itself begins to mutate into the sciences
of complexity, which owed much to their cybernetic forebears but, as we shall see,
were indebted to many other areas of the natural and life sciences as well.
Of all the developments to which we intend this story to draw attention, how-
ever, the single most important one concerns life itself. Here, with respect to cy-
bernetics, we therefore address a second part of the triptych of twentieth-century
developments – digitized cybernetics, molecularization and now complexity –
which problematized the very delineation of what it was to be a living thing, not

least by appearing to breach ontological and epistemic boundaries between what
was living and what was not. To repeat, our concern is not to adjudicate the truth
of this new truth-telling about the vital signs of life. Our concern is, instead, to
prepare the way to address more directly how this truth-telling about life trans-
formed the biopolitics of liberal rule and war because the latter draw so extensively
on the former. If the molecularization of biology, in particular, emphasized the
contingency of life, the cybernetic informationalization of man–machine systems
similarly emphasized not only the foundational character of its informational and
communicative connectivities, but ultimately also the very locus of ‘information’
in uncertainty. Thus was it that the concept of life began down the path both
towards crossing the organic/inorganic divide and being conceived in radically
contingent terms as what we call the ‘emergency of continuous emergence’.
Cybernetics
By late 1940, with the exception of the British Isles, Nazi Germany had con-
quered Western Europe and was seeking to consolidate its continental air supe-
riority by extending it over the United Kingdom in preparation for a sea-borne
invasion. It was in the context of this geopolitical crisis that Norbert Wiener, the
inventor of cybernetics, corresponded with the doyen of scientific war research
in the United States, Vannevar Bush, and offered his services: ‘I . . . hope you
can find some corner of activity in which I may be of use during the emergency’
(quoted in Galison 1994: 228). Wiener was enlisted to the war effort and set about
developing a novel calculating device which he called the ‘antiaircraft (AA) pre-
dictor’. His immediate ambition in the development of this device was to enable
the more efficient destruction of enemy aircraft. In essence, Wiener’s aim was to
develop an instrument which could determine the position of an enemy aircraft in
advance, and use that knowledge to destroy it. Wiener’s challenge was to create a
device that could not only anticipate the physical movements of a generic class of
aircraft but also adapt to the specific irregularities of movement introduced by its
human pilot concentrating on deceiving his antagonist. Such a device would have
to be invested, in other words, with the power not only to combat the physical
capacities of the aircraft, but to target its less predictable biological infrastruc-
ture as well. Wiener’s genius lay in his success in developing a device that could
gather information on the movement of an aircraft while it was in flight and learn
from that information in order to reliably predict the future movements of the ma-
chine (Galison 1994). This was a breakthrough of conceptual as well as technical
proportions. However crude it was, compared especially for example with later
digitized computing systems, Wiener was thereby able to claim the invention of
a weapon which possessed the capacities of a living system. It could exchange
information with its target, learn from that information, and adapt its own purpose
in relation to its target; in other words, the machine possessed the power to co-
evolve its tactical capacities in antagonistic relation with its opponent.
Wiener’s research subsequently led to the formation of the science of cyber-
netics: a forerunner to the information and communication sciences (computer

science) as well as the complexity sciences. In the development of computer sci-
ence, we have witnessed the further development of machines which, through the
formal generation and manipulation of informational patterns, exhibit ‘artificial
intelligence’, and, in so doing, pit themselves against the evolutionary powers
of learning and adaptive emergence which are now said to characterize all liv-
ing things. In short, Wiener’s cybernetics was the first science to allow for the
crossing of what had hitherto been understood as metaphysically distinct forms
of materiality: the organic and the inorganic, living entities and non-living en-
tities. Combining man and machine informationally, cybernetics pioneered the
conceptualization, invention and further development of the understanding of
hybrid ‘systems’ possessing life-like qualities, open to analysis and development
in terms of living properties. Here we have the origin of claims which were to
become widely popular by the end of the twentieth century, of the cyborg and the
post-human, succeeding what then came to be regarded as crude and outmoded
biological demarcations of the human (Hayles 1999; Haraway 1991).
If machines could be invested with intelligent adaptive powers then machines
could also be said to exhibit ‘life’. They were ‘animated’ at least, and ultimately
they were to become animated in ways which made it difficult to distinguish the
human from the non-human as much as the organic from the inorganic. The new
puzzles set by this blurring of boundaries once thought to have been written in
nature rather than on nature, compounded of course also by the contemporane-
ous molecularization of biology, were subsequently explored extensively in both
popular literature and film (from Neuromancer and Blade Runner to many other
novels and films). Biological nature was on the way to suffering the fate of physi-
cal nature: less a determining and dominating force over humankind and more a
reserve capacity for utilitarian instrumentalization by systems that humans initi-
ated and inherited, but by no means ultimately themselves appeared to know how
to control.
At the same time, Erwin Schrödinger’s What is Life? marked an even greater
historical shift in the interrogation of living entities. Published in 1944, precisely
the same period when Wiener was collapsing the distinction between man and
machine in weapons research, Schrödinger’s text was among the first to claim
that, although the behaviour and function of life is not amenable to explanation
by laws deriving from either physics or chemistry, it is nevertheless possible to
account for ‘the events in space and time which take place within the spatial
boundary of a living organism’ scientifically (2006: 3). Indeed ‘strict biological
laws are displayed’, Schrödinger argued, which allow for prediction (2006: 20).
Schrödinger also claimed that the chromosomes which are the subjects of proc-
esses of cell division within living organisms, from the fertilized egg cell to the
stage of reproductive maturity, contain ‘some kind of code-script’ in which ‘the
entire pattern of the individual’s future development and of its functioning in the
mature state’ can be read (2006: 21). Taken together, the confluence of the two,
Schrödinger’s biological ‘law-code’ and Wiener’s re-configuration of the man–
machine ensemble as living system, especially as it was ultimately to be worked
out later in the coalition of the digital and the molecular sciences, was to have the

most profound and widest possible impact on life in, as well as the life of, liberal
societies and states. In short, once ‘life’ became informationalized as code it also
began to transcend the boundaries which once confined it to the mortal biological
body.
In 1948, responding to the wartime work of Wiener especially, and motivated
by the general problem of efficiently transmitting information over a noisy com-
munication channel, Claude Shannon introduced a new probabilistic way of
thinking about communication while simultaneously also providing a novel and
mathematical account of entropy (Shannon and Weaver 1949). Shannon’s ideas
created a sensation and were rapidly consolidated into two domains of enquiry:
information theory, which employs probability theory to study the statistical char-
acteristics of data and communication systems; and coding theory, which uses
mainly algebraic and geometric tools to contrive efficient codes for various com-
municatory problematics.
Shannon was just one of a number of distinguished thinkers grappling with the
problematics of information and communication in the aftermath of the Second
World War. During this foundational era of what Wiener had called cybernetics,
Shannon also participated in annual conferences sponsored by the Macy Founda-
tion. These influential ‘Macy Conferences’ were attended by many who were to
become very significant figures in their fields, including, for example, John von
Neumann, Warren McCulloch, Gregory Bateson, Donald Mackay, John Stroud,
W. Ross Ashby and Heinz von Foerster. From the outset, the researchers involved
in the generation of the discourse of information and its theorization were work-
ing from radically interdisciplinary backgrounds. In addition to information
scientists, the Macy Conferences were also attended by biologists, literary theo-
rists, philosophers, semanticists, neurophysiologists, engineers and psychologists
(Hayles 1999: 50–75).
What brought this interdisciplinary community together was a broadly shared
interest in the concept of information, the problematic of communication, and the
conviction that the struggle to master these concepts was of strategic importance
for the development of liberal modernity, especially given the struggle with the
Soviet Union over the very directions of modernity, which was then pressing.
For some, Wiener principal amongst them, cybernetics offered the potential for a
universal theory of knowledge because, as Wiener argued, it held a mirror to the
processes by which we come to know the world and through which we discern
order as such. From the beginning, however, there was disagreement over what
information was, and if there was a particular commitment which defined what we
might call this first-order cybernetics then it was to the construction of a common
abstract or theoretical understanding of information. The leading players employed
the term in very different ways. Shannon, for instance, conflated information with
message probabilities (Shannon and Weaver 1949). Bateson associated it with
feedback loops (Bateson 1991; Bateson 1972). Both Wiener and von Neumann,
however, thought of information as the equivalent in communication systems to
energy in physical systems (Wiener 1985; von Neumann 1966). Thus, Wiener ar-
gued, ‘the fundamental idea is the message . . . and the fundamental element of the

message is the decision’ (Hayles 1999: 52). Decision mattered, Wiener argued,
because it increased the amount of information circulating in a system.
Shannon and Wiener were equally committed, however, to providing the
concept of information with a stable value. According to Shannon’s calculations,
the probabilistic functions of information required that it maintain a stable value,
otherwise it would be impossible to make predictions about the different effects
of different quantities and types of information in the transmission of messages
from one context to another. Shannon and Wiener disagreed, however, on the rela-
tion that was said to obtain between information and entropy. This disagreement
was the locus of a change which heralded Shannon’s development of information
theory.
Building on the work of Carnot, the thermodynamic notion of entropy had
been introduced by the physicist Rudolph Clausius in 1854. Clausius’ ideas were
later extended and clarified by Helmholtz and others (Cardwell 1971). Shannon
argued that information was to communication systems what entropy was to phys-
ical systems; that the terms were in effect interchangeable (Shannon and Weaver
1949). Whereas both Wiener and he agreed on the essential role of information
in communication systems, Wiener maintained that information was essentially
the opposite of entropy, which he conceptualized as randomness, uncertainty and
insecurity (Wiener 1954). Shannon argued instead that the more random, unex-
pected or threatening a message the more information it would contain and thus
the messages which provide the most information and which invigorate a system
to the optimum would also be those which, in dissipating, potentially also threat-
ened a system (Shannon and Weaver 1949).
Shannon’s theory was to have widespread influence. His biological colleagues,
especially, were quick to realize its potential application (Yockey 1992). Early
ecological work also applied Shannon’s concept of entropy as a measure of eco-
logical diversity (Ayres 1994). Also closely related to this work were the many
attempts to quantify hierarchical organization in ecosystems using entropy meas-
ures. Information theory also played an important role in both neurobiology and
molecular biology (Kay 2000). It is important to emphasize, however, that such
developments were premised not only on the reduction of language to a calcula-
ble utilitarian measure of communication in the form of ‘information’, but also
upon divorcing information from meaning. Semantics was not the issue; syntax,
the grammar of information, was. Despite their differences, Wiener and Shannon
nonetheless both sought to conceptualize information as an entity whose value
was if not stable at least quantifiable and calculable.
Others, however, recognized that the ‘value’ of information differed from con-
text to context; not least from the source which transmitted it to the audience
which received it. The message ‘war has broken out in France’ has a very different
value when relayed from Paris to Berlin as opposed to from Paris to Moscow. The
early simplification of information and communication could be justified only on
the grounds of rendering communication more transparent and the calculation of
it in the form of the transmission of information more calculable and therefore
also more efficient. For Shannon, in particular, the definition of information as a

function of probability meant that he could bracket what messages might mean.
Shannon’s approach was especially typical of cybernetic and other behavioural re-
search of the 1950s in the United States. Circumstances in Britain differed. There,
a researcher called Donald Mackay was working on a theory of information which
was seeking to incorporate, or at least address, the problem of meaning as well.
Mackay presented his ideas to the seventh annual Macy Conference (Mackay
1969). Arguing that Shannon and Wiener were able to lay claim to the study of
only particular and limited forms of information, he maintained instead that there
were essentially two forms of information. The first was ‘selective’ information,
confined to probability functions, which interested Shannon and Wiener. The
second was what Mackay called ‘structural’ information (Mackay 1969). What
he meant by structural information was a form of non-probabilistic information
providing the parameters instead for the interpretation of message information.
The value, utility or ‘performance’ of ‘structural’ information could therefore be
calculated only by analysing the impact of the information of a message on the
audience receiving it. But this inevitably reintroduced the problem of meaning
and interpretation. More importantly, it reintroduced the very ‘subjectivity’ which
other information theorists, Wiener and Shannon prime amongst them, had striven
to exclude.
In short Mackay reintroduced cybernetics to what it had been trying to avoid:
the messy processes of the emergence of meaning and how audiences in particu-
lar participate in its constitution (Mackay 1969). In terms which Mackay was to
introduce, and which many after him in a whole variety of other fields would
also employ, the problem of information and communication went ‘non-linear’.
Although he would not of course recognize these terms, Mackay had begun the
process of stepping back from the rarefaction of language, via its reduction to in-
formation and code, into the immemorial issue of the uncanny nature of language
as the irretrievably undecidable medium in which meaning, among many other
things including for example affect, is excited and circulated (Derrida 1976).
Meantime, also, in 1968, Nicholas S. Tzannes, an information theorist working
for the US government, decided that he also wanted to redefine information to
allow for its meaning to vary between contexts. According to Tzannes, Shannon
and Wiener defined information in terms of what it is, whereas Mackay defined
information in terms of what it does or how it performs (Tzannes 1985). Defining
information ontologically as what is, so to speak, precluded what was self-evi-
dently important for a broader understanding of communication: that information
is not only transmitted but also received, and that its reception, especially, governs
what is received. (These thinkers never got quite so far as considering that the
very formulation of what is transmitted is often equally also undecidable.) John
Stroud of the US Naval Electronic Laboratory in San Diego was amongst those
also arguing at that time that Shannon’s privileging of the stability of ‘informa-
tion’ was unsustainable; in particular that the ‘deviation’ which Shannon wanted
to exclude was itself ‘information rich’ (Hayles 1999: 63). At this juncture, what
we call first-order cybernetics gave way to a second-order cybernetics in which
interactivity and reflexivity were regarded less as deviant and more as productive
of information and communication.

Bringing the audience into information as mediation led the new generation
of second-order cyberneticists, like Tzannes, to transform information theory by
theorizing mediation. It did so first in terms of the forms of neural modelling. If
the mind is semantically active in the process of communication then it must also
be assumed that the mind possesses the biological apparatus with which to proc-
ess binary code. This observation ramified in all kinds of ways, particularly when
the communicatory analogy was extended to the biological as much as the social
realm. Second-order cybernetics developed this modelling in ways that were ex-
tended not only to biological and cognitive but also to social systems as well.
The first major result of bringing reception within the communication/mediation
process was the emergence of the concept of the ‘network’.2 This term was closely
associated with Warren McCulloch’s neuron model of informational processing
(McCulloch 1965). Here, in McCulloch’s model, neurons are connected into nets.
Each net has a separate set of inputs and outputs and a set of internal states. The
McCulloch model was made to stand simultaneously for both a computer code
and human thought and thus was to infer that there is no essential difference be-
tween thought and code. Here, too, McCulloch began collaborating with a young
neurophysiologist from Chile, Humberto Maturana, who together with Francisco
Varela would posit an informationally driven theory of auto-poiesis, which was to
prefigure later developments in artificial intelligence and cognitive science as well
as in, ultimately, third-generation cybernetics and the complexity sciences
Maturana and Varela went on to argue that cognitive reality is entirely con-
structed in the mind and that it is generated only through sets of interactive proc-
esses determined solely by an organism’s own organization (Maturana and Varela
1980).3 The result was a highly circular self-reflexive understanding of the proc-
esses through which the mind itself orders its reality. Once more the claim was
that the theory applied as much to the social as it did to the biological and the
cognitive. What also became increasingly evident were the many ways in which
cybernetics and biology had begun to share common theories of open system
behaviour, of evolution and co-evolution, as well as of complex informationally
constituted forms of organization and order as such. An entity’s organization is
then the complex network of all possible informationally mediated relationships
which are realised through the processes of auto-poiesis in the course of system
interaction (Maturana and Varela 1980). The concept of organization and order
thus became conflated with this informationally driven interactivity. It simply be-
comes the pattern described by complex and ongoing processes of informational
transaction and exchange. As network, it is the sum combinatory total of nodes
and their (informationally mediated) relations.
By this time, the 1970s, the concept of information had begun to refer not to the
certainty but to the degree of uncertainty generated within a network or between
networks, given that any network is itself constituted by a series of sub-nets: sys-
tems within systems within systems, in which the very issue of where to draw
the boundary lines began to figure very prominently as well (Bertalanffy 1968;
Checkland 1981). Such uncertainty is continually reinstated by the problematics

of reception. ‘Audience’ became an inference or set of inferences, a problematic
construct of the information, communication or message itself. Audiences do not
simply precede the message. Information or messages seek to mobilize and as-
semble the audiences they were once supposed merely to address. Information-
ally, auto-poiesis was therefore construed as this doubly productive and creative
process of transmission/reception in which of course the message, or information,
was itself also interpretively received back in response to the ways in which it is
thought to have been initially received. It sounds complicated, but in practice it
is not. Indeed, it is an everyday phenomenon with which we are very familiar in
contemporary politics, where it is called ‘spin doctoring’ (Mulgan 1991).
The emergency of emergence

Having written The Embodied Mind, Varela embarked upon a project of research
in a newly established field known as Artificial Life (Varela 1991). Locating the
origins of the new field within the broad history of cybernetics, Varela set out to
resolve the failings of auto-poiesis in respect of evolutionary change. Auto-poiesis
relies heavily on the internal processes of organisms to explain change. In doing
so it failed to account for the role of environment. Hence it entered into major
dispute with traditions of bio-evolutionary theory in which the major determinant
of change in organisms was precisely interaction with environment. In response
Varela developed the theory of emergence (Varela and Bourgine 1992): a concept
said by Capra to have been first introduced in the form of ‘emergent properties’ by
the philosopher C. D. Broad (Capra 1996). Subsequently, also, the field of Artifi-
cial Life was to develop an entire sub-field of the study of emergence combining
the analytic insight of both bio-evolutionary theorists and computer scientists.
According to this account of living systems, bio-systems that undergo processes
of emergence necessarily involve feedback loops through which the outputs of a
system are recursively returned as input (Steels 1993). As these processes recur
so minor deviations enter into the system. These in turn produce highly complex
interactions leading to forms of evolution understood as emergence. Complexity
scientists were later to add to this account of non-linear emergence by noting that,
since there was no way of establishing with certainty what the initial state of any
system was, equally there was no way of predicting in a linear way how its opera-
tions would turn out.
Recall that incorporating audience into cybernetics was first resisted because
it undermined the probability calculations upon which this initial account of
informational certainty rested. Whereas second-generation cybernetics posed
an ontological as much as an epistemological challenge to the first generation,
third-generation cybernetics attempted to resolve the issue of unpredictability
in particular by modelling it as emergence. Emergence, it was said, remained
amenable to probabilistic reasoning because, instead of analysing communica-
tion by starting from the hypothesis of a complex interaction and then attempting
to unravel that interaction working backward through inference, as Mackay had

done, research into emergence started by determining the basic building blocks
of complex communication processes. It then sought to generate and observe the
non-linear processes of transmutation which then occur. Instead of simply posit-
ing non-linearity it experimented in ways that allowed it to observe non-linearity.
Although non-linear processes of human neural emergence could not, at first,
be modelled directly in laboratories, they could be modelled in computers using
silicon-based animation: self-generating computer programs, such as the Tierra
program, were written, which the leading AI researcher at the Santa Fe Institute,
Thomas S. Ray, was to use to design computer programs to generate silicon life-
forms robust enough to undergo endless processes of emergence and evolution
without crashing (Ray 1992). Finally, Stuart Kauffman, a student of Warren Mc-
Culloch and a biologist also located at Santa Fe, but studying natural selection,
arrived at precisely the same conclusions as his colleagues studying life as com-
putation. Complex life-forms rely on their ability to self-organize spontaneously,
and such emergent organization tends to occur most efficiently and effectively,
Kauffman was to conclude, at the border between order and chaos (Kauffman
1995). A cognate understanding of the importance of information was also built
into Luc Steels’ distinction between ‘first-order’ and ‘second-order’ emergence
(Steels 1993). First-order emergence denotes any properties that are generated
by interaction itself; second-order emergence relates rather to properties that add
additional forms of functionality to the system. The ability to process information
itself is precisely one such additional, and critical, function.
The general problematic of organization and order in short – what it was to
manifest order as such, the very nature of form – thus became conflated with the
‘information’ of (third-order) cybernetics. In this complex genealogy also lies a
continuous, if shifting and continuously questioned, dialogical relation between
the biological understanding of life and its order emerging within molecular biol-
ogy. That intimate relationship between biology and information science has been
tracked and recorded by scientific historians; most scrupulously by Lilly Kay in
particular (Kay 2000).
This, then, was not simply a technical matter of trying to simulate life. It was
ultimately also a metaphysical matter; a matter once more of changing statements
about the nature of the real where life and the nature of what it was to be a living
thing were concerned. The reality of life – what it really was to be a living thing
– came increasingly, along with the discovery of the gene and the development
of molecular biology, to be expressed in terms of information and information
exchange. What this allowed for especially was, for example, a fascinating shift in
the relation between biological and non-biological materiality. The two combined
in information exchange could be said in composite fashion also to make up a
living system.4 Finally, once you digitize information as the vital sign of life and
combine that with the way in which the molecularization of biology correlatively
defined life in terms of code you thereby not only have all the ingredients of a
major revolution in the understanding of the nature of living things and thereby
also of their governance (Keller 2000; Keller 1993); you also begin to acquire the

capacity to transform the nature of living things themselves; indeed you transform
the understanding of what it is to be ‘alive’. Things talk (Daston 2004), and the art
of ‘animation’ very quickly comes to rival that of ‘living’; Machiavellian ‘seem-
ing’ and Hobbesian ‘personating’ take on a whole new aspect here. The nature that
was once said ontopolitically, in early modern liberalism and current realisms, for
example, to govern governance, becomes a nature itself wide open to the very
relations of power and changing informational and communicational capacities as
well as imaginaries of techno-science and governance itself; the biological nature
of ‘man’ proving no more resistant, in these and other respects, to the power rela-
tions of ‘man’ than ‘nature’ in the form of ‘environment’ had proved to be.
However significant it remains, and its centrality is undeniable, biology then
has to be listed among a whole variety of other sciences (what Foucault called
knowledges or savoirs) whose objective is the understanding and wholescale
reinvention, not mere manipulation, of living systems; systems which included
non-organic entities as well as systems or ensembles comprising hybrid, cyborg,
organic and non-organic materials. And often this was not so much a matter of dis-
covering something new as of simply refiguring and framing, thereby profoundly
re-problematizing, what already existed. The latter half of the twentieth century,
therefore, witnessed historical advances in the scientific refiguration of life within
but also outwith biology. Allied to the digitization of the information and com-
munication sciences, as well as to the molecularization of the biological sciences,
the impact on the biopolitics of liberal governance has been equally profound.
These have become evident especially in the advent and populariza-
tion of what is now known as global liberal governance, which we address in
Chapter 5. Global liberal governance was no simple response to changes in the
order of global strategic relations following the dissolution of the Soviet Empire
in Eastern Europe and of the Soviet regime of rule in Russia. It was a product
also of changing understandings of the biopolitical project of liberal rule itself,
through allied transformations in the sciences of life; most especially those that
came under the label of the complexity sciences (Urry 2003). As an expression of
liberal biopolitics globally, and in addressing itself to many comprehensive local
and global audits of living systems, global governance sought to specify what is
required for life to live up to its complex adaptive and emergent challenge, as
these were construed in the new neoliberal order of things, locally and globally.
Dual usage nonetheless characterizes every expression of the vital signs of life.
In telling you what life is in order to make life live, fructify and prosper, every
account of the vital signs of life simultaneously also identifies what threatens
life, where its dangers lie and who is its enemy. Global liberal governance was
thus to inaugurate a global audit of life in order to do precisely that; and it did so
explicitly through the optics, for example, of governance as government without
Government, and complexity as the complex adaptive emergence characteristic of
how control exists after decentralization through the application of governmental
and other self-applicating social and economic protocols.

Complexity
Ceaseless control in open sites.

Gilles Deleuze
‘For some years,’ Isabelle Stengers wrote at the end of the last century, ‘the theme
of complexity has played an ambiguous role in discourses on science’ (Stengers
1997: 4.3). Deriving from physics, chemistry and non-linear mathematics, it also
includes the microbiological sciences, cybernetics, the study of turbulence and
of systems in far from equilibrium conditions. It is preoccupied with dissipative
structures, bifurcation, auto-poiesis, complex adaptive systems, self-organization
and auto-catalysis and it has migrated through a number of the natural scienc-
es on through the digitized information and communications sciences into the
management and social sciences (Cummings and Wilson 2003). From there it
has acquired increasing influence over strategic thinking (military and manage-
rial), national and global governance, cultural governance and international poli-
tics (Jervis 1999; Cebrowski and Gartska 1998; Alberts and Czerwinski 1997;
Rosenau 1992a; de Landa 1991).
Indebted to the modern project of science (Nicolis and Prigogine 1989), com-
plexity is also committed to the anteriority of radical relationality, the dynamic and
mobile nature of existence and the contingent character of bodies-in-formation.
Traditional epistemic forms, according to complexity thinking, are Newtonian
and taxonomic. In brief, and to use a compound term that nonetheless dangerously
conflates a large and diverse field, what complexity theorists call ‘Newtonian sci-
ence’ is said to conceive of pre-formed bodies found to be operating in mechani-
cal relations and processes of exchange. Temporality here is a parameter, rather
than an operator. Said to be unaffected by the transformations that it describes
(Prigogine 1980: 3), Newtonian science was also based, it is said, upon a naïve
realism which assumed that the properties of matter were ‘there’ independent of
the experimental devices by which they were observed and recorded as exist-
ing (Prigogine 1980: 215). The assumption of pre-formed bodies is the key link
between the Newtonianism of traditional epistemic structures and the idea also
of secure taxonomic schemas. Albeit there is a long and vexed debate about the
real or nominal nature of species, going back, at least, to the discussion between
Bacon and Locke (Jones 2007; Jones 2005; Stuart 1999; Shapiro 1999), taxonomy
too tends to share the assumption of pre-formed bodies. It is the ambition of
taxonomic sciences to assign natural bodies reliably to appropriate categories and
classifications; assuming for the most part also that the world is pre-inscribed with
the natural order mapped by taxonomy.
It therefore followed that, should a mode of relating in time be recognized that
is not merely mechanical, or confined to exchange, and that allows time to be an
operator rather than just a parameter, then the status of bodies and their formation
will come into question. Similarly, but conversely, it follows that should bodies
(organs, molecules, plants, animals, humans, hybrids of human/non-human form)
arise that are anomalous, or ‘monstrous’, that is to say ‘radically disordered’ and

intractable to secure classification, then the scientific adequacy of taxonomiza-
tion itself, and not just any individual taxonomy, will also be called into question
(Ritvo 1998).
In essence, complexity science appears to make both claims. In prioritizing
the mode of relating, accepting that temporality is an operator rather than a mere
parameter, and conceiving of ‘bodies’ in terms of the contingent assemblages
and ensembles (systems) that are a function of their diverse modes of relating, it
simultaneously subverted the epistemic structures upon which both Newtonian
physics and the great scientific taxonomic enterprises of the last 200 years pro-
ceeded. That is why – and how – the science(s) of complexity, it is claimed, now
challenge the hegemony of these classical scientific enterprises. Stable taxonomy
and mechanical predictability are thus displaced by the rationalities and problem-
atics of the composite sciences of contingent and emergent being-in-formation.
Here too ‘information’ or ‘code’ becomes the prevailing term of art. Similarly,
advances in biology, and in molecular science in particular, not only offer ways of
conceiving of modes of relation (infiltration; distribution; infection; contamina-
tion; mutation; colonization; symbiosis) that are not simply mechanical ones of
exchange, and in which temporality is an effective operator rather than a mere
parameter; they also offer accounts of bodies that defy secure taxonomic clas-
sification, since, as a function of modes of relation, such bodies are contingent as-
semblages – bodies-in-formation – rather than pre-formed entities. Biology, par-
ticularly at the microscopic rather than the macroscopic level – including genetic
engineering – therefore offers a description of astonishing fecundity, mutability,
motility and sheer creative transformation and change that defies the macroscopic
entropy of Newtonian science and the exhaustive taxonomies of classificatory
schemas alike. Bacteria, for example, are now discovered to trade variable quanti-
ties of information in the form of variable quantities of genes with virtually no
regard for species barriers, while new forms and modalities are propagated across
species boundaries with almost indecent speed. The heterogenesis of morphogen-
esis cannot be described or explained within the terms of the linear paradigm of
pre-formed bodies in the predictable entropic motion of a logic of strategically
determined succession. However, according to one of its exponents: ‘It has to be
understood that what is not deterministic need not be random. The solution is the
existence of a new type of causality’ (Kempis 1991: 257). How to understand that
‘causality’, and its allied notions of pre-diction and pre-monition, is a key issue
closely related to the ways in which the complexity sciences not only understand
processes of formation and change, but also those of creativity: how things hap-
pen, how they can be made to happen, and how matters can be construed so that
certain kinds of happenings are encouraged or discouraged. Here, especially, the
notion of the ‘event’, particularly what Javier Lezaun has called ‘the transforma-
tion event’, also plays a critical role (Lezaun 2006).
Ilya Prigogine’s non-linear mathematics makes the claim that it is producing
the mathematical formulations that lead to a unified picture that ‘enables us to
relate many aspects of our observations of physical systems to biological ones’
(Prigogine 1980: xiv). Consequently, just as the concepts, dynamics, modes of

analysis and metaphorics of biophilosophy and biotechnics have begun radically,
and extensively, to supplant those of mechanics and taxonomics, so also Prigogi-
nean mathematics claims to complement their insights and to offer a means, ‘not
to “reduce” physics and biology to a single scheme, but to clearly define the vari-
ous levels of description and to present conditions that permit us to pass from one
level to another’ (Prigogine 1980: xiv).
Although we would argue against simply conflating their project with that of
complexity, one of the single most powerful metaphors for distinguishing between
‘Newtonianism’ and its competitors in biophilosophy and complexity, has been
provided by the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1999). It
is an especially important one since it also serves to open up debate with as well as
within evolutionary thinking; something that inevitably comes to the fore once the
shift to biophilosophy is made. Deleuze, it is convenient now also to note, applied
his understanding of these developments to sketch a celebrated model of what he
called (cybernetical) ‘control society’ (Deleuze 1995). For Deleuze and Guattari,
the strategic order presumed by Newtonian science and taxonomization alike is
‘arboreal’ (think trees). The self-propagation to which complexity science refers
is ‘rhizomatic’ (think grass, lilies or bamboo). As opposed to traditional phyletic
lineages, rhizomatic lineages serve to demonstrate the extent to which exclusively
filial models of evolution are dependent upon exophysical system descriptions
that are simply unable to account for the genuinely creative aspects of evolution.
If the organism is a function of the frame within which the science of biology
encodes it, then it is necessary to recognize that the frame captures only a small
part of the possible information (in-formation) that the assemblages are able to
express, and of the creative potential immanent in the system. The existence of a
code simultaneously requires a process of de-coding. Hence there is no genetics,
for example, without genetic drift.
Symbiosis, especially, serves to show that the delineation of organic units, such
as genes, plasmids, cells, organisms and genomes is a tool of a certain mode of
investigation as well; not an absolute ideal or model (Kay 1993). This challenges
notions of pure autonomous entities and unities because it functions through as-
semblages (multiplicities made up of heterogeneous terms) that operate in terms
of cross-fertilizing alliances, rather than tight genealogical filiations of more or
less scrupulous linear descent. A clear establishment of distinct ‘kingdoms’ – in
the human as well as the non-human world – is thereby rendered problematic.
What become important, instead, are the relational order; its generative principles
of formation; and the creative possibilities that the relational order, together with
its generative principles of formation, is capable of engendering.
Symbiosis similarly challenges the notion of informationally closed systems
and corresponds as well to the rhizomatic rather than the arboreal model. Since
codes are modes of mediation – in effect modes of transversal communication
because there is no code without its corresponding de-coding – they are strictly
speaking paralogical: para being the Greek prefix for alongside, besides, between
or in the midst of (Dillon 1995). There is, in short, no tree life characterized by an
increasingly differentiated genealogy, but a rhizome of spontaneous propagation
occurring at diverse sites of spontaneous local creativity amenable to paralogic

understanding (Taylor 1995). Rhizomizing a structure – for example that of an
organization – it has been claimed, would maximize this propensity for creative
adaptation at local sites (Chia 1996; Chia 1995; Chia 1994).
What is more, however, such biophilosophical forms of understanding and
description seem for many best suited also to comprehending the transformations
occurring with the global digitization of information and communication and the
vast powers of propagation that characterize these developments as well. What
biotechnics and complexity share with electronic ICT is, then, a shift from a preoc-
cupation with physical and isolated entities, whose relations are described largely
in terms of interactive exchange, to components of ‘information’ whose continu-
ous transmission and reception render components themselves continuously ‘in-
formation’, as well. The structures of components-in-formation are decisively
influenced, in other words, by the mode of relation governing their connectivity
with each other and their ‘environments’. In consequence of that dynamic con-
nectivity, they display autonomous powers of adaptation, formation, organization
and spontaneous emergence. Connectivity, mathematized for example in the net-
work analysis done by physicists such as Barabási (2002) and Vespignani (2004),
working beyond graph theory, is then a continuous process of being complexly
enfolded in ways that simultaneously also spontaneously produce the unfolding
of ‘form’: ‘form’ of diverse and changing character; with a corresponding socio-
economic and cultural shift, many claim, from the mode of production to the
mode of information and code (Bogard 1996; Poster 1990).
The very character of the mode of relating is, then, foregrounded in these de-
velopments as an active process of individuating the component parts in relation.
Thus an individual component does not possess a unity in its ‘identity’: that of
the (presumed) stable state within which no transformation, or only linear trans-
formation, is allowable. Rather, a component, or part, has a transductive unity
(Mackenzie 2006). What that means is that it can pass out of phase with itself,
break its own bounds, and unfold its own potential. This capacity of becoming is
an integral dimension of the component in a mode of relating, and not something
that happens to it following a succession of events effecting something thought to
be already fully given and present. Individuation is the process of change to which
the component is subject in virtue of its very participation in a mode of relating. It
is the becoming of the entity, not an exhaustion of its signification. What goes for
machinic assemblages, from this perspective, applies also to individual ‘subjects’
and ‘bodies’ of whatever description.
Here the world, therefore, seems more viral and mutable than it does mecha-
nistic and entropic (Ansell-Pearson 1997a). Thus, ‘if the word “nature” is to retain
a meaning, it must signify an uninhibited polyphenomenality’ of manifestation
(Rabinow 1996: 108), and what stem cell researchers call pluripotency (Cooper
2008). Finitude as empiricity gives way, also, to an ‘unlimited-finite’ play of
forces and forms, which incidentally also calls for us to begin revising Foucault’s
analytics of finitude, the best example of which is DNA. An infinity of beings can,
and has, arisen from the four bases out of which DNA is constituted. The Nobel
Prize-winning biologist, François Jacob, makes the same point when he writes:
‘A limited amount of genetic information in the germ line produces an enormous

amount of protein structures in the soma . . . nature operates to create diversity by
endlessly combining bits and pieces’ (quoted in Rabinow 1996: 92).
The mode of relation not only differentiates components; it also combines and
re-combines them in novel ways to produce new forms. In effect, it continuously
demands the re-engineering of components themselves. Add temporality as an
operator, rather than parameter, to all this, and all modes of relation must hence-
forth also be conceived as ‘in motion’. Together with the character of the mode
of relating, it is also that temporal dynamic – an integral motility – which ensures
that a mode of relating cannot leave the structure of components unaffected. Re-
lationality or, in complexity terms, connectivity is, and must be, transformative.
The power play of relationality – and it is a power play, a point to which we
return – is then conceived as a productive flow, displaying different forms of
motion – speed; velocity; waves; continuous flow; pulsing; fluidity and viscosity;
rhythm; harmony; discordance; and turbulence – as its ‘in-formation’ incites the
formation, deformation, reformation, mutation and transformation of contingent
assemblages and complex ‘life-in-formation’. No party to a relation is therefore a
monadic, or molar, entity. Each is, instead, a mutable function of the character of
the mode-of-being-related and its capacity for relationality.
Traditional epistemic assumptions once also made it difficult to recognize that
complex life-forms could be composed of inorganic as well as organic material,
since the machine has been classically defined in contradistinction to the organ-
ism. We now know that this is not so. ‘Machines’ – such as the Internet – exist
which do not have the governance that organisms were thought to possess and
yet are also powerfully capable of self-adaptation and self-propagation. We also
know that it is possible to produce ‘cartographies’ of machinic assemblages in
novel ways that show how the Kantian distinction between the organic and the
non-organic breaks down. For all its apparent common sense, then, the strict parti-
tion between the organic and the non-organic rests on an ontological privileging
of the notions of pre-formation, unity and finality that simply cannot be sustained
now, in either the ontological (that is to say, philosophical) or the historical (that
is to say, ‘material’) terms generated by the privileging of the anteriority of radical
relationality (de Beistegui 2004).
Even the neo-Darwinian Richard Dawkins has conceded that the concept
‘organism’ is of dubious utility precisely because it is so difficult to arrive at
a satisfactory taxonomic classification and definition of it. Everything depends
upon the hierarchy of life one is trying to defend. Thus the ‘organism’ enjoys a
semiotic status, and cannot be conceived independently of our cognitive mapping
of systems and their boundaries. It has, therefore, become possible to conceive
of machinic life in terms of the evolution of ‘becoming’ in which non-organic
life exists and through which it mutates. The evolution of machinic assemblages
refers, then, not specifically and exclusively to human contrivances and tools,
but to peculiar modes of propagation, such as symbiosis and contagion, which in
fact conflate the human and the non-human, as they do the organic and the non-
organic. It is as mistaken, on this view then, to conceive of machines naïvely as
single entities whose individuated existence is pre-given (Ansell-Pearson 1997a;

Ansell-Pearson 1997b) as it is to think of the human without the originary tech-
nicity that even its fundamental reliance on language indicates (Stiegeler 1998).
Going beyond the twin traditional arguments that organisms are either only more
perfect machines, or that machines are never more than mere extensions of the or-
ganism, we arrive at the threshold of the sciences of dynamic living assemblages
in which the traditional ways of distinguishing human and non-human, organic
and non-organic, break down; as does the related way of privileging components
over the modes, and intensities, of relation in which they are found.
Having to relate – openness to intervention – is, therefore, said to be invariant
for all forms of life; indeed for order as such. That does not mean that life forms
are determined in advance. On the contrary, it is the inescapable condition of com-
plex patterns of auto-poiesis in which both relationality and components change.
Being-in-formation necessarily entails deformation, reformation, mutation and
transformation (Leroi 2003). That is to say being-in-formation is characterized by
gaps, misfires, breaks, slippage, unintended outcomes, transference and change.
These cuts and breaks are not simply ‘unauthorized’ transversal communications
within and between assemblages or systems, which bring novel forces and rela-
tions into play and so also new formations, as early cybernetics was inclined to
say. They are also a function of the way events occur which is not rule governed;
or where existing rules do not apply and new ones have to be invented. Such
movement takes place not simply as transfer and exchange but also as ‘dissipa-
tion’, ‘dispersion’, ‘attenuation’, ‘infection’, ‘contamination’, ‘invasion’, ‘coloni-
sation’, ‘mutation’ and so on. That is to say, the involuted feedback, or connectiv-
ity, of the system becomes a measure of its very liminality. Sustaining diverse
kinds of alterior relations, that liminality manifests itself as bifurcation, singular-
ity and phase transition. Opposed to this view is the ideal of systems implacably
closed in on themselves striving to maintain an illusory autonomy, equilibrium or
‘survival’, by expending vast resources on specifying everything that is foreign
to the system so that it can be regulated, expelled or kept from it. The price of
such ‘autonomy’, or autarchy, it is now said, is paid in terms of a self-destructive
diminution of the liminal capacity of the system’s connectivity.
In conclusion, what we have here, in the vocabulary of complexity, is a so-
phisticated, and by now widely disseminated and popular, discourse not simply
for telling us what life is and how it operates, but also for identifying, conversely,
what interrupts, disrupts and ultimately also by way of implication corrupts life.
Offering itself as a superior account of the very nature of open life-like systems
of every description, complexity cannot but also offer itself as a discourse of
danger to which life, understood in these ways, is also exposed. Embracing the
very template of informationalized life offered ultimately by complexity, as it
drew extensively on both the biological and the informational sciences of the last
50 years, global liberal governance emerged as a system of governance which,
while also claiming to speak the truth about living systems in order to make life
live, simultaneously also embarked on a comprehensive assay of global life which
necessarily attempted to identify who and what, in the process of living, is less
worthy of living.5 Detailing how this works, and how it came to be, is the task of
the following chapter.

Part II

5 Global triage
Threat perception in the twenty-first
century
In our hubris, we rival the biosphere.

Stuart Kauffman
Introduction: governing through contingency

In our opening four chapters we explained some of the basic points underlying
our account of the liberal way of war. We recall them here, briefly, to frame the
chapters that follow; but we do so by extending them a little in respect of how it
is that governing through contingency supplements and transforms the ways in
which liberal rule has traditionally been depicted as governing through freedom.
Essentially these points concern an interpretation of liberalism as a biopolitical
project; all power is idiomatic and liberalism’s is biopolitical. Our argument is
not that liberalism became biopoliticized, but that it was biopolitical from its very
inception. By this we mean that the liberal way of rule – its political theorization
as well as its institutions and practices – has always revolved around some under-
standing of the human as species being. In as much as it is a biopolitical way of
rule, liberal power therefore takes species existence as its referent object of rule.
Its governance revolves around the properties of species existence. One of the
entailments of all forms of rule is the way in which it also authorizes and executes
violence. There is, then, a martial face to liberal peace. The liberal way of rule is
contoured by the liberal way of war.
What distinguishes liberalism as a regime of rule, we also observed with many
other Foucauldian analytics of liberalism, is the way in which it posits domains of
existence in relation to whose independent laws and dynamics liberal rule itself
must govern. In this respect it proclaims a form of limited government and self-
governance (Kahn 2004; Hunter and Sanders 2002; Tuck 1993; Skinner 1988).
Two classic examples are the modern economy and civil society. Ruling effec-
tively, here, is ruling in accordance with what can be known about the independ-
ent dynamics of different autonomous domains of existence, and the main task is
to continuously resolve the issue of governing too little and governing too much
in relation to these domains of existence. In discharging this, its generic task of
rule, liberal rule is also an adaptive system. Fallible, it is said, more importantly,

82 Global triage
to be uniquely capable of rectifying its mistakes since it is an open form of gov-
ernment – open to its referent object of rule – which pays continuous attention to
the referent subjects and objects that make up its referential matrix of rule. In that
sense it lays claim, also, to being a learning system and thereby also develops the
power/knowledge which literally teaches it how to govern.
The liberal way of rule does not, therefore, simply govern through freedom
(Joyce 2003; Dean 1999; Rose 1999) but through contingency (Dillon 2008a;
Dillon 2008b; Dillon 2007a; Dillon 2003).1 These two principles of liberal
governmental formation may be allied. The exercise of transactional subjective
freedoms will, for example, introduce its own contingencies. But that does not
make ‘contingency’ a dependent variable, as it were, of liberal subjectivity. In
as much as the liberal form of rule takes species life, as well as subjectivity, as
its referent object of rule, the liberal way of rule also governs by reference to
species properties, principal amongst which is contingency. Indeed, ontologically
as well as epistemologically speaking, these days, in various accounts of informa-
tion theory, chaos and complexity science as a whole, contingency has also been
embraced as a foundational concept upon which the operation of all open systems,
both physical and living, are now said to be premised (Stengers 2000; Daston
1988; Prigogine and Stengers 1984). Contingency is foundational, especially, to
how the operations of living systems are now conceived. Contingency here is not
Greek fate or tuche (luck). Neither is contingency, here, Roman or Machiavellian
fortuna. This is an especially modern construal of the contingent, as an epistemic
problem; a field of formation which is amenable to scientific analysis in a whole
variety of novel ways including, for example, probability analysis (Daston 1988;
Hacking 1975), risk analysis (Power 2007; Power and Hutter 2005; Hacking 1990)
and, increasingly, a wide variety of techniques for patterning behaviour employed
extensively from anti-terror surveillance, health and commercial marketing to
‘webometrics’.2 As a novel epistemic object, contingency has in consequence also
been widely assimilated into social scientific accounts of social and political order
as open systems (Rasch and Wolfe 2000; Byrne 1998; Cilliers 1998).
In general terms it is, however, life itself – understood as species existence –
which provides the liberal way of rule with its single most important autonomous
referential object of rule. Indeed, without the ontological proposition of radical
contingency the modern account of freedom would have to resort back to the very
onto-theological foundation of God, natural order or historical telos, which it has
widely rejected as the archē, or foundation, of freedom. So, when we say contin-
gency we are also gesturing towards the modern problematic of freedom which,
arguably, and pace Foucault, arises with Machiavelli, of freedom as the freedom
from transcendental rules in order to make the rules capable of constituting a form
of political life furnished by the radical contingency of the event of life as such
(Dillon 2008c; Wolin 2004; Vatter 2000; Althusser 1999).

Global triage 83
The emergency of emergence
The liberal way of rule is thus, and in this sense, a modern way of rule. This mod-
ern story of rule is traditionally told as a story of the pacification of civil society
via the removal of war from the life of civil society, most notably religious war,
and of the restriction of war-making powers to a sovereign (Hunter and Sanders
2002; Hunter 2001). The modern way of war was thus problematized as the mo-
nopoly of the legitimate use of force by sovereigns, both internally and externally.
In their external dealings it was also established that sovereigns had a right to
resort to war in the event that conflicts of interest between sovereigns could not
be resolved in other ways. The referent object of war and the discourses of danger
associated with war took the sovereign territorial state as their referent object. Es-
sentially this is the foundation of realism and of international relations.
Liberalism never fitted this model of modern politics and the modern problem-
atization of war very well – as we used Tom Paine and Michael Howard alike, for
example, to demonstrate. Howard claims in effect that it didn’t fit because what
he calls the ‘liberal conscience’ – exemplified in the figure of George Macaulay
Trevelyan – was naïve; naïve specifically in relation to the rules of geopolitics.
Our argument is, instead, that it didn’t fit because its martial as well as its political
character and ambitions always substantially exceeded this modern problematiza-
tion of politics and war. For liberalism was never a mere ‘conscience’. It was a form
of rule comprising a complex account of the political anthropology of man as both
divinely endowed and biologically driven. In this, it always aspired to remove war
from the life of humanity, not just from the life of civil society, by creating a novel
alliance between man and his species existence (Reid 2007). Removing war from
the life of humanity – pacifying by freeing it from the scourge of war – is quite a
different matter from removing war from the life of civil society. Such does not,
however, make liberal biopolitics naïve. Quite the contrary: for one thing it entails
a dramatic re-problematization of both politics and war, and a vastly more sophis-
ticated understanding of the political economy of the constitution of the modern
biopolitical subject of finitude, rather than the universal subject of abstract rights
underwritten by God. For another, it threatens unlimited and continuing violence
against life on behalf of life. No naivety, here, then, but a quite different, albeit in
its way also violent, biopolitical imaginary. The geopolitical way of war, we were
also careful to remark, has been no more distinguished than the liberal way of war
in limiting the violence of war.
However much it was proclaimed in the name of peace – the King’s peace, the
peace of the sovereign – removing war from the life of civil society was never in
fact, however, a peaceful business. Neither has it ever been fully accomplished as
its implication in the mounting hyperbolicization of security in the late modern
age testifies. Almost all states are subject to internal challenges, insurrections,
rebellions, revolts, social disorder, class and ethnic conflicts as well as aspirations
to local autonomy which cannot be accommodated within the sovereign territorial
constitution of the state or its allied national ideologies. Violence therefore per-
sists domestically, as much as it does internationally, under the active pacification
of sovereign forms of rule, and that violence may take many forms.

84 Global triage
Similarly, however much liberalism proclaims the virtue of liberal peace,
removing war from the life of humanity is no peaceful business either. In both
instances – pacification of civil society locally and pacification of humanity glo-
bally – we are dealing with projects of rule built upon complex problematizations
of fear and danger, amity and enmity, as well as of politics, security and war. As
you move between the one and the other you move between co-existing and het-
erogeneous, therefore differently conceived and differently driven, problematiza-
tions of politics, security and war; different, foundational, problematizations of
fear and danger. The liberal way of war, therefore, derives from the way in which
liberalism takes the life of the species as its referent object of politics – biopolitics
– as it pursues the project of removing war from the life of humanity. For these
reasons we can say that just as the liberal way of rule is a biopolitical project, in as
much as it revolves around the properties of species existence, so also the liberal
way of war is biopolitical in as much as it, too, revolves around the properties
of species existence. Similarly, also, these share the same ultimate objective or
horizon of concern: the promotion of species existence, most notably by seeking
to further promote the project of ‘making life live’, by removing war from the life
of humanity. We need, finally, to emphasize three further points: general points of
mounting importance in this argument.
First, just as the liberal way of rule is constantly adapting and changing so
also is the liberal way of war. There is, in that sense, no one liberal way of rule or
one liberal way of war. But there is a fundamental continuity which justifies us
referring to each in the singular. This continuity is provided by the fact that each
takes the properties of species existence as its referent object and is dedicated, in
doing so, to making life live by promoting species life; we formulate the point this
way in order to raise the suspicion that there may be other ways of allowing life to
live other than those confined to the preoccupation of promoting species life. Just
as the liberal way of rule has become a predominantly biopolitical way of rule,
finding its expression historically in many changing formations of rule according
substantially, but not always exclusively, to the changing exigencies and under-
standing of species being, for example, so also does the liberal way of war find
different forms of expression according to the changing historical contingencies
of war-making on behalf of the life of the species.
Second, none of this implies that there are no other forms of war. None of it
implies that liberal states may not also act as geopolitical sovereign actors as well.
They do, and in so doing they may also have geopolitical motives for the wars
they wage. Nothing dictates that, like different relations of power, different forms
of war cannot also co-exist at the same time. On the contrary, many different
forms of violence do co-exist at the same time and political conflict rages over
which violence might be called war, and thereby brought under certain privileges
and rules, as opposed to which violence might be called something else – terror
for example – and subject, therefore, to quite different rules; or, indeed, no rules
at all. Just as power is a palimpsestuous phenomenon – many different forms
overlaid genealogically upon one another appearing to efface one another but
leaching into one another since older forms often in some degree remain readable,

Global triage 85
or operational, despite the prominence of newer ones – so is violence.3 By seeking
to interrogate what we think are the dominant biopolitical drivers distinguishing
the liberal way of war, we do not intend to diminish the significance of geopoliti-
cal forms of war; it is necessary, albeit trite, to point out also that not all states are
liberal states. Liberal war may on occasions also be geopolitical; which is to say
that war may be simultaneously geopolitical as well as biopolitically driven since
the imperatives behind war are never uniform or simple; but what distinguishes
the liberal way of war as liberal are the biopolitical imperatives which have con-
sistently driven its violent peace-making (Reid 2005).
There is, third, an additional and critically important attribute of contingency.
It is this feature which does not merely add governing through contingency to
the political rationalities and governmental technologies of contemporary liberal
rule. It lends its own distinctive inflection to them; one which has had a profound
impact on the nature of liberal rule and war in relation, especially, to its current
hyperbolicization of security and their newly problematized and proliferating ac-
counts of dangers, threats and enemies. For if the biopolitical imperative is that of
making life live, the martial expression of that imperative, the drive to liberal war,
is preparedness to make war on the enemies of life. The biopolitical imperative to
make life live finds its expression today, however, in making life live the emer-
gency of its emergence; for that is what species life is now said to be. The liberal
way of rule and war has thus become the preparedness to make war on whatever
threatens life’s capacity to live the emergency of its emergence.
For allied to the radical contingency of species existence is an account of spe-
cies existence as a life of continuous complex adaptation and emergence. From
the perspective of security and war, in particular, such a pluripotent life, char-
acterized by its continuously unfolding potential, is a life that is continuously
becoming dangerous to itself, and to other life forms. Such danger is not merely
actual; because life itself, here, has become not merely actual. The emphasis has
shifted to the virtual – to the very pluripotent-ness of life as such; not only of all
the things life is, but of all the things it is possible for life to be. The emphasis in
the problematization of danger which accompanies such a politics of life itself
therefore also shifts dramatically from the actual to the virtual. Only this explains
the astonishing degree to which the historically secure lives of the Atlantic basin
have come to construe themselves, politically, as radically endangered by as many
unknown as there are unknowable dangers; a point regularly and frankly admit-
ted, officially, from terror to health mandarins, nationally and internationally.
Many have observed that the societies of the Atlantic basin are now increas-
ingly ruled by fear; that there is a politics of fear. But they interpret this politics
of fear in politically naïve ways, as the outcome of deliberate machination by
political and economic elites. They may well be correct to some degree. But what
is perfectly evident, also, is that the elites themselves are also governed by the
very grids of intelligibility furnished by the account of life as an emergency of
emergence. It is not simply a matter, therefore, of leaders playing on fears. The
leadership itself is in the grip of a conjugation of government and rule whose very
generative principle of formation is permanent emergency. In other words, fear is

86 Global triage
no longer simply an affect open to regular manipulation by leadership cadres. It
is, but it is not only that, and not even most importantly that. More importantly
(because this is not a condition that can be resolved simply by ‘throwing the
rascals out’), in the permanent emergency of emergence, fear becomes a genera-
tive principle of formation for rule. The emergency of emergence therefore poses
a profound crisis in western understandings of the political, and in the hopes and
expectations invested in political as opposed to other forms of life. Given the
wealth, and given the vast military preponderance in weapons of mass destruction
and other forms of globally deployed military capability of the societies of the
Atlantic basin, notably, of course, the United States, this poses a world crisis as
well.
In short, then, this complex adaptive emergent life exists in the permanent
emergency of its own emergence. Its politics of security and war, which is to
say its very foundational politics of rule as well, now revolve around this state
of emergency. Here, that in virtue of which a ‘we’ comes to belong together, its
very generative principle of formation (our shorthand definition of politics), has
become this emergency.
What happens, we also therefore ask of the biopoliticization of rule, when
emergency becomes the generative principle of formation of community and
rule? Our answer has already been given. Politics becomes subject to the urgent
and compelling political economy, the logistical and technical dynamics, of war.
No longer a ‘we’ in virtue of abiding by commonly agreed rules of government, it
becomes a ‘we’ formed by the rule of the emergency itself; and that is where the
political crisis, the crisis of the political itself in the west, lies, since the promise
always invested in western understandings of the political is that a ‘we’ can belong
together not only in terms of agreeing to abide by the rule of its generative princi-
ples of formation but also by the willingness to keep the nature and operation of
those generative principles of formation under common deliberative scrutiny.
You cannot, however, debate emergency. You can only interrogate the demands
it makes on you, and all the epistemic challenges it poses, acceding to those de-
mands according both to how well you have come to know them, and how well
you have also adapted your affects to suffering them, or perish. The very exigen-
cies of emergency thus militate profoundly against the promise of ‘politics’ as it
has been commonly understood in the western tradition; not simply as a matter of
rule, but as a matter of self-rule in which it was possible to debate the nature of the
self in terms of the good for and of the self. Note, also, how much the very idea of
the self has disappeared from view in this conflation of life with species life. The
only intelligence, the only self-knowledge, the only culture which qualifies in the
permanence of this emergency is the utilitarian and instrumental technologies said
to be necessary to endure it.
We have been here before in the western tradition, and we have experienced
the challenges of this condition. The emergency of emergence, the generative
principle of formation, the referential matrix of contemporary biopolitics globally,
is a newly formed, pervasive and insidiously complex, soft totalitarian regime of
power relations; made all the more difficult to contest precisely because, govern-

Global triage 87
ing through the contingent emergency of emergence, it is a governing through the
transactional freedoms of contingency itself.
Global triage
Making life live, then, liberal rule must also be in the business of assaying life
since not all life is equally productive of life and, indeed, not all life is productive
of the kind of life which promotes life; especially in the emergency of its emer-
gence. Some life, in other words, is always found wanting, and some life is always
found inimical to the promotion of life. Promoting life, the liberal way of rule
must continuously sort life into categories of living beings which contribute to or
detract from the promotion of life. In so doing, it seeks to learn from life itself,
most notably from the sciences of life. It thus takes continuous cognizance of the
properties of species existence, because it is not simply existing life that may pose
a threat to life. Life propagates itself through the very means by which it circu-
lates. In that circulatory self-propagation, life may produce life which is inimical
to the promotion of life: the emergency of emergence itself. Liberal biopolitics is
thus preoccupied not only with the future production of life but also with the very
processes of life-making, which biologists call morphogenesis, independent of
any particular extant form of life. Sorting existing lives into appropriate catego-
ries in respect of their varying capacities to live, and live well, according to what
the sciences of life help specify the requirements of effective living to be, liberal
biopolitics in the emergency of emergence has become at least as concerned with
selective management of the life process as it has with the adjudication of forms
of life. In its way of war, as much as in its way of rule, liberal practices themselves
seek to interrogate and mimic life processes, the better to prevail in making life
live through the promotion of species being; emphasizing, in the process, the need
to pre-empt the emergence of life forms in the life process that may prove toxic
to life.
Liberal rule has, therefore, not only to adjudicate membership of the species.
It decides, implicitly or explicitly, whom to correct and whom to punish, as well
as who shall live and who shall die, what life-forms will be promoted and which
will be terminated; and all this so that life can be made to live the emergency of
its emergence. It must also, however, adjudicate the future-seeking operation of
life processes themselves if it is to find ways not simply of indemnifying itself
against threat but also of ruling out the very emergence of a threat. Herein then
lies the dual character of the discourse of danger peculiar to the biopolitics of
liberal rule in the twenty-first century: adjudication of membership of the species
and adjudication of life processes themselves. In the process it is not only the
eligibility of life-forms that must be adjudicated – some aid the species, some may
not – and it is not only future life forms that must similarly be adjudicated. In the
age of life as information, when what it is to be a living thing is to be in constant,
informationally driven, complex adaptive emergence, liberal biopolitics of the
twenty-first century must have sufficient command of morphogenesis, as such, if
it is positively to engender life forms of which it approves.

88 Global triage
By such mechanisms, and according to such imperatives, liberal biopolitics
must ultimately say who shall live and who shall die. But liberalism does not kill
for the sake of it. Liberalism kills to make life live; specifically, today, in terms of
the emergency of its emergence. Just as its conception of life is instrumental and
utilitarian, so also is the logic of its biostrategic calculus of necessary killing. In
terms we introduced in the first chapter, liberalism is therefore obliged to exercise
a strategic calculus of necessary killing, in the course of which calculus it ought
also to be able to say how much killing is enough. It is not unique in having to de-
velop a strategic calculus of necessary killing. What is unique is the way in which
it seeks to determine that calculus by reference to the welfare of the biohuman as
a whole. But neither is liberalism unique in also failing to develop such a strategic
calculus. It has no better way of saying how much killing is enough, once it starts
killing to make life live, than does the geopolitical strategic calculus of necessary
killing. The problem of modern politics, as such, is that it simply does not know
how much killing is enough to realize its modernizing mission. If it did, its killing
would not have escalated so dramatically in the ways that it has. That liberalism,
like other modern projects, has failed, is indeed fated to fail, in developing a
strategic calculus of necessary killing which would teach it how much killing
is enough – to maintain balances of power, to establish international peace, to
remove humanity from the scourge of war, to make life live the emergency of its
emergence – is not a point we can go into here, since we are concerned instead
specifically to document the biopoliticization of rule and war. It is nonetheless a
point we ultimately wish to raise through this text, since we think the lethality of
modern war itself – geo- and biopolitical – problematizes the modern project as
such.
The liberal way of war thus makes war on life for the purposes of making life
live since it is the very emergency of emergence of life processes themselves
which engender the threats and dangers against which liberal biopolitics must
wage war if it is to succeed in promoting species life. What follows, in this, and
subsequent chapters is an account of how the liberal way of war has been refining
its mechanisms of both rule and war as it has been pursuing this enterprise, seek-
ing, as it does so, to take its cue ever more closely from what diverse life sciences
have been teaching about the very nature of life processes themselves.
In our opening chapters we also addressed the ways in which liberalism’s polit-
ical project for the emancipation of the species from war has been made possible
by the development of forms of scientific knowledge concerning the nature of spe-
cies life. To pursue the emancipation of the species politically, knowledge of the
species was required. Without it, the species could not be emancipated. With the
ending of the Cold War, liberal thinkers and liberal regimes of power rigorously
correlated improving the material welfare of the species with its pacification. Pov-
erty and war were allied; to be poor was to pose a threat (Goodhand 2003). Health
and war were also closely allied; to be contaminated by pandemic-threatening
viruses was equally to become a dangerous global threat. To be socio-technically
illiterate was also to be a danger to oneself and others, because life itself had
become an emergency of emergence in which incompetence at emergence posed

Global triage 89
a danger to the project of biopolitically optimizing the state of the species overall.
Economic and social transformation was equally required for material progress to
proceed, and many forms of force were and are required to realize it. Where they
were maladapted, for whatever reason, states and societies – many elements in
societies – had to be reconstructed, if necessary forcefully transformed, otherwise
they too would pose threats to the actual and virtual capacities of the biohuman to
live out its emergency of emergence even more vitally.
In as much as it is biopoliticized, therefore, liberal rule takes its cue from the
properties of species existence, the principal one of which, now, is said to be
the permanent emergency of its contingent emergence. Governance of the biohu-
man is therefore emergency governance. Its political rationalities and governing
technologies are all preoccupied – not to say obsessed – with governing through
emergency, which is why, among other characteristic features, its security preoc-
cupations have gone hyperbolic along with the intensity of its preparedness to
make war in pursuit of making life live this emergency of its emergence.
At the risk of being repetitious, let us make as clear as possible the significance
of this crucial turn in the liberal way of rule and war, which follows from the in-
terpretation of species existence, in the age of life as information, as a continuous
and contingent emergency of emergence. The first crucial point to make is that the
emergency is, itself, ungovernable since it is what gives rise to the problematic of
governance for contemporary liberal regimes of rule. It is neither possible, nor in
fact desirable, to bring an end to the emergency or, in effect, to diminish its rage.
For the emergency is now definitive of the condition of the everyday life of spe-
cies life. Life, here, is the emergency; and emergency does not so much present an
object to be governed as set the very operant conditions of governability as such.
If the vocation of biopolitics is to make life live, it must pursue that vocation these
days by making live life the emergency of its emergence ever more fully and ever
more resiliently; detailing, clarifying, amplifying and otherwise drawing out the
entailments of the emergency in the effort to make life live it even more animat-
edly in both virtual and actual terms. To optimize the state of life biopolitically is
therefore now to optimize the emergency of its emergence.
The second crucial point is this. It is the emergency which therefore governs.
It is the very positivity and empiricity of the emergency of species life which
global liberal governance now takes as its referent object of rule. It is the detailed
continuously unfolding and limitless nature of this emergency, its epistemic and
affective entailments and its manifold, indeed quite imponderable, dangers which
now pose the complex epistemic object of rule for global liberal governance.
When global liberal governance takes stock of life in order to orient rule around
the properties of life, these days it takes stock of life’s emergency of emergence.
Its global assay or audit of life is thus an emergency audit.
Every account of life is therefore contoured by its allied discourse of danger,
every account of order is contoured by an account of the disorder which threatens
it. The biopolitics of liberal rule and war differs only in the account that it gives
of ordered and disordered life and its self-endangering. To employ a medical term
which therefore fits this condition of rule precisely, the emergency of emergence

90 Global triage
requires a form of global triage. Global triage specifies who gets what treatment,
where, when and how. Some of that treatment – a lot of that treatment – is directly
and indirectly lethal. In the process of divining how to make life live the emer-
gency of its emergence even more vitally, the global triage of the liberal way of
rule simultaneously also provides a key source of the threat assessment for the
liberal way of war. The agency of the global triage required by the emergency of
emergence of species life, globally, has been preeminently that of global liberal
governance.4
Calling attention to the ways in which contemporary liberal biopolitics is
necessarily drawn to the generic conditions of life production and reproduction
– the heterogenesis of morphogenesis – independent of the individual features
of specific forms of life, the following brief survey of global liberal governance
similarly also focuses therefore on the features which it has regularly said are
necessary for all life to fructify. We draw attention to two of them – requisite di-
versity and informationally driven learning. It is, here, in the failure, for example,
to display ‘requisite diversity’, or in the failure to learn well informationally, that
forms of life exist or emerge which global liberal governance regularly finds toxic
to the promotion of life as such. Note also that the metric of ‘survival’ moves
from a simple matter of life and death – of whether or not, in Hobbesian terms, for
example, one avoids death at the hands of other ‘men’ – and becomes contingent,
instead, upon a certain disposition towards the world and a certain comportment
successfully adopted within the world. Note also that this comportment is not a
simple matter of deterring threat, as it was said to be during the course of the Cold
War, for example, nor is it a matter of mere disciplinary politics alone. Much more
is required of the living entity than this. The new order requires the self-ordering
of the entire being in its very being; the wholesale orientation of its life processes
less, indeed, around the simple matter of life and death, and more around the
cultivation of properties designed to live out its emergency more emergently.
If making species life live requires the assaying and sorting of life, how is
the assay organized and executed? How did liberal biopolitics, globally, come to
audit the species worldwide in order that, in advancing a certain understanding of
species existence, indeed of the very nature of the order of species existence as
complex adaptive and emergent, it came to better assess the dangers and threats
to which it was said the species is exposed by the operation of its very own life
processes? Our answer is through the discursive institutions and practices of glo-
bal liberal governance. Before moving directly to the military transformation and
change inspired by these developments, which we do in the next chapter, we have
to consider the global assay of life on the basis of which making life live finds
what to fear, where the danger lies, and who the enemy is, that its revised military
bodies have to target. We therefore address the account of species order to which
global liberal governance appeals in order to draw out the discourse of threat
which is now widely said, throughout the institutions and discursive practices of
global liberal governance, to endanger it.

Global triage 91
Global liberal governance as global triage
Throughout much of the modern era, the liberal project of peace was associated
with the pursuit of the ideal of some form of world government. Even though
Kant himself stopped short of advocating a world republic, liberals after Kant
tended to argue for it. Motivated not least by the recurring relationships between
the existence and ideal of nation-states on the one hand, and the phenomenon of
war on the other, many liberals have argued that Kant’s refusal to advocate world
government was inconsistent with ‘the deeper motivation of his own moral and
political principles’ (Baynes 1997: 225). In the wake of the immediate end of the
Cold War, however, leading liberal political theorists argued, as a minimum, for
the need to inaugurate a more robust ‘global constitutionalism’ (Falk 1993).
Within a few years of the end of the Cold War, then, a new form of liberal
internationalist discourse emerged, calling itself ‘global governance’ (Commis-
sion on Global Governance 1995).5 Global liberal governance differentiates itself
very clearly from world government and, in the process, significantly revises the
generative principles of formation and allied ambitions of liberal international-
ism. Whereas post-Kantian liberal internationalism tended to idealize the pos-
sibility of some form of world government, theorists of global liberal governance
are pursuing the alternative of what James Rosenau iconoclastically describes as
‘governance without government’ (1992). The absence of a world government ca-
pable of controlling nation-states through the imposition of sovereign order from
above is no longer seen as an impediment to the realization of a new global order
from below, since it is now in fact thought both possible and desirable to institute
such order from below without the travails of having to institute a supra-sover-
eign sovereign. Thus global liberal governance aspires, on Rosenau’s account, to
achieve order with as minimal a reliance on the use of the traditional institutions,
apparatuses and grids of intelligibility supplied by state sovereignty as practi-
cally possible. National governments, together with the United Nations, although
contributing to the conduct of global liberal governance, are regarded as mere
nodes in the network of this new scheme of a self-creating, self-legislating and
self-correcting global order without sovereignty. As Rosenau observed, ‘global
liberal governance is conceived to include systems of rule at all levels of human
activity – from the family to the international organization – in which the pursuit
of goals through the exercise of control has transnational repercussions’ (1998:
29). As the original report of the Commission on Global Governance states, global
liberal governance is to be conceived fundamentally as no more than ‘the sum of
the many ways in which individuals and institutions, public and private, manage
their common affairs’, involving a ‘continuing process’ of the accommodation of
‘conflicting or diverse interests’, and definitely does not imply world government
(1995: 2–4). This then is ‘government without Government’.
Seeking to forge global order by promoting the inherent capacities for self-
governance of all manner of social, economic and cultural units from within, rather
than by attempting to install regimes that reign over them from above, global
liberal governance is also an instance of what Foucault meant by the governmen-

92 Global triage
talization of the state: the reduction of governmental apparatuses to nodes in the
network of ordering without orderers, facilitating and empowering the network
of order rather than ruling it sovereignly from above. Much of the vocabulary of
this account of the global order also found its expression in the allied, now near
ubiquitous, discourse of networks (Shaviro 2003; Barabási 2002; Castells 1996).
International law remains, obviously, an important aspect of liberal interna-
tionalism; albeit one which we do not have the space to deal with directly here.
Not least because global liberal governance itself does not rely primarily on
legislative mechanisms nor indeed does it prioritize the task of getting states to
conform to an international regime of law. It does not construe its solutions to
the problem of international order in an especially juridical form, but largely es-
chews the theory and mechanisms of international law. It does not consider the
foundational question of international order to be premised on the problem of the
existence of nation-states, nor does it simply envisage some form of global civil
society emerging in cosmopolitan constraint of the existence of an international
state system. Its faith relies less on jurisprudence, national or international, natural
or positive, than it does on the science of living things. Its conception of the
problem of how to govern globally and its strategies of response to that problem
are thus located within the properties of species life itself. The strategies through
which it pursues the possibility of governance are, therefore, construed as work-
ing not between, or even simply within, states and societies, but in the steering of
the evolutionary processes to which states and societies like all living systems are
said to be subject globally.
Although drawing attention to the extra-juridical basis on which global liberal
governance proceeds, we do not, however, intend to align ourselves with the argu-
ment of those who insist that, in it, we are simply witnessing the demise of sov-
ereignty (Hardt and Negri 2001). Sovereignty remains an important aspect of the
organization and operation of global liberal governance, not least because states
remain key nodes in the networks of global liberal governance. Hence the state
form – the principle of formation of which is sovereignty – remains one power-
ful mechanism of subjectification upon which global liberal governance relies. It
may not enjoy the exclusive status it was once accorded in traditional accounts
of international relations – the liberal state has been substantially governmental-
ized, enmeshed in a complex matrix of plural power relations with other states
and non-state actors – but it nonetheless remains a key mode of subjectification
(Jessop 2007; Jessop 2006; Jessop 2004; Jessop 2002). However, many others
supplement it now.
Thus even as the state remains the primary actor in global politics, the results
of interdependence . . . are to create new networks and associations, many
of which are attempting to guide the state’s activities in the domestic and
international sphere.
(Barnett 1997: 538)

Global triage 93
Within the regime of global liberal governance, sovereignty is thus revised and
adapted, as Foucault indicated that it was nationally, rather than merely super-
seded. It has always co-existed with other forms and relations of power includ-
ing what Foucault variously described as disciplinary and biopower (Foucault
1991; Foucault 1990). But Foucault did not explore the complex triangulation
of disciplinary power, biopower and sovereignty in much detail until his Birth
of Biopolitics lectures (2008). Even there he left significant gaps to be filled, and
further questions to pose, since he also tended to reproduce the traditional ac-
count of sovereignty understood largely as the power to kill or threaten death.
Contra Foucault, somewhat, we nonetheless argue that sovereignty remains in-
tegral also to the exercise of power over life, and that global liberal governance
involves precisely such an operation of sovereignty, only pursued to new intents
and purposes in the selective operationalization of the global triage, for example,
that global liberal governance conducts through a whole variety of other agencies
and devices in addition to those of the state. As power over life has changed so
also has power over death; not surprisingly, since, as Foucault himself explained,
they were already deeply implicated in one another from their very early modern
inception.
Irrespective of ritualistic invocation of the rule of law, and other liberal princi-
ples, within the discourse of global liberal governance the term ‘governance’ does
not refer, therefore, to state rule with its sovereign conception of order and allied
political means of holding sovereign power to account through the operation of
representative assemblies and the rule of a form of law which is not reduced to
the administration of things. It appeals, instead, not only to a different conception
of how political order may be produced, but to an account of the production of
political order which relies upon a different conception of the very nature of the
production of order as such.
Thus far we have analysed that account of order in terms of its reduction of
language and life to information, and the reduction of this being-in-formation to
the emergency of emergence of complex adaptive behaviour. The emergency of
emergence, we observed, has introduced a wholly new and hyperbolic discourse
of danger to which we also gave the term ‘becoming dangerous’; in which it is
the very life processes of complex adaptive emergence themselves that endanger
complex adaptive and emergent entities.
But how are complex adaptive and emergent entities said to operate? Among
other things, it is said that, in essence, they must comprise the requisite diversity
and that they must be adept at informationally driven learning. It therefore also
follows, from the construal of species existence as complex adaptive emergence
of this character, that emphasis should be placed on the knowledge acquisition and
learning strategies by means of which complex adaptive behaviour takes place,
and on the diversity such systems are said to require if they are to initiate and self-
propagate. If language and life were thus reduced to information and code in this
account of the natural order of living things, so also has ‘learning’ been reduced
to information processing and actually existing cultural diversity reduced to the
systemic abstraction of ‘requisite diversity’.

94 Global triage
In its application of the global triage necessary to institute a continuous global
watch on species existence, in order to continually identify and anticipate spe-
cies threats to species existence globally, the theory and practice of global liberal
governance is especially distinguished by the ways in which it associates good
self-governance with learning capacities, and bad governance with the failure
to learn how to adapt and respond to the new political ecology; which politi-
cal ecology global liberal governance, itself, was busily writing on nature as it
nonetheless also claimed to find it installed naturally there. Similarly, although it
widely espouses diversity, the limits of its toleration to actually existing cultural
diversity are set by the parameters of the requisite diversity it requires to inscribe
its own core values and systemic economic as well as political requirements and
demands.
Requisite diversity
As historian of science, Lily Kay observed, the concept of order has long signi-
fied ‘the hidden agency governing the visible body: the plan of life, the “grand
design”, demarcating the animate from the inanimate,’ for the sciences of living
systems among which complexity claims to rank (2000: 46). Throughout most of
the modern development of biology, however, order within living systems was
measured in terms of the stability of functions among and within groups of organ-
isms constitutive of species. As Paul Weiss classically observed in 1939, ‘what
makes an organism an organism is that the diverse portions are definitely grouped
and arranged, maintain specific mutual relationships, and conform to a pattern
which is essentially identical for all members of a species’ (quoted in Kay 2000:
46). We saw in Chapters 3 and 4 how, along with molecular biologists, complexity
theorists have substantially revised this understanding of the order which char-
acterizes living systems. Rather than conceiving order as a static or even merely
complicated property of organisms which can be reliably taxonomized, complex-
ity theorists conceive order as a mutable, dynamic and complex process in which
the definitions of organisms and species are themselves necessarily implicated
and subject to change.
The conceptual transfer of this account of order into the kind of theories ad-
vanced by Rosenau and other global governmentalists is no simple misappro-
priation by naïve political scientists plucking ideas out of context. It is actively
promoted by complexity theorists themselves. As Kauffman himself forecasts,
The origin of life at a threshold of chemical diversity follows the same logic
as a theory of economic takeoff at a threshold of diversity of goods and serv-
ices . . . the edge of chaos may even provide a deep new understanding of the
logic of democracy . . . thus we will see hints of an apologia for a pluralistic
society as the natural design for adaptive compromise.
(1995: 27–28)

Global triage 95
Thus the complex forms of order which global liberal governance pursues inter-
nationally have to be distinguished from the merely complicated forms of order
envisaged by preceding forms of liberalism, and this distinction relates closely to
the distinctions which can be drawn between conceptions of order in classical ver-
sus contemporary forms of science. Indeed we argue that the former also accounts
for the latter. As we will detail in the next chapter, military strategic thinkers were
also quick to follow suit, embracing both the ontologies and epistemologies of
the newly emerging account of order. ‘[I]nformation is an embedded physical
property of all objects, that exhibit organisation and structure,’ declared two of the
leading defence intellectuals of the age of life as information. ‘This applies to dirt
clods as well as DNA’ (Arquilla and Ronfeldt 1996: 138).
By way of example, then, Dirk Messner’s work is paradigmatic for the ways
in which global liberal governance is extolled for combining an account of the
evolutionary processes with a novel conceptualization of security. A definitive
aim of global liberal governance, Messner argues, is its capacity to engender a
‘world society’ defined by a diversity of cultures and an ‘intricate plurality’ of
norms and value systems (2002: 46). However, in order that a world society may
prosper it is essential, Messner argues, that the cultures which constitute it ‘are
able to learn from one another without in this way endangering their capacity for
self-preservation’ (2002: 47). ‘The interaction between cultures’ Messner, argues,
‘heightens the moments of compatibility between them’ and while
the world is blessed with a great diversity of cultures, this diversity does not
imply any closed, historical unique cultures . . . but instead owes its existence
in the present to an eclectic and chance combination of cultural elements
stemming from a pool of cultural options, which is, in theory, institutional-
ized worldwide.
(2002: 47)
However much the concept of diversity has been fundamental to the development
of complexity science it nonetheless also mixes uneasily with the insistence on
promoting the core values of liberal internationalism such as those described, for
example, in the United Kingdom’s new national strategic discourse.
Explaining that Cold War threats have been replaced by a diverse but intercon-
nected set of threats and risks which express this new biopolitical account of
global order, the UK’s new national security strategy went on to specify a, by now,
sample set of threats including ‘international terrorism, weapons of mass destruc-
tion, conflicts and failed states, pandemics, and transnational crime . . . driven by
a diverse and interconnected set of underlying factors, including climate change,
competition for energy, poverty and poor governance, demographic changes and
globalisation’ (Cabinet Office 2008: 3). ‘The scope and approach of this strategy
reflects the way our understanding of national security has changed’, the document
went on to explain. It then summarized the grid of intelligibility operating behind
its account of global danger in terms which deserve more extensive quotation:

96 Global triage
In the past, the state was the traditional focus of foreign, defence and security
policies, and national security was understood as dealing with the protection
of the state and its vital interests from attacks by other states. Over recent
decades, our view of national security has broadened to include threats to
individual citizens and to our way of life, as well as to the integrity and in-
terests of the state. That is why this strategy deals with transnational crime,
pandemics and flooding – not part of the traditional idea of national security,
but clearly challenges that can affect large numbers of our citizens, and which
demand some of the same responses as more traditional security threats, in-
cluding terrorism. The broad scope of this strategy also reflects our commit-
ment to focus on the underlying drivers of security and insecurity, rather than
just immediate threats and risks.
(Cabinet Office 2008: 4)
The shift has not only prompted a move towards prioritizing prevention as well
as preparedness – ‘We are committed to improving our ability to scan the horizon
for future security risks, and to developing our capabilities for preventive action.
The most effective way to tackle all the major security challenges involves early
engagement’ (2008: 9) – this discourse of danger lays great emphasis also on
‘flexible alliances, coalitions or bilateral relationships tailored to particular issues’
(2008: 10) and the building of ‘adaptation strategies nationally and locally’ (2008:
50) to encourage underdeveloped countries to deal with the political ecology in
which they find themselves, especially, for example, in relation to the threats said
to be posed by the phenomenon of global climate change (2008: 50). That said,
the limits to requisite diversity were also clearly foregrounded:
Our approach to national security is clearly grounded in a set of core values

. . . Those values define who we are and what we do. They form the basis of
our security as well as our well-being and prosperity. We will protect and
respect them at home, and promote them consistently in our foreign policy.
. . . We believe that this set of core values is a potential basis for broad agree-
ment, not just in the United Kingdom but everywhere.
(Cabinet Office 2008: 6)
Such core values nonetheless become aligned with evolutionary diversity and
emergence, however, because, in an effortless slide from evolutionary to political
theory, they are now said to comprise the very mechanisms required for complex
adaptation and change; whereas they were once said to express the diversity of in-
terest and will of individual subjects endowed with natural freedom and equality.
In its preoccupation with the attributes of complex adaptive learning, complex-
ity theory also offers a fundamentally different account of the significance as well
as the origins and diversity of life; which diversity is said also to depend upon
learning behaviours in the form, for example, of traversing fitness landscapes well
by varying fitness strategies. Stuart Kauffman, for example, has gone so far as to

Global triage 97
claim the establishment of a ‘general law’, here, which is universal not only to
terrestrial life, but to the universe. ‘As an average trend’, he states,
biospheres and the universe create novelty and diversity as fast as they can
manage to do so without destroying the accumulated propagating organiza-
tion that is the basis and nexus from which further novelty is discovered and
incorporated into the propagating organization.
(2000: 85)
Diversity must be understood, he argues, as both the necessary condition for the
generation of life and that which life creates. Constitutive of life and generated
by life, diversity is thereby also said to be intrinsic to the laws which govern liv-
ing systems. It therefore becomes a metric by means of which the evolvability
of systems is measured, since evolving systems are required, on this account, to
display a critical degree of diversity if they are to successfully traverse the fitness
landscapes in which they find themselves continuously having to co-evolve. It be-
ing recognized that the system cannot evolve alone without simultaneously also
initiating evolutionary transformation and change in the very ecology in which it
is said to be operating, a question arises as to the specification of diversity itself.
For evolution necessarily connotes co-evolution. Such a basic observation none-
theless raises fundamental questions about the delineation, or boundaries, of the
very living systems one is said to be addressing: an undecidable level of analysis
problem posed by having to differentiate tiers of systemic behaviour that are radi-
cally co-implicated in one another from the outset. The system thus becomes a
construct of the analytical concern being expressed: an argument which parallels
the old argument between Locke and Bacon about whether species are written in
nature or written on nature.
Diversity may then said to be a necessity, indeed a metric of the origination
and operation of living systems, but the following questions cannot be elided
since they must continuously also arise: Which diversity? What diversity? Whose
diversity? In other words, since diversity is not an abstract thing but a material
feature, indeed a generative principle of formation and operation for all living
systems, according to what framing of co-evolving living systems is ‘diversity’
being specified? And what happens, we might ask, when the laws which govern
the creation of diversity are transgressed? Or when the limits to acceptable forms
of diversity are breached? What occurs to life forms which might not only learn
their evolutionary laws poorly, but, conversely, produce diversity at too great a
speed, or in quantities or of kinds that threaten to destroy the propagating powers
which account for diversity in the first place? What is it that the propagating pow-
ers of living systems fear in the pluripotent vitality of propagation itself? It turns
out that diversity is not a universal metric but a carefully specified and policed
parameter of living systems. The questions, as ever, becomes how much diversity
is enough, and what kinds of diversity are allowable.
For Kauffman also argues that the generation of biological diversity and nov-
elty is a necessarily bounded process. Life forms must remain beneath a critical

98 Global triage
threshold of diversity in order to avoid creating novelty at a lethal rate. All life
forms are said to undergo evolutionary development, that is clear, at the boundary
between order and chaos, or in a gated space which Kauffman also describes as
the ‘adjacent possible’. The adjacent possible is, however, especially important. It
circumscribes a particular space for the realization of life’s powers of propagation.
It is in this space that a species comes into contact with all those other molecular
species which are not current members of the actual, but are only one reaction step
away from the actual, representing the potentials of the possible (2000: 142). Life,
in order for it to go on propagating itself, must know how to enter the adjacent
possible, but it must learn to do so at what he calls a ‘subcritical’ as opposed to
a ‘supracritical’ rate. Indeed it must remain in contact with the adjacent possible
only subcritically ‘or else the rate of generation of molecular diversity would
overwhelm the capacity of natural selection to winnow out the winners from
the losers’ and those life forms which attained supracriticality would propagate
magnificent new forms but would ultimately die out (2000: 154). ‘Propagating
organization would’, thus, he argues, ‘poison its own propagation’ (2000: 154).
For populations, the result would be deformation ‘by the rapid accumulation of
mutations and diffuses away from the peak into the lowlands of poor fitness’
(2000: 208).
To avoid such strategic drift, Kauffman argues, life forms must learn to regu-
late the rates at which they create novelty and diversity, for, as he claims, in actu-
ality ‘we gate our entry into the adjacent possible’ (2000: 208, emphasis added).
This self-regulatory mechanism of life, that by which it gates its own entry to
the adjacent possible, is, Kauffman goes so far as to argue, the fundamental law
of emergence, dictating how species life governs its evolutionary development
through a continual process of experimentation and innovation without meeting
with catastrophe (2000: 157). Even within such complex adaptive accounts of
emergent order, then, diversity has its ‘critical’ limits, and therefore what is criti-
cal about such accounts of diversity is less the generic espousal of diversity than
the ways in which its ‘critical’ limits come to be specified, along the fear which
attends the engendering of forms and degrees of diversity that the system will
ultimately find alien. Whenever diversity is therefore espoused, it is as well to be
alert to the limits of the diversity that is being espoused, and the reasons why it is
being welcomed; for such reason will provide a clue to what degree and forms of
diversity are actually allowed.
In order for it to successively traverse evolutionary ordering, then, species
existence must engage with those other forms of life which it can encounter only
in the adjacent possible, according to Kauffman, to a (critical) degree different
and threatening to itself but also necessary for its capacity to mutate. In turn, it is
within the adjacent possible that species life is subject to its own particular test of
fitness. In order for it to achieve evolutionary order it must know when and how
to gate its passage to the adjacent possible. However, in what ways and to what
degree ought the species to gate that passage so that it can enable enough variation
from itself while disallowing the possibility of a supracritical encounter? At what
point must species life draw down the gate on its relation with the adjacent possi-

Global triage 99
ble, so that it can still distinguish between the useful and the useless in and among
those other potentialities for living which it encounters (Kauffman 2000: 22)?
How does species life, in other words, formulate the biostrategy it requires to
differentiate between life-forms more or less fit to contribution to species devel-
opment, and how does it operationalize the necropolitics of living death as well as
the juridical politics of sovereign death which necessarily complement the politics
of life biopolitically? Here then, in the very espousal of diversity itself, lies a bur-
geoning discourse also of threat which simultaneously also limits allowable diver-
sity; of the danger posed by too much diversity, too fast a diversification, or oth-
erwise parameter-busting diversity, threatening the fragile comportment required
for the complex adaptive emergence of evolvable systems. What is claimed, on
the one hand, to be robust in its adaptive diverse learning, is simultaneously also
therefore feared to be fragile and febrile, on the other; finely balanced between
order and catastrophe.
When Messner argues that the individual cultures which make up ‘world cul-
ture’ are those that have developed through the exercise of a capacity to ‘learn
from one another without in this way endangering their capacity for self-preserva-
tion’ (2002: 47), and that global liberal governance must govern by distinguishing
between eligible and ineligible cultures on grounds of their differing capacities
for learning, he is deploying precisely the same concept of strategy as that which
Kauffman employs to account for the evolutionary development of species life.
The new cross-fertilization with biological modes of discourse is as explicit here
in Messner’s work as it is now in that of many other social scientists:
in the developing world society, world markets, international organizations,

globally active NGOs, worldwide discourses on the universality of human
rights, and the establishment of institutions designed to protect them are the
germ plasm that give rise to global processes of social integration.
(Messner 2002: 50–1)
Since the transformation of societies from their industrial bases into knowledge-
based economies means that ‘the availability of knowledge is the key variable
involved in controlling social processes’ (2002: 50), so ‘global science’ becomes
‘an all-important building block in the process of constituting a world society’
(2002: 50).
Here again, too, and in its own specific ways, we also note that science is not
valued for how its truth is pursued independently from the exercise of power, but
even more insistently and globally allied to the new global ambitions of power. Its
contribution to the new order of global order derives, Messner maintains, from its
capacity, via the digital and molecular revolutions, to understand and master life
processes. It is these technologies which now account, he says, for the increase
in processes of integration through which societies and cultures can now be seen
to be ‘coalescing to form a worldwide system of interdependence’ (2002: 37). A
‘global communications infrastructure’ has emerged, for example, which ‘with
its electronic networks and date transmission lines, facilitates communications

100 Global triage
unbound by territoriality, making it possible to find, exchange, and use informa-
tion rapidly and cost-efficiently’ (2002: 40).
While the time–space compression and speed politics of its global networks
(Virilio 1986) are addressed as globally disseminated sociological phenomena,
leading to greater world integration, the topology and topography of power rela-
tions which they institute, the novel concentrations of corporate and ideological
power which they mobilize and the ideological force of their discursive practices
are systematically elided (Messner 1999; Castells 1996).
As terms of art, the concepts of network, diversity and information therefore
capture the contemporary convergence between life-scientific understandings
of how species life orders itself and concepts of world order, in particular those
of global liberal governance. For complexity theorists such as Kauffman, life in
its most elementary of conditions is simply an ‘emergent collective behavior’ of
‘complex chemical networks’ (2000: 15). Terrestrial life is based, for example,
on the ‘complex web’ of chemical interactions and reactions afforded by DNA,
RNA, proteins and metabolism (2000: 10). Such reactions constitute what other
theorists of complexity describe as ‘information transfer systems’ (Kay 2000:
319–21). In that process informational learning is also paramount; an additional
criterion of good evolvable governance which goes all the way back to Norbert
Wiener.
Informationally driven learning machines

The concept of information is deployed within complexity theory to describe the
power by which the memory of form is transferred from organism to organism
in the complex chemical reactions which constitute the life processes by which a
species evolves. Information is accordingly conceived as the fundamental source
of living order. The discovery of genetic information, the genetic code, and the
consequent development of recombinant DNA technologies during the Cold War
meant that science could conceive the possibility of being able to establish a glo-
bal control of life through the total plotting of its informational form and logos. As
Lily Kay observes, in her magisterial account of the discovery and development
of research on the genetic code, ‘the human genome is now generally viewed as
an information system and more specifically as a “Book of Life” to be read and
edited’ at scientific will (2000: 1).
Likewise, we argue, global liberal governance, in its establishment of a global
network society predicated on the exchange of information, makes claims on the
foundation of a new form of order for the institution of world order. Thus remov-
ing war from the life of the species has to been allied to the espousal of a new
form of ordering for the species, politically, governmentally and economically, in
which the new technologies of life as information – of being-in-formation in toto
– are said to be ‘revolutionizing the structures of social relations, the dynamics of
science, and the learning capacities of organizations and societies’ (2002: 40). A
culture which lacks the capacity to learn how to install and live-out life as infor-

Global triage 101
mation is a culture unable to adapt itself to the conditions for the development of a
world society which will, in turn, struggle to ensure its own survival (2002: 47).
These propositions derive in direct lineage from Wiener’s early work on cy-
bernetics. But the analytic of cybernetically based ‘control society’, which Gilles
Deleuze offered as a corrective to Foucault’s analytic of ‘disciplinary society’,
overlooked the ways in which Wiener also linked cybernetics to fitness and success
in an evolutionary struggle for survival dependent upon certain kinds of adaptive
learning. In Cybernetics, for example, Wiener identified the ‘power to learn’ as
the fundamental feature that distinguishes living from non-living systems (1961:
169). Indeed his broader claim was that, as a feature of living systems, learning
can also be identified as a feature of man-made machines, and that such machines
may therefore be said to exhibit life. But, in doing so, he drew on a theory of
learning as the capacity which distinguishes fit from unfit forms of life in the
development of evolutionary processes of natural selection. In a vivid section of
the text, he described, for example, the life struggle which takes place between a
mongoose and a cobra:
The mongoose begins with a feint, which provokes the snake to strike. The
mongoose dodges and makes another such feint, so that we have a rhythmical
pattern of activity on the part of the two animals. However, this dance is not
static but develops progressively. As it goes on, the feints of the mongoose
come earlier and earlier in phase with respect to the darts of the cobra, until
finally the mongoose attacks when the cobra is extended and not in a position
to move rapidly. This time the mongoose’s attack is not a feint but a deadly
accurate bite through the cobra’s brain.
(1961: 174)
The capacity which distinguishes the mongoose from the cobra, says Wiener,
is that of learning. Whereas the snake’s ‘pattern of action is confined to single
darts, each one for itself’, that of the mongoose ‘involves an appreciable, if not
very long, segment of the whole past of the fight’ (1961: 174). The mongoose is
able to time its attacks, Wiener argues, because it acts like a ‘learning machine’
(1961: 174).
The importance of the power to deploy learning capacities as part of the
armoury of life struggle is as true, Wiener argued, for the phenomenon of war
between human societies as it is of the animal world (1961: 175). His conception
of the ways in which the ‘power to learn’ through informational feedback loops
determined the relative fitness of human societies in war, extended, however, far
beyond their capacities to deploy advanced technological forms of weaponry in
defence of pre-formed territories and populations. In his later work The Human
Use of Human Beings he would go on to apply his arguments to the strategic
competition of interstate rivalry definitive of Cold War international relations. As
he argued there:

102 Global triage
that country will have the greatest security whose informational and scientific
situation is adequate to meet the demands that may be put on it – the country
in which it is fully realized that information is important as a stage in the
continuous process by which we observe the outer world, and act effectively
upon it . . . there is no Maginot line of the brain.
(1954: 122)
The struggle for survival internationally would be decided, then, Wiener argued,
by which regimes best optimized their capacities for information exchange, not
just within their own territorial boundaries but in their relations with their en-
emies: ‘The integrity of the channels of internal communication is essential to the
welfare of society’, he argued (1954: 131), presaging the widespread weaponiza-
tion of information which was to characterize war by the beginning of the twenty-
first century, even to the extent that it is ‘as important to keep one’s own message
channels open as to obstruct the other side in the use of the channels available to
it’ (1954: 128). Fitness, not just for war but for the ongoing struggle for survival
and development within the international sphere, depended, he argued, again an-
ticipating later orthodoxies of complex adaptive emergence, on the capacity of a
state to transform itself into a fully functioning learning machine which would,
like the mongoose, ‘be capable of being transformed by its past environment into
a different being’ (1961: 169).
Wiener’s work on information and its relations to problems of organization
and strategy had significant influence on leading American political scientists and
sociologists. Concerned more broadly with ‘modernization’, Karl Deutsch and
Talcott Parsons both made use of his ideas to develop new modes of political and
social analysis (Deutsch 1967; Kay 2000: 90). Yet what is most striking for us is
the implicit and sometimes explicit use of his conception of fitness, formulated
in terms of the power to learn, the capacity for transformation through adaptation
and information exchange, in the development of the discourse and practice of
global liberal governance.
Fitness for inclusion within the developing world society therefore requires –
demands – an emergent form of cultural homogeneity, globally hostile to cultural
forms which understand learning and practice life differently. If life in its essence
is simply a process of information exchange between an inside and an outside,
and if the great international power struggles of societies, cultures and civiliza-
tions are genuinely to be decided on the question of which possess the greater
capacities for learning, adaptation and information exchange, then it is difficult
to envisage how any other culture might be able to survive, let alone prosper,
in conditions of a developing world society in which learning, adaptation and
information exchange are said to be biostrategic prerequisites for survival. Req-
uisite diversity has its limits, and the capacity for informationally driven learning
and information processing, among other socio-cultural, political and economic
metrics, helps define them

Global triage 103
Conclusion
The biopolitical response of liberalism is to reduce all life to the same form of
life by rendering life, rather than war, universally utilitarian and instrumental.
Instrumentalizing life rather than war is a novel way of claiming to abolish war.
What it does, instead, is institute a kind of unlimited war to instrumentalize life
against life which resists its pure instrumentalization (Reid 2007). As Michael
Howard also observed long ago, albeit in different terms, liberalism’s way of war
admits of no immanent limit to war, so long as life remains obdurate in its resist-
ance to being reduced to a standing reserve for species improvement. In preceding
chapters we showed how epistemological developments within the life sciences,
broadly conceived also to include the so-called complexity sciences, helped con-
temporary liberal thinkers and institutions to further innovate to this end, both
nationally and internationally. Thus, the establishment of new knowledge about
the evolutionary processes that shape the development and constitute the ordering
of living entities, especially as these were increasingly conceptualized and ad-
dressed in terms of ‘information’, ‘requisite diversity’, ‘adaptation’, ‘emergence’
and ‘learning’, came to redefine the ways in which biopolitical forms of liberal
rule conceived biostrategies for the governance and security of biohumanity glo-
bally. In the process, socio-technical competence became a criterion by which to
adjudicate membership of, and modes of enfranchisement within, the species. As
the strategies developed which global liberal government required for the task of
making life live, so also did the enemies against which war had to be waged for
the optimization of species existence. The socio-technically illiterate – too poor
to have debts and too numerous to be confined, to adapt the Deleuzean epigraph
of this section – the generically seditious, parasitic or delinquent, especially those
who expressed themselves violently, instigated a new political nominalism: of
enemies, threats and dangers.
However much freeing biohumanity is expressed as a universal project, it is,
unsurprisingly, not universally practiced. It varies according to many factors, not
least those of its geopolitical circumstances; sovereign and biopower co-exist in
the modern manifold of power relations locally and globally. Among the reasons
are the limited resources of liberal states, the difficulty of agreeing on prioritizing
affronts to the peace of liberal rule and the bald geopolitical fear of other, often
nuclear armed, states. However much China may offend against the liberal way
of rule, for example, there will be no American-led coalition of forces to liberate
the Chinese people from the depredations of the Communist Party of China. Ditto,
probably, Iran as well as other geostrategic rivals and biopolitical enemies; and
there is no reason why one may not also, of course, be both. In short, however
much removing war from the life of the species is universally espoused in liberal
biopolitics, its selectivity has also to be accounted for. When you address that
selectivity, not the primary focus of concern in this text but one that must none-
theless be noted en passant, you enter into the complex interplay of the many
different considerations at work in the modern plural power play of contemporary
power relations.

104 Global triage
Expressing the means by which biohumanity is to be liberated from war, such
criteria also of course specify how the biohuman is conceived, what biohumanity
has to do, how it has to be governed, and what standards it has to meet if it is to
be recruited effectively into the project of global self-pacification by accepting its
universal instrumentalization as a domain of complex, and hybrid, ‘cybernetical’
emergence.6 These criteria are lethal criteria. They help specify who is to be cor-
rected, who is to be punished and how. They also specify who shall live and who
shall die. There is, in other words, what other analysts have called a necropolitics
to liberalism’s global biopolitics (Mbembe 2003; Mbembe 2001); not even a sys-
tematic fallout of unintended consequences but a necessary selectivity and culling
which, whatever else it may be called, is integral to how global biopolitics works
(Dillon 2009; Reid 2007; Davis 2006; Montag 2005; Seabrook 1996).
If freeing biohumanity from war is the goal, there is, in short, a price to be paid,
and somebody has to pay it. The price is levied differently and for different popu-
lation groups; there is a biopolitical economy of danger at work here in which
risks are differentially spread and one can see it in operation when one observes
which wars liberal regimes fight in practice, as well as how they fight them, and
which ones they do not. Some are, therefore, systematically more exposed than
others by the logic that is in force. Who gets what, where, when and how in
the biopolitical strategic calculus of necessary killing includes the biopolitical
economy of danger established as a systemic function, rather than a contingent
accident, of the liberal way of rule; even if, ultimately, it is not possible to say
how much killing is enough since, biologically speaking, of course, morbidity and
death are in fact indispensable to making life live.
In an age of global interdependence, the dissemination of weapons of mass
destruction and the prospect of ecological disaster, the price also now threatens to
be levied on biohumanity as a whole. Or, as Foucault observed in an astute précis
of the late modern human condition:
what might be called a society’s ‘threshold of modernity’ has been reached

when the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies . . .
modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being
in question.
However well-intentioned it may be said to be, politics reduced to animal hus-

bandry (biopolitics) provides no guarantee that the herd will be preserved, much
less improved. At this juncture the hermeneutics of analytical as well as political
suspicion which we are concerned with deploying throughout this book include
also that of asking whether or not biohumanity can afford the cost of thus being
liberated from war biopolitically. In the meantime western militaries, too, were
not only gearing themselves up to align with this new account of order; in very
many respects they were also at the forefront of pioneering it.
Since global liberal governance was explicitly intended to be a transformatory
exercise of new power relations inspired by such an account of order, locally and

Global triage 105
globally, little wonder that it eventually also provoked violent resistance (Dillon
2003). Although espousing a biopolitically driven model of global order designed
to promote the life of the biohuman globally, thus also developing a discourse
of danger and target list of threats to that project, global liberal governance ulti-
mately also found itself embattled by the frustration and rage of those who did
not get it, did not want it or found themselves on the very short end of receiv-
ing it; their own livelihoods and cultures construed, in the process, as toxic or
dispensable. This acerbic response to its project helped legitimize and fuel the
hyperbolicization of security fears which, nonetheless, derived primarily from its
very own conception of order as being-in-formation, subject to a continuous state
of emergent emergency, in which the primary condition of life, however secure
historically in practice, is construed as a continual becoming dangerous to itself.
That same conception of order was, however, also adopted by the military, whose
task it became to police and fight for this order.

6 Military transformation in the
age of life as information
Whether military organisation is based on the principle of self-equipment or that

of equipment by a military warlord who furnishes horses, arms and provisions, is
a distinction quite as fundamental for social history as is the question whether the
means of economic production are the property of the worker or of a capitalistic
entrepreneur.
Max Weber
In previous chapters we argued that, just as the rise of the modern state was pre-
occupied with removing war from the life of civil society, so also did the rise of
modern liberalism embrace the idea of removing war from the life of humanity by
promoting its account of the biohuman. And this it did from the latter half of the
seventeenth century. Removing war from the life of civil society – the political
revolution of the seventeenth century – did not entail the end of war. It histori-
cally re-problematized political violence in novel and newly complex ways, and
in the process also, of course, re-problematized war. This entailed a fundamental
reconfiguration of the space and time of political violence: from King, Empire
and Church to the State; and from the cosmic time of Christian doctrine to history,
as well as to the physical time of Galileo and Newton (Le Goff 1992; Le Goff
1986; Le Goff 1982). As Norbert Elias put it, in respect of the last especially,
‘the significance of the emergence of “physical time” from the matrix of “social
time” can hardly be overrated’ (Elias 1992: 115). The complex shifts involved
also entailed a change in the very ways in which war was cognized and waged,
indeed a change in the very purposes and values placed on, as well as invested
in, war, from those which had obtained during the course of the Renaissance as
well as the Middle Ages. Here, too, the technologies involved were not simply
those born out of improvements in science (Parker 1988). The ‘technology’ of
military organization has also moved on substantially since Weber drew attention
to the correlation between forms of life and forms of war, especially among liberal
states. In particular, it has done so because forms of liberal life have themselves
been transformed by a wide variety of historical developments including not only
the wars of the twentieth century, and the economic growth and techno-scientific
developments which these stimulated, but also the globalization of capital, the as-

Military transformation in the age of life as information 107
sociated development of information and communication technologies, and par-
ticularly the molecular revolution.
As the referent object of species life has helped furnish the liberal ambition to
remove war from the life of humanity with the truth-telling powers it also required
to articulate and pursue that ambition, this biopolitical peace-making project has
proved no less violent than the domestication of civil societies proved to be. In-
deed the argument here is that, in its range and in its depth, the project of pacifying
humanity requires a violence which acknowledges no immanent limit. Theorists
of interstate violence did, at least, try to formulate how the instrumentalization
of war might also serve to temper the ravages of war among communities which
were expected to remain diverse and different; however much this geo-strategic
ambition was subverted by states pursuing war with unlimited means to unlimited
ends.
If the life sciences are contributing to political strategies for the emancipation
of the species from war, however, they are also directly implicated in ramifying
and intensifying the means by which war is capable of being waged to that end.
Proclaiming the emancipation of the species from war does not simply, therefore,
establish peace. Rather, it translates peace-making into a kind of war machine:
that bent on the pacification of the human as biohuman. In ‘the age of the world
target’ (Chow 2006), it is not so much the incidence of violence which therefore
also changes as war’s organization and character, as well as the ‘targets of oppor-
tunity’ – including all aspects of life as such – which fall into its cross-wires (We-
ber 2005). The very space of enmity is itself re-problematized. Who is dangerous,
what is dangerous, how things become dangerous are all transformed.
Take for example the current expression of what the biohuman consists in,
which came to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century and to
which we devoted attention earlier in the book. If the referential centre of war be-
comes biohumanity, and biohumanity is conceived in complex adaptive emergent
terms, then the epicentre of enmity, fear and danger moves from the external other
to the very internal characteristics of biohumanity itself, namely its own complex
adaptive and emergent properties; its very capillaries and infrastructures, to use
expressions which we address in different terms, as critical national infrastruc-
tures, in the next chapter. It comes as no surprise that otherness is therefore found
within. The issue is how that otherness becomes not simply specified but also
targeted, because it is construed as a continuously contingent becoming danger-
ous which excites a hyperbolicization of security designed to pacify or otherwise
eradicate the danger it poses; a move which ultimately sutures the logos of war
ever more deeply into the logos of liberal biopolitics.
Two sets of danger arise here in connection with these biological properties of
species being. The first are those concerned with the rogues who resist this account
of themselves – they will not, cannot, or, simply, are not much good at, this kind
of living. They may very well have a quite coherent other account of what life
consists in and what living well involves. In consequence, they may be systemati-
cally ‘othered’, or ‘exceptionalized’, in a whole variety of well-established ways
(Neal 2009; Butler 2004). But ‘othering’ is not the only issue. It is the operation

108 Military transformation in the age of life as information
of the biopolitical grid of intelligibility which determines their marginalization,
exceptionalization or othering that also counts because not only does it instantiate
and institutionalize many of the foundational drivers; in the process its logos of
politics becomes a logos of war.
The second set of dangers is even more immanent to biohumanity than the
first. Not all emergence is good. We made the point following Kauffman’s ac-
count of super criticality in the previous chapter. Put bluntly, when life is con-
ceived in complex adaptive emergent terms, biohumanity is also conceived as a
continuous and contingent becoming dangerous to itself. A shift in the logic of
strategic science, and its material micro-practices, follows: good emergence has
to be distinguished from bad, desired emergence from unwanted emergence. In
the process, war becomes less a periodic phenomenon than the very optimization
of the state of living required by an emergency of emergence – such an emergency
determined by the character of life itself rather than the presence, for example, of
deadly geostrategic or even ideological rivals. Emergence simply is a permanent
emergency. In the process, also, novel micro-practices of securitization proliferate,
from scanning and self-policing to degrees of surveillance which now excite even
official fears (Ball et al. 2006). In short, the entire terrain of the problematization
of fear, danger, enmity, amity and lethal threats metamorphoses; as the UK and
US national security strategies indicate, strategic friendships become alliances of
convenience and coalitions of the willing out of biostrategic rather than Machi-
avellian necessity.
No wonder then that every conceivable kind of threat from pandemics to sys-
temic failures of critical national infrastructure now yields its own ‘war’. In these
instances war is no metaphor. Use of the term expresses how the biopolitical grid
of intelligibility lends itself to violently polemicizing all aspects of the social body.
Given that the object of war is the pacification of humanity, every threat to that
pacification – the vast bulk of which originates in the very distinguishing proper-
ties of biohumanity itself – is effectively a ‘bio’ threat. Little wonder also, then,
that the terms describing such threats are now widely expressed in all manner of
biological as well as bio-informatic terms. Similarly, once you make pacification
of humanity biopolitically your global objective, sedition and resistance is not
simply de-legitimized politically, it is simultaneously also pathologized biologi-
cally.
Thus, as the confluence of the digital and molecular revolutions has trans-
formed the very vital signs of life, so also has it transformed the very nature of
threat perception. Molecular processes of emergence – infrastructural as well as
organic – become prime sites of insecurity. As their life-like properties are fore-
grounded, so also is their potential for becoming dangerous. Monstrosity arises as
much from within as from without. Catastrophe finds a new location. It continues
of course to be associated with forces of nature: earthquakes, cyclones and tsu-
namis. But it also finds a new site here in the very expression of bio-informatic
order as such: the body itself threatens catastrophe. Immune structures provided
by the very complex adaptive infrastructures of life become the very mechanisms
which endanger it as well (Derrida 2005). No longer simply a prophylactic game

of protection, biopoliticized, security becomes molecularized: preoccupied with
newly construed design-arts of self-regulating forces and techniques associated
with self-initiating recombination, resilience and regeneration, together with their
complex architectures of information, dissemination, circulation and cybernetic
control.1 This biopolitical ideal of order, together with its biostrategic preoccupa-
tion with informationally comprised self-repairing and resilient complex adap-
tive emergent systems, was pioneered first, however, by the US military in the
so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) which it initiated in the hiatus of
geopolitical threat perception afforded by the dissolution of the Cold War.
RMA in the age of life as information

Long brewed in techno-scientific, cultural and commercial developments taking
place throughout the developed world in response to the confluence of the digital
and molecular revolutions, the current so-called Revolution in Military Affairs
(RMA) is also a complex matter. All RMAs also excite an undecidable debate
about when they started, when they ended, and whether or not they were really
‘revolutions’ (Gray 1999; Biddle 1996). We do not intend to enter these debates,
since they are not directly germane to our purpose, and derive in any event from
a way of problematizing political as well as military affairs from which we have
already explained our dissent. Suffice to say that this RMA is as much an exclu-
sively American way of making war as capitalism is an exclusively American way
of making a living; which is not to say that the mythopoiesis of the American Re-
public is not also composed of its own distinctive concatenation of national (Ka-
gan 2006; Lieven 2004; Slotkin 1993; Slotkin 1985; Slotkin 1973), racial (Brown
1991; Fields 1990), class and messianic violence (Hedges, 2006; Philips, 2006).
Suffice to say also that where ‘revolution’ is concerned, it is more profitable to
follow Wittgenstein (2001) on the one hand, by refusing to ask the meaning of the
word in order to draw attention instead to how it is used, or Shapin on the other
(1996) by recognizing that the very idea of ‘revolution’ is a modern invention
intimately linked with the idea of linear time.
In this instance ‘revolution’ was a key term of art deliberately employed by
American security thinkers and practitioners throughout the US military–indus-
trial, media and entertainment complex to effect dramatic transformations not
simply in the war preparation and war-making of Atlantic societies, but in the
very nature also of military cognition (Der Derian 2001). This required a new
discourse of military strategic thinking. Like all such discursive ensembles of
power/knowledge, its origins and effects were to be found as much in civil as they
were in military institutions. As ever we are dealing with a phenomenon which
breaches the civil/military divide. Accordingly, militaries, like corporations and
individuals, are also now conceived as ‘continually adapting ecosystems’ which
must develop evolutionary strategies of survival-as-emergence in competition
with enemies which are said to be continuously co-evolving with them in densely
mediated ecologies of globally organized informational networks, both actual and
virtual.

The political object of war, here, is not confined to the geopolitical ends of
seizing territory, defending borders or occupying land. It widely expresses the
biopolitical template of order which we have been elaborating throughout this
book, revising military strategic discourse and doctrine in the process to that of
attaining information superiority, developing the means of continuous adaptive
emergence better than one’s competitors, learning faster than illiberal enemies
inhabiting shared co-evolving ecosystems, and so on. In the process, territory,
borders and land are thoroughly de-territorialized only to be re-territorialized in
novel ways, as trans-national cooperation to continuously track the global circula-
tion of goods, services and ideas as well as individuals and populations, regularly
illustrates; the US Customs ‘virtual borders programme’, concerned with tracking
the global circulation of container shipping, provides just one specific example
(Binnendijk et al. 2002).
Here, the life sciences afford more than a means of making the biopoliticized
military body as well as its weapons systems informationally savvy and intel-
ligently life-like. Once more, it furnishes a complex template, or grid of intelligi-
bility, to which reference is made when re-cognizing military strategic discourse,
operational concepts and doctrines and re-modelling military planning, training
and leadership as well as the very understanding of war itself, and its now pluridi-
mensional battlespaces. Although such developments were initiated in the United
States, they were by no means confined to the US. They now characterize military
strategic discourse and practices throughout Australasia as well as the Atlantic ba-
sin, and they have leached as much into homeland security, civil contingencies and
counter-terrorism as they have into the domestic policing and social and corporate
life of their communities. We concentrate, in this chapter, on the military strategic
discourse and practices of network centric warfare, the informationalization of
weapons systems and the weaponization of information for what is commonly
called ‘war in the information age’ (Arquilla and Ronfeldt 2001; Arquilla and
Ronfeldt 1997; Schwartzstein 1996) but is, as we argued earlier, better described
as war in the age of life as information.
The RMA associated with the concept of ‘Netwar’, especially, is a classic il-
lustration of the key points we wish to make. Yes, it was a response to the de-
velopment of new electronic means of information and communication. As the
military say ‘the kit’ was transformed. But it has also effected a transformation
in military cognition: the very ways the military has of conceiving how it fights
as well as what it fights for. ‘We need to change not only the capabilities at our
disposal’, urged Donald Rumsfeld, the RMA’s political patron, in a speech to the
National Defense University, ‘but also how we think abut war. All the hi-tech
weapons in the world,’ he continued, ‘will not transform the US Armed Forces
unless we transform the way we think, the way we train, the way we exercise
and the way we fight’ (Rumsfeld 2002a: 29). Here, a peculiarly toxic confluence
of the biopolitical and the biomilitary occurred within the liberal way of rule
when the liberal way of war, in the process of going both digital and molecular,
embraced concepts and doctrines which were becoming common in the age of life
as information. It is this change in ‘cognition’ which interests us most, since the

conceptualization of war as well as the operational concepts and doctrines which
are now formulated to govern war preparation, in addition to war-making, have
all been extensively, and newly, informationalized and biologized in the process.
The material concern of this chapter is how, and to begin we return to its origins
in the story of cybernetics.
Informationalizing weapons, weaponizing information
The ontology of the annihilation of beings assumes therefore a validity as a

critique of knowledge.
Michel Foucault
Since information has become definitive, biologically speaking, not only of what
it is to be human, but of what it is to display living properties at all, information
and information exchange have become the vital signs of life. The development
of intelligent weapons, as much as military strategic thought, now also expresses
this biopolitical imperative. As they go ‘live’ in wholly novel ways, and to wholly
novel effects in terms of their impact on the very cognition of combat and the
delineation of battlespace, intelligent weapons themselves became iconic of the
martial face of biopolitical liberalism gone global in the informationalization of
what it is to be a living thing.
We are concerned here with two intimately related processes; the notoriety of
the one has eclipsed the equal if not greater significance of the other. Much at-
tention has been paid to the informationalization of weapons: the advent of smart
weapons and stealth technologies. In the process of informationalizing weapons,
however, it is important to remember that information itself also became weap-
onized. It did so in the widest possible sense. Beyond mere propaganda, infor-
mation itself became battlespace, and not simply a prize in the burgeoning bat-
tlespaces of the liberal way of war. Thus, although the introduction of new smart
weapons designed to have properties of living systems is an important feature of
the contemporary development of the liberal way of war, it is necessary to stress
that the impact of the life sciences on the liberal way of war has not been limited to
these technological innovations. The development of the life sciences in general,
and of complexity science in particular, comprising new knowledge about the
complex emergent adaptive processes and properties of open living systems, has
transformed the ways in which liberal regimes have come to understand the very
nature of war, and of the relation of war to complex adaptive evolutionary models
of rule and order. Here, biology in the form of life as information exchange is not
simply allied to organization, newly conceived in informational terms; biology
becomes organization, and, in the process, military strategy becomes biostrategy.
In this section we detail the nature of this shift.
It is a complex development, difficult to describe because we are dealing with a
two-way street. As our reflections on the birth of cybernetics and the early alliance
of cybernetics with biology demonstrated, it is impossible to identify a simple

point of origin for these developments. Military and civilian structures are so
closely intertwined with, and mutually dependent on, each other in the liberal way
of rule and war, that intercourse between them is constant. It would be surprising
if it were not. Of course, that intercourse violates what liberal rule teaches about
civil/military relations. But we are less concerned to indict that violation of liberal
principles than to document and explain how it was that military strategy also be-
came biostrategy, when life and order were conceived informationally, especially
as code, along with much of the civil strategizing which characterizes economic,
corporate and social life throughout the liberal world of the twenty-first century.
If military strategy became biostrategy, the grammar of that strategy became
‘transformation’. We detail that development in the next section. Before doing
so we have to explain, first, how and why military strategic discourse became
biostrategy, and in what that biostrategization essentially consists.
Biostrategization
The need for the military to engage with innovations in the life sciences, broadly
conceived, not just as a means to create more lethal technical capacities for vio-
lence, but to create new military and strategic doctrines, began to popularized by
Alvin and Heidi Toffler in the early 1990s (Toffler and Toffler 1993; Toffler 1990).
It was subsequently developed throughout the decade, by US military academies,
until it became a comprehensive strategic doctrine which received official sanc-
tion at the turn of the decade with the publication of two key US strategic policy
documents (USDOD 2000; USDOD 1996).
Under the US 1986 Goldwater–Nichols Department of Defense Re-organiza-
tion Act, a Roles and Missions Commission must present a report to the Secretary
of Defense every three years. The report issued by the commission in 1996 argued
that a central mission to guide the US armed services was missing and urgently
required to provide overall strategic cohesion and direction for the twenty-first
century The outcome was a document entitled Joint Vision 2010 (USDOD 1996).
This advocated a strategy of network-centric warfare, moving to more lethal mili-
tary capabilities not simply by adopting the information and communication tech-
nologies fuelling the so-called RMA more extensively and more intensively than
hitherto, but by systematically utilizing information as the generative principle
of formation for all aspects of military organization. A revised Joint Vision 2020,
issued in May 2000 (USDOD 2000), extended and embraced network-centric
warfare as the principle of formation governing all US national strategy. It also
raised the question of how the NATO alliance could be drawn into the evolving
strategic web of network-centric thinking (Dillon and Reid 2001).
The Joint Vision documents were the product of a wide variety of innova-
tive research and thinking which had taken place during the course of the 1990s
throughout US military universities and war colleges. Among the most influential
and prolific authors formulating the new doctrines of war for the so-called ‘infor-
mation age’ were John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt of the RAND Corporation,

an independent think tank with a very long-standing and intimate relationship
with the US Department of Defense and deeply involved also in championing
the changes which began to follow. Their co-edited text, In Athena’s Camp, drew
directly on the work of Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics (Arquilla and
Ronfeldt 1997b: 146–8). New knowledge about the function of information as a
property of living systems, the roles of information and learning in processes of
evolutionary adaptation and change, the fundamental relations between informa-
tion and order, all functioned, they argued, to render traditional forms of military
strategic doctrine obsolete.
In Athena’s Camp brought together a wide range of contributors, each of whom
interrogated how such developments in cybernetics and the life sciences impacted
on military strategic understandings of key parameters of military science – force,
organization and power – in ways which required fundamental shifts in the formu-
lation of military strategic discourse, operational concepts and doctrines, and in
the organization of military force. In certain ways the authors were exploiting the
opportunity provided by the dissolution of the Cold War to take a wider account
of social, economic and techno-scientific changes to re-think war itself, as well
as how the US might continue to enjoy the unilateral global hegemony afforded
by the fall of the Soviet Union. Stephen J. Blank (1997), for example, argued
that it was of fundamental importance for military forces to parallel what was
said to have taken place in commercial organizations in their response to the ICT
revolution (Mayer 1999). The US corporate sector as a whole had embraced the
ICT revolution, radically transforming its corporate structures and management,
leadership and employee discourse as it did so (Schiller 2000). Other capital-
ist economies also followed suit, such that discursive transformation of this sort
itself became a key marker of bodies possessing that socio-technical literacy said
to be essential for successful adaptation, emergence and change more generally.
As the American economy was said to have shifted from industrial to informa-
tion technologies, and from ‘smoke-stack’ industries, with their ‘silo’ thinking, to
knowledge-based structures, with their ‘network thinking’, so also Blank argued,
along with many others, must the US military follow suit. As ever, a discursive
transformation did not simply mediate a very significant material transformation
in one sector. It was itself an integral part of a much wider socio-economic and
cultural transformation; a transformation of experience in collective life, also,
among social institutions which had hitherto never conceived of themselves in
complex emergent terms, including those, for example, in education, the arts, the
humanities and even the charitable sector.
This, then, was not simply a matter of acquiring intelligent weapon systems.
We might say, instead, that newly intelligent weapon systems – informationalized
weapon systems – appeared to demand in their turn newly intelligent military
structures. In other words, the thinking that was done directed itself towards a
wide-ranging re-conceptualization of the increasingly virtual topography of war
as well as the institutional organization and martial corporeality of the military
body as such. As Blank put it:

States seeking strategic superiority via technological superiority must un-
dergo substantive organizational transformation that enhances adaptability.
Today, states move from technological to strategic superiority by achieving
organizational superiority. Organizational transformations translate superior
technology into superior strategic performance because organization is itself
a technology.
(1997: 63)
What emerged from such demands for enhanced adaptability and organizational
transformation was the new military strategic doctrine of ‘network-centric war-
fare’. The changes entailed by network-centric warfare have been far reaching.
What they required was a whole scale re-engineering of military strategic dis-
course that in turn embraced all the key concepts, while also adopting much of the
same biologized vocabulary, as that of the complexity as well as the information
and communication sciences.
The single most important official architect of network-centric warfare was,
however, Vice Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski. In a pioneering research paper writ-
ten with John Gartska, published in the United States Naval Institute Proceedings
at the end of the 1990s, Cebrowski outlined what military strategic doctrine, as
well as information-age military bodies, should look like in the age of life as
information (Cebrowski and Gartska 1998). In essence Cebrowski applied a blend
of ICT thinking with complexity science to the problematic both of war and of
military organization for war, newly configured not only to exploit electronic ICT
but to reconceptualize war in the image of ICT; bearing in mind also of course
that ICT thinking was itself very much influenced by open systems thinking and
biology, in as much as living systems, hybrid man/machine as well as organic,
were being newly conceived in informational terms. ‘Military operations are
enormously complex,’ they announced, ‘and complexity theory tells us that such
enterprises organize best from the bottom-up’ (Cebrowski and Gartska 1998). In
Cebrowski and Gartsksa’s terms this meant going beyond the merely instrumental
adoption of information and communication technologies to the pursuit of the
constantly re-animating ‘co-evolution of that technology with operational con-
cepts, doctrine, and organization’ (1998: 6).
Strategy in other words was to follow economy and its management in becom-
ing biostrategy. As Cebrowski and Gartska argued:
The organizing principle of network-centric warfare has its antecedent in

the dynamics of growth and competition that have emerged in the modern
economy. The new dynamics of competition are based on increasing returns
on investment, competition within and between ecosystems, and competition
based on time. Information technology (IT) is central to each of these.
(Cebrowski and Gartska 1998)
This had to be taught if it was to become effective: ‘Every new revolution in mili-
tary affairs produces a new elite. The inherent cultural changes are the most dif-

ficult and protracted’ (Cebrowski and Gartska 1998). Such a change was bound to
excite opposition among those sectors of the military who had deeply invested in
other ways of speaking, other ways of doing business. ‘The war fighter who does
not understand the true source of his combat power in such things as CEC, Global
Command and Control System, and Link-16 simply is worth less than those who
do’ (Cebrowski and Gartska 1998).2
The fundamental assumption underlying the development of network-centric
warfare was the belief, therefore, that there are necessary relationships between
technology, doctrine and organization, and that the co-evolutionary character of
that relation is to be defended and promoted as a matter of strategic principle:
Network-centric warfare and all of its associated revolutions in military af-

fairs grow out of and draw their power from the fundamental changes in
American society. These changes have been dominated by the co-evolution
of economics, information technology, and business processes and organiza-
tions.
According to Cebrowski and Gartska, the task of military forces was to engage
fully with the epistemological precepts of the sciences of life as information
which not only had made these technologies possible but were also extensively
pursuing their full commercial and social exploitation. In other words, they called
for a transformation of military self-governance – the term of art was ‘self-syn-
chronization’ – quite as radical as that which corporations and governments were
coming to demand of citizens as much as producers, of educators as much as
learners, and of failing schools, families and neighbourhoods as much as failing
corporations and states (Simons 2006).
The problem was therefore seen to be fundamentally cultural and systemic.
Their task was not simply conceived as a matter of exploiting technology; it was
a matter of transforming the very ways in which the conduct of conduct was
to be conceived and organized, whether or not it was located in the military or
the civilian sector of liberal life: ‘A process for the co-evolution of technology,
organization, and doctrine is required’ (Cebrowski and Gartska 1998). These new
rules were said to apply to all open systems irrespective of their institutional tradi-
tions or political and constitutional functions and affiliations:
The concepts of network-centric operations, shifting competitive spaces,

changing underlying rule sets, and co-evolution are not mere theory. They
have been applied successfully under demanding conditions with encour-
aging results. Similarly, these concepts are not limited to a few optimum
circumstances. The crime rate in New York City, for example, was reduced
dramatically through the application of these concepts.

In these and other related ways, the two authors began to re-conceptualize the
organization of relations within as well as between military units, developing a
doctrine of network intelligence as well as network organization in which infor-
mation, speed, self-synchronisation and flexibility were said to be at a premium,
just as they had become in the global economy. The required new strategy was
officially characterized by four themes.
1 The first was the shift in focus from the weapons platform – the battle tank,
the aircraft carrier, the strategic bomber – to the information network, as the
key military unit.
2 The second was a shift from individual military actors or units to radical
relationality; from viewing actors as independent operators to viewing them
as part of continuously adapting military ecosystems operating in constantly
changing battlescapes.
3 The third was the construal of military bodies in organic terms as
informationally constituted complex adaptive and emergent open systems.
Like ‘natural’ organisms, military systems were now said to co-evolve and
emergently adapt (swarming was a model regularly cited; Arquilla and
Ronfeldt 2000) through informationally mediated interaction (electronically
but it could also be chemically) with each other and the fitness landscapes of
the battlespaces (ecosystems) they were now said to inhabit.
4 The fourth feature was the conviction that, because information was now
understood to be the basic constituent of all matter, it had similarly also
become ‘the prime mover’ in military as in every other aspect of human
affairs; a ‘necessary’ rather than ‘accidental’ feature of the new ontology of
living materiality.
This elevation of information did not simply open up new enterprises for the
military as it did for business – information warfare and digitized battlespaces for
the military, e-commerce and so on for business. Neither did it simply mean that
information was a force multiplier alone, increasing the fire-power and effective-
ness of traditionally organized combat units or weapon systems, viz.:
an information superiority-enabled concept of operations that generates in-

creased combat power by networking sensors, decision makers and shooters
to achieve shared awareness, increased speed of command, higher tempo of
operations, greater lethality, increased survivability, and a degree of self-syn-
chronisation. In essence NCW translates information superiority into combat
power by effectively linking knowledge entities in the battlespace.
(Alberts, Gartska et al. 1999: 6)
Information was, in addition, embraced as the new principle of formation for all
military systems, initiating a whole-scale re-thinking of the very basis of martial
corporeality in terms of its organization, doctrine, force requirements, procurement
policies, training and operational concepts. Military formations were no longer to

rally around the flag; they were to form up, adapt and continuously emerge, or
swarmingly ‘self-synchronize’, ‘having a dramatically better awareness or un-
derstanding of the battlespace rather than simply more raw data’ (Cebrowski and
Gartska 1998; Arquilla and Ronfeldt 2000). They were to do so against the back-
ground of ‘a high-performance information grid that provides a backplane for
computing and communications’ (Cebrowski and Gartska 1998). Comprising an
‘operational architecture of sensor grids and engagement grids’, the information
grid, later to be omnisensorially called the system of systems, would ‘rapidly
generate high levels of battlespace awareness and synchronize awareness with
military operations. Engagement grids exploit this awareness and translate it into
increased combat power around information networks’ (Cebrowski and Gartska
1998).
No surprise, then, that the new doctrine of network-centric warfare was de-
scribed as ‘a warfighting ecosystem’ (1998: 7). The ‘experimentation’ which was
necessary for its introduction – ‘service experimentation programs are a vital first
step’ – was to become a cardinal principle of military operations themselves (Al-
berts and Hayes 2003). Conceiving of military force in these, and other related,
ways does not coincide easily with clear distinctions between the civil and the
military sectors, or the principles which are supposed to govern civil/military
relations in which the military is subordinate to the civil power. As in so many
other areas of its social, cultural and economic life, the constitutional principles
of liberal government simply did not match the everyday generative principles of
formation, and their allied operational discourse and practices, characteristic of
liberal rule: the interpenetration, in general, of the civil and the military through-
out all aspects of its military, industrial, commercial and cultural economies (Der
Derian 2001).
Indeed, Cebrowski and Gartska directly sought to overhaul these traditional
liberal distinctions between the civil and the military dimensions of economy and
society, by offering a re-conceptualization of liberal order itself in the evolution-
ary and co-evolutionary terms which they took to be the zeitgeist commercially
as much as scientifically. By viewing military force as deeply embedded within
a network of informationally constituted relations, which together make up an
ecosystem, they construed war as one of the natural processes of life as informa-
tion (being-in-formation) through which the liberal order itself was said to be
co-evolving. The laws which were to govern the development of this liberal way
of war were in essence indistinguishable, Cebrowski and Gartska argued, from the
laws which governed the development of the liberal way of living as such. That
is to say, the liberal way of war was inextricably interconnected with liberal ways
of ruling, producing, consuming, policing, educating, punishing, reproducing, and
so on. An account of any of these other sectors would find the same dynamics in
operation and the same discourse applying to them: rule is for adaptively emergent
self-rule; education is for (economic) fitness; art is for stimulating the creativity,
adaptation and innovation which complex adaptive emergence demands; punish-
ment is designed to stimulate self-synchronizing correction; and so on.
The most striking example of this reordering of liberal order itself took place

when Cebrowski and Gartska invoked and more rigorously applied Clausewitz’s
account of the isomorphic relation of war and commerce (Clausewitz 1993: 173;
see also Reid 2003; Toffler and Toffler 1993; Toffler 1990) in an observation
which, uncannily, also recalls Kant. Looking to make explicit the power of the
hidden hand of biostrategization to empower military strategy as much as it ap-
peared to have empowered the productive and financial vitality of late capitalism,
their insistence that liberal regimes must ‘make war the same way they make
wealth’ (1998: 2) was reminiscent also of Kant’s ‘First Supplement’ to the Articles
on Peace. There, eliding the violence it would necessarily entail, Kant conjectured
that ‘nature’ (in the stead of God), pursuing a kind of ‘secret plan’, would also
work to guarantee peace through the ‘asocial sociability’ of the species and the
development of ‘a spirit of commerce’ (Kant 1983; Baynes 1997: 220).
Warfare must then, like the economy, be subject to these same principles of
organization. Mimicking a co-evolutionary model of order began to distinguish
military strategy as life became informational. Whereas, for traditional military
strategists, war was conceived as the projection of the political interests of states,
for information age strategists war becomes just one among many expressions of
the projection of information as the generative principle of formation for order as
such; especially as this is successfully exhibited by wealth creation rather than
political will. Just as successful organization for profit was said to be dependent
on the complexity of effective network organization, so also was the successful
use of military force. Thus, successful organization for war must mimic success-
ful organization for profit.
A curious development thereby took place. Not only did war and economy
become conflated, but the means of their conflation was to be located in a com-
mon subscription to this new biostrategic discourse in which liberal biopolitics
finds its common mode of strategization. In the process, the classical reading of
Clausewitz was also reversed (Reid 2003). War was no longer understood as the
extension of politics by other means. Politics and economy become the extension
of war by other means, since all three were said to share the same principle of
formation, that of biostrategization: the construal of all behaviour in complex
adaptive emergent biological terms, common to the network-centric doctrines of
ICT as it was to complexity thinking and evolutionary biology, in which life as
information is not only continuously emergent but subsists thereby in a continu-
ous process of biostrategization.
With Cebrowski and Gartska, then, military strategic thinking became an ex-
pression less of military than of biological principles; security, thus, less a mat-
ter of simple survival than continuous emergent adaptation and change in which
resilience, recombination and regeneration were now most highly prized. Theirs
was less a military than a biostrategic imperative, therefore, and one which was
finding its expression throughout all aspects of liberal biopolitics in the age of
life as information. Similarly, military strategic imperatives were becoming less
distinctively military than they were more generically biostrategic: expressions
of drivers which drew their very social dissemination, as well as their very revo-
lutionary and rhetorical power, from the fact that they had become ubiquitous;

common discursive practices distributed throughout all aspects of liberal life, lo-
cally and globally, by the beginning of the twenty-first century. When actual wars
hit – specifically the war on terror or wars against rogue states such as Iraq and
Afghanistan – they too were configured, irrespective of their socio-cultural and
political particulars, in biostrategic terms.
Transformation: the grammar of biostrategization
[C]hanges in the mode of being of language are like alterations that affect
pronunciation, grammar, or semantics: swift as they are, they are never
clearly grasped by those who are speaking and whose language is neverthe-
less already spreading these mutations.
Michel Foucault
In October 2001, Cebrowski was appointed Director, and Gartska Deputy Director,
of the new US Office of Force Transformation (OFT), the department tasked with
effecting the cultural education and change they had outlined in their USNIP es-
say. Responding to the demands for clarification of his Office mission, Cebrowski
indicated how much ‘transformation’ was a form of continuous revolution:
Transformation is foremost a continuing process. It does not have an end

point. Transformation is meant to create or anticipate the future. Transforma-
tion is meant to deal with the co-evolution of concepts, processes, organiza-
tions and technology. Change in any one of these areas necessitates change in
all. Transformation is meant to create new competitive areas and new com-
petencies. Transformation is meant to identify, leverage and even create new
underlying principles for the way things are done. Transformation is meant
to identify and leverage new sources of power. The overall objective of these
changes is simply – sustained American competitive advantage in warfare.
(OFT 2006: 1)
However much it was necessarily also proclaimed in the name of US hegemony,

transformation was clearly also a biostrategic end in itself. Transformation was
good, and, irrespective of whether or not it would in fact help to secure US he-
gemony (it may very well not) it was necessarily good because it accorded with
the biostrategic order of ordering as such: the ‘profoundly generative . . . fun-
damentally always creative’ powers of biospheres (Kauffman 2000: 135); pure
instrumentality as biological necessity, revolution without significance outwith
the biological imperative itself, transcending mere subjective will
Albeit long in gestation, the 1991 Gulf War is often said to have introduced
this new era of warfare. Signalling also the prospect of a ‘new world order’, it
grandstanded the military strength of the US-led coalition. The destruction of
Iraqi forces demonstrated the vast military difference between advanced liberal
regimes, notably the United States, and other states. Since its humiliating defeat

in Vietnam, the US, especially, had invested heavily in the development and ap-
plication of ICT for the purposes of providing what, in military jargon, is known
as a ‘force multiplier’, and it used these to great effect in the counter-attack which
drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait (Freedman 2006: 12–13). But, what became
known controversially as the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) (Cohen 1996;
Owens 1995) was to involve more than the exploitation of the digital revolution
in ICT as a force multiplier. Rethinking the very nature of materiality as well as
force – ‘code is the prime mover’ said its two early pioneers (Arquilla and Ron-
feldt 1997) – military strategic thinkers began to rethink force, power and war as
such. A newly biologized discourse of military strategic affairs thus entered the
biopolitical lexicon of the liberal way of war.
To repeat, these changes were not merely technical and they were not simply
new. They were political and they had their own history, in which pure technophilia
as the very aesthetic of modern martial corporeality also figured prominently as
well, albeit the aesthetic of killing also began to take on its own powerfully biolo-
gized hue. But they were also cast within the broader biopolitical horizon of the
liberal way of rule as well:
We must transform not only our armed forces but also the Department that
serves them by encouraging a culture of creativity and intelligent risk-taking.
We must promote a more entrepreneurial approach to developing military
capabilities, one that encourages people, all people, to be proactive and not
reactive, to behave somewhat less like bureaucrats and more like venture
capitalists; one that does not wait for threats to emerge and be ‘validated’, but
rather anticipates them before they can emerge and develops new capabilities
that can dissuade and deter those nascent threats.
(Rumsfeld 2002a)
And again:
More significantly, in our nation-building endeavours in Iraq, Afghanistan,

or Haiti, our troops need to be able to shift roles, on a block-by-block basis,
serving as diplomats one moment, peacekeepers the next, and war-fighters
when under ambush, in order to win the peace and not just the battle. For
this kind of mission, intelligence becomes key, and social and cultural intel-
ligence even more valuable than conventional military intelligence, as we
strive to prevail in the domain of political victory as well as the domain of
military victory.
(OFT 2004)
To recall our argument thus far, liberalism, in being biopolitically driven, has
therefore sought to refigure war as much as it has sought to refigure the human as
biohuman. The liberal subject was always already a member of a species. Its ra-
tionality was deeply implicated in and effectively framed by biological necessity;
one encounters this in the classical thought of both Locke and Hobbes. Their early

accounts of liberal subjectivity, and of the properties required for civil society and
civil peace in particular, invoked God as the underwriter of last resort. The death
of God signalled the death of this subject. When it came to specifying how its
governance was to proceed beyond the initial grant of government and dominion
in common, itself a revolutionary doctrine eschewing tradition (Oakeshott 1991)
but also deprived of its divine underwriting, liberal subjectivity as governmental
mechanism is left only with its biological nature; and that biological nature is uni-
versally figured now in terms of the complex adaptive emergence of continuous
transformation and change: a theme fully embraced in the discourse of the current
liberal way of war as it found expression in this new RMA.
Liberalism’s biopolitical imperatives therefore grew to ascendancy as the on-
topolitical theology of its rational subject lost the warrant of its divine origination.
But these biopolitical imperatives themselves also mutated as the very experience
of biopolitical rule and the understanding of what it is to be a living thing also
changed. To paraphrase, by way of refuting, Locke, and to recall Kauffman, it be-
came an article of post-Darwinian biology, for example, that no god granted gov-
ernance or dominion in common to man. Man’s government and dominion were
determined by the biological properties of the human, whose political constitution
was increasingly furnished by the evolutionary orthodoxy of the life sciences; to
which reference could systematically also be made when seeking to determine
what kind of governance would be most effective, as well as how much govern-
ance would ultimately prove enough, for the purposes of good governance. In as
much as good governance required liberal peace – and in as much as liberal peace
was the definition of good governance – such peace had to be fought for and se-
cured. The evolution of the liberal way of war followed the evolution of the liberal
way of rule. Each has become increasingly driven by biostrategic discourses and
imperatives themselves deeply inscribed, ontologically as well as epistemologi-
cally, with the idea that not only life but order as such was informatted.
Beyond the western way of war

It is certainly therefore true that the development of western technology is con-
nected to what some authors have called ‘the western way of war’ (Jones 1987;
Shaw 2005; Hanson 1989). Equally, there is no doubt that the demands and exi-
gencies of war have shaped social forces as much as they have techno-scientific
ones (Hirst 2001; Tilly 1992; De Landa 1991; Parker 1988; McNeil 1982; Pearton
1982; Van Doorn 1975; Roberts 1956). But such arguments threaten to become
technicist if they do not also take into account the deep correlation which also
obtains between forms of rule and forms of war. Indeed they regularly do so in the
rationales offered by military reformers themselves:
The need to transform the US Armed Forces, as well as the organizations and
processes that control, support, and sustain them, is compelling. This need is
a by-product of the effects of globalization on the international security order

and the transition from the industrial age to the information age. And while
we might point to a beginning of transformation, we cannot foresee the end.
(OFT 2004)
Moreover, once this point is conceded, it follows that, since liberal forms of rule
have been so deeply biopoliticized in theory and in practice from their very incep-
tion, there is a way of war here which is deeply biopoliticized as well. That very
biopoliticization also effects an intimate relation with the life sciences. Each of
the military campaigns waged in defence and pursuit of global liberal governance
has, therefore, also witnessed this correlation in operation.
The current RMA, especially, does not simply draw on the molecular and the
digital revolutions to informationalize weapons and weaponize information, it
does so in ways which are also expressly intended to rewrite the script of force,
power and war biostrategically; ways which deliberately embrace continuous
contingent transformation itself as the generative principle of formation of the
new biostrategy. Thus the liberal way of war does not simply find its contempo-
rary expression through smart weapons, its very configuration of war preparation
as well as war-making finds its articulation through a new grammar as well as
a new vocabulary of war. If, however, information dominance, an operational
ideal promised for example by the new technologies, demands a different kind of
military as it demands a different kind of war economy, so it is also continuous
contingent transformation as such which expresses the new biostrategic grammar
of war preparation and war-making.
We need to underline two further analytical points here because they, too, de-
tail the cognitive transformation which has taken place. The first of these concerns
the observation that the liberal way of war finds a new biostrategic grammar and
not simply a new biostrategic vocabulary through the transformation of military
strategic discourse as well as operational concepts and doctrines which we have
witnessed over the course of the last 20 years. A grammar embodies a logic. A
logic expresses a generative principle of formation. The logic here expresses an
understanding of infinite adaptation and change as an immediate and compelling
necessity, beyond subjective will or preference, which requires continuous antici-
pation and command of the future so that the future never arrives unannounced,
since it is the very surprise of the future which embodies threat:
Transformation should be thought of as a process, not an end state. Hence

there is no foreseeable point in the future when the Secretary of Defense
will be able to declare that the transformation of the Department has been
completed. Instead, the transformation process will continue indefinitely.
Those responsible for defense transformation must anticipate the future and
wherever possible help create it.
(OFT 2004)
Surprise cannot, however, be eradicated biostrategically speaking. That much

is not only conceded; it is also insisted upon throughout all of contemporary mili-

tary and wider security discourses. Contingency is both a condition of operability
as well as a condition of possibility in this new formulation of biopolitics, security
and war. The point, then, is not that contingency resists eradication. The point is
that, just as the liberal way of rule now explicitly governs through contingency,
so also does biostrategic military discourse now seek, in the sciences of complex
adaptive militarily contingent and flexible formations, the solution to the organi-
zation and successful prosecution of the liberal way of war, together with the
realization of its biopolitical ends of state and societal resilience, recombination
and continuous regeneration. One can express the outline logic easily enough.
Since biopolitics is committed to making life live, it takes its governmental cue
from what it learns about the properties of species existence. Since the deter-
mining feature of biological life these days is said to be informationally driven
continuous contingent transformative emergence and change, it follows that the
new biostrategic grammar of liberal biopolitics, security and war should follow
suit; and indeed it does.
A generative principle of formation does not, however, dictate what you should
do, or tell you everything you need to know. It sets the conditions of possibil-
ity and of operability in the context of which you work out what you think you
should know and do. This, then, enables us to emphasize a second observation.
Military strategic discourse does not leap, Athena-like, fully formed out of the
head of the military strategic thinker. A shift in the military as well as the po-
litical imaginary of liberal biopolitics takes place as contingent transformation
becomes the biostrategic grammar of the liberal way of rule and war. It is one
which helps furnish military strategic thinkers with a new domain of ontological
and epistemological as well as military and political expression and experimenta-
tion: the real as spielraum. It is one we have called biostrategization. Indeed,
biostrategic experimentation itself was thereby embraced for its epistemological
as well as military, economic social and cultural effects (Smith 2002). Logics
are therefore investigated and followed, ideas are crafted according to the invita-
tions and openings which they offer as well as the imperatives and drivers which
they also seem to install, and these together newly refurbish old ambitions as
they excite new ones: shock and awe; omnisensoriality; informationalized omnis-
cience; omnipresent military capability; omnimalevolent threats; omnipotence to
match them. Biostrategic dominance militarily, of this character and form, itself
logically becomes the objective because it is seen as a ‘natural’ response to the
‘natural’ imperatives of the emergency of emergence of life thus understood in its
very essence as biostrategically embattled.
War, technology and biopolitics

It is not possible, then, we think, to interpret the advances in warfare achieved
by liberal regimes in recent years as simply another expression of the dialectic of
war and technology alone, as if these complex phenomena were not themselves
understood to be socio-technical, cultural, economic and political developments
as well. With a complex genealogy that owes something also to innovations in

physics, too, the information revolution has nonetheless been largely empowered
by advances in the life sciences, broadly conceived, and of course biology in par-
ticular. We have briefly tracked some of that history here. Once more, however,
we emphasize that our concern is to detail how the problem space of both rule and
war changes as these developments are introduced. Chemistry, ballistics, ther-
modynamics and, finally, nuclear physics were all serially involved in successive
military ‘revolutions’, but not without complex interpellation into their relevant
historical circumstances (De Landa 1991). None of these sciences would have
developed as they did, or been incorporated effectively into the weft and warp of
their times as well as military strategic science, had they not also been embedded
in the historical socio-economic and cultural as well as political circumstances
which helped define their emergence besides their application in the first place.
To give an earlier historical example, and to emphasize the point, we might
return to the Cold War. Early Cold War nuclear strategists, for example Bernard
Brodie and Henry Kissinger, recognized that the introduction of nuclear weapons
called for different ways of conceiving the role of military force in a world domi-
nated by global strategic rivalry with a nuclear armed Soviet Union (Brodie 2008;
Kissinger 1966). The strategy of nuclear deterrence, continuously under revision
throughout the Cold War period and differently interpreted depending on which
side of the Atlantic basin you happened to find yourself, was the result. However
much driven by the trope of universality to which all military strategic thinking
seems compelled to make reference, nuclear deterrence represented an historical
change in the cognition of war in which deterrence of war was prioritized and
crisis management, to manage the brinkmanship of coercive diplomacy which it
also encouraged, was refined. Not all military strategic thinkers went along with
this shift in cognition, not all who did went along with all of it, and most of those
who did still framed their thinking in terms of the instrumental utility of mutu-
ally assured destruction, maintaining that although a threshold in war had been
crossed an historical threshold in the military strategic instrumentality of war had
not. Hence, a new military strategic vocabulary emerged: of mutually assured de-
struction, forward defence and flexible response on the central front in Germany,
the threat of first strike and the requirement for an assured second strike; strategy
became as preoccupied with megatonnage and throw weights as it was with the
multiplication of warheads, ballistic missile defence and so on. The impact on
the societies and economies of the Atlantic basin, and of the US economy and its
infrastructure in particular, is by now exhaustively documented. However novel
its concerns, this ‘classic’ period of the nuclear age – our age remains nuclear in
its own dangerously proliferating way – was still an expression nonetheless of the
modern industrialization and massification of war which, however biopolitically
driven it may have been politically, had always relied more on chemistry and
physics, technically, than it had the life sciences. The Second World War changed
this.
War in the age of the life sciences, of life as information, thus also marks a
significant shift in the very understanding of force and energy as such, because
the forces at work in living entities differ very significantly from those which

are at work in ballistics and physics. To repeat, we are not arguing that one era
superseded another. Power is palimpsestuous. New forms and relations of power
become superimposed on older ones. Previous relations and accounts of power
are rubbed out but may not be entirely effaced. As the life sciences come to domi-
nance, however, not only does the ‘kit’ or equipmentality of power change but
so also does its cognition. In this particular respect the forces and energies with
which the life sciences deal are not the same as the forces and energies with which
physics, for example, deals. However much the sciences nonetheless do relate at
different levels, the life sciences are more concerned with the forces at play, as
well as the energies and processes involved, in the life-creating and life-changing
processes of morphogenesis, metamorphosis and mutation; all of which it must
also be said are simultaneously also concerned with the forces and energies in-
volved in pathology, morbidity and death.
Thus, it does not matter with which end of the life/death cycle biopolitics
deals. Pace many received understandings of Foucault, following his emphasis
on making life live, biopolitics is as much concerned with death as it is with life.
The point is that biopolitics significantly re-cognizes death as it does birth. You
do not therefore get a more acceptable biopolitics by concentrating on birth rather
than death. Biopolitically speaking, you are always already implicated in both
from the beginning.3 Politically speaking, it is not a matter of which end you start
from, therefore, or which process you prioritize. The military is as interested now,
for example, in life-creating and life-adaptive processes as it is in killing, because,
like the liberal way of rule and war more generally, it locates the nature of the
threat in the very becoming dangerous of the vital signs of life itself. The solution
which it seeks to that way of problematizing the challenge of life is not that which
Nietzsche diagnosed either: to breed an animal which can make promises (2006).
It is instead to continuously monitor breeding so that it does not produce the
monster. Our culture nonetheless still finds this solution monstrous.
Conclusion
Empowering the current RMA are developments in the very same areas of the life
sciences that have shaped the biopolitical strategies of liberal internationalism
which we documented in the previous chapter. As liberal regimes have prioritized
and biostrategized the powers of requisite diversity, learning, adaptation and in-
formation exchange for purposes of the political organization of the biohuman on
a global scale, so also they have learnt to deploy these capacities technologically
for the military purpose of destroying human life with unprecedented sophistica-
tion and precision. Learning how to develop and deploy all-round biostrategized
military capability, themselves mimicking the complex adaptation now said to de-
fine living systems, military strategic transformation also aims to shift the liberal
way of war from the industrial through to the age of life as information. Aspiring
to incarnate intelligence in the military body, both individual and collective, the
informationally empowered liberal way of war has come to match not simply the
standards but the very grid of intelligibility set by the liberal way of rule in the

form of global liberal governance: complex, adaptive, emergent, living to ‘learn’
how not to die by learning to live biostrategically through killing more intelli-
gently biopolitically.
In spite of their development of the technologies and organizational techniques
with which to secure their co-evolutionary superiority as living systems, liberal
regimes are nonetheless confronted with threats which do not simply refuse
or reject but play on and prey on the very informational capillaries of power/
knowledge and infrastructures of circulation of every description that characterize
liberalism’s biopoliticized life-form. Terrorist groups enhance their own offensive
operational capabilities through experimenting with molecular models of logisti-
cal organization and infrastructural resilience. Thus has biopolitical rule and war
created an enemy in the form of an alter ego, and in the following chapter we
detail how the ‘new terrorism’ feeds off and thrives on the very capillaries of rule
and war which sustain biopolitical life locally and globally. In response the liberal
form of life is being minutely re-engineered as a complex biopolitical security
mechanism deploying a quite unprecedented power over life that breaches almost
all the rules of liberal subjectivity, threatening the freedoms it extols and the rep-
resentative and accountable government upon which, it is said, those freedoms
depend.

Biohumanity and its rogues 127
7 Biohumanity and its rogues

Securing the infrastructures of
liberal living
When a race of plants is once pretty established, the seed-raisers do not pick out
the best plants, but merely go over their seed-beds, and pull up the ‘rogues’, as
they call the plants that deviate from the proper standard. With animals this kind
of selection is, in fact, also followed; for hardly any one is so careless as to allow
his worst animals to breed.
Charles Darwin
Introduction
Albeit liberal powers operate in a mobile, plural and complex terrain of power
relations, nationally and internationally, what distinguishes liberal imperialism
has always been its biopolitics rather than its geopolitics. Geopolitics there has
been, but the principal political rationalities, and the multiple micro-practices of
power/knowledge of the governing technologies of liberal imperialism, have been
biopolitical (Stoler 2006; 2002; 1995). Biopolitics thus explains both the how and
the why of the liberal way of rule; its commitment to making life live through the
way in which it gives political form to finitude via the biopolitical reconstitution
of the human as biohuman.
It similarly also furnishes the how and the why of the liberal way of war. For,
if liberal rule is designed to make the biohuman live, liberal war is designed to
eradicate threats to the living that the biohuman is required to practice; all liv-
ing is, of course, a practice and not a brute fact. The liberal way of war does so
by operationalizing a biostrategic calculus of necessary killing whose task is to
specify who shall live and who must die, as well as how much killing is enough,
to make life live. It is, in other words, that corpus of global triage, deterrent threat
and lethal sanction which the liberal way of war brings to the project of making
life live; to make war on the human in order to relieve the human of the scourge
of war itself.
Modern politics has long been the extension of war by other means. That form
of politics which emerged in contestation of the conjunction of war and politics,
liberalism, has nonetheless also proved to be an expression of that same confla-
tion. To see the point one has to understand the historical emergence of both rule

and war under modern regimes of government and governance in general, and
those of liberal governance in particular (Foucault 2003), both with and against
the Hobbesian theorization of political rule. By the end of the twenty-first century
what comes to characterize the form of life which the liberal way of rule is com-
mitted to optimizing is, however, the emergency of the continuous and contingent
complex adaptive emergence of the informationalized life of the biohuman. Since
threats to the biohuman are now also said to originate in the very dynamic of
emergence which distinguishes life processes, rather than the cupidity of man to
which early modern political theorists, like Hobbes, addressed themselves, the
liberal way of war has thus become ever more deeply sutured into the life of
civil sociality, economy and governance. The emergency of emergence which
now comprises the pluridimensional battlespace of the liberal way of war is cot-
erminous with the life of liberal biopolitics as such. Thus the liberal way of rule
now finds itself ever more deeply governed by the logic of war in the form of the
emergency of emergence which it widely propagates as the very nature of species
existence.
The battlespace is coterminous, then, with the space of civil society itself, but
that battlespace is not singular, uniform or well defined. On the contrary. Since
civil life itself is plural, diverse and ill-defined, in as much as it undergoes con-
tinuous contingent complex adaptation and emergence, so also is the battlespace
of the liberal way of war. Here, too, in this late modern expression of the confla-
tion of war and politics in liberal biopolitics is a complex new driver to liberal
imperialism.
The specifically liberal inclination to become imperial in the cause of freedom
is well recorded historically. The recording of it theoretically, as John Pocock
(2003) teaches, goes back to Machiavelli.1 Our gloss on the imperialist imperative
long installed in pursuit and aggrandizement of the liberal freedom of the Atlantic
world thus concerns the biopolitical rather than the Machiavellian character of
that rule.2 Taking its governmental cue from the properties of species existence,
the liberal way of rule has been biopolitically committed, since the end of the
seventeenth century, to making life live; in particular by making war to remove
war from the life of the human, in production of a novel liberal subject to whom
we have given the name of ‘biohuman’. In that sense our explanation for ‘why’
liberal regimes make war, beyond all those other commercial, economic, racial
(civilizing) and geopolitical reasons which have regularly also been invoked, is
its biopolitical form of rule. None of these other commercial, economic, racial
and geopolitical drivers are insulated from the biopolitical character of the liberal
way of rule.
The biopolitics of infrastructure

Seeking to remove war from the life of the human does not, however, simply
install one additional martial driver among many others. We have explained how
the biopoliticization of liberal rule installs war as the very grid of intelligibility
for liberal rule: and how that grid of intelligibility helps reverse Clausewitz, in as

much as liberal peace becomes the extension of war by other means. One of the
key battlegrounds in which that extension is practiced is the logistical and capil-
lary structures of liberal life; what are now called critical national and international
infrastructures (Reid 2007b). These closely coupled processes of transaction and
circulation – never merely national or international but complexly transnational
in conception, ownership and operation – now provide one of the single most
important referent objects of liberal rule and war, since they comprise the very
warp and weft of liberal sociality, economy and governance. They had already
come to prominence as a source of novel vulnerability to liberal societies long
before 9/11 raised fear of the ways in which they could be deliberately targeted by
Al-Qaeda (Dunn and Kristensen 2007). But in the twenty-first century they have
been further reified as referent objects of liberal security and governance, to new
intensity and effect.
Strategies for defence against Terror have therefore been factored into the self-
surveying, self-regulating and self-remedying strategies which constitute the new
self-securing regime of governance towards which liberal societies have been
progressing since the end of the Cold War. This is not to say that the network
character of Terror and the threat of suicide attack do not pose their own special
problems. They do. But such problems are themselves understood by the relevant
authorities as part of a continuum of threat, the answer to which is thought to lie
in the complex adaptive capacities of infrastructures themselves: their ability not
simply to forecast, predict and intelligently adapt, but also to spring back to life
after suffering even catastrophic damage. And, in that sense, one has to understand
national and international intelligence agencies as well as financial structures, in
addition to information, food, health, transportation and water for example, as
co-evolving aspects of the networked character of liberal societies. Here, although
civil/military divides may persist, civil/military distinctions provide significantly
less insight into the operational structures and dynamics, the epistemic interde-
pendencies and overall biopolitical ethos which characterize these networks; in
particular their shared ways of framing the security problematic with which they
are faced and the lethal organization of violence which they ultimately require to
effect their protection.
The post-9/11 reification of infrastructures as referent objects for the security
of liberal regimes of governance can be observed in the United States, for exam-
ple, where George W. Bush provided a series of presidential directives for the
development of a National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP). The response to
the directive is expressed in The National Plan for Research and Development in
Support of Critical Infrastructure Protection published by the US Department of
Homeland Security in 2004 (DHS 2004). In Europe, the European Union is pursu-
ing what it terms a European Programme for Critical Infrastructure Protection
(EPCIP) ‘to enhance European prevention, preparedness and response to terrorist
attacks involving critical infrastructures’ (CEC 2005: 2). The United Nations is
seeking meanwhile to identify the critical infrastructure needs of liberal regimes
globally, as well as continuing to ‘explore ways to facilitate the dissemination of
best practices’ with regard to critical infrastructure protection (UN 2006: 16–17).

The pursuit of cooperation on critical infrastructure protection between the United
States and the European Union, as well as between the United Nations and its
member states, indicates that ‘homeland security’ is not merely an American phe-
nomenon. It also indicates how superficial are the attempts to interpret the wider
War on Terror as an expression of increasing American unilateralism. If anything
the strategies dedicated to waging War on Terror only testify to the increasingly
transnational basis on which security is being defined within and between liberal
regimes of governance.
In the European context critical infrastructure is defined as ‘those physical
resources, services, and information technology facilities, networks and infra-
structure assets, which, if disrupted or destroyed would have a serious impact on
health, safety, security, economic or social well-being’ (CEC 2005: 20). In the
United States it is defined similarly as the ‘various human, cyber, and physical
components that must work effectively together to sustain the reliable flow of
goods, people and information vital to quality of life’ (DHS 2004: 63). Academic
studies have pointed also to the importance of critical infrastructure for the main-
tenance of the ‘good governance’ of societies (Kelmelis and Loomer 2003: 127).
Thus the defence of critical infrastructure is not about the mundane protection of
human beings from the risk of violent death at the hands of other human beings,
but about a more profound defence of the combined physical and technological
infrastructures which liberal regimes have come to understand as necessary for
their vitality and security in recent years. Indeed, in these documents ‘quality
of life’ is deemed inextricably dependent on the resources and technologies of
information and of evolutionary models of social organisation established by lib-
eral regimes which we examined previously. The Terror that liberal regimes are
concerned with waging war on is a threat precisely because it targets the critical
infrastructures which enable the liberal governance of these regimes rather than
simply the human beings which inhabit them. Indeed, key intelligence sources,
such as the FBI, report that Al-Qaeda is making the targeting of critical infrastruc-
tures its tactical priority (Likosky 2006: 89). In Iraq, the insurgency is defined by
similar methods involving the targeting of key infrastructure projects (Likosky
2006: 69–88).
Biopoliticization of liberal rule and war thus helps explains the why and the
how of liberal war. In effect making life live incorporates a casus belli peculiar to
liberal regimes: making war on whatever threatens the fructification of life. This
‘why’ was addressed in the first and second chapters. The ‘how’ was documented
in the last chapter, which detailed the radical biologization of liberal war-making:
making weapons live; conceiving the battlespace as a pluridimensional co-evolu-
tionary fitness landscape; aspiring to make the military body complex, adaptive,
emergent and informationalized. Here, in this chapter, we can begin by drawing a
parallel between this biopoliticization of the military and the biopoliticization of
the threats which global liberal governance detects within the infrastructures of its
very own referent object of security and war: the biohuman. For these threats have
themselves become biologized and biopoliticized as they, too, have learnt to adapt
and target those core capillary features of liberal life which are simultaneously

also said to constitute their biopolitical vitality. For, while liberal regimes are de-
ploying their newfound powers of emergence, information and adaptation to fend
off the geopolitical threats posed by ‘rogue states’ and ‘rogue behaviour’, they are
also busy using these selfsame powers to defend species life from the existence
and proliferation of roguery of every description within, as well as outwith, their
territorial borders.
The faith of liberal regimes in the life sciences and its technologies as sources
for the security of the biohuman from its rogues is being continuously tested by
the adaptability of rogue behaviours. The exponential growth in fear of the threats
posed by Terror to liberal regimes is now exacerbated by Terror’s exploitation of
the same resources of knowledge and technology, deriving from the life sciences,
that have empowered the liberal project historically. Contemporarily, for these
reasons, Terror is increasingly described as ‘bioterrorism’ (Chyba and Greninger
2004). Ordinarily bioterrorism is described thus because it incorporates a capacity
to exploit developments in the biosciences for the creation of new forms of bio-
technological weaponry, which threaten liberal regimes, potentially, with massive
loss of life. However, we argue that it may better be defined thus because it targets
the evolutionary architectures of liberal regimes: their reliance on organizational
models derived from their scientific knowledge of the origins and order of life.
There are both strategic and political explanations for the development of this
latter and hitherto more obscure characteristic of bioterrorism. Indeed their strate-
gies and their politics are mutually interdependent. Strategically, liberal regimes
are vulnerable on account of the extent of their historical investment in infrastruc-
ture as sources, paradoxically, for their security. Al-Qaeda exhibits an understand-
ing of this and is consequently making the targeting of infrastructure a priority.
Beyond such strategic reasoning, the targeting of infrastructure by Islamist groups
can also tell us something about the symbolic as well as material importance
of infrastructure as an expression of the biophilosophical account of human life
out of which liberalism’s commitment to the biohuman grew and which remains
fundamental to the account of security they pursue and the model of governance
on which they rely to achieve it.3
The terror of biohumanity

The main argument we want to make in this chapter, then, is that the enemy of
Terror which liberal regimes are contemporarily faced with is idiomatic to their
own techniques of organisation and governance. Al-Qaeda, especially, cannot be
understood by reference to a fanatical desire for the violent destruction of hu-
manity, fuelled by a theologically inspired hatred for the western world (Ruthven
2004; Elshtain 2003). What renders the new forms of terrorism distinct from pre-
vious forms is its exposure of, and explicit hostility to, the reduction of the human
to the biohuman on which the liberal project depends (Reid 2007). This is not a
conflict about the coincidence of sovereign claims over a disputed territory or the
pursuit of a war of national liberation, because the form of power relations which
Terror contests is neither simply sovereign or imperial in those ways. The ‘new

terrorism’ (Laquer 1999) is not ‘new’ because of the way in which it employs
suicide attack. Suicide attack is an old game, and offering oneself suicidally for
one’s cause is not a practice confined to Islamist extremists: dulce et decorum est
pro patria mori. The ‘new terrorism’ is new because the order it contests is new,
at least in its currently unrivalled intensity and global hegemony.
It is worth noting that the targeting of infrastructures has occurred before. The
Irish Republican Army conducted a campaign in the United Kingdom during the
late twentieth century which encompassed the direct targeting of the transport and
financial infrastructures of Britain (Belton 2006). However, infrastructure was
targeted in that conflict because it provided a means by which to use violence
while strategically seeking to avoid loss of life. In the case of the new form of
Terror, the critical infrastructures of liberal regimes are choice targets for violent
destruction. It is specifically these infrastructures, so fundamental to the capaci-
ties of liberal regimes and their societies to function as living systems, which al-
Qaeda are seeking to destroy on account of both their strategic and their symbolic
value. The governmental representatives of liberal regimes, such as the former
Prime Minister Tony Blair in the United Kingdom, and George W. Bush in the
United States, have been absolutely correct therefore, when they have ascribed
such vital stakes to the War on Terror. For this is indeed, as both these statesmen
have asserted, a conflict over essential questions of ‘how to live’ and the propriety
of different ‘ways of life’ (Blair 2005; Bush 2001). Not simply, however, one way
of life defined by a commitment to essential liberties and freedoms versus another
way of life defined by systems of oppression and prohibition; but a conflict be-
tween regimes empowered by their control and regulation of life properties and
processes versus political movements opposed to the biospheric hubris on which
liberal biopolitics is based.
There is a second aspect to the Global War on Terror, however, to which we
wish to draw attention in this chapter. For, despite its expression of opposition
to liberal regimes, Terror is itself enabling liberal regimes, through their War on
Terror, to intensify their biopolitical regulation of life. As a consequence of the
declaration of the War on Terror, and more especially as a result of the ways in
which the threat of Terror has been interpreted and understood by its proponents,
the investment of liberal regimes in the development of new techniques and tech-
nologies for the control of life has increased exponentially. And in the process,
strategies for critical infrastructure protection are further institutionalizing and
refining the biopolitical reduction of the human to the biohuman on which the
liberal project is based.
Amid the creation of plans for the provision of critical infrastructure protec-
tion, and in the establishment of new governmental agencies for the execution of
those plans, the life sciences are receiving powerful affirmation of their modelling
of governmental order while also receiving additional, and substantial, financial
subventions from governments as well. The development of knowledge garnered
from the life sciences is not, however, advancing especially human interests. In
contrast, new scientific knowledge concerning the evolutionary capabilities of the

human is being developed with a view to securing critical infrastructures from the
threats posed by human beings to the governance capacities of liberal regimes.
Human beings themselves do, of course, constitute a significant element of critical
infrastructures, not least in terms of humans’ reliance on infrastructures for their
own material welfare. But it is a fact that human beings within critical infrastruc-
tures are equally also said to pose the ‘greatest danger’ to them (Dunn 2005: 263).
The human is both the enemy against which liberal regimes are today seeking to
secure themselves, as well as a resource from which they are attempting to extract
value in pursuit of their security. The targeting of the human depends, as we will
also show, on modes of discrimination exercised at the level of the biological life
of individuals and populations which are explicitly as well as implicitly racialized
(Dillon 2009; Introna and Wood 2004).
Biological roots of infrastructural security

Terror’s contemporary discovery and exploitation of the vulnerabilities of the in-
frastructures of liberal regimes is akin to biologists’ discovery and exploitation, in
the late eighteenth century, of the hidden infrastructures which were then newly
found to account for the existence of living beings. Back then, the pioneering
biologist Lamarck revealed what François Jacob in his now classic account of
the historical development of biology, The Logic of Life, described as that ‘secret
architecture imposed by the necessity of living’ (1989: 85). Whereas biologists
at the beginning of the eighteenth century sought explanation for the powers of
life in the major organs and in the visible structures of living things, by the end
of that century whole networks of new relationships within living organisms and
between their different organs were being discovered. What mattered, henceforth,
was less the individual organs that performed different functions within bodies
than the relations between those organs, for it was this less discernible infrastruc-
ture of relations ‘that gave living beings the internal law determining the very
possibility of their existence’ (Jacob 1989: 85).
The infrastructure, or what was then more commonly described as the ‘internal
organization’ of living organisms, would in time become a privileged object of
scientific investigation. Indeed, it was that object of scientific study which would
serve eventually to direct and define scientific investigation carried out within the
new science of biology. For it enabled ‘biologists to scan the living world and to
bring some order into its complexity’, as they sought and managed to establish
new systems of taxonomic classification based on the differentiation of organiza-
tional systems to be found at work in living beings (Jacob 1989: 85). Gradually,
as a result of the discovery of the critical importance of the hidden infrastructures
of relations within and among living things, the new science of biology emerged.
As Jacob describes, ‘it no longer studied plants and animals as particular classes
of natural bodies, but rather the living organism endowed with singular properties
as a result of a special kind of organization’ (1989: 87). As the founding father of
biological science was then to assert:

Everything that is generally common to plants and animals and all faculties
proper to each of these beings without exception must constitute the unique
and vast subject of Biology: for the two kinds of beings which I have just
referred to are all essentially living bodies and they are the only beings of
that kind which exist on our globe. The considerations pertaining to Biology
are therefore quite independent of the differences that plant and animals may
show in their nature, their state and the faculties peculiar to certain of them.
(Lamarck quoted in Jacob 1989: 87)
As the liberal biopolitics developed from the eighteenth century onwards, and
as the foundations for political sovereignty became grounded more firmly in the
promotion of the needs and capacities of the species, so the task of identifying,
strengthening, and securing the hidden infrastructures of populations became an
increasingly important objective for liberal regimes. Conceptions of how to pur-
sue security also changed dramatically in this period, shifting from traditional
concerns with the fixing and demarcation of territory to a new problem of how to
govern the infrastructures of circulation on which the biohuman depended for its
welfare (Foucault 2007: 65). Liberal states of the early modern era attempted to
improve the governance of the infrastructure not so much out of moral concern
for the welfare of populations, however, but to secure themselves from the threat
of ‘sedition’. Gradually it became understood that the general improvement of
circulation among the domestic population, not least in respect of the circulation
of food and the avoidance of dearth or famine, was required as much to avoid
riot and sedition as it was to strengthen the sinews of the state, as well as, relat-
edly, to better organize the accumulation of capital and the pursuit of profit and
trade (Foucault 2007: 267–72). This theme is now widely expressed once more
by governmental and non-governmental agencies at a time of significantly rising
food prices globally.
In its historical context circulation referred to the material infrastructures
that allowed the movements and exchange of goods, money and men, as well
as the systems of regulation thought necessary to ensure the smooth functioning
of the infrastructure (Foucault 2007: 325–6). This biologized understanding of
the sources of the security of the state would be gradually rationalized in the
development not just of liberal political and philosophical thought, but of the new
disciplinary and biopolitical practices with which emerging liberal regimes would
seek to enhance the resilience of the infrastructures of relations which would
become the benchmarks of both their geo- and bio-political power. Discipline
and governmentality became, as Foucault analysed in depth, the primary arts and
techniques by which liberal regimes would seek to manage the distribution and
circulation of life within the networks of relations making up the infrastructures
of their populations (Foucault 2007: 325–6).
The liberal conception of the population as an organism comprising networks
and infrastructures of relations gathered apace throughout the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, culminating in the prevailing conception of a networked world
population held together by, and dependent economically, social, politically and
militarily on, the density of its infrastructures. As Andrew Barry has described:

In an idealised vision, technical devices and communication technologies
appear to function as the infrastructure of an international economy, or as an
infrastructure of the nation – connecting it together. They are the technical
base on which social, economic and political life take place and on which the
operation of law is possible – the base on which the liberal political order and
capitalist economy rests.
(Barry 2001: 14)
Likewise the idea developed simultaneously that the regimes which govern such
populations are vulnerable because of their reliance on the vitality of those net-
worked infrastructures. This was evident not least in the development of the prac-
tice of wars between liberal regimes themselves. The increasing use of airpower
in warfare throughout the twentieth century worked, for example, on the assump-
tion that enemies could be defeated by inflicting critical damage on the infrastruc-
tures on which the life of their populations depended (Warden 1988). Against
illiberal regimes such methods have not infrequently been found wanting. In their
war against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, for example, the US-led coalition
encountered an enemy with little identifiable infrastructure to target. As Lawrence
Freedman asked bluntly, ‘what was the point of aiming for power plants in a coun-
try where only 6% of the population had electricity?’ (2006: 65). Strategies for
destroying illiberal regimes are now more likely to be based not so much on the
violent destruction of their infrastructures as on their positive regeneration, with
a view ultimately to reinserting them into the networks of exchange and flows
which constitute the global liberal polity. During the 2003 campaign in Iraq, for
example, the coalition dropped leaflets warning workers to protect infrastructure
from sabotage by Saddam Hussein’s forces, threatening them that they would be
held personally liable for any damage (Likosky 2006: 70).
Targeting the infrastructures of liberal regimes has, on the other hand, been dis-
covered and exploited more meaningfully by the enemies of liberal regimes. Dur-
ing the course of the 1990s the United States and the United Kingdom especially
became increasingly concerned about their vulnerabilities to new forms of ‘infor-
mation warfare’ and ‘cyberterrorism’ (Denning 2001). As liberal dependence on
information technologies increased, so illiberal actors sought new and innovative
ways to disrupt information networks. A new class of enemy of liberal regimes
named ‘hackers’ emerged: more or less random individuals and groups dedicated
to the subversion of information networks for political purposes (Wark 2004).
However, hacking was to be embraced by state actors as well as the battlespace
of information warfare developed. The practice of hacking into information net-
works for purposes of strategic disruption became a tactic increasingly deployed
also by illiberal states in conflicts during the 1990s. Serbia, for example, is widely
thought to have employed hackers to target the information networks of NATO
and other allied organizations (Denning 2001: 273–80). Throughout the decade,
especially in the lead-up to the Millennium, critical infrastructure protection was
debated largely in terms of the protection of information networks. Their critical-
ity was illustrated, also, in the near disaster of May 1998, when the breakdown of
a satellite’s on-board controller led to the disruption of around 80–90 per cent of

the electronic pagers used in the United States, affecting the ability of hospitals to
contact doctors on call and the linkages of emergency workers, as well as every
other institution reliant on these technologies for their communications purposes
(Cutter et al. 2003).
The 9/11 attacks, in contrast, highlighted the need for the physical protection of
other forms of infrastructure. One of the major features of the attacks conducted
by al-Qaeda on 9/11 was their impact on the global transportation network. Com-
mercial air traffic in the United States was halted for days following the attacks,
and ‘its worldwide impact in terms of travel disruptions and economic losses’
has been said to be significant (Miller 2003: 146). Terror seeks to attack trans-
portation infrastructures not simply because doing so assures a loss of human
life, but because, like information networks, effective transportation networks are
foundational to the governance capacities of the targeted regimes. This because
such critical infrastructures are thought to be ‘vital’ to the ‘health, safety, comfort
and economic activity’ of liberal populations (Miller 2003: 145). It is for these
reasons that some security professionals describe them as the ‘lifelines’ of liberal
regimes (Platt 1995).
This targeting has persisted since 9/11 with attacks on transport systems in Lon-
don, as well as in Madrid, where the attack directly achieved its political purpose
of making Spain withdraw its contribution to the US-led coalition in Iraq. The fear
of Terror is engendered, therefore, not simply by the possibility of suicide attack,
but by an acute appreciation of the vulnerability of these infrastructures, their
close-coupled character and the prospect of rapidly escalating crises that might
be precipitated by the collapse of any one of them. It is not, therefore, the bare
life of populations within liberal regimes which Terror is considered to threaten,
but the liberal way of living which those regimes are tasked with promoting and
defending on account of its value to their security.
Attacks on, or indeed the mere breakdown of, one infrastructure system – fi-
nance, information, transportation, fuel, or food, all of which have had their fragil-
ity exposed in recent years – serve to increase anxiety about every infrastructure
system and transnational infrastructures tout court. Here, as elsewhere, it is not
the ability of Terror to mount such attacks which is at issue, alone, so much as the
heightened sense of infrastructure dependencies and interdependencies as well as
the kind of loss that might be suffered if a cascade of infrastructure failures were
to be precipitated either through breakdown or by deliberate attack.
Once again, the point to be emphasized here is less the actuality than the vir-
tuality of a cascading catastrophe. There have of course been very few Terror
attacks. It is therefore less their frequency, or, indeed, despite the fear, death and
pain they have inflicted, the strategic losses they have caused, than the fear of
what they might achieve. That fear arises from an acute appreciation not only of
the close-coupled capillary character of the way in which life is lived under liberal
conditions, but also from an equally acute appreciation that the capacity to govern
is dependent upon the smooth and uninterrupted functioning of infrastructures.
The fear of Terror serves therefore to raise the worst, and even ‘inconceivable’,
case into a necessary operating condition for infrastructure emergency planners.

Beyond the protection of the communication and transportation infrastructures,
strategies are therefore being developed on a transnational basis for the defence
of water, fuel, banking and finance, air transportation, sea transportation, port
security, agriculture, health and food as well (Wimbish and Sterling 2003). Were
liberal regimes to govern differently, such tactics of Terror simply would not
be effective. Were liberal regimes to operate on more mechanical principles of
organization, for example, were they to be less dependent on the smooth flow
of information throughout their networks of communication, were their societies
and economies to be less reliant on processes and practices of circulation, were
they to be less dedicated to the promotion of speed and mobility in and between
the infrastructures which constitute them, such targeting of critical infrastructures
would make little tactical sense. Instances of such attacks on more diverse forms
of infrastructure are, it must be said, few and far between. The governmental hys-
teria around, and the mobilization of new strategies for the protection of critical
infrastructures, tells us more about liberal regimes’ fears over the fragility of their
infrastructures than about the actual extents of the material threats posed to it.
Evolutionary terror
The networked structures of organization which al-Qaeda has developed in or-
der to infiltrate and operate within liberal regimes are thought to demonstrate a
nuanced understanding of the very same biological principles and processes of
organization that have empowered the development of liberal regimes of Global
Governance. Evolutionary powers of learning, adaptability, and information ex-
change are said to be fundamental to its strategic functioning; al-Qaeda has for
example, been likened to a ‘neural network’ (Woo 2003). As Thomas Hammes
also describes, al-Qaeda is strategically successful because ‘it learns from mis-
takes, incorporates the lessons learned into its training and future operations, and
literally re-attacks the problem’ (2006: 140).
Like Norbert Wiener’s mongoose in its struggle with the snake, the strategy of
al-Qaeda is premised upon its achieving information superiority over and against
its liberal enemies. The counter-terrorism strategies of liberal regimes are in turn
being informed by knowledge and concepts deriving directly from cybernetic
studies of the evolutionary strategies of living systems. One such concept is Ash-
by’s Law of Requisite Variety: a version of the law of requisite diversity which
derives from one of the basic rules of cybernetics inspired directly by Wiener’s
work (Ashby 1952; Wiener 1954: 34–8). Ashby’s argument is that, because living
systems compete by learning from each other, in order for one living system to
gain strategic superiority over another it must introduce a principle of variation
into its behaviour. It is only through employing variation that one living system
may evade the anticipatory movements of its opponent. Counter-terrorism strate-
gies are also configured now to incorporate such a principle of variation into their
calculations of the probable form and event of future attacks (Woo 2003: 3). As
Gordon Woo, a leading consultant on the risks posed by terrorism contemporarily
argues, ‘it is in the interests of al-Qaeda to increase the entropy of the process by

which its operations are undertaken, so that these are obscured from surveillance
by their dynamic complexity’ (2003: 3).
In another recent study, Paolo Palladino draws attention to the prominence of
zoological metaphors in the discursive representation of threats posed by Terror
(2005: 1–2). Members of al-Qaeda are depicted as ‘parasites’ by outgoing US
President George W. Bush, and as ‘terrible animals’ by the now former President
of the European Commission, Romano Prodi (Palladino 2005: 1). However, as
Palladino also observes, it is not simply a matter of pathologizing Terror. An in-
teresting ambivalence appears in as much as terrorists are also described as adept
at the very strategy of swarming which is likewise favoured by military strategists
(Arquilla et al. 1999), who have now switched to demonizing terrorists, as well
as insurgents, criminal gangs, narcotic cartels and other seditious agents on ac-
count of their supposed propensity to swarm (Palladino 2005: 7; Libicki 1997:
198–201). Swarming is said to involve the ‘systematic pulsing of force and/or
fire, by dispersed interneted units, so as to strike the adversary from all directions
simultaneously’ (Arquilla and Ronfeldt 2001: 8–9). In its bombings of the Khobar
Towers in Saudia Arabia in 1996, the Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam US embassies
in 1998, the USS Cole in 2000, the World Trade Center in 2001, and the French
tanker Limburg in 2002, al-Qaeda is also, however, said to ‘have developed a
swarm-like campaign of pulsing attacks from different nodes of its global net-
work’ (Woo 2003: 7). The irony of this development is that the tactic of swarming
is constitutive of a model of warfare that liberal regimes themselves have been
celebrating and attempting to enact for a number of years, under the influence of
principles deriving from molecular biology and the complexity sciences (Dillon
and Reid 2001: 62–3). It was a key component of the strategy implemented by the
military forces of allied liberal powers in the 2003 invasion of Iraq (Dillon 2003).
Al-Qaeda therefore finds itself in a curiously paradoxical position in which its
zoological figuration is deployed to construct them as both morally and politically
inferior, while strategically superior, to their liberal enemies.
Biohuman security
The challenge posed for liberal regimes by the new forms that terrorism is assum-
ing in the twenty-first century, then, is that of an enemy which understands their
dependence on organizational models that mimic the vitality and vulnerability
of living systems. In spite of the confidence with which liberal regimes have in-
vested in their capacities to know life with a view to being able to emancipate,
develop and ultimately secure the species, they now find themselves faced with
an enemy which mocks that strategy by mimicking it. And yet, in spite of Terror’s
violent subversion of the biological premises of the security of biohuman life,
liberal regimes are, in their attempt to overcome it, continuing to pursue the very
same strategy of security. In their quest to research and develop new methods with
which to secure their infrastructures from Terror, liberal regimes are traversing
and advancing beyond new thresholds of knowledge and control of life properties

and processes; in the hope that such knowledge and control will provide them
with the resilience to see out the threats posed by Terror.
Central to the plans for the provision of security to critical infrastructures
which have developed since 9/11 is a renewed investment in the field of what
is known as ‘human factors engineering’ or HF/E as it is abbreviated. HF/E is,
as the US National Plan for Research and Development in Support of Critical
Infrastructure Protection describes, ‘both a science of human performance and an
engineering discipline, concerned with the design of systems for both efficiency
and safety’ (DHS 2004: 64). Developing since before the Second World War, its
aim is to harness the ‘cognitive, emotional and social capabilities of the human’ in
order to design more secure systems for the defence of the critical infrastructures
of liberal regimes (DHS 2004: 65). To invest in such human capabilities with
a view to creating systems of infrastructure resilient to what are called ‘decep-
tive behaviours’ (DHS 2004: 65), ‘rogue activities’ (DHS 2004: 42), and ‘insider
threats’ said to endanger critical infrastructures (DHS 2004: 42).
There is a remarkable paradox at work here in the development of these strate-
gies for infrastructure protection. If critical infrastructures are the principal targets
of Terror and therefore the referent object for the security practices of liberal
regimes, then the human is conceptualized as a mere resource from which such
security of critical infrastructures is to be provided. Human life, in this context
of the War on Terror, is valued merely in terms of its utilities for the protection
of the physical and technological infrastructures on which liberal regimes depend
for their security. The advance of such strategies and their application to popula-
tions operates by reducing human life to a logistical calculus of value on account
of its capacities to enhance infrastructure. This is a propensity of liberal regimes
which reaches back to their inception in the early modern era, when, in order to
afford their own protection, liberal regimes first learned to govern human life via
its reduction to ‘logistical life’. This term is apt because the techniques and prac-
tices of social control through which regimes of the eighteenth century learned to
govern were drawn directly from the domains of the major security institutions
of the early modern state: its militaries (Reid 2007: 17−39). Logistical life is
a life lived under the duress of the command to be efficient, to communicate
one’s purposes transparently in relation to others, to be positioned where one is
required, to use time economically, to be able to move when and where one is told
to and, crucially, to be able to extol these capacities as the values for which one
will agree to kill and die (Reid 2007: 13). In the eighteenth century, the deploy-
ment of techniques with which to increase the logistical efficiencies of individuals
and populations was legitimized by regimes through the claim that it was neces-
sary for the exceptional defence of the civil domain of society from its external
enemies. Increased military efficiency and discipline was said to be necessary
and beneficial to forms of civil life, the ‘quality’ of which was defined by their
distinction from the condition of war said to prevail beyond the boundaries of
the state. It is in critique of this type of legitimization that Foucault’s analysis, in
its demonstration of the ways in which techniques for the increase of the logisti-
cal efficiency of armed forces impacted directly upon the everyday order of life

within the civil domain of society, is so powerful (Foucault 1991: 135–69). He
exposes how the methods with which liberal regimes historically prepared for war
with external enemies provided model templates with which to subject the life of
their civilian populations to new insidious forms of control and manipulation, and
how, in turn, liberal regimes have sought to legitimize their wars in the name of
the defence and development of the very forms of logistical ways of living they
were busy inculcating within and among their subjects.
Rather than receding into the historical background, this propensity today ap-
pears more pronounced than ever. Throughout The National Plan for Research
and Development in Support of Critical Infrastructure Protection, the quality of
human life is reduced to its capacities as an expression of species life. The species
capacities of human life are then celebrated for their potential contributions to the
security of the infrastructure of liberal regimes. The adaptability of human beings
and their evolutionary capacities for learning and information exchange are in
these plans conceptualized as the highest expressions of what it is to be human.
As the Plan states:
Part of the challenge of infrastructure protection is how to take full advantage

of human capabilities. The Social, Behavioral and Economic (SBE) Working
Group in the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) is focused
on scientific research in the areas of sensory, motor, cognitive and adaptive
capability of the human. Currently, the brain is unmatched by any technologi-
cal system. The human brain is a semi-quantitative supercomputer that is pro-
grammable and reprogrammable by explicit training, previous experience,
and on-going observations on a real-time, virtually instantaneous basis.
(DHS 2004: 63)
Intriguingly, not only is it the case that the human, here, is said to be a superior
kind of species. In being a superior species it is likewise by definition a superior
kind of technology. The fundamental value of the human, the capabilities which
distinguish it from other life forms, the plan states, rests in its superior amenabil-
ity to programming. And in being so, human life itself, the plan states, is to be
understood itself as merely an advanced form of technology. As it continues:
Human eyes are capable of high-resolution, stereo-optical vision with im-

mense range, and, integrated with a highly plastic brain, make humans
uniquely capable of discovery, integration, and complex pattern recognition.
Human hands constitute a dexterous, sensitive biomechanical system that,
integrated with the brains and eyes, are unmatched by current and near-future
robotic technologies. Humans operate in groups synergistically and dynami-
cally, adjusting perceptions, relationships and connections as needed on a
real-time and virtually instantaneous basis. Human language capabilities ex-
ist and operate within a dimensional space that is far more complex and fluid
than any known artificial architectures.
(DHS 2004: 63)

In engineering the means with which to secure the infrastructures on which liberal
regimes depend against the ‘deceptions’, ‘rogues’ and ‘insider threats’ aimed at
it, human life is reduced to species life, and the latter, accordingly, to logistical
life. Indeed, beyond the implications of these developments for human existence
under conditions of liberal rule, each and every human individual is at risk of sub-
jection to the new techniques and technologies of control and surveillance being
developed in the name of critical infrastructure protection. ‘Anyone can be’, the
Plan informs its readership, ‘presumed to be a candidate for insider threat’ (DHS
2004: 43). And indeed everyone is the candidate of this form of threat. Research
and development in response to the fear of ‘deceptions’, ‘rogues’ and ‘insider
threats’ is aimed at the creation of what is called a ‘Common Operating Picture
for Critical Infrastructure’ or ‘COP’ for short, in order not simply to ‘sense rogue
behaviour’ in pre-identified sources of threats but to ‘sense rogue behaviour in
a trusted resource or anticipate that they may be a candidate threat’ (DHS 2004:
41). As such it is deemed necessary ‘that we presume any insider could conduct
unauthorized or rogue activities’ (DHS 2004: 42). Consequently, the movement
of human beings, each and every possible human disposition and expression, of
each and every human individual subject to the liberal way of rule, is becoming
the object of strategies for the liberal way of war. In this context any action or
thought that borders on abnormality is likely to be targeted as a potential source
of threat. As the Plan states, ‘the same anticipation of overt damaging action by a
purposeful threat can be used to anticipate an unfortunate excursion in thought or
action by a well-meaning actor’ (DHS 2004: 44).
The fear of rogues

This confession as to the risks posed for individuals and populations by the devel-
opment of these new practices of critical infrastructure protection against ‘rogue
activities’ serves to remind us of the fundamentally human quality of ‘roguery’
itself. In a brilliant analysis, delivered not long before his death, Jacques Der-
rida demonstrated the genealogical intertwinements of the word ‘rogue’ and its
equivalents in French, voyou and roué, with concepts of humanity and animality,
and its roles in the development of modern political practices of security and lib-
eral governance (Derrida 2005). In English the word ‘rogue’ designates deviance
in both human and non-human life forms. Derrida demonstrates this by quoting
from an article in which ‘a rogue is defined as a creature that is born different
. . . incapable of mingling with the herd, it keeps to itself, and it can attack at any
time, without warning’ (2005: 94). Intriguingly, this concept of the rogue and
of roguery was also popular within early to mid-modern theories of biology. In
reference to the vegetable kingdom, Charles Darwin himself referred to ‘roguing’
as the practice by which nurserymen would weed out plants that deviated from
the proper standard of plants in seed-beds, literally pulling up what they called
the ‘rogues’ (Darwin 1979: 91). He then adapted the concept of roguing to de-
scribe the process by which natural selection functions throughout living systems

to maintain order among species. In French, Derrida argues, the word has a more
human resonance, for
the word voyou has an essential relation with the voie, the way, with the
urban roadways (voirie), the roadways of the city or the polis, and thus with
the street (rue), the waywardness (dévoiement) of the voyou consisting in
making ill use of the street, in corrupting the street or loitering in the streets,
in ‘roaming the streets.’
(2005: 65)
Politically, Derrida shows, liberal governance has always aspired ‘to present as
voyous all rebels, agitators, and insurgents, indeed all revolutionaries, regardless
of whether they come from bad neighbourhoods, or from the suburbs’ (2005:
67). Thus, the rogue is marked by its inhumanity, aggression, non-conformity,
and disorder, while always being ‘a part of mankind, always human, of our kind’
(2005: 67).
The concept of the ‘rogue state’ has become a frequently invoked designation
during the era of global liberal governance for regimes that, as Derrida also con-
siders, do not conform to, and pose threats to, the boundaries of global order (Lit-
wak 2000; Derrida 2005: 95–107). This proliferation of the discourse of roguery
from the biological to the social to the international tells us a lot about the increas-
ing complexities of liberal security practices and their continuities with the early
modern era. It tells us also a lot about the power of their biological imaginaries
upon the conceptions of fear and danger which have motivated the development
of the security practices of liberal regimes historically, and which are proving
definitive of their political response to the new threats posed by terrorism.
In essence what is being demanded in the development of a ‘common op-
erating picture for critical infrastructure’, is a mapping of the movements and
dispositions of human beings on a scale and with an intensity that liberal regimes
of earlier, less technologically enhanced, eras were only able to fantasize about.
In the nineteenth century the protection of political order from the threats posed
by ‘rogues’ involved securing life, as Derrida describes, on ‘the street, in a city, in
the urbanity and good conduct of urban life’ (2005: 63). In the twenty-first century
the ‘paths of circulation’ (2005: 64) on which rogues are feared to roam are that
much more complex and require that much more insidious methods of protection.
The evaluation of threats for the development of a ‘common operating picture’
requires ‘detailed analysis in order to detect patterns and anomalies, understand-
ing and modelling of human behaviour, and translation of these sources into threat
information’ (DHS 2004: 46). It requires the development of new technologies
able to provide ‘analysis of deceptive behaviours, cognitive capabilities, and the
use of everyday heuristics’ and ‘the systematic analysis of what people do and
where lapses do – and do not – occur’ (DHS 2004: 65). It requires not just the
surveillance and control of the social body as a whole, or of the movements and
dispositions of particular risky individuals, but rather techniques which target and
are able to achieve control of life at the molecular levels of its biological function-
ing and existence.

The development and application of technologies and techniques for the analy-
sis of ‘what people do’ and their ‘deceptive behaviours’ does not simply run the
risk, however, of reducing human life to a logistical calculus of value, although
that it surely does achieve. It also runs and indeed fulfils the risk of the violent
destruction of individuals and groups who for no fault of their own, are deemed
to exhibit signs of anomalous and threatening behaviour. In the wake of 9/11,
a shoot-to-kill policy, named Operation Kratos, was adopted by British police
with a view to preventing similar suicide attacks occurring in the United King-
dom (Segell 2006: 56). This policy failed, however, to prevent the attacks on the
transport infrastructure of the United Kingdom which took place on 7 July 2005,
leading only to the deliberate murder of an innocent, Jean Charles de Menezes,
killed with five gunshots to the head fired at point blank range by British police
on 22 July 2005. This human being, described as ‘unidentified male’ with ‘dark
hair beard/stubble’, was targeted on account of the fact that his ‘description and
demeanour’ ‘matched the identity of a bomber suspect’ (Campbell and Honigs-
baum 2005). The simple facts of his leaving an apartment block thought to have
been used by terrorist suspects, and that on his subsequent journey he exited and
re-entered the bus on which he travelled, despite the facts that he walked did not
run, showed no sign of possessing weapons of destruction and gave no signal of
intent of any sort, were deemed, nevertheless, to represent a divergence from a
normal pattern of behaviour so serious that his life was targeted with the most de-
liberate violence, and he was killed. In spite of the scale and intensity with which
the aim of a complete mapping of human dispositions and behaviours has been
pursued, and in spite of the urgency with which today it is being implemented, the
most banal and everyday expressions of life continue to fall, sometimes tragically,
outside its grasp.
Biometrics and race

The development of a ‘common operating picture’ involves creating sensor sys-
tems which will pervade critical infrastructures in their entirety, encompassing the
tracking and targeting of human dispositions and actions intensively and exten-
sively. The central principle on which critical infrastructure protection depends is,
as we are told, that ‘anyone can be presumed to be a candidate for insider threat’
(DHS 2004: 43). And yet, in its application, critical infrastructure protection
functions through a range of techniques of discrimination by which individual
candidates for insider threat are distinguished from one another. ‘The physical
and virtual doorways’ into critical infrastructure are of central importance in the
War on Terror and their adequate protection is deemed to require the develop-
ment of new methods of portal security (DHS 2004: 37). Portal security, in the
post-9/11 world, it is said, ‘will require robust and predictable operations under a
variety of environmental conditions that provide identification and authentication
of the people, materials, and information that pass through them’ (DHS 2004:
37). ‘Identification’, in this context of portal security, ‘refers to the process of
recognizing an individual or object from a known population’ (DHS 2004: 38).

Successful identification depends on a ‘system’s ability to recognize a person or
object by comparing a measurement, or multiple measurements, with a previously
acquired record in a database’ (DHS 2004: 38). It depends, methodologically,
on what is called a ‘one-to-many comparison since the measured identifier must
be compared to some or all of the records in the database to determine potential
membership within the population (DHS 2004: 38).
The measurements by which identification is established are dependent on
modes of discrimination exercised at the level of the biological life of individuals
and populations. They can involve the discernment of specificities of human gait,
the distinctiveness of a written signature, or the input of keyboard strokes onto a
computer. Physical measurements include ‘fingerprints, hand and finger geometry,
facial features, vasculature structure of the retina, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA),
and speech characteristics’ (DHS 2004: 38). These are what are known now in
the technical literatures as ‘biometric identifiers’ (DHS 2004: 38). Research and
development in the field of ‘biometrics’ has increased exponentially since the 9/11
attacks. A powerful biometrics industry has grown out of renewed governmental
investment in the abilities of private companies to develop the technologies with
which to identify terrorists on the basis of their biological signifiers, and protect
critical infrastructures from intrusion and subversion accordingly. A central fea-
ture of claims made as to the abilities of these technologies to provide security to
critical infrastructure has been the stress placed on their capacities to identify indi-
viduals on the basis, for example, of their facial characteristics. In the wake of the
9/11 attacks, the Visionics Corporation, a major player in the biometrics market,
published a white paper titled Protecting Civilization from the Faces of Terror:
A Primer on the Role Facial Recognition Technology Can Play in Enhancing
Airport Security (Visionics Corporation 2001). As the paper argues ‘terror is not
faceless’ and through the development of databases of terrorist faces’ the threat of
terrorism can be tracked and prevented (Visionics Corporation 2001: 2).
The assumptions on which such biometric techniques of facial recognition as
a means of identification are based are vast. As Kelly Gates has described, such
techniques are based on the epistemological hubris that ‘the dynamic nature of
the face – its expressive capacity, its transformation over time, and especially its
radical variability across populations’ is merely a ‘technical hurdle’ which can be
surmounted ‘in the process of transforming faces into stable, mobile, and combin-
able information’ (Gates 2006: 430). In turn the measurement of the risks posed
by particular candidates for insider threat, principally on the basis of whether or
not individuals share facial characteristics with the populations constructed on da-
tabases, means that identification depends on the representation of a face within a
racially encoded visual field. Whereas in the abstract ‘anyone can be presumed to
be a candidate for insider threat’, the application of facial recognition techniques
and their use in combination with ‘databases of terrorist faces’ means that indi-
viduals are targeted on account of their visual appearance decoded in racialized
terms. To belong to a particular population distinguishable within a visual field of
representation as of higher risk than other populations, is to be distinguished as a
more dangerous individual than other individuals.

The murder of Menezes demonstrates the arbitrariness and dangers inherent
in this practice of using racial criteria to determine the risks posed by particular
individuals. Menezes was, as is now well known, a Brazilian. Joseph Pugliese
has coined the term ‘racialised phenotypology’ to describe the techniques through
which Menezes was targeted. ‘De Menezes’ phenotypical features – his olive skin,
his black hair and bushy eyebrows’ were ‘transmuted into the stereotypical signifi-
ers of the Orientalist figure of the terrorist: a Brazilian thereby morph(ed), fatally,
into an Asian’ (Pugliese 2006: 3). The same racialized techniques of discrimina-
tion are now being applied to target specific populations in the development of
new security apparatuses, means of control and surveillance, by biometrically
enhanced liberal regimes globally, particularly the UK (Sivanandan 2006). The
presumption that the task of securing the biohuman requires the discerning of dif-
ferences between forms of life on the basis of their relative tendencies towards the
generation of species life, contra its rogues, remains today, as it was in the eight-
eenth century, the definitive feature of the strategies underpinning the develop-
ment of the liberal way of war. And yet today, in the context of the War on Terror,
the practice of roguing has become disseminated to a degree that each and every
human being, as well as each and every living thing, is participant in this conflict
of the biohuman with its rogues. In turn the racialized categories through which
the human species was originally conceived by liberal thinkers and practitioners
of the eighteenth century remain vividly present in the conduct of this conflict.
Kant’s depiction of a human species, essentially universal, but tragically riven by
the evolutionary struggle between a European elect and its Negrid and Mongolid
deviants (Baker 1974: 81) remains the framework in which liberal strategists of
the present conceive the struggles of the day. And, like Darwin’s seed-raisers and
animal-breeders, liberal strategists continue to proceed on the understanding that,
with the supremacy of their own race secured, they may persevere by merely
surveying and extracting those rogues which deviate from the proper standards of
biohumanity, for, as Darwin observed, ‘hardly any one is so careless as to allow
his worst animals to breed’ (1979: 91).
Conclusion
The advance of scientific knowledge concerning the evolutionary powers of spe-
cies life has shaped the development of the social and political strategies through
which liberal regimes have pursued the development of a world society fit for the
biohuman. The same forms of scientific knowledge have informed the develop-
ment of new technologies which liberal regimes are deploying militarily in wars
against the rogues of global liberal governance. Developments in life-scientific
knowledge about the organizational needs and potentials of the species have also
transformed the strategic doctrines in which the basic function of war and its
roles in defence and procreation of species existence are theorized for the political
purposes of liberal regimes. And yet these selfsame evolutionary powers, the dis-
covery and enhancement of which have enabled the transformation of the social,
political and military organization of liberal regimes, are now proving to be their

major sources of vulnerability. Liberal regimes of global governance are faced
not merely with the military threats posed by territorial ‘rogue states’ but with a
proliferation of ‘rogue actors’ and ‘rogue behaviours’ which threaten disruption
and subversion from within the infrastructures on which these regimes depend for
their biosecurity.
In this chapter we have seen how liberal strategies for the defence of infrastruc-
tures vital to their security from the threats posed by rogues are affording scientific
advances in the development of new knowledge on the adaptive capabilities of the
human, and how such new knowledge is being made use of strategically. Liberal
regimes are investing in their ability to know and control the adaptive capacities
of the human as a means to provide themselves with security from Terror. In the
process, species capacities for adaptation and learning are celebrated as among
the highest expressions of what it is to be a human being. As we will see in the
following chapter, a similar and strategically related trend has taken place in the
global governance of humanitarianism since 1989. Biologically inspired concepts
and theories of adaptation are being applied by humanitarians to determine why
some societies are supposedly more prone to disasters than others in the form of
‘adaptive failures’ and how such societies can avert disasters from occurring in the
forms of ‘adaptive responses’, as well as how they can recover from them when
they do occur by learning ‘adaptive behaviours’. Theories of adaptation and other
biologically inspired concepts are also being applied to conceive the frameworks
in which responses to disasters can best be organised. Throughout the domains
and practices of humanitarian activities the notion of the human conceived as an
expression of species life has taken hold, as has the idea of being able to deliver
humanity from its various forms of insecurity, most especially war, through the re-
duction of the human to the biohuman, based on an understanding and promotion
of its powers of adaptation, learning, co-evolution and information-sharing. Thus
humanitarianism is being transformed in ways complicit with the biopoliticiza-
tion of world order.

8 Conclusion
Good for nothing
Good for nothing–

A naught person, an unprofitable man, that walketh with a perverse mouth.
Proverbs 6:12
Introduction
The central purpose of this book has been to draw attention to how the compass
of human existence begins to be drawn too tightly around utilitarian and instru-
mental measures of what it means to be human, more generally also what it means
to be a living thing, when species life is taken to be the referent object of politics
and power, subject thereby to the logics and dynamics of the biopolitical economy
of species existence – espèce humaine/être biologique. The charge is even more
pointed than that. The objection is made that a dangerous paradox appears to be
at work here. The more the emancipatory politics of the biohuman circumscribes
the politics of emancipation, specifically in seeking to make war to remove the
scourge of war from the human, the more intensively do biopolitical imperatives
intrude into everyday life, and the more extensively are they applied globally.
There is, thus, a necropolitics to this advance in the biopoliticization of liberal rule
in the age of life as information.
In as much as its very concept of the ordering of order as such has changed, the
biopolitical project of making life live has arrived at an interpretation of life as
an informationally driven contingently adaptive process of complex emergence;
which emergence necessarily establishes a continuous emergency of emergence,
since life that is always becoming is life that is simultaneously also readily con-
strued as a becoming dangerous. Moreover, the drivers of that continuously be-
coming dangerous of the emergency of emergence are located within the very vi-
tal processes of life itself. Life is thus reduced to a living which is a continuously
becoming dangerous to itself. Securing such a life, making war to emancipate
such a life from the becoming dangerous to which it is continuously exposed
via the operation of its very own life processes, becomes a war waged against
life; one which calls routinely, in addition, when it is not also applying lethal
force to the forms of life said to endanger life, for unlimited emergency measures

to be continuously implemented to guard against the dangers of what life might
become. This lethal business is conducted in both actual and virtual terms.
In the first instance, life continuously exposed to becoming dangerous to itself
must continuously also, therefore, be surveyed and assayed to determine which
living is currently inimical to life and which actually existing forms of life betray
life-threatening potential. From this perspective, of course, all life does betray
life-threatening potential, since all life is said to be complexly adaptively emer-
gent. For that reason, all life thereby qualifies to be subject to unlimited regulation
in what amounts to a reduction of politics to biopolitical policing.
Since the current biopolitical definition of life is informationally driven com-
plex adaptive emergence, all life not only may be actually threatening, it must
also be virtually threatening as well. Thus, the real focus of biopolitics – the schw-
erpunkt of its war on life to emancipate life from war – is the future. It is not so
much what life currently is, as what life may become, that is the preoccupation
of biopolitics in the age of life as information. For that reason, biopolitics in the
twenty-first century is ultimately driven to be less interested in actually exist-
ing life than in the heterogenetic processes which engender life: morphogenesis.
Herein, also, lies its totalitarian seduction: the biopower of desire excited by the
radical contingency of its emergency of emergence. For, biopolitically, it is not
enough to secure existing life against the exigencies of current threats and dan-
gers; even those presented by itself to itself. It is not sufficient, either, to merely
extrapolate those threats upstream and downstream, as it were, into the genealogy
which made them possible or the futures which they threaten. The policy prob-
lematique with which liberal rule in the age of life as information confronts itself
is how to manage breeding. That problem is posed in manifold ways in terms of
the securing, ultimately, of what is brewing because of the fear of what life itself
might be breeding.
Breeding for what? The ‘for what’ is itself, of course, always in-formation, and
so the telos demanded of the life-engendering process is continuously also subject
to change. Here, in fact, it matters less what life is ‘for’ than that life itself should
always be made ready to receive whatever ‘for what’ is currently thought to be
required or desired; and such desires and requirements change endlessly. That is
why transferable skills and adaptive learning are now espoused more highly than
traditional forms of education, for example. Adaptive learning and transferable
skills are the means by which life is made ready for anything, such that life may
therefore be utilized in any way.
In the event, therefore, any particular ‘for what’ does not matter much. It is the
readiness to be subjected to a ‘for what’ which matters most; such that command
of the contingent processes of life-production itself becomes the most prized form
of biopower/knowledge. Actually existing life is strictly speaking, therefore, al-
ways surplus to life requirements, because what matters most, in this biopolitical
scheme of things in which life is being-in-formation, is, of course, the availability
of the surplus of life; not simply the biopolitical economy of what life currently
consists in, but the biopolitical economy which capitalizes by continuously ex-
tracting the surplus of life – life’s pluripotency – in order to keep life working at

the lathe of making life live. As if this were all there was, could be or should be,
to life or to living.
Actually existing life, in the age of life as information, is ultimately therefore
construed, biopolitically, somewhat in the way that molecular biology currently
construes stem cells: the pluripotency of life-potential material abstracted from
actually existing forms of life, said to bear no imprint of any known form of
life, in whose biopolitical experimentation and manipulation the promise of future
life-management and enhancement is now said to lie.
This is by no means, however, an argument against science in general, life
science in particular, new medicine or the wider desire for improvement of the
materiality of the human condition. On the contrary, it is an argument designed
to revivify the question of the human and its life by demonstrating how it has
been confined within its appropriation by the biopoliticization of rule and war.
This is by no means an argument against the relief of human suffering either. On
the contrary, it is an argument designed to show how human suffering is readily
instrumentalized in the cause of making life live biopolitically, when rule and
war take species life as the referent object of rule and war. Finally, this is by no
means a repetition of the immemorial argument that human beings are danger-
ous to themselves and to others. However that might be, this is not the story of
Machiavelli nor of Hobbes. In many respects this is not a tale about the human
at all. Biopolitics concerns a species understanding of life which includes, but by
is no means confined, especially now, to the human – whatever the human might
be said to be. On the contrary, and this is the essential part of our quarrel with
liberal ways of rule and war: although the human can be said to be many things
not only does it seem impossible to say definitively what the human is, but in that
very impossibility, we think, lies the possibility of a quite different account of
politics: that in virtue of which a ‘we’ comes to belong together in deliberating
and questioning the rules and practices of the common life thus formed.
Our preoccupation in this book has, however, been that of presenting and pur-
suing a certain analytic of contemporary biopolitics by starting with the question
of what happens to power and politics when it takes species life as its referent ob-
ject, and then asking what happens to that biopolitical regime of power relations
thus formed when the life which it takes as its referent object is informationalized
and construed as contingently adaptive complex emergence, thereby continuously
also becoming dangerous to itself. In that sense, it is an argument designed to raise
questions about the nature of the modern account of the political as such rather
than deliver answers; everybody has answers, and they are invariably cheap fixes.
What kind of collectivity is it whose belonging together is increasingly furnished
by belonging together in virtue of a fear of its very own life processes that increas-
ingly constitute its principles of rule? What happens to freedom, law, constitutional
politics, the accountability of governments, the distributive economies of capital
and the micro-practices of governance organized around a burgeoning biopolitical
economy of infinite self-endangerment, when species life, in the complex adap-
tive emergency of its own emergence, becomes the referent object of biopolitical
rule and war? These questions are not as well formed as we would like them to be.

They are not specified or ramified and applied in all the particular ways in which
we would wish to see them refined and gain further purchase on contemporary
political analysis. But they are designed less to foreclose political discussion than
to open it up to its very terms of rule; terms of rule which are by no means settled
but profoundly, and violently, agitated in the biopolitics of our age.
This is why we also take such profound exception to Julian Huxley’s question,
posed in an earlier chapter: ‘What are people for?’ The question is not only mis-
conceived, it is a profoundly threatening question because of the ways in which
it always already prefigures, and thereby forecloses, debate about the human, its
rule and the violence which attends all its forms of life. Here is a generic metric,
perhaps the metric of metrics, for a strategic calculus of necessary killing un-
troubled, insulated from being troubled, by the killing that it does. Biopolitically
speaking it is not only in those who are disciplined, punished, sentenced to correc-
tion, confined to the margins of life or otherwise despoiled, ravaged, targeted and
taken out that the ‘good for nothing’ is made manifest. (Those who are collaterally
damaged are ritualistically regretted.)
Beyond biohumanitarianism
Here is where the ontopolitical assumption from which our political dissent against
liberal biopolitics arises. People are not ‘for’ anything. That is the point. People
are good for nothing. Historically we have looked, among others, to the humani-
tarian movement to champion the cause of the ‘good for nothing’, for it is there,
among other places, that we traditionally find the most powerful affirmation of
concern for ‘the condition of man considered solely as a human being, regardless
of his value as a military, political, professional or other unit’, and ‘not affected
by any political or military consideration’ (International Committee of the Red
Cross 2007). But humanitarians too have been drawn into the violent play of glo-
bal biopolitics as liberal governance has come to espouse development doctrines
and transformation programmes which appeal to many humanitarian sensibilities.
What right-thinking people could be for tyranny and racial hatred, resist the ap-
peal of the dispossessed or, more generally, be opposed to life? A popularization
of values has taken place within liberal biopolitics, allied closely to the burgeon-
ing expertise in emergency provision for the needs of devastated populations, the
immediacy of whose urgent requirements often cloak the globally systemic socio-
economic, military and political drivers in which liberal governance is also deeply
implicated. In consequence, pursuing the professionalization of their business and
therefore as much by their own commission as by the biopolitical exigencies in
which they found themselves operating, they have become important participants
in the game of liberal governance locally and globally, losing very much of the
neutral status they once had, the rationale it once provided for their operations
and the protection it had afforded their operatives (Torrente 2004; Dillon and
Reid 2000).
Some argue that this shift has been a matter of the ideological capture of
humanitarian discourse by state agencies and development entrepreneurs (Zolo

2002). Humanitarian agencies have themselves, however, been complicit in the
process; their neutrality traded for access, funding and professionalization of the
aid business in partisan commitment also to the politics of rights and the transfor-
mation of historically constituted into the biological stuff of populations (Lischer
2003; De Waal 1994). But their subsumption has been a complex discursive affair,
requiring as it did, in the process, a transformation of the very conception not only
of humanitarianism per se but a displacement of the concept of ‘humanitarian
disaster’ with that of the complex humanitarian emergency (Macrae et al. 1994).
That shift in nomenclature from disaster to emergency can be understood only
as part of the correlate shift in the conceptualization of order and governance
itself to which we have drawn attention throughout this book. Humanitarian emer-
gencies are now conceived effectively as milieus in which life does not require
saving or securing, in the sense simply of its prophylactic protection, so much
as transforming. Thus the humanitarian emergency has become the locale, more
virtual than actual since it ultimately always revolves around the possibility of
the emergency to come, which affords an opportunity for the institutionalization
of biopolitically governable populations. Hence emergencies represent sites of
global danger and disorder vested with renewed political significance because
they occur where not only has life failed to perform its adaptive functions in
securing itself, but its very failure to adapt is construed as a threat to the security
of the biohuman. Thus the failure of these maladapted populations threatens not
only themselves, but devastation to the order of liberal governance as well, since
their disasters promise economic dislocation or even violent political disaffection
which may rebound upon the liberal heartlands. Thus they become subject to the
biopoliticized discourses of danger in response to which liberal governance seeks
an ever widening warrant for the reconstitution of human life as biohuman life.
We can see this logic taking effect among humanitarian agencies in the pro-
motion of development strategies globally to foster the popular policy goal of
‘resilience’. Resilience is defined by the UN in its Strategy for Disaster Reduction
as ‘the capacity of a system, society, community or society potentially exposed
to hazard, to adapt by resisting or changing in order to reach and maintain an
acceptable level of functioning and structure’ (UN 2004: ch. 1, s. 1:17). It levies
holistic demands:
a consideration of almost every physical phenomenon on the planet. The slow

movements in the earth’s mantle – the convection cells that drive the move-
ment of continents and the manufacture of ocean floors – are the starting
and also the sticking point. They lift mountains and shape landscapes. They
also build volcanoes and trigger potentially catastrophic earthquakes. Like
those other invisible movements that take place on a vast scale through the
atmospheric medium – the carbon cycle and the water cycle and the nitrogen
cycle – volcanoes and earthquakes, along with technological advancements,
provide the bedrock of strong nations, rich industries and great cities. They
do, of course, also have the potential to destroy them.
(2004: ch. 2, s. 1:4).

The UN’s idealisation of bio-ecological harmony requires a healthy and di-
verse ecological system that is productive and life sustaining, a healthy and di-
verse economy that adapts to change and recognizes social and ecological limits
(UN 2004: ch. 1, s. 2:18). It requires, most significantly, ‘capturing opportunities
for social change during the “window of opportunity” following disasters, for
example by utilizing the skills of women and men equally during reconstruction’
(2004: ch. 1, s. 2:20). More fundamentally, it requires making societies ‘aware of
the importance of disaster reduction for their own well-being’ (2004: ch. 3, s. 4:1),
because ‘it is crucial for people to understand that they have a responsibility to-
wards their own survival and not simply wait for governments to find and provide
solutions’ (2004: ch. 3, s. 4:20). Resilience therefore becomes a measure of the
adaptability of biohuman life; a necessarily empty measure but one demanding
political change and economic reform for all, and among the weakest and poorest
most of all. Whereas the biohuman is the referent object of liberal rule and war,
‘the emergency of emergence’ of biohuman life provides the where and the how
of its taking place, and the instantiation of emergency measures is its favoured
mode of operation.
Randolph Kent, a former United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Co-ordi-
nator in Somalia, Rwanda and Kosovo, and now Director of the ‘Humanitarian
Futures’ programme at King’s College London, is an archetypal enthusiast. As
Kent argues, ‘rapid change and complexity will be the hallmark of the twenty-first
century’ and the inabilities of humanitarian aid agencies to meet the challenges
of change and complexity are likely to ‘provoke large-scale human vulnerability’
(2002: 68). ‘In the most basic sense’, Kent maintains, ‘humanitarian crises result’
not simply from the failures of aid agencies, but ‘from society’s inability to adapt
to changing circumstances or from reactions based on inadequate understand-
ing’ (2002: 68). ‘Adaptive failures’, which term Kent assumes to include racial/
ethnic ‘stereotyping and exclusion’ (2002: 70–2), are, he argues, responsible for
humanitarian crises; as if, for example, the Rwandan massacres could be so sim-
ply explained.
Kent’s humanitarianism embraces the biopoliticized vision of global liberal
governance espoused by many others examined earlier in the book:
Within five decades, human beings will likely be able to create, target and
control rainfall. Nuclear fusion will provide high levels of energy for the
world’s population, while artificial blood and brain implants, along with
‘smart skin’ for intelligent clothing and direct human repair, should be able to
enhance the length and style of life.
(Kent 2002: 80)
‘[D]isasters (as we know them)’, he says, ‘may not even be issues of major concern’
(2002: 80), since ‘dysfunctional and war-affected societies’ will be transformed
‘into cooperative, representative, and especially stable entities’ (2001: 11).

Force multiplication of biohumanitarianism
If it proved impossible to sustain the distinction between civilian and military in
the massification and industrialization of warfare introduced by the Atlantic and
European powers of the twentieth century, so, progressively, it has also become
difficult to distinguish between the humanitarian and the biopolitical partisan in
the complex emergencies and war zones of the twenty-first century. In military-
strategic terms, humanitarian aid agencies dedicated to the reconstruction of infra-
structure are increasingly now seen as part of the war effort. In saying this we are
not claiming that all humanitarian agencies have become dupes of liberal govern-
ance. Neither do we wish to denigrate the work of those who devote themselves
to the welfare of others in the most dangerous and demanding of circumstances.
We agree, to a degree, with Adi Ophir when he insists that we remember that there
are ‘real differences between moral technologies for the administration of disaster
and disastrous technologies for the administration of life’ (Ophir 2006); and that
there is a vital ‘moral residue in the work of humanitarian organizations that can-
not be reduced to the role they play in the political sphere, in the consolidation of
a new world order’ (Ophir 2006).
That said, many humanitarians themselves have been troubled by the degree to
which humanitarian relief was biopoliticized during the course of the 1990s. No
longer finding a secure location in the neutral space between blocs of power which
were once clearly defined and geopolitically institutionalized – in terms which
were never in fact as clear as they were said to be – they, too, are wondering what
kind of transformation it is that humanitarian organisations have enjoyed (Fassin
2007; Brauman 2004); particularly one that has allowed them to be claimed by
former Secretary of State Colin Powell as ‘force multipliers’ (Powell 2001).
The role of biohumanitarians as force multipliers is exemplified in their contri-
bution to the reconstruction of infrastructures in the wake of liberal intervention
and conquest. From a humanitarian perspective, infrastructures are necessary to
sustain human life and relieve its suffering. From a biopolitical perspective they
are the site where the war to remove war from the life of the human, in constitut-
ing the biohuman, is ultimately won or lost. Whereas infrastructure construction is
an operational goal of humanitarian relief agencies, infrastructure transformation
and renewal is a strategic aim of liberal rule and war. Here, then, is one powerful
confluence between the humanitarian and the military by means of which humani-
tarian agencies have been mobilized biopolitically; absorbed into the matrix of
liberal power relations, locally and globally, such that their neutral status has been
progressively eroded; their members made targets and their relief often turned
into an instrument of war (Reid 2005).
The terror of the good for nothing
He winketh with his eyes, he speaketh with his feet, he teaches with his
fingers;
Forwardness in his heart, he deviseth mischief continuously.
Proverbs 6: 13–15

Ordering has to work with, within and upon something. Without the sheer
gratuity of the good for nothing there would, therefore, be no ordering to speak
of. Thus, however much Proverbs prophesy, ‘Therefore shall his calamity come
suddenly; suddenly shall he be broken without remedy’, ordering cannot dispense
with the good for nothing because the good for nothing is not only a product of
ordering; it is that surplus to order, within order, which ordering never domesti-
cates.
In your face, the good for nothing speaks back. It gives you lip. Its voice is a
discordant voice. A voice that defames rather than proclaims order, it is neither
complex, adaptive or emergent. Indicting the very metrics which establish the or-
der of things – the distributive economy of who gets what, where, when and how,
the distributive economy of who is counted in, discounted or counted out – the
voice of the good for nothing is simple, direct and immediate. It is not a voice you
want in your home: ‘he speaketh with his feet, he teaches with his fingers’. The
good for nothing is a bit of a monster; a terror.
‘Forwardness in his heart’, it is the very forwardness of life itself which of-
fends. The good for nothing doesn’t know its place. It is denied a place. It contests
the very act of placing. Unless the universe can be made to add up, all place
settings in place, however dynamic the scheme of things is said to be, the good
for nothing is ineradicable. For the good for nothing is the surplus which even
dynamic complex adaptive emergent order itself cannot domesticate: white noise,
genetic garbage, clutter, deus absconditus ex machina.
Biopolitics cannot abide the good for nothing. But politics, that process by
which order is changed to accommodate new principles of order rather than to
rank all principles under a common metric, must insist on admitting the good for
nothing to the conversation; must admit the good for nothing to the conversation
because that is the vocation of the political. In the process of finding a way of
doing so, however, politics requires the revision of all the identities around the
table. The rules of the house must be changed and another generative principle
of formation governing belonging together formulated. That is why politics is a
rare and difficult task. But it has been practised before, even by those most rigidly
proclaiming order. And it can be done again today.
As liberal rule, today, seeks the rule of life in complex adaptive emergence, so
it applies rules that revolve around the state of emergency of biopolitical emer-
gence. Politics, meanwhile, has to ask other questions when it comes to cleaning
up the mess of events.
The questions ultimately derive from the persistence and insistence of the good
for nothing. They incite a kind of enlightenment, specifically that ‘second enlight-
enment’ to which Foucault himself referred in his reflections on philosophy, the
history of science and the Enlightenment in his introduction to Georges Canguil-
hem’s The Normal and the Pathological (Foucault 1991b). Reviewing intellectual
life in France during the course of the twentieth century, Foucault observed that
‘several processes, marking the second half of the twentieth century, have led
to the heart of the contemporary preoccupation concerning the question of En-

lightenment’ (1991b: 12). The first was the power acquired by techno-scientific
rationality, of the kind that we have addressed here in relation especially to the
biopolitical ransacking of the life sciences; its appropriation, in particular, of the
informationalization of life and its application of the account of life as complex
adaptive emergence, governed by the emergency of its adaptive emergence, to
institute emergency as its principle of rule, not least in pursuit of removing war
from the life of its subject, the biohuman.
The second was that of (political) ‘ “revolution” whose hope since the close of
the eighteenth century, had been borne by a rationalism to which we are entitled to
ask, what part could it have in a despotism where that hope was lost’ (1991b: 12).
Foucault does not say so explicitly, perhaps because he wanted the momentum
of his argument to carry weight in respect of the despotic tendencies of reason
itself, but the despotism which brought all reason to the bar of political account,
challenging the hope vested in politics as such, was that which once enabled
Auschwitz. However much it may conjugate itself differently today, that despotic
tendency in reasoning is not dead (Derrida 2005).
The third was ‘the movement by which, at the end of the colonial era, people
began to ask the West what rights its culture, its science, its social organisation
and finally its rationality itself could have to laying claim to a universal validity’
(1991b: 12). Here, Foucault’s response is nuanced; too nuanced for those quick
to dismiss him, and others, as an anti-Enlightenment thinker. Replying to his own
question, he says: ‘two centuries later the Enlightenment returns: but not at all as
a way for the West to become conscious of its actual possibilities and freedoms to
which it can have access.’ How, then, instead? He answers: ‘as a way to question
the limits and powers it has abused’ (1991b: 12).
All three developments therefore help institute a certain kind of questioning
which we hope this book, too, will foster: a questioning that addresses itself ‘to
a rationality which makes universal claims while developing in contingency’
(1991b: 12). Thus has the rationality of the latest round of the appropriation of
sciences of the contingent been very much our target here. But ‘in the event’ it
is not so much books like ours but the persistence of the good for nothing which
makes the questioning to which Foucault refers inescapable. Not because the
good for nothing is theoretically literate, philosophically minded or even aware of
its own incitement to enlightenment. It does not need to be. In itself it is simply
that affront which will always incite questioning, including the questioning that
incited the writing of this book. The good for nothing that we are. Here, error, po-
litical and other, ‘is not eliminated by the muffled force of a truth which gradually
emerges from the shadows but by the formation of a new way of “speaking true” ’
(1991b: 15). In the realm of rule and war, in the intimate and violent correlation
of rule and war, politics is the solvent which allows that new force of ‘speaking
true’ to appear. Consider the work of those actively and courageously involved,
throughout the course of the twentieth century, in that dissolution of terrors, just
as implacable as those with which we are said to be faced today, which required
the revision of old identities in the formation of new ones. Its heroines and heroes

may often also be surprising. So also may be its methods. For, as in the advance-
ment of science to which he was more directly referring, but in ways that have
purchase here on this appeal for a politics to leaven biopolitics:
the successive transformations of this truthful discourse continuously pro-

duce reshapings of their own history; what for a long time remained a dead
end, today becomes an exit; a ‘side’ attempt becomes a central problem
around which all the others gravitate; a slightly divergent step becomes a
fundamental break.
(1991b: 15)
Such a revisionary political history of the age of biopolitics ultimately falls to

politics affronted by the good for nothing. For, as Foucault observed of the life
sciences, so also might we observe of contemporary biopolitics:
it proved impossible to make up a science of the living being without having

taken into account, as essential to its object, the possibility of disease, death,
monstrosity, anomaly, error, (even if genetics gives this last word a mean-
ing completely different from that intended by eighteenth century physicians
when they spoke of an error in nature).
(1991b: 17–18)
Here is a crucial point where life science, biological life science most poign-
antly, ultimately therefore differs from the biopolitics of rule that sanctions war in
order to free the human from the scourge of war: ‘it has . . . been able to develop
only in so far as the problem of the specificity of life and of the threshold it marks
among all natural beings was continually thrown back as a challenge’ (1991b: 18).
Here, however, is also a second difference. If, ultimately,
[t]he biologist must grasp what makes life a specific object of knowledge and
thereby what makes it such that there are at the heart of living beings, because
they are living beings, some beings susceptible to knowing, and, in the final
analysis, to knowing itself,
(1991b: 20)
the vocation of politics exceeds that knowing in its acknowledgement of the

recurrence of the good for nothing which is not so much another object of knowl-
edge as a voice which will not shut up, and a pair of feet that simply cannot march
in step.

Notes
1 Introduction
1 This traditional international relations narrative is by no means uncontested outside
the disciplinary orthodoxy of international relations. Contrast it for example with that
told by political theorists such as Charles Tilly (see Tilly et al. 1985) and anthropolo-
gists such as Talal Asad (see Asad 2003). Political theologians are especially hostile to
the received account (see for example Cavanaugh 2002; Milbank 1993). The political
theology of the modern state is an important but almost wholly neglected topic, one
whose significance has grown considerably with the advent of the so-called war on
terror. A notable exception can be found in the work of Paul Fletcher (see Fletcher
2004).
2 Although the geopolitical reading of Clausewitz is highly disputable. For a more criti-
cal reading see Reid (2006a).

1 ‘There is no dividing line – there is a dividing line in our world, not between nations,
and not between religions or cultures, but a dividing line separating two visions of
justice and the value of life. On a tape claiming responsibility for the atrocities in
Madrid, a man is heard to say, “We choose death, while you choose life.” We don’t
know if this is the voice of the actual killers, but we do know it expresses the creed
of the enemy. It is a mind set that rejoices in suicide, incites murder, and celebrates
every death we mourn. And we who stand on the other side of the line must be equally
clear and certain of our convictions. We do love live, the life given to us and to all.
We believe in the values that uphold the dignity of life, tolerance, and freedom, and
the right of conscience. And we know that this way of life is worth defending. There
is no neutral ground – no neutral ground – in the fight between civilization and terror,
because there is no neutral ground between good and evil, freedom and slavery, and
life and death’ (Bush 2004).
2 The rise and correlation of the two is carefully documented by Foucault especially in
his lectures on the Birth of Biopolitics (2008), explaining how Homo oeconomicus is
irreducible to the original juridical subject of rights, thereby also posing a new prob-
lematic of governance as such, namely that of the political rationalities and governing
technologies to apply to this new referent object of rule, Foucault explains: ‘for gov-
ernability to preserve its global character over the whole space of sovereignty, for it
not to be subject to a scientific and economic reason which would entail the sovereign
having to be either a geometer of the economy or a functionary of economic science,
for the art of governing not to have to split into two branches of an art of governing

158 Notes
economically and an art of governing juridically, in short to preserve the unity and
generality of the art of governing over the whole sphere of sovereignty, and to keep
the specificity and autonomy of the art of governing with respect to economic science,
to answer these three questions, the art of governing must be given a reference, a
domain or field of reference, anew reality on which it will be exercised, and I think
this new field of reference is civil society’ (Foucault, 2008: 295).
3 See for example the account of the celebrated dispute between Locke and Boyle over
the nature of ‘species’ (Jones 2007; Peter 1985; Curley 1972).
4 The term ‘original grant’ is one used by Sir Richard Filmer. Filmer is Locke’s main
protagonist in ‘False Principles’, the first section of his Two Treatises of Government.
Locke agrees that there was an original grant. He maintains instead that it was not to
Adam ‘privately’ but to men in common.
5 The point to be emphasized here in relation to the death of God is that Nietzsche is
referring to the God of onto-theology, to the God that emerged out of the convergence
of the Christian and Aristotelian traditions in which the Christian God came to stand
as the ground or archē of Aristotelian ontology. Heidegger, for example, observes
that, here, God ‘becomes, even in theology the God of the philosophers, namely of
those who define the unconcealed and the concealed in terms the causality of making,
without ever considering the essential provenance of this causality’ (Heidegger 1997:
26).
6 Behind this point is, of course a continuing and complex argument about the secu-
larization and disenchantment said to characterize the modern world. In general see
especially for example Löwith (1949) and Blumenberg (1985). On secularization see
especially Asad (2003) and Hunter (2007).
7 For an extraordinarily rich account of the ‘economy’ of divine providence during the
Christian era see Marie-Jose Mondzain (2005). Mondzain leads in with a brief sum-
mary of Aristotle on economy before describing the way in which ‘economy’ figured
within the Christian understanding of being as a whole.

1 Note we say ‘the modern idea’. As Bahrani’s (2008) fascinating book, for one, il-
lustrates, other times and other places had their own well-developed, if radically dif-
ferent, account of the ways in which war has been said to be governed by its own
dynamics.
2 Although the promotion of the theory of life as contingency has been much inspired
by Clausewitz’s classical theory of war as an expression of the laws of contingency,
so also has the current biostrategic retheorization of war as the play of the contingent
been similarly inspired by complexity and the life sciences. That inspiration is quite
explicit in the work of Stuart Kauffman, for example. ‘We have thought that the un-
folding of society and culture could be brought under the sway of science.’ Kauffman
observed. ‘On the other hand,’ he also says, ‘Sun Tzu, four centuries prior to Christ,
and Clausewitz, in the early nineteenth century, in, respectively, The Art of War and
On War, both stressed the totally unexpected ways of battle and the need for intuition
and command genius, whatever the science lying behind strategy and tactics’ (2000:
x). Note also that placing radical contingency at the heart of order may not only en-
gender a new episteme of the contingent; it regularly also introduces the persona of
‘the genius’, defined, according to Kant at least, as ‘the inborn mental trait (ingenium)
through which nature gives the rule to art’ (quoted in Richards 2002). This is indeed a
classic Romantic trope to which, despite their avowed positivism, all epistemologists
of the contingent ultimately also seem drawn (Richards 2002). Indeed, despite the
death of God, contingency theorists like Kauffman have found the need to reinvent
God in the guise of the genius as well (Kauffman 2008). Again, irrespective of the

Notes 159
death of God, the question of divinity was always powerfully at work in the intimate
correlation of Religion and Romanticism (Richards 2002).
3 For a wide-ranging collection of essays debating Foucault’s impact on the understand-
ing of space see Crampton and Elden (2008).
4 For a detailed examination of the process by which Foucault’s thought ramified among
these thinkers see Reid (2007).
5 Which is not to say that the question of divinity is dead or that the relation between
religion and politics is moribund. On the contrary, it is to indicate instead that the very
question of God and its correlation with religion and politics requires to be newly
posed. There are of course many doing precisely that. A sample would include Derrida
(2002); de Vries and Sullivan (2006); de Vries (2002); de Vries and Weber (2001);
Asad (2003) Bulhoff and ten Kate (2000); Caputo (2002); Giesen and Šuber (2005);
and Goodchild (2002).
6 This is not intended to exhaust what there is to say both politically and historically, as
well as ethically, about the holocaust in these and many other terms. On the contrary,
that experience remains a provocation not only to ‘the liberal conscience’ but to all
historical, political and ethical reflection, which is now indelibly marked by it.
7 As if the point were that people had to be ‘for’ something or be worth nothing. Their
incalculable invaluability, rather than their biopolitical utility, is instead precisely the
point. In that sense people are not ‘for’ anything.
1 Complexity, for example, sounds a lot like jazzed-up open systems theory going back
through Luhmann (1982 and 1995) to Bertalanffy (1968).
2 The idea of network was also developed by physicists out of graph theory (Barabási
2002; Pastor-Satorras and Vespignani 2008).
3 Some might stigmatize this as ‘post-modern’.
4 This is not to gainsay biologists who insist on an unbridgeable distinction between the
living and the not-living thing, Monod (1997) not least amongst them.
5 An assay weighs and measures material to discover what utilizable ore it may contain
so that the rest can be discarded.
5 Global triage
1 The issue of how liberal freedoms are necessarily also construed as transactional
freedoms is an important one which requires more extensive treatment than we can
give it here.
2 Webometric studies of hyperlinking patterns in the Internet emerged in the mid-1990s.
Coined by Almind and Ingwersen (1997), webometrics applies bibliometric and in-
formetric techniques to investigate the Internet. Some of the major topics for Internet
researchers include: structure/typology of web links (Kavanaugh et al 2005; Larson
1996; Park, Kim and Barnett 2004), functions and performance of search engines
(Bar-Ilan 1998/9; Bar-Ilan 2005; Courtois and Berry 1999; Introna and Nissenbaum
2000; Oppenheim, Morris and McKnight 2000; Rousseau 1998/9; Snyder and Rosen-
baum 1999; Thelwall 2000), situation analysis/web-based citation analysis (Ackland
and Gibson 2005; Cronin 2001; Rousseau 1997; Van den Bos 2006), web impact
factors (Björneborn and Ingwersen 2001; Ingwersen 1998; Noruzi 2006; Thelwall
2000) and mapping (issue) networks (Ackland and Gibson 2005; Garrido and Hala-
vais 2003; Lancaster and Lee 1985; Rogers 2004; Rogers and Marres 2000; Van den
Bos 2006; Wormell 2000). See especially Hsu (2008).
3 For an account of how the idea of a palimpsest forces a reconfiguration of the ge-
nealogical account of power emphasizing that if power is genealogical its history is

160 Notes
rhizomatic rather than arboreal see S. Dillon (2007), especially Chapter 6, ‘Refiguring
Intertextuality’.
4 We owe this extraordinarily powerful expression to an essay by Geoffrey Whitehall
(2009).
5 There are different accounts of global liberal governance; we concentrate on the neo-
liberal one.
6 By ‘cybernetical’ here we simply mean to indicate the way in which information ex-
change allows all manner of systems to be understood as living in as much as they are
complex and adaptive as a consequence of the ways in which information circulates
through and constitutes as it simultaneously also transforms them.

1 The modernization literature is, of course enormous. Covering a very wide range of
themes and scholarship, modernizationists generally posited a unilinear evolutionary
model of political development, drawn especially from Parsonian functionalism. Tra-
ditional society, it was argued, would break down in the course of the social, political
and economic change brought on by unavoidable contact with the modern world. Pre-
cise mechanisms of democratic development were not definitively specified but it was
thought that the mechanisms of liberal representative government would be necessary
both to resolve the crises induced by modernization as well as to become themselves
the end game of modernization (Almond and Verba 1963; Almond and Coleman 1960;
Lipset 1959; Lerner 1958). There was an implicit ‘end of history’ thesis circulating
long before Francis Fukayama made his name recycling it. Modernization theses were
also as heavily criticized in their heyday as Fukayama was. Our point is not to re-enter
or re-stage this debate. Quite the contrary, by focusing on the emphasis which is now
given, instead, especially in military-strategic discourse, to transformation rather than
modernization we wish to underline the shift which has taken place. In contrast then
with modernization, transformation is very much understood to be a non-linear rather
than a linear process. It is one moreover which has no inevitable logical or historical
outcome. It is therefore very much an expression of contemporary understandings of
the workings of complex adaptive systems derived from biology and chaos theory
rather than from earlier accounts of economic modernization.
2 And opposition, of course, there proved to be. The OFT was subsequently to be
disbanded with the fall of Donald Rumsfeld, albeit its work proceeds in other ways
now that its cultural revolution has become military orthodoxy on both sides of the
Atlantic. See for example Barnett (1999).
3 This argument fundamentally challenges the biopolitics advanced most notably in the
work of Roberto Esposito (see Campbell 2006).

1 A side argument arises here concerning liberalism and republicanism. We do not
intend to enter into it, since the points raised are not germane to our general argu-
ment and it has, in any event, largely resolved itself into a truce between the warring
parties. These now accept that there has been a mixture of liberal republicanism and
republican liberalism. For a summary overview, see Gibson (2000); and for a critique
see Dillon (2008c).
2 We do not dissent from the application of the popular understanding of ‘Machiavel-
lian’ here, since liberal regimes are as Machiavellian, in that respect, as any other. But
we do specifically mean ‘Machiavellian’ in the sense of republican freedom and virtù
which Pocock analysed in his celebrated Machiavellian Moment (2003).
3 Although space does not permit a full extension of this line of argument it is worth
noting that the faith liberal regimes invest in life as the fundamental source of author-

Notes 161
ity upon which to base their modes of governance is, from the perspective of leading
Islamist political philosophers such as Sayyid Qutb, both hubristic and repugnant. In
this vein Qutb was especially troubled by the power of the life sciences in liberalizing
societies of both western and non-western worlds (2005: 107–16). He did not dispute
their practical importance in improving the material conditions of humankind, but dis-
puted the political authority with which their truths have been rendered, and the con-
sequent degradation of the capacities of human communities to organize themselves
in accordance with alternative metaphysical systems, especially those associated with
his own religion of Islam. Indeed in his most influential text, Milestones, Qutb depicts
Islam itself as participating in a struggle to save humanity from its subjugation to the
degradations it suffers under conditions of liberal governance. ‘Islam freed all human-
ity from the ties of the earth’, he argued, ‘so that they might soar toward the skies,
and freed them from the chains of blood relationships – the biological chains – so
that they might rise above the angels’ (Qutb 2005: 124). For these reasons the stra-
tegic advantage of attacking infrastructure for al-Qaeda may well be complimented
by the symbolic value of its destruction. The strategic importance of infrastructure to
the ‘good governance’ of liberal regimes is not incidental to the materialism which
grounds liberalism philosophically. Indeed it is a direct expression of the deep-seated
and historically embedded faith that they place in life itself as a resource of knowl-
edge and organizational model on which to base their strategies of governance; a
faith which generates fear and loathing among Islamists fighting to defend alternative
models of divine authority. Back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when
infrastructure first emerged as a new referent object for the security of liberalizing
regimes, and when the circulatory life of societies was first conceived as something
requiring protection and promotion, the goal was to govern the threat of sedition. Here
in the twenty-first century we can see that the very practice of sedition has developed
to incorporate an understanding of not only the strategic importance of infrastructure
for liberal governance, but its symbolic importance as an expression of the material-
ism which seditious groups such as al-Qaeda are concerned with challenging.

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The Liberal Way of War

THIS BLURB IS UNDER DISCUSSION, DO NOT TREAT AS FINAL

Michael Dillon is Professor of Politics at the University of Lancaster, UK. He

Julian Reid is Lecturer in International Relations at Kings College London, UK,

Politics/Political Theory/Military Studies/International Relations

UNCORRECTED FIRST PROOFS

We live in a moment that urgently calls for a reframing, reconceptualizing and

International Relations and the Problem of Difference

Methods and Nations

Declining World Order

Human Rights, Private Wrongs

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