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On Security, by Ronnie D. Lipschutz
James Der Derian
The rapidity of change in the international system, as well as the inability of international theory to make sense of that change, raises this question: Of what value is security? More specifically, just how secure is this preeminent concept of international relations? This evaluation of security invokes interpretive strategies to ask epistemological, ontological, and political questions--questions that all too often are ignored, subordinated, or displaced by the technically biased, narrowly framed question of what it takes to achieve security. The goal, then, of this inquiry is to make philosophically problematic that which has been practically axiomatic in international relations. The first step is to ask whether the paramount value of security lies in its abnegation of the insecurity of all values.
No other concept in international relations packs the metaphysical punch, nor commands the disciplinary power of "security." In its name, peoples have alienated their fears, rights and powers to gods, emperors, and most recently, sovereign states, all to protect themselves from the vicissitudes of nature--as well as from other gods, emperors, and sovereign states. In its name, weapons of mass destruction have been developed which have transfigured national interest into a security dilemma based on a suicide pact. And, less often noted in international relations, in its name billions have been made and millions killed while scientific knowledge has been furthered and intellectual dissent muted.
We have inherited an ontotheology of security, that is, an a priori argument that proves the existence and necessity of only one form of security because there currently happens to be a widespread, metaphysical belief in it. Indeed, within the concept of security lurks the entire history of western metaphysics, which was best described by Derrida "as a series of substitutions of center for center" in a perpetual search for the "transcendental signified." 1 From God to Rational Man, from Empire to Republic, from King to the People--and on occasion in the reverse direction as well, for history is never so linear, never so neat as we would write it--the security of the center has been the shifting site from which the forces of authority, order, and identity philosophically defined and physically kept at bay anarchy, chaos, and difference.
Yet the center, as modern poets and postmodern critics tell us, no longer holds. The demise of a bipolar system, the diffusion of power into new political, national, and economic constellations, the decline of civil society and the rise of the shopping mall, the acceleration of everything --transportation, capital and information flows, change itself--have induced a new anxiety. As George Bush repeatedly said--that is, until the 1992 Presidential election went into full swing--"The enemy is unpredictability. The enemy is instability." 2
One immediate response, the unthinking reaction, is to master this anxiety and to resecure the center by remapping the peripheral threats. In this vein, the Pentagon prepares seven military scenarios for future conflict, ranging from latino small-fry to an IdentiKit super-enemy that goes by the generic acronym of REGT ("Reemergent Global Threat"). In the heartlands of America, Toyota sledge-hammering returns as a popular know-nothing distraction. And within the Washington beltway, rogue powers such as North Korea, Iraq, and Libya take on the status of pariah-state and potential video bomb-site for a permanently electioneering elite.
There are also prodromal efforts to shore up the center of the International Relations discipline. In a newly instituted series in the International Studies Quarterly , the state of security studies is surveyed so as to refortify its borders. 3 After acknowledging that "the boundaries of intellectual disciplines are permeable," the author proceeds not only to raise the drawbridge but also to caulk every chink in the moat. 4 Recent attempts to broaden the concept of "security" to include such issues as global environmental dangers, disease, and economic and natural disasters endanger the field by threatening "to destroy its intellectual coherence and make it more difficult to devise solutions to any of these important problems." 5 The field is surveyed in the most narrow and parochial way: out of 200-plus works cited, esteemed Third World scholars of strategic studies receive no mention, British and French scholars receive short shrift, and Soviet writers do not make it into the Pantheon at all.
The author of the essay, Stephen Walt, has written one of the better books on alliance systems; 6 here he seems intent on constructing a new alliance within the discipline against "foreign" others, with the "postmodernist" as arch-alien. The tactic is familiar: like many of the neoconservatives who have launched the recent attacks on "political correctness," the "liberals" of international relations make it a habit to base their criticisms on secondary accounts of a category of thinking rather than on a primary engagement with the specific (and often differing) views of the thinkers themselves. 7 In this case, Walt cites IR scholar Robert Keohane on the hazards of "reflectivism," to warn off anyone who by inclination or error might wander into the foreign camp: "As Robert Keohane has noted, until these writers `have delineated . . . a research program and shown . . . that it can illuminate important issues in world politics, they will remain on the margins of the field.' " 8 By the end of the essay, one is left with the suspicion that the rapid changes in world politics have triggered a "security crisis" in security studies that requires extensive theoretical damage control.
What if we leave the desire for mastery to the insecure and instead imagine a new dialogue of security, not in the pursuit of a utopian end but in recognition of the world as it is, other than us ? What might such a dialogue sound like? Any attempt at an answer requires a genealogy: to understand the discursive power of the concept, to remember its forgotten meanings, to assess its economy of use in the present, to reinterpret--and possibly construct through the reinterpretation--a late modern security comfortable with a plurality of centers, multiple meanings, and fluid identities.
The steps I take here in this direction are tentative and preliminary. I first undertake a brief history of the concept itself. Second, I present the "originary" form of security that has so dominated our conception of international relations, the Hobbesian episteme of realism. Third, I consider the impact of two major challenges to the Hobbesian episteme, that of Marx and Nietzsche. And finally, I suggest that Baudrillard provides the best, if most nullifying, analysis of security in late modernity. In short, I retell the story of realism as an historic encounter of fear and danger with power and order that produced four realist forms of security: epistemic, social, interpretive, and hyperreal. To preempt a predictable criticism, I wish to make it clear that I am not in search of an "alternative security." An easy defense is to invoke Heidegger, who declared that "questioning is the piety of thought." 9 Foucault, however, gives the more powerful reason for a genealogy of security:
I am not looking for an alternative; you can't find the solution of a problem in the solution of another problem raised at another moment by other people. You see, what I want to do is not the history of solutions, and that's the reason why I don't accept the word alternative . My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. 10
The hope is that in the interpretation of the most pressing dangers of late modernity we might be able to construct a form of security based on the appreciation and articulation rather than the normalization or extirpation of difference.
A Genealogy of the Concept
In traditional realist representations of world politics as the struggle for power among states, the will to security is born out of a primal fear, a natural estrangement and a condition of anarchy which diplomacy, international law and the balance of power seek, yet ultimately fail, to mediate. 11 By considering some historical meanings of security that exceed this prevailing view, I wish to suggest "new" possibilities and intelligibilities for security. Admittedly, this brief genealogy is thin on analysis and thick on description. But my intention is to provoke discussion, and to suggest that there is more than a speculative basis for the acceptance of a concept of security that is less coherent and dogmatic, and more open to the historical complexity and contingent nature of international relations.
In its earlier use, "security" traveled down a double-track and, then, somewhere at the turn of the nineteenth century, one track went underground. Conventionally understood, security refers to a condition of being protected, free from danger, safety. This meaning prevailed in the great power diplomacy of the modern states-system. In 1704, the Act of Security was passed by the Scottish Parliament, which forbade the ascension of Queen Anne's successor to the throne of Scotland unless the independence of the Scottish kingdom was "secured." 12 In 1781, Gibbon conveyed a specifically geopolitical meaning when he wrote in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that "the emperor and his court enjoyed . . . the security of the marshes and fortifications of Ravenna." 13 Coeval, however, with the evolution of security as a preferred condition of safety was a different connotation, of security as a condition of false or misplaced confidence in one's position. In Macbeth , Shakespeare wrote that "Security is Mortals cheefest Enemie." 14 In a 1774 letter, Edmund Burke impugned "The supineness, neglect, and blind security of my friend, in that, and every thing that concerns him." 15 And, as late as 1858, the Saturday Review reported that "Every government knew exactly when there was reason for alarm, and when there was excuse for security." 16
Clearly, the unproblematical essence that is often attached to the term today does not stand up to even a cursory investigation. From its origins, security has had contested meanings, indeed, even contradictory ones. Certainly, the tension of definition is inherent in the elusiveness of the phenomenon it seeks to describe, as well as in the efforts of various users to fix and attach meanings for their own ends. Yet there is something else operating at the discursive level: I believe there is a talismanic sign to security that seeks to provide what the property of security cannot. The clue is in the numerous citations from sermons found in the Oxford English Dictionary . They all use security to convey the second sense, that is, a careless, hubristic, even damnable overconfidence. The excerpts range in dates from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century: "They . . . were drowned in sinneful security" (1575); "This is a Reflection which . . . should strike Terror and Amazement into the securest Sinner" (1729); one, claiming that "It is an imaginary immortality which encloses him in sevenfold security, even while he stands upon its very last edge"(1876). 17
Mediating between these two senses of security lies a third. In the face of a danger, a debt, or an obligation of some kind, one seeks a security, in the form of a pledge, a bond, a surety. From the 1828 Webster : "Violent and dangerous men are obliged to give security for their good behavior, or for keeping the peace." 18 In Markby's Elementary Law (1874), the word is given a precise financial meaning: "I shall also use the word security to express any transaction between the debtor and creditor by which the performance of such a service (one capable of being represented in money) is secured." 19 A security could also be "represented" in person. Shakespeare again, from Henry IV : "He said, sir, you should procure him better Assurance, the Bardole: he wold not take his Bond and yours, he lik'd not the Security." 20
Hobbes and Epistemic Realism
| Nor is it enough for the security, which men desire should last all the time of their life, that they be governed, and directed by one judgement, for a limited time; as in one Battell, or one Warre. For though they obtain a Victory by their unanimous endeavour against a forraign enemy; yet afterwards when either they have no common enemy, or he that by one part is held for an enemy, is by another part held for a friend, they must needs by the difference of their interests dissolve, and fall again into a Warre amongst themselves. |
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--Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan 1 |
For his representation of security, Hobbes preferred the axiomatic style of Euclid and the historical reasoning of Thucydides to the poetic excess of Shakespeare. Both Hobbes and Shakespeare contributed interpretations that exceeded and outlived their contemporary political contexts and historical emulations. 21 However (and unfortunately), since Hobbes rather than Shakespeare enjoys a paradigmatic status in international relations, a short overview of his foundational ideas on realism and security is needed.
In chapter 10 of the Leviathan , Hobbes opens with the proposition that "The Power of a Man . . . is his present means, to obtain some future apparent Good." 22 Harmless enough, it would seem, until this power is put into relation with other men seeking future goods. Conflict inevitably follows, "because the power of one man resisteth and hindereth the effects of the power of another: power simply is no more, but the excess of the power of one above that of another." 23 A man's power comes to rest on his eminence , the margin of power that he is able to exercise over others. The classic formulation follows in chapter 11: "So that in the first place, I put a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death." 24
The implications for interpersonal and interstate relations are obvious. Without a common power to constrain this perpetual struggle there can be no common law: "And Convenants, without the Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all." 25 In the state of nature there exists a fundamental imbalance between man's needs and his capacity to satisfy them--with the most basic need being security from a violent and sudden death. To avoid injury from one another and from foreign invasion, men "conferre all their power and strength upon one Man, or upon one Assembly of men, that man reduce all their Wills, by plurality of voices, into one Will." 26 The constitution of the Leviathan, the sovereign state, provides for a domestic peace, but at a price. Hobbes's solution for civil war displaces the disposition for a "warre of every man against every man" to the international arena. 27 Out of fear, for gain, or in the pursuit of glory, states will go to war because they can. Like men in the precontractual state of nature, they seek the margin of power that will secure their right of self-preservation--and run up against states acting out of similar needs and desires.
In these passages we can discern the ontotheological foundations of an epistemic realism, in the sense of an ethico-political imperative embedded in the nature of things. 28 The sovereign state and territoriality become the necessary effects of anarchy, contingency, disorder that are assumed to exist independent of and prior to any rational or linguistic conception of them. In epistemic realism, the search for security through sovereignty is not a political choice but the necessary reaction to an anarchical condition: Order is man-made and good; chaos is natural and evil. Out of self-interest, men must pursue this good and constrain the evil of excessive will through an alienation of individual powers to a superior, indeed supreme, collective power. In short, the security of epistemic realism is ontological, theological and teleological: that is, metaphysical. We shall see, from Marx's and Nietzsche's critiques, the extent to which Hobbesian security and epistemic realism rely on social constructions posing as apodictic truths for their power effects. There is not and never was a "state of nature" or a purely "self-interested man"; there is, however, clearly an abiding fear of violent and premature death that compels men to seek the security found in solidarity. The irony, perhaps even tragedy, is that by constituting the first science of security, Hobbes made a singular contribution to the eventual subversion of the metaphysical foundations of solidarity.
Marx and Social Realism
Marx took probably the most devastating--and certainly the most politically influential--shot at the metaphysics of Hobbesian security. I will avoid the obvious gesture of recounting how Marx put Hegel--and with him the state--back on material footing, and instead focus on Marx's early polemic against the universalist guise of the state, "On the Jewish Question." 29
In the essay, Marx traces the split between civil society and the state to the spread of secularized traditions of Judaism and Christianity. In an essentialist if not racialist manner, Marx locates the earliest "spirit of capitalism" in the Judaic practices of usury and the "chimerical nationality of the Jew . . . of the trader and above all the financier." 30 He attributes to it a powerfully corrosive effect that sunders Christianity's universalist spirit into the "spirit of civil society , of the sphere of egoism, of the bellum omnium contra omes ." The "war of all against all" is not the residue of an imagined state of nature, but the universalization of the "capitalist spirit" of Judaism "under the reign of Christianity," which "dissolves the human world into a world of atomistic, mutually hostile individuals." Like Hobbes, Marx is a realist in that he acknowledges a universal struggle for power; and he is clearly indebted to Hobbes for his nominalist demythologization of power.
But Marx goes one step further, identifying the source of the Leviathan's power not in a free association of alienated power, but in "the separation of man from man . . . the practical application of the right of liberty is the right of private property." The desire for security, then, does not emerge from some external state of nature: "rather, security is the guarantee of the egoism of civil society." It is not a Hobbesian fear or self-interest that gives rise to security; it is money, as "the alienated essence of man's labour and life, this alien essence dominates him as he worships it." This elevation of the egoistic partiality to a metaphysical universality conceals the real divisions created by alienated labor. Not the Leviathan but Mammon binds together society: "The god of the Jews has been secularized and has become the god of the world." The state takes on this universalist identity, becoming the "mediator to which man transfers all his unholiness and all his human freedom ."
In Marx, alienation gives rise to a struggle for power which necessitates the security of a state, whereas, in Hobbes, alienation is a consequence of the struggle for power. Moreover, in Marx the power struggle is not a permanent condition: it is historically and class specific, and once the contradiction between a social production of wealth and the private exercise of power comes to its dialectical resolution, the state would become obsolescent--and with it the security dilemma. For Hobbes, the struggle for power is permanent and universal; hence the state is unlikely to wither away. Moreover, it is improbable that a supra-state Leviathan could be constructed: "In states and commonwealths not dependent on one another, every commonwealth has an absolute liberty to do what it shall judge most conducive to their benefits." 31 Marx sees this extra-territorial liberty to be as chimerical as Hobbes's domestic version. Just as the power of partial economic interests dominates the whole of civil society through the abstract universality of the state, Marx considered interstate politics to be the "serf" of a "universal" financial power hiding a narrow class interest. 32
Nietzsche and Interpretive Realism
| In the last analysis, "love of the neighbor" is always something secondary, partly conventional and arbitrary--illusory in relation to fear of the neighbor . After the structure of society is fixed on the whole and seems secure against external dangers, it is this fear of the neighbor that again creates new perspectives of moral valuation. |
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--Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil |
Nietzsche transvalues both Hobbes's and Marx's interpretations of security through a genealogy of modes of being. His method is not to uncover some deep meaning or value for security, but to destabilize the intolerable fictional identities of the past which have been created out of fear, and to affirm the creative differences which might yield new values for the future. 33 Originating in the paradoxical relationship of a contingent life and a certain death, the history of security reads for Nietzsche as an abnegation, a resentment and, finally, a transcendence of this paradox. In brief, the history is one of individuals seeking an impossible security from the most radical "other" of life, the terror of death which, once generalized and nationalized, triggers a futile cycle of collective identities seeking security from alien others--who are seeking similarly impossible guarantees. It is a story of differences taking on the otherness of death, and identities calcifying into a fearful sameness. Since Nietzsche has suffered the greatest neglect in international theory, his reinterpretation of security will receive a more extensive treatment here.
One must begin with Nietzsche's idea of the will to power, which he clearly believed to be prior to and generative of all considerations of security. In Beyond Good and Evil , he emphatically establishes the primacy of the will to power: "Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength--life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the most frequent results." 34
The will to power, then, should not be confused with a Hobbesian perpetual desire for power. It can, in its negative form, produce a reactive and resentful longing for only power, leading, in Nietzsche's view, to a triumph of nihilism. But Nietzsche refers to a positive will to power, an active and affective force of becoming, from which values and meanings--including self-preservation--are produced which affirm life. Conventions of security act to suppress rather than confront the fears endemic to life, for ". . . life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation--but why should one always use those words in which slanderous intent has been imprinted for ages." 35 Elsewhere Nietzsche establishes the pervasiveness of agonism in life: "life is a consequence of war, society itself a means to war." 36 But the denial of this permanent condition, the effort to disguise it with a consensual rationality or to hide from it with a fictional sovereignty, are all effects of this suppression of fear.
The desire for security is manifested as a collective resentment of difference--that which is not us, not certain, not predictable. Complicit with a negative will to power is the fear-driven desire for protection from the unknown. Unlike the positive will to power, which produces an aesthetic affirmation of difference, the search for truth produces a truncated life which conforms to the rationally knowable, to the causally sustainable. In The Gay Science , Nietzsche asks of the reader: "Look, isn't our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover everything strange, unusual, and questionable, something that no longer disturbs us? Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is the jubilation of those who obtain knowledge not the jubilation over the restoration of a sense of security?" 37
The fear of the unknown and the desire for certainty combine to produce a domesticated life, in which causality and rationality become the highest sign of a sovereign self, the surest protection against contingent forces. The fear of fate assures a belief that everything reasonable is true, and everything true, reasonable. In short, the security imperative produces, and is sustained by, the strategies of knowledge which seek to explain it. Nietzsche elucidates the nature of this generative relationship in The Twilight of the Idols :
The causal instinct is thus conditional upon, and excited by, the feeling of fear. The "why?" shall, if at all possible, not give the cause for its own sake so much as for a particular kind of cause --a cause that is comforting, liberating and relieving. . . . That which is new and strange and has not been experienced before, is excluded as a cause. Thus one not only searches for some kind of explanation, to serve as a cause, but for a particularly selected and preferred kind of explanation--that which most quickly and frequently abolished the feeling of the strange, new and hitherto unexperienced: the most habitual explanations. 38
A safe life requires safe truths. The strange and the alien remain unexamined, the unknown becomes identified as evil, and evil provokes hostility--recycling the desire for security. The "influence of timidity," as Nietzsche puts it, creates a people who are willing to subordinate affirmative values to the "necessities" of security: "they fear change, transitoriness: this expresses a straitened soul, full of mistrust and evil experiences." 39
The unknowable which cannot be contained by force or explained by reason is relegated to the off-world. "Trust," the "good," and other common values come to rely upon an "artificial strength": "the feeling of security such as the Christian possesses; he feels strong in being able to trust, to be patient and composed: he owes this artificial strength to the illusion of being protected by a god." 40 For Nietzsche, of course, only a false sense of security can come from false gods: "Morality and religion belong altogether to the psychology of error : in every single case, cause and effect are confused; or truth is confused with the effects of believing something to be true; or a state of consciousness is confused with its causes." 41
Nietzsche's interpretation of the origins of religion can shed some light on this paradoxical origin and transvaluation of security. In The Genealogy of Morals , Nietzsche sees religion arising from a sense of fear and indebtedness to one's ancestors:
The conviction reigns that it is only through the sacrifices and accomplishments of the ancestors that the tribe exists --and that one has to pay them back with sacrifices and accomplishments: one thus recognizes a debt that constantly grows greater, since these forebears never cease, in their continued existence as powerful spirits, to accord the tribe new advantages and new strength. 42
Sacrifices, honors, obedience are given but it is never enough, for
The ancestors of the most powerful tribes are bound eventually to grow to monstrous dimensions through the imagination of growing fear and to recede into the darkness of the divinely uncanny and unimaginable: in the end the ancestor must necessarily be transfigured into a god . 43
As the ancestor's debt becomes embedded in institutions, the community takes on the role of creditor. Nietzsche mocks this originary, Hobbesian moment: to rely upon an "artificial strength": "the feeling
One lives in a community, one enjoys the advantages of communality (oh what advantages! we sometimes underrate them today), one dwells protected, cared for, in peace and trustfulness, without fear of certain injuries and hostile acts to which the man outside , the "man without peace," is exposed . . . since one has bound and pledged oneself to the community precisely with a view to injury and hostile acts. 44
The establishment of the community is dependent upon, indeed it feeds upon, this fear of being left outside. As the castle wall is replaced by written treaty, however, and distant gods by temporal sovereigns, the martial skills and spiritual virtues of the noble warrior are slowly debased and dissimulated. The subject of the individual will to power becomes the object of a collective resentment. The result? The fear of the external other is transvalued into the "love of the neighbor" quoted in the opening of this section, and the perpetuation of community is assured through the internalization and legitimation of a fear that lost its original source long ago.
This powerful nexus of fear, of external and internal otherness, generates the values which uphold the security imperative. Indeed, Nietzsche locates the genealogy of even individual rights, such as freedom, in the calculus of maintaining security:
- My rights - are that part of my power which others not merely conceded me, but which they wish me to preserve. How do these others arrive at that? First: through their prudence and fear and caution: whether in that they expect something similar from us in return (protection of their rights); or in that they consider that a struggle with us would be perilous or to no purpose; or in that they see in any diminution of our force a disadvantage to themselves, since we would then be unsuited to forming an alliance with them in opposition to a hostile third power. Then : by donation and cession. 45
The point of Nietzsche's critical genealogy is to show that the perilous conditions that created the security imperative--and the western metaphysics that perpetuate it--have diminished if not disappeared; yet, the fear of life persists: "Our century denies this perilousness, and does so with a good conscience: and yet it continues to drag along with it the old habits of Christian security, Christian enjoyment, recreation and evaluation." 46 Nietzsche's worry is that the collective reaction against older, more primal fears has created an even worse danger: the tyranny of the herd, the lowering of man, the apathy of the last man which controls through conformity and rules through passivity. The security of the sovereign, rational self and state comes at the cost of ambiguity, uncertainty, paradox--all that makes a free life worthwhile. Nietzsche's lament for this lost life is captured at the end of Daybreak in a series of rhetorical questions:
Of future virtues--How comes it that the more comprehensible the world has grown the more solemnities of every kind have decreased? Is it that fear was so much the basic element of that reverence which overcame us in the presence of everything unknown and mysterious and taught us to fall down before the incomprehensible and plead for mercy? And has the world not lost some of its charm for us because we have grown less fearful? With the diminution of our fearfulness has our own dignity and solemnity, our own fearsomeness , not also diminished? 47
It is of course in Nietzsche's lament, in his deepest pessimism for the last man, that one finds the celebration of the overman as both symptom and harbinger of a more free-spirited yet fearsome age. Dismissive of utopian engineering, Nietzsche never suggests how he would restructure society; he looks forward only so far as to sight the emergence of "new philosophers" (such as himself?) who would restore a reverence for fear and reevaluate the security imperative. Nietzsche does, however, go back to a pre-Christian, pre-Socratic era to find the exemplars for a new kind of security. In The Genealogy of Morals , he holds up Pericles as an example, for lauding the Athenians for their "rhathymia "--a term that incorporates the notion of "indifference to and contempt for security." 48
It is perhaps too much to expect Nietzsche's message to resonate in late modern times, to expect, at the very time when conditions seem most uncertain and unpredictable, that people would treat fear as a stimulus for improvement rather than cause for retrenchment. Yet Nietzsche would clearly see these as opportune times, when fear could be willfully asserted as a force for the affirmation of difference, rather than canalized into a cautious identity constructed from the calculation of risks and benefits.
Baudrillard and Hyperrealism
| Like the real, warfare will no longer have any place--except precisely if the nuclear powers are successful in de-escalation and manage to define new spaces for warfare. If military power, at the cost of de-escalating this marvelously practical madness to the second power, reestablishes a setting for warfare, a confined space that is in fact human, then weapons will regain their use value and their exchange value: it will again be possible to exchange warfare |
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--Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies |
Fine allegories, Baudrillard would say of Marx and Nietzsche. Nietzsche's efforts to represent the deeper impulses behind the will to security, as well as Marx's effort to chart the origins of the struggle for power, to pierce the veil of false consciousness that has postponed revolution, to scientifically represent the world-to-be, are just examples of a representational mirroring, a doubling of late-modernity's cartography of the world-as-it-is. "For it is with the same Imperialism," says Baudrillard, "that present-day simulators try to make the real, all the real coincide with their simulation models." 49
Baudrillard goes beyond Nietzsche in his interpretation of the death of god and the inability of rational man or the proletariat to fill the resulting value-void with stable distinctions between the real and the apparent, idea and referent, good and evil. In the hyperbolic, often nihilistic, vision of Baudrillard, the task of modernity is no longer to demystify or disenchant illusion--as Nietzsche realized, "with the real world we have also abolished the apparent " 50 --but to save the reality principle, which in this case means, above all else, the sovereign state acting in an anarchical order to maintain and if possible expand its security and power in the face of penetrating, de-centering forces, like the ICBM, global capital, military (and now civilian) surveillance satellites, the international or domestic terrorist, the telecommunications web, environmental movements and transnational human rights conventions, to name a few of the more obvious forces. In his now familiar words: "It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real." 51
The idea that reality is blurring, or has already disappeared into its representational form, has a long lineage. It can be traced from Siegfried Kracauer's chronicling of the emergence of a "cult of distraction" in the Weimar Republic, 52 to Walter Benjamin's incisive warning of the loss of authenticity, aura, and uniqueness in the technical reproduction of reality, 53 to Guy Debord's claim that, in modern conditions, spectacles accumulate and representations proliferate 54 and, finally, to Jean Baudrillard's own notification that the simulated now precedes and engenders a hyperreality where origins are forgotten and historical references lost. 55 In his post-Marxist work, Baudrillard describes how the class struggle and the commodity form dissolved into a universal play of signs, simulacra, and the inertia of mass culture--and the revolution went missing along with the rest of reality. We are at end-times: but where Marx saw a relentless, dialectical linearity in capitalism leading to social revolution, Baudrillard sees only a passive population depending on the virtuality of technology to save a defunct reality principle.
War serves as the ultima ratio of all four thinkers. The Gulf War, and the postwar attempt to set up a "new world order," provide rich material for Baudrillard's thesis that security has now entered the realm of hyperreality. Back in 1983, when Baudrillard wrote of the renewed possibility of an "exchange of warfare," he had already spotted the dark side to a possible end of the ultimate simulation of the Cold War, nuclear deterrence. And if ever a war was "engendered and preceded by simulation," it was the Gulf War. We were primed for this war. Simulations had infiltrated every area of our lives, in the form of news (re)creations, video games, flight simulators, police interrogations, crime reenactments and, of course, media war games. 56 From the initial deployment of troops to the daily order of battle, from the highest reaches of policymaking to the lowest levels of field tactics and supply, a series of simulations made the killing more efficient, more unreal, more acceptable. 57 Computer-simulated by private contractors, flight-tested at the Nellis Air Force Base, field-exercised at Fort Irwin in the Mojave Desert, and re-played and fine-tuned everyday in the Persian Gulf, real-time war games took on a life of their own as the real war took the lives of more than 100,000 Iraqis.
But there is also evidence that simulations played a critical role in the decision to go to war. In an interview, General Norman Schwarzkopf revealed that, two years before the war, U.S. intelligence discovered, in his words, that Iraq "had run computer simulations and war games for the invasion of Kuwait." 58 In my own research, I learned that Iraq had previously purchased a wargame from the Washington military-consulting firm BDM International to use in its war against Iran; and almost as an aside, it was reported in September 1990, on ABC Nightline , that the software for the Kuwait invasion simulation was also purchased from a U.S. firm. 59 Moreover, Schwarzkopf stated that he programmed "possible conflicts with Iraq on computers almost daily." Having previously served in Tampa, Florida as head of the U.S. Central Command--at the time a "paper" army without troops, tanks, or aircraft of its own--his affinity for simulations was and is unsurprising.
In fact, Schwarzkopf sponsored a highly significant computer-simulated command-post exercise that was played, in late July 1990, under the code-name of "Exercise Internal Look `90." According to a Central Command news release issued at the time, "command and control elements from all branches of the military will be responding to real-world scenarios similar to those they might be expected to confront within the Central Command AOR consisting of the Horn of Africa, the Middle East and Southwest Asia." The war game specialist who put Exercise Internal Look together, Lt. General Yeosock, moved from fighting "real-world scenarios" in Florida to command of all ground troops--except for the special forces under Schwarzkopf--in Saudi Arabia.
Perhaps it is too absurd to believe that the Gulf War was the product of one U.S. wargame designed to fight another wargame bought by Iraq from an American company. Perhaps not. My purpose is not to conduct an internal critique of the simulation industry, nor to claim some privileged grounds for ascertaining the causes of the war. 60 Rather, my intent is to ask whether, in the construction of a realm of meaning that had minimal contact with historically specific events or actors, simulations demonstrated the power to construct the reality they purport to represent-- and international security suffered for it. The question is whether simulations can create a new world order where actors act, things happen, and the consequences have no origins except the artificial cyberspace of the simulations themselves. 61
Indeed, over the last decade there has been a profusion of signs that a simulation syndrome has taken hold in international politics. According to Oleg Gordievsky, former KGB station chief in London, the Soviet leadership became convinced in November 1983 that a NATO command-post simulation called "Able Archer `83" was, in fact, the first step toward a nuclear surprise attack. 62 Relations were already tense after the September shootdown of KAL 007--a flight that the Soviets considered part of an intelligence-gathering mission--and since the Warsaw Pact had its own wargame, which used a training exercise as cover for a surprise attack, the Soviets assumed the West to have one as well. No NATO nuclear forces went on actual alert, yet the KGB reported the opposite to Moscow. On November 8 or 9, flash messages were sent to all Soviet embassies in Europe, warning them of NATO preparations for a nuclear first strike. Things calmed down when the Able Archer exercise ended without the feared nuclear strike, but Gordievsky still maintains that only the Cuban missile crisis brought the world closer to the brink of nuclear war.
On a smaller, more conventional scale, the mistaking of war for its simulation was repeated in July 1988, when the radar operator and the tactical information coordinator of the U.S.S. Vincennes misidentified an Iranian Airbus as an attacking Iranian F-14, even though the ship's highly sophisticated Aegis radar system registered an unknown airplane flying level at 12,000 feet. The nine months of simulation training with computer tapes that preceded the encounter proved more real than the reality of the moment. In effect, the Airbus disappeared before the surface-to-air missile struck, transmuted from an airplane with 290 civilians into an electronic representation on a radar screen and, then, into a simulated target.
The Gulf War is the preeminent, but probably not the last, case of a simulation syndrome manifesting itself in the discourse of national security. Baudrillard was right, in the sense that simulations would rule not only in the war without warring of nuclear deterrence, but also in the postwar warring of the present. 63 It was never in question that the coalition forces would win the military conflict. But they did not win a "war," in the conventional sense of a destroying a reciprocating enemy. What "war," then, did the U.S. win? A cyberwar of simulations. First, the prewar simulation, Operation Internal Look `90, which defeated the "Made in America" Iraqi simulation for the invasion of Kuwait. Second, the war game of AirLand Battle, which defeated an Iraqi army that resembled the game's intended enemy, the Warsaw Pact, in hyperreality only. Third, the war of spectacle, which defeated the spectacle of war on the battlefield of videographic reproduction. And fourth, the postwar after-simulation of Vietnam, which defeated an earlier defeat by assimilating Vietnam's history and lessons into the victory of the Gulf War.
Perhaps Baudrillard's and Marx's worst scenarios have come true: the post-Cold War security state now has the technology of simulation as well as the ideological advantage of unipolarity to regenerate, at relatively low cost to itself, an ailing national economy and identity through foreign adventures. We should expect, then, endo- as well as exo-colonial wars, trade wars and simulated wars to figure in the new world order. Iraq served its purpose well as the enemy "other" that helped to redefine the Western identity: but it was the other enemy, the more pervasive and elusive threat posed by the de-territorialization of the state and the disintegration of a bipolar order that has left us with a "Gulf War Syndrome," in which the construction and destruction of the enemy other is measured in time, not territory; prosecuted in the field of perception, not politics; authenticated by technical reproduction, not material referents; and played out in the method and metaphor of gaming, not the history and horror of warring.
Not a conclusion but a provocation
| People in the newly sovereign republics of the former Soviet Union report greater fear and insecurity than they felt before they became independent. . . . Indeed, the data show that the greatest perceived threats are closest to home, with most of those asked more fearful of their neighbors than anyone else, reflecting the lingering unease among ethnic groups living side by side in the former republics." |
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--"Many in the Former Soviet Lands Say They Feel Even More Insecure Now," |
If security is to have any significance for the future, it must find a home in the new disorder through a commensurate deterritorialization of theory. We can no longer reconstitute a single Hobbesian site of meaning or reconstruct some Marxist or even neo-Kantian cosmopolitan community; that would require a moment of enlightened universal certainty that crumbled long before the Berlin Wall fell. Nor can we depend on or believe in some spiritual, dialectical or scientific process to overcome or transcend the domestic and international divisions, ambiguities, and uncertainties that mark the age of speed, surveillance and simulation.
This is why I believe the philosophical depth of Nietzsche has more to offer than the hyperbolic flash of Baudrillard. Can we not interpret our own foreign policy in the light of Nietzsche's critique of security? As was the case with the origins of an ontotheological security, did not our debt to the Founding Fathers grow "to monstrous dimensions" with our "sacrifices"--many noble, some not--in two World Wars? Did not our collective identity, once isolationist, neutralist and patriotic, become transfigured into a new god, that was born and fearful of a nuclear, internationalist, interventionist power? The evidence is in the reconceptualization: as distance, oceans and borders became less of a protective barrier to alien identities, and a new international economy required penetration into other worlds, national interest became too weak a semantic guide. We found a stronger one in national security , as embodied and institutionalized in the National Security Act of 1947, as protected by the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, and as reconstructed by the first, and subsequent National Security Council meetings of the second, cold war.
Nietzsche speaks a credible truth to increasingly incredible regimes. He points toward a way in which we might live with and recognize the very necessity of difference. He recognizes the need to assert heterogeneity against the homogenizing and often brutalizing forces of progress. And he eschews all utopian schemes to take us out of the "real" world for a practical strategy to celebrate, rather than exacerbate, the anxiety, insecurity and fear of a new world order where radical otherness is ubiquitous and indomitable.
Note *: This essay is a revision of a paper presented at the 1991 British International Studies Association Meeting in Warwick, England, and at the 1991-92 series of workshops on "Security and the Nation-State" held in Santa Cruz, California. An earlier version was published in Mick Dillon & David Campbell, eds., The Political Subject of Violence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). I would like to thank Ronnie Lipschutz, Beverly Crawford, Mick Dillon, David Campbell and all of the participants who offered comments at those occasions, and Bret Brown who provided valuable research assistance. Back.
Note 1: J. Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Science," A. Bass, trans., Writing and Difference (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 279. Back.
Note 2: The same mantra has since been repeated by President Clinton. Back.
Note 3: Stephen M. Walt, `The Renaissance of Security Studies', International Studies Quarterly 35, no. 2 (June 1991): 211-239. Back.
Note 4: Walt, "Renaissance," p. 212. Back.
Note 5: Walt, "Renaissance," p. 213. Back.
Note 6: Stephen Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). Back.
Note 7: The political theorist William Connolly has also noted this tendency among international relations theorists, and refers to it as the "strategy of condemnation through refraction." See William E. Connolly, Identity\Difference--Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 49-63. Back.
Note 8: Walt, "Renaissance," p. 223. Back.
Note 9: M. Heidegger, "The Question concerning Technology" (David Krell, ed.), Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 317. Back.
Note 10: M. Foucault, "On the genealogy of ethics," interview by P. Rabinow and H. Dreyfus, The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 343. Back.
Note 11: See J. Der Derian, chapter 4 on "Mytho-diplomacy," pp. 47-68 and chapter 7 on "Anti-diplomacy," pp. 134-67, in: On Diplomacy--A Geneology of Western Estrangement (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). Back.
Note 12: See Oxford English Dictionary , vol. 9, p. 370. Back.
Note 13: Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1781), xxxi, III, p. 229, quoted in OED , vol. 9, p. 370. Back.
Note 14: William Shakespeare, Macbeth (1605), III, v. 32, quoted in OED , vol. 9, p. 370. Back.
Note 15: E. Burke, Letter to Marq. Rockingh. , quoted in OED , vol. 9, p. 370. Back.
Note 16: Saturday Review (17 July 1858), p. 51, quoted in OED , vol. 9, p. 370. Back.
Note 17: OED , vol. 9, p. 370. Back.
Note 21: See S. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Back.
Note 22: Thomas Hobbes (C. B. Macpherson, ed.), Leviathan (Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1968). Back.
Note 23: Thomas Hobbes (F. Tonnies, ed.), Elements of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), p. 26. Back.
Note 24: Hobbes, Leviathan . Back.
Note 28: For a theoretical exposition of the ontotheological character of "epistemic realism," see Connolly, Identity\Difference , pp. 70-71; and William Connolly, "Democracy and Territoriality," Millennium (Winter 1991): 474 and 483n . See also David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). Back.
Note 29: A fuller account of this essay can be found in Der Derian, On Diplomacy , pp. 138-141. Back.
Note 30: K. Marx, "On the Jewish Question" (L. Easton & K. Guddat, eds.), Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (New York: Anchor Books, 1967), pp. 216-248. Back.
Note 31: Hobbes, Leviathan , p. 64. Back.
Note 32: Marx, "On the Jewish Question," p. 245. Back.
Note 33: This echoes an interpretation first presented by Gilles Deleuze in Nietzsche and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), which inspires much of my analysis of Nietzsche on fear and security. Back.
Note 34: . Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil , no. 13. Back.
Note 35: Beyond Good and Evil , no. 259. Back.
Note 36: Will to Power , no. 53. In an equally significant passage, which links social valuation and biology, Nietzsche warns against interpreting particular legal institutions as anything more than temporary, life-restricting constructs. That is, to the extent that the legal order is "thought of as sovereign and universal, not as a means in the struggle between power complexes, but as a means of preventing all struggle in general" it must be seen as hostile to life. (On the Genealogy of Morals , II, no. 11) Back.
Note 37: F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science , no. 355. Back.
Note 38: Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols , no. 5. Back.
Note 39: Nietzsche, Will to Power , no. 576. On the flip side of this influence of timidity, as man has over time overcome particular fears, the now rational, causal object or instance now gives pleasure precisely because it used to inspire fear. Therefore Nietzsche contends that the "feeling for nature" is possible now due to our previous invocation of mystical meaning and intention. See also Daybreak , no. 142. Back.
Note 40: Will to Power , no. 917 Back.
Note 41: Twilight of the Idols , "The Four Great Errors," no. 6 Back.
Note 42: F. Nietzsche (W. Kaufmann, ed. and trans.), On the Genealogy of Morals (New York: Random House, 1967), pp. 88-89. See also Der Derian, On Diplomacy , pp. 53-56, for a fuller account of how the reciprocity of this relationship between the living and the dead is projected as a mytho-diplomatic mediation between alien peoples. Back.
Note 44: Genealogy of Morals , II, no. 9 Back.
Note 45: Daybreak , no. 112. Bret Brown pointed out to me the connection that Nancy Love makes between Nietzsche and Marx on the relationship of rights to security in Marx, Nietzsche, and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986): "Marx says, `security is the supreme social concept of civil society, the concept of police , the concept that the whole of society is there only to guarantee each of its members the conservation of his person, his rights and his property.' Nietzsche says, `How much or how little is dangerous to the community, dangerous to equality...now constitutes the moral perspective.' They agree that freedom is oppression and equality is inequality, so security is insecurity. Again from different perspectives, they argue that liberal democracy secures an alienated existence." (p.157) Back.
Note 46: Daybreak no. 57. Back.
Note 47: Ibid., no. 551. Back.
Note 48: Genealogy of Morals , I, 11. Back.
Note 49: J. Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), p. 2. Back.
Note 50: See F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols , pp. 40-41; and Der Derian, "Techno-diplomacy," Chapter 9, of On Diplomacy , pp. 199-200. Back.
Note 51: Baudrillard, Simulations , p. 48. Back.
Note 52: See F. Kracauer, "Cult of Distraction: On Berlin's Picture Palaces," (T. Y. Levin, trans.), New German Critique , 40 (Winter 1987): 95; and S. Kracauer, Das Ornament der Masse (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1963); S. Kracauer (T. Y. Levin, trans. and ed.), The Mass Ornament (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995). Back.
Note 53: See Walter Benjamin (H. Arendt, ed.), "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 241-42. Back.
Note 54: See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), no. 1, 45pp. 1 and 23. In a more recent work, Debord persuasively--and somewhat despairingly--argues that the society of the spectacle retains its representational power in current times: see Commentaires sur la Société du Spectacle (Paris: Editions Gerard Lebovici, 1988). Back.
Note 55: Baudrillard, Simulations , p. 2. Back.
Note 56: Whether it took the form of representing criminality on "America's Most Wanted," where alleged crimes are re-enacted for the public benefit, or docu-dramatizing espionage on ABC primetime news, with a stand-in for the alleged spy Felix Bloch handing over a briefcase to a KGB stand-in, a genre of truthful simulations had already been established. There are as well the many commercially available war simulations. To name a few: from Navy simulations there is Harpoon , Das Boot Submarine , Wolf Pack , and Silent Service II ; from the Air Force, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe , F-19 Stealth Fighter , A-10 Tank Killer , and F-15 Strike Eagle ; and for those seeking more serious global simulations, Populous , Balance of Power , SimCity , and Global Dilemma . On the heels of the Gulf War, wargames like Arabian Nightmare (in which the player has the option to kill American reporters like Ted Koppel) and the Butcher of Baghdad were added to the list. Back.
Note 57: Simulations in this context could be broadly defined here as the continuation of war by means of verisimilitude , which range from analytical games that use broad descriptions and a minimum of mathematical abstraction to make generalizations about the behavior of actors, to computerized models that use algorithms and high resolution graphics to analyze and represent the amount of technical detail considered necessary to predict events and the behavior of actors. Back.
Note 58: See J. Albright, "Army mastermind stays ahead of the `game'," Atlanta Constitution , October 25, 1990, p. 1. Back.
Note 59: See T. Allen, War Games (New York: McGraw Hill, 1987), p 4; and "ABC Nightline" transcript, September 26, 1990, p. 3. Back.
Note 60: Two excellent criticisms of the internal assumptions of gaming can be found in a review of the literature by R. Ashley, "The eye of power: the politics of world modeling," International Organization 37, no. 3 (Summer 1983); and R. Hurwitz, "Strategic and Social Fictions in the Prisoner's Dilemma," pp. 113-34, in: Michael Shapiro and James Der Derian, eds., International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1989). Back.
Note 61: This is not to suggest that the 500,000+ troops in Kuwait were not real; rather, to point out that their being there might well have been a consequence of a "reality" constructed out of the imagined scenarios created within the computer war games. Back.
Note 62: C. Andrews and O. Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), pp. 583-605; and conversation with Gordievsky, 7-9 November 1991, Toronto, Canada. Back.
Note 63: The art of deterrence, prohibiting political war, favors the upsurge, not of conflicts, but of "acts of war without war ." Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer (Mark Polizotti, trans.), Pure War (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), p. 27. See also Timothy Luke, "What's Wrong with Deterrence? A Semiotic Interpretation of National Security Policy," pp. 207-230, in: Shapiro and Der Derian, International/Intertextual Relations . Back.
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