Chavez Ally, Not Foe

This guest editorial was published in the Kentucky Kernel on 9/25/06
I read with interest the Kernel's 9/22/06 Letters to the Editor section, which chastised the "madman" Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez for calling George W. Bush "the devil" in front of the United Nations last week. The "madness" of Chavez pertained to his speaking against Bush on US soil. Much media attention has been given to those "smells of sulfur" comments by Chavez (along with his plug for Noam Chomsky), but I encourage others to read the full text of his speech before making an ill-informed judgment of the Venezuelan leader.

In his speech before the UN, Chavez correctly asserted that this Administration approaches the world as if they were imperialists: "As the spokesman of imperialism, Bush came to share his nostrums [at the UN], to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world."

Chavez was critical of Bush's model of democracy: "It's the false democracy of elites, and, I would say, a very original democracy that's imposed by weapons and bombs and firing weapons."

"What kind of democracy," Chavez wonders, "do you impose with marines and bombs?"

Chavez also had words for Bush's penchant for creating an environment of fear: "Wherever Bush looks, he sees extremists. And you, my brother -- he looks at your color, and he says, oh, there's an extremist. Evo Morales, the worthy president of Bolivia, looks like an extremist to him. The imperialists see extremists everywhere. It's not that we are extremists. It's that the world is waking up. It's waking up all over, and people are standing up."

These comments by Chavez merit reflection, not only because of their accuracy, but more importantly because it lets Americans know how they are understood in a volatile world.

I do want to point to what I consider to be madness, and it is not Hugo Chavez the person, but rather his actions. I consider it to be madness that our society provides such little protection for it’s poor (e.g., Katrina victims) that Chavez has to provide free oil to lower-income families within the United States so that they can heat their homes in the winter.

As the New York Times reported last week (9/21/06): "Mr. Chavez offered to double the amount of heating oil Venezuela donates to poor communities in the United States."

"CITGO," New York Times notes, "is owned by Petroleos de Venezuela S.A., and delivered free and discounted oil to Indian tribal reservations and low-income neighborhoods in the United States, including the Bronx."

Indeed, this is madness. It is madness that this nation's resources go to making war on people across an ocean instead of maintaining levees or providing heat for the nation's poor, while relying free resources from other countries. It is madness that funding for education is in crisis, yet the military receives an annual budget of $440 billion a year.

Despite this madness, it is little surprise coming from an Administration which seeks to re-interpret international human rights agreements in order to justify torture; or seeks to cut taxes for the rich while incarceration rates have doubled in urban poor areas since 2000; or refuses to acknowledge the health care crisis where 1 in 3 people between 18 and 35 are without health insurance. All this in the richest nation in the world.

That is madness, not a South American president who is popularly elected and donates resources to the urban poor in the United States.

Homeland Security and Societies of Control

''I reminded them [House Republicans] that the most important job of government is to protect the homeland." -- George W. Bush, Thursday Sept. 14th

We need to begin asking questions about the origins of such questions protecting homelands, since what is ultimately at stake is the militarization of space. It should go without saying what that sort of militarization would mean for the prospects of radical democracy.

The discourse of security that is in circulation today has a long history based in liberal thought. The liberal notion of security can most succinctly be traced back to Jeremy Bentham. Liberalism in Bentham's time was a reaction to sovereign power: it contested the extent to which a sovereign could understand/manage social processes that were argued to be opaque to the sovereign gaze. These social processes (the economy, the bureaucracy, the family, the reasoning individual, etc.) were understood by liberals to be natural social phenomena outside the realm of sovereign power (who sought to make such processes transparent). Thus, the various disciplines of political-economics, political science, public administration, sociology, etc. were established to investigate and reflect upon these processes that were understood to be operative outside (though internally to) the transcendent state.

But, the question was eventually posed as to how to manage such processes within a territorially bound space, and how to make them productive for economic and state growth (hence the title of Adam Smith's " An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations").

As Michael Dean discusses in his book "Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society," Bentham sought to articulate four 'subordinate ends' for state legislation in order to fulfill the utilitarian end of "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." The ends, according to Bentham, were to provide subsistence, to produce abundance, to favor equality, and to maintain security.

According to Dean, "security, including security of person, honour, property and condition, was lifted to the top of the hierarchy of government for it is the 'foundation of life' on which everything depends." Of course, this had to due with the economic relation between security and subsistence. Thus, security was first and foremost a disciplining mechanism: a mechanism to produce liberal subjects that exercised a particular type of freedom. In other words, the service of security had to be structured in such a way as to "lead indigent and other troublesome groups to exercise a responsible and disciplined freedom in the market and in the family (Dean)." Bentham's liberty, argues Dean, is reduced to a branch of security. The detailed regulation of "men and things" thus involves "governmental interventions in the name of security [in order to] to produce forms of liberty appropriate to the participation in the market (Dean)."

How can we trace this liberal notion of security put forward by Bentham to the current predicaments of security that have risen in the aftermath of 9/11?

I think we have to think of the disciplining effects of the purposeful use of the word "homeland" prior to the word "security" when the Bush Administration speaks on the subject. The word "homeland" is a control mechanism that seeks to create what Hardt and Negri call a "differential unity" that must be managed. What do I mean by "control," and further, what do I mean by "differential unity?"

My use of the important term "control" is borrowed both from the so-called "governmentality" literature, and from the essay "Postscript on control societies" by Gilles Deleuze, whereby a shift has occured from the society that disciplines subjects through institutions (factories, schools, barracks, etc.) outlined by Foucault, to a society where "one is always in continuous training, lifelong learning, perpetual assessment, continual incitement to buy, to improve oneself, constant monitoring of health and never-ending risk managment. Control is not centralized but dispersed; it flows through a network of open circuits that are rhizomatic and not hierarchical (from Nicholas Rose's "Powers of Freedom")."

To quote Rose at length:

"IN such a regime of control, Deleuze suggests, we are not dealing with 'individuals' but with dividuals: not with subjects with a unique personality that is the expression of some inner quality, but with elements, capacities, potentialities. These are plugged into multiple orbits, identified by unique codes, identification numbers, profiles of preferences, security ratings and so forth: a 'record' containing a whole variety of bits of information on our credentials, activities, qualifications for entry into this or that network. In our societies of control, it is not a question of socializing and disciplining the subject ab initio. It is not a question of instituting a regime in which each person is permanently under the alien gaze of the eye of power exercising individualizing surveillance. It is not a matter of apprehending and normalizing the offender ex post facto. Conduct is continually monitored and reshaped by logics immanent within all networks of practice. Surveillance is 'designed in' to the flows of everyday existence. The calculated modulation of conduct according to principles of optimization of benign impulses and minimization of malign impulses is dispersed across the time and space of ordinary life."

Of course, this everyday existence with multifarious networks of practice should not be understood as a homogeneous existence. Quite the contrary. Operative power within the everyday should be understood as seeking to manage difference towards unifying ends. This is why we cannot understand power today as a return of fascistic tendencies. Fascism requires a homogeneous society with top-down control--a society with a hammer over its head. Indeed, this kind of power that assumes homogenous populations certainly still exists (e.g., in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, China, etc.). But, there is a marked difference between a fascistic sort of power, and the power operative today in the United States.

Instead of a homogeneous society where power is based on top-down fascist violence, power in the United States (and Europe) seeks security through a general economy of command: a management of the flows and networks of everyday existence that Deleuze identified above. This sort of neo-liberal operative power Hardt and Negri identify as "the management and hierarchization of differences;" in other words, it is a power operative through freedom: a subjective freedom that should be understood as participating in markets, taking care of the self, dividualizing, molecular, atomistic.

So when the Bush Administration speaks of "homeland security," the word "homeland" needs to be understood as a unifying signifier: a signifier that seeks to unify differential and multiple networks into a productive hegemonic acquiescence. The goal is to have the effect of a subject saying "Yes, let us protect that territorially-bounded abstraction (the homeland), while I participate in my everyday over here." In other words, let them take care of that over there, while I do this over here. The accumulation of the latter sorts of practices ("taking care of this, my own everyday, here") is what needs to be understood as security. It is the detailed regulation of "men and things" identified above: the "governmental interventions in the name of security [in order to] to produce forms of liberty appropriate to the participation in the market." That is the meaning of protecting the homeland. The act of articulation on the part of George Bush is a productive managing discourse.

This is a productive power operative through subjects, not on subjects (as in fascism).

Of course, I am here only dealing with subjects that imagine themselves to be participating in the abstract "homeland" of the United States. I want to discuss next what I believe to be the productive significance of establishing military tribunals for those who have been understood to be acting against "the homeland."

Thoughts on Franz Fanon...

“Europe is literally the creation of the Third World.” The Wretched of the Earth, 102

Jean-Paul Sartre understood the sense of urgency in Fanon’s work when he famously claimed at the end of his preface to The Wretched of the Earth that ‘the time is drawing near’ for an unimaginable backlash of colonized peoples against European opulence. Indeed, in his masterfully truculent criticism of Europe, Fanon patiently articulates a call for war against the ‘shadow of [European] palaces’: ‘Europe has laid her hands on our continents, and we must slash at her fingers till she lets go… Let us start fighting; and if we’ve no other arms, the waiting knife’s enough (1963: 311, 13; quoted by Sartre).’ If The Wretched of the Earth is an act of war, then Black Skin White Masks is the ‘untimely meditation’ leading up to that act.

Black Skin White Masks is an emotional topography of the object black male (‘I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects’). According to Fanon, the black subject can only be understood as a colonial/white construction that works within language (38); as an ‘obsessive neurotic type’ subjected in agony because ‘he [will not] be taken at his true worth’ by the gazing white (60); as a patient ‘suffering from an inferiority complex’ (100); as a ‘biological danger’ (165); and finally as an ontological exteriority – ‘for not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the (ontological) white man (110).’ The black subject is a pre-determined Hegelian negation, an antithesis.

"And so it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me. It is not out of my bad nigger’s misery, my bad nigger’s teeth, my bad nigger’s hunger that I will shape a torch with which to burn down the world, but it is the torch that was already there, waiting for that turn of history… The dialectic brings necessity into the foundation of my freedom drives me out of myself... I am not a potentiality of something, I am wholly what I am… My negro consciousness does not hold itself out as lack. It is. (135)"

In his critique of reason (118-135), Fanon addresses a phenomenon strikingly similar to Michel Foucault’s articulation of ‘power as war’ (‘politics as war by another means’) outlined in his lectures in Society Must Be Defended. In his discussion of discourses which establish a ‘basic link between relations of force and relations of truth,’ Foucault argues that ‘being on one side [of force] and not the other means that you are in a better position to speak the truth (2003: 53)’—a side Foucault would place Fanon. ‘Reason (the totalizing, neutral discourse that appeals to a juridical universality and ‘rights’) is on the side of wild dreams, cunning, and the wicked (the enemy; the colonizing white man),’ asserts Foucault. ‘At the opposite end of the axis, you have an elementary brutality: a collection of deeds, acts, and passions, and cynical rage in all its nudity. Truth is therefore on the side of unreason and brutality (2003: 55).’ Within relations of power and force, ‘truth,’ argues Foucault, ‘functions exclusively as a weapon (2003: 57).’

Fanon begins his discussion of reason by, in fact, appealing to reason: ‘It was hate; I was hated, despised, detested, not by the neighbor across the street or my cousin on my mother’s side, but by an entire race. I was up against something unreasoned… I would say that for a man whose weapon is reason, there is nothing more neurotic than contact with unreason (118).’ But after the reason of the world became ‘confident of victory on every level (the Negro was found to be human), I had to change my tune (119).’ This game of cat and mouse ‘made a fool’ of Fanon. Reason turned into scientific inquiry into the biological drives in black men, and the genetic foundation of cannibalism. Reason represented the black subject as a ‘stage of development,’ a circular invocation of sui generis… History was not ‘real history’; ‘my unreason was countered with reason, my reason with “real reason.” Every hand was a losing hand for me.’

"I analyzed my heredity. I made a complete audit of my ailment. I wanted to be typically Negro—it was no longer possible. I wanted to be white—that was a joke. And, when I tried, on the level of ideas and intellectual activity, to reclaim my negritude, it was snatched away from me. (132)"

The relations of force/rationality are inimical to the relations of truth. In Sartre’s attempt to absolve the race problem through the dialectic (‘negritude is a transition’), Fanon complains that the dialectic negates him, ‘drives me out of myself.’ The dialectic, Foucault argues, turns struggles into a twofold process of ‘totalization and revelation of a rationality that is at once final but also basic, and in any case universal… [it] ensures the historical constitution of a universal subject, a reconciled truth, and a right in which all particularities have their ordained place (2003: 58).’ In other words, to echo Fanon, the dialectic can only understand being black in relation to white; Fanon is trapped in truth, and struggling against the forces of (dialectical) rationality.

The similarities between Foucault and Fanon in describing a world of struggle and domination leads to serious questions about the ways in which they both conceptualize power. Without getting into the particulars of Foucault’s shortcomings of articulating a conception of ‘power as war’ in Society Must Be Defended, Fanon’s reliance on a socio-psychoanalytic framework only allows for picture of power that is understood as repressive. In his discussions of language, for example, Fanon can only conceive of language as a white mechanism: ‘to speak a language is to take on a world, a culture’ (38) – a world and culture that are invariably white. The plight of the mulatto can only be understood as an affective erethism; i.e., as a stimulating false consciousness that solely ‘aspires to win admittance into the white world (60).’ In other words, power, to Fanon, acts on people, not through people; or in psychoanalytic terms, it is an ‘exterior inhibitor’ on the black mind. Black subjects are thus ‘obsessive neurotics’ that suffer from anxiety (inferiority complex) and potentially ‘compulsive acts’ (partially his justification of anti-colonial violence in The Wretched of the Earth).

The obvious problem with this conceptualization of power by Fanon has been discussed ad nauseum in other places: power is not understood as capillary; it fails to address not only how subjects are immersed in multiple porous power discourses that require circulation through articulation (power as ‘frequency of repetition’); it fails to capture how subjects (black or white) are not organic wholes bouncing off one another, but overdetermined (cf. Said, Laclau and Mouffe); how power works through freedom; etc. etc.

It (re)begins now.

Praxis. This is a promise I made to myself, and has thus far gone unfulfilled. It is hard to break out of old habits, especially those techniques I utilize which lead to overly regulatory technologies of the self. I may be frustrated because there is a tension, even a contradiction between my techne and potential ethos. Of course, the ethos is the most important element, and is the generative basis of desire, to become.

What do I want to become? A 'social theorist'; a rendering agent for 'liberation' of 'society' and 'self.' In other words, following the later Foucault, I want to minimize the fascism in my head, the domination that works through my body.

What can I do? Though the drawbacks are many, academia is the best suited institution in the U.S. to engage in (an always imperfect) form of praxis. I have committed myself, rightly, to providing a genealogy of sovereignty in relation to the torture question. In terms of academia, this is what I have to dedicate myself to for the next eight months. Though, for the moment, I have to completely dedicate myself academically to entertaining Hardt and Negri's project. They are obviously allies, so I should critically read them and provide insight as to how to make our perspective projects better, to 'ensure transition' as Laclau and Mouffe put it, particularly by focusing on their notion of sovereignty.

After Hardt and Negri, I need to best approach my thesis questions by strategically working them through my school work; i.e., through my responses to Anna, and through my project with Virginia. What are the contents of my thesis? This is the outline for what I need to send to my committee:
1. Sovereignty & the 'state of exception'
-How is this theoretically constructed?
-how has it been utilized in geography?
-Agamben, Schmitt, Gregory, Secor, "Culture of Exception"
2. Biopolitics vs. Sovereignty
-or Pastoral power vs. the 'city-citizen' game
-theories of sovereignty
-Mitchell, Rose, Foucault
3. The myth of sovereignty -- Law of the Father
-sovereignty as mnemic image
-psychoanalysis
-Laclau and Mouffe -- Mitchell's totalitarianism
4. Governmentality, Torture, and "leak spaces"
-history of torture techniques
-role of torture in liberal governmentalities
-how torture was put into effect
-what kind of space was produced (exception vs. leak)

I needed to write that down.

What about outside my academic life? Even though this is the part I have the least amount of time to work on, it is obviously the critical crux towards a positive ethico-political existence. In many ways, it has to be a positive constitution through means of self-regulation; it must be politically positive and in sync with the desires of my partner, Lauren. It comes aas no surprise that this must arise from a politics of the body. I have to ask myself: what are those networks that my everyday actions have the most impact upon? What are the consequences of my actions? What are my desires in relation to those consequences? Is this where contradictions and frustrations on my part arise?

The most obvious network that I have an impact upon is my food network. The consequences are indeed well known, and something that concerns me greatly in the abstract, but always fall short of importance in terms of practice. Who rules the food network? Transnational corporations. How do I resist? Resist transnational corporate networks to the greatest extent possible; learn not to fetishize my food; follow the commodity chains to their source. This means stocking up on food from the co-op and farmer's market, avoiding corporate grocery stores and non-local businesses, and avoiding corporate food sold in local businesses to the greatest extent possible (especially meat). This also means avoiding corporate coffee, and making my consumption as sustainable as possible. Why this sort of technique on the self with an ethos of sustainability? Because the consequences on the Earth are indeed on the brink of crisis (that is, if we are not already in crisis) and this is something that I can effect to the extent of my effective scope within the network.

The second most obvious netowrk is financial. I need to move away from having accounts with massive transnational corporations. The better of two evils dictates a transference of funds into a credit union, while exploiting to the greatest extent possible frequent flyer loop holes.

The third netwok is (for lack of a better term) "pop cultural." Even though I have greatly minimized my participation relative to the past in public spectacle production, I need to transcend the last great hurdle related to footboall, because the impact it has my thinking is too great, and ultimately bad for my body (in terms of beer and food). I must exercise a great amount of secular asceticism towards that bread-and-circus activity, no matter how much it pains me. It is a social problem that I must not reproduce.

Which leads to what I do wish to produce. Again, I seem willing to fall victim to the dictates of contemporary biopolitical paradigms, as well as the neoliberal mentality of producing 'human capital,' but I am adament about producing a healthy body, free of contradictions. Secondly, I want to reorient my political activity to blog writing, which I should make the time to do. It will help me synthesize my ideas.

This is the foundation, now I need to work through it and anticipate the outcome.