jamie king on Fri, 30 Jan 2004 03:05:38 +0100 (CET) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
<nettime> The Bio-Power Digest (3rd instalment) [excerpt] |
Hey, entity known as Nettime What with all of this talk about biopower, I thought some of y'all might be interested in this 'ere Bio-Power Digest what I've been accepting into my inbox of late. I daresay if you drop me a line by return I may be able to have you added to the author's list directly -- I won't go as far as suggesting you contact him personally, since he does not, possibly significantly, add a name to this publication. FYI, the BPD cometh about once a month. see you, jamie ------> SNIP The Bio-Power Digest (3rd instalment) IATROCAPITALISM! BARE LABOUR! UNLIMITED LIABILITY! The physician says I have “Nervous Prostration”. Possibly I have – I do not know the Names of Sickness. - Emily Dickinson Object ‘a’ The US litigation sector has taken time over its inevitable massive mobilization post-S11. Only now are the outlines of the ingenious legal strategy incubated over the last two years beginning to emerge. Lawyers hired by victims’ families and other ‘materially damaged’ parties are suing airport security agencies, airlines, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the owners of the World Trade Center for ‘negligence in the prevention of terrorism.’ To an extent that seems exceptional today but is easy to imagine as a near-future norm, their case lays bare the ‘effective fiction’ of Law’s application to anomic life by appealing to it directly. New York district court judge Alvin Hellerstein had little choice but to throw out American and United Airlines’ objections, allowing the case to go ahead, because the plaintiffs are invoking, and thus putting to the test the mechanism that ultimately founds Law’s capture of life in every case: the ‘sovereign’, retrospective decision to ‘apply’ Law to unlegislated anomie. The terms of Hellerstein’s ruling lay out this logic of unlimited liability with breathtaking candour. The airlines admitted responsibility for the fate of the passengers on the planes, but they argued that they couldn’t be held accountable for the effects of the towers’ collapse, ‘because the consequences of the attacks were unpredictable’. The Judge was bound to disagree: the airlines are answerable for all the deaths and other ‘damage’ that day, because from the moment the terrorists boarded the aeroplane everything was possible. In other words, the legal principle of probability, of ‘reasonably’ intelligible cause and effect, was instantly suspended when the ‘terrorists’ appeared. By their very presence they created a sort of subaltern ‘state of exception’, within which all laws were in force but none could be applied. This didn’t mean the cancellation of legal responsibility, although the latter is articulated precisely in terms of the idealized common sense of cause and effect. On the contrary, the impossibility of delimiting responsibility for particular effects meant that all parties could be limitlessly accountable for everything that happened. Neither the space nor the patience is available here to go into why it might be convenient right now for the Empathetic Security Statei to have this principle, on which the application of all Law always implicitly depends, brought a little further out into the open in a high-profile, emotion-saturated test case. It’s at least a ‘sign of the times’ that this happens at a moment when ‘security and public health risks’ tend to be presented in terms of virtually permanent invisible menace, perpetually threatening to detach cause from comprehensible effect, to paralyse society and individuals with ever-exceptional undecideability. A less banal chain of consequences, however, might follow from a legal precedent unobtrusively established by the ruling, almost as a by-product of the main vindication of Law’s biopolitical basis in unlimited liability. According to the court, the hijacked aeroplanes (and, by extension, all the territory attacked using them, and, by extension, all the world in which another such attack remains possible...) were transformed into something like zones of exception, in which ‘anything was possible’, with all application of Law suspended even as all laws remained in force. (Enforcement of the ‘suspended’ laws, of course, is merely deferred, until the future moment of their unlimited retrospective application to everything ‘within’ the episode of causal undecideability.) Accounting for the events in these terms, however, entails determining the hijackers’ legal position in relation to them, even if only implicitly. In traditional legal theory, the power to initiate and end the state of exception is exclusive to the sovereign; in fact the essential quality of sovereignty consists in this perogative. Judge Hellerstein departs dramatically from this tradition, for, geopolitical conspiracy theories aside, no constituted sovereign power can be said to have ‘declared’ the airborne exception. ‘Everything was possible’ from the moment the terrorists boarded the aeroplane: the exceptional circumstance is unequivocally attributed to their action. Their embarkation was the last causally intelligible act before the suspension of legal causality, and the interlude ended with their final ‘decision’ on the flying bombs’ delivery. Whatever Hellerstein intended, the ruling marks a breakthrough in materialist jurisprudence: sovereign power is fully secularized, detached from all residue of divine right or moral content, even from the need for a fixed relation to a given sovereign body. In bestowing it on a few lightly-armed civilian ‘irregulars’, the Judge acknowledged sovereignty to be assumed, contested and transferred, bought, sold and usurped, according to the prosaic contingencies of material power. Never before have such plainly subaltern subjects been endowed in Law with the regal privilege of concentrating the ‘decision over death’ in their own miserably exposed bodies, interrupting the legal order and in doing so renewing its ‘exceptional’ basis in the lethal management of life. Object ‘a’.1 Some national justice systems have advanced further than others in updating the idea of a crime from that of an event occurring at a particular time and place to that of a pure potentiality of the criminal body, as much an essential personal attribute before as after it first manifests itself in whatever transgressive act. The UK leads the world in this kind of research, with particular success in the pre-emptive enclosure of potential or latent criminals. Nonetheless, although the British biopolice works on the cutting edge, a few lessons remain to be learned from overseas. Late in 2003 the Inner London Crown Court convicted Mohammed Dica, described without fail by newspapers as ‘an asylum seeker’, of biological grievous bodily harm, for infecting two lovers ‘with HIV, which causes Aids’. The verdict was ‘greeted with tears, applause and shouts of “yes”’. Around the same time, however, a Federal court in Switzerland showed just how far Law can really go towards annexing the indeterminate in cases of this kind. According to Corriere del Ticino, a Zurich ‘drug addict’ was imprisoned 15 months ago for ‘Aids contamination’. Except that no virus but fear was actually transmitted: he only believed he’d infected his partner, and this belief was the basis for the original conviction. When he tested HIV-negative, the erstwhile pathogen appealed against his sentence, but he lost his appeal and has to stay in jail. The court ruled that, even though it wasn’t what he was initially convicted for, having had sexual relations with his partner made him guilty of an impossible crime under article 23 of the Swiss penal code. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net