Conversations After Reading Friel (Part Five)
- By Amanda Minervini and Adam Sitze, with Jim Hicks
Link to Part One
Link to Part Two
Link to Part Three
Link to Part Four
V. On Torture Warrants and Kill Courts
Jim Hicks: We can’t end this conversation without saying something about how Friel ends his book. The gesture of Dershowitz towards the authorization of torture courts is a way to get this discussion, he says, out into the open. The labeling of a similar possibility, of having kill courts, is a way of describing what our foreign policy is currently engaging in, although it’s not yet happening in any court discussions that I know of. For me, it made sense for Friel to end the book with a chapter on this topic, because it does seem to me the most dramatic and horrendous symptom of a slide into authoritarianism. And I would like to hear from you both on this, to see if you agreee, and if you see any countervailing forces out there. I hope it’s not too much to ask for us to think about where we go from here, given the warning signs from Friel on where it looks like we’re going.
Amanda Minervini: Adam, do you want to respond?
Adam Sitze: Sure, I’ll take a stab at it. I think Friel is right, that he’s done a good job laying out the argument. I think that there is undeniable evidence that there is an apparatus in the executive branch that is trying to legalize the creation of kill lists, whether or not those on the list are American citizens, whether or not there’s any public or transparent judicial review, whether or not there is due process or a formal declaration of war. So I think there’s definitely a worrisome development here.
To me, the question of authoritarianism is a little bit different. I think of authoritarianism as a form of government in which there’s a strong leader, who is, for the most part, publicly supported, and who maintains a sense of order above all. To me that doesn’t describe Obama or current US politics: I don’t think Obama has the strong public support that would warrant this characterization. Certainly, Obama’s trying to juridify, legalize, and normalize extra-juridical killing, and congress’s authorization for the use of force unfortunately gives him good grounds for his efforts. But honestly, I think that’s the sign of a more chaotic development.
What I worry about is the emergence of a new and different sort of bureaucratic or administrative rule—a form of government that Arendt called “the rule by nobody.” This occurs when you’re obliged to operate on the supposition that somebody is watching you, that somebody is capable of turning you in, that somebody is capable, essentially, of punishing you, or keeping a record on you in order eventually to punish you. What seems to worry Arendt in this form of rule is that, far from there being a single leader directing all of this, there is to the contrary no leader at all—there’s no single person you can name who might be capable of stopping the damned system. You can peel back the onion all you want, but you’ll never find a core, a single locus of power.
The emergence of an impersonal security apparatus, both public and private, both open and secret, that’s been normalized under the Obama administration—to me that’s the real danger with the routinization of endless war, the blending of warfare and the use of military force with normal policing, with normal law enforcement. It would be foolish to deny the increasing concentration of power in the executive branch: we read reports that describe a very centralized process for the creation and maintenance of kill lists. But the vast networks and powerful espionage technologies that characterize this apparatus, that the executive branch has permitted and even demanded, are in principle, on purely technological grounds alone, capable of extending to include surveillance of the very executive branch that authorized their existence in the first place. And that points to the potential for a very different dynamic—one that can’t be deciphered adequately with reference to traditional political categories such as the separation of powers.
Already this is happening with reference to the legislative branch. Bernie Sanders wrote to the NSA recently and asked, “Have you guys spied on members of the Senate?” The response from the NSA was purely bureaucratic: “We do not comment on ongoing operations.” Now, have any of the recent disclosures given us any reason to suppose that once the NSA discovers or invents the technical capacity to surveil a given party or section of the population, they will decide not to carry out that surveillance? Do we have any convincing examples of self-restraint, where they can do something but don’t? Or is the rational supposition instead that whenever the NSA discovers that it can surveil a party or population, they will use that capacity to the utmost? Put differently, isn’t it the case that the NSA is technologically determinist bureaucracy, and that the limits on its powers are determined not by jurisprudence or congressional debate but by technics alone—by the conversion of every technical possibility into a security imperative? If so, does anyone doubt that the NSA is not only capable of surveilling but also by its own logic bound to surveil not only the legislative branch but also the executive branch as well? And if that’s the case, perhaps we’re off the mark when we seek to personify power in this or that authority. Perhaps the problem today is that more than every before power has no author, that it’s a “script”—in the sense that the term is given not only in computer science but also dramaturgy—that runs on its own, that we act out and perform without also revising or editing.
So what I’m most worried about is not actually authoritarianism, but also a generalized surveillance society, a new normal, in which it has somehow become reasonable to assume that our most intimate exchanges are being monitored and archived by a military surveillance agency. Arendt defined bureaucracy as a “rule by nobody”; today’s teletechnical devices allow for the radicalization of that rule. Our eighteenth century institutions of governance—the executive and the legislative alike—now depend upon twenty-first century technologies for their day-to-day functioning. But even as this dependence seems to be becoming ever more definite by the day, those same technologies also seem increasingly to be exceeding the understanding and power of the very authorities who rely upon them. The elected representatives who write and execute our “codes”—our written laws—now rely in their daily work upon a genre of “codes”—algorithms and programs—that they can neither write nor execute, and whose saturation of their lives and their work in fact obliges them to surveil their speech and action from the standpoint of a bureaucracy that by right they’re supposed be overseeing. To make sense of these developments, it won’t be enough just to say, only now at a greater volume, with greater force, that there should be a separation of powers, that we need judicial oversight, and so on. No, we need a whole new metalanguage for politics, one that can begin to take technology seriously as a juridical problem.
Now against this—to go back to concrete jurisdictions—one proposal on the table in Cambridge is that we should pass laws at the most local level to just shut off the water to NSA databases, to use local jurisdictions—city councils, and state governments—to shut off the water to any data collection center that is storing this information. Because the NSA can’t store the information, they can’t keep it cool, without water, and because in many cases local governments control water rights, this is a counterintuitively concrete approach to a global problem that otherwise seems diffuse and insoluble. And so again, if you think only in terms of civil liberties, the debate over the NSA seems over. We don’t even know the jurisprudence, FISA courts are secret, we don’t even know what kinds of arguments are being made. It’s hard to know where to begin. But if you kind of rub your eyes, and then open them again, then the question of jurisdiction, concretely posed, allows for other possibilities, for new and different experiments with emancipatory politics.
Jim Hicks: And so the next move by the government will be to have data collection centers in Guantanamo?
Adam Sitze: Right, point taken. Or Washington DC, another legally indeterminate zone.
Jim Hicks: Amanda?
Amanda Minervini: No, I’m really just tuning in with interest. I see this all turning into a sci-fi film, where the government is bad, and where the resistance is reduced to a few activists who go back to writing letters and not using cell phones. Or do they spy on letters too?
Jim Hicks: Yes, we may all end up using archaic technologies as a way of keeping ourselves outside the digital world. Sci-fi is, at some level, a critical discourse. It’s an attempt to analyze and investigate the present. And the fact that the present may be more wildly dystopian than any novel we’ve yet read. . . that’s a dismal way of phrasing it, but perhaps it does make some sort of sense. After September 11th, didn’t they bring Hollywood scriptwriters in, to see if those guys could figure out the next, ummmh, movie?
Amanda Minervini: In business too… I had to check first to see if this news story is fake, but it's not. Amazon now thinks that they can predict what you’re going to order. So. . . preventive shopping? I’m not laughing, because I’m too puzzled.
Adam Sitze: Just to go back to the point about omnipotence and impotence: Big Data is all the rage, not only in the NSA but in the Digital Humanities. But if you look at the results, what is Big Data doing, actually? As one worries about the “rule by nobody,” one also needs to remain alert to something else: what seems to be the real impotence of the NSA. How many attacks have the NSA actually prevented through the use of these preventive means? Patrick Leahy looked at this. The NSA was claiming that fifty-four attacks have been foiled. Then they looked into this, really very carefully, and found that the number is actually very low: by some counts zero, by some one, or by some six. That’s actually the scariest dimension to all of this. Far from being omnipotent, the NSA’s panicked, hubristic attempts at data collection are basically impotent, and in a strictly dialectical sense: they’ve collected so much data that they can’t actually make sense of it, that they can’t render it intelligible, that they can’t act on it in a way that’s consistent with their desires and stated aims. And, honestly, when you look at some of the results of the Digital Humanities, it’s not much different. Look at some of those micrological studies of sentence structures: what are they actually teaching us about who we are today? What are we understanding better from the results of Big Data that we otherwise wouldn’t understand? What finding or result from this fad will we remember when we look back on the Digital Humanities twenty years from now? The wager of Big Data in the Humanities is that quantity corresponds to quality: massive keyword and string searches will yield insights of a new and different kind. But what you see instead is a quality of an unexpected sort: massiveness in quantity in fact turns out to correspond to minuteness in quality, to discoveries of increasingly tiny scales. Understood as a prosthetic extension of the eye’s aperture, Big Data in the Humanities is not then an opening; it’s a narrowing. It’s a genre of vision that corresponds to nothing so much as exhaustion, to the moment before sleep, when fatigue forces one’s eyes to close in lovely and comforting surrender. A squint, not a stare. The great, open secret of digital instruments is not their omnipotence but their impotence, their inability to produce schemas and forms that create order out chaos, to produce sense or intelligibility, to yield lasting wisdom or vigilant wakefulness.
You could also look at it this way. From Freud we learn that modern individuals have a desire to be “prosthetic gods,” and that technology are material expressions of fantasies that precede, govern, and exceed those expressions. What do we want from our technologies? The same things we used to want from our gods. Redemption, salvation, safety, security, truth and justice, a new and better future, peace in and for our friends and destruction for our foes. One could go on. But our technologies will never live up to the non-technological desires that call them into being: our experience of technology is destined to remain nonidentical with itself, strung out with hubristic untechnological fantasies that are destined to frustrate us even as they hoist us on our own petard, calling into being new technological dynamics that exceed our control even as they fail to satisfy the desires that gave birth to them. And I think that the NSA, and Obama, as well as some digital humanities scholars—some of the people who are most enthusiastic about their faith in high technology—are actually the people who are most untechnological in their desire for technology, in their trust and love of technology.
Today, as we know, the jargon of Silicon Valley subculture has ascended to become the metalanguage of politics and academics alike; it’s become the default language in which we express our self-consciousness about what we do when we try to live together, about what it means to teach and research. But this self-consciousness is shot through with unself-consciousness. Faster computers, more information, bigger data, more networking, greater access and convenience, better algorithms—none of this is not going to resolve the enduring problems of modern politics. The problem the NSA is trying to solve is that security is imperfect, that there are openings in the body politic that can be infiltrated by hostile bodies. But attempts to perfect security end up accomplishing the opposite: they produce an autoimmunitary crisis in which we discover that precisely the protected are in need of an unprecedented sort of protection—protection from the forces of protection itself. That’s what we’re faced with when we think about the NSA: an excessive desire for protection has left the protected themselves vulnerable to the same systems that propose to defend and secure their lives. Our nontechnological faith in technology is not going to change that; it’s going to accelerate it.
Jim Hicks: This discussion actually made me think of an essay by John Berger that we published in our Casualty issue, so I grabbed it off the shelf. It’s a piece he calls “One Message Leading to Another,” and he starts by positing that the state of the planet today, that the dominant metaphor we need to think of, and to think through, is prison. That we are, in fact, prisoners today. And he does that in order to think about what that might mean, but also in order to think of what resistance might mean. And Berger ends by thinking about the weakness, the impotence, of this world of global imprisonment. Let me read it to you:
"The fact that the world’s tyrants are ex-territorial explains the extent of their overseeing power, yet it also indicates a coming weakness. They operate in cyberspace and they lodge in guarded condominiums. They have no knowledge of the surrounding earth. Furthermore, they dismiss such knowledge as superficial not profound. Only extracted resources count. They cannot listen to the earth. On the ground they are blind. In the local they are lost.
For fellow-prisoners the opposite is true. Cells have walls that touch across the world. Effective acts of sustained resistance will be embedded in the local, near and far. Outback resistance, listening to the earth.
Liberty is slowly being found not outside but in the depths of the prison." (MR 52.4, pp.)
Obviously, a kind of utopian moment and discourse. Berger is wonderful for that, and also, in a positive sense, wonderfully romantic, but I think it does get to the fact that, as Adam has been stressing, there are local means that can address this fantasy of omnipotence.
Adam Sitze: Yes, and I think that I would add that despair among leftists has a spatial quality too. Because sometimes these problems seem so massive that we can’t locate any one place where we can begin to intervene against them. I do think that sobriety and effective political action does follow the lines that Berger outlines. Instead of assuming that you’re resisting an omnipotence, and that the power you’re fighting is like the Blob—that it’s everywhere and nowhere, and that it’s always going to win—start from the opposite assumption, that, essentially, power is hubristic, and it doesn’t understand the extent to which its excesses mark the spot of its weaknesses, and also prepare the conditions for its own dissolution. And then treat the local as the kind of site where political imagination begins to investigate those weaknesses. And then begin to use them to slow down the forces that are deteriorating the possibility for a flourishing life. So I love what you just read. I couldn’t agree more. Against despair! When my students despair, it’s always because they’re thinking space in the wrong way, because their hopes are abstract.
Amanda Minervini: So, something in between…?
Adam Sitze: No, honestly, it would be enough today just to be sober. Just to have that kind of Freudian, evenly suspended attention. Freud wanted to have this kind of sobriety about what’s possible and what’s not.
Amanda Minervini: Yes, the reality principle.
Adam Sitze: Exactly.
Amanda Minervini: I like that.
Link to Part One
Link to Part Two
Link to Part Three
Link to Part Four
Amanda Minervini is Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian and German at Salem State University. She has published translations of Giorgio Agamben, Wendy Brown, and Carlo Galli, as well as essays on Saint Francis, Italian cinema, and the work of the philosopher Roberto Esposito. Her essay on the war years of Saint Francis and Pope Francis will appear in MR this fall.
Adam Sitze is Assistant Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College and author of The Impossible Machine: A Genealogy of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Univ. of Michigan Press, 2013). He has also edited, with Timothy Campbell, Biopolitics: A Reader (Duke UP, 2013) as well as Carlo Galli's Political Spaces and Global War (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2010).
