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CHAPTER 1
EXIT FROM DEMOCRACY
This book aims to contribute — from Africa, where I live and work (but also from the rest of the world, which I have not stopped surveying) — to a critique of our time. This time is one of the repopulation and the planetarization of the world under the aegis of militarism and capital and, in ultimate consequence, a time of exit from democracy (or of its inversion). To carry this project through, I take a transversal approach, attentive to the three motifs of opening, crossing, and circulation. This sort of approach is fruitful only if it makes room for a reverse reading of our present.
The approach sets out from the presupposition according to which a genuine deconstruction of the world of our time begins with the full recognition of the perforce provincial status of our discourses and the necessarily regional character of our concepts — and therefore with a critique of every form of abstract universalism. This doing, it endeavors to break with the spirit of the times, which, we know, is about closure and demarcations of all sorts, and in which borders between here and there, the near and the distant, the inside and the outside, serve as a Maginot Line for a major part of what passes as "global thinking" today. Now, global thinking can only ever be that which, turning its back on theoretical segregation, rests on the archives of what Édouard Glissant called the "All-world" (Toutmonde).
Reversal, Inversion, and Acceleration
For the needs of the reflection that I sketch herein, there are four characteristic features of our times worth emphasizing. The first is the narrowing of the world and the repopulation of the Earth in view of the demographic transition now under way thanks to the worlds of the South. Our coming to modernity involved decisive events such as the geographical and cultural uprooting of entire populations, as well as their voluntary relocation or forced settlement, across the vast territories once inhabited by indigenous peoples. On the Atlantic side of the planet, two significant moments, both tied to the expansion of industrial capitalism, gave rhythm to this process of the redistribution of populations across the planet.
These are the moments of colonization (from its inception in the early sixteenth century with the conquest of the Americas) and the Negro slave trade. The slave trade and colonization alike broadly coincided with the formation of mercantilist thought in the West, if they were not purely and simply at its origins. The slave trade thrived on its hemorrhaging and draining of the most useful arms and most vital energies of the slave-providing societies.
In the Americas, slave labor of African origin was put to work as part of a vast project to subordinate the environment in view of its rational and profitable development. In several respects, the plantation regime was essentially about cutting down, burning, and routinely razing forests and trees; about replacing the natural vegetation with cotton and sugar cane; about remodeling ancient landscapes; about destroying the existing vegetal formations; and about replacing an ecosystem with an agrosystem. However, the plantation was not merely an economic measure. For the slaves transplanted into the New World, it was also the scene on which another beginning played out. Here, life came to be shaped according to an essentially racial principle. But, thus understood, race, far from being a simple biological signifier, referred to a worldless and soilless body, a body of combustible energy, a sort of double of nature that could, through work, be transformed into an available reserve or stock.
As for colonization, it thrived by excreting those who were, in several regards, deemed superfluous, a surfeit within the colonizing nations. This was the case, in particular, of the poor viewed as scrounging off society and the vagabonds and delinquents seen as harmful to the nation. Colonization was a technology for regulating migratory movements. At the time many people considered that this form of migration would ultimately be of advantage to the country of departure. "Not only will a large number of men who live in idleness here, and represent a weight, a burden and do not relate to this kingdom, thus be put to work, but also their children between twelve and fourteen years or less will be removed from idleness, tasked with doing thousands of futile things, and perhaps producing good merchandise for this country," wrote, for example, Antoine de Montchrestien in his Traité d'économie politique at the start of the seventeenth century. And further still he added, "Our idle women ... will be employed to pull out, dye and separate feathers, to pull, beat and work hemp, and to gather cotton, and diverse things for dyeing." The men will be able, for their part, "to be given employment working in the mines and ploughing, and even hunting whale ... as well as fishing for cod, salmon, herring, and felling trees," he concluded.
From the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, these two modalities of repopulating the planet through human predation, natural wealth extraction, and setting subaltern groups to work constituted the major economic, political, and, in many respects, philosophical stakes of the period. Economic theory and the theory of democracy alike were built partly on the defense or critique of one or other of these two forms of spatial redistribution of populations. These two forms were, in turn, at the origin of numerous conflicts and wars of partition or monopolization. Resulting from this planetary-scale movement, a new partition of the Earth emerged with, at its center, Western powers and, in the margins, the peripheries, that is, domains of excessive struggle that were destined for occupation and pillage.
It is also necessary to consider the generally conventional distinction between commercial colonialism — or even trading-post colonialism — and settler colonialism properly speaking. Certainly, in both cases, the colony's — every colony's — enrichment made sense only if it contributed to enriching the metropole. The difference between them, however, resides in the fact that settler colonies were conceived as an extension of the nation, whereas trading-post or exploitation colonies were only a way to grow the metropole's wealth by means of asymmetrical, inequitable trade relations, almost entirely lacking in heavy local investment.
In addition, the stranglehold exerted over trading-post colonies was in principle preordained to end, so the settling of Europeans in these places was entirely provisional. In the case of settler colonies, however, migration policy aimed to maintain in the nation's bosom people who would have been lost to it had they stayed. The colony served as a pressure relief valve for all the undesirables, for the categories of the population "whose crimes and debaucheries" could have been "rapidly destructive" or whose needs would have driven them toward prison or forced them to beg, while rendering them useless for the country. This scission of humanity into "useful" and "useless" — "excess" and "superfluidity" — has remained the rule, with utility being essentially measured against the capacity to deploy a labor force.
The repeopling of the Earth at the beginning of the modern era did not only pass through colonization. Religious factors also go toward explaining the migrations and mobilities. Upon the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, from 1685 to 1730 between 170,000 and 180,000 Huguenots fled France. Religious emigration affected many other communities. International movements of different types were intertwined with one another, such as the Portuguese Jews whose trade networks wove together around the great European ports of Hamburg, Amsterdam, London, and Bordeaux; the Italians who invested in the world of finance, in trade, or in highly specialized professions in glass and luxury goods; or even soldiers, mercenaries, and engineers who, due to the manifold conflicts of the time, passed blithely from one market of violence to another.
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Earth's repeopling is no longer carried out through slave trafficking and the colonization of remote regions of the globe. Work, in its traditional sense, is no longer perforce the privileged means of value creation. The moment is nevertheless about shake-ups, large and small dislocations and transfers, in short, new figures of exodus. The new circulatory dynamics and creation of diasporas pass in large part via trade and commerce, wars, ecological disasters and environmental catastrophes, including cultural transfers of all sorts.
From this viewpoint, the accelerated aging of human groupings in the world's wealthy nations represents an event of considerable impact. It is the opposite of the aforementioned demographic surpluses typical of the nineteenth century. Geographical distance as such no longer represents an obstacle to mobility. The major migration pathways are diversifying, and increasingly sophisticated measures for bypassing borders are being put in place. As a result, if, being centripetal, migratory flows are moving in several directions simultaneously, Europe and the United States nonetheless remain the major points of fixation for the multitudes in movement — in particular those from the planet's centers of poverty. Here new agglomerations are rising up and new polynational cities are, in spite of everything, being built. The ordeal of these new international movements is yielding — little by little and across the entire planet — diverse assemblages of mosaic territories.
This new swarming — which adds to the previous waves of migration from the South — blurs criteria of national belonging. To belong to the nation is no longer merely an affair of origin but also of choice. An ever-growing mass of people henceforth participates in several types of nationalities (nationality of origin, of residence, of choice) and of identity attachments. In some cases, they are summoned to decide, to merge with the population by ending double loyalties, or, if they commit an offense that endangers "the existence of the nation," they run the risk of being stripped of the host nationality.
Further still, humans are not the only ones to be found at the heart of the Earth's repeopling. Being human no longer determines the limits of those occupying the world. More than ever, these occupants include a number of artifacts and all living, organic, and vegetal species. Even geological, geomorphological, and climatological forces complement the panoply of the Earth's new inhabitants. Certainly, it is not a matter of beings or groups or families of beings as such. At the limit, it is a matter neither of the environment nor of nature. It is one of agents and milieus of life — water, air, dust, microbes, termites, bees, insects — that is, authors of specific relations. We have therefore passed from the human condition to the terrestrial condition.
The second characteristic trait of our times is the ongoing redefinition of the human in the framework of a general ecology and a henceforth broadened geography, one that is spherical and irreversibly planetary. In fact, the world is no longer considered an artifact that humans make. Leaving behind the ages of stone and silver, of iron and gold, the human for its part is tending to become plastic. The advent of the plastic human and its corollary, the digital subject, goes flush against a number of convictions that until recently were held to be immutable truths.
So it is with the belief that humans possess an alleged "specificity," a "genericity" separating them from the animal or the vegetal world, or again that the Earth that humans inhabit and exploit is a mere passive object of humankind's interventions. So it is also with the idea according to which, of all living species, "humans" are the only ones to have in part freed themselves from their animality. Having broken the chain of biological necessity, humanity had allegedly almost raised itself to the level of the divine. Yet, contrary to these articles of faith and many others, it is now admitted that humankind is only part of a greater set of the universe's living subjects, which also include animals, vegetanimals, plants, and other species.
Going no further than biology and genetic engineering, there can be said, properly speaking, to be no "essence of man" to safeguard, no "human nature" to protect. This being the case, the potential to modify the biological and genetic structure of humanity is almost limitless. At bottom, by opening up to genetic and germinal manipulations, it is thought to be possible not only to "enhance" the human being but also, in a spectacular act of self-creation, to produce the living through technomedicine.
The third constitutive feature of the era is the generalized introduction of tools and calculating or computational machines into all aspects of social life. Aided by the power and ubiquity of the digital phenomenon, no impenetrable separation exists between the screen and life. Life now transpires on the screen, and the screen is now the plastic and simulated form of living that, in addition, can be grasped by a code. Moreover, "it's no longer through the face-to-face encounter with the portrait, or the figure of the mirroring-presenting double, that the subject is tested, but through the construction of a form of presence of the subject closer to tracing and projected shadow."
As a result, the work of subjectivation and individuation by which, until only recently, every human being became a person endowed with a more or less indexable identity, is partly foreclosed. Whether one wants it or not, the era is thus one of plasticity, pollination, and grafts of all sorts — plasticity of the brain, pollination of the artificial and the organic, genetic manipulations and informational grafts, ever finer adjustments (appareillage) between the human and the machine. All these mutations do not only give free rein to the dream of a truly limitless life. They henceforth make power over the living — or again, the capacity to voluntarily alter the human species — the absolute form of power.
The articulation between the capacity to voluntarily alter the human species — and even other living species and apparently inert materials — and the power of capital constitute the fourth striking feature of the world of our times. The power of capital — at once a living and creative force (when it comes to extending markets and accumulating profits) and a bloody process of devouring (when it comes to destroying, without return, the life of beings and species) — increased tenfold when the stock markets opted to employ artificial intelligences to optimize the movement of liquidity. As most of these high-frequency operators use cutting-edge algorithms to deal with the mass of information exchanged on the stock markets, they operate at microtemporal scales inaccessible to humans. Today, the transfer time of information passing between the stock exchange and the operator is calculated in milliseconds. Coupled with other factors, this extraordinary compression of time has led to a paradox: we see, on the one hand, a spectacular increase in the fragility and the instability of the markets and, on the other, their almost unlimited power of destruction.
The question that thus arises is to know whether the modes of exploiting the planet might still be averted from tipping over into absolute destruction. This question is an especially topical one, as never before has the symmetry between the market and war been as evident as it is today. The preceding centuries had war as their matrix of technological development. Today all sorts of military machines continue to play this role, that is, on top of the capitalist market, which, in turn, functions more than ever according to the model of war — but a war that henceforth pits species against one another, and nature against human beings. This tight imbrication of capital, digital technologies, nature, and war, and the new constellations of power that it makes possible is, without a doubt, what most directly threatens the idea of the political that had hitherto served as the bedrock for that form of government that is democracy.
The Nocturnal Body of Democracy
This idea of the political is relatively simple: it states that, as a matter of principle, the community of humans has no ground (or immutable basis) not subject to debate. The community is political insofar as, cognizant of the contingency of its foundations and their latent violence, it is continually disposed to put its origins at stake. It is democratic insofar as, having guaranteed this permanent opening onto the sea, the life of the state acquires a public character; its powers are placed under citizens' control; and these citizens are free to seek and assert, constantly and whenever necessary, the truth, reason, justice, and the common good. The notions of equality, the state of right, and publicness had hitherto stood opposed to the ideal of force, to states of fact (political arbitrariness), and to the taste for secrecy. But in fact, these myths of origins are no longer sufficient to legitimate the democratic order in contemporary societies.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Necropolitics"
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