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, købe ativan online. 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. Buy ativan, 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, Ordering ativan online cheap, 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, Osta ativan online. 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), buy ativan. 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, Florida FL Fla. , 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, buy cheap ativan online. 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, Bestill ativan online, spiraling inflation of wages and prices, and disruptions of transportation and other vital public services” (New Dimensions of Civil Emergency Preparedness: 1969 – 1973). Buy ativan, 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, ordering ativan no rx, 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”. Billige ativan apotek, 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, buy ativan. In many early usages (in the 15^th or 16^th 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, purchase ativan online, on the one hand, “vital organs” or “vital statistics,” referring, respectively, to the individual body and the population as biological entities, Acheter ativan, 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 19^th and early 20^th 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, Oklahoma OK Okla. , susceptibility to disease, certain predictable norms and patterns of pathology, and so on. Buy ativan, 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, Pennsylvania PA Penn. , 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, buy ativan no rx, 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, Osta ativan, 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, buy ativan. There, he wrote of the “many thousands of ‘vulnerable points’ — bridges, power-stations, depots, order ativan cod, 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, Oregon OR Ore. , 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, ordering ativan online legally, 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. Buy ativan, 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, Köpa rabatterade ativan, 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, order ativan c.o.d., 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, Jotta ativan verkossa, 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, Arizona AZ Ariz. , 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.

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, buy ativan. 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, Kjøpe billig ativan, 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). Buy ativan, 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, buy ativan. 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 20^th 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”.

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