Le Monde - January 10, 2004
No to Bio-Political Tattooing By Giorgio Agamben Le Monde
<snip>
These technological devices that register and identify naked life correspond to the media devices that control and manipulate public speech: between these two extremes of a body without words and words without a body, the space we once upon a time called politics is ever more scaled-down and tiny.
Thus, by applying these techniques and these devices invented for the dangerous classes to a citizen, or rather to a human being as such, states, which should constitute the precise space of political life, have made the person the ideal suspect, to the point that its humanity itself that has become the dangerous class.
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The Dept. of Homeland Security, is in many ways, the fulfillment of the nightmares of dystopian science fiction authors.
Consider.
Although it's true federal agencies such as the FBI have, over the years, used their power to destroy, harass and monitor various outsider groups, these efforts were always easily spun as deviations from their official and proper mission. Conventional liberals critiqued the Bureau by saying, essentially, *nailing organized crime? yes - cointelpro? no.* A reliable formula - good mission, bad mission - which could be used to display loyalty even while criticizing *excesses*.
Homeland Security is very different; it's purpose, properly understood, is to perform cointelpro on the entire populace 24 hours, 7 days a week. There is no other mission besides achieving total information awareness. Old assumptions have been turned upside down. All must be tracked. Welcome to the startling first chapter of a 3-dimensional Phillip K. Dick novel.
Whereas before an apolitical, middle or ruling class White male within that age range so beloved by marketeers could expect to be exempt from examination the lidless eye of anti-terrorism no longer ignores him. *Any one of you,* federal actions tell us *might be a terrorist or a sympathizer. All must be seen in order for all to be safe.*
Of course, people who are Arab (or Arab in appearance to confused security officials) explicitly political or insufficiently obedient at bio-metric scan time receive the most scrutiny. And, airports are the epicenter of this upheaval so far.
Still, a wide ranging and deep change has come as Zizek warned in his essay, THE IRAQ WAR: WHERE IS THE TRUE DANGER?
<excerpt>
We do have here a kind of perverted Hegelian "negation of negation": in a first negation, the populist Right disturbs the aseptic liberal consensus by giving voice to passionate dissent, clearly arguing against the "foreign threat"; in a second negation, the "decent" democratic center, in the very gesture of pathetically rejecting this populist Right, integrates its message in a "civilized" way - in-between, the ENTIRE FIELD of background "unwritten rules" has already changed so much that no one even notices it and everyone is just relieved that the anti-democratic threat is over. And the true danger is that something similar will happen with the "war on terror": "extremists" like John Ashcroft will be discarded, but their legacy will remain, imperceptibly interwoven into the invisible ethical fabric of our societies. Their defeat will be their ultimate triumph: they will no longer be needed, since their message will be incorporated into the mainstream.
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DRM