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Beyond Resisting Security: Thinking the Complex Political Environment

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Beyond Resisting Security: Thinking the Complex Political Environment Beyond Resisting Security: Thinking the Complex Political Environment Doerthe Rosenow (Royal Holloway, University of London) & Leonie Ansems de Vries (University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus) [email protected] [email protected] Paper to be presented at the Millennium Annual Conference London School of Economics, 20-22 October 2012 Work in progress. Please do not cite without the permission of the author. Comments are most welcome. 1 Introduction (…) between substantial forms and determined subjects, between the two, there is…a natural play of haecceities, degrees, intensities, events and accidents that compose individuations totally different from those of the well-formed subjects that receive them.1 According to critical security scholars, categories of identity and opposition, the self and the other, are crucial to understand contemporary security practices, which ‘form[…] a people’ by instilling fear of what is deemed to be different.2 Security practices, the argument continues, facilitate exclusion and suppression of forms of life that are categorised as less valuable, or are deemed an outright threat. Related to this, the question of how to resist securitisation has emerged as an important one in recent years.3 Claudia Aradau and Rens van Munster distinguish between two different approaches to resistance: (1) the ethical approach that focuses on how the subject of security can and should develop a different understanding of the self and its identity, recognising its interrelation with the Other, and (2) the agency approach that criticises how the Other, the abject of security, is continuously derived from the (ultimately Western) ‘us’ and deprived of any agency.4 This paper appreciates that the question of resistance has appeared on the agenda of critical security studies and values the insights provided by existing research, be they ‘ethical’ or ‘agency’-focused. However, the paper aims to express a discomfort with the incapacity of the discussion to move beyond the binary opposition that (still) underlies the understanding of self and other in both approaches. While the ‘other’ is indeed derived from a pre- conceptualised ‘self’ in the ethical mode, abject agency is equally analysed as re-active, resisting a particular pre-existing logic or practice of security. Indeed, one of the decisive problems lies in the term re-sistance itself, which defines struggle as always secondary. The contention of the paper is that we need to move beyond this impasse by investigating the fundamental ontology that lies at the heart of our contemporary way of thinking about politics. We will demonstrate that reducing the political environment to an oppositional framework does not only feature a problematic understanding of political struggle, but exemplifies a more profound misconception of the organisation of material life; a conception that always starts from the notion of bounded entities and their identities (subjects, abjects, and so forth). By contrast, we argue that (political) life is primarily produced by and productive of a complexity of movements, relations and positions. At first glance, this seems to be a conventional argument moving on the well-trodden path of complexity theory, which had found entrance into the social sciences, including their conceptualisation of the international/global realm, already a decade ago.5 However, drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of life, we maintain that its fleshing-out and application has so 1 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, transl. by Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004), 280. 2 Michael Dillon, The Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought (London and New York: Routledge, 1996): 16. 3 Claudia Aradau and Rens van Munster, “Post-structuralism, Continental Philosophy and the Remaking of Security Studies”, in The Routledge Handbook of Security Studies, ed. Myriam Dunn Cavelty and Victor Mauer (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 77. 4 Ibid: 78-9. 5 See for example John Urry, Global Complexity (Cambridge: Polity Press; Oxford and Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003). 2 far been rather limited, simply because of its inability to fundamentally move beyond what we call the politics-identity-opposition nexus and the continuing denial of the complexity of life’s becoming; especially life’s becoming different from itself. Our investigation thus poses a double challenge to both ethical and agency-focused analyses of the relationship between security and political resistance, by seeking to sever both the security-identity-difference and the security-abject nexus, in favour of a complex understanding of politics as becoming. For the purpose of both, the paper, unlike those poststructuralist critiques that seek to avoid ontological presumptions, embraces the significance of ontology in the pursuit of reimagining politics. This is related to William E. Connolly’s argument that no analysis of politics can take place without at least implicitly invoking ontological and political assumptions and beliefs. In other words: to fundamentally move away from the politics/opposition-impasse, we need to engage in what for Deleuze is creating ontological concepts that are able to transgress classical thinking. Instead of secondarily deriving an understanding of resistant politics from an analysis and critique of the ontopolitical assumptions unveiled in practices of security, as exemplified in Michael Dillon and Julian Reid’s distinction between ‘biopolitics’ and ‘politics’,6 ontological creation in this sense is both primary and secondary – it entails the double movement of ungrounding and at the same time grounding political life. And to (un)ground political life qua complexity, it will be argued, one must turn to Deleuze and Guattari’s radicalisation of complexity thought qua becoming. This involves, firstly, the anteriority of relations and movements rather than prioritising bounded identities and entities; and, secondly, the specific materialism that derives from this. The latter not only blurs the boundaries between the living and the non-living, the organic and the non-organic and the material and the immaterial, but is premised on the primacy of heterogeneous connections and ‘unnatural participations’: Bands, human or animal, proliferate by contagion, epidemics, battlefields, and catastrophes…Propagation by epidemic, by contagion, has nothing to do with filiation by heredity, even if the two themes intermingle and require each other. The vampire does not filiate, it infects. The difference is that contagion, epidemic, involves terms that are entirely heterogeneous: for example, a human being, an animal, and a bacterium, a virus, a molecule, a microorganism. Or in the case of the truffle, a tree, a fly, and a pig. These combinations are neither genetic nor structural; they are interkingdoms, unnatural participations. That is the only way Nature operates – against itself.7 To avoid making this argument about the complexity and radical relationality of life merely in the abstract, the paper will engage with a particular case of political contestation, which is the opposition to genetically modified organisms. Despite being, at first glance, simply another example of political struggle that is framed in oppositional terms, the paper will show that it is underlined by a different notion of life that focuses on its relational aspects and at least attempts to prioritise those over the identities of entities. The engagement with this particular set of practices will serve, on the one hand, to show how the politics-identity-opposition nexus is ungrounded whilst, on the other, it will reveal the (necessary) limitations of this movement of ungrounding in providing an alternative that moves beyond the politics of subject and abject, of self and other. Indeed, the paper will argue that oppositional mo(ve)ments are not to be denounced per se; rather, our understanding of politics must be expanded, multiplied, encompassing also 6 Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 154. 7 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 267. 3 what Deleuze terms lines of flight. These forces of resistance both disrupt and complexify the binary lines of dualistic politics, and create new lines of political becoming beyond dualistic either/or categorisations. We enter a play of becoming forces beyond identity/opposition and re-ordering movements producing binary orderings; a play which is not oppositional but complex and opens up to different modes of relationality and connectivity, different modes of individuation. Politics lies somewhere in-between these movements, in the middle [au milieux]. Resisting security: ethics, agency, ontology Drawing on the thought of Connolly and others, David Campbell argues that contemporary security logics do not recognise how relations of self/other are complex and intertwined, and that ‘secure’ identity-construction always takes place inbetween the ‘self’ and ‘other’. For Campbell, the question of how to resist securitising practices should therefore be answered by projecting an ontology of ‘the radical interdependence of being’ that enables the development of an ‘ethos of political criticism’, which recognises our ‘inescapable responsibility to the other’ and leads to a conceptualisation of politics that weakens its connection to the identity- opposition nexus, making
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