Review of: Randy Martin, An Empire of Indifference: American War and the
Financial Logic of Risk Management. Durham: Duke UP, 2007.
- Randy Martin's Empire of
Indifference deploys the concept of "securitization"--with its double reference
to financial and military processes--as a way of approaching the seeming
convertibility of the economic and the political calculus of risk in the U.S.'s most
recent imperialisms. If the revolving door between the two now seems as intimate as
that between the Republican dynasty and its donors, Martin is not so much interested
in these contingent alliances as in the temporality that unites their imperial
investments. The leveraged, hyper-volatile investments afforded by the financial
derivative thus offer a parallel perspective on the apparent flightiness of recent
U.S. imperial strategy. This is a terrain of investigation that seems to be opened up
by the philosophy of the event in its different genealogies (Deleuze and Negri, via
Lucretius, Spinoza, Machiavelli, and pragmatism; Derrida and the later Althusser, via
Heidegger and Machiavelli; Badiou via set theory). But whereas the evocation of the
event in these philosophies seems to point to a horizon of ontological resistance or
even messianism, in some sense beyond the politics of state and capital, Martin places
his whole strategy firmly within the field of the event. Event-based capitalism
thereby becomes the terrain in which power struggles are to be conducted. The promise
and the gift of an unknowable futurity with which the event is associated in recent
French theory is nothing more or less than the promissory future of speculative
capital. The question then becomes how to think through a counter-politics of the
event. With its clean departure from state-based and political theological accounts of
power, it seems to me that Martin's book represents one of the first political
philosophies to offer a thorough critique of the political economy of the
event.
-
Martin's previous book, Financialization of Daily Life (2002) is concerned
with the intimate psychology of risk in an era when the barriers between public and
private financial spheres were being deliberately dismantled. Standard histories of
financialization point to the breakdown of Bretton Woods, the turn to monetarist
anti-inflation strategies, and the Clinton-era repeal of the Glass Steagall Act as
defining moments in the ascent of finance to a commanding position in the U.S., and
global, economy. Less attention is paid to the process by which personal finance in the
form of pension savings, education loans, household debt, and mortgages were transferred
to the global capital markets over the same period. The liquidity of these markets
presupposes the availability of a mass of personal finance that was previously
sequestered from the vagaries of speculative capital. In Financialization of Daily
Life, Martin is concerned with the resounding effects of such a shift on
everyday life. What happens when the worker/consumer is invited to manage
his or her life risks with the same opportunism as the financial investor? And when the
Fordist utopias of progressive growth, the middle class, and the standard of living give
way to the normalization of indebtedness and credit-based upward mobility? In
post-Fordism, the savings plan, with its promise of deferred gratification, is replaced
by the leveraged investment and its demand that we valorize the future before it gets a
chance to bankrupt us. Nowhere is the precariousness of this situation more visible than
in the securitization of the home mortgage, as the sub-prime mortgage crisis has once
again made clear.
-
Empire of Indifference, which can be read as a sequel to this work, looks
outward to the effects of financialization on U.S. foreign policy and imperial
intervention, and inward to the parallel militarization of the domestic front. Here it
is no longer the "home" but the "homeland" that is subject to the risks and
opportunities of securitization. And it is not the home mortgage but escalating
governmental indebtedness that provides the leverage for proliferating financial and
military opportunism. Martin offers no attempt to discern the "real" reasons underlying
the war in Iraq--the oil reserves of Iraq no more determine the risks and gains of war
than the market price of energy futures are decided by the fundamental value of oil.
Rather he situates the war within the context of an overall shift in U.S. foreign policy
that aspires to displace the strategic value of geographic locale and long-term
territorial appropriation with the risk-opportunism of short-term investment. This
shift, he argues, is visible both in the ongoing reconstitution of the U.S. armed forces
and in the changing face of imperial intervention itself. The doctrine of force
transformation (otherwise known as the revolution in military affairs) has covered
for a thoroughgoing restructuring of the armed forces in perfect alignment with the
precepts of corporate outsourcing, asset-stripping, and self-government. The
generative effects of
pre-emptive warfare have been well documented--the fact for example that Iraq has become
a training ground for al-Qaeda as a consequence of U.S. intervention or that the
possibility of weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of the Taliban has
been made more likely by the alliance with Pakistan. Most importantly, the
declaration of a war on terror seems to have provoked a certain unity of purpose amongst
various denominations of militant Islamism, crystallizing alliances that would
otherwise have lain dormant. Whatever the costs, pre-emption will have at least succeeded in
generating "relations at a distance" and risk opportunities where none existed before.
This mode of intervention is curiously indifferent to its own "success" or
"failure," since both eventualities open up a market of future risk opportunities where
even hedges against risk can be traded for profit. "Fighting terror unleashed it
elsewhere, just as well-placed put or call (sell or buy) of stock would send ripples of
price volatility through the market. Drops in price can be hedged against, turned into
derivatives, and sold for gain. The terror war converts both wins and losses into
self-perpetuating gain" (98).
-
Among other things, this book offers a powerful reflection on method. Martin is
particularly illuminating on the limitations of Foucault's enormously influential
account of biopower in Society Must be Defended, which makes the
unfortunate move of opposing the dynamism of a relational account of power to a
substance-based view of economic exchange and property relations. Addressing himself to
the more reductive strands in political Marxism, Foucault ends up deserting the whole
field of economic analysis, a surprising move given Foucault's early attention to the
simultaneous development of the modern life sciences and political economy. "While
certainly not so in Foucault's earlier writing such as The Order of Things
(1966), in later work the matter of life and money is typically written about as if
active consideration of one precluded critical attention to the other. While political
economy seems moribund, biopower is money-free" (132). Even in his follow-up lecture
series, La naissance de la biopolitique (1978-79), where Foucault offers
his first and last analysis of Chicago school neoliberalism, his analysis of the
"economisation" of life is limited to the more reductive neoclassical attempts to
measure life's value in economic terms. Not only is Foucault's method inadequate to the
contemporary co-penetration of domestic and commercial economic relations, argues
Martin, it is also singularly unsuited to dealing with the event-based dynamics of
financial capital. "Of course Foucault is not reading Marx in these lectures but Hobbes,
although he is clearly arguing against a particular version of Marxism" (135). Hence one
of the unexpected consequences of Foucault's account of biopower is that in spite of its
intentions, it ends up reorienting contemporary debate around the question of sovereign
power and political theology (Agamben's work, which responds to Foucault via Hobbes, is
representative here).
-
The power of Martin's method is that it gives space to perplexity, putting it to work
rather than resolving it. This is a welcome move when, in the protracted "aftermath"
of the Iraq intervention, we are left wondering "what was that all about?" Martin
steers a course between what he calls the "functional" and the "figural" approaches in
theoretical critique. On the one hand, he wants to avoid the functionalist extremes of
a certain kind of systems theory. That is, the overly rationalist account of
imperialism that ends up endowing the independent variable--intervention in Iraq--with
a sense of predestined purpose, as "if capitalism always knew what was best for it,"
and its mirror image, the current of imperial "irrationalism" that sees
contemporary U.S. imperialism as
a kind of descent into pure chaos, an empire of "incoherence." These approaches are
closer than they might at first seem. On the other hand, Martin is convincingly
critical of the "figural" approaches of Giorgio Agamben and Achille Mbembe, who step
straight into the sovereign void opened up by Foucault in his late work and end up
reducing all power dynamics to the figure of state violence in absentia. These
approaches have their temptations, not least because they offer a kind of all-purpose
filler for the unexplained. As soon as some democratic rule is presumed missing, one
has only to declare that a state of exception has been installed. And in case some
historical detail were needed, it will be agreed that the state of exception has
become "more and more" the norm since about (ummm) the Declaration of the Rights of
Man or the early Roman Empire. The appeal to the state of exception simplifies the
complexity
of power relations at least as much as the liberal triumphalism that accompanied the
end of the Cold War. "The normalization of the camp allows the mind to race in
affirmation from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib" (141) yet the reduction of these instances
of power to a state sovereignty affirmed by way of exception paradoxically ends up
rigidifying the figure of the state at the precise moment when the state is undergoing
a complex force transformation of its own. In the North American context, this
transformation has included the outsourcing of both welfare and security functions to
the transnational service conglomerate, a dispersed privatization of state power that
goes someway towards explaining the proximities between the racialized abuse carried
out in domestic prisons and the torture at Abu Ghraib. By paying attention to these
shifts, Martin is able to account for the fluidity with which imperial interventions
can invest such geographically dispersed locations as Iraq and New Orleans, displacing
surplus populations with extraordinary rapidity and indifference to their long-term
management. In its domestic interventions, contemporary U.S. imperialism replaces
strategies of permanent segregation with wave-like mobilization
events--the forcible removal of urban minorities from the metropolitan centers
becoming a pretext for "urban regeneration" and "creative destruction." Racism here
becomes a function of errant, forcible homelessness rather than permanent relegation
to a state-administered camp or reserve. As Martin writes,
Shaving off the portion of the population from the body of an
electorate or citizenry is certainly a venerable form of divide and rule. But the
fluidity with which one entity or another may become the excluded other speaks to a more
active principle of circulation that now informs self-government, in an ever stranger
convergence of foreign and domestic.
-
In Martin's account, the derivative war is relentlessly and prematurely triumphant, but
nevertheless trapped in a loop of temporal self-sabotage that is endemic to
finance-based capitalism too.
In practice, the only thing that turned out to be
discretionary in the Iraq war was its timing: when to begin something that had already
begun and end something that could not be stopped. . . . The preemptive empire of
indifference consumes its own futurity, expending its assets in advance, delivering its
promises before they are made, announcing its successes before its failures can catch up
with it. (160)
This is not a messianism of revelation, but a state of emergent
premonition coupled with incurable attention deficit disorder. Ultimately, Martin
suggests, pre-emptive warfare is crippled by its constitutive indifference, its
inability to sustain confidence when returns aren't immediately forthcoming. When war
requires the mobilization of consumer confidence to the same extent that financial
markets demand the faith of the investor, it exposes itself to the dangers of affective
disengagement. The permanent recruitment difficulties faced by the U.S. defense forces,
the volatility of public support for the war, and the gross on-the-ground failures of
logistics in Iraq and Afghanistan are all symptoms of an imperial interventionism that
even by its own opportunistic calculus, reveals an extraordinary indifference to
consequences and results. -
Martin explains the self-sabotaging tendencies of pre-emptive warfare in terms of the
uncomfortable alliance between neoconservative and neoliberal philosophies of power in
the U.S. polity. While the proliferation of derivative contracts and the chronic
indebtedness of the government undermine any semblance of fundamental value, the
pre-eminence of U.S. government bonds and hence the magnetic force of its financial
markets is predicated, in the last instance, on the threat of U.S. military violence.
Hence the neoconservative tendency in American politics periodically intervenes to
reassert the rights of imperial nationhood in the most belligerent of ways. Financial
securitization, which works to undermine fundamental value, is sustained by military
securitization, which aspires to refound it. Martin notes in passing that this
reassertion of force is particularly concerned with the moral tenor of nationhood.
The
risk-driven accumulation of finance that neoliberalism offered as its political economy
would meet its moralizing faith in the neoconservative commitments to evangelizing
intervention. . . . The revolution in international finance yielded a "new geography of
money" that looked amoral for all its mathematical sophistication but relied heavily on
various forms of warfare to restore the moralism lost to the vanishing ideals of the
unified nation. (24)
And as the father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, has
suggested, the nostalgia for lost nationhood has everything to do with the fear of
"frank female sexuality" (151). Quite apart from the fact that the Department of
Homeland Security has given ample support to the Office of Faith-Based and Community
initiatives, it would seem that the project of homeland security is intimately concerned
with the reimposition of sexual law and order. This is a point that Martin makes in
passing but doesn't explore in detail. -
But to return again to the question of Foucault and method, I'm left wondering what
Martin would make of Foucault's lecture series of 1977-78, Security, Territory
and Population, which seems to avoid the reductive binarization of political
economy and political power that we find in Society Must be Defended
(1975-76). Here Foucault argues that the contemporary problematic of "security"
emerges from the history of urbanism and the problems of circulation, infrastructure,
and contingency that beset the modern, capitalist city. It is the practical management
of the event and its unpredictabilities, he asserts, that informs the rise of such
conceptual innovations as field theory in mathematics, differential calculus, and
hydrodynamics, not to mention the bureaucratic arts of statistical analysis. This, it
would seem, offers a more productive field of concepts for Martin's analysis than
Foucault's account of biopower. It is a genealogy of the evental that is at once more
attuned to the nonreductive Marxism of Deleuze and Guattari, Antonio Negri, and the
late Althusser, while also introducing the potential for critique--notably around the
problematic of desire. Taking stock of Deleuze and Guattari's insistence that the
production of money and desire are continuous, Foucault also seems to conclude that
the politics of the "event" needs to be thought as the hinge term between the
economic, the genealogical, and the political. If early theories of population discern
a contiguity between the flows of money and those of desire, then what of the
encounter between moral and political economy today, when neoconservatism seeks to
reestablish the proper value of the genealogical--the proper articulation of sex and
race--in the figure of the securitized homeland (72-73)?
-
Martin touches on this question sporadically and intriguingly. I wish he had gone
further. This is not so much a criticism as a feeling of wanting more.
Sociology
University of Sydney, Australia
melinda.cooper@arts.usyd.edu.au
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Works Cited
Foucault, Michel. La naissance de la biopolitique. Cours au Collège de
France 1978-1979. Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2004.
---. Security, Territory, Population (Lectures at the Collège
de France, 1977-1978). London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Martin, Randy. Financialization of Daily Life. Philadelphia: Temple UP,
2002.
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