Occupy Wall Street & the State of Exception

On Fri­day, Septem­ber 30, 2011 the United States announced it had leg­ally murdered two US cit­izens without due legal pro­cess in Yemen. The fol­low­ing day, the police kettled and arres­ted 700 anti-​corporate pro­test­ers who were march­ing peace­fully on the Brook­lyn Bridge in New York City. Seem­ingly unre­lated and spa­tially dis­tant from each other, these events non­ethe­less reveal that the US cit­izens tak­ing to the streets to chal­lenge the cap­it­al­ist loot­ing of the com­mons are also con­front­ing a state that has just declared that it can assas­sin­ate, without recourse to courts, cit­izens deemed hos­tile to the state.

The Bush administration’s aban­don­ment of due pro­cess to tor­ture and assas­sin­ate non-​citizens, allegedly because of the “excep­tional” nature of the war on ter­ror, is well doc­u­mented. Obama has now exten­ded this prin­ciple to US cit­izens by sus­pend­ing the Fifth Amend­ment, the one that says “no per­son shall be deprived of life, liberty, or prop­erty, without due pro­cess of law.” Fur­ther, Obama seems to have ordered to put an end to the tor­ture and rendi­tion of sus­pects under Bush so that those sus­pects could be executed. This is an extraordin­ary turn­ing point, for the murder of cit­izens without due pro­cess of law is now decreed legal. The same way that for George Orwell the clearest examples of author­it­arian double-​speak under Big Brother were the slo­gans “war is peace” and “slavery is free­dom,” now the motto under the Bush-​Obama paradigm is “ignor­ing your con­sti­tu­tional rights is legal.” As Gior­gio Agam­ben has argued, this state of excep­tion also defined the Nazi state, which in its twelve years of exist­ence was under a con­sti­tu­tion sus­pen­ded by Hitler in the name of defend­ing the Ger­man nation. The polit­ical regimes of North Amer­ica and Europe seem to be mov­ing in a sim­ilar dir­ec­tion, ruled by con­sti­tu­tions that are recur­rently sus­pen­ded because the state of the excep­tion, as Wal­ter Ben­jamin once argued, is no longer the excep­tion but the rule.

“Imper­ial sov­er­eignty means that no point of space or time and no ele­ment of the bio-​political tis­sue is safe from inter­ven­tion” (Tiqqun, Intro­duc­tion to Civil War, p. 157). The bio-​political tis­sue of US cit­izens was never safe from imper­ial inter­ven­tion, yet this inter­ven­tion was at least partly reg­u­lated. In the 2007 film The Bourne Ulti­matum, a secret CIA pro­gram is shut down, and its dir­ect­ors pro­sec­uted, when Jason Bourne revealed that its hit-​men had assas­sin­ated US cit­izens without due pro­cess. The movie, and its mes­sage of account­ab­il­ity for state ter­ror, rep­res­ents a paradigm of the past. The last obstacle that put lim­its to the reach of imper­ial death squads, US cit­izen­ship rights, has been declared void. Now the bio-​political tis­sue of every single human being on the planet can be des­troyed with impun­ity through an exec­ut­ive order based on clas­si­fied evidence.

This de-​facto dis­sol­u­tion of the dis­tinc­tion between cit­izens and non-​citizens also means that the very nature of the global geo­graph­ies under imper­ial sov­er­eignty is shift­ing. In extend­ing the reach of the state of excep­tion, imper­ial form­a­tions are also cre­at­ing glob­al­ized polit­ical sub­jects that are equally vul­ner­able to state ter­ror irre­spect­ive of nation­al­ity. While imper­ial viol­ence con­tin­ues being racial­ized and dir­ec­ted largely at non-​white bod­ies, we are mov­ing toward a paradigm of sov­er­eignty in which all human bod­ies on the planet are poten­tial expres­sions of what Agam­ben calls “bare life,” bod­ies that can be killed without break­ing the law.

This is a somber reminder that the pro­test­ers on Wall Street are chal­len­ging not only cor­por­ate Amer­ica but also a state that has fully embraced the reg­u­lar use of death squads in the name of national secur­ity. As we know all too well, in the imper­ial order of things the dif­fer­ence between non-​violent act­iv­ists and ter­ror­ists is often a ques­tion of lan­guage and labels, as was appar­ent when Joe Biden argued that Julian Assange is a “high-​tech ter­ror­ist.” But the offi­cial announce­ment this past Fri­day that the state of excep­tion has entered a new polit­ical phase also con­firms what the Occupy Wall Street pro­test­ers have been say­ing all along: that ordin­ary US cit­izens have been reduced to a dis­em­powered under­class whose demo­cratic rights are recur­rently over­run, and made mean­ing­less, by the hijack­ing of the polit­ical sys­tem by cor­por­ate power. And that they have been inspired by sim­ilar protests in Egypt and Spain reveal that they see them­selves as part of a global mul­ti­tude striv­ing for uni­ver­sal forms of justice. The same way that the state of excep­tion tends to equal­ize all humans as poten­tial tar­gets irre­spect­ive of their cit­izen­ship, the pro­test­ers on Wall Street are respond­ing in kind and embra­cing a more uni­ver­sal polit­ical sub­jectiv­ity, embod­ied in their slo­gan “We are the 99%.”

From Space and Politics

Tags: Occupy

This entry was posted on 4 October 2011 at 7:25 am and is filed under Critical Legal Theory, Political Philosophy. Published under Creative Commons (CC) Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License: You are welcome to share and remix this content for non-commercial purposes. Kindly acknowledge and hyperlink the source.