Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The Liberal Way of War will prove essential reading for anyone perplexed by
Foucault’s pithy observation – that ‘massacres have become vital.’ Not only
does the book shed new light on such topics as the liberal rationalization of
killing, the humanitarianization of biopolitics, and the informationalization
of war; it shows there to be complex relationships between them.
William Walters, Associate Professor, Department of Political
Science and Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton
University, Canada
Although it has long been asserted that liberal democracy, like any political
system, is based not simply on consensus but also on the exercise of violence,
Dillon and Reid cast new light on an old problem by bringing it into the
‘information age’ – which for them is also the age of ‘biopolitics.’ They ar-
gue that liberalism must be understood neither simply in terms of individual
rights, nor as an economic system, but as effort to organize the reproduction
of ‘life’ through ‘breeding’ and ‘adaptation’ as ‘being-in-formation.’ The
militarization of politics thus emerges as a necessary correlative of a politics
that increasingly identifies the protection of life – security – with the admin-
istration of death. A provocative thesis that will be a focus of discussion in
the years to come.
Samuel Weber, Avalon Professor of Humanities, Northwestern
University, USA
The Liberal Way of War
In The Liberal Way of War: Killing to make life live, Michael Dillon and Julian
Reid argue that the liberal way of war and the liberal way of rule are correlated;
they trace that correlation to liberalism's original commitment to ‘making life
live’. Committed to making life live, liberalism is committed to waging war on
behalf of life, specifically to promote the biopolitical life of species being; what
this book calls ‘the biohuman’.
Tracking the advent of the age of life-as-information – complex, adaptive and
emergent – while contrasting biopolitics with geopolitics, Dillon and Reid detail
how and why the liberal way of rule wages war on the human in the cause of
instituting the biohuman. Contingent and emergent, the biohuman is however
continuously also becoming-dangerous to itself. It therefore requires constant
surveillance to anticipate the threats it presents to its own flourishing.
Dillon and Reid explain how, in making life live, liberal rule finds its expres-
sion, today, in making the biohuman live the emergency of its emergence. Thus
does liberal peace become the continuation of war by other means. Just as the in-
formation and molecular revolutions have combined to transform liberal military-
strategic thinking, so also have they contributed to the discourse of global danger
through which global liberal governance currently legitimizes the liberal way of
war.
Rethinking Refugees
Beyond states of emergency
Peter Nyers
Cinematic Geopolitics
Michael J. Shapiro
Acknowledgements xi
Part I
4 Informationalizing life 55
Part II
Notes 157
References 163
Index 185
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. 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 pro-
gramme, Mark Lacy and Cindy Weber, as well as his undergraduate students on
Politics 329 The Politics of Global 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 Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (Instituto de
Ciencia Política) in 2008. Thanks to Vanessa Lemm and Miguel Vatter for organ-
izing that meeting 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, and to do so 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 encoun-
tered 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 in these pages, 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,
Nicholas Michelsen and Doerthe Rosenow. The book benefited significantly from
xii Acknowledgements
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 the 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,
his wee blond beasts, he is indebted for reminding him daily of the sheer joy of
being alive. And to Laura, for her eyes, and her laughter, which remind him daily
to love the earth.
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 clas-
sic formulation, by that great agitator and pamphleteer Thomas Paine, being that
‘society is the result of our reasonably regulated needs, government the result of
our wickedness’ (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,
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).
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.
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.
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
economy and civil society.2 But the basic referent object was life itself (Foucault
2008a; Foucault 2007; Foucault 2003). Despite the early liberal attacks on scho-
lasticism (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, so it must always return to the properties of this
‘grant’: first, to resolve the problematic of rule posed by the need to institute a
From the liberal subject to the biohuman 17
civil society through the founding of a constitution and, second, to resolve the
problem of the everyday regulation 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 gov-
ernmentally organized. Rather, it set conditions. These conditions were composed
of the different properties of the dual nature of the liberal subject itself, to which
liberal government had to return when rule confronted the exigencies and con-
tingencies 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
18 From the liberal subject to the biohuman
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.
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.
From the liberal subject to the biohuman 21
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.
22 From the liberal subject to the biohuman
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 machinic. 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 prob-
lematic 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 have 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.
From the liberal subject to the biohuman 23
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 (Dillon 2002b). 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
24 From the liberal subject to the biohuman
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.
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 2008a: 16–17)
So, he says, with political economy we enter an age whose principle could be
this:
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:
Homo oeconomicus 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.
(Foucault 2008a: 295)
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 (1997a), 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
28 From the liberal subject to the biohuman
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
From the liberal subject to the biohuman 29
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, com-
plexity 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 re-
spect of the generic relationship between liberal rule and war. ‘Over the past few
decades,’ she explains, for example, ‘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 concepts and doctrines, as well as force deployment and
equipment acquisition policies, 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 developments 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 of both gov-
ernment and governance, especially, we argue, in relation to security and war..
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
discourse of what it is to be a living being to the policing, auditing and augment-
ing of species properties. In its relation to itself, the humanum of the human in the
form of Man 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 re-
morseless 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:
30 From the liberal subject to the biohuman
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.
(Foucault 1997: 259)
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
From the liberal subject to the biohuman 31
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
meant, in practice, was that the liberal way of rule had to decide what elements,
and what expressions, of human life best served the promotion of the species.
Those that did not were precisely those that most threatened it; those upon which
it was 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 is now said to depend.
32 From the liberal subject to the biohuman
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 contemporary 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. Immanent 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-
From the liberal subject to the biohuman 33
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 2002a; 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 discourses
and all political practices have their entailments. One of these entailments is the
organization and use of violence. Thus war is a political entailment of any and
every form of political rule. Liberal political discourse and liberal political prac-
tices 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 as-
serted 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.
36 War in the age of biohumanity
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’ (2008a). 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
War in the age of biohumanity 37
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 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 2008a: 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 poli-
38 War in the age of biohumanity
tics arises, arguably with Machiavelli, as a domain less determined by God than
subject to its own natural laws. Those laws were, in addition, said to derive from
different 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 spe-
cies existence: ‘Nature is something that runs under, through and in the exercise
of governmentality’ (2008a: 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 im-
mediately suffer negative consequences’ (2008a: 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’ (2008a: 16). The cry of ‘unfair’
thus has to contend with the reply, ‘it works’. Thus:
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.
(Foucault 1990: 137)
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 violent 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.
(Foucault 1996: 415)
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.
War in the age of biohumanity 41
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 resonated 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 liberalism
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
historical impasse in its own distinctive ways. He wished to disclose that implica-
tion. 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. However, 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 (Cook 2007).
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.
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
52 War in the age of biohumanity
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
titled ‘the international’. Thus the contemporary development of liberal interna-
tionalism, in particular, continues to follow the line laid out by Paine centuries
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 regularly
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
War in the age of biohumanity 53
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,
54 War in the age of biohumanity
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-
56 Informationalizing life
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, for example, of
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:
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’.
58 Informationalizing life
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)
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
60 Informationalizing life
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.
Informationalizing life 61
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 development 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
62 Informationalizing life
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
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
64 Informationalizing life
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
Informationalizing life 65
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 definedfirst-
order cybernetics then it was to the construction of a common abstract or theoret-
ical 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 argued, ‘the
fundamental idea is the message . . . and the fundamental element of the message
66 Informationalizing life
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
Informationalizing life 67
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 al-
low for its meaning to vary between contexts. According to Tzannes, Shannon and
Wiener defined information in terms of what it is, whereas Mackay defined infor-
mation in terms of what it does or how it performs (Tzannes 1985). Defining in-
formation ontologically as what is, so to speak, precluded what was self-evidently
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 argu-
ing at that time that Shannon’s privileging of the stability of ‘information’ was
unsustainable; in particular that the ‘deviation’ which Shannon wanted to exclude
was itself ‘information rich’ (Hayles 1999: 63). At this juncture, 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.
68 Informationalizing life
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/me-
diation 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 con-
nected 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 between thought and code (Hayles 1999: 58–61). Here, too, McCul-
loch 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 arti-
ficial 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 (Hayles 1999: 136). 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 medi-
ated relationships which are realised through the processes of auto-poiesis in the
course of system interaction (Hayles 1999: 138; Maturana and Varela 1980). The
concept of organization and order thus became conflated with this informationally
driven interactivity. It simply becomes the pattern described by complex and on-
going 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;
Informationalizing life 69
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).
‘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; Rosenau and Czempiel 1992; 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
Informationalizing life 73
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 simul-
taneously subverted the epistemic structures upon which both Newtonian physics
and the great scientific taxonomic enterprises of the last 200 years were said to be
based. 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
74 Informationalizing life
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
Informationalizing life 75
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 and totipo-
tency (Cooper 2008; Fischbach and Fischbach 2004). 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
76 Informationalizing life
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;
Informationalizing life 77
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
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 nec-
essarily drawn to the generic conditions of life production and reproduction – the
heterogenesis of morphogenesis – independent of the individual features of spe-
cific forms of life, the following brief survey of global liberal governance simi-
larly also focuses therefore on the features which it is regularly said are necessary
for all life to fructify. We draw attention to two of them – requisite diversity 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 in-
ternationalist discourse emerged, calling itself ‘global governance’ (Commission
on Global Governance 1995).5 Global liberal governance differentiates itself very
clearly from world government and, in the process, significantly revises the gen-
erative principles of formation and allied ambitions of liberal internationalism.
Whereas post-Kantian liberal internationalism tended to idealize the possibility of
some form of world government, theorists of global liberal governance are pursu-
ing the alternative of what James Rosenau iconoclastically describes as ‘govern-
ance without government’ (1992a). The absence of a world government capable
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-sovereign
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
92 Global triage
governmentalization 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 governmentalized,
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 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 (2008a). Even there he left significant gaps to be filled,
and further questions to pose, since he also tended to reproduce the traditional
account 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 (see also Canguilhem 1988).
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
94 Global triage
to information processing and actually existing cultural diversity reduced to the
systemic abstraction of ‘requisite diversity’.
In its application of the global triage necessary to institute a continuous global
watch on species existence, in order to continually identify and anticipate species
threats to species existence globally, the theory and practice of global liberal gov-
ernance 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 political ecology
global liberal governance, itself, was busily writing on nature as it nonetheless also
claimed to find it naturally installed 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: 27–8)
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 1997a: 138).
By way of example, then, Dirk Messner’s work is paradigmatic for 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:
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 evaded
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 sys-
tems, 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 powers 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 become ‘How much diversity is enough?’, and
‘What kind of diversity is allowable?’.
98 Global triage
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
threshold of diversity in order to avoid creating novelty at a lethal rate. It is clear
that all life forms are said to undergo evolutionary development 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. In what ways and to what degree ought
the species to gate that passage so that it can enable enough variation from itself
Global triage 99
while disallowing the possibility of a supracritical encounter? At what point must
species life draw down the gate on its relation with the adjacent possible, 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:
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
100 Global triage
‘global communications infrastructure’ has emerged, for example, which ‘with
its electronic networks and date transmission lines, facilitates communications
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 evaded (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.
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 (Cybernetics was first published in 1948) 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, via the logoi of security and war, universally utilitarian and
instrumental. Thus instrumentalizing life 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 – the generically seditious, para-
sitic or delinquent, especially those who expressed themselves through counter
violence, 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:
In previous chapters we argued that, just as the rise of the state was preoccupied
with removing war from the life of civil society, so also did the rise of modern lib-
eralism embrace the idea of removing war from the life of humanity by promoting
its account of the biohuman. And this it did progressively 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 (Fletcher 2009; 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 Renais-
sance as well as the Middle Ages. Here, too, the technologies involved were not
simply those born out of improvements in science (Parker 1988). The ‘technol-
ogy’ 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
Military transformation in the age of life as information 107
of capital, the associated development of information and communication tech-
nologies, and particularly 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
becomes biohumanity, and biohumanity is conceived in complex adaptive emer-
gent 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 infra-
structures, 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-
dangerous 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 may very well have a quite coherent other account
of what life consists in and what living well involves. In consequence, they may
be systematically ‘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 of the biopolitical grid of intelligibility which determines their
108 Military transformation in the age of life as information
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 account of
supracriticality in the previous chapter. Put bluntly, when life is conceived in com-
plex 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 be-
comes 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, dan-
ger, 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 Machiavellian neces-
sity.
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 idioms. 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
Military transformation in the age of life as information 109
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.
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
112 Military transformation in the age of life as information
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 be 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 sanction at the turn of the decade with the publication of two key US stra-
tegic 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
Military transformation in the age of life as information 113
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:
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: 8).
In Cebrowski and Gartsksa’s terms this meant going beyond the merely instru-
mental adoption of information and communication technologies to the pursuit
of the constantly re-animating ‘co-evolution of that technology with operational
concepts, 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:
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: 12). These
new rules were said to apply to all open systems irrespective of their institutional
traditions or political and constitutional functions and affiliations:
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
116 Military transformation in the age of life as information
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 2001) 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.:
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, procure-
ment 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 aware-
Military transformation in the age of life as information 117
ness or understanding of the battlespace rather than simply more raw data’ (Ce-
browski and Gartska 1998: 5; see also Arquilla and Ronfeldt 2001). They were to
do so against the background of ‘a high-performance information grid that pro-
vides a backplane for computing and communications’ (Cebrowski and Gartska
1998: 7). Comprising an ‘operational architecture of sensor grids and engagement
grids’, the information grid, later to be omnisensorially called the system of sys-
tems, would ‘rapidly generate high levels of battlespace awareness and synchro-
nize awareness with military operations. Engagement grids exploit this awareness
and translate it into increased combat power around information networks’ (Ce-
browski and Gartska 1998: 10).
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 eco-
system, they construed war as one of the natural processes of life as information
(being-in-formation) through which 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 op-
eration 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;
118 Military transformation in the age of life as information
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
Military transformation in the age of life as information 119
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.
[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:
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:
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
Military transformation in the age of life as information 121
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 (in)formatted.
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)
122 Military transformation in the age of life as information
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:
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
define living systems, liberal regimes also aim to use military strategic transfor-
mation 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, adap-
tive, emergent, living to ‘learn’ how not to die by learning to live biostrategically
through killing more biopolitically.
126 Military transformation in the age of life as information
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.
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
128 Biohumanity and its rogues
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.
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 also 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
136 Biohumanity and its rogues
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 the 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 terrorists 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.
Biohumanity and its rogues 137
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 strat-
egies 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 argues
contemporarily, ‘it is in the interests of Al-Qaeda to increase the entropy of the
138 Biohumanity and its rogues
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 find themselves in a curiously paradoxical position in which
its zoological figuration is deployed to construct them as both morally and politi-
cally 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
Biohumanity and its rogues 139
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
140 Biohumanity and its rogues
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:
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:
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.
Biohumanity and its rogues 143
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.
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
146 Biohumanity and its rogues
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 scien-
tific 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 Ter-
ror. 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, final, 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 re-
cover 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 reduction 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 biopoliticization 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
construed as a becoming-dangerous. Moreover, the drivers of that continuously
becoming-dangerous of the emergency of emergence are located within the very
vital processes of life itself. Life is thus reduced to a living which is a continu-
ously becoming-dangerous to itself. Securing such a life, making war to emanci-
pate 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
148 Conclusion
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
Schwerpunkt 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-
lematic 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 and totipotency – in order to keep
Conclusion 149
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 and totipotency 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 is by
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 ques-
tioning 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
object, and then asking what happens to that biopolitical regime of power rela-
tions thus formed when the life which it takes as its referent object is informa-
tionalized 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 polit-
ical 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 increasingly 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 adaptive emergency of its own emergence, becomes
the referent object of biopolitical rule and war? These questions are not as well
150 Conclusion
formed as we would like them to be. They are not specified or ramified and ap-
plied 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 current 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 human-
itarian discourse by state agencies and development entrepreneurs (Zolo 2002).
Conclusion 151
Humanitarian agencies have themselves, however, been complicit in the process;
their neutrality traded for access, funding and professionalization of the aid busi-
ness in partisan commitment also to the politics of rights and the transformation
of historically constituted peoples 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 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:
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’ (2002: 11).
Conclusion 153
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 2008); 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 2008).
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).
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
154 Conclusion
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.
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 formulated to govern their belonging together. 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 with our contemporary
terrors.
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
Conclusion 155
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
156 Conclusion
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:
Here is a crucial point where life science, biological life science most poignantly,
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 recur-
rence of the good for nothing which is not so much another object of knowledge
as a voice which will not shut up, and feet not made for marching in-formation.
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
2009 and 2004).
2 Although the geopolitical reading of Clausewitz is highly disputable. For a more criti-
cal reading see Reid (2006a).
4 Informationalizing life
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
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Index
ICT (information and communications Jacob, François 55–6, 57, 59, 60, 61, 75–6,
technology) 34, 46, 75, 113, 114, 118, 120 133–4
idealism of liberalism 2 Jasanoff, S. 46
identification 143–4 Jervis, R. 72
ideology 15, 24; liberal political theory and 19 Jessop, Bob 92
immune structures 108–9 Jeter, K.W. 62
industrialization of warfare 7, 49, 124, 153 Joint Vision 2010 and 2020 (USDOD) 112–13
information 103; adaptation and 131; as code Jones, A. 121
Index 191
Jones, J. 72, 158n3 Lennox, J.G. 59
Joyce, Patrick D. 43, 82 Lerner, D. 160n1
Leroi, A.M. 77
Kagan, R. 109 Lezaun, J. 73
Kahn, Victoria 16, 19, 81 liberal biopolitics 49–50; development of 134
Kant, Immanuel 41, 48, 51, 76, 91, 118, 145, liberal conscience 83; American perspective 5;
158–9n2; Copernican revolution 58; rise of 1–2; war and 3–7
pragmatic knowledge, on development of liberal imperialism 1, 49; biopolitics and 127–8;
46–7; ‘Universal History’, idea of 32 policies and rationalities of 6
Kantorowicz, E.H. 16 liberal internationalism 36, 48, 50, 52–3;
Kauffman, Stuart 18, 61, 70, 81, 94, 96–7, 97–9, international law and 92
100, 108, 119, 121, 158–9n2 liberal modernity, cybernetics and 65
Kavanaugh, A. et al. 159n2 liberal order, ‘network-centric warfare’ and
Kay, Lily E. 66, 70, 94, 100, 102 117–18
Keller, E.F. 70 liberal political theory 19
Kelmelis, J.A. and Loomer, S.A. 130 liberal power relations 7–8, 39
Kempis, G.K. 73 liberal rule: adaptiveness of 81–2; biopolitics of
Kennedy, Paul 8 war and 18–24, 120; historical emergence of
Kent, Randolph 152 127–8; political economy of war and 24–30
Kissinger, Henry 124 liberal space 84
Kittler, F.A. 61 liberal universalization of war 5
knowledge 22, 41, 45, 65, 103, 111, 113, 137, liberalism: biohumanity and 31; biological
146; acquisition of 93; availability of 99; properties and 17–18, 19–20; biopolitical
biological knowledge, change in 17–18; response to 103, 121; biopoliticization
biopower and 148; development of 132–3; of liberal rule 32, 38–41, 88–9, 120–1;
exploitation of 131; of forms and processes capillary character of liberal way of life
of life 16, 45–6; life as object of 156; 136–7; contemporary liberal biopolitics 90;
linking of 116; medical knowledge 50; emancipation of species from war, pursuit
order of power and 40; power and, political of 30–1, 39–41; emergency of emergence
reliance on 9, 19–20, 22, 35, 37, 38–9, and 88; faith in life of liberal regime
82, 109, 126, 127; pragmatic knowledge 131; Foucault on life and 43; freedom,
46–7; reflectiveness and reliability of 34; contingency and 82; grant of governance
savoirs 71; scientific knowledge 42, 50, 88, and 16–17; Howard’s critique of liberal way
131, 132–3, 145; self-knowledge 51, 86; of war 1–2, 4–5; humankind, promotion of
thresholds of 138–9 16; idealism of 2; liberal political theory
Kuwait 120 19; liberal power relations 7–8, 39; natural
political rights and 17–18; outcome of
Howard’s critique 5–6; political economy,
Lamarck, Jean Baptiste 134
exposure to 19; population as organism,
Lancaster, F.W. and Lee, J.I. 159n2
concept of 134–5; post-Cold War 52, 54;
de Landa, Manuel 72, 121, 124
reproblematizing liberal way of war 7–11;
language: information, code and 67; technicity
revolutionary change and liberal thought
and 77; utilitarian demands of 21
47–8; security of liberal rule 59; self-rule
Laquer, Walter 132
and 38–9; species emancipation and
Larson, R.R. 159n2
88–9; species governance and life sciences
Lasky, Melvin J. 48
46, 47–8, 145–6; strategy of necessary
law: extra-judicial basis for global liberal
killing 32, 44, 88; values of 2; and war,
governance 92–3; governance and 17;
universalization of 20
immanent laws 61; natural and positive 17;
Libicki, M. 35, 138
natural laws 16, 17, 38; positive law 17
Lieven, A. 109
Le Goff, Jacques 16, 106
life: ambition in 107; animation and 71;
League of Nations 48
assaying and sorting of 90; auditing of life
learning 103; cybernetics and adaptive learning
forms 43; battlespace of 44; biopoliticization
101; informationally driven 90; threat
of 29–30; catastrophe and dynamics of 31;
perception and informationally driven
as contingency, theory of 158–9n2; dangers
machines 100–2
in 147–8; digitization, molecularization and
legitimacy, success and 38
nature of 70–1; diversity and living systems
192 Index
97–8; dual usage in 71; force, energy and Marx, Karl 28, 53
war 124–5; forms of life and forms of war, Marxism 24, 25
correlation between 15–18; forwardness massification of warfare 7, 124, 153
of 154; historical perspective on 55–6; material gain 15, 16
informalization of 21–2; knowledge of Maturana, H. and Varela, F. 68
forms and processes of 45–6; liberal regime Maturana, Humberto 68
faith in 131; life-adaptive processes 125, Mayer, P.A. 113
148; life-production ‘for what?’ 148–50; Mbembe, A. 104
metaphysics and reality of 70; military mediation, information and 68
efficiency and everyday order of 139–40; Meillassoux, Q. 58
processes of 43–4, 45–6; specificity of 156; Meinecke, F. 3
story of 21; as threat to life 31; wholesale Messner, Dirk 95, 99–101
orientation of processes of 90; see also metaphysics 18, 19, 64, 70, 160–1n3
species existence Milbank, J. 157n1
life sciences 149; American capital and 28–9; Milestones (Qutb, S.) 160–1n3
biology central to understanding of 61–2; military organization 9–10; adaptability in 114;
biopolitics of rule and 156; liberalism, biopoliticalization of, threat biopoliticization
species governance and 46, 47–8, 145–6; and 130–1; cognitive transformation in 122–
living systems, techno-science and 71; 3; doctrine, technology and, co-evolution of
military science and 113 115–16; formations, adaptiveness of 123,
Likosky, M.B. 130, 135 130–1; network intelligence, doctrine of
Lindsey, Larry 10 116; ‘technology’ of 106–7; transformation
Link-16 115 in 114–17
Linnaeus, Carolus 28 military science 34, 113
Lipset, S.M. 160n1 Miller, H.J. 136
Lischer, S.K. 151 Mills, C. 46
Litwak, R.S. 142 modernization 102; literature on 160n1; of war
Locke, John 16, 17, 72, 97, 120–1, 153n3 34–5
The Logic of Life (Jacob, F.) 133–4 molecular biology 66, 70, 73
logistical life and governance 139–40 molecular revolution 23, 56; digital and,
logos of war 9, 107–8 confluence of 108–9
Löwith, K. 158n6 molecularization 22, 55, 56, 62–3, 64, 70–1, 109
Luhmann, N. 159n1 Mondzain, Marie-Jose 26, 158n7
Luttwak, E. 15 Monod, Jacques 55, 57–8, 59, 61, 159n4
Montag, W. 104
McCulloch, Warren 65, 68, 70 morphogenesis 23, 31, 44, 73, 87–8, 125, 148;
Machiavelli, Niccoló 1, 3, 32, 34, 38, 71, 128, heterogenesis of 90
149, 160n2; fortuna of 82 Mulgan, G. 69
Machiavellian Moment (Pocock, J.) 160n2 mutually assured nuclear destruction 50–1
machines: cybernetic informationalization of
man–machine systems 63, 64; life-likeness Nairobi, US embassy bombing in 138
of 22; living beings as chemical machines nation 15
67; organisms and 77 National Plan for Research and Development in
Macintyre, R. 43 Support of Critical Infrastructure Protection
Mackay, Donald 65, 67, 69–70 (DHS, US) 129, 139, 240
Mackenzie, A. 75 nationalism 9, 49
McKinley, M. 19 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization)
McNeil, W.H. 121 112, 135
Macrae, J. et al. 151 natural laws 16, 17, 38
Macy Conferences 65, 67 natural selection 70, 98, 101, 141–2
Madrid, bombings in 136 Nazism 48–9
Malthus, Thomas 28 NCW (network-centric warfare) 116
Manent, P. 16 Neal, Andrew 107
Mann, M. 8 Negri, Antonio 41
Maoz, Z. and Russett, B. 48 Neocleous, M. 39
martial adjudication 30–3 ‘Netwar’, concept of 110–11
Index 193
‘network-centric warfare’ 114–17, 117–18 Pastor-Satorras, R. and Vespignani, A. 159n2
Neumann, John von 65 Patton, Paul 39
neurobiology 66 peace-making: biohumanity and 42; biopolitics
‘new terrorism’ 126, 132 and 42, 85, 107
Newton, Sir Isaac 60, 72, 106; Newtonianism Pearton, Maurice 9, 121
74; physics of 73 Peter, A. 158n3
Nicolis, G. and Prigogine, I. 72 phenotypology 145
Nietzsche, Friedrich 19, 125, 158n5 Philips, K. 109
9/11 and aftermath: ‘biometrics,’ development Platt, R.H. 136
post 144; Operation Kratos 143; portal pluridimensional battlespaces 110
security in world after 143–4; post-9/11 Pocock, John G.A. 19, 48, 53, 128, 160n2
reification of infrastructures 129, 136, 139 political economy: biopolitics and 27–30;
NIPP (National Infrastructure Protection Plan) exposure to liberalism 19; governamce and
129 25–7; of liberal rule and war 24–30
non-linear adaptation 60 politics: aporia of humanity in war 40; existence
The Normal and the Pathological (Canguilhem, and 53–4; modern politics, war by other
G.) 154 means 127–8; natural political rights,
Noruzi, Alireza 159n2 liberalism and 17–18; ontopolitics 18–19,
NSTC (National Science and Technology 23, 45, 71, 121, 150; order and governance
Council) 140 93; political history and biopolitics 156;
nuclear destruction, mutually assured 50–1 ‘speaking true’ and 155–6
nuclear strategy 124 polyphenomenality 75–6
population: as organism, concept of 134–5;
Oakeshott, Michael 121 ‘population’ studies 19–20; world population
objects of governance 38–9 policy, advocation of 51
OFT (Office for Force Transmission) 119, 120, portal security 143–4
121–2, 160n2 positive law 17
Olby, R. 55 Poster, Mark 61, 75
ontopolitics 18–19, 23, 45, 71, 121, 150 Powell, Colin 153
Operation Kratos 143 power: global ambitions of power and
Ophir, Adi 153 science 99–100; knowledge and, political
Oppenheim, C., Morris, A. and McKnight, C. reliance on 9, 19–20, 22, 35, 37, 38–9,
159n2 82, 109, 126, 127; liberal power relations
The Order of Things (Foucault, M.) 24–5, 27–8, 7–8, 39; palimpsestuous nature of 125;
39 politics, biopolitics and 21–2; politics,
ordering 92, 100–1, 119, 147, 154; assaying and informationalization of life and 23–4; power
sorting of life 90; evolutionary ordering 98; relations, transformation and 104–5; truth-
of living entities 103; reordering of liberal telling and 56; see also biopower
order 117–18; self-ordering 90 Power, M. and Hutter, B. 82
organization: interactivity and 68; strategy Power, Michael 82
and 102; see also governance; military pre-emption 31, 43
organization Prigogine, I. and Stengers, I. 82
Origin of Species (Darwin, C.) 55 Prigogine, Ilya 72, 73–4
Osborne, Thomas 36 Prigoginean mathematics 73–4
‘othering’ 107–8 probability analysis 82
Owens, W.A. et al. 44, 120 processes of life 43–4, 45–6
Prodi, Romano 138
propagation, mutation and 98
Paine, Thomas 3, 4, 30–1, 41, 51, 83; on life of
Protecting Civilization from the Faces of Terror
species and security of governance 47, 48
(Visionics Corp) 144
Palestine 10
Proverbs (6:12) 147
Palladino, Paolo 42, 138
Proverbs (6:13–15) 153–4
paralogical understanding 74–5
Pufendorf, Samuel, Baron von 3
Park, H.W., Kim, C.S. and Barnett, G.A. 159n2
Pugliese, Joseph 145
Parker, Geoffrey 106, 121
Parsons, Talcott 102
Pascal, Blaise 61 Qutb, Sayyid 160–1n3
194 Index
Rabinow, Paul 55, 75–6 SBE (Social, Behavioral and Economic)
race 15; biometrics and 143–5; species and, Working Group 140
distinction between 46–7 Schiller, D. 113
racism, biopoliticization and 49–50 Schmitt, Carl 3, 5, 44
radical contingency 34–5 scholasticism, liberal attacks on 16
radical relationality, anteriority of 72 Schreuder, D.M. 4
RAND Corporation 112–13 Schrödinger, Erwin 64
randomness 66 Schwartzstein, S. 110
Rasch, W. and Wolfe, C. 82 science: complexity sciences 64, 68, 71, 73–4,
Ray, Thomas S. 70 82, 95, 103, 111, 114, 138; global ambitions
Reagan, Ronald 28 of power and 99–100; internationalization
reality: cognitive reality 68; metaphysics and of 50; military science 34, 113; see also life
reality of life 70; origins and nature of sciences
18–19 scientific knowledge 50, 88, 131, 132–3, 145;
Red Cross, International Committee of the 150 sovereignty and 42
Reid, Julian 7, 35, 39, 45, 47, 49, 83, 85, 103, Seabrook, J. 104
104, 118, 129, 131, 139, 153, 157n2, 159n4 Second World War 6, 9, 48–9, 65
relating, connectivity and mode of 75–6 security: biopolitics of 44; contingency, war
relationality 58, 76, 77; radical relationality, and 132; core values for national security
anteriority of 59, 72 96; emergent adaptation and 118–19;
religion 15, 16 evolutionary diversity and 96–7; ‘human
Renaissance 34 factors engineering’ 139; hyperbolicization
requisite diversity 90, 93, 94–100, 103 of 83, 107; of liberal rule 59; portal security
resilience 151–2 in world after 9/11 143–4; prevention of
revolution: American Revolution 30; digital terrorism, prioritization of 96; strategies for
revolution 23, 56, 70–1, 108–9; ecological 95–6
revolution 51; French Revolution 30, 48; Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the
information revolution 123–4; liberal Collège de France (Foucault, M.) 40
thought and revolutionary change 47–8; sedition 134
molecular revolution 23, 56, 108–9; political Segell, G.M. 143
155; RMA (Revolution in Military Affairs) self-endangerment 149–50
21, 109–11, 112, 120, 121, 122, 125 self-governance, inherent capacities for 91–2
Ricardo, David 28 self-interest 36
Richards, R.J. 158–9n2 self-knowledge 51
The Rights of Man (Paine, T.) 4, 30–1 self-propagation 74, 76, 87
risk analysis 82 self-rule and liberalism 38–9
Ritvo, Harriet 73 sensor systems 143–4
RMA (Revolution in Military Affairs) 21, Serbia 135
112, 120, 121, 122, 125; in age of life as Shannon, C. and Weaver, W. 65, 66
information 109–111 Shannon, Claude 65–7
RNA (ribonucleic acid) 100 Shapin, S. 109
Roberts, Michael 121 Shapiro, L. 72
Rogers, R. and Marres, N. 159n2 Shaviro, S. 92
Rogers, Richard 159n2 Shaw, M. 121
rogues: fear of 141–3; rogue elements 141–2, Shell, S.M. 47
146; rogue states, concept of 142, 146 Simons, J. 36
Roman fortuna 82 Simons, M. 115
Rose, Nikolas 36, 43, 82 Sivanandan, A. 145
Rosenau, James 72, 91, 94 Skinner, Quentin 16, 81
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 41, 159n2 Slotkin, Richard 109
Rumsfeld, Donald 10, 110, 120, 160n2 Smith, Adam 28
Russett, B.M. 48 Smith, E.A. 123
Russia 71 Snyder, R. and Rosenbaum, S. 159n2
Ruthven, Malise 131 society: control society, learning machines and
101; learning machines and disciplinary
Sainson, K. 48 society 101; sociological perspective on
Saudi Arabia, bombing of Khobar Towers in 138 society and war 8–9
savoirs 71 Society Must Be Defended (Foucault, M.) 40, 47
Index 195
socio-technical competence 103 life sciences 71; in military organization
sovereignty 27; governance and sovereign 106–7; military organization, doctrine and
peace 83; revision and adaptation of 93; and co-evolution of 115–16; NSTC (National
scientific knowledge 42 Science and Technology Council) 140
Soviet Union 2, 65, 71, 113, 124 technophilia 120
species emancipation: and liberalism 88–9; temporality 76
violent correlates of biohumanity and 41–8 terror: of biohumanity 131–3; bioterrorism
species existence 26; adaptation, emergence 131; ‘cyberterrorism’ 135; evolutionary
and 85–6; assaying and sorting of life 90; terror 137–8; fear of, exponential growth
biological properties of 107–8; biopolitical of 131, 136; of the good for nothing 153–6;
imaginary of 32–3; biostrategy for life-form infrastructural targeting 131, 133, 135–6;
differentiation 99; capillary character of international terrorism 95–6; ‘new terrorism’
liberal way of life 136–7; degenerative 126; prevention of terrorism, prioritization
forces and 47; emancipatory possibilities of 96; strategies for defence against 129
of 46; emergency of, positivity and Thacker, E. 61
empiricity of 89; evolutionary ordering Thelwall, Mike 159n2
and 98–9; foundational preoccupation threat evaluation 142–3
of 39; fundamental value of human life threat perception 108; biopoliticalization of,
140–1; global triage and 94; human destiny military biopoliticization and 130–1; and
and future of 51–2; human technological emergence, emergency of 83–7; global
superiority 140–1; informationalization of liberal governance as global triage
life and 56–7; living organisms, ‘internal 91–4; global triage 87–90; governance
organization’ of 133–4; martial adjudication and evaluation of threat 142–3; governing
of 30–3; ontopolitics of 18–19; political through contingency 81–2; learning
existence and 53–4; properties of, changes machines, informationally driven 100–2; life
in 20–1; refiguration of, biopolitics and as threat to life 31; mutually assured nuclear
29–30; see also life destruction 50–1; requisite diversity and
specificity of life 156 94–100; rogues, fear of 141–3; ‘sedition’
stability of information 66, 67 134; zoological metaphor in 138
Steels, Luc 69, 70 Tilly, Charles 121, 157n1
stem cells 149 time, mode of relating to 72–3
Stengers, Isabelle 72, 82 Toffler, A. and Toffler, H. 112, 118
Stiegler, Bernard 77 Toffler, Alvin 112, 118
Stiglitz, J. and Bilmes, L. 10 Torrente, N. de 150
Stiglitz, Joseph 10 totalitarian seduction 148
Stoler, L.A. 49, 127 transformation: grammar of biostrategization
Stone, L. 9 119–21; rubric of 44–5; through adaptation
story of life 21 102; see also adaptation
strategies for: adaptation 96; counter-terrorism, Trevelyan, George Macaulay 1, 3, 7, 24, 83
variation in 137–8; defence against terror Tuck, Richard 16, 81
129; necessary killing within liberalism 32, Two Treatises of Government (Locke, J.) 158n4
44, 88; security 95–6 Tzannes, Nicholas S. 67, 68
Stroud, John 65, 67
Stuart, M. 72 uncertainty, information and 68–9
subjects of governance 38–9 United Nations (UN) 48, 91, 129; Strategy for
Sun Tzu 158–9n2 Disaster Reduction (2004) 151–2; UNESCO
supracriticality and biohumanity 98, 108 (UN Education Science and Culture
Suresh, R. 44 Organization) 50, 51–2; world population
symbiosis 74–5; contagion and 76–7 policy, advocation of 51
United States: infrastructural protection,
Taliban 135 cooperation with EU on 130; life sciences
Taylor, M.C. 75 and American capital 28–9; military–
technology: biopolitics and 123–5; industrial–media–entertainment complex
communication technologies 22; human 109
technological superiority 140–1; ICT Urry, John 71
(information and communications USDOD (US Department of Defense) 112–13
technology) 34, 46, 75, 113, 114, 118, USNIP (United States Naval Institute
120; living systems, techno-science and Proceedings) 114, 119
196 Index
validity, questioning universality of Westernism warfare’ 114–17, 117–18; parallels between
155 wars on communism and on terrorism 2;
values of liberalism 2 pluridimensional battlespaces 110; political
Van den Bos, Adriaan 159n2 aporia of humanity in 40; political economy
Van Doorn, Jacques 121 of liberal rule and 24–30; pre-emptive war
Varela, F. and Bourgine, P. 69 43; problematization of 35; reproblematizing
Varela, Francisco 68, 69 liberal way of 7–11; sociological perspective
Vattel, Emerich de 3 on society and 8–9; technology, biopolitics
Vatter, Miguel E. 82 and 123–5; universalization of 20; violence,
Vespignani, A. 75 co-existence of various forms of 84–5;
Vietnam 120 ‘western’ way of 121–2
Vietnam War 5 War and the Liberal Conscience (Howard, M.)
violence: co-existence of various forms of 1–2, 3–5, 24
84–5; organization and use of 35; political On War (Clausewitz, C. von) 158–9n2
violence, time and space of 106 War on Terror see Global War on Terror
Virilio, Paul 41, 100 (GWOT)
Visionics Corporation 144 Warden, John A. 135
voyou see rogues Wark, McKenzie 135
Vuillemin, J. 57 weapons: informationalization of 110, 111–12;
intelligent weapon systems 113–14; of mass
Waldby, C. and Mitchell, R. 46 destruction, dissemination of 6, 45, 86, 95,
Walzer, K. 32 104; weaponization of information 110,
war: biological template of order and 110; 111–12
biopoliticization of 34–5, 36–41; biopolitics Weber, Max 8, 35, 106, 107
of liberal rule and 18–24, 156; continuity in webometrics 82
liberal way of 84; correlation between forms Weiss, Paul 94
of rule and forms of 121–3; democratic ‘western’ way of war 121–2
accountability and 24; form of life and What is Life? (Schrödinger, E.) 64
forms of, correlation between 15–18; Whitehall, Geoffrey 160n4
fundamentalist religiosity of liberal way of Wiener, Norbert 62, 63–7, 101–2, 113, 137
2; geo-economics of 15–16; geopolitical Williams, Andrew J. 7
actions of liberal states 84–5; geopolitics Wilson, liberalism of President Woodrow 1
of 3–4; geostrategic inevitability of 6–7; Wimbush, W. and Sterling, J. 137
governmental institutions, formation and Wittgenstein, Ludwig 109
transformation of 9; health and 88–9; Wolin, Sheldon 34, 82
historical emergence of 127–8; humanity in Woo, Gordon 137, 138
3–4; information warfare, hacking and 135; world culture 99
lethal nature of liberal way of 42; liberal world society: fitness for inclusion in 102;
conscience and 3–7; liberal universalization plurality and 95
of 5; liberalism and emancipation of Wormell, Irene 159n2
species from 30–1, 39–41; liberalism and
universalization of 20; logos of 9, 107–8; Yockley, H.P. 66
martial adjudication of species life 30–3;
melancholy story of liberalism and 1, 2; Zammito, J.H. 46
modern politics, war by other means 127–8; Zolo, Danilo 53, 150–1
modernization of 34–5; ‘network-centric