University of California Riverside
The mutation of the sovereignty-form involves a transformation of war.[1] The mutation of sovereignty has consisted for some time in its displacement from the national State-capital ensemble into that of transnational techno-capital,[2] in the midst of a political-social counterrevolution that installs a rationality—“neoliberalism”—that became intertwined with the digital technological mutation. The mutation of war, correspondingly, appears as the passage from its classical modern forms—categorized under the concepts of interstate war, colonial war and internal civil war—to its contemporary forms that express the transnational imperiality-coloniality of techno-capital: managerial war, war machines, paramilitary wars, state terrorism and non-state terrorism tending to be diffuse, territorial processes of environmental devastation, rural dispossession and urban gentrification, governmental—state and non-state—promotion of religious, classist, racist and xenophobic social violence, among other ways.[3]
If what we are witnessing is the mutation of sovereignty and war in the era of political geoeconomics—that is, in the era of the subsumption of State politics and civil subjectivities into the imperial apparatus of the global economy crowned by corporate-financial capitalism—then the phenomenon of contemporary capitalistic war would have to be made visible against the grain of the regime of visibility or legibility that defines, on the one hand, the modern categories traditionally established to think about war—the categories of interstate war, colonial war and internal civil war—and, on the other hand, the imaginary of the classical bourgeois liberal utopia—a utopia that projects the vision of a conjunctural and anomalous relationship, past and surmountable, between capitalism and war.
If what exists today is an imperialism of corporate-financial capitalism (whose original accumulation is still sustained, under its mathematical artifacts, in land and work), such imperialism would have the United States-NATO and China-Russia as intra-imperial poles, in relations of greater or lesser tension—since the imperialism of the United States is subsumed in the dynamics of “integrated world capitalism.” Herbert Marcuse, taking up Heidegger’s former hypothesis, once argued that “Russia and America” are metaphysically speaking “the same,” in the form of industrial society.[4] Consistently, today we could say that the United States and China are “the same” as far as it concerns financial capitalism. Indeed, although China has not deployed itself militarily to the extent that the United States does, it does so through an enormous economic strategy of investments, commerce and financial loans even backed by raw materials. To understand the modulations of violence in the era of globally integrated capitalism, we could look for some clues, precisely, in some passages by Heidegger on war and terror at the consummation of the “technical epoch.”
The technical epoch that is expressed in the “Americanization of the world,” Heidegger maintains, would be the epoch of calculating nihilism that dwells in the pre-understandability of beings as a resource-object of total machination (das Gestell): techno-economic consummation/exhaustion of theo-onto-anthropological metaphysics. That is to say, and thinking about it “unfaithfully” at the intersection with Marx: it is about the late modern times of the deployment of the principle of unconditioned sufficient reason functional to the capitalistic pattern of normalization, equivalent fetishization, destructive production and flexible accumulation, with its wake of devastation of human and non-human worlds beyond “sustainable” destructive production. As far as human lifeworlds are concerned—which, of course, can only be thought of illusorily as separated from the surrounding “nature”—the epoch of globalized capitalism becomes an epoch of terror (Erschrecken),[5] in the midst of the (un)familiar (das Ungewöhnliche) of the event of the total machination (totale Machenschaft) of beings by dispositive reason—phenomenical logification of totality of being as an object of scientific representation (Vorstellung) and resource of technical exploitation (Bestand, natural and human resources).
And here is the first key: only because this total machination operated on beings in the form of a dispositive logic (Gestell, in French dispositif) implies total “security” (Sicherkeit, derived from Gewissheit or modern subjective certainty, moral in Luther and physical-mathematical in Galileo) at the level of its assemblage, precisely is for that reason that there is “terror.”[6] The wizard of Messkirch turning things around. Terrorism would thus be the dystopian expression and, in turn, the mirror reverse of the necro-biopolitical dispositive of modern reason as the agency of the total assurance of beings (government). Terror is unleashed because there is an unleashed government. Terrorism appears, on the one hand, as a dystopian expression of the very agency of the capital/State ensemble, with its machination and violent sacrificiality deployed across the planet in order to be functional to its pattern of economic-political accumulation—on a plane where legality and illegality coexist or they get confused. This transnational and State-national capitalist terrorism has its mirror opposite in the violence of diffuse terrorism that “resists” everywhere its territorialization, but reproducing its necropolitical logic of power. Let’s put it this way: there is terrorism because there is security, and the more security, the more terror. There is imperial-colonial terrorism by the dispositive ensemble between transnational Capital and national State (State terrorism, paramilitary terrorism); terror proliferates in metropolitan populations due to the “insecurity” of one’s own Homeland, spread through the media by the politics of fear (media terrorism); terror proliferates among those who suffer the violence of capitalistic war and State terrorism, who, in addition, among their resistance strategies (defensive or based on their own ideological agendas), can offensively reproduce the terror practices of the necropolitical dimension of the imperial-colonial dispositive against agents of oppressive capital and States, or against metropolitan populations attached to those States, etc.—in war often the methods are symmetrically deadly, although the parties are not so in the power relationship. “Security” is precisely an ontological violence that, by agencying as a disposition of life on life[7] and encountering resistance, materializes and diffracts into a kaleidoscope of see-saw violence, offensive and defensive, defensive and offensive violences.
The monster curve of technology, by virtue of the techno-capitalist consummation of Western metaphysics, would place us in an epoch in which “Americanism” names a violent project of technological domination and homogenization of the world. As if there were a world—i.e., one world—, securely appropriable through its government—as if the world could be reduced to a home (oikos, oikonomía). It is precisely this presupposition that founds terror as a fundamental mood attunement and mode of production of world. However, as we had already noted, Americanism today would not be something substantial and exclusive attribute of the United States—avant-garde “Western” power—, just as nothing that generally emerges as coloniality is exclusive to the colonizer—that is what the sentence “today Russia and America are metaphysically the same” means, and also Heidegger’s characterization of the United States as an active epistemic vanguard and, at the same time, a patient of ontological blindness,[8] and therefore the first victim of Americanism itself, which is instinctively familiar to it in terms of subjectivation—administrative culture—, at the same time that it surpasses it planetary, and geopolitically disorganizes the board.
Today we live in the transition from the time of the political imposition of a territorialized order (nomos of the earth) to the time of economic administration—calculus, management—of a global disorder (global nomos). And this changes the modalization of the ongoing war. Heidegger tries to open a horizon of understanding for the late modern war phenomenon, beyond the ossified circulating categories of the old German general Carl von Clausewitz: it would be a question of thinking, in the times of the nihilistic consummation of modernity, the mutation of the theater of war beyond the Clausewitz model and its “modernist” subjectivist assumptions. The question today continues to be rethinking war in its drift after the world wars and the neoliberal emergence at the end of the 20th century.
To do this, Heidegger analyzes the conception of modern war according to Clausewitz’s scheme and then breaks and splinters each of the characterizations involved in the concept to clear the field of visibility of war that opens up after the world wars and the totalizing predominance of techno-economic reason. According to Clausewitz, modern war can be characterized as 1) subjectively oppositional war, a kind of “large-scale duel”,[9] either between rational political subjects (i.e., between national States), or between rational political subjects and animals/humans in state of nature (national States versus “savage” inhabitants of “disputed territories” or of not constituted as States territories): “classical” modern war, interstate or colonial, regulated by the Ius Publicum Europaeum (in Schmittian terms, nomos of the earth and nomos of the sea); 2) humanist war based on the imposition of law and of an “order of the human” (humanism carrying a positive content), will to win in the sense of imposing an order to the other in the form of law: war is an act of force that compels the other to do our will,[10] so that it is about breaking the will of the other and “reading them their rights”, of being able to impose a sovereign text on them, for which the will of political subjection of the community itself is required, both at the troop level (“heroic sacrifice”) and the entire “social body” (“total mobilization”, “national unity”); 3) teleological war, subjectively making-real an idea, “putting into work”: attaining an idea, strategy to achieve it despite the “friction” and contingency of the real,[11] because war has a well-resolved goal—a goal that entails its cessation—, a well-defined sense of execution despite obstacles.
So war in Clausewitz’s model also carries with it a certain idea of “peace”: since only a total war to death, absolute and annihilating, can lead to peace, what is “realistically” aspired to is a police peace (pacification and normalization) that protects the political-legal and economic order imposed by war from the threat of latent subversive conflict from now on—indistinction between war and peace: war is politics continued by other means (army) , but at the same time politics is the continuation of war by other means (law and police). In any case, the categorial regime of Clausewitz’s “classical” model for thinking about war implies the order of a modernist subject (identifiable and unitary political subjects, with clear and distinct alliances and goals), an order-scheme that becomes puzzled with the more diffuse and opaque phenomena of a contemporary nihilistic war, no longer articulated by conditioning ideas that would give its teleology a positive content, but rather unleashed by the naked imperiousness of economic-political calculation, unconditioned and flexible, deterritorialized and impersonalized (cybernetic, algorithmic, artificially intelligent).
Heidegger confronts Clausewitz point by point. Following his analysis, after the world wars of the 20th century, war could be characterized as follows:
1) Absence of “true” opposition between “political subjects”.[12] There may be intra-imperial tensions, but deep down the parties share the same logic of political-military and techno-economic calculation based on domination and accumulation: by virtue of this communion, everything is confused in pure calculation, alliances are mobile and tactical, the subjects are equivalent and replaceable fetishes, not centered on their State-national inscription but surpassing it centrifugally, in an ontologically flexible medium within a framework where everything can be functionally disposed to the process of capitalist valorization (everything, in its “distinction” can be “valued”).[13] Everything changes, but without ceasing to be the same. Heidegger: “(…) war no longer admits the distinction between ‘conquerors and conquered’; everyone becomes a slave to the history of Being.”[14] Even the leaders are slaves, because in the nihilism of capital there are no longer subjects in the strong sense, but all its actors supply the same fabric, the same canvas of capitalistic war in the midst of which, whether they win or lose, they “decide” nothing, but only “function.”
2) Will without a subject “humanistically” ordered to law, but dissolved in the fluctuation of the techno-economic calculation. If the modern will affirmed itself in the person-form as a subject with positive content (humanist will moved by a concrete image of “the human”), its late drift is processed as a nihilistic and unconditionally calculating self-affirmation within the unquestioned and globalized mode of production—the political-legal will for order gives way to the economic will for the administration of disorder. In effect, “humanism”, the “human essence”, today has become a resource, a mere means and not an end[15]—this would account for the contemporary phenomenon of a certain reactivation of the nomos of the earth (nationalist and identity implosion) in contexts of “balkanization” at all levels (strategy of producing civil war through the promotion of religious, racial, ethnic, nationalist, identity sectarisms, etc.). That the political-legal will for order gives way to the economic will for the administration of disorder is also expressed in the contemporary status of the “leader”, who is another functional part of the machine and not a transcendent decision-making instance: the exception is the rule (Walter Benjamin) and not the miraculous and decisive act of the sovereign outside the machine (ex machina).[16] Something similar happens with the figures of the “partisan” or the “patriotic soldier”, who are progressively replaced by the figure of the “mercenary” and the transnational privatization of the military and security forces—today the free market makes it possible for a country like Russia, “opposed to the free market”, to hire the Wagner mercenary company to fight the war in Ukraine. If politics and war are subsumed in the economy of capital, the decision obeys in each case to techno-economic calculations and not to ideological projects of a leader or a sovereign vanguard.
3) Absence of an idea and its teleological “putting into work”. Nihilism involves the abolition of the ideal that, from its remoteness, marks the distance with the real: war is not a means to put into practice an idea, an order as a clearly defined goal, which once achieved would lead to the cessation of war. The ideal has been immanentized and dynamized in contingency and calculation, so that what there is is a total and endless war produced and administered as an unconditioned deployment of means of accumulation, in the midst of the permanent “crisis” and its permanent police “pacification”: total and permanent war, of a poly-dimensional texture—from its geopolitical expression to the war of oneself against oneself in the society of control.
The non-modernist drift of war shows up as
a war without "true" decisive oppositional subjects or humanist orientation to order.
Contemporary war—total, endless, nihilistic—appears as a technical interface in
which we rather inhabit. War is no longer what it was.
[1] In 1989, five U.S. Army and Marine Corps officers
published a paper (cf. Lind, William et al., “The Changing Face of War: Into
the Fourth Generation”, in Marine Corps Gazette, October 1989, pp. 22-26),
where they systematized the phenomenon of modern war for United States military
doctrine in a series of four generations: 1) first generation war, since
the first wars with firearms and the formation of professional armies at the
service of the States (war of Spanish succession, Napoleonic wars, Spanish
American wars of independence, etc.); 2) second generation war, which
begins with industrialization and mechanization, is characterized by the capacity
to mobilize large armies, the use of large-scale, high-firepower war machinery,
and trench warfare (Boer war, First World War, Iran-Iraq War, etc.); 3) third
generation war, which begins with the “lightning war” (Blitzkrieg)
of the German army during Second World War; it is characterized by the massive
introduction of tanks–which break the stalemate of trench warfare–and is based
on the speed and surprise of the attack, not allowing time for the coordination
of the defense, in addition to the technological superiority over the enemy,
coordinating air, marine and land forces, interrupting the enemy’s
communications and producing the logistical isolation of its defenses, causing
an intentional terrifying psychological impact, and massively attacking
civilians to prevent them from supporting the war industry that the enemy needs
to continue the war (Spanish Civil War, Second World War, Korean War, Yom
Kippur War, Gulf War, etc.; Blitzkrieg was used by the United States in
the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and by Israel in the Lebanon War in 2006); 4) fourth
generation war, the technological superiority of State armies implies that
the only reasonable way to try to confront them is the use of hidden irregular
forces that surprise the enemy, using unconventional combat tactics. In these
tactics, the great face-to-face battles between molar forces no longer occur
(Chinese civil war, Vietnam war, armed conflict in Colombia, war against narco,
civil war in Angola, “war against terrorism”, Yugoslav wars, etc.). So that fourth-generation
warfare would include forms such as guerrilla warfare, asymmetric warfare,
low-intensity and high-frequency warfare, “dirty war,” State terrorism, popular
struggles, civil war, terrorism and counterterrorism, etc. (see also Van
Creveld, Martin, «The transformation of war. The most radical
reinterpretation of armed conflict since Clausewitz», Free Press Publisher,
New York, 11991).
[2] It is interesting to see how this transition appears in popular culture
and is reflected in American cinema; see Lumet, Sidney (dir.), “Network”
(U.S.A., 1976). See also Villalobos-Ruminott, Sergio. «Soberanías en suspenso. Imaginación y
violencia en América Latina», Editorial La Cebra, Buenos Aires, 12013,
pp. 23-24; and in a sociological approach, see Katz, Claudio, «Bajo el imperio del capital»,
Escaparate Ediciones, Santiago, 12015, p. 7 et seq.
[3] Regarding this imperiality-coloniality of
transnational capital, Rodrigo Karmy has coined the formula of an
“economic-managerial sovereignty”, from which what he proposes as a managerial
war becomes intelligible: “In contemporary times, sovereignty it continues
to operate, but no longer embedded in the properly political form of the
national-State, but in the governmental form of the global economy. In this
light, sovereignty remains what it has always been, namely the hyperbole of
accumulation based on the exploitation of collective human labor, the
chiasmatic point through which capital is deployed. (…). Unlike Marx’s time
when a difference between economics and politics could still be visualized
(surely Schmitt is the last theorist to attempt that difference), the
contemporary drift has positioned economics as a true political paradigm. That
is, the economy constitutes the locus of sovereign decision and, therefore,
defines the character of war in a different way. Because if war was always the
shadow of all sovereignty, today, when it is deployed eschatologically in the
form of the neoliberal economy, what is understood by war must necessarily be
redefined. And if when sovereignty still lavished the State form, war was
limited to the strictly inter-State dimension, today it is emancipated
in the form of what, for lack of a better term, I will call managerial war.
(…). This indicates a radical transmutation in which the sovereign dispositive
has gone from acting as a restraining force (what Carl Schmitt called katechón)
to a force that is consumed at a global level, erasing all borders (what we can
call the assumption of the eschaton). In this way, contemporary
managerial war would account for a true eschatologization of sovereignty in
which, unlike its previous form, oriented towards the containment and defense
of external borders, it is deployed towards the rearticulation and flexibility
of all internal borders.” (Rodrigo Karmy, “La
guerra gestional”, in El Desconcierto, November 8, 2013).
[4] Heidegger: “Russia and America, metaphysically seen,
are the same thing; the same desperate fury of unleashed technics and of the
abstract organization of the normal man” (Heidegger, Martin, «Introducción a la
metafísica (1936)», translated from German
into Spanish by Emilio Estiú, Editorial Nova, Buenos Aires, 11966, p. 75 et seq.).
[5] Heidegger, Martin, «Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), 1936-1938», Gesamtausgabe
65, Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 32003, p. 369.
[6] Heidegger: “Morality, to the extent that
it is a mode of assurance and security, is identical with evil. (…). It may be
that morality, for its part, and with it all particular attempts to put people
through morality within the prospect of a world order and to establish world
security with certainty, is nothing more than a monstrous spawn of evil.” (Heidegger,
Martin, «Feldweg-Gespräche»,
Gesamtausgabe 77, Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 11995,
p. 209). At this point we try to point out with Heidegger an issue that Rodrigo
Karmy has raised: that “it will not matter so much ‘who’ the terrorist is but
rather what the conditions of its production are” (Karmy, Rodrigo, «¿Qué es el terrorismo?, o cómo el
imperialismo contemporáneo produce guerras civiles», in El Desconcierto, September
19, 2016; see also Karmy, Rodrigo, «¿Qué
es el terrorismo? Prolegómenos para una “analítica del
terrorismo”», in Revista
Poliética, vol. 5, nº 1, São Paulo, 2017, pp.
20-39).
[7] For a genealogical sketch of securitary logic, see Díaz-Letelier,
Gonzalo, “La cuestión mapuche y el
derecho penal del enemigo como consumación jurídica del ‘humanismo’”, in
Revista Espacio Regional, vol. 2, nº 12, Departamento de Ciencias Sociales of
the Universidad de Los Lagos, Osorno, 2015, pp. 28-62.
[8] Like when in Chile we say, regarding this condition,
that the religious, political and economic right wing has the military and does
not need to think, because it “acts”, with certainty and assertiveness,
security and necessity. It is about the relationship between thought and
action, or the lack of thought when the action becomes nihilistic and
rationally automaton (“instinctive”, in the sense that Samuel Butler once put
it).
[9] Clausewitz, Carl von, «Vom Kriege»,
Dümmlers Verlag, Bonn, 191980, p. 191.
[10] Clausewitz, opus cit., pp. 191-192.
[11] Ibidem, p. 955.
[12] Heidegger, «Introducción a la metafísica (1936)»,
p. 75 et seq.
[13] Heidegger: “being has become value”, cf.
Heidegger, Martin, «Holzwege»,
Gesamtausgabe 5, Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 22003,
p. 258.
[14] Heidegger, Martin, «Die Geschichte
des Seyns», Gesamtausgabe 69, Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, Frankfurt am
Main, 11998, p. 209.
[15] Heidegger, Martin, «Überwindung der
Metaphysik», Gesamtausgabe 7, Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, Frankfurt am
Main, 12000, p. 91.
[16] Heidegger: “(…) the leaders [Führer] are the necessary
consequence of the fact that entities have drifted onto the path of errancy, in
which the expansion of the void requires a singular function of ordering and
securitization” (Ibidem, p. 92). Paradigmatic, in this sense, is what was the
relationship between president Donald Trump and the political-military and corporative
apparatus of the United States and beyond.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario