an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Volume 2, July 2005, ISSN 1552-5112
Sovereignty and the State of Emergency
Alexander Galloway and
Eugene Thacker
The video game “State of Emergency” offers gamers a
chance to be part of an urban riot, a riot that has no aim other than to
overthrow an anonymous, vaguely-named "Corporation." Designed by Rockstar Games in the wake of the
L.A./Rodney King riots
and the Battle for Seattle, State of Emergency puts artificial life algorithms
to good use. One must carefully navigate the chaotic swarm of civilians,
protestors, and riot police. The game has no aim except to incite riot, and it
is unclear as to whether the title "state of emergency" refers to the
oppressive corporate State or the apparent chaos that ensues. In other words:
Is the State of emergency also a state of emergency? Except for military
simulation games, rarely do games so explicitly make politics part of their
game play. One can imagine the game played from the other side--that of the
riot police. Here the goal would be crowd control, surveillance, and military
blockading. The computer skills necessary for playing either scenario amount to
network management tasks. Either you are infiltrating the city and
destabilizing key nodes, or you are fortifying such nodes. The lesson of State
of Emergency is not that it promotes an anarchic ideology, but that, in the
guise of anarchic ideology, it promotes computer and network management skills.
Again following Agamben, modern sovereignty is based not on the right to impose
laws, but rather on the ability to suspend the law, to claim a state of
emergency. In a way, State of Emergency
is sovereignty through the back door: inside the screen-based rioting, what is
at play is the new sovereignty of networks, control, and the fetish of information.
In this sense, forms of informatic play should be interrogated not as a
liberation from the rigid constraints of systems of exchange and production,
but the very pillars that prop them up. The more video games appear on the
surface to emancipate the player, raising his or her status as an active
participant in the aesthetic moment, the more they enfold the player into
codified and routinized models of behavior. Only eight buttons (mirrored in
eight bits) are available for the entire spectrum of expressive articulation
using the controller on the Nintendo Entertainment System. A PlayStation
running State of Emergency supplements this with a few more channels of
codified input. Just as the school, in Foucault, was mere pre-school for the
learned behavior necessary for a laboring life on the factory floor, games from
State of Emergency to Dope Wars are training tools for life inside the
protocological network, where flexibility, systemic problem solving, quick
reflexes, and indeed play are as highly valued and commodified as sitting still
and hushing up were for the disciplinary societies of modernity.
Epidemic and Endemic
One of the results of the American-led war on terror has been the increasing
implosion of the differences between emerging infectious diseases and
bioterrorism. Not so long ago, a
distinction was made between emerging infectious disease and
bioterrorism based on their cause: one was naturally-occurring and the other
the result of direct human intervention. International organizations such as
the WHO and UN still maintain this distinction, though only vaguely. The U.S.
government, in the meantime, has long since dispensed with such niceties, and
as a result has radically streamlined the connections between the military,
medicine, and the economics of drug development. A White House press release
outlining the President's 2003 proposed budget discusses how, "in his 2003
Budget, the President has proposed $1.6 billion to assist State and local
health care systems in
improving their ability to manage both contagious and non- contagious
biological attacks..." Similarly, a 2003 press release describes Project
BioShield as a "comprehensive effort to develop and make available modern,
effective drugs and vaccines to protect against attack by biological and
chemical weapons or other dangerous pathogens." The implication of the
word "or"-biological weapons or other pathogens-signals a new,
inclusive stage in modern biopolitics. Regardless of the specific context, be
it disease or terrorist, the aim is to develop a complete military-medical
system for "alert and response" to biological threats. Context and
cause are less important than the common denominator of biological effect. It
matters little whether the context is terrorism, unsafe foods, compromised
Federal regulation of new drugs, or new virus strains transported by air
travel. What matters is that which is at stake, and what is always at stake, is
the integrity of "life itself." This U.S. program of military,
medical, and pharmaceutical governance ushers in a politics of "biological
security." Biological security has as its aim the protection of the
population, defined as a biological (and genetic) entity, from any possible
biological threat, be it conventional war or death itself. What this also means
is that the biological threat--the inverse of biological security--is a
permanent threat, even an existential threat. It is a biological angst over
"death itself" (the biopolitical inverse of "life itself"). This requires a paradigm in which "the
population" can be regarded as simultaneously biological and political. As
Foucault notes,
…at the end of the eighteenth century, it was not
epidemics that were the issue, but something else--what might broadly be called
endemics, or in other words, the form, nature, extension, duration, and
intensity of the illnesses prevalent in a population...Death was now something
permanent, something that slips into life, perpetually gnaws at it, diminishes
it and weakens it. [1]
It is clear that, in this context, there is no end to
biological security, its job is never finished, and by definition, can never be
finished. If there is one site in which the state of emergency becomes the
norm, it is this site of non-distinction between war and disease, terrorism and
endemic.
Network Being
Information networks are often described as more than mere tools or relations,
but as a "World Brain," a "collective intelligence," a
"global village," and as "life on the net." What is it
about networks that impels us to describe them as somehow being alive? For
Heidegger, however, the question of being and the question of being alive are
two different questions. Too often an inquiry of the latter presupposes the
self-evident existence of the former. The fields of anthropology, psychology,
and biology begin their analyses on the question of "life itself,"
its modalities and characteristics, its laws and behaviors, its properties and
taxonomies. Rarely do they ever inquire into the existence as such of
"life itself," the almost confrontational factuality of the being of
life—what Levinas described as the impersonal "horror of the 'there
is'...". As Heidegger notes,
"in the question of the being of human being, this cannot be summarily
calculated in terms of the kinds of being of body, soul, and spirit which have
yet first to be defined".[2]
But it is precisely this question that the sciences of life jump over, in favor
of exclusively anthropomorphic inquiries of psychology or biology. "Life
itself" is always questioned, but the existence as such of life, the being
of life, is not regarded as a problem. Such knowledge--as in the life
sciences--thus continues with an assumption of having understood the very
existence as such of living beings. One begins with Darwinian evolution, with
developmental genetics, with studies of biological morphogenesis, with the
genetic factors in health and disease. "The ontology of life takes place
by way of a privative interpretation. It determines what must be the case if
there can be anything like just-being-alive".[3]
The life sciences thus become, in this regard, reduced to the human sciences.
For Heidegger, this absence shows itself as a "missing ontological foundation,"
upon which "life itself" and specifically human life, is understood,
without recourse to the always-mystical and unstated "being of life"
on which it is based.
Our question is: at what point does the difference between "being"
and "life" implode? What would be the conditions for the
non-distinction between "being" and "life"? Perhaps this is
where the life sciences get hung up. They are confronted with anomalies,
anomalies that cross species barriers, that are at once "faceless"
and yet "living": single-celled organisms known as myxomycetes (such
as the Physarum or Dycostelium), which, during their life cycles, may be either
an amoeba, a motile cell with flagellum, or a plant-like structure giving off
spores. Or the famous limit-case of the virus. It is alive? It contains genetic
material, and it is able to reproduce (or at least to replicate). It shows a
high degree of genetic adaptability in its mutations and its ability to cross
species boundaries. But it is not much more than a strand of RNA and a protein
coating. Then, on the opposite side of the scale, there is the infamous case of
Gaia...
What Heidegger's point makes clear is that the question of "life" has
traditionally been separate from, but dependent upon, an unquestioned notion of
"being." In away, the example of network science presents us with the
opposite case: a concept
of "being" is arrived at by a privative definition of
"life." Network science, it would seem, assumes a minimally
vitalistic aspect of networks, that informs its studies of networks of all
types, networks which all share a being common to
networks: "Whatever the identity and the nature of the nodes and links,
for a mathematician they form the same animal: a graph or a network".[4]
Network science's reliance on universality, ubiquity, and a mathematical model
suggests that it is really a metaphysics of networks. It seeks a universal
pattern that exists above and beyond the particulars of any given network. For
this reason network science can study AIDS, terrorism, and the Internet all as
the same kind of being--a network.
The philosophical impact of this view is that of network being, a Dasein
specific to network phenomena. However what it means specifically is confused.
Does it mean the experience of being (in) a network, a new network
phenomenology? Does it mean
the existence of abstract, mathematical properties across different
networks? Networks are said to have a
"life of their own," but we search in vain for the "life"
that is specific to networks, except their being as networks. On the one hand,
the proof of the existence as such of living organisms is their living. On the
other hand, the proof of the living aspects of networks is their existence as
such, that is, their being. The question of "life" and the question of
"being" seem to always imply each other, but to never meet.
an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Volume 2, July 2005, ISSN 1552-5112