Elsewhere the urge to map human influence takes a more problematic turn for a mapping of the social, as in the case of the phantasmagoric dissemination of the footprint in the ecological imagination. Consumption footprints, carbon footprints, water footprints: the human footprint today bears the mark of a planetary Oedipus, in that the average ecological footprint in the U.S.—which measures how much land and water area a human population requires to produce the resource it consumes and to absorb its wastes—has swollen to an estimated 9.4 global hectares, or roughly a million square feet (WWF). *Per pair of feet*. At first glance none need ask today, in the manner of that infamous Theban biped, *Where shall now be found the footprint, hard to trace, of ancient guilt*? Yet the ecological debt of the global North, for all its unmistakability in an industrial and agricultural setting, leaves a harder to trace, but no less destructive *legacy* (itself bearing the traces of Derrida's leg work in *legs de Freud*) in those terrestrial systems otherwise undisturbed by human activity. These hard to trace tracks of bioinvasion—the absence of a familiar birdsong, a persistent cough, a mottled leaf, the soft touch of algae on an otherwise sandy ocean floor—point to a fundamental shift in the organization of the biophysical, one that often goes unregistered topographically, is soundless as opposed to merely "silent", and seemingly unspectacular, but potentially more destructive and deconstructive of the environment than any other form of climate change. Paradoxically a bioregional attunement to local changes leads to the dissolution of the locus into a polytopic confluence of "socioecological processes occurring at quite different scales" that David Harvey and others have analyzed (542). Following Harvey and Jameson outside of the *polis*, or less adventurously to the (hardly) vacant lots within the city, I want to argue that the social, its dissolution, and its potential recuperation achieve a certain visibility, and sets off an archive fever, in the promised disaggregation of vibrant ecosystems into "ecoslums" of "weedy species, relics, and ghosts" (Meyer 7).

### Biotic Globalization and the End(s) of Oikopolitics

These largely untheorized and scarcely administrated spaces contain the traces to which I propose (re)introducing to critical attention. In ecosystems least subjected to administrative control, technological mediation, and economic exploitation we can nonetheless make out the imprint of globalization. This claim can be made without falling into the trap, identified by Bergson and Jameson, that the proliferation of "multinational species" throughout ecosystems, for example, would be so many caricatures of corporate conglomerates. These nonhuman, post-cosmos cosmopolitans are not caricatures but products, however unmarketable, signifying how late capitalism is ghostwriting and multinational corporations underwriting ecosystems across the planet. But there is another side to this story. What is startling is not the eclipse of nature—divested of aura and defined as "a bundle of ecosystem services" (Kareiva 1869)—by history but rather the glimmering awareness that *globalization is capable of jumping species*. There remains the promise, not unconsidered by growing ranks of biosecurity specialists, that these ghastly and ghostly ecologies of invasion will sabotage the mode of production that unintentionally produced them. As species continue to opportunistically appropriate the global transportation infrastructure for their own dissemination, an unintended modality of globalization appears on the horizon: *biotic globalization.*6 Understanding this shift necessitates something of a critical climate change: a turn away from the urban(e) common-places of multinational capital—those spaces well articulated by architect Keller Easterling as "organization space"—and toward the peripheral underinstrumentalized spaces currently in the process of being non-deliberately formatted by globalization: the increasingly cosmopolitan and multinational life systems inhabiting streams, valleys, lakes, meadows, forests and tropical islands.7

Such a call for a change of critical venue might appear embarrassingly belated following the acknowledged penetration of the market into both the most intimate and peripheral spaces and the attendant unavailability of a tenable concept of distance in political and critical theory. This redundancy can be exaggerated by recalling the image of the shipping lanes and the reading that the infrastructures of a global economy underwrite contemporary restructurings of biogeography. But even when the natural-historical production of local ecological communities is facilitated (in both productive and destructive senses of a *Bahnung*) by a global economic system, and even when the "integrity" and health of the remaining "intact" ecosystems is increasingly dependent on the management of conservationists, the translocation of life referred to as biological invasion signals that these mutating ecosystems cannot be simply absorbed into the dominant economic system. This is where things get interesting. While Timothy Morton offers a compelling account of an "ecology without nature" the unmanageable ecologies of invasion present the apparent aporia of an *ecology without the oikos*—an ecological thought shorn of the aesthetic ideology of the household, immune to domestication, and requiring a critical vocabulary of the terrestrial that does not prep, already at the level of perception, the landscape for an inevitable anthropogeomorphological modification.

In the sheer desperation of the sentence, *The enemy is Mother Nature*, the limit of the economics of nature-as-oikos announces itself. More than an accountable mother, making "nature" an enemy, a *hostis*, must be understood as a form of primitive accumulation, an *underwriting*, a first step or first strike toward making nature a *host*, and thereby subject to the law of hospitality (with statistically calculable lapses into inhospitability), ultimately subject and subjected to the law of the anthropomorphic household, an *oikonomia*. Derrida's thinking around the sentence, *nous ne savons pas ce que c'est, l'hospitalité*, could be a pivot point of a critical reorientation in an era of invasion meltdowns. Hospitality, or *Wirtbarkeit* as Kant defines and delimits *Hospitalität* in the third definitive article of perpetual peace, is glossed by Derrida on the basis of the *Wirt* that "governs the whole lexicon of *Wirtschaft*, which is to say, economy and, thus, *oikonomia*, law of the household" ("Hospitality" 6). But what is the subject of hospitality when ecosystems, overrun by exotics, increasingly stand *before* the law of the household?8 Species invasion does not pose a novel challenge to hospitality—the shock comes from the generosity of the ecosystem to the foreigner—but rather illuminates the self-contradiction that hospitality, as latent *hostipitality*, harbors in its own body. The limit of the project of conflating the feral ecosystem with the "natural" (as "bundle of ecosystem services") is evident in the fact that most ecosystems not currently expropriated for human or corporate welfare are operating at a loss; the managerial and budgetary framework furnished by oikonomia registers everywhere only "ecological debt" and a sharp downturn in the availability of "ecological services."

Out of a politically, administratively, and more or less commercially disciplined movement of the majority of the biophysical world—witness not only these statistics but the budgetary consciousness that registers ecosystems in economic terms: a global North that appropriates nearly half of the planet's net primary productivity, consumes over one-third of the productivity of the oceanic shelf, uses a majority of freshwater runoff, and operates over 36,000 dams—out of this "administered world" (Adorno) an unregulated, unadministratable and undisciplined circulation of life is emerging under the banner of the invasive, commencing to undermine cemented conceptual frameworks and tropologies—including that of the topos itself, revealed as the polytopic—and even to undermine the economy that bases itself on the anticipated stability of the ecosystems (agricultural and otherwise), whose hospitality to exotics and invasives has been severely underestimated.9 As the return of the repressed on a planetary scale, species invasion exacerbates, in the frustration of the global attempt to fold ecology into the economy, coming agricultural crises. It portends the invasion of multiple species into every arena of human life, including the political, and in this sense the discourse, or the trope taking the place of a discourse, of "invasion" in ecology could be read as the paroxysm of what Angela Mitropoulos, following Hannah Arendt, terms an *oikopolitics*—articulated doubly in the blurring of the public (commons) and the private (enterprise) as well as in the attempt of politics to secure "an intimately normative disposition" on grounds "both familial and national" (72).

Less abruptly dismissive of an oikopolitics we could instead pose the question: if habitat loss and species invasion, as two of the leading forces shaping ecosystems, could stand to alter the make-up of the *oikos* (as paleonymy designating squat or slum rather than affluent single-family household), then what might an actual oikopolitics, readjusted for this eviction of past associations and occupation by new ones, promise? For the scope of this essay such a question is too speculative to answer, but in the foreclosure of oikopolitics emerges, no matter how rudimentary, a political ecology. In the rise of feral ecologies the eco- will not come out unscathed, but neither will the political where as it is based on, and projects, a certain normative disposition of the domestic. The insolvency of oikopolitics in an era of ecological invasion might be softened, then, to the foreclosure of the purchase of the oikos.

There's a loss of features that allow you to describe where you live. When you characterize where you're from, you look out the window at the plants and animals even if you don't notice them immediately. I think there's something wrong with the loss of a distinct sense of being. It comes down to: where's my home? (Burdick 11)

Hardly just a question of the house. Already some time ago Adorno identified the contiguity between the seemingly apolitical "protective hand" of the gardener—like the biologist quoted above from *Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion*—and an extreme hostility to immigration.

The caring hand that even now tends the little garden as if it had not long since become a 'lot', but fearfully wards off the unknown intruder, is already that which denies the political refugee asylum. (34)

And it should be no surprise that same presidency that in 1999 produced Executive Order 13112, which authorized U.S. federal agencies to prevent the introduction and/or control the spread of alien invasive species had in 1994 militarized the U.S. / Mexico border with the establishment of Operation Gatekeeper; both are, in the words of Mike Davis, not originary events but only so much "gas on the flames of nativism" (11). But before the increasing absurdity of nativism, and the increasingly frequent irruption of nonspecies, the magnitude of the dissolution of the ecological "home" into the "lot" should have the capacity to inform political practice (encompassing even immigration policy) and not the other way around.

#### Dissemination

*For all that a technologically assisted passage may be an aspect of adventure, biological life's willingness to take advantage of new openings suggests a capacity for mobilism, dispersal and self-transformation that is not reducible to any anthropic principle, let alone any single moment in the development of the technological apparatus. (Clark 104)*

The task of this critical climate change is no longer to consider the extent to which globalization intervenes in, structures, disarms, imprints, or otherwise acts upon life systems; rather the explosion of translocated life invites consideration of how the biophysical world itself capitalizes on the generosity of infrastructure and the transportation industry for its own dissemination and proliferation. This shift in agency has been posed by Michael Pollan in *The Botany of Desire*: what if it is the plant that exploits us for its own proliferation and not the other way around? But what if this perspectival shift goes feral, leaving the *hortus conclusus* in which Pollan, the human bumblebee, is content to dwell? Such a perspective might find in biotic globalization an extreme and perhaps contentious case of what has been called "globalization from below" and in doing so would follow Nigel Clark, who argues that "there is no final cut-off point to this 'below,' no guard rail to keep us to the realm of the already humanized" (105).

By its very deterritorializing capabilities, plurality of affiliations, openness to mutation and hybridization, dissemination operates in a deconstructive modality far outside those textfields to which it has been discursively delimited. The exploitation of the accidental filiations between seme and semen, seeds and semes, is what dissemination is all about: finding new corridors, new communication networks, novel contacts and vectors of contagion, and new generative possibilities. Biotic modalities of dissemination capitalize on these entirely fortuitous resemblances too: the similarity, for a disseminule, between a drifting timber mass and the deck of a steamer, between a prolonged gale and the sail of a ship, between a land bridge and the landing gear of a 747. Floating as well as *flying* signifiers: "the force and form of [dissemination's] disruption explode the semantic horizon" (Derrida, *Points* 41). The extensification of dissemination takes form today in the ecological explosion, not only in the upheavals in the distribution of life, but first in the "enormous increase in numbers of some kind of living organism" (Elton 1). This novel usage of "explosion," popularized by Elton, itself signals an explosion by the word "explosion" out of a fixed semantic horizon. "I use the word 'explosion' deliberately," Elton confirms on the opening page of *The Ecology of Invasions*, "because it means the bursting out from control of forces that were previously held in restraint by other forces. Indeed, the word was originally used to describe the barracking of actors by an audience whom they were no longer able to restrain by the quality of their performance" (1). The OED corroborates Elton's etymology: "to explode: to clap and hoot a player off the stage; to drive away with expressions of disapprobation; to cry down; to banish ignominiously." The metaphoric "ecological explosion" is at the same time an explosion of the metaphor: an outbreak of the allegorical and a breakdown of the monosemantic within an ecological treatise, and moreover an outbreak that "explodes" out of the semantic horizon of the theater and into the wild: *the explosion goes feral*. And what does species invasion portend if not an explosion of dissemination in the transgression of one boundary after another? The inverse also deserves consideration: that species invasion signals the implosion of the oikos, and thus a mutation of the eco- into a horizon not constrained by any anthropology.

### A Willingness to Take Advantage of New Openings

Yet, to return to an earlier point, Nigel Clark's compelling suggestion that the explosive dissemination of invasive species could be attributed to a polymorphous perverse "willingness to take advantage of new openings"—still offends the dominant scientific sensibility. A survey of ecological literature evidences a refusal to consider the Pollanian possibility of dissemination outside of an anthropogenesis. "Humans," one reads, "have surpassed natural forces as the principal global disperser of vascular plants" (Mack and Lonsdale 95). More recently and more encompassing: "Species transfer though human agency is much more frequent, efficient and effective than through natural mechanisms and has no parallel in evolutionary history" (Kowarik and von der Lippe). While the initial articulation as such of "Man as a Dispersal Agent" may stem from a talk given in 1958 by botanist F.R. Fosberg, this talk is limited to domesticated species in agricultural space, whose proliferation and maintenance is dependent at every stage of life on a horticultural agency. Yet today species transfer increasingly deals with "escaped" and non-target *nonspecies* in peripheral spaces not actively managed. And the extent to which "human agency" is an adequate designation for such non-deliberate proliferation, often occurring outside of agricultural space, remains highly dubious. While the most noxious weeds in Australia, for example, consist mostly of exotics deliberately imported for ornamental gardens, their proliferation outside of horticultural space could not be achieved without their willingness to take advantage of new openings. The very problem of bioinvasion, if one may put it this way, is based on an extreme ecological irresponsibility on the part of human specie(s), coupled with an equally radical response-ability by biological life to technological development.

To wind down—both this paper and the anthropological machine—I propose turning to a critical passage of American literature, the close of Cormac McCarthy's *Blood Meridian*. Set in a crucial moment in American history, the years directly following the colonization and genocide of the Southwest, the closing scene of the novel takes place in a crude theater, which doubles as a bordello, situated amidst a theater of war populated only by "enormous ricks" and "colossal dikes" of buffalo skeletons, the blood of the massacres having evaporated. Amidst this landscape a bear in a crinoline dress, dancing to the sound of a barrel organ, is shot during a drunken altercation, and, though bleeding profusely, continues dancing in the eerie stillness, until it collapses and dies. The Judge, the monstrous Judge Holden, nonspecies *par excellence*, falls to speaking to the Kid, the novel's protagonist, of this stage. "There is room on this stage," says the Judge, "for one beast and one beast alone. All others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness beyond the footlamps. Bears that dance, bears that don't" (331). What Judge Holden describes is the subscript of a species whose emblem consists in the image of an unruly audience that will not cease exploding until it has driven every other actor off the stage. As definitive as his totalitarian proclamation sounds in a country currently defined by a military doctrine of full-spectrum domination, the mutually assured destruction of the environmental and financial crises, both greatly amplified by wars abroad, supplants such outdated asymmetries. And while conservationists now propose programs of "managed relocation" and "assisted deportation" for species unable to track climate change fast enough, at the same time new (and far better funded) bureaucracies and biosecurity agencies have been established to stop the flow of invasives into and throughout the country.10 These seemingly opposing movements, however, work in tandem with the wealth of commercial activities tied to the destruction of habitat—namely, to ensure the subjection of the biosphere to political, administrative, and commercial control. Of all the hats he wears—scalp-hunter, natural-historian, scientist, and politician—Judge Holden's legendary ledger book, in which he inscribes his anthropological discoveries before consigning them to the fire, places him foremost in the position of a administrator, a manager of budgets.

Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent. He looked out at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he'd collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men's knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth. […] The Judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said.  Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation. (199)

But suzerains as well as stewards of the earth, subjected to dialectical *Umschlag*, both belong to ruined mythologies. In our ecologies of war only a limited and highly discrete control is capable of being exercised. The novel pathways of biotic migration are too engrained in a modern technicity to be eradicated without a total collapse of the global economy, and yet metropolitan space is too sprawling to permit the unassisted passage of most species. Until further notice these government agencies, as well as Judge Holden's apocalyptic pronouncements, will remain, as one aptly calls them, a security theater.

### *Notes*

### *Works Cited*

Easterling, Keller. *Organization Space*. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.

*Chapter 8*

## **Bioethics**

## Bioethics Otherwise, or, How to Live with Machines, Humans, and Other Animals

Joanna Zylinska

*For thinking concerning the animal, if there is such a thing, derives from poetry. There you have a thesis: it is what philosophy has, essentially, had to deprive itself of.* – Jacques Derrida, *The Animal That Therefore I Am*

*It seems that an animal is in the world as water in the water.* – Bojan Šarčević, video project, Galerie BQ, Cologne

*I never wanted to be posthuman, or posthumanist, any more than I wanted to be postfeminist.*

– Donna Haraway, *When Species Meet*

#### Broken Wings

How can the human speak in the shadow of the post-humanist critique? This essay arises out of a prolonged moment of doubt, a cognitive and affective confusion over the ontology and status of what goes under the name of "man." Now, that confusion is of course nothing new. It has been inherent to the disciplinary inquiry within the *human*ities conducted under the aegis of philosophical positions broadly associated with poststructuralism over the last few decades. The early twenty-first century attempts on the part of humanities scholars to turn to a more serious engagement with those hard sciences that deal with different human parts and particles—anatomy, neurology, genetics—have contributed even further to this uncertainty, as has the discovery that the typical signal points of the human such as language, tool use, culture (or "leaving traces"), and emotions are to be found across the species barrier.1 Rather than aim at ascertaining the identity of the human/non-human animal, in all its biodigital configurations, what I am predominantly concerned with in this essay is discussing how this transformed understanding of the human can help us not only *think better* about ourselves and others who may or may not be like us, but also *live better* with others—machines, humans, and other animals. The emphasis in this investigation falls on the pragmatics of the "how" as much as on the nature of that "we." My focus here is therefore primarily ethical rather than ontological. And yet the very inquiry into ways of living a good life must be accompanied by the assessment not only of who will do the living but also of who will be involved in the process of judging its goodness, and in structuring a theoretical discourse around our biological and political forms of existence.

In a certain sense this essay is an attempt to return to the human "after the cyborg."2 This attempt is underpinned by an intellectual and, dare I say it, personal imperative to find a way out of what I see as the posthumanist impasse of some strands of contemporary cultural theory, whereby the widespread acceptance of the notions of transhuman relationality, interspecies kinship, and machinic becoming by many humanities scholars seems to have diminished the need for a more rigorous interrogation of the singularity of trans-species and intra-species difference. It is thus armed with doubt and singularity as my analytical tools, coupled with the intransigent use of the "I" pronoun, which simultaneously undermines and reasserts the humanist pretence of this piece of writing, that I set out to explore these issues. Obviously, there is also a possibility that this posthuman, all-too-human interrogation is just another exercise in narcissism, a desperate attempt to return to the self and hang on to a fantasy of human exceptionalism. In this context, Jacques Derrida's query "Is there animal narcissism?" (51–52) becomes something of an accusation, aimed perhaps at those of us who are still obsessed by Descartes' question: "But as for me, who am I?"

Still, post Freud, this fantasy of human exceptionalism is not an easy one to retain, as Donna Haraway explains poignantly in her book, *When Species Meet*. The three great wounds to the primary narcissism of the human—the Copernican revolution, the Darwinian theory of evolution, and the Freudian excavation of the unconscious—have seriously destabilized humanity's geographical, historical, and psychic self-centeredness.3 To these Haraway adds a fourth, "informatic or cyborgian" wound, "which infolds organic and technological flesh" (*Species* 12). As a result, the human has to think of her- or himself as always already technological, as co-constituted and co-evolving with the world which is made up of animate and inanimate entities. To explain this performative process, Haraway takes recourse to the metaphor of dance and argues that this process of co-constitution is never fully stabilized or accomplished, and that each intervention, each movement, generates a new state of becoming. "All the dancers are redone through the patterns they enact," she writes (25).

Applying a critical lens to the theoretical offerings on interspecies relations by Haraway and two other theorists of becoming-with-animals, Matthew Calarco and Paul Patton, I want to raise some broader questions about the emergent (inter)discipline of animal studies which has gone some way towards thinking human-nonhuman relations precisely *as relations*. This is why "animal studies" is sometimes referred to as "human-animal studies" (Calarco 3). "While there is no widely agreed upon definition of what precisely constitutes animal studies," as Calarco acknowledges in the introduction to his *Zoographies*, "it is clear that most authors and activists working in the field share the conviction that 'the question of the animal' should be seen as one of the central issues in contemporary critical discourse" (1). The key debates within animal studies thus focus, on the one hand, on the being or (for the lack of a better word) "nature" of animals, and, on the other, on the possibility of making the human-animal distinction (2). Within this, the question of *living-with* but also of *living-as* animals becomes central to this field of inquiry.

It is the promises and limitations of the very notion of interspecies or companion ethics as outlined by animal studies theorists that are of particular interest to me in this piece. To let the cat out of the bag, so to speak, I am not going to be too optimistic about the viability of any such ethical framework or model. This conceptual hesitation will be outlined against the wider canvas of what I called in my earlier work "alternative bioethics." "Departing from the more accepted definition of bioethics as the interrogation of 'ethical issues arising from the biological and medical sciences,' … [b]ioethics for me stands for an 'ethics of life,' whereby life names both the physical, material existence of singular organisms (what the Greeks called *zoē*) and their political organization into populations (*bios*)" (Zylinska, *Bioethics* xii–xiii). Traditionally, the bioethical debate about issues of health and life management has been primarily procedural, with questions of moral agency, political influence, and economic interest already pre-decided in many of the dominant ethical paradigms which are applied to resolving the so-called moral dilemmas concerning genomic interventions, cosmetic surgery, and cloning. Rooted in the philosophy of alterity, the "alternative" non-systemic bioethics I propose instead takes as its focal point relationality and kinship between humans and non-humans—such as animals and machines. Yet, for all my consideration of interspecies relationality and the recognition of its significance as both a set of material circumstances and an ethical injunction, I stop short of embracing companion or interspecies ethics as a viable proposition for what we can tentatively (but not unproblematically) call the posthuman age. In the argument that follows I will attempt to provide a justification for this ethical stoppage on my part and work through the three fundamental blind spots that the intermeshed trajectories of thought in animal studies have frequently run into. These are, to shoot from the hip:

The humanist blind spot, which is centered around issues of language, culture, affect, and the violence of imposition. Arguably, the majority of what we can call distributed positions on interspecies ethics return (to) the human through the back door, even if the theorist has temporarily descended into the kennel, looked her cat seriously in the eye or his horse in the mouth. That return in itself is not so much of a problem, I will argue, provided it is recognized as such, rather than slid or galloped over.

The technicist blind spot, where much work goes into recognizing the animal's anima, i.e. its "subjecitivity," with the animal becoming an extension of the human. Entities designated as "human" and "animal" then get carved out of a complex field of co-constitutive technical forces and situated on the side of "nature."

The violentist blind spot, where violence is posited as the enemy of ethics, something that should be overcome both in "us" and in "the world," rather than being seen as a structuring and inevitable condition of all relationality.4

The reason I have decided to reroute my discussion of (the difficulties of) interspecies ethics here via the thought of Haraway, Calarco, and Patton is not because I am positioning these thinkers as the representatives or figureheads of "animal studies"—although of course they cannot by themselves fully resist such an interpellation. I am turning to them primarily because in their respective works they have actually taken some significant steps towards addressing, more or less explicitly, the three blind spots outlined above. To what extent these efforts have been successful and whether they can help us envisage some better ways of living with non-human others is something I will discuss in the course of what follows. The essay will end with a tentative outline of a bioethics for the twenty-first century, a kind of "in-the-clouds" proposal that piggybacks on the ideas of the animal studies scholars such as Haraway, even if it ultimately takes many of their notions in a somewhat different direction.

Haraway's *When Species Meet* is an exceptional book precisely because of its consistently playful yet rigorous effort to undermine human exceptionalism through a series of philosophical exegeses, scientific reports, auto-ethnographic accounts, and personal anecdotes. It is also an attempt to enact what we may describe as lived philosophy, whereby the theorist lays on the table, for all to see, both her well-processed intellectual trajectories and her much more convoluted desires and passions. Such an act of dual revelation is not entirely new: feminist and queer scholars have been attempting to incorporate, literally and figuratively, their passions, desires, and everyday foibles into their theoretical and activist projects for a few decades now. Importantly, Haraway is prepared to turn her own critical lens not only on her ideas, but also on her own everyday lived practices—her agility training with her dog Cayenne, her family history—while also exposing, for all to see, the weaknesses and contradictions of any such "live/d theory." It is precisely while stumbling and becoming entangled in the texts and textures of human-nonhuman environments made up of academics, dogs, bureaucrats, Californian sunshine, wine, training competitions, research papers, French philosophers, and technologies big and small that Haraway's argument becomes most powerful.

### Puppy Love

Haraway has frequently been accused of either hedging around ethical questions in her earlier books, or of resorting all too early to the American legal discourse, with its clearly identified, individualized moral and political subjects. However, in her latest offerings—primarily her 2003 text, *The Companion Species Manifesto*—she makes a more explicit effort to outline an alternative (bio)ethics of living-with, and emerging-with, other beings. The origins of her ethics of companion species are experiential and spring from "taking dog-human relationships seriously" (3). Significantly, the natural habitats for these cross-species acts of encounter and emergence are always already technological. In her attempt at thinking how to live well together, Haraway insists that the orientation of this ethical project has to transcend the wishes and desires of man as the sole arbitrator of "goodness." This is when she makes one of those well-known gestures of hers which tend to leave many of her critics, myself included, somewhat baffled: namely, she proposes "love" as the source of an ethical bind between companion species. Although she is careful to distinguish it from technophiliac or canonophiliac narcissism (i.e. the belief that dogs are either "tools" for human activity or sources of unconditional affection and spiritual fulfillment for humans), this notion of love as ethical co-emergence and cohabitation entails a number of problems. Not least among these is the way in which the values that underpin her ethics of companion species—love, respect, happiness, and achievement—have a distinctly human "feel" to them precisely because it is the human who defines the meaning of these values and their appropriateness for all companion species. There is no escape from the philosophical quandary that even the most committed of efforts to give dogs what they want, and not what humans merely want for them, inevitably depend on the human ideas of "want," "satisfaction," and "gift." This is not to say that dogs should tell "us" what "they" want; only that a value-driven theory of good is not the most appropriate basis for this kind of ethics.5

To a certain extent, *When Species Meet* is a continuation of Haraway's attempt to think an interspecies ethics, but one of the most significant developments in this book concerns the suspension of any programmatic, value-driven intimations of Haraway's prior ethical outlook. Instead, she is much more self-reflexive and hesitant. Picking up a thread from her earlier work, Haraway proposes that "to be a situated human being is to be shaped by and with animal familiars" (47). While this is an ontological given for her, an ethical way of being-with needs to involve curiosity about our ontology and our becoming—i.e., about those who are not us, but who constantly challenge us through their gaze, their touch or through the lick of their tongue.

#### Sealed with a Kiss

Haraway lays out her ethical injunction for animal curiosity—arguably the softest and yet, paradoxically, also the strongest building block of any ethics of interspecies cohabitation—through an encounter with that oft-cited text within the posthumanist circles, Jacques Derrida's essay, "The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)." In this text Derrida provides an account of finding himself naked, gazed at, and thus put to shame, by his own cat—"a real cat, truly, believe me," he insists (6). Now, Haraway is very upfront about her affections: she loves her dog— "We have had forbidden conversations; we have had oral intercourse," she confesses (16)—and rather likes Derrida. She is just slightly worried about the latter's actual feelings for his cat. More precisely, she is disappointed with Derrida for ultimately using his cat as a stepping stone for a nice philosophical parable about human unknowingness, and for not being intimate enough with his cat or curious enough about her. Begrudgingly, Haraway writes: "he did not seriously consider an alternative form of engagement…one that risked knowing something more about cats and *how to look back*, perhaps even scientifically, biologically, and *therefore* also philosophically and intimately" (20). Derrida himself admits as much: "my having confessed to feeling disarmed before a small mute living being, and my avowed desire to escape the alternative of a projection that appropriates and an interruption that excludes, all that might lead one to guess that I am not ready to interpret or experience the gaze that a cat fixes, without a word, on my nakedness…" (18). In this very event Derrida came "right to the edge of respect" but then got sidetracked by himself, by his own nakedness and his pee-pee, and hence his own philosophico-anthropocentric narcissism. He thus "failed a simple obligation of companion species; he did not become curious about what the cat might actually be doing, feeling, thinking, or perhaps making available to him in looking back at him that morning." In Haraway's reading, that day Derrida "missed a possible invitation, a possible introduction to otherworlding" (20).

This is a serious admonition; one as a failed animal lover—i.e. someone who has never owned a dog, does not coo over kittens, and has no desire to go horse riding—I take personally, which is also perhaps the sign of the aforementioned narcissism (as well as unreconstructed humanism). Yet what if Derrida did indeed "get curious," but then refused to rechannel this curiosity through his own imagined ideas of desire, love, respect, and companionship?

### Love is Not Enough

The uneasiness of these admonitions raised by Haraway—not just against Derrida, but also against other "metropolitan" theorists of critical persuasion (like myself) who are somehow prevented by their own disciplinary corset and urban upbringing from caring sufficiently and adequately about animals—raises for me the important issue of what it actually means to become undone by another species, and to redo oneself after the encounter. Is this "becoming-undone" the best post-humanism can hope for, where the "post-" refers to the transformative interspecies encounter rather than any straightforward overcoming of the human (Haraway, *Species* 21)? In which case what happens if this animal is not just a dog, a cat, or a horse from the family of befriended or domestic animals, but rather a parasite, bacteria, or fungus? (Incidentally, all these are also included in Haraway's notion of companion species, even if they are not really properly "encountered" as such in her writings.) In a review of *When Species Meet*, Boria Sax similarly criticizes Haraway for showing "hardly any interest in wild creatures, except when these offer opportunities to display human ingenuity." Love for Ms Cayenne Pepper, as Haraway's Australian shepherd is often referred to affectionately, seems to win over an obligation to tell a multispecies story, with what Derrida calls "unsubstitutable singularity" (9) giving way to mere particularism—or, to put it in less generous terms, to being undone by pet love. Rather than worry about overcoming the human-animal difference via the shared experience of "other-worlding," perhaps we should spend more time tracing the already embedded, "worlded" differences between animals, breeds, and kinds, and analyze what they *mean*, not just how they unfold? Horses, for example, are said to induce either reticence or careless familiarity in those who do not know them, according to Australian sociologist Ann Game. "But to live relationally with horses," writes Game, "is to know and respect their otherness and difference, which, in turn, implies recognition of the otherness in us" (10).

What shall we do then with Calarco's postulate that "*the human-animal distinction can no longer and ought no longer to be maintained*" (3)? If by distinction we mean the listing of structural differences that safely place different beings in entirely discrete categories—Homo sapiens, Canis lupus familiaris, Erinaceus europaeus—then perhaps there are good reasons for suspending, at least temporarily, such a typology, especially given how it can be used to justify interspecies dependency and exploitation (even if we are to conclude eventually that power relations inevitably define human-animal coexistence). Yet the acknowledgement of a gap between human and animal as conceptual categories at our disposal is necessary if we are not to fall all too easily into uncritical species continuism, a theory that claims that "we" are basically "animals" professed by neo-Darwinists such as Richard Dawkins. The latter of course exerts all his human cognitive privileges in carrying out the theoretical maneuver of subsuming one conceptual category—i.e., "the human," under another—"the animal." In the same way, Calarco's statement about the need to obviate "*the human-animal distinction*" can only ever be made *from the point of species difference*.

When Calarco asserts that "philosophy still has a unique and significant role to play" in transforming "our thinking about what we call animals," he seemingly remains unaware of the fact that his proposition reaffirms the very distinction he is trying to overcome (4). In describing Derrida's reluctance to "abandon the human-animal distinction" altogether as "dogmatic" (145), Calarco reveals and simultaneously conceals his own gesture of attempting to continue philosophizing about the animal, even if the latter is seen as part of a broader system of co-emerging materialities. Now, I do not want to enter into a discussion as to whether the animal can or cannot do philosophy, since I am not sure such a discussion would get us very far. I only aim to foreground this differential, cutting gesture of *philosophizing about the other*—which is singularly different from, say, *eating the other*. It is not therefore surprising that Derrida would not abandon this evidently troublesome and politically sensitive human-animal distinction. After all, any such act of "abandonment" could only ever be conducted from within the most anthropocentric position of not just "I am," but also "I decide" and "I profess," with all the hegemonic authority this carries. What Calarco therefore sees as Derrida's "refusal" is perhaps only a hesitation, one that actually adds strength to the latter's attempt at practicing "animal studies." Incorporating such a moment of hesitation as a condition of responsible interspecies ethics, however, is not something either Calarco or Haraway particularly want to consider. Significantly, in turning to the latter's "Cyborg Manifesto" on the penultimate page of his own book, Calarco takes as a statement of fact what is evidently a normative proposition—i.e., that "the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached" (148)—a proposition that, incidentally, remains disconnected from any particular material context and that carries all the rhetorical force of an "I" that writes, signs, and breaches. Ironically, Calarco proposes that a better solution than Derrida's "refusal" is to be found in Haraway's closing statement that "many *people* no longer feel the need for such a separation" (140) (I hope I do not need to explain the unwitting joke once I've italicized it for you, dear reader?).

### Don't Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes

Where do we go from here? How far can this hesitation about the animal take us—epistemologically and ethically? Derrida provides us with the following, much more jagged but perhaps also much more responsible and thought out (in that old-fashioned anthropocentric way) suggestion:

There is no interest to be found in debating something like a discontinuity, rupture, or even abyss between those who call themselves men and what so-called men, those who name themselves men, call the animal. Everybody agrees on this; discussion is closed in advance; one would have to be more asinine than any beast…to think otherwise….The discussion is worth undertaking once it is a matter of determining the number, form, sense, or structure, the foliated consistency, of this abyssal limit, these edges, this plural and repeatedly folded frontier. The discussion becomes interesting once, instead of asking whether or not there is a limit that produces a discontinuity, one attempts to think what a limit becomes once it is abyssal, once the frontier no longer forms a single indivisible line but more than one internally divided line; once, as a result, it can no longer be traced, objectified, or counted as single and indivisible. What are the edges of a limit that grows and multiplies by feeding on an abyss? (30–31)

From there, Derrida develops a threefold thesis, which asserts that: (1) this abyssal rupture does not mark a straight and clear-cut distinction between two entities: Man and Animal; (2) the border of this abyssal rupture has a history which we cannot ignore or dismiss all too quickly; (3) beyond the border of the human there exists a heterogeneous multiplicity of the living, or "a multiplicity of organizations of relations among realms that are more and more difficult to dissociate by means of the figures of the organic and inorganic, of life and/or death" (31).

There is perhaps a similarity between what Derrida calls "a multiplicity of organizations" between indissociable realms and what Haraway understands as the co-evolution and co-emergence of the organic and the inorganic. This line of argument also points to the technical dimension of these multiple ontologies, whereby beings come to life precisely via the technical process of bringing-forth or creation, in which no fixed elements precede their mutual becoming. However, even if we are to take co-evolution and co-emergence as a starting point for considering ethical relations between species and kinds, I suggest we need to get there via the Derridean detour of caring not only about other beings and other species but also about the history and meaning of these processes of "saming" and "othering." This, in turn, requires us to recognize "our" kinship not just with animals but also with machines(s), with technics. Ethical responsibility stands for the ability and need to respond—"responders are themselves co-constituted in the responding" (Haraway, "Becoming" 116)—which applies to people as well as lab and domestic animals. It also entails acknowledging the inevitability of relations of dependency between and among humans, animals, and machines, some of which may include causing pain and killing—even though, as Haraway insists, such practices "should never leave their practitioners in moral comfort, sure of their righteousness" (*Species* 75).6

What emerges from the above is that violence and dependency are positioned as inevitable conditions of "worlding." This conclusion should not be seen as a get-out clause from ethical responsibility. The recognition of the inevitability of violence in any relation with alterity does not take away the injunction to both minimize the violence and reflect on it. An ethical theory that embeds violence into its framework—rather than just pushing it aside in a fantasy gesture of moral purification—promises to address the question of dependency in all its complexity. This does not imply imposing moral equivalence between all forms of violence and all forms of dependency, even if we accept that "[*a*]*ny* act of identification, naming, or relation is a betrayal of and a violence toward the Other" (Calarco 136).7 Yet in spite of recognizing that there is no "pure" ethical position, "no way of living that is not also a way of someone, not just something, else dying differentially" (Haraway, *Species* 80), Haraway's proposal for "ruthlessly mundane," non-utilitarian interspecies ethics ultimately sounds rather fuzzy when she writes that "The needed morality, in my view, is culturing a radical ability to remember and feel what is going on and performing the epistemological, emotional, and technical work to respond practically in the face of the permanent complexity not resolved by taxonomic hierarchies and with no humanist philosophical or religious guarantees" (75). By saying this she seems to fall prey to what Simon Glendinning calls the "cognitivist presumption" of humanism, in the sense that the human acts and processes of "remembering," "feeling what is going on," and "performing practically" are not adequately assessed for their anthropocentrism (184). Again, this is not to say that humans need to invite "others"—animals, sentient machines—into their thinking, feeling, and acting circle: such a gesture would only confirm the taxonomic hierarchy. It is only to suggest that a certain doubt or hesitation should perhaps be introduced at the very foundation of any such ethical endeavor. Yes, there is a danger that this *ego dubito* will only be an extension of the Cartesian thinking and reasoning. Yet for it to be about the ethics of the other, rather than primarily about the ontology of the self, the outcome of this doubting process needs to be pointed elsewhere. *Ethical* doubt has the potential to turn the focus and attention of the study of interspecies relationality precisely to the alterity that is not in me. It does not therefore serve the ultimate reaffirmation of the human "I."

Anything else—no matter if I was to defend the special positioning of the human as a being with its own teleology and truth, or the species continuism of modern naturalism which only affirms differences of degree, not of kind—would require the reinstatement of the position of *knowing* the nature of interspecies difference and being able to arbitrate over it once and for all. There is ethical value in the injunction for curiosity about "animals," yet this curiosity has to be combined with the recognition of not knowing all that much about "them." Otherwise we face the danger that this curiosity will lead to the projection of our most unreformed beliefs, ideas, and desires onto "the animal other," with the alleged knowledge being a mere extension of what we thought we knew in the first place, a filtration of some observed behavior through the cognitive and conceptual apparatus at our disposal which also makes us believe that we have been co-constituted together—while in fact we have only constituted this "animal" in our own image (of "us" or "them"). The *ethical* recognition of this difference between human and animal does not therefore amount to knowing its nature once and for all. Indeed, any attempt to cognitively master it will only be a narrative, a story, one that inevitably has a mythical character. It will also be another technical prosthesis—alongside flint tools, hammers and computers—that shapes our systemic co-emergence in and with the world.8

### Side Saddle

If stories and myths shape the human as much as technical tools and apparatuses do, one particular story that is of interest to me in the context of this enquiry into interspecies ethics concerns animal training as narrated by both Haraway and Paul Patton. Reflecting on training to a high standard of performance for competitions with her dog Cayenne, Haraway remains aware of the economies of class, leisure, and geography that shape this particular sport. She also acknowledges that it is the human who decides that training will take place, even though "[t]he human must [then] respond to the authority of the dog's actual performance" (221), and hence take account of what Game calls animal (or, to be more precise, horse) "sociality" (4). But even if we recognize, with Game, that in any training situation animals need to "*allow* people to teach them to be led" (4), we also need to acknowledge the problem of multiple temporalities—i.e., a difference between the animal present and the human future, which is also a difference between (strategic) necessity and expediency. Haraway admits to having had the same reservations regarding the perfecting of the breed to "produce dogs who could herd with matchless skill, win in conformation, excel in obedience and agility sports, and serve as pets with dignity" that many cultural theorists display, but she apparently changed her mind after she "fell in love" (129). Now, we should take this confession less as an acknowledgement that what she calls "the love of the breed" has clouded her critico-ethical judgment and more as an admittance to being with, amongst and close to animals; and thus also an admonition against critical theorists (such as myself perhaps) who only ever look at animals from far away, treating them as objects of interpretation while also reducing them to two-dimensional figures of speech. Haraway seems to be saying to us: some of you know *how to think* with animals but not really *how to live* with them—and actually *what to do* with them.

Analogous concerns underpin Paul Patton's attempt to think animal philosophy from the bottom, or rather saddle, up. His essay, "Language, Power, and the Training of Horses" in Cary Wolfe's edited collection, *Zoontologies*, opens with a generic declaration of animal love: "People love horses for all kinds of reason" (83). Patton himself fell in love with horses through the experience of learning to train them. In a similar vein to Haraway, he is attempting to combine his philosophical position rooted in continental philosophy with "a good story" about his training relationship with his horse Flash. And yet what is missing for me from Patton's narrative is a deeper reflection on this desire to train, and hence master another being—and on the pleasure of that. Even if we recognize that precision in training involves making the horse "do the right thing," this does not explain why "we" would want to achieve this in the first place. What is the purposefulness of horse/man training? The argument about ennoblement borrowed from horse trainer Vicky Hearne that Haraway brings under the rubric of flourishing and that Patton also refers to is just too close to colonial narratives of improving the native for my own, admittedly paper-thin animal lover's comfort. Of course, Haraway and Patton are no strangers to postcolonial theory. Patton also realizes that "The aesthetico-moral defense of the activities for which animals are trained is corrupt…to the extent that it misrepresents what, anthropomorphically, we might call the 'values' of the animals involved and it projects onto them as natural certain aptitudes and airs that are valued by their all too human trainers" (93).

How does he then get out of the potential accusation of rationalizing certain human preferences and culturally acquired desires for beauty, grace, and skill through training practice? Not very well, I fear, as evidenced in the following declaration: "Disciplinary relations of command and obedience are precisely a means to create and maintain stable and civil relations between different kinds of beings, not only among individuals of the same species, but also between representatives of different species" (95). Conceding, after Nietzsche and Foucault, that all social relations are power relations does not resolve the socio-political quandary that not all social relations are the same; they do not all *mean* the same thing, and are not *necessary* in the same way. For example, how has a decision been reached that training horses is a good thing? I am not particularly convinced by the more spiritualist justification of human-horse training provided by Game as a way of living together more "creatively" (7–8). While the majority of us humans would probably agree that training horses is not morally equivalent to beating or eating horses, I also wonder what criteria underpin Patton's notion of "civility" that structures his declaration and how he has arrived at it. Patton says that we learn from animal training "that hierarchical forms of society between unequals are by no means incompatible with ethical relations and obligation toward other beings" (95). But this argument has to be developed further via the notion of species singularity, the forgetting of which will only perpetuate the species exceptionalism that both Haraway and Patton are so keen to avoid. By asking "What is the point of training?" I am not therefore promoting some kind of Edenic fantasy of free roaming wolves or mares. I am only suggesting that a clarification is needed with regard to the affective investments of animal lovers and animal studies theorists. The reflection on the trainer's desire to make the universe supple, to have it bend under their command, is nevertheless something Haraway and Patton withhold in their affective analyses of human-animal relationships. Even if we acknowledge, as Patton does, that a training relation is one possible form of an ethical relation which "enhances the power and the feeling of power of both horse and rider" (97), we are back in a logical loop, with the theorist's fantasy and projection covering over the violence involved in making the world and in making meanings in the world with and via animals.

### What's New Pussycat, or Bioethics Otherwise

Is there a way out? As the discussion above hopefully demonstrates, any gesture of attempting to propose an ethical framework is always inevitably suspended between anthropocentrism and violence. Yet this recognition should not absolve us of an ethical responsibility to work out better ways of living-with—with humans, other animals, and machines. As biotechnologies and digital media are constantly challenging our established ideas of what it means to be human and live a human life, they also command a transformation of the recognized moral frameworks through which we understand life, as well as a rethinking of who the moral subject is in the current conjuncture. The so-called post-humanist critique discussed throughout this essay has the potential to call into question the anthropocentric bias of our established ways of thinking—i.e., the belief that the human is situated at the top of the "chain of beings" and that this special positioning entitles him or her to a particular set of consumerist and exploitative attitudes towards non-humans (mammals, fish, rainforests, the ecosphere as a whole, etc.). Following Haraway *et al*., the human can be understood instead as being part of a complex natural-technical network and as emerging in a dynamic way out of this network. On this emergence, the human is presented with an ethical task of having to make decisions, always in an uncertain terrain, about life, in all its different incarnations and enactments.

In the biodigital age, this tentatively differentiated human needs to respond to an expanded scope of obligations, beyond those exerted by singular human others. The field of bioethics thus has to deal not just with questions of the transformation of life on a biological level—via genomics, DNA sequencing, cloning, and so forth—but also with life situated in a broader political context, through questions of the financing of the biotech industry, of the database management of the immigration and asylum systems, of the normativity of cosmetic surgery, of national and cellular surveillance, of biocitizenship, etc. The decision-making processes of those who call themselves human, with all the awareness of the historical and cultural baggage this term carries, and of the temporary and fragile nature of any such identification, are important in any situation when issues of life and its multiple transformations are at stake. Involvement in these processes does not have to amount to the celebration of human superiority though: it should rather be seen as a practical mobilization of the human skills, however compromised and imperfect, of critical reflexivity and practical intervention. Now, the question of whether "animals" or "machines" should also engage in such ethical processes is irrelevant, even if we recognize that the features and behaviors that used to be seen as uniquely human have recently been identified across the species barrier. It is irrelevant because this responsibility only ever refers to "me": a temporarily stabilized singular human who emerges in-relationwith human and non-human others.

The moral quandary of whether "we" should respect parrots, bacteria, cyberdogs, or even iPods that is sometimes raised in the context of interspecies ethics shows a reluctance to submit this "we" category, in all its implied unity and speciesism, to a rigorous critique. Also, in the framework outlined throughout this essay ethics is not so much about respect, because respect assumes that I am already fully constituted as a moral agent before I encounter the other, any other, and then I can give this other my gift of recognition, care, and kindness. Instead, ethics can be thought more productively in terms of phenomenological responsiveness and moral responsibility—a position that assumes that whatever attitude I adopt towards the other, I am already responding to the other's presence and demand.9 Indeed, sometimes withholding respect might be the most responsible thing to do, depending on the circumstances. Also, it is worth emphasizing again that the notion of the human—who, as soon as she takes up ethical responsibility, she differentiates herself from carrots, machines and the general flow of life—does not disappear altogether in this "alternative" bioethical theory, even if we raise some substantial questions for the humanist, anthropocentric assumptions around many traditional bioethical positions.

Understood in this way, bioethics becomes a supplement to both morality and politics; a prior demand on those of us who call themselves humans to respond to the difference of the world critically and responsibly, without taking recourse all too early to pre-decided half-truths, opinions, beliefs, and political strategies. But it is not something that can be "implemented" once and for all or become a practical tool for resolving specific moral dilemmas over life and death. The kind of alternative bioethics I am attempting to outline here cannot be instantiated in a single "example" because any such example would inevitably take over and even colonize the need for open-ended critical work of bioethics by becoming a measuring stick against which other bioethical cases and dilemmas could be compared.10 In undertaking this kind of critical-creative work of bioethics, I am much more interested in shifting the parameters of the ethical debate from an individualistic problem-based moral paradigm in which rules can be rationally and strategically worked out on the basis of a previously agreed principle, to a broader political context in which individual decisions are always involved in complex relations of power, economy, and ideology.

By pointing to a place of difference as a productive site of relationality and interspecies kinship, bioethics as an ethics of life the way I envisage it has the capacity to challenge the hierarchical system of descent through which relations between species and life forms have traditionally been thought. At the same time, focusing on the multiple instances in which this difference manifests itself, always differently, is one way of ensuring that we do not collapse various beings and life forms into a seamless flow of life, and then continue philosophizing about it as if nothing had happened. This non-normative, technics-aware bioethics thus needs to seriously consider the polyvalent relations of co-evolution and co-emergence. However, it must also carry a visible trace of reflection on the very process of its creation: from the human vantage point of language, philosophy, and culture. In other words, this technics-aware bioethics entails an injunction to give an account of the violence of thinking ethics, including that of interspecies relations.

Importantly, doubt needs to become the condition and structuring device of such an alternative bioethics. Yet this is not the impartial doubt of the Cartesian ego cogito. Rather it involves the suspension of the cognitive essentialism that knows the nature of interspecies difference in advance, all too early. Even if this sounds like a much more tentative and hesitant ethical proposition than some of those discussed throughout the course of this essay (not to mention many procedural or value-based bioethical theories, where different forms of life are assigned value in advance and are then weighted against each other), it can perhaps speak more convincingly to those of "us" to whom animal love does not come "naturally," as it were. It can also keep a check on those animal studies experts who love their companion species, or even themselves *as* companion species, a little too much. Because the question that is posed to us is not only "What does my pet want?" or even the Cartesian "But as for me, whom am I?" but also, perhaps first of all, "And what if a bacteria responded?"

#### *Notes*

#### 222 Joanna Zylinska

concept may give too much ammunition to the proponents of many "fluid" theories of human-machine couplings, where the overall metaphor of the flow seems to have swept away any discrete beings and entities. But the defense or critique of the cyborg as a singular entity is not my primary aim in this essay. My efforts rather arise out of my dissatisfaction with *some aspects* of the relational theory of becoming which at times leads to an all-too-quick dissolution of differences between beings, species and kinds—hence my return to the human "after the cyborg" here.

#### 224 Joanna Zylinska

cloning, genetic testing, or art practice which uses biomaterial, and have also suggested ways of thinking ethically about all these different cases.

### *Works Cited*

Fudge, Erica. *Animal.* London: Reaktion Books, 2002.

Game, Anne. "Riding: Embodying the Centaur." *Body and Society* 7.4 (2001): 1–12.

Glendinning, Simon. *In the Name of Phenomenology*. London: Routledge, 2007.

#### *Chapter 9*

## **Post-Trauma**

### Towards a New Definition?

Catherine Malabou

In his article "Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject," Slavoj Žižek develops a very insightful critique of the current neurobiological and neuro-psychoanalytic approach of trauma. He challenges the way in which these approaches tend to substitute for the Feudian and Lacanian definitions of psychic wounds.

Žižek's critique may be summarized in the following terms: while developing its own critique of psychoanalysis, namely of Freud and Lacan, neurobiologists would not have been aware of the fact that Lacan, precisely, has already said what they thought he hasn't said. They would thus be ventriloquized by Lacan at the very moment when they thought they were talking from another point of view than that of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Why is that? How is it possible to repeat Lacan without knowing it? According to Žižek, contemporary approaches to trauma would remain unaware—out of disavowal or of desire—of Lacan's most fundamental statement: *trauma has always already occured*. A specific trauma, such or such empirical shock, may happen only because a more profound and originary trauma, understood as the Real or as the "transcendental" trauma, has always already occured. Trauma had always already happened. Already always already. Lacan had already said always already. The new approach of trauma would only be a confirmation, and not a destitution, of the always already. It would be a mere repetition of what has already occured and been said.

To state that trauma has already occurred means that it cannot occur by chance, that every empirical accident or shock impairs an already or a previously wounded subject. There is an obvious rejection of chance in Freud and Lacan. Beyond the always already principle. Something that Lacan had never said, to the extent that I wanted to give a chance to a thought which would definitely escape the always already's authority, which would give a chance to chance.

"Before I focus on the notion of chance, I want to state that the possibility of such a beyond is opened (this is the central thesis of my book) by current neurobiology and its redefinition of both the unconscious (named neural unconscious or neural psyche) and the trauma, consequently the post-traumatic subjectivity." Neurobiology and neuropsychoanalysis challenge the Freudian conception of the psychic accident understood as a meeting point between two meanings of the event: the event conceived of as an internal immanent determination (*Erlebnis*) and an encounter that occurs from outside (*Ereignis*). In order for an accident to become properly a psychic event, it has to trigger the subject's psychic history and determinism. The "Ereignis" has to unite with the "Erlebnis." The most obvious example of such a definition of the psychic event is the example, often taken by Freud, of the war wound. When a soldier, on the front, gets traumatized by a wound, or fear of the wound, it appears that the current real conflict he is involved in is a repetition of an internal conflict. Shock is always a reminder of a previous shock. Freud would then have then considered PTSD as the expression of the always already character of the conflict or trauma.

Neurobiologists admit on the contrary that severe trauma 1) is fundamentally an "Ereignis," that is something which happens by mere chance from the outside; 2) it thus dismantles the *Ereignis/Erlebnis* distinction to the extent that it severs the subject from her reserves of memory and from the presence of the past. After severe brain damage, which always produces a series of disconnections and holes within the neural network, a new subject emerges with no reference to the past or to her previous identity. A neural disconnection does not trigger any previous conflict. Instead, the post-traumatized subject disconnects the structure of the always already. The post-traumatized subject is the never more of the always already.

We can then state that a neural disconnection cannot belong to either of the three terms that form the Lacanian triad of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real, to the extent that this triad is rooted in the transcendantal principle of the always already. We propose to entertain a fourth dimension, a dimension that might be called the material. From a neurobiological point of view, the trauma would be taken to be a material, empirical, biological, and meaningless interruption of the trancendental itself. This is why post-traumatic subjects are *living examples of the death drive* and of the dimension *beyond the plesaure principle* that Freud and Lacan both fail to locate or to expose. Beyond the always already principle is the true beyond the pleasure principle.

Žižek affords a certain credulity to these ideas but rejects them out of hand for three main reasons:

only under a threat of separation, it is the effect of separation (from substance)" (141).

3. This last sentence expresses the main objection: according to Žižek, the subject is, since Descartes, a post-traumatic subject, a subject structured in such a way that it has to constantly erase the traces of its past in order to be a subject. Thus, and once again, the experience of being cut off from oneself is a very old one. Neuriobiology doesn't teach us anything new on that point, it rather confirms the very essence of the subject: "The empty frame of death drive is the formal-transcendental conditions" of subjectivity: "What remains after the violent traumatic intrusion onto a human subject that erases all his substantial content is the pure form of subjectivity, the form that already must have been there" (144). Further: "If one wants to get an idea of cogito at its purest, its 'degree zero,' one has to take into a look at autistic monsters (the new wounded), a gaze that is very painful and disturbing" (146).

From Descartes to Damasio via Lacan, there would, once again, be one and only one principle: *trauma has always already happened*.

To answer these objections one may insist that the motif of chance, thought and elaborated in a certain way, deconstructs the always already, which appears to be a barrier to what it is supposed to be—that is, a barrier to destruction. If destruction has always already happened, if there is something as a transcendental destruction, then destruction is indestructible. This is what, in Freud and in Lacan, remains extremely problematic: destruction remains for them a structure, the repetition of the originary trauma. What if the always already might explode? What if the always already were self-destructive and able to disappear as the so-called fundamental law of the psyche?

In order to address these issues more specifically, let's concentrate on the status of chance in a dream that Freud analyzes in chapter 7 of *The Interpretation of Dreams*, and that Lacan comments in his turn in seminar 11, *The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis*, in chapters 5, "*Tuché* and *Automaton*," and 6, "The Split between the Eye and the Gaze."

### Freud writes:

A father had been watching beside his child's sick bed for days and nights on end. After the child had died, he went into the next room to lie down, but left the door open so he could see from his bedroom into the room in which the child's body was laid out, with tall candles standing round it. An old man has been engaged to keep watch over it, and sat beside the body murmuring prayers.  He woke up, noticed a bright glare of light from the next room, hurried into it and found that the old watchman had dropped out to sleep and that the wrappings and one of the arms of the beloved child's dead body had been burned by a candle that had fallen on them. (5: 547–8)

The issue immediately addressed by Freud is to know whether we can consider such a dream as a wish-fulfillment. Isn't it on the contrary an objection, a counter example to the theory of dreams as wish-fulfillment?

Let's consider Lacan's answer to this issue. First of all, after having reminded us of this dream, Lacan posits that psychoanalysis is "an encounter, an essential encounter—an appointment to which we are always called with a real that eludes us" (53). This essential missed encounter, or misencounter, with the real is the encounter with the trauma. According to Lacan, this dream stages such an encounter. The Freudian question comes back at that point: if this dream stages the encounter with the trauma, how can we consider it as a wish-fullfillment, as a fullfillment of a desire?

We need to understand more precisely what the very notion of "encounter with the real" means. The analysis of this formula ("encounter with the Real"), forms the content of Chapters 5 and 6. This formula is contradictory to the extent that "encounter" refers to something contingent, accidental, something that may or may not happen, and "real," on the contrary, designates for Lacan the necessary and determined mechanism of repetition, the always already of the trauma. How then can we encounter—contingently—the necessity of trauma? Here, the notion of chance is emerging. How can we encounter—by chance—the necessity of the trauma which has been always already here?

It is on this point that Lacan refers to Aristotle, who distinguishes in his *Physics* two regimes of events or of causality. First *"tuché"*: which means fortune, contingency; then "*automaton*," the blind necessity of the repetition mechanism, the compulsion to repeat as such. We then have chance on the one hand, determinism on the other. According to Aristotle, everything that comes to pass is due to one of theses two modes of temporality. *Tuché* will decide if you will meet by chance a friend on the agora today. *Automaton* governs the cycle of sunset and sunrise, or the seasons cycle, etc. Lacan comments on these two modes: "*Tuché*, he says, is good or bad fortune" (69). "*Automaton* is the Greek version of the compulsion to repeat" (67). Even if this encounter between two regimes of events and two modes of causality is said to be a missed encounter, it is nonethesless an encounter. Again, how is this possible?

Here begins the analysis of the dream. In this dream, what does belong to *automaton* and what to *tuché*? As Lacan puts it: "Where is the reality in this accident?" (58) and where is the accident in this reality? Obviously, what belongs to *tuché* is the falling of the candle and the burning of the child's arm. This is the reality, Lacan says, but not the real. The Real is the unreal "resurrection" of the child and the words "Father, can't you see I am burning?" And here, Lacan starts to analyze *tuché* as a secondary kind of causality or of reality. The child's burnt arm is not the real accident in this dream, it is not the Real. The Real comes with the speech, the son's address to his father. *Tuché* has no autonomy, it is in fact only a means for the Real or the *automaton* to emerge. There would only be one mode of happening, that of *automaton*, with a disguised version of it, a mask, *tuché*.

Chance, or fortune, is only an appearance, an "as if." What happens "as if " by chance is in fact always the automatism of repetition, the primary trauma: "What is repeated, in fact, is always something that occurs *as if by chance*" (54).

Lacan asks himself what is genuinely burning in the dream: is it the child's arm, or the sentence uttered by the child: "Father, can't you see that I'm burning?" "Does not this sentence, said in relation to fever," asks Lacan, "suggest to you what, in one of my recent lectures, I called the cause of fever?…What encounter can there be with that forever inert being—even now being devoured by the flames—if not the encounter that occurs precisely at the moment when, by accident, as if by chance, the flames come to meet him? Where is the reality in this accident, if not that it repeats something more fatal *by means* of reality, a reality in which the person who was supposed to be watching over the body still remains asleep, even when the father reemerges after having woken up?" (58).

It is clear that if contingent reality is always a means for the Real to come to light, it is then always secondary. When Lacan asks what is the reality in this accident, he means that there is something other, in the accident, than the accident: "Is there no more reality in this message than in the noise by which the father also identifies the strange reality of what is happening in the room next door?" (58).

The contingent external encounter of reality (the candle collapses and inflames the cloth covering the dead child, the smell of the smoke disturbs the father) triggers the true Real, the unbearable fantasy-apparition of the child reproaching his father. Again, what burns are the words, not the arm. "Father, can't you see I'm burning? This sentence is itself a fire-brand—or itself it brings fire where it falls" (69) Further: the veiled meaning is the true reality, that of the "primal scene."

In other words, there is a split between reality and the Real.

Now is the moment for approaching the problem of wish-fulfillment.

Lacan writes: "It is not that, in the dream, the father persuades himself that the son is still alive. But the terrible version of the dead son taking the father by the arm designates a beyond that makes itself heard in the dream. Desire manifests itself in the dream by the loss expressed in an image at the cruel point of the object. It is only in the dream that this truly unique encounter can occur. Only a rite, an endlessly repeated act, can commemorate this…encounter" (59).

This dream would then be a kind of fullfillment to the extent that it would render the encounter with "jouissance," enjoyment, possible. The fullfilment is not always linked with pleasure, says Lacan, but it can be linked with jouissance. We remember that "jouissance" is defined by Žižek as the beyond of the pleasure principle, the excess or surplus of pleasure which transforms itself in a kind of suffering which is the very expression of the death drive. Because we can only encounter "jouissance" in dreams, then this dream is, in its way, a wish-fullfillment.

Is the way in which Lacan distinguishes two kinds of realities in this dream, a true one and a secondary one, not properly inadmissible? Cannot we think that the accident of the candle falling on the child's arm is traumatizing per se, that it does not necessarily trigger the repetition mechanism of a more ancient trauma? This accident would then be as real as the words it provokes.

If there is a beyond the pleasure principle, can we still understand it as a beyond chance, beyond the accident or beyond contingency? This is precisely what is no longer possible. When the victims of traumas are "burning," we certainly don't have a right to ask: where is the reality in these accidents? We certainly don't have a right to suspect contingency for hiding a more profound kind of event, for being the veiled face of the compulsion to repeat. To split reality from the Real, contingency from necessity, the transcendental from the empirical, good or bad fortune (*tuché*), from necessity (*automaton*). Reading this Lacanian interpetation, we cannot help but visualize the psychoanalyst as a fireman looking at the catastrophe and saying: "there must be something more urgent, I am due to take care of a more originary emergency."

The accident never hides anything, never reveals anything but itself. We need to think of a destructive plasticity, that is a capacity to explode, that cannot, by any means, be assimilated by the psyche, even in dreams.

The answer we can give to the second objection, concerning castration as something which has always already occured, is that the threat of castration is what helps Lacan to always see, even if he says the contrary, the Symbolic at work within the Real.

Castration is for Freud the phenomenal form of the threat of death. Because it means separation, it gives death a figurative content. About separation, Lacan declares: "We must recognize in this sentence ['Father can't you see I'm burning ?'] what perpetuates for the father those words forever separated from the dead child that are said to him" (58). We find here the motive of separation. Here, separation, the child's death, the separation from the child is the trauma, the *automaton*. But since this separation can be expressed by another separation, that of words—words separating from the body—then the trauma encounters the symbolic and never escapes it. The real is separated from itself thanks to words, thanks to the symbolic.

What challenges the idea that castration or separation has always already happened is precisely the fact that this always already is the presence of the Symbolic in the Real, consequently also a kind of erasure of the trauma. There is no "pure" Real.

What brain damage allows us to see is that the violence of the traumatizing lesions consists in the way they cut the subject, as we already noticed, from its reserves of memory. The traumatized victims's speech doesn't have any revelatory meaning. Their illness does not constitute a kind of truth with regard to their ancient history. There is no possibility for them of being present to their own fragmentation or to their own wound. In contrast to castration, there is no representation, no phenomenon, no example of separation, which would allow the subject to anticipate, to wait for, to fantasize what can be a break in cerebral connections. One cannot even dream about it. There is no scene for this Thing. No words.

We don't believe in the possibility of responding to the absence of meaning by reintroducing some kind of hidden repetition of the Real. We have to admit on the contrary that something like a total absence of meaning is the meaning of our time.

There is a global uniformity of neuropsychological reactions to traumas, be it political, natural, or pathological traumas. "Žižeks considers this new uniformized face of violence"

First, there is the brutal external physical violence: terror attacks like 9/11, street violence, rapes, etc., second, natural catastrophes, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc.; then, there is the 'irrational' (meaningless) destruction of the material base of our inner reality (brain tumors, Alzheimer's disease, organic cerebral lesions, PTSD, etc.), which can utterly change, destroy even, the victim's personality. We would not be able to distinguish between natural, political and socio-symbolic violence. We are dealing today with a heterogeneous mixture of nature and politics, in which politics cancels itself as such and takes the appearance of nature, and nature disappears in order to assume the mask of politics. (125)

What Žižek doesn't seem to admit is that a new form of violence is emerging today, one implying a new articulation of the concept of the Real, we might also say the concept of what is burning. A concept that would give chance its chance, a chance that would never be an "as if," an "as if by chance."

Let's turn to the third and last objection. We remember that for Žižek, post-traumatic subjectivity is nothing other than the classical Cartesian form of subjectivity. The subject is an instance capable of erasing all substantial content in order always to be new and present to itself and to the world. This is as true as the whole history of metaphysics.

This might be true, but it is difficult to believe that traumatic erasure can occur without forming each time a new subject, unaware of the previous one. Repetition is plastic, it gives form to what it destroys. We have to think of a form created by destruction, the form of a new person, which is not the transcendatal subject, but what undermines it, as the threat of its explosion. The plasticity of contingency has the power to bestow its own form on the subjects that it shocks. A subject that burns, and that urges us to see, at long last, that it is *really* burning.

~

What is a shock? A trauma? Are they the result of a blow, of something that cannot, by any means, be anticipated, something sudden, that comes from outside and knocks us down, whoever we are? Or are they on the contrary always predestined encounters? Something which would force us to erase the "whoever you are" from the previous sentence to the extent that an encounter presupposes a destination, a predestination, something which happens to you, to you proper, and to nobody else ? According to this second approach, a shock or a trauma would always result, as Freud states, from a meeting between the blow itself and a preexisting psychic destiny.

Is this Freudian conception still accurate to characterize current global psychic violence, or don't we have to admit that blows, shocks, strike any of us without making any difference, erasing our personal histories, destroying the very notion of psychic destiny, of childhood, of past, even of the unconscious itself?

For Freud and for Lacan, it seems clear that every external trauma is "sublated," internalized. Even the most violent intrusions of the external real owe their traumatic effect to the resonance they find in primary psychic conflicts.

When it comes to war neuroses, Freud declares in his Introduction to "Psycho-analysis and the War Neuroses," the external accident that causes the trauma is not the genuine cause of it. It acts as a shock or a blow which awakens an old "conflict in the ego." The genuine enemy is always an "internal enemy" (17: 210).

According to Freud, there is only one possible kind of "neurosis etiology": the sexual one. Some passages from "Sexuality" in *The Aetiology Of The Neuroses* and from "My Views on the Part Played by Sexuality" in *The Aetiology Of The Neuroses* are clear in this respect. In the first, Freud states: "The true ætiology of the psychoneuroses does not lie in precipitating causes" (7: 250).

In the second text, Freud sums up his whole theory of infantile trauma and recapitulates all the changes he has brought to it. He says that he was forced to give up the importance of the part played by the "accidental influences" in the causation of trauma (7: 275). Traumas are not caused by effective events or accidents but by phantasms: "Accidental influences derived from experience having receded into the background, the factors of constitution and heredity necessarily gained the upper hand once more" (3: 250).

For Freud, brain injuries and brain lesions, since they are regarded as merely external, cannot have a real causal power. The brain has no responsibility in the course of our psychic life and in the constitution of our subjectivity. The brain is not responsible, which also means that it cannot bring a proper response to the questions of danger, fragility, and exposure in general. It is exposed to accidents but not to the symbolic and or psychic meaning of accidents. Sexuality appears to be first of all, for Freud, not only the "sexual life" but a new specific kind of cause, which alone is able to explain the constitution of our personal identity, our history and our destiny. There is a wide gap between external and internal traumatic events, even if, as we know, the frontier between inside and outside is being constantly redrawn in Freud. Nevertheless, it is clear that none of the determinant events of our psychic life has an organic or physiological cause. In a certain sense, such events never come from outside.

In *Beyond the Pleasure Principle*, Freud goes so far as to state that the emergence of a neurosis and the occurrence of a physical lesion are antithetic and incompatible: "In the case of the ordinary traumatic neuroses two characteristics emerge prominently: first, that the chief weight in their causation seems to rest upon the factor of surprise, of fright; and secondly, that a wound or injury inflicted simultaneously works as a rule *against* the development of a neurosis" (18: 12).

Freud here recognizes the importance of surprise and terror. He seems then to admit the power of chance and the absence of anticipation. However, this power either causes a physical wound or a psychic wound. In the first case, there is a narcissistic bodily investment which takes care of the wound, as if organic injuries were able to cure themselves without any help from a psychic therapy. It is as if physical and psychic wounds have nothing in common unless the first can be translated into the language of the second, to be considered as "symptoms." It means that for Freud, people suffering from brain diseases do not obey psychoanalytic jurisdiction. That is why, perhaps, we do not encounter any kind of despondancy in Freud's clinical studies.

We then emerge with the idea that the psychic life is indestructible:

The primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable.  In reality, the destruction only applies to later acquisitions and developments. The essence of mental disease lies in a return to earlier states of affective life and functioning. An excellent example of the plasticity of mental life is afforded by the state of sleep, which is our goal every night. Since we have learnt to interpret even absurd and confused dreams, we know that whenever we go to sleep we throw out our hard-won morality like a garment, and put it on again next morning. (Freud 24: 285–6)

Even if Lacan displaces many Freudian statements, he also shares many Freudian statements on the indestructibility of psychic life, which is another name for *the always already*. Neurobiology puts the so-called psychic immortality into question. Our socio-political reality imposes multiple versions of external intrusions, traumas, which are just meaningless brutal interruptions that destroy the symbolic texture of the subject's identity and render all kinds of internalization/interiorization impossible as well as the accident's reappropriation or resubjectivation, because some regions of the brain have been destroyed. Nothing, in psychic life, is indestructible.

At some point in his review, Žižek evokes the possibility that neurobiologists would only project their own desire, without mentioning it, in their account of neurobiological victims and meaningless trauma: do they "not forget to include [themselves], [their] own desire, in the observed phenomenon (of autistic subjects)?" (137).

Here comes desire again! But we might of course reverse the objection: does not Žižek omit to include his own desire for the always already? Even if he is one of the most accurate and generous readers of current neurobiology, as it is manifest in his great book, we might interpret here the meaning of such a desire as a fear of the trauma of being definitely separated from Lacan.

### *Works Cited*

*Chapter 10*

## **Ecologies of War**

### Dispatch from the Aerial Empire

Mike Hill

*The realities of today's operational environment…is modified by population explosion, urbanization, globalization, technology, resource demand, climate change and natural disasters, and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.*

– Tactics in Counter Insurgency

#### SkyOps

The central question of this entry on war—let us recall the genre most akin to military affairs and call this writing a "dispatch"—is not why we should put "ecology" under the heading of empire but the reverse: why use the word ecology as an organizational term by which to connect intragovernmental violence with so many other forms of "mass destruction"? Of course, the term empire is itself contested, and in the ecological sense, I would argue, it has also changed. While still a routine marker for unilateral global supremacy and for capital accumulation within an epoch of US-inspired neo-liberalism, empire also invites us to rethink geographical expansion from within dimensions that are rather more disorienting than the traditional limits of the nation-state would allow. This is true in a spatial sense as well as a temporal one.1 In this expanded notion of empire, history is witnessing an unprecedented convergence of the once disparate systems of technological and environmental modalities of conflict listed by US Army Counter Insurgency doctrine (COIN) as comprising a twenty-first century *co*-"operational" reality of war. On this order, there are key words from the epigram above that move the traditionally geographic orientations of empire into what we might call its aerial domains. The term aerial here should signal not only the destructive potential of the atmosphere, catastrophic climate change, and by extension, the coming resource wars, but should also pertain to the spatio-informational armament, endless ensembles of antennae, satellitic vision, those supersites of knowledge transmission, data analysis, and tele-connectivity that re-orient conventional military arts. According to the dynamics of aerial empire, one might say that the battlefield becomes etherized, and war is perpetuated, indeed made immanent to life itself. The key-words from the epigram: "population," "technology," "mass destruction," are triedand-true war items to be sure, but how to work "climate change" and "natural disasters"—as of 2008, legally defined as essential to US security policy2 —into a military schema that regards "nature" as a functional part of the atmospherically embedded war machine? How to account not just for sky assassins in the form of unmanned drones but also hurricanes, drought, species mutation, extreme weather, rising tides—forces of machinery and natural elements that work so closely together that they are impossible to divide, let alone objectively suss out from the banal violence of every day life?

There is of course a clear if also dotted line that connects twenty-first century US security policy with global ambition as far back as the Monroe Doctrine and up through the Cold War, comprising two centuries and more of overt and covert military presence in key regions of the world. The list of Cold-war era interventions alone—military-sponsored coups, incursions, assassinations, and police acts—are well rehearsed and readily rehearsable: Iran (1953); Guatemala (1954); Dominican Republic (1965); Indonesia (1965); Chile (1973); El Salvador (1980s); Grenada (1983); Panama (1989) (Retort 80–88). Before September 2001, there were already 285,000 troops in at least 130 countries (510,927 troops in 151 foreign countries are reported in 2009), and at the peak of the Cold War there were 1,014 foreign US military bases (761 reported in 2008).3 As is well known, the US sells more than 50 per cent of all weapons on the world market, with the near-failed state of Mexico being our most recent reversal of first-world violence come tragically home.4 All this said, the admittedly hazy term aerial empire is not meant to diminish concern over the standing record of war proper and its traditional arsenals, nor should we ignore the hypocritical brutishness of so much continued inter-state aggression in the name of democratic freedom. But let me qualify if not excuse such haziness: to the extent that this record of violence is presumed to exist as an effect of (and presumably, in order to fortify) a writerly privilege of objectified safety in the imaginary "green zone" of civil society, and to the extent that civil society is arguably transformed by the reality of permanent and proximate war, a different kind of analysis—we should say a different analytic—of war is right now starting to emerge. What can writing do and not do in relation to war today? To ask the question is to take seriously the US National Security Doctrine (NSS), which in the wake of September 11, 2001, renders the "saying" of anything regarding war as being said by the citizen who is always also the suspect of our amped-up security state. In this peculiar sense, war presents a double bind for the very conceptualization of war from a standpoint that presumes to be critical of it. If, as I want to suggest, war has seeped into civil society relations and critical thinking as such, then it is unsatisfactory or at least highly troublesome to reduce the ecologies of war to a seamless next step in the perpetuation of US imperial dominance, itself never on less stable ground. The same 2009 COIN field manual cited in the epigram above sums up this double-bind by referring to the predominant conception of foreign military occupation as a matter of "armed civil affairs" (*Tactics* C-7). And next to the *National Security Strategy of the United States of America* (NSS), one begins to surmise, apropos the US Patriot Act and the US Northern Command (20,000 domestically deployed rapid-reaction forces focused on the coming internal disturbances), that this phrase also refers to the arming of civility at home.5 On the one hand, contemporary COIN doctrine openly connects with more than two centuries of US military confrontation with insurgency, from the Whiskey Rebellion (1791–94) in the eastern states, to the eradication of Native Americans in the Western Plains (1785–1890s), and from there, to the Boxer rebellion in China (1898–1901), Poncho Villa in New Mexico (1916), Agusto Sandino in Nicaragua (1927–1933), and so on. On the other hand, COIN also insists that irregular warfare—the twenty-first century resurrection of the non-state combatant, and in response, the self-internalization of war *cum* security within the US body politichas become a normative social condition that jettisons the link between justice and peace. The notion of civil society as a peaceable (and let's not forget, highly privileged) zone of communicative reason has become a shibboleth-effect in a context of extra-judicial assassination and unconventional war. In the past, US covert assassination ops focused on state officials and civilians of interest in countries with whom we may (Vietnam) or may not (Latin America) have been overtly at war, but were carried out by CIA-trained local paramilitary groups and police forces. In 2010, there are 13,000 Special Operations commandos deployed worldwide, an unprecedented number that is apposite to a US strategy of targeted killing well beyond the confines of the traditional battle field. And as noted by the *New York Times* in December of 2009: "For the first time in history, a civilian intelligence agency is using robots to carry out a military mission, selecting people for killing in a country where the United States is not officially at war" (Branfman). The country referenced here is Pakistan, but the Global War on Terror authorizes such tactics wherever they are deemed necessary: beyond the Middle East, in the former Russian Republics, Yemen, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, and so on. Mechanized assassination further permeates the infusion of violence within the world's peaceable zones of relative safety, a general effect of twenty-first century warfare that is evidenced by the secret practices of overhead, and underwear, bombers alike.6 In a paradoxical sense, the call for global civil society comes at a historical moment when sociability itself has become a newly invigorated paramilitary Operational Area (AO). Here intra-state violence supercedes, while appearing to compliment, the more primitive mode of making war in a geographically coherent national mode.7 Put in bumper sticker speak: really, "freedom isn't free."

Thus a continued (rather, a *continuous*) "Revolution in Military Affairs" (RMA), to cite Defense Secretary Robert Gates, ushers in a "*new* reality…for America, and for humanity [insofar as] the lines separating war [and] peace…have become more blurred" (5; emphasis mine). At stake in this blurring between war and peace, which Gates rightly extends to the existence of anything we might go on calling the human, is an innovative set of techno-environmental insecurities that are arguably effacing at different levels and with different speeds—the coherency of the state and of the state's anthropomorphic referents in any of humanity's ethical guises (read here: left-liberal notions of the human being and right-wing possessive individualism, alike). Twenty-first century war doctrine regards population control, race and ethnic division, the manipulation of computerized knowledge systems, deliberate and non-deliberate manifestations of environmental modification (ENMOD), epidemic disease, and resource scarcity as commonly intertwined within a complex set of super-surfaces that mutate almost too fast to be described (*Tactics* A-4). What is new, a 2009 US Army Strategic Studies Institute paper insists, "is that climate change poses security threats unmatched among environmental phenomena" (Parsons 2). And what is radically new is that climate change represents a relatively untapped means for engaging in war, "a unique and promising opportunity for the United States…to advance its security interests" (Parsons 7). The explicit reference in this citation is to competing US-China interests in Sub-Saharan Africa, the rush to grab oil, natural gas, and other commodities; but think, implicitly, of hurricane Katrina as the preemptive first strike in a planetary civil war that no one has officially declared. In this "new" ecology of war (the scare quotes are meant to mark extremities of chronology, breaks, as well as compressions and expansions in the experience of time), the epistemo-military arts are developing techniques that incorporate a symbiosis of agencies—biological, atmospheric, geological, and mechanical—that from any other perspective than war would be revealed as the suicidal miscellany of a planet abandoned to siege.

This present dispatch thus limits itself to transmitting a set of strategic connections between biotic as well as non-biotic factors of military conflict. These connections are becoming central to a new war doctrine, while they are only beginning, by fits and starts, to forge analogues of philosophical critique that may or may not be able to stand up against it. To continue this forging, we will have to range widely from global telesurveillance, drone-warfare, and the weaponizing of culture, to other, tactically significant life-and-death scenarios, such as climate change, viral transmission, the US Amy's investment in chaos theory, and the culling of the human species cloaked as humane adaptation (the count of climate refugees is estimated to be 50 million in 2010, 200 million or more by 2050) (Glenn and Gordon 2). These items have not until now been found under the heading of war. But they may be given a certain uneasy futuristic logic given war's new organizational capacities. And if the phrase aerial empire fails to call forth a political formula guaranteed to preserve the cause of human equality, or if this dispatch begs the charge of being mere catastrophe porn, it is because the reality of conflict within which any humane conviction might be proffered is riddled with the same evanescent mini-movements, the same insurgent groupuscles, not simply of this or that "population" but also insurgencies of knowledge and (or, *as*) matter, a movement of movements that criss-cross traditional phyla, and by doing so, exceed the epoch of what Jürgen Habermas wishes to preserve as the "human being *per se*."8 Consider, it has been 44 years since President Lyndon Johnson's advisory council linked greenhouse gas to "marked climate change." And as of 2009, about \$3 billion per year are spent on symposia, conferences, films, TV shows, publications, and the like, on environmental issues. In 2010, there are 80 million references to climate change on the Internet alone (Editorial 24). What to make of such visibility, such ubiquity, and therefore, apparent normalization of planetary risk? Should we assume that the almost sadistic publicity of our precarious life is sufficient alone to generate change; or does the apparent apostasy of scientific truth confirm the existence of a change already in our midst? If as I want to suggest this change has at least already mutated public sphere activity (perhaps not least, in the form we are practicing it now), then we will have to work with a dispatch that retains both a critically modest and germinal status.

### Las Vegas in Afghanistan

*Every morning in Las Vegas, Steve Smith kisses his wife and young daughters goodbye, gets in his car, drives 50 minutes down the freeway, past shopping malls and casinos, and goes to war in Afghanistan.*

– Christopher Goodwin, *The Sunday Times*

Clearly, the banalization of war as so much work-a-day clock punching is evident in this epigram from the *Times*. All of middle-class life appears to be here, wife and family at home, the daily drive, reminders to shop (lest the terrorists win), the name Smith, even the division between leisure work implied by the act of reading *The Sunday Times*. But this scene is met with a violent *frisson* of nasty equations that determine the guaranteed loss—casino-like—of bourgeois existence and of our global war gamble alike. Gaining is losing in this epigram: consumption is risk without winning, just as war is nowhere and everywhere at home. What is being depicted in this casually chilling account of the military work-shift is the latest in leading edge war-tech applications, the manning of the MQ-9 Reaper drone, which pipes real-time video images as well as other data at light-speed to the cock-pit key-boards where Officer Smith launches Hellfire missiles on unsuspecting targets worlds away. Let us consider this Reaper-moment as emblematic of at least one—the mechanical or robotic—facet of the aerial empire. This is not only the unmanning of the war machine but is also the unmanning of *man*.

The historical genesis of Unmanned Aerospace Vehicles (UAVs) can be located in the Nazi V-1 and V-2 rocket programs. This technology, spun out in the 1950s with the CIA's development of the drone prototype, was first deployed in 1959 in order to serve the secretive Rockefeller interests (Chase Manhattan and Standard Oil) in Latin America.9 The Reaper's forerunner, the MQ-1 Predator, was used in Yemen in 1992, and deployed in Bosnia in 1994, where it has returned since. In the twentyfirst century, aerospace power, such as the Strike Star program, as well as the Predator, the tiny hand launched Raven, and the larger Shadow, gives the military 24-hour continuous air occupation in Afghan and Pakistani skies—and over unknown countries with whom we are not (overtly) at war—365 days a year, at the stealthy height of 21,000 feet, with a range of 3,700 miles from launch base, and with the immediacy of striking the keyboard and dropping the key-strike.10 There are currently more than 7,000 UAVs deployed by the US military (not to mention those used by Iran, and Hezbollah—a political movement, not a state). On average 2009 saw about one drone strike a week. These techno-terminators are capable of generating 16,000 hours of video a month, far more than can be digested by the human eye, and are therefore being equipped with new batteries of machine intelligence. Drone vision can see through walls, and create biometric data-pictures that translate daily patterns of life, such as street movement and travel routes, into omni-visible target-rich environments. Defense Secretary Gates wants more UAVs, and has already said that the next generation of fighter planes will be the last manned fighter aircraft (Robertson). An estimated 40 or more countries are currently developing drones in 2010.

At one level, the military drono-sphere is a stealthier and more lethal adaptation of US assassination campaigns that go as far back as the Kennedy administration's endorsement of the coup that lead to the South Vietnamese autocrat Ngo Dinh Diem's demise in 1963. Only in the current instance, with estimates as high as 50 civilians killed for each terrorist leader, remote control warfare trades in higher immediate non-combatant loses.11 At another level, the dawn of the eternal sortie is not the usual art of war. Even with civilian causalities as high as they are—but how can one distinguish the civilian from the insurgent?—the 600 plus Hellfire missiles dropped by Predators in one year's time are being touted for hitting over 90 per cent of their targets. UAVs are credited with killing more than half of al Qaeda's top 20 leaders. But, paradoxically, by surrendering killing to the finer-tuned war machine, by minimizing the human input necessary to launch the new weapons of war, the drono-sphere at least publicly promises a more humane and also farther-reaching way of killing human beings. In line with the RMA's more general over-haul of contemporary war doctrine, new tactical priority and new financing is being given to UAV and supporting programs.12 Military experts remark that we are only at the cusp of drone potential, and suggest that the UAV is poised to have the biggest impact in 5,000 years on how war is waged (Robertson, n. 18). Traditional fighting tools, not least of which is the regular, human solider, are being replaced by—or better, are being reabsorbed into—unconventional military hard- and soft-ware that are creating a uniquely twenty-first century war imaginary. This imaginary runs the gamut from Officer Smith's trigger *cum* keyboard, to insectsize swarms of nano-drones, robotic snake surveillance, pain-inducing microwave sky-beams, robotic canines, bio-mass consuming automated ground-war machines (the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot, or EATR program), and insect-inspired digital optics.13 But let us stay within the aero-technical realm, to the extent that staying there is possible, and hone in on the knowledge systems that accompany drone war and are endemic to the RMA, the revolution not only in military—but recalling Secretary Gates—also in human affairs.

Defense Department documents outline certain key temporal adjustments in the future of—or better, the future *as*—war. New satellite technology now focuses on high-density cities and other sites, targeting them full-time as potential locations of "urbaniz[ed] insurgence" (Graham 1). Through the use of UAV video surveillance, either deeply embedded within city architecture or loitering in the atmosphere over potentially insurgent areas, highly sophisticated computer software profiles and comparatively reads normal movement patterns against anomalies of human flow in the micro-geographies of the planet's civilian populations. Pattern recognition capabilities such as this can be used either as a platform for the hellfire missile, or to set aloft "fan-propelled swarms [to] disperse nano-payloads" of various levels of destruction or interference, even before the insurgent act of violence can occur (Graham 3). These new capabilities enable warfare to operate in a way that "compress[es] the kill chain," or by a "first look, first feed, first kill" operation, as the Raytheon Corporation puts it. Kill chain compression accelerates the time it takes to find and kill a target to a point of sight-velocity in which opposition disappears the very moment it is configured. "Before [you] can drop your weapon and run," the R&D publicity reads, "[you're] probably already dead" (4). Preemptive war technology is the tactical application of an overall national strategy. It effaces the enemy at the same moment the enemy is designated as such. More peculiar still, the enemy exists in an autogenic way; that is, as an opponent who is effectively generated within the same social space as friendly military occupation. This slippery zone of friend/foe distinction works according to relationships of violence that—if they can be pictured—are always already armed.14 The target itself is not seen and then destroyed: seeing is its destruction according to current war R&D. According to the DARPA technologies, the less distinguishable it is from civilian life, the less visible and the less objectifiable, the more effective war becomes. Real-time satellite, CCTV, and drone transmissions compress the duration between violence and representation. There is ideally no peaceable distinction between the time it takes to take a picture and the time it takes to strike.

In this way, machine vision re-works our spatial bearings and enables the weaponization of temporality itself. It is not enough to say that war is made more proximate by the notion that, in the homeland, everyone is at least potentially both suspect and object of terror; nor is it sufficient to argue, as Virilio would have it, that the RMA depends on a "dromological revolution" (as in the Greek *dromos*, 'course of running') by technically increasing the dynamics of speed.15 What we might call a *drono*logical revolution works according to the twin mastery of both space and time, with intensities of compression and expansion, as well as degrees of velocity, that vary depending on the objective of whatever application is at hand. To put the RMA completely, twenty-first century war functions according to intensities of both proximity *and* distance, of both speed *and* latency, at specific levels and according to discrete military goals. For example, kill-chain compression makes targeting a nearly instantaneous act; but it also means that war in terms of beginnings-and-ends is displaced by a time signature evidently stopped in its tracks. Wartime is both reduced *and* extended to the hyper-stasis of an eternal present. Similarly, regarding space, on the one hand drone war makes violence seem virtual and remote. On the other hand, the eternal sortie makes war an utterly proximate activity, disintegrating the distinction between violence and ordinary life, however each side defines the ordinary. To cite a particularly apposite example of the new time and space mastery at the core of the RMA, consider kill-chain compression along with Cyberkinetics Inc.'s "brain-gate" program, which for the first time has enabled human brain-computer interface (BCI) in its most intimate sense.16 This application was seized upon immediately by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2002, and by 2009 has been funded by more than \$25 million in Department of Defense (DOD) grants. Consistent with the DOD's own war neuromics program, BCI harkens toward a moment when weaponry will be literally hard-wired to the human brain, and when *firing* will designate both a micro-synaptic, spatiocranial event, and a cyber-kinetic macro-explosion on the geography of a battlefield both virtual *and* real. Warfare is here inserted into a network of electricity and human biomass such that thinking itself, now a kinetic activity, becomes the most deadly weapon of all. A four-millimeter square silicon brain implant, studded with 100 hair-thin microelectrodes, is attached matrix-like via a skull-plug that coverts brain waves into a pattern of optical or other data via computer translation. This is a version of drono-sphere activity that has absorbed the human being from yet another angle. And again, we see a drono-spheric application that is predicated on a dynamic of non-linear time made possible by new ways of gathering, computing, reading, and infinitely re-reading, computerized data. Here, synapses fire in an only apparently random molecular order, that is, only apparently random to the human eye, which needs machine translation to form coherent micro-patterns that can be extended to whatever weapons system at light speed: intelligence becomes data; becomes electrokinesis; becomes war. In this way, BCI is capable of stretching and shrinking, accelerating and freezing, the twenty-first century battlefield into one long moment of the right here and now.

Realized by the symbiotic connection between human and machine, BCI uses just a fraction of the brain's 100 million neurons. Here again we can see the connection between kill-chain "compression"—the elimination of an enemy without the slow subject/object alignment that used to guide face to face human combat in a different rhythm of terrestrial violence—and technologies of knowledge "compression," *per se*. There are other examples, beyond the brain's newfound military plasticity, as well. As part of the new UAV technologies, the emerging science of digitized fractal compression is displacing *merely* mimetic real-time image technology with an entirely different space-time calculus. Whereas an older format of JPEG technology uses bit-maps to break down an object into more or less co-equal translations that parallel each other according to individual squares on corresponding grids (the computer screen's and the camera frame's), fractal media offers a more complex notion of image production. Here the word compression means to rethink, and reinterpret (albeit mathematically) a given scene, rather than to simply distill, unpack, and reproduce it. The fractal *mis-en-scene* as such reads a picture that is both more fabricated and more real, producing different layers of spectator-knowledge depending on the sensitivity of the machine and what algorithms are at hand: heat oriented, chemically differentiated, movement based, and so on.17 In JPEG technology, the more complex the snapshot of the image, the higher the compression ratio is needed for a reliable replication of the object being viewed. It is a question of knowledge as payload, and only so much data can be "lifted" from a visual field at once. But according to fractal image reproduction, the object (read here: target) is produced beyond the battlefield without needing the physical referent. This version of data compression needs only a fragment of the battle scene and a set of mathematically determined fractal instructions to create a given pattern and zero in on its anomalies. The same algorithmic technology that underwrites BCI and that sorts through the meshwork of fractal data compression are used in 2010 to fine-tune shipping networks, predict life-spans, recall records from emails and social networks, map social movements, and predict weather patterns.

As we have already seen, a complex space and time adjustment is at work in the drono-sphere in that it mobilizes what we might call an eternal latency.18 BCI and fractal data compression together help bring the war machine into an all-seeing and eternal present. At the macroscopic level, fractal media looks among the myriad chaos of life-and-death scenarios for new patterns yet to go into the tool kit of war. In the same way, at the microscopic level, molecular brain firings and computational readings recombine in war's electric flow. At both levels, these patterns can be stored within a vast data bank so that the machine learns greater and greater subtleties in evaluating the norms and deviations of whatever changing groupuscle or latent micro-movement. Essential to the efficiency of weaponized war media, large or small, twenty-first century compression technology uses computational projection to decrease the amount of data needed to be compressed. It uses math to lighten data's so-called weight. Fractal media, as we have seen, only needs to determine what is *probably* there, in the same way the human eye compensates for blind spots and peripheral vision. Drone war is thus executed, Vegas-like, according to a deadly gaming of the epistemo-military odds. The apparently random events that comprise the patterns of collective human existence are finally given objectifiable if also utterly malleable status according to the new war machine. Rather than being tethered to the old bit-map visual technology, which claims mere representational fidelity, mathematically produced targets enable a sort of hyper-vision that invigorates aleatory events and former epistemic blindness—as well as those sheltered spaces of peace called ordinary life—with unprecedented war potential. Drone hyper-vision sorts and manipulates certain life-rhythms (brain waves, as well as social movements) at the speed of light, and therefore offers a more effective application of war fighting than using plain human sight. And by working the image-data from within the fractal war register, not only is image fidelity displaced with image production, but it also becomes possible—and militarily useful—to locate otherwise invisible targets from multiple perspectives at once. For example, the Reaper is being fitted in 2010 with the \$150 million Gorgon Stare system. This apparatus configures the drone with multiple super-powered cameras capable of filming two-and-a-half miles around and from 12 different angles (Schachtman). Even if 12 targets are visualized in 12 different directions, the Stare could simultaneously orient the elimination of each. The Argus program—named after the Greek monster with a hundred eyes—will use 92 cameras at once in its round-the-clock orbits. The eternal orbit of the Reaper is the mechanical embodiment of war by fractal means, which is to say, by mathematical probability, rather than by plain human sight, a temporal and ontological "revolution" to be sure: Las Vegas in Afghanistan, once more. A next generation of UAVs, the British Taranis, will take over completely from the human fighter "pilot," as autonomous craft take off and land, survey an area, and return, without any human input. Provided legislation can be amended, civilian cargo flights could be automated by 2015, ushering in a juridical mutation in the notion of human responsibility, commensurate with a mutation in the human root and branch (Goodwin n. 15).

The advance of drone war (and ESCYBERCOM more generally) presents dynamics that we can apply to the basic war policy questions glossed earlier in reference to the US National Security Strategy (NSS). The oft-used term "shadow wars" in this document have both real and representational applications. With kill-chain (temporal) *and* fractal (spatial) compression/expansion in mind, we should say that the NSS extends war's technical logic into a policy statement that recombines the real and representational targets. In the same way, the compression of battle within the statellitic mode produces singularities of non-linear time and blurs the present and the past into an eternal future of violence. Recalling Gates, this unique time-space signature is concurrent with the way war is "blur[ing]" into peace in the form of "shadow" wars. There are "shadow" wars fought today (in Sudan, Syria, Pakistan, and Mexico) where no offensive power claims a presence, and no one takes credit or blame for whatever victory or loss. And we know US policy allows for unannounced attack (if not extra-judicial assassination) in at least 20 different nations (Hallinann). One of the first declarations of President Obama was to underscore the uniqueness of twenty-first century war—no longer the Global War on Terror (GWOT) but simply the "Long War"—as "increasingly unconventional and transnational" (qtd. in Hsu). When the NSS speaks of a "war without duration," insisting that "campaigns need not be sequential" but instead will adhere to a principle of "direct and continuous action," we are well within the fractal time-space purview of the drono-sphere. This does not simply mean continued investment in the Bush Doctrine of preemptive and permanent war, although the Weinberger and the Powell doctrines, which were designed for large-scale, nationally circumscribed oppositions, and for warfare with clear beginnings and ends, are unlikely to return. Rather, the policy of permanent war—or its paradoxical lengthening by way of compression—brings us to a future, after Bush, of war as unseen and everywhere apparent, up close and distant, sped-up and frozen in time.