August 9, 2009
Concept Work: “Vital”
Over the past few years Andy and I have been trying to find appropriate terms to describe a distinctive diagram of power that is concerned with the vulnerability of transportation and energy infrastructures, public health apparatuses, and webs of industrial production, to unpredictable and potentially catastrophic events. The diagram draws together diverse techniques and practices, such as vulnerability assessment, simulation, cataloguing of resources, enactment, and preparedness planning, according to a normative rationality or strategic logic. We have provisionally used the term “vital systems” to refer to the central object of knowledge and target of intervention of this diagram of power. We see this diagram as distinct from – but related to – the problematic of the “population” central to apparatuses of security that Foucault described in Security, Territory, Population. The term “vital” is valuable in pointing to this relation, but our use needs further elaboration. It is frequently used by first-order observers in the domains we are examining, but is slippery: laden with associations both wanted and unwanted. So, in the interest of advancing conceptual work on the vital I wanted to open a discussion by: first, indicating how the observers in the fields we have been examining use it; second, outlining potential problems it raises; third, through reference to Sloterdijk’s use of the concept of “the vital” in Terror from the Air on which Paul has posted recently (here, here, and here), pointing to a possible “mutation of the vital” that accompanies the emergence of the diagram of power we are describing.
Read more after the jump.
What is the “vital” in “vital systems”?
The reference to collections of heterogeneous elements such as webs of industrial production and transport and information infrastructures as “vital systems” can be traced back to the rise of total war, and specifically to the articulation of strategic bombing theory by military planners during and then after World War I. In strategic bombing theory, we see a new understanding of economic and social life: as a collection of vulnerable “vital” systems that could be made the target of attack. The Italian air war theorist Douhet, thus, argued that air war should no longer focus on military equipment or the bodies of soldiers. Instead, it should focus on “the most vital, most vulnerable, and least protected points of the enemy’s territory” – systems of industrial production, food supply, and so on, upon which all aspects of a war effort depended. Strategic bombing was elaborated in the U.S. during the interwar period. Key figures in the U.S. Air Corps Tactical School sought to identify the targets that were crucial to a war effort, in particular through the theory of the “industrial web.” Air force officer Donald Wilson, a key proponent of this theory, wrote in 1938 that the modern economy was composed of “interrelated and entirely interdependent elements,” and that by attacking these “essential arteries,” or “organic essentials” of a society and economy it would be possible for a strategic bombing campaign to paralyze an enemy war effort (quoted in Faber 1997: 218, 219). It is evident – and I will return to this point – that Wilson was drawing on a prevalent contemporary understanding of the collectivity as a kind of organism, referring to infrastructures as the key elements that made the polity’s “life” possible. Industrial web theorists also articulated a new understanding of the United States as a collection of such vulnerable systems, noting that an enemy could easily attack “any targets of their choice in the vital industrial heart of our country (ibid: 194).
In the ensuing years, the term “vital” continues to appear in a diversity of contexts that Andy and I have described in our article on “The Vulnerability of Vital Systems.” From civil defense and mobilization planning in the 1950s, to articulations of “total preparedness” in the 1960 and 1970s, to more recent discussions of concepts such as critical infrastructure protection, the “vital” designates infrastructures, production systems, and so on, that are critical to collective security and wellbeing. A 1973 review of the work of the Office of Emergency Preparedness during the Nixon administration, thus, argued that “Along with readiness to meet any external threats to our national security, we must be continuously prepared to deal with internal problems that vitally affect our welfare and strength as a nation – natural disasters, fuel and energy shortages, spiraling inflation of wages and prices, and disruptions of transportation and other vital public services” (New Dimensions of Civil Emergency Preparedness: 1969 – 1973). In 1985, James Woolsey and Robert Kupperman wrote of events that could disable “networks crucial to life support, economic stability, and national defense.” (Woolsey and Kupperman 1985) And Critical Foundations, a 1997 Presidential report that laid out the basic principles of critical infrastructure protection argued that “Reliable and secure infrastructures are … the foundation for creating the wealth of our nation and our quality of life as a people,” noting that “certain of our infrastructures are so vital that their incapacity or destruction would have a debilitating impact on our defense and economic security” (Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection 1997: 3).
Hesitations
Thus, we see that reference to the “vital” can be found in a range of texts and contexts that we have been examining to indicate certain systems of production, communication, transportation, and so on, and a certain set of problems that have emerged historically in relation to these objects, concerning their vulnerability to catastrophic disruption, their criticality, etc. A question that immediately emerges is: how does this usage relate to other and perhaps more familiar reference domains of the word “vital”? What parts of those other meanings does it carry along with it? Etymologically, “vital” obviously relates to that which is connected to life. The word generally refers to that which is essential to life. In many early usages (in the 15th or 16th centuries) “vital” is not associated with what we now understand as the biological; indeed, it often refers to the spirit and is specifically opposed to mortal flesh. It was then attached to biological life, although with some variation of meaning and reference (thus the somewhat contrasting implications of, on the one hand, “vital organs” or “vital statistics,” referring, respectively, to the individual body and the population as biological entities, and, on the other hand, “vitalism” – which retains some of the spiritual reference of earlier usage).
So how was this word that first referred to the animating spirit and then came to refer to biology and to biological organisms subsequently used to describe electricity grids, industrial enterprises, or road networks? An obvious answer has to do with the 19th and early 20th century extension of organismic metaphors to new understandings of “society” as a single totality that was like an organism in that it had certain vital functions, susceptibility to disease, certain predictable norms and patterns of pathology, and so on. As is well known, this metaphor was widespread in projects ranging from social welfare to nationalism to eugenics to economic development. When we find reference to the “vital” in the theorists of strategic bombing, it is, in part, such organismic metaphors that they have in mind – thus Donald Wilson’s reference to “essential arteries” and “organic essentials.” So here would seem to be arguments against using the word “vital” to describe what we are trying to designate: it is associated with a now-discredited extension of organismic metaphors to describe collective life, one that was often linked to rather nefarious projects; it is primarily associated with first spiritual and then biological definitions of life.
That said, I continue to find reference to the word vital quite rich and suggestive, and to suggest a set of connections – both conceptual and genealogical – that are not suggested by other obvious terms that also show up in first-order discourse such as “critical” or “essential.” Here, very briefly, are a few reasons why.
- First, the organismic reference is not the only one relevant to our first-order actors. There has been and continues to be a very widespread use of the “vital” in military contexts, which simply refers to issues that are strategically as opposed to tactically important, and it was this military usage that, from strategic bombing to civil defense, was transferred to the description of the domestic economy in the context of total war. I wrote a blog post about this a couple years back when reading Churchill on civil defense during the Battle of Britain. There, he wrote of the “many thousands of ‘vulnerable points’ — bridges, power-stations, depots, vital factories, and the like” that “had to be guarded day and night from sabotage or sudden onset.” For many of our “first order actors” this military reference domain is of central importance. Given the role of military developments in our story, “vital” nicely points to a crucial line of genealogical development.
- Second, if organismic metaphors are explicit in the early theorists of strategic bombing, then they are markedly absent in more recent discussions. Thus, the clear implication of the Presidential report on critical infrastructures, cited above, is that these infrastructures are essential to life, but there is no hint of concern with the idea that the totality they comprise is “like” an organism in any way. In this sense, if it is still “life” that is in question, it is individual life, a collection of living individuals, not the “life” of a collective in some mystical sense. In this sense, rather than muddying our account by reference to an unacknowledged organicism, tracing the treatment of “vital systems” might show us how a problematic initially understood in terms of organismic metaphors was loosed from these metaphors and from the political projects with which they were associated. Certainly, as Andy and I showed in our article on “Distributed Preparedness,” this is crucial to the American story, where the emergence of a concern with the vulnerability of vital systems after World War II was linked to efforts to construct a model of the modern state that did not involve the “collectivism” of European or Soviet socialist variants. The problematic was: how could one protect the vital systems upon which life depends while preserving the traditions of individualism, local autonomy, and free enterprises that, for contemporaries, were key to the American political system?
- That said – and this is a third point – despite discomfort with an organismic metaphor for describing the totality of collective life, it seems that there is something valuable about this reference to the historical scene in which these metaphors emerged. Organismic metaphors were, again, linked to a whole series of projects – social welfare, eugenics, and total war – in which “life” came to be understood not only in relationship to individual biology but to the entire series of relationships that constitute the social milieu, and that themselves became the objects of new kinds of knowledge and intervention. In this sense, the “vital” here indicates a more general relationship of our story to the history of biopolitics, through which, following Foucault, life and population became problems of government. Thus, in tracing out the changing reference of this term – from strategic bombing to civil defense and domestic preparedness for nuclear attack to a broader concern with preparedness for various kinds of future catastrophe – we might also be tracing a modulation of the vital, from something conceived as a biological organism in a natural environment to something that is necessarily linked to the socio-technical milieu of modern life.
Mutations of “Vital” – A Note on Sloterdijk
This modulation might be suggested in a very preliminary way by reading our claims about vital systems in relationship to Sloterdijk’s observations about the vital in Terror from the Air. Very briefly, Sloterdijk locates a critical moment of contemporary history in the emergence of chemical war during World War I. The distinctive feature of chemical war, he observes, is the “displacement of destructive action from the ‘system’ (here: the enemy’s body) onto his ‘environment’” (22). In attacking the environment, chemical war aims to disrupt “the enemy’s primary, ecologically dependent vital functions” by which he means the strictly biological problems of “respiration, central nervous regulation, and sustainable temperature and radiation conditions” (16). He is thus tracing the emergence of an “expanded zone of warfare” in which “the enemy became an object in the environment whose removal was vital to the system’s survival” (27).
Here we find a number of intriguing convergences as well as some striking distinctions with our work. The most obvious convergence is Sloterdijk’s observation concerning a shift from attack on the enemy’s body – the “system” – to the “environment” that is “vital” to life. As noted above, we have observed a parallel shift in strategic bombing theory from attacks on troops and military equipment to the “vital systems” of food supply, industrial production, and infrastructures that are essential to a total military effort, not least because the lives of troops depend on them. The striking difference is in how this “environment” is conceptualized in each case. Sloterdijk, it seems, has a naturalistic conception of the environment. It is the previously un-reflected upon (and, he seems to imply, rather implausibly, previously pure) air that surrounds us. But in our genealogical work, we have found that the environment that is increasingly “explicated” – and that becomes the target of military attack – during the 20th century is comprised of a vast array of other systems: that is, self-consciously constituted, interdependent infrastructures and production facilities upon which life, in modern societies, depends. In this sense, it might be possible to write Sloterkijk’s history into the more general history of forms of knowledge and modalities of intervention concerned with the vulnerability of vital systems – both as objects of attack and as objects of protection or security.
Questions on Concept Work
In light of all this, here are a few questions that might be valuable to discuss: Are these associations of the vital with an organismic metaphor for collective life disqualifying? Or are they valuable in pointing to important lines of genealogical development and mutations of the vital? How does the identification of first-order concepts in a genealogical series relate to their use in an anthropology of the contemporary? How does this use of “vital” or “vital systems” compare to familiar concepts such as Foucault’s “population,” which was the object of apparatuses of “security”?
Congratulations to us all for getting going again!
Thanks to Stephen for writing this excellent piece.
I find the piece very clarifying. Let me just add one quick slightly discordant comment with more to follow: none of this confronts the issue of “critical” versus “vital”. The natives use both. While the affect has waned on this topic, I still don’t see why critical won’t do?
I was also wondering about critical vs. vital, but in the more mundane sense of whether actors in preparedness planning themselves make a distinction or whether both terms simply mean something like “important.” Or for that matter, the distinction between system and infrastructure. I can well imagine that amongst most people you are referring to these distinctions would be seen as semantic quibbles (as is the wont of engineers and planners), but I could also imagine there being a space of the unthought here. I’m well aware of the evolution of these terms over the course of the 20th century (to say nothing of that of the vital and vitalism between the age of Bergson and that of molecular biology), but i’m also willing to believe that the actors you are talking about are making even finer distinctions… are they?
To me, the advantage of ‘vital system’ over ‘critical system’ is that it resonates with a genealogical history of modern governmental interventions into ‘life’. Thus, vital systems security attempts to secure the function of, as Stephen writes, “self-consciously constituted, interdependent infrastructures and production facilities upon which life, in modern societies, depends”. While the distinction may not be made by the actors involved (i.e. they may use both terms interchangeably to mean important), as Stephen and Andy have unearthed there is an actual genealogical relationship to earlier moments in which the vital system was associated with organismic models of society. Using the term vital systems therefore makes a point about the relationship of ‘vital systems security’ to ‘population security’. Thus, vital systems security does not supplant concerns with the life of the population but superimposes a new grid of problems (disaster-scale events) and new scale and temporality of interventions (preparedness, discontinuous response). In the case of electricity, for example, the emergence of concerns with resilience to disaster-scale events did not displace concerns with everyday reliability or, for that matter, basic infrastructure extension.
One hesitation for me would be that the actors seem to indicate that life (of individuals, of population) is not the only concern of their work. In the declared programs for a ‘vital systems security,’ the preservation of life is often coupled with other ends like the continuity of political power or military capacity. Is this movement away from concerns with life more significant than the continuity of these concerns, in which case perhaps vital is not the correct term because it masks this shift?
Well, precisely. What if I were to pose it this way: is there a genealogical difference between “vital systems” as something that has roots in 19th century organismic/system models of societies, cities, nations and a “critical infrastructure” as something with roots in post-world war II cybernetics? Both use the term system, but they mean different things. The presense of vital or vitalism does seem extremely important here because it is a question of whether life (the vital) is the pre-eminent value at stake in the protection of systems or infrastructure (the sine qua non for protecting economic systems or transporations systems etc), or just one value among others (or perhaps it is a question of the re-definition of life as something planetary and systematic, rather than something individual and organismic). The cybernetic view is radically secular in this sense, I think, in that biological life, and in particular the biological life of humans, is just one of many different systems. In the grid of new disaster-events, is there a qualitative difference between the disaster that kills large numbers of people and the disaster that disrupts the flow of commerce or the DDOS attack that disables Twitter for two days. It strikes me that Twitter could be called a critical infrastructure, but I would be hard pressed to see it as a vital system without a more radical definition of what “life” is.
This is why I think it is important to ask whether the actors themselves favor terms like vital systems or critical infrastructure, to probe whether or not there are commitments at work there?
Just a quick note: In discussions around pandemic vaccine prioritization in the US, the reference to critical or vital infrastructure protection made by a particular group of experts (here we need the ethnography of these folks, which is still missing) was a deliberate move AWAY from concerns with “health” (and therefore with “life”). It was, in fact, deliberately cast as such. For instance, experts telling me that “health” (and therefore “life”) is just one “value” among others. What critical or vital infrastructure protection meant in this case was the protection of “society” (native’s term), by which they primarily seemed to mean the economy. So this appears to be an empirical case which seems to confirm Lyle’s hesitation. I am sure there are other empirical cases, which point in the opposite direction (i.e. towards concerns with the vital and its mutations). Food safety may be one.
Thanks for the responses all. A couple quick replies in this initial round.
Chris, I think that this is closer to what I had in mind: “or perhaps it is a question of the re-definition of life as something planetary and systematic, rather than something individual and organismic.” I guess I would not say planetary for sure, but definitely “systemic” or “infrastructural.” The economy, infrastructures, etc., are mechanisms through which needs that are basic to life are fulfilled. So they are “vital” in that sense. It seems strange to me to posit that there should be a strictly organismic or individual understanding of the vital, or that the only alternative to the organismic understanding would be the vital of “vitalism.”
Honestly I am not sure I grasp the point that is being made here about the other “ends” that are sometimes at stake in the domains we have been examining. Yes: of course there can be preparedness, vulnerability assessment, and so on, for a computer system, or in an industrial plant. But we have been interested precisely in those areas in which existing domains of biopolitical government (“life and population…”) have been reconfigured by these techniques. Thus, Andy’s work on pandemics and vaccination, mine on insurance, both of our work on emergency management. To me, precisely the reason for calling them “vital” rather than “critical” is to draw the distinction between a computer routine and a water system (for example). Lyle hits this on the nose: “vital” establishes a relationship between what we are looking at and the biopolitics of population.
This is for, perhaps, another iteration, but I think that a distinction between the registers of techniques and political technologies might clear this up a bit. “Vital system” clearly belongs to the latter register, not the former.
I come late to this debate and perhaps my comments are unqualified.
If I understand correctly, Andy and Steve argue that the “vital” of VSS is not merely used in a metaphorical way (for then “critical” would do). Instead it refers – in a way that needs to be determined – to life itself. And that inevitably means, or so I think, that biological life is at stake.
The question is: What does that precisely mean? In which concrete way is life itself at stake in VSS?
The answer Andy and Steve offer thus far is that VSS must be seen – or understood – as a variant of (or perhaps as an element of) biopolitics: What is at stake is the “life” of a population (in a literal, not in a metaphoric sense).
At first glance, this seems difficult to appreciate because VSS is not primarily designed as work on the vital processes of a given population (like hygiene or the regulation of reproduction) — or is it?
It seems to me as if VSS’s relation to life itself is a rather indirect one. In any case, I am open to the argument that VSS is a political technology designed to secure those elements of a given infrastructure that are, in case of a disaster, critical to maintaining the vitality (in a biological way) of a population.
If this reading is correct then the challenge Andy and Steve face is to determine, in a concrete way, the literal sense in which the vital is at stake in VSS.
Just to clarify: So this means that what you and Andy are analyzing is the result of a problematization of certain technologies of risk management, rather than the result of a shift in the problematization of life, which then gave rise to new technologies of risk management around the vital?
Carlo — I don’t think that’s what I meant. Only that, as Foucault says, there is the history of techniques — like vulnerability assessment or catastrophe modeling — and then there is the history of something like political technologies, such as those concerned with the vulnerability of vital systems. I think we are tracing both, and tracing their points of intersection. I just wanted to draw the distinction between the two registers.
… ok. I see. Thanks for the clarification! Given these two registers of techniques and technologies, are there also two registers of problematization?
My instinct would be that techniques are only elements in problematizations — taken up, transformed, or invented in relationship to political, ethical, or other kinds of problems. But would be interested to hear others’ views…
The distinction between techniques and technologies (both here and in Foucault) remains somewhat opaque to me. If it’s a really important distinction perhaps a sharp definition or crystallizing illustration would help? Given what I understand of your usage, though, I would think that ‘techniques’ are the sorts of things that get elaborated in response to problematizations, and then of course sometimes they go on to become constituent elements in later problematizations. I don’t think Foucault ever suggested there are two ‘registers’ (‘levels’?) of problematization. Though there are often (always?) multiple problematizations competing in a single space or field.
Also I wonder if it matters for the argument if the relationship between ‘vital systems’ and ‘life’ is an indirect one? If it is, this seems to fit the argument in a natural way. Vital systems security is a modulation of biopolitics. If biopolitics worked ‘directly’ on life, then the techniques at the heart of the modulation may look like they work more ‘indirectly’ on life. But perhaps I am just skeptical about the claim that anything is ‘direct’ here. If we are doing histories of the production of objects and the techniques that work on them, then the relationship can always be made to look indirect (or what some would call ‘artificial’). Thoughts?
@steve. I’m pretty sure I follow your response here, and I can totally roll with the politcial technologies/techniques distinction (@Colin: a technique would be a shared software package that models the transmission of a virus in a population and spits out some form of prediction on which people rely, whereas a political technology might include the forms of coordination between public health departments, first responders and politicians, and the modes of veridiction wherein that software package is used as reliable evidence by all of them). However, it still strikes me as begging the question of what’s important/critical/vital. I could make the case that Twitter (i.e. immediate information) is now a need basic to life, but I don’t know how people decide whether it is a more or less basic need than water, air, sex, etc. Are preparedness planners using Maslow’s hierarchy or what? Seriously… it’s not that I don’t believe that vital captures something different than critical… it’s just that I want to know more about what counts as more and less vital in this world… raw mortality numbers, amount of organic material on the planet, number of Twitter followers? I’m trying not to be flip, but sarcasm is my most vital need
Colin: Thanks for the comment on “direct.” I agree. Maybe it would be just better to talk about “figurations” of the vital, with no particular figuration having a greater immediacy or directness (or non-metaphorical value).
On techniques and technologies, I agree with Colin that these are not different registers of problematization.
This is from my piece on “topologies of power” which is coming out (soon, I hope) in Theory, Culture, and Society. I am noting that in Birth of Biopolitics Foucault draws a distinction between two kinds of history:
One, the “history of techniques,” asks how techniques – of confinement, for example – are taken up and redeployed in different technologies of power. Foucault’s illustrations suggest that he is referring, at least in part, to his own previous work. The other kind of history is what Foucault calls “the history of technologies,” which he describes as the “much more general, but … much more fuzzy history of the correlations and systems of the dominant feature which determine that, in a given society and for a given sector – for things do not necessarily develop in step in different sectors, at a given moment, in a given society, in a given country – a technology of security, for example, will be set up, taking up again and sometimes even multiplying juridical and disciplinary elements and redeploying them within its specific tactic” (Foucault, 2007: 8-9).
I think that “taking up and multiplying” is probably (part of) the work of problematization. So for us, for example, what is interesting is to see how a technique such as vulnerability assessment used to think about military equipment is redeployed as a kind of reflexive modernizing intervention into the pathologies of biopolitical government (as in the case of vulnerability reduction in natural disaster preparedness).
Chris: Of course the question about “what counts as more and less vital” is essential, but it is a first order question that gets answered in different ways in different contexts. (I just read a 1949 dissertation on the economics of targeting in strategic bombing, so if you really want to know the answer…).
Are animals vital ? I raise the question from my fieldwork in Hong Kong, and plunge in the discussion rather wildly. My question comes from the fact that in order to prevent Avian Flu the Hong Kong government has decided to close progressively all the poultry farms on its territory and to import chickens from China. Of course this is just a way to psuh the difficulty further by strengthening the controls at the border. Last week I worked at one of the remaining poultry farms in Hong Kong, and I can tell you chickens have a real biological existence : they eat and sheet a lot, and many things need to be surveilled, not only viruses. At the end of the week I took part to a Buddhist fansgheng ceremony, the purpose of which is to buy animals on the market and release them in the wild to gain “good merits”. These Buddhist people are critical of the animal market as they try to take animals out of the markets, thereby showing that they are spiritual entities and not only biological commodities. This spiritual take on the issue raises new problems as there is little knowledge of the environment in which animals are released, and many die because they cannot survive in this new environment. I wonder if this ethnographic example falls into your categories of the vital and the critical. I’m interested by preparedness of Avian Flu pandemic in as much as it allows to conceive a society where there are no living animals transformed into commodities, but a separation between “spiritual” animals and pure commodities. I think this dissociation opens a space for critic. Is it in your sense ? Is it a second or a first order observation ?
Friends,
One of the reasons for re-animating the blog is to start assembling a concept inventory in a more or less rigorous fashion. The other reason is to reanimate some degree of sociability and solidarity before the death squads take us away (check on John Stewart on this – one of the funniest and scariest things I have seen in years).
It seems to me that the discussion is taking a good turn by moving away from the “term” vital to exploring what the concept or concepts involved might be as well as their referents.
I think it would be helpful to continue in this direction.
So, we all agree that “problematization” is deep and important but we don’t really know how to circumscribe it.
The distinction Collier draws between technique and technology is helpful.
Presumably things function differently in assemblages and apparatuses. Collier and Lakoff et al have done a great deal of work on the emergence, permutations and reconfigurations of techniques, etc over different historical moments.
We have found a distinction between episodes and events helpful.
Perhaps we can continue in this vein.
As some of you know, Diogenes Lab has a “concept” page in which we are assembling an inventory. We then are looking to Adrian to design clusterings and recombinations that can be made visual.
Onward,
Paul
More terms with concepts: diagram, rationality, schema,
The extraordinary lecture in “Security, population, territory” where Foucault compares and contrasts discipline and security is exemplary.
Reminder: the lectures of four years from the College de France are now up on the Berkeley website (as well as some discussions in English and one or two other lectures in English).
I posted a comment yesterday but it seems Chinese censorship didn’t allow it, so I try again. I was trying to relate your discussion by raising the question : are animals vital ? I am fascinated by the fact that the Hong Kong government has decided to get rid of all poultry farms on its territory to avoid contact between birds and humans on the poultry markets. Of course this pushes the problem further by depending on mainland China for poultry imports. When I visited poultry farms or markets I was struck by their biological existence : they eat and shit all the time! Hong Kong markets are full of life, flesh and viruses included. Now on these markets you find people who buy the animals and release them ib Buddhist ceremonies, called “release life” (fangsheng). They are critical of the live animals markets and consider animals as spiritual beings who can revenge against humans. For these urban religious people life is not a commdodity that can be controled but a spiritual entity, and I think “critic” comes from this dissociation. But then I would consider “vital” as a first-order term and “critical” as a second-order term. I don’t know if it fits in your articulation of vital infrastructure, but I wanted to add animals to the electricity wires and gas tubes that are currently problematised.
in another direction. Stephen and Andy have worked for years on a comparison: Foucault described that kind of security, we are describing this kind of security. We have debated vital (or critical) in contrast to “population” as modifiers of this base object, security. So the framework that is set up is: here are two types of the same thing; how are they different? I am not convinced that for vital systems, security is the right object.
If i read correctly, security here (as Stephen laid it out in the original post) is a “diagram of power”. The rationality ordering their diagram of power is “preparedness.” The particular object/target is “vital systems.” A diagram of power could be drawn to any scale, but somehow it seems off to make the two coequals. Part of the power of Foucault’s security in the 77-78 lectures is in the insight that unlike law, which prohibits, and discipline, which prescribes, security uses movement, it modulates. It requires freedom and so tends to expand etc. Schematic, but useful for thinking about the world, not only populations. To my mind, a “kind of security” must have more than one object. Maybe what we’re talking about is not a kind of security but as Stephen notes, a political technology, so, a technology of security, something like “vital systems protection.”
I find the history you’ve done incredibly careful, thoughtful and useful. i am just trying to push on something that I’ve never been able to make click.
A new article by Fassin on biopolitics has just been published in Theory, Culture & Society. Maybe of interest.
http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/26/5/44
Picking up on two earlier threads:
1. Stephen’s question: “how does the identification of first-order concepts in a genealogical series relate to their use in an anthropology of the contemporary?”
2. Paul’s reminder of the tripartite term = word+concept+referent: “It seems to me that the discussion is taking a good turn by moving away from the “term” vital to exploring what the concept or concepts involved might be as well as their referents.”
A strength of Stephen’s initial entry (reflecting the strength of the VSS work generally) is that he identifies a genealogy of relations of power in which a key word remains stable while referents and concepts undergo significant shifts. In the first place, with total war, the vital referent shifts from populations-bodies to infrastructures taken to be essential for “society” conceive as an organic totality. In the second place, with total preparedness, the concept of the vital focuses attention on infrastructure taken to be critical to collective security and wellbeing, losing its organismic undertones.
In this light I can note once again, echoing Stephen and others, that the diagram of power introduced by VSS diverges from biopower twice over. In terms of orienting inquiry, then, work on the concept “vital” indicates that the question of figuration is as significant as questions of techniques and technologies. At the level of techniques and technologies, vital systems no doubt remains articulated with and into biopolitical apparatuses. At the level of figurations, whatever techne at might or might not be at play, the objects and tele of power are certainly reconfigured.
This brings me back to Stephen’s question. A strength of the word “vital” in vital systems is that it inheres in the genealogical series under consideration. But it’s worth pressing the question: given shifts in both concept and referent across the series, is it worth introducing a shift in word as well? A criterion might be: would a different word help the analytic task of lifting out and highlighting the shifts in concept and referent, object and telos, that make a VSS diagram of power distinctive?
If the answer is yes, other term might accomplish this? Critical or essential? Of these, essential would seem to capture some of one etymological strengths of the vital. As Stephen notes, in late medieval thought the term vital is connected to the metaphysical idea of inspiration–the hylomorphic notion that substance has form and telos by the ordering presence of the spirit. It followed that the loss of the vital element results in disorder and deviation.
Few of us take substance, form, and telos have a necessary and pregiven relation. Nevertheless, insofar as the term “vital” carries these resonances, it draws attention to the fact that the infrastructures and elements under consideration in the VSS diagram are taken to be essential to sustaining the forms and purposes of the systems under consideration.
A note on Meg’s comment — which gets to the heart of a discussion Andy and I have been having for quite a while now.
You will notice that I did not use the term “vital systems security” in the initial post here. The reason has to do with a certain uncertainty linked, in part, with just the kind of reservations that you express. Is this a “type” of security? And what does that mean?
I hope Andy weighs in at some point, because I am not sure that we have settled on a common story, but here is an initial response that loops back to the distinction already discussed between techniques, rationalities, and political technologies (or something like that).
Regulatory norms like “preparedness,” “vulnerability reduction,” “resilience” seem to me best understood on the level of rationalities that can, as you suggest, be articulated at various scales, in relation to various objects. This of course is also true of techniques and rationalities associated with what Foucault called the security of populations. Thus, for instance, Donzelot’s analysis of insurance: The techniques of actuarialism, the practices of calculating reserve ratios, etc., are initially shaped in relation to the high financial risks associated with long-distance shipping. They are subsequently articulated onto a new “object” — the population — both in the context of private and public insurance schemes. “Social security” refers, most generally, to this collectivization of risks as a specifically *political” problem (and solution). (Ironically, social security in the United States is not an insurance scheme, but whatever.)
Similarly, I think that Andy and I have been at pains to distinguish between the techniques and rationalities of vulnerability reduction, preparedness, and so on, and the mapping of these into a specifically political problematic in which vital systems are an object of protection. So in our work, it seems very significant that there is a certain moment when a range of techniques and technologies that are initial circumscribed in problems of total war (modulated in the context of nuclear conflict) are transformed into properly political problems.
Take, for example, the problem of logistics, which is both a question of optimization and a sphere of vulnerability in military thinking for many centuries. With the rise of total war the “logistics” system is extended to include key infrastructures, industrial production facilities, and so on, of entire countries. This step (roughly from World War I to the Cold War) is associated with an extraordinary proliferation of new techniques (operations research, systems analysis, industrial web theory, catastrophe modeling, targeting theory in strategic bombing). In a final step, this primary relationship to war falls away, and the protection of vital systems, their function in the wake of a catastrophe, becomes an increasingly important concern of the US government in the last forty years or so in areas ranging from energy policy to public health to natural disaster response and reconstruction, etc.
So my immediate response to your question is just that to me it isn’t so much a question of “scale” as it is the moment at which a certain set of techniques and forms of rationality (a diagram of power) are mobilized to answer a given political problem. Which gets to what seems to me the real issue here — what is a “political problem” or “political technology” and how does that relate to “security.”
This might be worth a separate “concept” discussion, but just a quick note here. My understanding of security as a political problem — and I don’t think Andy and I have quite arrived at consensus on this point — emerges from a certain Hobbesian tradition. Hobbes talks about security as the most essential element of the implicit contract that founds political order. What is infrequently noted is that Hobbes does not only talk about control of violence, but also about what we would now call welfare and protection from catastrophic circumstances that befall a citizen. His claim simply is that citizens give up some freedom in return for provision of “security” in the very broad and vague sense in which he defines it. So the points are: (1) security for Hobbes can refer to protection from many different kinds of misfortunes including poverty and natural disasters, not only warfare or civil strife; (2) that security for Hobbes is defined as the essential political problem — what government delivers to citizens.
So to me the question is this: Is there a way in which we can say — strictly empirically — that the security of vital systems has become a central political problem for contemporary government? I don’t think that this requires us to say anything about whether the security of vital systems is parallel to the security of populations or that “vital systems security” and “population security” are the same “type of thing” — as you say — since they aren’t things but analytical constructs. And security is not the “object” but, for me, designates a certain space of specifically political problematization.
The question I would want to ask, therefore, is not so much about isomorphism (or non-isomorphism) between SSS, VSS, and PS, but whether a term like “the security of vital systems” makes visible and intelligible a set of genealogical relationships, but also a set of techniques, rationalities, etc. that show up in different empirical configurations (topologies) that have to be studied.
In any case, I would be very excited to take this question up in a subsequent discussion devoted to it, since I think it is quite essential, and Foucault’s articulation of these questions, in my view, changes significantly in the late 1970s.
This discussion is getting somewhere!
– techniques or technologies are not “transferred” to another object without transformations of that object. In the terms Gaymon and I have used, elements are recombined to constitute different objects according to shifting metrics, modes and the like. I know we all agree there was no object “population” before all this work was done.
– events, episodes, and the type of genealogies or pathways need more attention analytically…
– in the XVIIIth century, a central term (and concept and referent) was “circulation” and hence whatever the organic or organismic referred to was quite different than late XIXth century uses.
–”strictly empirically” means “through rigorous inquiry”?
Hi everyone,
I am sorry for joining the debate a bit late as I did not realize the discussion took up so rapidly and lively. I hope my comments won’t be a distraction from the direction this exciting conversation is heading towards. I hope you forgive me if I end up repeat some of the points already stated in the discussion as it is pretty hard to intervene in a discussion that has already quite extensively unfolded.
I would like to turn to Rabinow’s initial comment on the necessity of teasing out the implicit distinction between “vital” and “critical” and Lyle and Chris Kelty’s comments towards this direction. They both push Stephen towards how exactly the modulation of the concept of the vital from its 19th century organismic and biological meaning referring specifically to the well-being and importance of biological entities at both the micro (the body) and macro (the population) levels to the mid-20th century conceptualization and qualification of socio-technical systems (such as electric grids or energy pipelines) took place. In this vein, I believe the key question is what the genealogical thread that needs to be identified for causing such a mutation and in-stabilization in the conceptual architecture which led to the schism between vital and the critical.
Stephen in a way tries to answer these critiques rightly by asserting the analytical distinction between the political technologies and rationalities on the one hand and techniques and the technical rationalities that deploy these techniques on the other. Although I think he pays respect to the latter, he is nevertheless inclined towards the former as both the explanatory variable and the variable that is in need of explanation in the mutation we are trying to understand (please excuse my sociological psuedo-positivist language here). But I wonder to what extent we can really understand the question at stake by privileging the political rationalities and technologies at the expense of the techniques and the technical rationalities through which the experts on/in the ground/wild operate. I wonder if we need a better way of understanding the question at stake w/out privileging one side over the other which obviously comes at the expense of one. Possibly one way to design the explanation is through developing an analytical language that would allow us to study the correlations between these two distinct but inter-related and interacting phenomenon as they under-determine the concept of the vital through which a hybrid spaces of problematization and struggle opens up for different group of actors from different domains of the social, political, and technical to congregate for solutions to the recurring problems of the collective life.
Obviously what I have just said is no mystery to us, but I wonder to what extend we have payed enough attention to the technical side of the things when it comes to the VSS. I am trying to push this point further here, because I believe we are making the shift from the organismic 19th century metaphor of the social to the mechanical late 20th century notion of the critical/vital too fast which I believe has something to do w/ our bias towards the political and the biological for good reasons when it comes to the genealogy of biopolitics w/in the problematization of collective life in general. In short what I am trying to articulate whether the modulation we are interested in has anything to do w/ the convergence of a certain political concern of the Sovereign State Security with the domain of engineering somewhere in the 1930s.
Let me open up this last sentence by referring to certain empirical data points that both I and Stephen have been interested in in the last couple of years.
1) Let me start w/ the 1938 Donald Wilson quote (“the modern economy was composed of “interrelated and entirely interdependent elements,”) that Stephen cites. What is intriguing to me as someone who has been working on the history of economic planning and management is the similarity of the language of “interrelationality” and “interdependence” of the elements of a modern “economy”. I am intrigued by this language for two reasons. First, it sounds exactly like the problematization of the Economy, which was a novel invention of the 1930s at least in the case of the United States as Tim Mitchell puts it, by Wassily Leontief an actor those of us working on the technical side of the OEP story know quite well from OEP’s efforts for modeling the national economy by the input-output analysis and modeling technique which was invented by this economist in the early 1930s in the US at Harvard as an improvement on the Soviet total planning technique of “material balances accounting”. Input-Output modeling as its name might make explicit was precisely interested in the inter-relationships that make up the totality of an industrial system, which was consequently called the Economy right at this period, and the resulting interdependencies that emerge as a property of such a system of relationships. The second reason I would argue has to do not necessarily with a conceptual homology of problematizations, but actually a direct empirical convergence of these two threads during WWII at OSS where calculations for strategic bombing were conducted. Here, we see the necessary inter-dependence of a problematization (strategic bombing) which might or might not have anything do with the other thread of problematization and a technical device that is necessary for materializing the problematization by bringing into being a particular vision of the system that is being attacked through a set of calculative techniques. And the surprise is we find Leontief implementing and teaching his technique of input-output modeling in OSS. These economists, some of whom will later will come to very important positions both w/in the US government (Policy Programming Division of the State Department and the National Security Council) or international development aid organizations (such as Latin American leg of the UN Economic and Social Development Division) and will be called “structuralists”, can be seen as the first systems analysts to reduce the optimality of a production system, which in this case happens to be the entire industrial economy that is supporting the total war mobilization (so I do not think here the correct reference is the cybernetics, but is the input-output analysis and accounting as a much more mundane but powerful and precise activity). Here, we see that the object of intervention is entities that were called “bottlenecks” as also referred to as the “critical nodes”, “problem spots”, “key sectors” of an entire economy’s input-output model (here i think the “bottlenecks” vs “vital nodes” reveal to us the correlation between two different but homologous problematization of vital systems that are converging from different genealogical threads).
2) Here I would like to take the notion of “structure”, since I believe it has vital significance to the technical side of the problematization. I believe that this notion is key to understanding the epistemic ground upon which analytical techniques of operations research, systems analysis, structural economics, and engineering analytical techniques (such as power flows analysis in electrical engineering and similar techniques in other engineering branches that are mainly interested in the modeling of material flows based on much familiar network analysis) depend on. Again I think sticking to Leontief as an exemplary figure is a good idea. In his 1936 article, which seems to be one of the earliest articulations of his inter-industry economics work from the early 1930s and late 1920s in the english language, Leontief uses the title “Quantitative Input and Output Relations in the Economic system of the United States”. By 1941, this weird and excessively long title is transformed into a rather sharp book title: The Structure of the American Economy (it is important to note that the publication of this book was done thanks to the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the Department of Commerce whose work and support on the modeling of the US economy in terms of input-output relationships have been one of the key threads leading to OEP’s input output modeling work in the 1960s).
I think the shift from the language of “input-output” to the “structure” is not necessarily important at the level of the level of technical conduct of calculation(since Leontief was already in the business of using matrix algebra of linear algebra in postulating his models), but in signaling us that a new style of reasoning is emerging at this moment in various segregated but nevertheless interdependent engineering/economics domains that are grounded upon a common episteme of mathematical thinking. l would argue that what allows the technical and calculative visibility of the systems which will become the object of techno-political reflection as Andy and Stephen show in their work on VSS is exactly this undercurrent of mathematical thinking that has been emerging at this moment.
Although admittedly I do not yet have good evidence as to the surface of emergence of the concept of “structure”, my suspicions lie in the domain of civil engineering and to be more specific in the work of an American Civil Engineer Hardy Cross who invents a calculative technique called “moment analysis” in the early 1930s to analyze the “structural” properties of buildings that are made out of newly invented cement concrete. What is interesting about Cross is the fact that he applies this analysis which he had invented for the analysis of the “structure” of a building to analyze and engineer the optimum structure of “hydraulic pipeline systems” circa 1933. This analysis which seems to be based on the analytic unit of vectors is its assertion that what makes a building a building or a pipeline a pipeline is not necessarily the physical totality of the entity, but rather a deeper level that is called the “structure” which allows the entity to preserve its form over a long-term period (i.e. its quality of durability and stability). I think Cross is another significant figure for precisely two reasons: first his work exemplifies the emergent concept of “structure” which will become the object of intervention of VSS later on (including in the work of Leontief- i think it is still a question whether there are empirical connections between Leontief and Cross), and second he seems to have invented the first analytical technique which will later be called “network analysis” which again is the prime device for intervening in vital systems, be it they are socio-technical infrastructure systems or socio-biological population systems.
I think after this detour of technical rationalities and techniques, I can come back to the question of the schism of the vital and the critical. I think Stephen’s point on the distinction between life and its environment that comes towards the ends of the conversation is critical in giving a satisfactory answer to the difference btw vital and the critical and to what levels such analytical concepts should apply to. Here I also agree w/ Lyle’s preference of vital over the critical when it comes to the biopolitics of the population. As Stephen suggests, there is no doubt that the infrastructure systems that are at stake in VSS are vital to the well-being of the population and the form and mode of collective life in which such population is inhibited and embedded. However, I wonder if the critical could not do a powerful analytical work for us if we were to preserve it not for the function of the system vis-a-vis the population, but for studying the way in which experts are concerned with the well-being of the system itself and especially their interest in the particular vulnerabilities that are believed to be due to the intrinsic material qualities of this entity. So, in short I guess I cannot keep myself wondering to what extent the vital of the 20th is the genealogical descent of the vital of the 19th century and not whether we are under-appreciating the role of what one might call mechanical sciences in favor of the human sciences. I guess I am pushing in this direction more towards technical rationalities because I am wondering without analyzing the both sides of the correlation of rationalities to what extent we can really distinguish rhetorical speech acts from discursive positivities that are the constituents elements of problematizations (after all I do not see any reason why technical rationalities themselves can come to point where they determine the telos of the configurations of techniques that constitute the political technologies that govern the ontological relationship between the social and the political as we have seen in many technocratic expertiments of the 20th century modern state often ending with rather undesired consequences and outcomes).
A new set of images of Gerhard Richter’s work in connection with his current exhibit in Madrid, including some not seen before, might be of fresh interest.
http://www.fundacion.telefonica.com/arteytecnologia/exposiciones/richter.htm
All: I am posting a comment here for Jim Faubion, who was experiencing some technical difficulties with the site.
“I think that Stephen’s rephrasing of the term with which this discussion began–from “vital systems security” to “the security of vital systems”–is helpful both visually and rhetorically. It puts to my mind appropriate stress on both security and systems and deflects the centrality of the vital, which several commentators have already suggested might be a good move. To take the latter first: The concept of the system as it comes to be formulated through and beyond cybernetics seems to unify a number of the examples that commentators have put forward for examination as well as distinguish what I think must be recognized as a grid of intelligiblity and a fortiori both technologies and techniques that are distinct from that of the biopolitical and biopolitics. Systems are for one thing not biopolitical populations. They are not statistically representable. They are not comprehensible within the logic of either frequencies or the dichotomization of normal and abnormal. They are not necessarily vital–i.e. not necessarily living or even organic (consider the system of the generation of electric energy, which of course includes living beings but is not reducible to them)–but instead autopoietic. They are not necessarily organismic (consider the same system), but again, autopoietic. (Organisms are a subset of autopoietic systems.) Whether closed or open, they are representable instead through appeal to variables and their transformations. Their logic is informatic, a matter of content, the structuration of content, the (autopoietic) organization of what has been structured and what, in the process of autopoiesis, may well be restructured. (I’m wondering if the last commentator’s economist might better have been deploying the word “system” than the word “structure,” since he was clearly thinking about matters at once of substance, structure and organized processes, which is precisely to be thinking about systems.) Systems come into their own during the course and in the aftermath of WWII, so they don’t yet fully inform the examples brought forward from WWI. They do give some force, however, to the suggestion that WWII is not yet over. We continue to live under the dominion of a technology of systems–among other things. And what–to raise the obvious point–would biology have been if it, too, had not had the infusion of the logic of the informatic, autopoietic system and, with it, the gradual figuration of the “genetic code”? Contemporary cosmology marches on in the same mode. In any event, to repeat: the logic of systemic technology is not the same as the logic of biopolitical technology. Hence, genealogical struggling with what has become of the vital in its biopolitical sense may be somewhat methodologically misplaced. I think one must also become the archaeologist and recognize systemic technology as stratigraphically distinct from its biopolitical counterpart (which of course hasn’t been buried–far from it). Becoming an archaeologist, one might further be tempted to argue that the security of vital (here, surely, the broader concept at work is not that of the living but that of the critical) systems belongs far more to the systemic than to the biopolitical domain. True, biopolitics is tripolar and one of its poles is indeed that of security. But biopolitics as a discourse of the legitimation of intervention is never about security alone. Every pole of the triangle is always in play. Such play is not at all obvious to me in the projects in the past half century or so that have focused on the security of such vital systems as the governmental apparatus in, say, the aftermath of a nuclear wipe-out. To be more concrete: I doubt very much that the people who designed and built Iron Mountain were very concerned with the health, security and welfare of a biopolitical population. They were concerned about the security and at least the minima of the health and well-being of particular people, especially those at the highest reaches of governmental decision-making and command but also those who could serve them in keeping the government running–soldiers of various ranks, provisioners of materiel and other supplies, etc. The civil population, that signature object of biopolitical obsession? Already gone, baby. Dust. And isn’t this just the logic that one encounters in present approaches even to such classically biopolitical provocations as epidemics and other mass disasters? I don’t think the issue is one of people just throuwing up their hands in the face of the impossibility of effective biopolitical intervention. I think the issue is rather one of an alternative technology of political organization, for which the fundamental poles are no longer those of normality and abnormality, norm and deviation, but rather those of degeneration and (re)generation, poles that do not permit of sharp internal divisions but rather define a continuum, the normativity of which varies from one environment to the next. This points to the even more basic contrast between the system and its environment. One doesn’t have to follow such a fanatic of system closure as Luhmann to notice that the rise of the system has also been accompanied by the rise of the environment, not just as a socio-technical milieu but instead as an Other on equal conceptual footing with the system itself, as I think some of the examples already introduced corroborate. What’s of potentially great interest here is that the system is not something that is “in” an environment, as element or part; it is instead other than an environment that it constantly encounters and with which it must come again and again to terms, as modulations, novelties and shifts of terrain, etc., loom on the horizon.”