“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.”

http://www.fundacion.telefonica.com/arteytecnologia/exposiciones/richter.htm

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).

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.

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.

http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/26/5/44

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.

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).