Aporias of Security
Anthony Burke
Publication Information:
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political.
Volume: 27.
Issue: 1.
Publication Year: 2002.
Maybe the [task] nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are. We have to...get rid of the political "double-bind," which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures.... The political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual from the state and from the state's institutions, but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualisation which is linked to the state.
Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power"
What does it mean to be secure? Should we even need to ask? Surely we know. We know that security is one of the most fundamental human needs: an irrefutable guarantee of safety and wellbeing, economic assurance and possibility, sociability and order; of a life lived freely without fear or hardship. That security is a universal good available to all, and a solemn pledge between citizens and their political leaders, to whom their people's security is "the first duty," the overriding goal of domestic and international policy making. As such it has been able to trace a powerful path between subject and world, state and citizen, to promise simultaneously a solution to the inchoate fears and insecurities of everyday life and the enormous spatial, cultural, economic, and geopolitical complexities of government. In short, security remains one of modernity's most stubborn and enduring dreams.
However, I believe that, more than ever, we do need to ask what it is to be secure. Surely we no longer know what security is--in that Platonic sense. Surely more than ten years after the end of the Gold War, after the Clinton Doctrine and the destruction of the Twin Towers, after humanitarian and policy disasters in Indochina, Africa, East Timor, the Middle East, and Central America, and after a growing body of humanist and critical scholarship has questioned security's unity, discursive structure, and political implications, security no longer possesses a credible wholeness. (1) This article begins from the premise that security's claims to universality and wholeness founder on a destructive series of aporias, which derive firstly from the growing sense that security no longer has a stable referent object, nor names a common set of needs, means, or ways of being, and secondly, from the moral relativism that lies at the center of dominant (realist) discourses of security that pretend to universality but insi st that "our" security always rests on the insecurity and suffering of an-other.
While this article argues strongly that security has no essential ontological integrity, it also argues that if the power and sweep of security are to be understood and challenged, its claims to universality must be taken seriously. They underpin and animate sweeping forms of power, subjectivity, force, and economic circulation and cannot be dismissed out of hand. Nor, in the hands of some humanist writers--who have sought to think human and gender security in radical counterpoint to realist images of national and international security--are such claims always pernicious. They have a valuable moral and political force that undermines, perhaps unwittingly, the logocentric presuppositions of the realist discourses they question. Yet a common assumption that security can be ontologically completed and secured does present a hurdle for the kind of "ontopolitical" critique that we really need. (2)
The answer is not to seek to close out these aporias; they call to us and their existence presents an important political opening. Rather than seek to resecure security, to make it conform to a new humanist ideal--however laudable--we need to challenge security as a claim to truth, to set its "meaning" aside. Instead, we should focus on security as a pervasive and complex system of political, social, and economic power, which reaches from the most private spaces of being to the vast flows and conflicts of geopolitics and global economic circulation. It is to see security as an interlocking system of knowledges, representations, practices, and institutional forms that imagine, direct, and act upon bodies, spaces, and flows in certain ways-to see security not as an essential value but as a political technology. This is to move from essence to genealogy: a genealogy that aims, in William Connolly's words, to "open us up to the play of possibility in the present ... [to] incite critical responses to unnecessary violences and injuries surreptitiously imposed upon life by the insistence that prevailing forms are natural, rational, universal or necessary." (3)
This article explores the aporias of security. And then begins the work of its genealogy--a genealogy of security's conceptual and discursive roots that aims to uncover, at its crucial points of formation, the order of knowledge lying beneath security's drama of struggle, technology, violence, and metaphor--in the hope that this order of knowledge can in turn be challenged, altered, and rethought. It is to ask: Is there something beyond or "outside" security? What might its possibilities and dangers be?
Two Kinds of Aporia
In both its realist and humanist guises, security takes the form and promise of a metaphysical discourse: an overarching political goal and practice that guarantees existence itself, that makes the possibility of the world possible. US President Bill Clinton prefaced the 1997 National Security Strategy by saying that "protecting the security of our nation--our people, our territory and our way of life--is my foremost mission and constitutional duty." Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, of Malaysia, has argued that "national security is inseparable from political stability, economic success and social harmony." In 1995, former Australian Labor leader Paul Keating argued that "a prime minister's duty, his first duty, is to the security of his country," while his successor Kim Beazley declared the party's central values as "security and opportunity" and elevated security to an overarching goal that linked, along a seamless continuum, the personal security of individuals and families with the security of the nation itself. (4) In Indonesia, security was a fundamental societal discourse during the entire tenure of the Soharto New Order, and it has taken on only greater urgency in the turmoil that accompanied his retreat from power. In Indonesia's doctrinal continuum between national and regional "resilience," security links the unity and prosperity of the nation to ideal systems of regional and international order. (5)
Indeed, the European political theorist R. N. Berki argues that security is the ultimate and overriding human value, the basic condition for life and freedom: "Security is the paramount value for self-conscious, rational, thinking individuals ... not just an external (and therefore optional) condition of life and freedom but simply another word for life and freedom." (6) More critically, the critical scholar Michael Dillon recognizes the same drive: "Security impress[es] itself upon political thought as a self-evident condition for the very existence of life--both individual and social." (7) R. B. J. Walker likewise argues that modern accounts of security define "the conditions under which we have been constructed as subjects subject to subjection. They tell us who we must be." (8)
Even a position admirably antithetical to that of Berki and other realists, as set out by J. Ann Tickner in her 1992 book Gender in International Relations, accepts that "the achievement of security has always been central to the normative concerns of international relations scholars." Her work seeks to realize a "truly comprehensive security" that adds the removal of "gender relations of domination and subordination" to "the elimination of physical, structural and ecological violence." (9) Similarly R. B. J. Walker's earlier (1988) One World, Many Worlds argued for "a clearer sense of what it means to have security for all people rather than the national security that now renders' everyone increasingly insecure." (10) Whatever the important differences between Tickner, the 1988 Walker, and the still hegemonic claims of realism, there remained a common assumption that security is universal.
However, these differences should not be quickly effaced. While the common metaphysical assumption presents a problem, the critiques developed by Tickner, Walker, and others have been of enormous political value and have implicitly contested both their own and realist assumptions that security was universal. This occurred in two ways. Firstly, in arguments for human security there was a radical shift in the nature of the subject to be protected--from the highly abstract imaginary of the nation-state to the immediate, corporeal distress of the human, a human that, in that distress, activates a call for difference that simultaneously undermines the illusory unity of a body politic that would subsume all differences beneath a common imagination of home. Secondly, the force of such critiques shattered realism's claim to be a founding and comprehensive account of security, scattering its objects, methods, and normative aims into an often contradictory and antithetical dispersal. What was revealed here was not a u niversality but a field of conflict, as much social as conceptual. This creates some serious problems for a more radical and inclusive language of security, however important its desire for justice. This was recognized later by Walker, who argued in 1997 that "demands for broader accounts of security risk inducing epistemological overload." (11) Indeed, Simon Dalby argues that security, as a concept, may no longer be viable: "That the political structures of modernity, patriarchy and capitalism are the sources [rather than the vulnerable objects] of insecurity. . . is so different as to call into question whether the term itself can be stretched to accommodate such reinterpretations. Inescapably, it puts into question the utility of the term in political discourse after the Cold War." (2)
Thus humanist critiques of security uncover an aporia within the concept of security. An aporia is an event that prevents a metaphysical discourse from fulfilling its promised unity--not a contradiction that can be brought into the dialectic, smoothed over, and resolved into the unity of the concept, but an untotalizable problem at the heart of the concept, disrupting its trajectory, emptying out its fullness, opening out its closure. Derrida writes of aporia being an "impasse," a path that cannot be traveled; an "interminable experience" that, however, "must remain if one wants to think, to make come or to let come any event of decision or responsibility." (13)
As an event, Derrida sees the aporia as something like a stranger crossing the threshold of a foreign land: yet the aporetic stranger "does not simply cross a given threshold" but "affects the very experience of the threshold . . . to the point of annihilating or rendering indeterminate all the distinctive signs of a prior identity, beginning with the very border that delineated a legitimate home and assured lineage, names and language." (14) Thus it is important to open up and focus on aporias: they bring possibility, the hope of breaking down the hegemony and assumptions of powerful political concepts, to think and create new social, ethical, and economic relationships outside their oppressive structures of political and epistemological order--in short, they help us to think new paths. Aporias mark not merely the failure of concepts but a new potential to experience and imagine the impossible. This is where the critical and life-affirming potential of genealogy can come into play.
My particular concern with humanist discourses of security is that, whatever their critical value, they leave in place (and possibly strengthen) a key structural feature of the elite strategy they oppose: its claim to embody truth and fix the contours of the real. In particular, the ontology of security/threat or security/insecurity--which forms the basic condition of the real for mainstream discourses of international policy--remains powerfully in place, and security's broader function as a defining condition of human experience and modern political life remains invisible and unexamined. This is to abjure a powerful critical approach that is able to question the very categories in which our thinking, our experience, and actions remain confined.
This article remains focused on the aporias that lie at the heart of security, rather than pushing into the spaces that lie beyond. The contours of this project are already becoming clearer. (15) What is still required is a properly genealogical account of security's ability to provide what Walker calls a "constitutive account of the political": as Walker says, "claims about common security, collective security, or world security do little more than fudge the contradictions written into the heart of modern politics: we can only become humans or anything else, after we have given up our humanity, or any other attachments, to the greater good of citizenship." (16)
Thus, before we can effectively rewrite security, we have to properly understand how security has written us-how it has shaped and limited our very possibility, the possibilities for our selves, our relationships, and our available images of political, social, and economic order. This, as Walker intriguingly hints, is also to explore the aporetic distance that modernity establishes between our "humanity" and a secure identity bounded and defined by the state. In short, security needs to be placed alongside a range of other economic, political, technological, philosophic, and scientific developments as one of the central constitutive events of our modernity, and it remains one of its essential underpinnings.
Security derives its enormous cultural power from its place at the center of modern political thought--at the center of a thought that, after first establishing the founding myths of modern political society, has further sought to think the juridical basis and function of the state, its enabling relation to a broader cultural and economic modernity, and to the imagination of "progressive" forms of modern political and economic subjectivity. Just as Foucault sought, through the idea of governmentality, to trace the emergence of simultaneously totalizing and individualizing forms of state power, I would argue that security occupies a key enabling position at their junction. The remainder of this article elucidates security's "constitutive account of the political" through a reading of Hobbes, Locke, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and Hegel, using Foucault's writings on governmental reason as a loose template.
It is in this constitutive account of the political that we find the second aporia of security, which is opened up as an impasse within its basic conceptual structure. Sadly, this is a moral impasse that also possesses a malign functionality. This aporia occurs because despite their presumption to universality, realist structures of security have always argued that the security of the self (the individual, the nation, or the "way of life") must be purchased at the expense of another. This was starkly laid out by the European political theorist R. N. Berki, who wrote in his Security and Society, "Seeking after security for oneself and being a cause of insecurity for others are not just closely related; they are the same thing, with no chance of either logical or existential separation . . . when the chips are down, and to a certain degree, they are always down . . . it is my life, my freedom, my security versus the rest of the human race." (17)
Ur-theorist of realism Hans Morgenthau, surprisingly enough, expressed some qualms about such an image of security, even as he did so much to entrench national security at the apex of modern policy making. With the advent of the nuclear age, he argued, no state could purchase its security at the expense of another; now diplomacy must seek to make all nations equally secure. (18) However, this insight was lost on a generation of later theorists and policy makers, for whom security would inevitably imply the sacrifice of the other. Consider George Kennan's argument, in 1948, that the United States would have to "to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to retain our position of [economic] disparity without positive detriment to our national security. . . . We should cease to talk about vague--and for the Far East-unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratisation." (19) One of Australia's most senior and influential policy makers of the post-Vietna m era, Richard Woolcott, underlined the continuing power of this view when he argued in 1995 that "sentimental notions" of self-determination for East Timor and Bougainville were a threat to Australia's national security (a security that for two decades had been premised on close relations and military cooperation with the murderous Soharto regime). (20) This highlights an urgent need to interrogate the images of self and other that animate (in)secure identities, and to expose the violence and repression that is so often relied on to police them.
I am serious in arguing that the aporias of security do create important room to move, to disrupt its claim to universality and truth, to imagine new possibilities that escape its repressive dialectic of self and other. Yet here we also encounter a disturbing irony. Security forms a political technology whose power partly derives from its aporetic structure. A generalized opposition between society and its others has worked as an effective technology of fear to construct and police forms of national and ethnic identity; while illusions of universal security have simultaneously worked as a smokescreen for a realpolitik that purchases the security of the self at the expense of the other. In short, security's power lies in the very slipperiness of its significations, its ironic structure of meaning, its ability to have an almost universal appeal yet name very different arrangements of order and possibility for different groups of people. This is why it is pointless to try and stabilize security's ontology. It i s better to track security's tactical and discursive power though its development as a constitutive account of the political-one that is simultaneously structured, enabled, and fissured by its aporias.
Security and "Government"
In his "Governmentality" lecture, Foucault traced the emergence of security within Western political thought through two linked developments: first, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of the administrative and governmental apparatuses of the territorial monarchies, of mercantilism, statistics, and the Cameralists' "science of police"; and second, of what he called an "and-Machiavellian literature" that sought to formulate an "art of government" against that narrower focus on the prince, his sovereignty and preservation.
Foucault highlighted two key features of Machiavelli's study. The first was that its central problematic, the link between the prince, his subjects, and territory, was a "purely synthetic one," and thus eternally fragile, vulnerable to both external enemies and from within, from "subjects who have no a priori reason to accept his rule." Second, this implied that the objective of the exercise of power was "to reinforce, strengthen and protect the principality, but with this last understood not to mean the objective ensemble of its subjects and territory, but rather the Prince's relation with what he owns." (21)
The art of government implied both the "government" of individuals and social institutions and the designation of new techniques and objects of power that would emerge within the problem of "governing the state as a whole." Between these realms was posed an essential continuity: the more discrete forms of governing were still "internal to the state or society," and the task of the art of government was to establish them within a continuum that worked "in both an upwards and a downwards direction." The downward line, which "transmits to individual behaviour and the running of the family the same principles as the good government of the state," was at this time beginning to be called police. The upward line meant the application of principles of self-government and familial government to the conduct of the state's affairs; we can also locate it in the emergence of what Foucault elsewhere discussed as reason of state, which sought specific forms of knowledge whose object was the state itself, rather than the un certain relation between the prince and his realm. Reason of state implied a rationality of government that could ensure that the state "must hold out for an indefinite length of historical time--and in a disputed geographical area." (22)
An analogous development was the extension of the idea of economy and its introduction into a general political practice--the invention of "political economy," as we now understand it. This involved a series of shifts, first from economy as a principle for the government of the family to one for the general organization of society, and then of sovereignty from a rule over territory to the government of a "complex of men and things" that would incorporate territory into a set of economic relations. Thus an important new object of politics emerged: population. (23)
Statistics now discovered that population had its own measurable "regularities," that with it came new objects of medicine, labor, and wealth, and that population had analogous economic effects through its movements, customs, and activities. The family was thus recast as "an element internal to population, and as a fundamental instrument in its government." We can see here the convergence with the phenomenon Foucault has elsewhere described, the linked development of the human sciences and the social technologies of discipline that enabled a more detailed and flexible production of subjectivity: "Discipline was never more important or more valorized than at the moment when it become important to manage a population." (24)
Political economy, he said, "arises out of the perception of new networks of continuous and multiple relations between population, territory and wealth" and out of the development of new techniques of intervention that, I would argue, become by the twentieth century a field encompassing the whole task of government: linking welfare, defense, economics, health, immigration, communications, science, education, and law. Sovereignty is then rearticulated in the terms of Rousseau's attempt, in The Social Contract, to divine "a general principle of government which allows room both for a juridical principle of sovereignty and for the elements through which an art of government can be defined and characterised." What forms is a triangle of rationalities linking sovereignty, discipline, and government, which together is governmentality--a powerful ensemble "formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security." (25)
Colin Gordon argues that Foucault treats security here not merely as a self-evident object of political power but "as a specific principle of political method and practice, distinct alike from those of law, sovereignty and discipline, and capable of various modes of combination with these other principles and practices within diverse governmental configurations." He goes on to argue that, for Foucault, security, from the eighteenth century on, "tends increasingly to become the dominant component of modern governmental rationality: we live today not so much in a Rechtsstaat or disciplinary society as in a society of security." (26)
Hobbes and Locke established security as a key signifier in the myth of the emergence of the modern state form (the commonwealth) from the state of nature, and thus makes security indispensable to modern practices of liberalism and sovereignty. These would in turn feed into that triangular relation of governmentality that aimed for the general government of the state as a regime of prosperity. If Foucault emphasized the intense problematization of sovereignty within the emergence of an "art of government," the work of Hobbes and Locke had already countered this problem exactly in the terms posed by Rousseau (of reconciling a juridical model of sovereignty with the new rationalities of "government") and in so doing achieved a more powerful fusion of both. In particular, they laid out the discursive limits for the citizen as a form of subjectivity and bound it to the state as an essential figure.
While Hobbes's account is considerably more theatrical, both thinkers found modern political society on the same myth: its emergence from the state of nature through the exchange of freedom for security. Hobbes's account is particularly revealing when he argues that in the condition of war that is the state of nature
there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no Building. . . no Knowledge. . . no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. (27)
This passage is highly important, providing a link from the myth of the state of nature to the fundamental promise and objectives of the state, which are not only to provide a means of protection for individuals but to enable a new kind of society to flourish. Here we can see security's function at the threshold and fulcrum of our modernity: the birth of the Artificial Man, Leviathan, enables not merely the development of more efficient forms of governmental reason but new industrial and cultural possibilities in which the idea of a great and progressive civilization--of the modern itself--can become real. In this metaphor of the body politic was the problem of Machiavelli's prince resolved: no longer a "synthetic," vulnerable link between sovereign and subject but their absolute fusion and identity, in a chilling prophecy of Hegel's merging of the subject with the unity of the One.
Already this image of the One reposed on the rejection and repression of the other: first in the idea of the state of nature itself, as an essential realm of conflict where passions rule reason and insecurity is perpetual; second, in the division between reason and unreason, in which "Children, Fooles and Mad-men" cannot be the authors of their own or the sovereign's actions, and thus not whole subjects; third, in the division between criminal and society, strictly established by the law, which conforms to reason and embodies the will of the people; and finally, in the division (so important to a colonial and postcolonial modernity) between savage and civilized.
Here Locke made a far-reaching formulation, in which Labour (which formed the ontological basis of property as the productive use of land) pivoted on an image of waste and impoverishment in "the Indian's" failure to exploit the earth. This in turn fed into a chain of reasoning by which a claim to property was only secured by land's exploitation through labor, that its origin was in a man's "property in his own person" (which is brought out of the state of nature through the "Labour of his body") and that the preservation of Property was itself the "chief end" of "men's uniting into Commonwealths," and was thus the prime object of security. (28) Thus we can see, in embryo, the idea of subjectivity as realization upon which Hegel would base a philosophy; what Locke also achieved was a new ontological condition for subjectivity in work. From here political economy--and modernity as an inexorable historical progression--became thinkable.
Bentham: Security and the Future
Jeremy Bentham's Principles of the Civil Code could be said to straddle this historical moment, within a context where the centrality of raison d'etat was giving way to a form of liberalism in which the linkages between reason of state, the art of government, and political economy were more problematic, yet no less necessary. While police science (or Cameralism) had already formulated a relation between totalizing and individualizing power that had as its objective a general prosperity, Foucault sees Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations as then marking out the point at which the Cameralists' notion of an equivalence between state and economy was placed under stress. Political economy becomes a knowledge that is "lateral to" the art of governing, but cannot itself constitute government, and its "effect is to resituate governmental reason within a newly complicated, open and unstable politico-epistemic configuration." (29)
Smith's "invisible hand" marked a shift from reason of state in that it sought to place limits on governmental intervention in contrast to an earlier emphasis on its expansion, and conceived the economy as an autonomous realm with its own laws that worked, ostensibly, for the public good. Laissez-faire, then, writes Foucault, was an injunction "not to impede the course of things, but to ensure the course of natural and necessary modes of regulation, to make regulations which permit natural regulation to operate." (30) In twentieth-century foreign economic policy, we can then see the combination of two modes: a kind of soft mercantilism wherein governments use aid programs and diplomacy to promote trade and contracts for the corporations domiciled within their state, and a form of "regulation of natural regulation" that takes as its focus infrastructure, labor and foreign-investment law, cost structures, and trade regimes that have a more general effect on business activity and profits. Nor should we forget t hat Western governments, most notably that of the United States, have used diplomatic pressure, military intervention, and sponsored coups in order to improve the business climate in many states.
Bentham's Civil Code appeared in the space Smith carved out, entrenching security as a fundamental societal objective within the openness and uncertainty of this new political configuration. Bentham began Principles of the Civil Code by asserting that the principal object of the legislator ought to be the "happiness of the body politic." This happiness consists of four objects--subsistence, abundance, equality, and security--of which security was the most important. Security guaranteed all the others, contained them, and designated acts and persons dangerous to them: "Actions hurtful to security, when prohibited by the laws, receive the character of crimes." Either security or crime: within this brief, claustrophobic formula lay the basis of a whole system of order.
Furthermore, Bentham made the crucial and far-reaching argument that, as a guarantee of all the objects of government,
security is the only one which necessarily embraces the future: subsistence, abundance, equality, may be regarded for a moment only; but security implies extension in point of time, with respect to all the benefits to which it is applied. Security is therefore the principal object. (31)
In a prophetic convergence of Enlightenment thought with economic liberalism, government now took on a temporal dimension: the future was now a thinkable space in political discourse, and a general progressive movement could be imagined as an essential condition of human society. Bentham argued that security protects Man's expectation of the future: through expectation
we are enabled to form a general plan of conduct. ... Expectation is a chain which unites our present and our future existence, and passes beyond ourselves to the generations which follow us. The sensibility of the individual is prolonged through all the links of this chain. (32)
Above all, as expectation the future was an economic principle, linking the construction of subjectivity as interest and desire with the general increase in prosperity that modern economics calls growth:
The active desire of adding to our happiness, will, under the safeguard of security, incessantly produce new efforts after new acquisitions. Wants and enjoyments, those universal agents in society, after having raised the first ears of corn, will by degrees erect the granaries of abundance, always increasing and always full. (33)
This in turn effected new modes of government that linked discipline with population, individualizing with totalizing power-- a power that, seemingly without coercion, could produce individuals as subjects of their own desire while integrating them into a much broader system of regulation. Elsewhere, Bentham contrasted "the doleful motive of punishment" with the "gentle motive of reward," the apparatus of law with "the gentle liberty of choice"; labor, he said, is "so easy and so light when animated by hope." (34)
This "uncoerced," economic form of liberal individualism generated what Foucault has called "the subject of interest" and introduced a contradiction into governmental reason: while it made individuals more accessible to power, it also distanced them from it, forming a rhetoric in which, as Bentham said, security also guarantees "political liberty" against "the injustice of the members of the government." This introduced, said Foucault, a "dissonance of rationalities" between the juridical form of government implied by sovereignty and the more diffuse and accidental reconciliation of individual and societal interests in liberalism. Subjects were to be subservient to the exercise of sovereign power, but they were also assumed to be free and autonomous economic actors. Liberalism as an art of government began, he argued, when it could formulate the "incompatibility between the non-totalisable multiplicity which characterises subjects of interest, and the totalizing unity of the juridical sovereign." (35)
This generated a political problem: to discover a form of government that--recognizing that no sovereignty can fully comprehend the totality of the economy or regulate every act that may have an economic effect--must still seek to do so. It was at the appearance of this problem that Foucault sited the junction of security, discipline, and population--a mix of rationalities that might more fully grasp this uncertain political space. Thus, he argued, "liberty is registered not only as a right of individuals legitimately to oppose ... the sovereign, but also now as an indispensable element of governmental rationality itself." (36) This engendered a drive for flexibility, mobility, and vigilance: as Bentham declared, "Economy has ... many enemies," and, hence, security "requires in the legislator, vigilance continually sustained, and power always in action, to defend it against his constantly reviving crowd of adversaries." (37) In short, the new, open space of liberalism had engendered a prophetic paranoia: the theme of a new productivity of political power that simultaneously reaches into the heart of the citizen and multiplies its own spatial reach. It seems no accident that both Bentham and Smith wrote at the height of the European imperialisms, within which the discursive imagination of the twentieth century--global trade, geopolitics, war, and technological progress--was born.
The Strategic Imagination
In describing this productivity, Foucault emphasized the simultaneous individualization and totalization of governmental power-- discipline and desire addressed to individuals, biopower addressed to populations, in a perpetual feedback and combination. (38) To these, however, we must add geopolitics as the form of power that combined these rationalities with the vast lusts of modern imperialism. (39) By the mid-twentieth century, geopolitics had become the practice of security par excellence--a spatializing rationality of power that sought the control of territories and populations (as both economic resources and strategic possessions) within a perpetually dangerous and contested arena, through the interdependent production of domestic and transnational political space. Notwithstanding the fascist imperialisms of the 1930s, we could thus characterize geopolitics as a liberal philosophy of global intervention, which links increasingly global issues of economic management with domestic policy formations across the whole of government. The domestic and international become fused spaces through a series of interlinked processes: of domestic and foreign economic policy, transnational business and trade, and the raising of armies with images of fear and otherness that simultaneously secure and rigidify domestic identities. As global influence becomes conceivable, the interrelation of political economy, nationalism, and the other become central to security as a vector and rationality of power.
The technology security puts into action here, which has been central to its extension from a relation between state and citizen to a principle for the actions of the body politic in the international arena, I have chosen to call the strategic imagination. This imagination is primarily spatial, but not exclusively so, becoming powerfully linked with temporal discourses of racial superiority, political enlightenment, and cultural and economic progress. The strategic imagination is not so much an entry into a preexisting space as the production of a new one by a detailed political technology that seeks to make it meaningful as it orders and partitions it into the vehicle, effect, and arena of an industrial, political, and cultural economy. Through the mapping and traversing of this space by transport, its appropriation through sovereignty, its defense by acts and means of war, and its cultivation and exploitation by industry, agriculture, and commerce, the strategic imagination thus seeks to engender economica lly and politically useful arrangements of bodies, communities, and social institutions. In this sense, its space is never static and unchanging, but itself has a history: changes in technology introduce changes in its extent and permeability, changes in political doctrine change its meaning and in turn affect not only the economic and social possibilities of individuals but their psychic interiors. Thus its representation is crucial: is this space threatening or safe, familiar or alien, masculine or feminine, productive or recalcitrant? What are its flows and boundaries? And, above all, what is our capacity for action within its geopolitical and psychic contours?
Hegel: Security as Realization
The work of Hegel, close in time to Bentham's, refined such liberalism by developing a philosophy that self-consciously understood the future as an entry into the radically new temporal space of the modern. His work intervened, in a political sense, at the point where Enlightenment rationalism and the liberal problem of government coincide. Hegel lifted liberal ideas of freedom and right into a philosophical universalism that powerfully illuminates the ontological structure of modern nationalisms, the forms of subjectivity they engender, and the essential (and negative) role of the other for their thought. In particular, he developed a formal model for discourses that would attempt to reconcile liberal political economy with a strong image of the nation-state. In this transition, we can see the "political double-bind"--the interplay of totalizing and individualizing power--take on a powerful new form--one linking a future-directed mode of self-belief and conduct with grander nationalist and civilizational nar ratives in a mutually reinforcing exchange.
In the Phenomenology of Spirit, the modern appears as a constant break with the past, which creates exciting new possibilities and horizons. Yet it also engenders uncertainty and loss: having sundered its foundations and "the immediacy of faith" and having gone "beyond the satisfaction and security of the certainty that consciousness then had, of its reconciliation with the essential being," spirit had "lost its essential life." Philosophy's task then was to recover "through its agency that lost sense of solid and essential being." (40) Habermas suggests that Hegel sought to limit this problem through the idea of progress, "to close off the future as a source of disruption with the aid of teleological constructions of history." (41)
As if to reconcile liberalism with conservatism, Hegel sought to liberate the restless energies of modern subjectivity while controlling them, retaining a vision of stability and order in which progress takes the form, not of an irruption, but a measured and "rational" design. It was again security, refracted through the liberal problematic of Smith and Bentham, that would provide the framework for this difficult calibration. It would be in the harnessing and management of uncertainty that security and spirit would coincide: security manages change and peers into the cloudy future; spirit strives to illuminate its promise and strengthen the resolve of the present to move on.
Hegel here developed a thematic of certitude earlier visible in Descartes that has become central to modern statecraft. Cartesian thought posits less a world that is stable prior to its cognition than one that begins as disordered: to obtain truth it was first necessary to postulate absolute doubt and uncertainty beyond the boundaries of the subject's own existence and cognition, then to move, via the correct method, to stable and universal truths. (42) As Costas Constantinou argues, "securitization as a discursive practice works by synchronising security, safety, and certitude." (43) This enters our contemporary modernity as the foundation of both a dangerous empiricism by which policy makers (stable cognitive minds) feel that policy can be made to correspond with a verifiable and accessible external reality and to be the foundation of a continual projection of uncertainty as the discourse's own condition of possibility. In the midst of a modernity whose imagination of the future paradoxically opens up a spa ce of darkness and unpredictability, the Cartesian model has had a potent appeal as a formal and procedural solution. This was particularly visible in Robert McNamara's (now disavowed) approach to the Vietnam War, and it is a desire still powerful in dominant approaches to strategy and policy making. We have only to consider George W. Bush's assertion, in the wake of the attacks on New York and Washington of September 11, 2001, that "this country will define our times, not be defined by them." (44)
Just as subjectivity was a key achievement for Hobbes, Locke, and Bentham--formed into a principle for citizenship, the secure body politic, and economic man--it provided a central, overarching principle for Hegel's thought. He replayed the levels of subjectivity present in their work, introducing them into a temporal movement that would constitute subjectivity itself and merge it with the restless labor of the age. In particular, in the Philosophy of Right this culmination of subjectivity was made hostage to its immersion in the greater identity represented by the nation-state. The potentially dangerous division immanent in liberalism-between state and civil society-was here controlled by a system that, allowing for the diffusion of nodes and mechanisms of power conceived by the "art of government," sought to seize subjectivity at its very center, through its effacement in the greater identity of the One. Membership of the state was not optional-rather the full ethical development of the individual depended on its absolute psychological immersion in the "universal life" of the state. (45) In this way, Hegel intensified the logocentric closure of the system visible in Hobbes and Locke. He clarified and intensified the necessity of the other for security, for prosperity, and for progress in general, incorporating it into a wholly restricted economy in which the other was always subsumed within a return to the higher unity of the same. In this way, security, economic prosperity, and a central organizing racism powerfully coalesce.
This racism is starkly clear in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, in which Hegel sought to show the progress of spirit through world history. Unsurprisingly, this practical forward movement of spirit (in which Europe was at the most advanced stages of world history and America "the land of the future") turned on the opposition to-and negation of-a backward other, much as it did in Hobbes, Locke, and Bentham. (46) Hegel spoke of the "want of spirit, crouching submissiveness," and "inferiority in all respects" of the "native Americans." The African, he declared,
exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state. We must lay aside all thought of reverence and morality- all that we call feeling-if we would rightly comprehend him; there is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found. (47)
In the face of this, should we be surprised that Pierre Clastres was driven to say that the "spirituality of ethnocide is the ethic of humanism." (48)
This "progressive" ethnocentrism in turn provided an apologia for imperialism. Hegel argued that imperialism was an entirely natural resolution of "the inner dialectic of civil society [which] drives it ... to push beyond its own limits and seek markets.., in other lands which are deficient in the goods it has overproduced." (49) At this point the relation between the art of government and political economy came into its own, and security made the leap from a principle for the production and management of the nation-state to one that simultaneously directed the policies of states within an inter-national system. The historic gap had been bridged; the modern, in an important sense, now became possible.
Security and Gender
It would be fair to conclude, then, that a secure modernity has itself been fundamentally characterized and constituted by various modes of imperialism. Whether in "realist" or "liberal" forms, these modes of imperialism and geopolitics drew their underlying ontological frameworks from the constitutive account of the political analyzed here. Gender is a crucial element of this "geopolitical" liberalism, affecting security's images of self and other, its spatial and economic organization of bodies and work, and, in particular, the economy of action that dominates policy making. Most significantly, it has also been a repressed organizing principle for the modern architectonic of security.
In her essay "Corporeal Representation in/and the Body Politic," Moira Gatens challenges Hobbes's account of the Leviathan as a neutral image of the political body, arguing that it is an implicitly masculine ideal--the "artificial man" who by establishing a commonwealth "frees himself from the necessary but difficult dealings with both women and nature." She argues, in a similar way to that in which I have sought to argue here, that this body politic has difficulty accommodating "anything but the same"--because this image of sameness is secured through a refusal to acknowledge difference as such; rather, difference is produced as otherness through the exclusion of "different kinds of beings from the pact. . . slaves, foreigners, women, the conquered, children, the working classes." (50)
This problem bears on both the subjects who have historically directed state actions (most often men) and the kinds of actions deemed legitimate and effective (those that have tended to conform to a "masculine" drive for certitude and sameness). A crucial division here is that between the "public" and the "private" that has been central to so much liberal thought and that helps organize the interplay between the individualizing and totalizing modes of power that security puts into action.
Hegel is of particular relevance here, In a similar way to that in which the mad, the criminal, and the savage had to be excluded from the body politic in earlier accounts, in the Philosophy of Right Hegel denied full subjectivity (within even a "European" state) to fully one-half of the population. This reproduces a gendered division between public and private, which would in turn be crucial for modern practices of security:
Man has his actual substantial life in the state, in learning, and so forth, as well as in actual labor and struggle with the external world and with himself so that it is only out of his diremption that he fights his way to self-subsistent unity with himself... . Woman, on the other hand, has her substantive destiny in the family, and to be imbued with family piety is her ethical frame of mind. (51)
Thus he preserves, for subjectivity, a dialectical schema of realization that still reposes on the negation and supersession of the other, and whose culminating moments in public life, the state, the liberal ontology of labor, production, and struggle, will always be essentially "male"--preserved both for male bodies and male modes of being. Writers such as Gatens, while acknowledging the partial advances of women into public life, still argue that the body politic remains dominated by masculine languages and modes of existence: "If woman . . . speaks from this body, she is limited in what she can say. If she lives by this reason and this ethic, she still lives from the body of another." (52)
These insights have direct relevance to the international conduct of states. Christine Sylvester has argued that there is a pernicious "normativity of sex" structuring international relations, while Tickner argues that statecraft is dominated by an image of "hegemonic masculinity" that is "sustained through its opposition to various subordinated and devalued masculinities such as homosexuality . . . and through its relation to various devalued feminities." In international policy, the characteristics of hegemonic masculinity "are projected onto the behaviour of states whose success as international actors is measured in terms of their power capabilities and capacity for self-help and autonomy." (53)
What this achieves is a whole series of exclusions (and norms of action) based on the dichotomy between masculine and feminine. This generates a chain of analogous oppositions that align maleness with reason, activity, objective truth, and the mind, and woman with passion, passivity, subjective truth, and the body--realms and values constructed as perpetually threatening, backward, and disruptive. By then aligning these with two other crucial dichotomies--between savage and civilized, and the commonwealth and the state of nature--this chain of oppositions gives life to the progressive movement of being central to a post-Enlightenment politics of security.
In the liberal chain that links subjectivity, economy, and geopolitics, gender is simultaneously a work on the self, a principle for the participation of individuals in society, and one for the conduct of the state in managing subject populations and constructing geopolitical space. Hegemonic masculinity has also been crucial to universalizing the liberal mode of economic subjectivity based around the subjugation, control, and exploitation of nature--with the implicit exclusion of other possible modes of economic life. (54) A pivotal figure here is Descartes, whose philosophical account of method and the division between mind and body has underpinned many characteristics of the modern liberal order: its obsession with political and epistemological certitude (stability and equilibrium), the vision of nature implicit in modern economics, and the control and production of international space. Genevieve Lloyd emphasizes how the separation of mind and body was essential to his vision of a "unitary pure thought" t hat secured the foundations of modern science, yet simultaneously separated it from the rest of life. Lloyd also draws out the links between Cartesian method and Hegel's association of male attainments with universality. Maleness becomes a technical attribute achieved by breaking away from the nature associated with woman, and thus analogous to modern theories of technological, political, and economic progress based on the manipulation and control of nature. (55)
This opens up significant questions about the structure and operation of security as a concept: however much they disavow it, Derrida reminds us that all such metaphysical ideals exist in a relation of dependence to a subordinated term they claim to supersede or expel. Security is no different. While betraying pretensions to absolute self-presence, security only ever exists in relation to "insecurity": it thus operates according to the Hegelian economy that incorporates this dichotomy into a "dialectical" movement that poses the second term as the anathema of the first, which becomes an ideal state, or goal, toward which one aspires in a movement away from the second. Security then becomes a powerful signifier of an ideal political, economic, and cultural order, opposed to "others" designated as inferior or threatening. Yet its promise breaks down when we consider that, because "security" is bound into a dependent relation with "insecurity," it can never escape it: it must continue to produce images of "inse curity" in order to retain meaning.
Deployed into a political technology that activates the exchange between the "individual" and the "total," this economy has two potent effects. At the level of the individual, it forms a powerful mechanism of subjectivity in which images of fear and insecurity (at either a personal, societal, or geopolitical level--often all at once) can be used to manipulate individuals and populations. As Michael Dillon suggests, "Don't ask what a people ... ask how an order of fear forms a people." (56) Such images portray the state as patriarchal and protective, provoking feelings of allegiance, safety, and submission: activating the exchange between public and private, they tend to feminize the citizenry while reserving full masculine participation in the defense of the state for men. The argument that women are unsuitable for combat has served both to legitimate the exclusion of women from public life and to make men's participation in war the vehicle of a more "total" enactment of subjectivity. Moira Gatens believes t hat this derives from the condition (dating from the Greeks or even "the original covenant between God and Abraham") for full admission to the political body being that one can make the appropriate forfeit. For Abraham, it was the "corporeal sacrifice" of his foreskin; for modern men it has too often been life in battle. (57)
At the level of the total, insecurity also works as a metaphor describing both the inherent nature of the international system and an ideal mode of state action. Thus we have the realist assertion that the international system is essentially anarchic and that the objective of states should be to order it, using force as a fundamental mechanism; only within such a Cartesian metaphysic does a statement like E. H. Carr's, that military strength is "a recognised bearer of political values," take on meaning. (58) In fact, in this discourse a hegemonic masculinity, an Enlightenment progressivism, and a founding ethnocentrism coalesce to generate the modern politico-economic thematic of order--one that imagines certain economic modes (indigenous or agriculture-based) and forms of identification (substate and local) as backward, and often also unstable and threatening. Thus feminized and demonized, they are made subject to the ordering effects of both a male economy of action (too often military and repressive) and to the ultimate masculine metasubject (the industrializing state). As Tickner notes, "nonwhites and tropical countries are often depicted as irrational, emotional and unstable, characteristics that are often attributed to women." (59)
Order, in this sense, becomes analogous to the taming of woman and nature. From the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century movements of colonization to the Cold War battles over the Third World and the turn-of-the-millennium efforts to manage and accelerate globalization, such integrated images of race and gender have been central to the construction of an architectonic mode of security and order--one that, through the operations of the strategic imagination, might reach simultaneously into the depths of the subject and integrate them into the vast spaces and flows of geopolitics. In this vision, security appears as what it has too often been: a stifling disciplinary machine. How could it ever be escaped?
Refusing Security
It is perhaps easy to become despondent, but as countless struggles for freedom, justice, and social transformation have proved, a sense of seriousness can be tempered with the knowledge that many tools are already available--and where they are not, the effort to create a productive new critical sensibility is well advanced. There is also a crucial political opening within the liberal problematic itself, in the sense that it assumes that power is most effective when it is absorbed as truth, consented to and desired--which creates an important space for refusal. As Colin Gordon argues, Foucault thought that the very possibility of governing was conditional on it being credible to the governed as well as the governing. (60) This throws weight onto the question of how security works as a technology of subjectivity. It is to take up Foucault's challenge, framed as a reversal of the liberal progressive movement of being we have seen in Hegel, not to discover who or what we are so much as to refuse what we are. (61 ) Just as security rules subjectivity as both a totalizing and individualizing blackmail and promise, it is at these levels that we can intervene. We can critique the machinic frameworks of possibility represented by law, policy, economic regulation, and diplomacy, while challenging the way these institutions deploy language to draw individual subjects into their consensual web.
This suggests, at least provisionally, a dual strategy. The first asserts the space for agency, both in challenging available possibilities for being and their larger socioeconomic implications. Roland Bleiker formulates an idea of agency that shifts away from the lone (male) hero overthrowing the social order in a decisive act of rebellion to one that understands both the thickness of social power and its "fissures," "fragmentation," and "thinness." We must, he says, "observe how an individual may be able to escape the discursive order and influence its shifting boundaries.... By doing so, discursive terrains of dissent all of a sudden appear where forces of domination previously seemed invincible." (62)
Pushing beyond security requires tactics that can work at many levels--that empower individuals to recognize the larger social, cultural, and economic implications of the everyday forms of desire, subjection, and discipline they encounter, to challenge and rewrite them, and that in turn contribute to collective efforts to transform the larger structures of being, exchange, and power that sustain (and have been sustained by) these forms. As Derrida suggests, this is to open up aporetic possibilities that transgress and call into question the boundaries of the self, society, and the international that security seeks to imagine and police.
The second seeks new ethical principles based on a critique of the rigid and repressive forms of identity that security has heretofore offered. Thus writers such as Rosalyn Diprose, William Conolly, and Moira Gatens have sought to imagine a new ethical relationship that thinks difference not on the basis of the same but on the basis of a dialogue with the other that might allow space for the unknown and unfamiliar, for a "debate and engagement with the other's law and the other's ethics"--an encounter that involves a transformation of the self rather than the other. (63) Thus while the sweep and power of security must be acknowledged, it must also be refused: at the simultaneous levels of individual identity, social order, and macroeconomic possibility, it would entail another kind of work on "ourselves"--a political refusal of the One, the imagination of an other that never returns to the same. It would be to ask if there is a world after security, and what its shimmering possibilities might be.
Notes
(1.) On the Clinton Doctrine, see Strobe Talbott, "Self-determination in an Interdependent World," Foreign Policy, no. 118 (spring 2000): 152-164; on Vietnam, see James William Gibson, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986); Paul Hendrikson, The Living and the Dead (New York: Knopf, 1996), and Anthony Burke, "Violence and Reason on The Shoals of Vietnam," Postmodern Culture, May 1999:
www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/current.issue/9.3burke.
Much of the valuable critical literature on security is referenced and discussed throughout this article. Further important writings include James Der Derian, "The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard," in David Campbell and Michael Dillon, eds., The Political Subject of Violence (Manchester UP, 1993); David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Manchester UP, 1992); R. B. J. Walker, "Security, Sovereignty, and the Challenge of World Politics," working paper 87, Canberra: ANU Peace Research Centre, 1990; Gary Smith and St. John Kettle, ed., Threats without Enemies (Sydney: Pluto, 1992); Graeme Cheeseman and St. John Kettle, ed., The New Australian Militarism (Sydney: Pluto, 1990); Graeme Cheeseman and Robert Bruce, eds., Discourses of Danger and Dread Frontiers: Australian Defence and Security Thinking after the Cold War (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996); Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams, eds., Critical Security Studies (Minneapolis: U o f Minnesota P, 1997); Michael C. Williams, "Identity and the Politics of Security," European Journal of International Relations 4, no. 2 (1998): 204-225; Ronnie Lipshutz, ed., On Security (New York: Columbia UP, 1995); Jef Huysmans, "Security! What Do You Mean? From Concept to Thick Signifier," European Journal of International Relations 4 no. 2 (1998): 231-232.
(2.) For a discussion of the term ontopolitical, see William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), pp. 1-5. Connolly suggests that "ontopolitical interpretation" needs to critically revisit the founding (and often disavowed) claims of modern politics "about the necessities and possibilities of human being" to question how many "common presumptions of our time... contain dangerous demands and expectations within them."
(3.) Ibid., p. 34.
(4.) Clinton and Mahathir are cited in Brig. Gen. Mike Smith, Australia's National Security into the Twenty-First Century: Rethinking Strategic Direction (Canberra: Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, ANU, 1997); Keating is quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald, Dec. 16, 1995; Australian Labor Party, 1998 national platform.
(5.) For the Indonesian concepts of "resilience" and "security," see the Indonesian 1995 Defence White Paper The Policy of the State Defence and Security of the Republic of Indonesia, p. 12, which argues that the primary geopolitical concept known as Wawasan Nusantara (archipelagic principle) requires "the strengthening of national resilience, which is the integration of all forms of resilience existing in the political, economic, sociocultural, security and defence fields. This resilience is aimed at guaranteeing national stability, which incorporates the stability in all these fields"; see also Dewi Fortuna Anwar, Indonesia and the Security of Southeast Asia (Jakarta: Centre for Strategic and International Studies, 1992).
(6.) R. N. Berki, Security and Society: Reflections on Law, Order, and Politics (London: Dent, 1986), p. 20.
(7.) Michael Dillon, Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 13.
(8.) R. B. J. Walker, "The Subject of Security," in Michael C. Williams and Keith Krause, eds., Critical Security Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 71.
(9.) J. Ann Tickner, Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security (New York: Columbia UP, 1992), pp. 22-23.
(10.) R. B. J. Walker, One World, Many Worlds: Struggles for a Just World Peace (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1988), pp. 1-9.
(11.) Walker, note 8, p. 66.
(12.) Simon Dalby, "Contesting an Essential Concept: Reading the Dilemmas in Contemporary Security Discourse," in Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams, eds., Critical Security Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 20.
(13.) Jacques Derrida, Aporias (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993), p. 16.
(14.) Ibid., pp. 12-35.
(15.) See Anthony Burke, "Poetry outside Security," Alternatives 25, no. 3 (2000): 307-321, and, idem, In Fear of Security (Sydney: PlutoAustralia, 2001). Valuable work in this direction has been carried out by Costas Constantinou, who urges us to see security not as "a rescue from danger but a freedom from the care of danger... a continuous, spiritual, seafaring agon," and Michael Dillon, who critically interrogates "the limits set by security to our modern political imagination... by showing how security, itself exceeding those limits, challenges us to out-live the modern": Costas M. Constantinou, "Poetics of Security," Alternatives 25, no. 3 (2000): 292; Dillon, note 7, p. 10.
(16.) Walker, note 8, p. 71.
(17.) Berki, note 6, pp. 32-33.
(18.) Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations (New York: Knopf, 1973), pp.553-555.
(19.) Kennan, cited in Noam Chomsky, Turning the Tide: The US and Latin America (New York: Black Rose, 1987), p.48.
(20.) Richard Woolcott, "The Perils of Freedom," Weekend Australian, Apr. 22-23, 1995, p.24.
(21.) Michel Foucault, "Governmentality," trans. Pasquale Pasquino, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p.90.
(22.) Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture, ed., Lawrence D. Kritzman (London: Routledge, 1988), pp.76-77.
(23.) Foucault, note 21, p.92.
(24.) Ibid., pp.98-102.
(25.) Ibid., pp.101-102.
(26.) Colin Gordon, "Governmental Rationality: An Introduction," in Burchell, Gordon, Miller, note 21, p.20.
(27.) Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin, 1985), p.186.
(28.) John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1967), pp.305-309.
(29.) Gordon, note 26, pp.11-16.
(30.) Ibid., p.17.
(31.) Jeremy Bentham, "The Principles of Civil Life," in John Bowring, ed., The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 1 (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1837), p.302; emphasis added.
(32.) Ibid., p.308.
(33.) Ibid., p.304; emphasis added.
(34.) Ibid., p.312.
(35.) Gordon, note 26, pp.21-23; Bentham, note 31, p.302.
(36.) Gordon, note 26, p.20.
(37.) Bentham, note 31, p.307.
(38.) Foucault outlined biopower in "The Right of Death and Power over Life," the final chapter of The History of Sexuality, vol. 1. He characterizes its emergence, from the seventeenth century, as a shift from the sovereign's right to kill treasonous persons to "the calculated management of life" focused around two poles: discipline and the body as machine, and the body of the species--all the opaque processes of public health and population. With it came a mutation in power, echoed in Bentham:
The growing importance assumed by the action of the norm, at the expense of the juridical system of the law...a power whose task is to take charge of life requires continuous corrective and regulatory mechanisms. It is no longer a matter of bringing death into play in the field of sovereignty, but of distributing the living in the domain of value and utility.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York: Peregrine, 1987), p.144.
(39.) For excellent writing on the production of space by geopolitical reason, see Gearoid O'Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), and Gearoid O'Tuathail and Simon Dalby, eds., Rethinking Geopolitics (London: Routledge, 1998).
(40.) G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), p.4.
(41.) Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (London: Polity, 1987), p.12.
(42.) Elizabeth Anscombe, ed., Descartes: Philosophical Writings (Melbourne: Nelson, 1966), p. 153.
(43.) Costas M. Constantinou, "Poetics of Security," Alternatives 25, no. 3 (2000): 288.
(44.) Burke, note 1; George W. Bush, Address to Joint Session of Congress and the American People, Sept. 20, 2001.
(45.) Ibid., p. 156.
(46.) G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Prometheus, 1990), pp. 91-99, 80-87.
(47.) Ibid.
(48.) Pierre Clastres, "On Ethnocide," trans. Julian Pefanis, Art and Text, no. 28 (May 1988): 53.
(49.) Hegel, pp. 151-152.
(50.) Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power, and Corporeality (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 25.
(51.) G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1991 [1821]), p. 114.
(52.) Gatens, note 50, p. 25.
(53.) Tickner, note 9, p. 6.
(54.) J. Ann Tickner cites Sandra Harding's argument that an African worldview "in which the economic behaviour of individuals is embedded in a social order, is a communal orientation seen as 'deviant' by neoclassical economic theory; yet it is one that represents a different type of economic behaviour specific to other cultures": Tickner, note 9, p. 73.
(55.) Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: "Male" and "Female" in Western Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 44.
(56.) Dillon, note 7, p. 16.
(57.) Gatens, note 50, p. 23. It is easy to demonstrate how such formations are also ruptured by multiple ironies. The role of women in the armed services is still highly ambiguous (some states still barring them from combat roles, others now including them), the general presence of women destabilizing long-standing gender economies in the military. Likewise, women have often had close experience of combat (as nurses, doctors, and civilians), and the experience of combat and injury can also destabilize men's experience of masculinity, exposing them to a traumatic and terrifying consciousness of frailty and embodiment.
(58.) E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis: 1919-1939 (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), p. 109.
(59.) Tickner, note 9, p. 9. One terrible example of this economy in action was the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975. Indonesia defended its actions--which included a series of brutal counterinsurgency offensives through the late 1970s and early 1980s that killed as many as two hundred thousand people--by portraying the Fretilin resistance movement as threat to the security of the Indonesian state. In 1974, Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, in rhetoric echoed by Soharto the next year, argued that an independent East Timor would be "an unviable state and potential threat to the stability of the area": Nancy Viviani, "Australians and the Timor issue," Australian Outlook 30 (Aug. 1976): 97.
(60.) Gordon, note 26, p. 48.
(61.) Michel Foucault, cited in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984).
(62.) Roland Bleiker, Popular Dissent, Human Agency, and Global Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2000), pp. 187-188; see also Toby Miller, The Well-Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture, and the Postmodern Subject (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993); and Anthony Burke, In Fear of Security (Sydney: PlutoAustralia, 2001).
(63.) Gatens, note 50, P. 27; Rosalyn Diprose, The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment, and Sexual Difftrence (London: Routledge, 1994); William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralisation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). For further writings on ethics, responsibility, and world politics, see Anthony Burke, "Strangers without Strangeness: Ethics and Difference between Australia and the Indonesian New Order," Communal/Plural: Journal of Transnational and Crosscultural Studies 8, no. 2 (Oct. 2000); Jim George, "Realist Ethics, International Relations, and Post-Modernism: Thinking beyond the Egoism-Anarchy Thematic," Millennium 24, no. 2 (1995); David Campbell, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1998); David Campbell and Michael Shapiro, Moral Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1999).
Anthony Burke (*)
(*.) School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, QLD 4076, Australia. E-mail:
anthony.burke@mailbox.uq.edu.au.