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Power at the heart of the present: Exception, risk and sovereignty

Mitchell Dean European Journal of Cultural Studies 2010 13: 459 DOI: 10.1177/1367549410377147 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ecs.sagepub.com/content/13/4/459

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european journal of
Article

Power at the heart of the present: Exception, risk and sovereignty

Mitchell Dean
Abstract

European Journal of Cultural Studies 13(4) 459475 The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permissions: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1367549410377147 ecs.sagepub.com

Macquarie University

This article argues that the notion of power is less important as a theoretical concept that can guide research than as an orientation towards the present. As such, it foregoes a focus on agencies of power for an engagement with relations and mechanisms of power and what Foucault terms a critical ontology of ourselves. It notes that the first decade of the 21st century has witnessed different series of catastrophic events, such as 9/11 or the financial meltdown of September 2008. These events appear as markers of a crisis of neoliberalism as both governmentality and metaphysics. The elements of an emerging set of relations of power include the security complex characterized by the language of the exception, the rationality of precautionary risk, new techniques of security, and recharged and often militant forms of sovereignty capable of delegation by and derogation from the state. It is the understanding of this dispositif, its ambiguities and consequences, captured by a broad range of cultural, political and social studies, which locates the relations of power that lie at the heart of many current contestations. Given the fecundity and creativity of these analyses, such studies would appear to call into question the project of a theory of power.

Keywords
crisis, event, exceptionalism, governmentality, neoliberalism, power, risk, security, sovereignty

In the words of one iconoclast, we are warned about the concept of power. Be sober with power, advises Bruno Latour (2005: 261): abstain as much as possible from using the notion of power in case it backfires and hits your explanations instead of the target you are aiming for. This can serve as an epigraph for the present article. The article addresses a literature across international relations, security studies, political science and cultural studies that establishes the salience of aspects of contemporary

Corresponding author: Mitchell Dean, Centre for Research on Social Inclusion, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia. Email: Mitchell.Dean@mq.edu.au

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power relations, including the pervasive idiom of exceptionalism, the notion of precaution in risk rationality, techniques of security and the renewal and modification of sovereignty. The sum of these themes marks key contours of contemporary regimes and experiences of power. This has been called the dispositif of precautionary risk (Aradau and van Munster, 2008) and the state of pre-emption (Ericson, 2008). However, this wideranging field poses something of a conundrum. The characterization of these regimes and experiences of power proceeds, as if heeding Latour, without bothering a great deal 1 with the theory and concept of power. The key theoretical reference here remains Michel Foucault and his analytics of power and governmentality. Foucaults analytics can be contrasted with conventional approaches to power. From the perspective of Steven Lukes (2005: 61), Foucault beamed floods of light on questions of securing the compliance of more or less willing subjects of power, but did so in an excessively rhetorical style entirely free of methodological rigour. By contrast, the theoretical approaches to power of the community power debates of the 1960s practised a healthy precision, clarity and methodological rigour (2005: 60). Yet, it is Foucauldian analytics rather than a theory of power that continues to help us name and understand contemporary power relations and the discourses, imaginaries, techniques and technologies through which power operates and is manifest. Lukes further proposes that power cannot be attributed to structures or relations or processes that are unable to be characterized as agents (2005: 72). The literature I refer to here does not share this view. From the various perspectives afforded by it, this problematic of agency is relatively banal and moribund. For much of it, power is not primarily attributable to agents or, if it can be, such an attribution is the least interesting thing about power. These analyses do not start from the project of a clarification of the general theory of power or from a primary concern with the identification of agents of power, but from the attempt to understand the kind of power relations in which such forms of agency appear. More specifically, I shall now suggest, they have as their objective an understanding of the regimes (or dispositifs) and relations of power at the heart of the present. If such studies contribute to the concept of power, it is through the understanding and characterization of these power relations rather than a clarification of the essential meaning of the term. There is a further central feature of this contemporary analytics of power that I want to emphasize: its relation to our experience in the present. Foucault elaborated a critical ontology of ourselves or an ontology of ourselves and ontology of the present (Foucault, 1986b: 50, 1986a: 96). Here, the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them (Foucault, 1986a: 96). The analysis of relations of power is thus a component of how we come to understand who we are and the nature of our present. It is a way in which we have come to be who we are, and it is a way in which, through our understanding, we can become clear about key regimes of power such that they would become available for contestation. Even if much of the research of the past decade does not explicitly pose Foucaults politico-experimental attitude, it is certainly concerned to grasp those limits and to make intelligible how power works or what happens in relations of power. From this perspective, power (relations, discourses and mechanisms) should be understood as constitutive of our present and things of our world rather than a Platonic

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form (Power with a capital P) that allows us to detach ourselves from that world in order to analyze it. How we name and identify relations of power are part of an attempt to understand our experiences, our present and ourselves. Rather than seeking to grasp the totality of power relations, the task of this literature whether it draws on or contests governmentality studies focus on liberalism and neoliberalism; Agambens paradigms of sovereignty and the exception, notions of risk and Ulrich Becks risk society, or even Carl Schmitts steely accounts of sovereignty and international law is to indicate what is new, novel, innovative or simply different about the present. They ask of power a question Foucault found in Kants texts on Enlightenment: What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday? (1986b: 24). For the purposes of this article, part of the answer to that question is the rise of the catastrophic event as exogenous to liberal ways of governing, the crisis of neoliberalism, both as an art of government and a metaphysics, and the emergence of a rather different assemblage of imaginaries, rationalities, techniques and practices (a dispositif) centred on governing security through risk. Intellectually, terms and theories of power are today deploying vocabularies of sovereignty and security, the exception and the political, which is reshaping older perspectives and concepts around governance and networks. Temporally rescaling Carl Schmitts thesis that significant concepts of the modern theory state are secularized theological concepts that partake of the structure of the metaphysical image that a definite epoch forges of the world (1985: 36, 46), I want to suggest, therefore, that our concepts of power have many specific connections to other extensively used metaphysical images. Defined negatively, I would propose that our present is defined by the moment when the images of network, governance, complexity, flows and even globality no longer capture our experience of relations of power. Defined positively, I want to propose, first, that our present the long twentyfirst century (Dean, 2007: 26) is marked by the crisis of neoliberal governmentality.

The crisis of neoliberal governmentality

Yet, what is this present? Present to and for whom? What gives it its unity? These are fundamental questions (Dean, 1994: 513). Foucault was aware that the present was one for a distinct we, a unique cultural ensemble (1986a: 89). With these provisos, our experience of the current century is one of disruption by events, which are or appear to be outside the ways in which we imagined the world and its futures, or they were imagined for us. They are events that were unexpected, but which, in hindsight, could have been anticipated. In a sense, events immobilized the assemblages of thought and action that had been created to process and simplify our world. Fukuyamas end of history has itself come to an end even, or especially for, American neoconservatives (e.g. Kagan, 2008). 9/11 was no doubt the archetype of such events, but it was by no means the first; consider the 2000 presidential election in the USA. The long history of the 21st century has revealed itself to be one of a series or, rather, of several series of: bombings and terrorist attacks aimed at the safe spaces of the inhabitants of the liberal democratic world (New York/Washington/Pennsylvania, Bali, Madrid, London); other unanticipated and catastrophic events (avian flu, Katrina, Asian tsunami, food crisis, climate change); and,

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towards the end of the decade, of economic and financial events, starting in the American subprime mortgage market and encompassing financial, housing and employment markets. Certainly, the first decade has been defined (at least for a certain cultural ensemble) by two Septembers: that of 2001 and that of the financial events (e.g. the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the ensuing panic) of 2008 and their consequences. The event, thus, is unexpected and anticipated at the same time, as one commentary on the Russian-Georgian war of August 2008 put it (Nodia, 2008). It appears in the first place as something unthinkable, extraordinary and utterly exceptional. Yet, it could also have been anticipated. It can be broken into its constituent parts and explained almost as soon as it happens, although few foresaw its possibility or those that did went unheeded. Against the smooth contours of narratives of liberal progress, peace, freedom and prosperity, the event punctures, deflates and defeats our expectations. Certainly, events of this kind, from Watergate to Rwanda, have marked other recent decades. No doubt the event has become partly media driven. Yet, for our purposes, I am interested in how this kind of experience of the event is bound up with transformations in our technologies of power, particularly those concerned with risk to our security. For, as we shall see, it is the security techniques of risk which today seek the pre-emption of the catastrophic event (Amoore and de Goede, 2008a: 78) or the minimization of the probability of an undesirable event happening in the future (Aradau et al., 2008a: 148). The shock and awe of the event, its unexpected character, which is soon broken down, analyzed and even explained away, is, however, an indication of something that is perhaps more fundamental, which I shall characterize as the crisis of neoliberalism, both as governmentality and as metaphysics. Over the last decades of the 20th century, neoliberalism came to be understood as the dominant philosophical or policy framework through which power has been exercised in the domestic and international spheres. For David Harvey (2005: 2), neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade. In what came to be called governmentality studies, by contrast, the emphasis was less on neoliberalism as a theory or ideology and more as an art or style of governing based on a critique of the irrationality peculiar to excessive government (Foucault, 2008: 322). By contrast, the metaphysics of neoliberalism are captured in the imagery of the perfect circulation of goods, money and profits in a pacific global domain and, hence, the end of history manifest in the telos of liberal democratic capitalism and a consequent diminution or displacement of the capacities of the sovereign state by partnerships and networks of governance. The metaphysics of this neoliberal programme are, therefore, a vision of the world in terms of mobility and complexity and of flat, horizontal relations. It is an image of a giant network or, better still, a worldwide web, which somehow renders archaic asymmetrical power relations and domination. In Foucaults lectures, there are two different forms of the crisis of governmentality. Both are rooted in the ever-present liberal test of the risk of too much governing that is at the heart of such crises. Here, the recurrent crises of governmentality are intrinsic to the liberal art of government, which operates as a critique and a method of the rationalisation of government (Foucault, 2008: 318). He concludes:

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So we arrive, if you like and this is an important point to keep hold of at the idea that in the end this liberal art of government introduces by itself or is the victim from within [of] what could be called crises of governmentality. (2008: 68)

The first form is one of the economic costs of the exercise of democratic freedom. An example would be the anti-work and anti-consumer sentiment that has run through alternative social and cultural movements since the 1960s. The second crisis is due to the inflation of the compensatory mechanisms of freedom, which, he said in 1979, is precisely the present crisis of liberalism (2008: 689). Here the devices that are designed to secure freedom public provision in health care, social welfare and education, for instance actually risk producing their opposite. In both American libertarian liberalism and German ordoliberalism, the target here is Keynes and the interventionist policies perfected between 1930 and 1960 and the paradoxical effects of those mechanisms that are introduced to avoid the reduction of freedom that would be entailed by transition to socialism, fascism, or National Socialism (2008: 69). While, with some reservations (e.g. the oil shocks of the 1970s), the formation of neoliberalism in the period 19752000 might be viewed as this kind of endogenous crisis of governmentality, our present has thrown up a rather different kind of crisis. We might ask, what happens when the form taken by governmentality is already one that is constantly on guard against too much governing and which is precisely the outcome of such an anxiety? Is such a governmentality therefore not susceptible to crises? Can there be a crisis of not governing enough in which the state has failed as regulator and which requires direct intervention by states acting alone or together? In a speech on health care in 2009, President Obama argued: that the danger of too much government is matched by the perils of too little; that without the leavening hand of wise policy, markets can crash, monopolies can stifle competition, the vulnerable can 2 be exploited. This is where, I propose, the present, as we understand it here, provides a kind of necessary modification or extension to Foucaults thesis. Within the context of what became known as the global financial crisis, the key principle today is not so much that one is always governing too much, but that one should seek a balance between governing too much and governing too little. What is at stake in this present is not an intrinsic crisis of liberalism similar to the critique and problematization of welfarism from the late 1970s, but an extrinsic, unexpected and, in that sense, cataclysmic crisis, at least from the perspective of neoliberalism. It is this crisis that forms the backdrop of the rethinking of configurations of regimes of power in the present around what might be called the idiom of the exception and the emergence of a new security complex which activates a precautionary approach to risk.

Exception
Today, key aspects of politics and government are discussed and conceived through the idiom and vocabulary of the states of exception and emergency. This discussion addresses power relations in that it represents something of a renewed theoretical salience of the concept of sovereign power, which has been displaced to the margins of earlier

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discussions of national and international governance a point elaborated below. Some of the domains in which this language is deployed include: the return of the camp (Diken and Lausten, 2005); counter-terrorism legislation and policy, including the use of torture; extra-judicial targeted killing by states (Kessler and Werner, 2008); border control and the protection and security of the homeland or domopolitics (Walters, 2004); and, various types of military interventions, including doctrines of pre-emption and humanitarian intervention (Aradau, 2007; Huysmans, 2008: 165; Neocleous, 2008). It is also used to describe natural disasters and manmade catastrophes. The key proposition is that the event, the catastrophe that cannot be foreseen, introduces a radical uncertainty into the future. The experience of the actuality of catastrophic events, as well as the radical contingency of future events of this kind, creates a necessity that entails a suspension or curtailment of what are generally assumed to be fundamental liberties and basic rights in order to protect citizens. In the language of exceptionalism, one series of events, real and imagined, those which start with 9/11, have been viewed as necessitating the denial of normal legal processes and basic individual rights, including being informed of charges, access to legal representation and civilian courts and of protection under the international law of war, including the Geneva Conventions. Places like the USAs detention camp at Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, have been viewed, usually critically, as a legal black hole or a legal limbo, the legal equivalent to outer space or a space outside the law (see Johns, 2005; Neocleous, 2008: 401). In the idiom of the exception, the event is thus linked to a response held to be necessary, such as a temporary state of emergency. Soon after the rubric of the war on terror was adopted, however, some theorists argued that this was far from a temporary situation and would become a permanent feature of the political landscape (Agamben, 2005; Hardt and Negri, 2004). If exceptionalisms first move is to identify the conditions of emergency that have suspended law, one of its second moves is to argue that these conditions create a new normal. The key references here are Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamins thesis that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule (Agamben, 2005: 6; Neocleous, 2008: 40). Schmitts account of sovereignty explains this more fully and links yesterdays exception with todays rule. Here, the sovereign is not only he who decides the state of exception, but, given that a legal order depends on a normal situation, also he who definitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists (Schmitt, 1985: 5, 13). In a famous echo of this in response to 9/11, Vice-President Cheney was to argue as early as October 2001 that:
Homeland security is not a temporary measure just to meet one crisis. Many of the steps we have now been forced to take will become permanent in American life. They represent an understanding of the world as it is, and dangers we must guard against perhaps for decades to 3 come. I think of it as the new normalcy.

In this respect, we can say that rather than a state of exception becoming the norm, a decision on the exception presupposes a decision on what is normal and that the existence of the exception reframes the very idea of normality. Hence, the exceptional event its ramifications and the radical contingency it engenders enters into the decision of what constitutes what Schmitt called the normal, everyday frame of life (1985: 13).

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The language of exceptionalism has been criticized for its representation of what happens in the geographic space of exception. Rather than a space outside the law, in her analysis of Guantnamo Bay, Johns (2005: 618) finds one filled to the brim with law and legal and administrative regulation. She also criticized it for its absorption of critical energies and for its assumption that a return to legality will solve many of the problems it identifies. More broadly, its lineage is denounced as politically dubious, as tending to obscurantism and as occluding conceptions of the societal and, hence, democratic basis of the political (Huysmans, 2008). Others regard the discourse on the exception as highly analytically problematic because it emphasizes the extreme mechanisms of power as domination, coercion and violence and might even seek to ground all kinds of power in fundamentalist conceptions of sovereignty (Rabinow and Rose, 2006). These criticisms are germane if exceptionalism is taken to be an explanation of the present. Alternatively, we could seek to understand it as a component of the rationalities, imagination and contestation of power in our present. At its simplest, the exception is a diagram of power that can authorize and justify the deployment of extended security measures, police powers and military interventions and specific techniques in the arrest, detention and treatment of suspected populations, and can be deployed to address natural catastrophes. The same diagram can also be used to criticize, from the perspective of law, the foregoing of legal process and rights. A diagram is a way of rendering visible a domain, which may be a physical space or a domain of problems and events. In this sense, Agambens (1998) conception of the camp as the paradigm of our contemporaneity could be considered to be less what actually happens in particular kind of camps than as a sophisticated version of the diagram of exceptionalism, which stresses the aporia of a space in which being taken outside (ex-capere) is a kind of political inclusion and which breaks up the unity of order and orientation found in law. A diagrammatic rationality has no necessary political valence or directionality. If governmentality entails an action under a description, as Hacking would say (1999: 99114), then the diagram is the component that provides the description that renders the domain visible and knowable. Sometimes contestation might take place between different descriptions. In the case of the exception, however, contestation takes place within the same diagram. Here, the military, security analysts and professionals and politicians share the same discursive space as human rights activists, non-governmental organizations, civil libertarians and some lawyers and judges who criticize them. Both uses of the diagram share the opposition between normal life and exceptional measures, the trade-off between individual liberties and the security state. Insofar as the latters mission is to defend a free society based on the rule of law, and law is a central component of the institution of security, both sets of arguments might be seen as making the field of security practices operational. The diagram of the exception is linked to the crisis of neoliberal governmentality. First, we have a liberal critique of exceptionalism in terms of the rights and liberties of the legal subject. More fundamentally, from a neoliberal perspective, exceptionalism portends excessive state intervention without limits and suspends the rule of law. In both these senses, it resembles neoliberalisms key adversaries of war planning, national socialism, Soviet socialism and Keynesian interventionist policies (Foucault, 2008: 322 3). Indeed, the exception mobilizes and uses the language of war and national security so that the legal order must be broken to save the social order (Ericson, 2008: 57).

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Yet there is a different side of exceptionalism. Its political valences are not all the same. Witness the affinity of certain strategies of national security with social security and social welfare measures. According to Collier and Lakoff (2008: 12), the development of national security and civil defense in the USA after the Second World War, in response to the risk of nuclear attack, was a kind of Cold War liberalism based on a military-Keynesian consensus. Today, emergency response doctrines of distributed preparedness do not generate extrajudicial detentions that increase the power of the federal government and curtail civil liberties and protections (2008: 26). Instead, they advocate a disaggregated sovereignty and a coordinated local and state response. To the extent that they locate key vulnerabilities in decaying infrastructure, areas of poverty and weak public health services, such doctrines can lead to more social welfare and healthcare expenditure. In this sense, there might be an unsuspected politics of what kind of exceptional security measures should be implemented. In other programmes, neoliberalism and the exception work hand in hand. The normal, everyday frame that is to be secured might be characterized as neoliberal (Aradau and van Munster, 2008: 357). This is not simply the identification of our way of life with that of capitalist economic activity and private property, but the active use of exceptionalism and emergency to undo workers power in the workplace, breaking and forbidding unionization for security personnel at airports and dubbing unpatriotic those unwilling to accept wage and benefit cuts. Here, exceptionalism defines the space in which the neoliberal critique of excessive government meets the necessities to secure and extend the power of corporations and the control of capital. Both in classical liberal accounts of law and government and in Michel Foucaults rendering of the liberal arts of government, liberty is closely linked to security. Generally, liberty and security are viewed as forming a zero-sum game, so that greater measures of security may occasion a reduction of individual liberty. In a sense, the argument over necessity and the state of exception is a particular variant of this security-liberty relationship insofar as it concerns the quantum of liberty exchanged for securing it. Foucault, by contrast, uncovers another trope of classical liberal thought and practice in which individual liberty is a condition of the functioning of those quasi-natural processes, such as those of the economy, whose security is necessary to prosperity and order (2007: 353). The crisis of neoliberal governmentality would appear, however, to activate mutations found along another related axis: that of risk and security.

Risk
Some analysts have noted a shift in the meaning and practice of security from a threatbased model, emphasizing agency and intent, intelligence and dangers, to a model based on risk (Aradau et al., 2008a: 148). They argue that the latter looks more towards characteristics of systems, actuarial-like data and contingency and risk refers to the problem of an undesirable event happening in the future. As a consequence of this shift, they conclude, we have witnessed a range of different policies and techniques that function within a more or less organized ensemble of practices, techniques and rationalities concerning precautionary risk a dispositif of precautionary risk (Aradau and van Munster, 2007: 91).

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According to Franois Ewald, the precautionary principle does not target all risk situations but only those marked by two principal features: a context of scientific uncertainty on the one hand and the possibility of serious and irreversible damage on the other (2002: 282). Precautionary risk therefore applies not only to terrorist risk, such as that emerging after 9/11, but also to ecological risks, such as those of climate change and those of technological catastrophes in the nuclear and chemical industries. An early formulation of the principle of precaution is in the Rio Declaration of 1992: Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation (cited in Aradau and van Munster, 2007: 102). It would follow that the routine invocation of the Great Depression of the 1930s as an exemplar of the effects of economic catastrophe during the financial crisis of 200809 performed a similar kind of precautionary logic. Aradau and van Munster argue that precautionary risk is based on four interlinked rationalities that allow for the deployment of specific technologies of government: zero risk, worst-case scenario, shifting the burden of proof and serious and irreversible damage (2007: 103). These rationales, grounded in the catastrophic and radically contingent elements of risk, displace earlier ones based on the mutual pooling of risk and compensation for injury. The key point is that any level of risk is now considered unacceptable; risk must be avoided at all costs. Risk minimization and other forms of risk management (such as contingency planning) derive from the joint realization that the catastrophe will happen. Precautionary risk, as Amoore and de Goede note (2008a: 1011; Ewald, 2002: 294), is a risk beyond risk, one that acknowledges the sheer unpredictability and incalculability of the catastrophic event, but nonetheless seeks to anticipate and pre-empt such an act. Precautionary risk practices exceed the limits provided by actuarial calculation while, at the same time, attempting to envision and imagine how, when and where the catastrophic event might occur, hence the use of imaginative rather than statistical techniques, such as stress testing, scenario planning and disaster rehearsal (OMalley, 2004: 5). Risk emerges as a technology of limits always capable of exceeding those limits (Amoore and de Goede, 2008a: 15). The contemporary attempt to govern security through risk often has sources and sites beyond the war on terror in areas such as critical infrastructure protection and crime fighting (Aradau et al., 2008a: 149). Simon (2008) notes the way in which the war on terror itself has been shaped by the skewing of the fields of crime, politics and governance towards security. De Goede (2008) shows how the war on terror has enlisted techniques for the tracking and tracing of financial transactions and has used these as forms of intervention outside or below the threshold of formal law. Precautionary risk tolerates zero risk, but it does so through heterogeneous means, including ones that might employ a more differential risk calculation. Consider the recent innovations at or around national borders and in airports, which are themselves no doubt an outcome of the deployment of the idiom of the exception and of emergency since 9/11 (Neocleous, 2008: 689) and the logic of precaution. A key example, studied by Amoore (2006), is the development of the comprehensive management of crossings into the USA via the United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (US VISIT).

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This US VISIT system, devised under the Department of Homeland Security by a team headed by management consultants Accenture, addressed the issue of identifying potential terrorists and other high-risk individuals through data integration and dataveillance, and, in so doing, is a component in the establishment of a biometric border. Accentures smart border solution rests upon a system of dataveillance that categorizes populations into degrees of riskiness, produced by interfacing and integrating approximately 20 existing databases from police authorities, to health, financial and travel records (Amoore, 2006: 33940). The logic of precaution, with its tolerance of zero risk, drives the innovation and implementation of such systems. However, the latter might apply a different kind of risk calculus (here, of the division of populations according to degrees of risk) in the pursuit of such a goal. Paul Henman (2004) has observed the close relationships between risk rationalities and targeted governance in his analysis of Australian social security systems. He finds a multilayered and heterogeneous approach to welfare fraud, which shifts away from the focus on the offence in criminal law, or the dangerous individual in discipline, to the unknown offence or even the prevention of uncommitted offences (2004: 178). According to this kind of risk logic, it is sufficient to have the characteristics or profile of the welfare fraudster or the long-term unemployed to be treated as if one had committed welfare fraud or had become pathologically unemployable. Something similar occurs with the US VISIT system. Risk is calculated via a multilayered system that integrates multiple and diverse databases with aspects of the body through biometric identifiers such as fingerprints, iris scans, facial and gait recognition. The allure of biometrics derives from the entwinement of informational systems with the characteristics of the individual body; the latter is an indisputable anchor to which data can be safely secured (Amoore, 2006: 345). As a consequence, US VISIT acts as a dividing practice that confers different risk identities such as the trusted traveller, the illegal immigrant and the terror suspect. To apply Henmans point, it is enough to have the characteristics of the latter groups to be treated as if one were one of them. The dispositif of precautionary risk suggests that the key intelligibility of security measures in the wake of the crisis of neoliberalism does not purely reside in the language of exceptionalism, although there are certainly affinities between catastrophe and emergency, and the worst case scenario and exception. If the idiom of exceptionalism demands that we bypass legal conventions and rights, it is because this is viewed as necessitated by a situation that calls for zero risk. Pre-emptive strikes and extrajudicial killing, contracting out torture by means of extraordinary rendition to third parties and states, raising the threshold on what constitutes torture and the use of indefinite detention are all responses to the application of the logic of precaution to terrorism as a catastrophic event. This has led some scholars to try to distinguish this new assemblage from a classical state of exception. Ericson used the term counter-law to describe what he called the state of pre-emption (2008: 578), a situation where, following Agamben (2005: 87), the declared state of exception has been replaced by an unprecedented generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government. The first types of counter-laws are laws that undermine existing law and are, in a sense, laws against law. These include: the provisions of the Patriot Act, such as those pertaining to unlawful enemy combatants and the role of Combatant Status Review Tribunals; the torture

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memos (Greenberg and Dratel, 2005); and, the legalization of access to communications and database infrastructures (Ericson, 2008: 627). The second are surveillant assemblages, which include: the extended use of CCTV, potentially across all public space; the integration of domestic and national security, and of terrorism and crime fighting, through the use of electronic surveillance; the tracking of money trails and banking transactions; the growth of private security operatives; and, the intensified insurance oversight of commercial operations (2008: 6976). It is possible to identify a third category of counter-law in the state of pre-emption: the undoing of law or a law above the law. Kessler and Werner (2008) show how the legal rationalities that seek to regulate targeted killing by states are undone by the principle of precautionary risk in the war on terror. The introduction of the unstructured, radical and genuine uncertainty (2008: 294) of precaution into law undoes the distinction between the law of peace and the law of war, and between domestic and international law, and evades the accountabilities of independent inquiry after the fact and of determination of guilt entailed in principles of individual responsibility, imminent threat or institutionalized danger. The status of the unlawful combatant is particularly unstable because it denies one party the privilege of fighting while rendering them lawful targets for attack (2008: 304). The logic of this is that states borrow the language and moral force of the law enforcement paradigm without accepting the real responsibilities that normally come with it (2008: 305). Legal accountability is overridden by a higher source of law: political discretion. It is commonly pointed out that the risk of being a victim of terrorist attacks is small 4 relative to the cost of being secure against such risks. This type of comment is both beside the point and precisely on point. It is on point in that it indicates the sense of the crisis of neoliberalism. It is hard to justify the levels of expenditure on security in an economically rational calculus; this is clearly too much government. It is beside the point in that once it is accepted that zero risk is the only acceptable level of risk in a given situation or space, then a critique of too much government in terms of economic costs can no longer be successful. This underlines the affinity between the crisis of neoliberalism and the formation of the risk-security complex.

Sovereignty
The idiom of exceptionalism operates less in relation to a lawless state of exception and more in relation to the laws and counter-laws, forms of expertise and governmental regulation which constitute this risk-security complex. However, the characterization of the risk-security complex would be incomplete without a critical understanding of sovereignty. If sovereign power is a deductive power, grounded on a right of death, as Foucault assayed (2003), then it is hard not to characterize aspects of this risk-security complex in such terms. The kind of practices that follow from the risk-security complex at, within and outside the borders of nations are those that might deduct from liberty, as Foucault would have it, such as detention, expulsion, deportation and banishment. In this regard, they remind us of Agambens (1998) theme of the sovereign ban, which is a taking to the outside of the social body, an exception in this active sense of the word. Even more

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fundamentally, the dispositif of precautionary risk destabilizes and reshapes the basis of the right to kill, as we mentioned in the case of extrajudicial killing by states. No doubt the majority of those who register as positive on the risk of terrorism scale, whether a false positive or not, will not be subject to this kind of sovereign power. Yet, the risk-security complex also empowers certain actors, such as police officers, air marshals, private security guards, regular armies and special forces officers, to act with deadly force. And we know that this sovereign right of death has been exercised on civilians with no relation to terrorism other than suspicion. The example of the Brazilian immigrant Jean Charles de Menezes, killed by police (or a special forces unit acting as police) at Stockwell underground station in London on the day after the 7/7 bombings, is well known. The case of Rigoberto Alpizar, a Costa Rican-born American citizen fatally shot by sky marshals on a jetway at Miami International Airport in 2005 is perhaps not so well known. These are low-tech versions of decisions on risk, the first occurring after a stakeout of a block of flats, the second by undercover federal agents meant to safeguard aircraft against hijacking. As Amoore notes (2006: 348), when the integrated databases of US VISIT reach a moment of decision based on patterns of behaviour, these will not be in public view, even to the limited extent that such deaths are visible. However, this does not rule out the possibility that we are in the presence of sovereign power. In deciding the norm of the acceptable level of risk (including zero risk), the sovereign also decides the exception. This exception, however, is not an exception to the law. As the Miami-Dade State Attorneys Office report finds, (t)he shooting death of Mr Alpizar, while tragic, is legally justified in light of the surrounding circumstances presented to the 5 air marshals. Rather than a temporary, publicly declared state of exception, we have many exceptions and many different loci of decision on what constitutes the exception. Judith Butler (2004: 56) has noted the resurgence of petty sovereigns and William Connolly (2005: 145) the plurality of forces circulating through and under the positional sovereignty of the official arbitrating body (cited in Amoore, 2006: 345). Yet, perhaps the best way to conceptualize the agency or authority who or which decides the exception is as a delegation of, or even a derogation from, sovereign authority (Dean, 2007: 137 8). This occurs in counter-terrorism and policing, where the power to make die has been derogated from the state in favour of private security firms, management consultants and contractors and delegated onto multiple agents, including police officers, air marshals and security operatives, in conjunction with biometric technologies and techniques of dataveillance. Similarly, decisions on targeted killing rather than capturing terror suspects, according to the Washington Post, are made by either the president or his design6 ees, including the CIA director or secretary of defense. Is it possible that the crisis of neoliberal governmentality is one, as Beck observes (2002: 45), where the pluralization of experts and expert rationalities of risk is then replaced by the gross simplification of enemy images, constructed by governments and intelligence agencies without and beyond public discourse and democratic participation? Beck is certainly right to argue that the study of risk in this new security environment raises questions that cannot be posed within the framework of governmentality and the rationalities of risk alone. In this context, he is also right to refer to the primary sense of the political in terms of the friend/enemy relationship advanced by Carl Schmitt. However, the mutation that Beck notices is rather too simple and there are two ways in

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which the rationalities and technologies of precautionary risk are the opening through which the political in this sense emerges. First, the precision technology of risk, such as that of US VISIT, begins to delineate through banking and foreign exchange transactions, visa applications, international movements, as well as physical appearance through iris scans and fingerprints, the lifestyle, activities and appearance of the enemy, or at least the probability of being the enemy. This is clearly a case of a kind of liberal technology of risk which produces, among other divisions, a class of individuals who pose a fundamental threat to the liberal legal and political order itself inside the domestic state or in the international domain (Dean, 2007: 11822). More fundamentally, however, the enemy also emerges as that figure which cannot be detected through such systems. It emerges in the phantasm of the undetectable terrorist (Aradau and van Munster, 2007: 104) with haphazard patterns of commitment, little by way of links with radical groups and nearly impossible to detect. What appears is less the public enemy, declared, knowable and identifiable, and, in that respect, a descendant of the justis hostis (the just enemy) of classical European law of war (Schmitt, 2003: 1424). Nor do we have the enemy who is the irregular, non-state partisan, with his or her attachment to their country and soil. This new enemy knows no national borders or spatial limitations; his or her behaviour is unruly and unpredictable and intent on catastrophic violence on innocent victims. In this sense, the enemy is an absolute one with ambiguous legal status, who must be annihilated; hence, to this extent, security practices mirror the terrorists view of the enemy as absolute enemy, the essence of evil, rather than a real enemy of the partisan who is fought in war (Ulmen, 2007: 101). If the absolute enemy is usually defined as the enemy who stands outside the law of war and the minimum moral standards of humanity, the new absolute enemy is also undetectable by the rationalities of risk and technologies of security, but imaginable on the basis of them. The undetectable terrorist is, in this sense, produced by the double infinities (Ewald, 2002) of catastrophic consequences and uncertainty in conjunction with the experience of the event. The events of September 2008 and the subsequent collapse of the worldwide credit system have been held to augur the demise of neoliberalism by a prime minister (Rudd, 7 2009: 25) and the end of laissez faire by a president. Yet the event and the response repeat very closely the same kind of pattern we have seen established since 9/11. First, there is the unexpected event (but which could later have been foreseen if only we knew how to read the signs of impending catastrophe). Second, the response takes the form of a recharged exercise of sovereign power by the state: this time it takes the form of bailouts of banks, companies, nationalizations, handouts and spending on infrastructure. Just as the development of security against terrorism called forth a new surveillance role for the state and its agencies, so the fear of a new depression reinvigorated the regulatory and interventionist domains of the state. Third, the crisis manifested itself on the risk-security axis. We have witnessed a kind of precautionary principle in the face of the worst imaginable eventuality of a depression that matches that of the 1930s. But we also witness the discourse on the failure of the calculation of risk, perhaps due to the complexity of financial instruments, which led to the exposure of banks, finance, insurance companies and, indeed, states to bankruptcy and employees and citizens to unemployment. At the heart of the challenges raised by our present, therefore, is the question of sovereignty and sovereign power, its forms of centralization and distribution.

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Conclusion
Questions of the exception that binds legal arguments concerning rights and freedom to ones of risk and security; of precautionary risk which can, on occasion, trump other logics of government; of new mechanisms of security that are being invented under the tolerance of zero risk; of a recharged state sovereignty in response to economic crisis; and, a delegated sovereignty and the right of death are key components of our experiences of power in the present. To list them in this way is not to offer a comprehensive description of power relations in the present, but to suggest a loose and mobile assemblage of diverse elements a dispositif. They do nevertheless form at least one axis of our experience of the present and of power. That experience of power has been linked to the emergence of a new kind of absolute enemy, the re-emergence of an experience of the political and to a crisis of neoliberal governmentality. This characterization of aspects of our experience of power is a long way from the most influential definitions of power. From Max Weber (1972: 180) to Steven Lukes, these concern the ability of one party to achieve its will while blocking or frustrating another party from achieving its will. Power adds to one what it subtracts from another. Hence, Lukess (2005: 24) claim: the absolutely basic common core to, or primitive notion lying behind, all talk of power is the notion that A in some way affects B. There are a number of penetrating criticisms of these definitions that concern their teleological character and their limited empirical and predictive value (e.g. Hindess, 1996). However, what such notions of power also assume is a fundamental uniformity and homogeneity of power. For those offering an engagement with the contemporary analytics of power, there are at least two senses in which power is heterogeneous. First, there are different kinds of power, whether sovereignty, biopolitics, discipline, governmental or pastoral, each with their own genealogy, and trajectories of reinscription and recombination with one another. One of the key components of understanding power in our present is understanding the position of a renewed sovereign power not only as centralized in the state, but also distributed among our regimes and relations of power and government. Second, power is heterogeneous in that it is made up of different kinds of entities, of rationalities and technologies, to be sure, but also of forms of social and political imagination. The study of this double heterogeneity, of kind and of elements, constitutes the proper study of power. The key point I want to make here is that if we start from our experience of the present, rather than a general theory or concept of power, then we find ourselves confronted with a quite different appreciation of the mechanisms of power today and our task in contesting them. To do this is to engage in a different kind of theory, which is about producing concepts adequate to that experience (of which we have prcised many above), and what is novel or different in that experience, without claiming to be general or universal. One conclusion may be that rather than the quest for an overarching concept of power, we should seek an orientation towards power relations in the production of concepts concerned with what is novel about them. Another might be that it is these concepts and experiences that could ultimately advance our theories of power.

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Dean Notes
1. 2. 3.

473

4.

5.

6.

7.

See the various contributions to Aradau et al. (2008b) and Amoore and de Goede (2008b). Obamas Health Care Speech [accessed 4 November 2009: http://www.huffingtonpost. com/2009/09/09/obama-health-care-speech_n_281265.html]. Vice-President Cheney Delivers Remarks to the Republican Governors Association, 25 October 2001 [accessed 20 February 2010: http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/ vicepresident/news-speeches/speeches/vp20011025.html]. R. Gittens, The Terrifying Cost of Feeling Safer, Sydney Morning Herald, 26 August 2008 [accessed 25 February 2010: http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-terrifying-cost-of-feelingsafer-20080826-435l.html?page=fullpage]. Police Shooting, Miami-Dade Office of the State Attorney, 23 May 2006, p. 44 [accessed 25 February 2010: http://web.archive.org/web/20060818181749/http://miamisao.com/publications/ press/2006/airmarshalshooting.pdf ]. K. de Young and J. Warrick, Under Obama, More Targeted Killings than Captures in Counterterrorism Efforts, Washington Post, 14 February 2010 [accessed 22 February 2010: http:// www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2010/02/13/AR2010021303748.html]. A. Guiral, Le laisser faire, cest fini, Libration, 26 September 2008 [accessed 19 February 2010: http://www.liberation.fr/politiques/010133587-le-laisser-faire-c-est-fini].

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Biographical note
Mitchell Dean is Professor of Sociology in the Centre for Research on Social Inclusion, Macquarie University. From 200308, he was the Dean of the Division of Society, Culture, Media and Philosophy at Macquarie University. He has twice been a visiting professor in the Department of Management, Philosophy and Politics at the Copenhagen Business School (200203, 2010) and has held visiting fellowships at the Australian National University, Birkbeck College, London, and Goldsmiths College, London. His areas of speciality are political and historical sociology, social and political theory, and governing in liberal democracies. His most recent writings focus on governing and power within societies and increasingly across and between societies. He is the author of The Constitution of Poverty (Routledge, 1991), Critical and Effective Histories: Foucaults Methods and Historical Sociology (Routledge, 1994), Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (Sage, 1999; expanded 2nd edn, 2010) and Governing Societies: Political Perspectives on Domestic and International Rule (Open University Press, 2007). He is editor, with Barry Hindess, of Governing Australia: Studies in Contemporary Rationalities of Government (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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