Definition:

1. An area where everything is visible.
2. A prison so constructed that the inspector can see each of the prisoners at all times, without being seen. Originally proposed by Jeremy Bentham in 1791.

“A building circular… The prisoners in their cells, occupying the circumference—The officers in the centre. By blinds and other contrivances, the Inspectors concealed… from the observation of the prisoners: hence the sentiment of a sort of omnipresence—The whole circuit reviewable with little, or… without any, change of place. One station in the inspection part affording the most perfect view of every cell.”

Jeremy Bentham; Proposal for a New and Less Expensive mode of Employing and Reforming Convicts (London, 1798)

Introduction

I will not be doing a history of the Panopticon here, as it has already been written about extensively in other places – most notably in Michel Foucault’s book, “Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison”. What I aim to cover here is the whole concept of Panopticism in relation to the modern age, and how this effects the disciplinary police states we all find ourselves living within.

So often in activist circles I hear the phrase “police state” bandied around every time a new, more egregious, police power comes into existence, as if this was something new that has only been occurring within living memory. This is a grossly incorrect use of the term “police state”, for several reasons, most importantly because all modern nation states by their very nature are “police states”, and have been since at least the latter half of the 18th century. A “police state” is merely a state whereby the populace are policed and disciplined routinely throughout the very fabric of their society – from school to work to retirement, disciplinary control mechanisms are the norm in every institution they come into contact with throughout their lives, even before you get to the military or the criminal justice system. What these activists are really complaining of is how particularly “Statist” these new developments are, without any real sense of irony concerning the fact that we do live under Statism as a rule and not an exception.

These disciplinary control mechanisms serve a particular purpose within the modern nation state:

The development of the disciplines marks the appearance of elementary techniques belonging to a quite different economy: mechanisms of power which, instead of proceeding by deduction, are integrated into the productive efficiency of the apparatuses from within, into the growth of this efficiency and into the use of what it produces. For the old principle of ‘levying-violence’, which governed the economy of power, the disciplines substitute the principle of ‘mildness-production-profit’. These are the techniques that make it possible to adjust the multiplicity of men and the multiplication of the apparatuses of production (and this means not only ‘production’ in the strict sense, but also the production of knowledge and skills in the school, the production of health in the hospitals, the production of destructive force in the army).

Michel Foucault; Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison; p 219

In order for these disciplinary control mechanisms to percolate throughout the social body, the modern nation state has to be a police state, or, a self-policing-state. Again, Foucault wrote:

On the whole, therefore, one can speak of the formation of a disciplinary society in this movement that stretches from the enclosed disciplines, a sort of ‘social quarantine’, to an indefinitely generalizable mechanism of ‘panopticism’. Not because the disciplinary modality of power has replaced all others; but because it has infiltrated the others, sometimes undermining them, but serving as an intermediary between them, linking them together, extending them and above all making it possible to bring the effects of power to the most minute and distant elements. It assures an infinitesimal distribution of the power relations.

Michel Foucault; Ibid; p 216.

This is what a disciplinary “police state” actually is – a system of micro-governance throughout society using disciplinary powers and techniques alongside Juridical powers. In fact, all other state powers are both infected and reinforced with these disciplinary powers and techniques.

Disciplinary techniques have a normalizing power over individuals who fall foul of them, most notably in the criminal justice system, but also, throughout every disciplinary institution that an individual may find themselves within or under the attention thereof:

“First, there is the requirement that every individual who comes before the assize courts has to have been examined by a psychiatric expert. As a result, the individual never appears in court with just his crime. He arrives with the psychiatric expert’s report and comes before the court burdened with both his crime and this report. There is a question concerning whether this measure, which is universal and obligatory for the assize courts, should also become the general rule in the criminal courts, where it is only applied in some cases, but not yet universally.

The second sign of the implementation of a medico-judicial power is the existence of special courts for children in which the information given to the judge, who both investigates and judges, is essentially psychological, social, and medical. This information consequently bears much more on the context of the individual’s existence, life, and discipline than on the act for which he has been brought before the children’s court. The child is brought before a court of perversity and danger rather than before a criminal court.

Equally, within the prison administration, medico-psychological services are established that are required to report on the individual’s development while serving his sentence, that is to say, on the level of perversity and level of danger he still represents at a given moment during his sentence, it being understood that if he has reached a sufficiently low level of danger and perversity he could be freed, at least conditionally.

A series of institutions of medico-legal surveillance surrounding childhood, youth, young people in danger, and so on could also be mentioned.”

Michel Foucault; Abnormal; p 40

In order for these disciplinary powers to be effective throughout society and its institutions, a new power has to come into play, a power which Banthem called the Panopticon, and Foucault later extended with the phrase “panopticism“.

Full Spectrum Awareness

The aspect of panopticism I want to address, as now it is in all the news media and is causing quite a storm in the USA and UK (and world-wide), is the NSA’s doctrine of Full Spectrum Awareness. With the advent of new technologies, which we all rely upon, the ability of the disciplinary police state to find out even more about us is greater than ever before. For many years, digital rights activists, such as the Electronic Freedom Foundation, have been warning the general public that privacy online is more or less a myth, that governments and corporations are hoovering vast amounts of digital data on us through the internet and telecoms services we ourselves use. Of course, both governments and the media have been calling these activists “conspiracy theorists”, but now we have had revelations about how widespread this mass-spying upon the ordinary citizenry is, and there is more to come, such tin-foil-hat allegations now ring hollow with the general public.

The first revelation is concerning the sharing of all telecoms metadata by Verizon with the NSA. Verizon, a US corporation, owns the UK and EU corporation Vodafone, and the Republic of South Africa’s Vodacon. In fact, it is very hard to separate these three companies once you look at who sits on the various Boards of Directors. It is basically the same corporation operating under three different names. This co-operation with the NSA is nothing new, as Verizon has been handing over all customers’ metadata for at least seven years. Undoubtedly, all other telecommunications corporations within the US have been subject to the same rolling court orders for the past seven or more years as well.

There are concerns in the UK over similar acts constantly being pushed through Parliament despite heavy resistance, most notably the Snoopers Charter. What is of far more concern is how readily the NSA is willing to share data with GCHQ, so the passing of the Snoopers Charter is a rather moot point, as GCHQ can continue to get the same data without it.

Then we have the further revelations that the NSA has been hoovering vast amounts of communications data beyond mere metadata – they have been collecting every email, text message, phone call, skype video conference, and chat room conversation going. This is going to concern a lot of people who have been getting more intimate over Skype:

Of course, all the big internet and telecoms companies are denying all knowledge of the PRISM scheme, but one is not inclined to believe their word here at all. Corporations have a history of co-operating with government agencies against the best interests of their customers or the general citizenry, and that is not going to change any time soon. The interests of the corporations and the interests of governments go hand in hand so much that often one is left wondering if the tail is wagging the dog.

Resistance

“And beneath the lapses of memory, the illusions, and the lies that would have us believe that there is a ternary order, a pyramid of subordinations, beneath the lies that would have us believe that the social body is governed by either natural necessities or functional demands, we must rediscover the war that is still going on, war with all its accidents and incidents. Why do we have to rediscover war? Well, because this ancient war is a [ . . . ] permanent war. We really do have to become experts on battles, because the war has not ended, because preparations are still being made for the decisive battles, and because we have to win the decisive battle. In other words, the enemies who face us still pose a threat to us, and it is not some reconciliation or pacification that will allow us to bring the war to an end. It will end only to the extent that we really are the victors.”

Michel Foucault; Society Must Be Defended; p 51.

But systems of societal control are never omnipotent, no matter what advocates of modern doctrines of full spectrum dominance or full spectrum surveillance might have us believe. There are imperfections – ghosts in the machine – which makes it impossible to gain absolute control over society. Those who say otherwise are full of hubris. Human systems are flawed, cracks appear where they are unexpected, and rebellions do happen, even in the most authoritarian systems.

The cracks in the biopolitical system of regulatory control are already beginning to show – the very need for the New Military Urbanism doctrine of controlling urban spaces and populations display the cracks in the seams of the system as a whole. The curtain is finally being rolled back, the machinery is being revealed, and the people are beginning to realise that they are not half as free as they once thought they were. The new collectives – ghosts in the machine – of Anonymous, Occupy, Manifencours, and other such movements are our part in that ‘ancient, permanent, war’ which Michel Foucault talked about – the war of the people against unwarranted State power.

We live in very interesting times.

Philip Khaled Brennan; On Foucault and Governance.

I wrote the above passage over a year ago, and today it is even truer than it was back then. We really must develop methods and techniques of resistance to unwarranted state power while we still can. Over the past thirty years, panopticism has become even more technologically advanced than at any time in our human history, and it is only now that we are waking up to this fact. We have an extraordinarily long and hard battle ahead to dismantle this disciplinary police state which has been erected around us, and this is where the battle lines need to be drawn first.

In light of recent events in Woolwich, and the various allegations floating around against MI5 in relation to at least one of the suspects, we at CAMPACC have decided to release the footage we took of this conference into the public domain – with one edit -only the public speakers’ section is shown - the question and answer section after the speakers has not been released to protect the identities and privacy of those who attended, who might find themselves harassed by MI5 should their contributions be shown.

You may view the entire playlist of videos here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9m7Mykr3JM&list=PLzzve-MLMZEZMyVJHJ4_vFRhWiz1ZND-4

Intersectionality (or Intersectionalism) is the study of intersections between different disenfranchised groups or groups of minorities; specifically, the study of the interactions of multiple systems of oppression or discrimination. This feminist sociological theory was first highlighted by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989). Intersectionality is a methodology of studying “the relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relationships and subject formations” (McCall 2005). The theory suggests that—and seeks to examine how—various biological, social and cultural categories such as gender, race, class, ability, sexual orientation, and other axes of identity interact on multiple and often simultaneous levels, contributing to systematic social inequality. Intersectionality holds that the classical conceptualizations of oppression within society, such as racism, sexism, homophobia, and religion- or belief-based bigotry, do not act independently of one another; instead, these forms of oppression interrelate, creating a system of oppression that reflects the “intersection” of multiple forms of discrimination.

(From the Wikipedia entry on Intersectionality.)

Caveat: Before I go on, please remember that I am a white male of working class background, and this means I am bound to get one or two things wrong, so please bear with me.

I am writing this post in response to Louise Mensch’s latest “piece” on feminism, but I am not writing it about her unmitigated crap in particular. This would give her more textual space than she will ever deserve on the pages of the Cat House. It is a piece so divorced from reality that the likes of “stavvers“, among many others, have already ripped to shreds. Instead, I am going to deal with the whole question of Intersectionality from a viewpoint of someone who studies Foucauldian Biopower and related subjects, and relate it to the whole unspoken subject of “Matrices of Privilege and Prejudice” that I have been mulling over for quite some time.

In the last Cat House article I wrote, “Institutional Racism and Biopower“, I detailed how the state seeks to destroy heterogeneous elements within the general populace, or, if it cannot destroy them, discipline them in such a way that they no longer constitute a threat to their desired homogeneity:

State or institutional racism is the power of normalization over whole heterogeneous populations through techniques of command and control, of permitting homogeneity and forbidding deviance. Whether it is racial deviance, political deviance, or social deviance, it matters not to the nation-state: everything must be normalized (c.f., Michel Foucault: Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974-1975). Only then can you control, or exert some perceived level of control, over random factors within the social body, and this can only be achieved within a matrix, or within matrices, of privilege and prejudice. Race privilege/prejudice, class privilege/prejudice, gender privilege/prejudice – they are all part and parcel of the same boipolitical control mechanisms used over man-as-species rather than man-as-individual.

We live in an artificial matrix of privilege and prejudice, created around us by the biopolitical systems of control exerted through the disciplinary methods applied to the whole of society. These disciplinary methods are not just used in our prisons, but in our military, places of work, schools, and in wider society as a whole through policing. These disciplinary methods themselves work through systems of panopticism:

“Moreover, whereas the juridical systems define juridical subjects according to universal norms, the disciplines characterize, classify, specialize; they distribute along a scale, around a norm, hierarchize individuals in relation to one another and, if necessary, disqualify and invalidate. In any case, in the space and during the time which they exercise their control and bring into play the asymmetries of their power, they effect a suspension of the law that is never total, but is never annulled either. Regular and institutional as it may be, the discipline, in its mechanism, is a ‘counter-law’. And, although the universal juridicism of modern society seems to fix limits on the exercise of power, its universally widespread panopticism enables it to operate, on the underside of the law, a machinery that is both immense and minute, which supports, reinforces, multiplies the asymmetry of power and undermines the limits that are traced around the law. The minute disciplines, the panopticisms of every day may well be below the level of emergence of the great apparatuses and the great political struggles. But, in the genealogy of modern society, they have been, with the class domination that traverses it, the political counterpart of the juridical norms according to which power was redistributed. Hence, no doubt, the importance that has been given for so long to the small techniques of discipline, to those apparently insignificant tricks that is has invented, and even to those ‘sciences’ that give it a respectable face; hence the fear of abandoning them if one cannot find any substitute; hence the affirmation that they are at the very foundation of society, and an element in its equilibrium, whereas they are a series of mechanisms for unbalancing power relations definitively and everywhere; hence the persistence in regarding them as the humble, but concrete form of every morality, whereas they are a set of physico-political techniques.”

(Michel Foucault; Discipline and Punish – The Birth of the Prison; Part Three: Discipline; Chapter Three: Panopticism; page 223)

So it is into this panoptic matrix of privilege and prejudice that we come, with all its disciplinary powers and societal reinforcements, as heterogeneous elements which the nation-state seeks to make homogeneous. This is exactly how things stand no matter how much one might like to pretend otherwise. and this is why, in all our activism, intersectionality is the most important tool at our disposal.

As a white man I have never experienced racism or sexism, and nor am I ever likely to. But as one of the working classes I am well experienced in dealing with class bias, and how that effects me in all my dealings with the government, the police, and even, other people within our society. And believe me, I am very well aware of being looked down upon by the middle class because I am working class, of being told how I should feel about something or how to act in opposition to it, usually by people who have never had to face being poor and working class. I suffer from the effects of prejudice against the working class, to put it most simply. So as a working class person I should be able to have some understanding of how those who suffer from racism and sexism might also feel when those prejudices are used against them.

I am also a Muslim, which means I do sometimes suffer from the prejudices against Muslim people, but being white, my white privilege often disguises me in relation to this (few can get their heads around white English Muslims – we apparently do not exist). I am therefore placed within a matrix of privilege (white, male) and prejudice (working class, poor, Muslim, not particularly good formal education) which seeks to deal with my heterogeneity and keep me in a place which is assigned to me but is not of my own choosing. I am effectively marginalised within society even though I am not a threat to it, other than by my mere existence.

How much more so are people of colour, women, and various other heterogeneous groups, marginalised by these matrices of privilege and prejudice? This is why intersectionality is so important to all activism, whether it be against racism, sexism, for social justice, etcetera. It shows the relationships between all these various matrices of privilege and prejudice and makes them visible to political and social discourse. And once you can talk about something within a discourse that illuminates it, then you can do something about it.

I know my tweet above contains harsh words, but it really is true. Intersectionality is not some faddish buzz-word that we like bandying about within activist circles – it is a vital part of our arsenal for opposing all forms of prejudice that we deal with on a day to day basis, and unless we utilise this very important tool of discourse and action, our activism will remain ineffectual for reaching out to people who would not usually ally with us. It really is that simple.

Investigative reports about the impact of S/S powers upon ethnic minority communities conducted by the London School of Economics and the Open Society Justice Initiative about the use and impact of the Section 60 found that black people were 30 times more likely to be stop and searched by police in England and Wales compared to White people. It also found that despite the safeguards, S/Ss have disproportionately increased over the years and found that they acted as an “aggravating factor” in the summer riots of 2011. Various bodies of research also illustrate that S/Ss often result from police racial profiling. Thus, this police power has become progressively controversial.

Thus, even before we get into the Terrorism Act 2000, we are seeing clear evidence of the effects of institutional racism within the police force in how stop and search powers are used against minority communities. Racial profiling, disproportionate use of stop and search powers by the police upon black and Asian youth – these all add up to a rather grim picture on how little institutional racism has been tackled within the police forces of the United Kingdom. When you add the figures for the use of Stop and Search powers under the Terrorism Act 2000 into the equation, the picture becomes even more grim.

This is just one example of how institutional racism effects the lives of people who fall under the governance of a biopolitically racist system. The fact that ethnic minorities find it harder to gain employment than their white counterparts even when similarly qualified, that ethnic minorities are blamed for the most crime within the media when statistically no one ethnic group commits any more crime than another in the United Kingdom, shows that institutional racism exists at all levels of our society, and not just within the police force or the judiciary (who are known to give out stiffer sentences for ethnic minority offenders than their white counterparts).

Meanwhile, the reasons for this institutional racism is kept out of public discourse, and for good reason – it does not do the government any favours admitting to the existence of institutional racism: it does them even less favours to admit that this institutional racism is quite deliberate.

This is not, then, a military, warlike, or political relationship, but a biological relationship. And the reason this mechanism can come into play is that the enemies who have to be done away with are not adversaries in the political sense of the term; they are threats, either external or internal, to the population and for the population. In the biopower system, in other words, killing or the imperative to kill is acceptable only if it results not in a victory over political adversaries, but in the elimination of the biological threat to and the improvement of the species or the race. There is a direct connection between the two. In a normalizing society, race or racism is the precondition that makes killing acceptable. When you have a normalizing society, you have a power which is, at least superficially, in the first instance, or in the first line a biopower, and racism is the indispensable precondition that allows someone to be killed, that allows others to be killed. Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of the State.

So you can understand the importance – I almost said the vital importance – of racism to the exercise of such a power: it is the precondition for the exercising the right to kill. If the power of normalization wished to exercise the old sovereign right to kill, it must become racist. And if, conversely, a power of sovereignty, or in other words, a power that has the right of life and death, wishes to work with the instruments, mechanisms, and technology of normalization, it too must become racist. When I say “killing,” I obviously do not mean simply murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on.

Michel Foucault; Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-1976; pages 255 to 256.

State or institutional racism is the power of normalization over whole heterogeneous populations through techniques of command and control, of permitting homogeneity and forbidding deviance. Whether it is racial deviance, political deviance, or social deviance, it matters not to the nation-state: everything must be normalized (c.f., Michel Foucault: Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974-1975). Only then can you control, or exert some perceived level of control, over random factors within the social body, and this can only be achieved within a matrix, or within matrices, of privilege and prejudice. Race privilege/prejudice, class privilege/prejudice, gender privilege/prejudice – they are all part and parcel of the same boipolitical control mechanisms used over man-as-species rather than man-as-individual.

In extreme forms of biopolitical governance, death is an actual physical reality as well as a political reality. It was through biopolitical racism within the post-First World War German Republic that enabled the Nazis to seize power; the means to kill six million Jews, two million Roma, and several million communists, political dissidents and the disabled was already within the political institutions of pre-Nazi Germany, even before Hitler formed the NSDAP. A cursory examination of the Volkskische movement of the 1900s to 1920s would plainly illustrate this to anyone who cares to look.

Similarly, the biopolitical racism of the Ottoman Empire enabled the genocide of the Armenians to take place, and again, the biopolitical racism of the Turkish state allows them to oppress the Kurdish peoples even today. It was the biopolitical racism of the British Empire that allowed the concentration camps of the Second Boer War for the internment of women and children, and again, this same biopolitical racism allowed the British Empire to imprison and torture Kikuyu dissidents in Kenya in the 1950s who were fighting for independence from a colonial power that had most definitely outstayed its welcome. We see this biopolitical racism played out in Malaysia and the Yemen around the same time as in Kenya and other African states fighting for their independence from the British Empire, and many people were imprisoned, tortured, and murdered by the state.

In the more ‘normal’ course of state racism you see situations constantly crop up like riots against the police and the state for the racism shown against minority communities: the bottom of society (including the working class as class bias is a racism) become so oppressed by restrictions to their movements and free associations by agents of the state that the only voice they have left is that of the riot. One can tut and shake ones head all one likes: this is the reality on the ground for so many within our society. Now with the constant assault on the weakest in society that surrounds and infects political discourse these days, on all sides of the political spectrum, one can see in the not too distant future more such riots breaking out as all legitimate means to gain redress have been removed from the working class and ethnic minorities.

To summarise everything that I have said so far, we live in an institutionally racist society because biopolitical systems of governance need this racism in order to justify their continual oppression of non-homogeneous elements within the social body. Heterogeneousness is verboten in the modern nation-state. Everything must be either made the same or disciplined in order to remove every random factor that can loosen the State’s control over whole populations of people. It is not enough that the state seeks to control the birth and mortality rates of the population, which appears to be the original purpose of biopower before it found that racism was a very useful element in gaining even more, unwarranted, power over the populace – the state seeks to control every aspect of human life it possibly can, without any regard to the needs and wishes of the population it governs.

(I immediately responded to the tweet expressing my disgust. My comment is below pic).

The picture was extremely graphic and upsetting. I have worked with abused women and their families and was horrified. This image reduces the effect of violence. It blatantly disregards so many factors regardiung the victim such as socio-economic struggles and emotional trauma. It portrays gamers as male-only, abusive, ranging barbarians who may ignore legal ramifications. It illustrates that a woman can not express her feelings about a relationship if it oversteps interferes with the latest, greatest gaming product. It perpetrates that a female partner in a relationship is not as worthy as the newest video game on the market.

Most horrifically, it shows that if she says something one may not agree with it is fine to bash her teeth out.

The https://twitter.com/Footy_Jokes account has over 195,000 followers on twitter many of whom are young men. It is not only condoning violence in the name of a video game but encouraging it.

As depicted in the above illustration, there were many retweets of the image. One can assume that a retweeted image is an endorsement of the tweet, unless specifically stating otherwise. That almost 1000 people found this cartoon to be comical is mortifying at best.

Since this post, the image has been removed from the account. It was not endorsed by the designers/ creators of the video game. They did not acknowledge or speak our against it. It is possible that it was removed before they were notified.

Understandably there were millions of men and women who waited for the demo release of FIFA 2013 on Sept.11, 2012. To unofficially market the game through joking about violence against women is reckless and irresponsible particularly when this year has been such an exciting time for women’s football. The London 2012 Olympics showed some spectacular athletes and level of play as did the more unknown South Asian Football Federation Women’s Cup tournament.

To reduce many accomplishments by relating’s women’s participation in football and fandom to such a disgusting image is disrespectful to millions of people- and the sport itself.

It is very dangerous and setting a terrible precedent. Using a such a serious epidemic as Violence Against Women as the butt of jokes is not funny.

Speaking up and out against Violence against Women is an important step.

Letting media outlets and social media know that this will not be tolerated and mocked is necessary.

To educate and eradicate we must be sure that people understand that no sport, no match, no virtual reality, no fantasy league will ever justify hitting a woman.

What is raison d’Etat? Well, Chemnitz says, for example, it is something that allows departure from all “the public, particular, and fundamental laws of whatever kind they may be.” In fact, raison d’Etat must command, not by “sticking to the laws,” but, if necessary, it must command “the laws themselves, which must adapt to the present state of the republic.”

Introduction

In “Security, Territory, Population”, Michel Foucault takes the reader from the ancient pastoral form of governance and into the form of governance used by the modern nation state. He examines the former roots of governance as viewed by both the ancient Greeks and Hebrews, and how this was changed and expanded upon by the religious state of the Christian West. He then went onto to examine how the nature of the state changed after the Reformation and Renaissance into the secular, self-perpetuating state, which is where I would like to examine most closely what he says, as I believe this will be a revelation to many of my readers.

The State in a Permanent State of Exception

What is raison d’Etat? Well, Chemnitz says, for example, it is something that allows departure from all “the public, particular, and fundamental laws of whatever kind they may be.” In fact, raison d’Etat must command, not by “sticking to the laws,” but, if necessary, it must command “the laws themselves, which must adapt to the present state of the republic.” So, the coup d’Etat does not break with raison d’Etat. It is an element, an event, a way of doing things that, as something that breaches the laws, or at any rate does not submit to the laws, falls entirely within the general horizon, the general form of raison d’Etat.

Here Foucault is talking about how a coup d’Etat does not break with raison d’Etat because it is just one of many tools the state has to preserve itself. This might seem like a very specific situation, a very specific event, which may or may not delegitimize the state, but it is not. It is merely one of many tools of the state to ensure its survival – a sovereign ban, or state of exception, if you will. He goes on to say that:

But what, then, is specific in the coup d’Etat that makes it more than just one expression among others of raison d’Etat? well, raison d’Etat, which by its nature does not have to abide by the laws, and which in its basic functioning is always exceptional in relation to public, particular, and fundamental laws, usually does not respect the laws. It does not respect them in the sense of yielding to positive, moral, natural, and divine laws because they are stronger, but it yields to them and respects them insofar as, if you like, it posits them as an element of its own game. In any case, raison d’Etat is fundamental with regard to these laws, but makes use of them in its usual functioning precisely because it deems them necessary or useful.

Here he states quite plainly that the nation state will only obey the laws so long as it is convenient to do so. If the laws laid down become an inconvenience to the operation or survival of the state, they will either be changed to the state’s advantage, or disregarded entirely. Thomas Jefferson had a lot to say about this when he said:

We must bind both criminals and governments with the chains of the constitution, so that the second does not become the legalized version of the first.

Unfortunately, not even constitutions can effectively bind governments or criminals from breaking the laws that have been laid down for their governance, as well as for the governance of the populace. The state exists purely for itself – for its own propagation and its own survival – and not for the benefit of the populace unless this is in line with the self-preservation of the state. The state of exception is not nearly as exceptional as one might like to think.

However, there will be times when raison d’Etat can no longer make use of these laws and due to a pressing and urgent event must of necessity free itself from them. In the name of what? in the name of the state’s salvation. It is this necessity of the state with regard to itself that, at a certain moment, will push raison d’Etat to brush aside the civil, moral, and natural laws that it had previously wanted to recognize and had incorporated into its game. Necessity, urgency, the need to save the state itself will exclude the game of these natural laws and produce something that in a way will only be the establishment of a direct relationship of the state with itself when the keynote is necessity and safety.

This passage illustrates what I have been saying above – that the self-preservation of the state comes before the rule of law or any constitutional considerations. One example of this is in how the US put Guantanamo Bay outside the rule of law, making the inmates Homo Sacer, or ‘bare life’, so that the state could deal with them as they wished. Another example would be the internment camps of the British Empire during the Kenyan Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s and the state of emergency (state of exception) there.

The coup d’Etat is the state acting of itself on itself, swiftly, immediately, without rule, with urgency and necessity, and dramatically. The coup d’Etat is not therefore a takeover of the state by some at the expense of others. It is the self-manifestation of the state itself. It is the assertion of raison d’Etat, of [the raison d’Etat] that asserts that the state must be saved, whatever forms may be employed to enable one to save it. The coup d’Etat, therefore, is an assertion of raison d’Etat, and a self-manifestation of the state.

Again, going back to the specifics of a state of exception which allows the state to act upon itself in order to preserve the state in its entirety, the coup d’Etat is just one manifestation of this tendency for self-preservation, irrespective of the wishes of the populace. The coup d’Etat is not unusual in and of itself – it is just viewed as unusual by the populace because they really do not expect it to happen, when in reality, as Foucault and I have stated above, it is just another tool of the state. Other states of exception may be declared en masse instead of the coup d’Etat – curfews, proscription of organisations deemed to be a threat to the state, declarations of war, states of emergency, and so on. One could even view the state of emergency as being a coup d’Etat on the civil populace rather than on the state itself, and a declaration of war as being a potential coup d’Etat on a foreign state if invasion is the intention.

Conclusions

The state exists for itself and not for the populace. The state governs the populace whether they want it to or not, and the state will act against the populace, or upon itself, in order to preserve itself. Therefore, the state is not a benign entity acting in the interests of its populace, no matter what the government of the day might wish to claim. The raison d’Etat is about self-preservation and nothing else, and laws will be suspended where they get in the way of this state self-preservation.

References

Michel Foucault, “Security, Territory, Population” pages 261-262

1. What is the root of biopolitical regulatory control?

2. How did systems of sovereign power move from being purely judicial to becoming disciplinary upon the transgressive individual and then onto becoming regulatory on whole multitudes of people?

3. Who, primarily, benefits from biopolitical power?

Structures:

The evolution from “peasant / artisan / ruling classes” to “working / middle / ruling classes” reveals to us that this evolution was only beneficial to a minority of people, namely, those in the ruling classes. So what was the purpose of changing the method of controlling society from a purely judicial-disciplinary one to that which includes biopolitical regulatory control structures alongside the former methods of control?

Observation:

Only the ruling class remains stable or static. The working and middle classes remain in a permanent state of flux with upward and downward movement between them. It is a very rare event that someone would move from these two lesser classes into the ruling class, and an even rarer occurrence that one from the ruling class would drop down to the middle or working class. Ergo, society is structured so that the ruling power remains static and in as few hands as possible.

Methodology of Biopolitical Regulatory Control:

• Indoctrination – the training of children within their social class to believe in certain things through education and repetition.

• Propaganda – the regulation of information and ideas en masse through printed and electronic media.

• Morality – the societal discourse on acceptable behaviour and self-regulation reinforced through both indoctrination and propaganda.

• Policy – set by the ruling class in order to govern how society should function for their benefit primarily.

• Law – the judicial interpretation of the body of law handed down from the ruling class in order to govern society when the ‘moral code’ fails to regulate behaviour.

• Discipline – the system of forced control over transgressive bodies which starts from police intervention and winds up in the prison, probation or mental health systems.

Note: the above list is in no particular order of relevance, preference or chronology.

Indoctrination:

Indoctrination is basically education with a purpose other than purely passing on knowledge, but is also concerned with passing on the morality codes and beliefs of the society and class that the student finds oneself within – either by birth or by migration, it does not matter which at this point. Indoctrination also sets limits on what the student can achieve according to his class, which is why education is stratified between classes. It is interesting to note just how many of the ruling class have attended the best private schools and universities – the education and indoctrination they receive prepares them to rule rather than to be ruled. Even in middle-class education establishments, clear limits are placed as to what level the student can aspire to – and as for working class educational establishments, well, they are designed to keep people firmly in their place at the bottom of the social ladder.

This area needs far more study as few would admit that education plays a pivotal role in the indoctrination of students despite the evidence of this plainly being the case.

Propaganda:

All media is propaganda. To think otherwise is to lead into an intellectual cul de sac whereby one can easily be deceived by what one reads in the papers or views on the television. With the birth and rise of new forms of electronic media – from the internet to smart phones to electronic advertising hoardings and so forth – the ability to avoid propaganda is becoming increasingly harder than ever before.

Note that the BBC was formed at the end of World War One out of the propaganda methods and technicians of Wellington House (the primary propaganda unit of the British Empire’s war effort). When I state that “all media is propaganda” I am being quite literal.

Two great resources on propaganda have been the books “Propaganda” by Edward Bernays (1928) and “Manufacturing Consent” by Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky (1988).

Morality:

Beyond the basic ideas of do not murder, steal, rape, lie, etcetera, morality plays a far larger role in the self-regulation of society beyond the basic need for people to be able to live together peacefully. Therefore, morality has transgressed this original role to one of reinforcing conformity of behaviour beyond that which is necessary for society to function, and has become a biopolitical regulatory method of outlawing mere difference or dissent. Therefore, any questioning of ‘morality’ at this point should not seek to tackle questions of absolute right and wrong, but seek to understand how public morality goes beyond its rightful authority in regulating behaviour that is not intrinsically wrong but merely outside of what is considered ‘normal’ in a society that is heavily indoctrinated and propagandized to dislike the ‘other’.

Policy:

The policies set by the ruling class are designed primarily to benefit the few within the ruling class. Power naturally gravitates towards a state whereby it is in as few hands as possible and is then jealously guarded by these same few hands.Therefore, any government policy designed by the ruling class will, invariably, benefit the ruling class above any other. This is best demonstrated on how policies are set to make court sentencing more grievous upon those transgressive bodies from the working and middle classes than upon the ruling class.

Law:

A recent example of the above is from the UK, in as much as how quick the courts were to give punitive sentences to working and middle class rioters – an act of policy from the ruling class executed through the courts to send a message to the lower classes that dared to riot and loot. Conversely, one would also notice how sentences were unduly lenient upon the few members of the ruling class who got prosecuted for expenses fraud in Parliament, sentences which were far lower than what the working or middle classes would have received for similar offences.

Discipline:

“The strength, the vigor, and the penetrative and disruptive power of expert medico-legal opinion with regard to the legality of the judicial institution, and the normativity of medical knowledge, is due precisely to the fact that it offers them different concepts, addresses itself to a different object, and introduces different techniques that form a sort of third, insidious, and hidden term, carefully cloaked on all sides and at every point by the legal notions of “delinquency,” “recidivism,” et cetera, and the medical concepts of “illness,” et cetera. Expert medico-legal opinion offers in fact a third term, that is to say, I want to show that probably it does not derive from a power that is either judicial or medical, but from a different type of power that for the moment I will provisionally call the power of normalization.”

(Michel Foucault, Abnormal, p 42)

The Latin phrase Homo Sacer can be both translated as the “sacred body” or the “accursed body” – both translations are perfectly valid here. Homo Sacer exists in a state of exception whereby it may neither be killed nor sacrificed – the transgressive body is removed from both political and sacred life, becoming ‘bare life’ which may be dispensed with as sovereign power pleases – the killing of the transgressive body is neither a sacrifice, nor is it homicide. The transgressive body has no religious or legal rights and can be disposed of how sovereign power wishes it to be disposed without the breaking of any religious or secular laws. Should the transgressive body be executed, it is neither a sacrifice nor a homicide. It is just the removal or killing of ‘bare life’.

This is how sovereign power is able to kill the transgressive body without breaking the biblical ban against killing – “thou shalt not murder” – and the secular ban against homicide. Executions under sovereign power in the 18th century were still carried out in public as both spectacles and as warnings to everyone else. Michel Foucault describes one such execution in “Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison” (pages 3 to 8), that of Robert Francois Damien in 1757. I am not going to quote the whole passage here as it is rather long, but it suffices to say that his execution – and you can look it up in the historical record – was particularly nasty, drawn-out, excruciatingly painful, and very, very public. He was tortured and mutilated before being drawn and quartered by horses, and was made a public example of. The priest offered him no consolation because he was at that point outside of sacred law as well as secular law.

With the event of biopolitical regulatory controls in the late 18th century, the methods of punishment changed dramatically even though the person of Homo Sacer remained the same. The disciplinary methods used on transgressive bodies were changing, just as sovereign power was shifting from the Sovereign to the Nation State, but still, these transgressive bodies still existed in a state of exception in the eyes of the law. They could still be executed, but these executions happened in private, not as public spectacles but as the mere disposal of an unwanted bare life through the gallows or the guillotine. Within the panopticon of the prison systems built in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the execution chamber became a small room of mechanical death, a hidden courtyard surrounded by cells segregated from the rest of the prison for the condemned.

The above four paragraphs, including the quote of Michel Foucault’s “Abnormal”, is from a paper I am writing called “Both Sacred and Accursed: The Disciplinary Nonperson of Homo Sacer within the Regulatory Matrix”. Consider the above an introduction into how disciplinary methods are used within a biopolitical regulatory system. Within the paper I will go into far more detail, drawing on the writings of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, but for now, this should give you a taster of where my thoughts on this matter are heading.

Conclusion to these notes:

So far I have only touched upon question one and three – question two is being answered in parts by the various articles I am writing and posting online. Biopolitics is such a wide field of study that you cannot just write one definitive paper on it and then state “This is biopolitics in a nutshell” – it does not work like that. The study of biopolitics is a whole field of study in its own right, with its own field of disciplines, lexicons, concepts, and philologies. What I do aim to illustrate in my writing is how biopolitics permeates every sector of our society and its governance, and to provide rabbit holes for further research and study.

I hope to encourage other writers in the field of philosophy, sociology, law, history, and political science to start examining biopolitics further, and to disseminate knowledge of its means and powers to all, but especially, to those who are concerned with activism and revolutionary discourse.

The declaration of the War on Terror has done much to shed light on the plight of women in the Muslim world. Since, western feminists have actively chided the unfathomable illiteracy rates in nations like Afghanistan, the long dark robes covering women’s bodies in theocratic Muslim regions, the choking of freedom on account of not being able to drive in Saudi Arabia, and perhaps the most harrowing of all, the mutilation of young girls private parts thus preventing them from enjoying their sexualities as adults in parts of the African continent. The war on Muslim patriarchy has given the broader feminist movement a sense of common purpose. It has also provided them with a strong sense of what and who they are not.

This war has run concurrently with the greater war against a robust type of Muslim patriarchy – a patriarchy that views the western way of life as a threat to their strict religious sensibilities. As such, the west represents a place of social and moral degradation, where western women dress in objectionably scant clothing and men and women’s intimate relationships are broadcast openly. Keeping out the “immoral” values of the west, where people have too much freedom, has resulted in an ensuing battle that has wound up on a battlefield between the theocratic forces seeking to pre-emptively prevent liberal values from reaching sacred land, and the western forces seeking to prevent the theocratic forces from striking at the western way of life. Since the presence of western forces in these regions, young girls who were previously denied education have now been given access to schools and Afghani women have begun to question the forced nature of veiling.

What has ensued in the past decade is a dual fronted war on Muslim patriarchy. The first war subsists in a physical battlefield where opposing bodies meet and, depending on the technologies, act out warfare to defend what is right and just. Simultaneously fought is a second intellectual battlefield where a meeting of the minds asserts right and wrong in an open more inclusive, as opposed to a geographically excluded, forum. Most importantly, in the grander War on Terror, the two facets of this war have served to implement and uphold universal value systems into some of the most remote regions of the world – where lack of access to facilities and education have brought unnecessary suffering and conflict.

Tragically, in many instances, it has been the women who bear the brunt of deficiency and shortage.

Most recently, the internet roared with back and forth debate over Muslim women’s freedom in relation to the recent uprisings in the Arab world, primarily in response to Mona Eltahawy’s article in Foreign Policy magazine titled “Why Do They Hate Us?” followed by an inventory of crimes committed by Arab men against Arab women. Eltahawy states:

An entire political and economic system – one that treats half of humanity like animals – must be destroyed along with the other more obvious tyrannies choking off the region from its future. Until the rage shifts from the oppressors in our presidential palaces to the oppressors on our streets and in our homes, our revolution has not even begun.

Immediately following publication however, a backlash split readers who either loved or loathed the piece. The clash spurred a storm on twitter and in the blogosphere.

In her defence of Eltahawy, Adele Tomlin took on the faction of voices objecting to the Foreign Policy article charging it as racist. Tomlin, in turn, charged the anti-racist response to Eltahawy as “dangerously” trumping the anti-racist struggle over the feminist struggle. Citing the recent murders of Trayvon Martin and Shaima Alawadi and the intentional drive of activists to parallel “hoodies and hijabs” as a coalesced anti-racist rallying point, Tomlin deduces on account of misogynistic Islamic culture, that the hoodie and hijab are incomparable and, thus, cannot serve as a unifier between political allies. By symbolically taking on the hijab as an assembly point, according to Tomlin, anti-racist activists are potentially jeopardising Muslim women’s liberation. Similarly while anti-racists responding to Eltahawy may not have opposed the facts Eltahawy presented in her piece, many felt the framework of her article had racist overtones. While the fuel Eltahawy’s piece may have provided to Islamophobic discourse was regrettable, according to Tomlin, the direct nature of the piece was nevertheless prudent in light of the depth of crimes committed against women in the Muslim world, culminating in the charge that the anti-racist movement is anti-women. Tomlin concludes, “The ‘excuse-making of cultural relativism’ and the politically correct face of anti-racism is ugly and dangerous.”

Once excusing herself from her politically correct decorum, however, Tomlin proceeded to defensively assert that her whiteness should not act as a deterrent on her ability to critique Islamic culture, to insist that the majority of women who wear the hijab are forced to wear it, and then claim that concerned feminists must not shy away from speaking candidly about Muslim and Arab culture for fear they may provide fuel to racists, Islamophobes and xenophobes.

Instantaneously, readers should be struck by the inaccuracy of Tomlin’s assertions. Yet her assertions are consistent with this rationale in one of her older pieces titled “To Be Anti-Racist Is to Be Feminist: The Hoodie and the Hijab Are Not Equals.” In it, Tomlin again asserts:

The hijab … is discriminatory and rooted in men’s desire to control women’s appearance and sexuality, [and] is not a choice for the majority of women who wear it. The hoodie, on the other hand, is a choice for everyone who wears it. The history and origin of these two items of clothing and what they represent could not be more different…

It is not the purpose of this article to defend or oppose the hijab. From a personal perspective, however, it should be noted that I defend a woman’s right to choose according to her agency, but nevertheless view women’s choices as ultimately rooted in context. As such, she is never fully free. However, I vehemently reject the idea that a Muslim woman who chooses to wear hijab or burqa does so based on a false sense of self resulting from patriarchal religious structures that confine her experience and intellect –only inasmuch as I reject the same notion about western women.

What could have been a genuine endeavour to connect women’s movements across a wide expanse, from the United States to the Muslim world, and everywhere in between, has failed; Adele Tomlin providing a prime example of why this is so. While it should be noted that her older piece was appropriately removedfrom The Feminist Wire, where it was originally published, analogous motives nevertheless persist within certain factions of western feminism. What is most troubling is how liberal feminist discourse about Muslim women’s oppression has come to frame the lexicon of the broader War on Terror and similarly, how the War on Terror has framed feminist discourse.

Writers and pundits observing the palpable patriarchal systems Muslim women live under too often frame their commentary as an attempt to put aside political correctness and discuss “bare-naked facts” about Islamic cultures. The act of tossing aside ones otherwise politically correct stature is often followed by a gross litany of accusations and generalisations – and often bigoted in nature. It is as if the politically correct mask serves as a temporary facade of polite, yet simultaneously disingenuous, tolerance. What is actually hidden behind it is an inherent dissatisfaction and censure of Muslim life.

In recent years, western political figureheads have dichotomised western and Islamic values all too often citing the treatment of Muslim women as evidence to demonstrate the two cultures as inherently incompatible. Most notably was Prime Minister David Cameron’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in February of 2011, where nations came together to discuss security policy and major security and defence corporations were present exhibiting how their technologies can assist requisite national security needs, and where Cameron subsequently listed off the “bare naked facts” about Muslim women resulting from forced marriage and honour killing – a most inappropriate, yet all too telling venue to discuss the private lives of Muslim women. What this spells out to the wider public is that the domestic lives of Muslims is a threat to national security.

Resulting from the politicisation of Muslim women’s issues has in fact been the further alienation of Muslim women seeking recourse from crimes committed against them at the hands of family and community members. Muslim women (of whom I am personally aware) have expressed time and again that they no longer feel safe to openly speak of the issues they face within their communities and at home for fear of fuelling Islamophobic discourse – a precedent that makes her all the more vulnerable. What is most baffling is the retort to Muslim women who now choose silence (of whom I am also personally aware) as to not incite racist indignation. The response to the women who choose silence is all too often: “don’t keep silent because you worry about a racist backlash against the Muslim men who are ultimately responsible for your oppression!”  Western feminists like Tomlin avowed that neither “religious maniacs” nor racists should own Muslim women’s discourse.

What this discourse ultimately neglects is that Islamophobic racism also deeply affects Muslim women. The commentary further begs the question: what good would it ultimately do for a Muslim woman to join feminist ranks and speak out against the misogyny at the hands of Muslim men by inadvertently enabling racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic discourse of which she will also fall victim? Furthermore, this discourse not only dictates to a Muslim woman that she must choose between struggles, but it also places her feminist struggle over her struggle against racism and Islamopbobia as opposed to allowing her own agency to prioritise.  Racist and Islamophobic attacks hurled at Muslim women – too often sexist and misogynistic in nature – are as damaging as the broader misogyny they face as workers, citizens, wives, sisters and daughters. To liberate Muslim women means to not only to remove from her the shackles of sexism and misogyny she experiences in her community and by the broader world, but to also remove the shackles from her as a racial and religious “other”, and her shackles as an oppressed labourer. Lest we remember the vital words of black lesbian feminist Audre Lorde who stressed “there is no hierarchy of oppression.”

Nevertheless, the war against Muslim patriarchy on the physical battlefield has informed western feminism about the nature of Islamic patriarchy: the deviant Muslim man, or terrorist, represented by the likes of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, is the shadowy evil that the west must with in a perpetual all-out war with in order to preserve and perpetuate the western way of life. In moral terms, this has created a cultural dichotomy of an upstanding honourable western culture as defined by principled egalitarian minded citizens living orderly lives, contrasted with the defiled eastern Islamic patriarchal cultures that can be evidenced by failed cultural, economic, and governmental systems – excluding the context of tyranny, war, and occupation – at the hands of pathological patriarchal Muslim men.

Conversely, western feminism informs the western fighters on the physical battlefield about the details and very nature of Islamic patriarchy of which the Muslim woman has become the collateral damage. The “religious maniacs” are far too dogmatic and chauvinistic to see beyond their holy scriptures to do what is best for the society and the women around them. The western feminists’ resultant construction of the Muslim woman victim is wholly reliant on the War on Terror’s construction of the zealous authoritarian Muslim man, simultaneously fought off by western heroes, whose hands she suffers at. In effect, the two constructions feed off of one another and, in turn, justify one another.

In their paper “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots”, Jasbir K. Puar and Amit S. Rai note: “The continuities between Bush’s agenda and queer Left, feminist… positions are rather stunning, especially in the use of ‘culture’ and ‘cultural norms’…” In Foucauldian terms, the Muslim man has now become the wests new “abnormal” figure to be corrected or quarantined in western political discourse – in which factions of the left and the right actually inform one another.

Furthermore, the construct of the Muslim woman victim has developed into a fetishised caricature in western political and feminist discourse, whose biggest obstacle and hurdle that she must overcome is the patriarchal Muslim man. Warmongering western political discourse relies heavily on the violation of the Muslim woman by the Muslim man to justify itself. For that reason, the construct of the Muslim woman victim has come to be perceived by western political and feminist discourse as standing alone in her uniqueness and distinction. However, what has actually resulted from this is her disconnect from other struggles – for the only thing that truly harms the Muslim woman is Muslim patriarchy at the hands of Muslim men, where all else ceases to be equally as damaging. This nourishes the idea that the obliteration of Muslim patriarchy will see the ultimate liberation of the Muslim woman. Intrinsically, the abuse of a Muslim woman is therefore understood to be tied to the perceived failure of the regional culture, of Islam and, ultimately, of the Muslim man.

The abuse of Muslim women by Muslim men is thus treated by feminist and political discourse as a special kind of abuse deserving of exceptional attention as a unique oppression unparalleled to other women’s oppression. Such was the message of Eltahawhy’s Foreign Policy article which was befittingly subtitled “The Real War on Women Is in the Middle East.” Likewise, when western feminism rears its ugly head in the direction of western Muslim women, their subsequent harassment and intimidation with paradoxical slurs and chants such as: “I bet your husband beats you!”,  or hijab wearing women who have been spat at or had rocks thrown at them, or the French police who absurdly arrest Muslim women who defiantly wear the burqa after the government banned its use, are consequently met with a stunning silence by the very same feminists who howl at Muslim women’s abuse at the hands of Muslim men.

Similarly, liberal western feminist discourse has offered little by ways of the anti-war movement since the beginnings of the War on Terror that has seen the hostile invasions of machismo militaries and mercenaries, the destruction of entire regions, and the crippling of economies and lives throughout the Muslim world. The indiscriminate killing of men, women, and children and the indefinite imprisonment without trial, of Muslim husbands, fathers, and sons via the Foucauldian quarantining treatment, has brought further misery and distress into the lives of the people of the region – including the women.

It is crucial at this point to compare the treatment of crimes against Muslim women inflicted by Muslim men as a unique form of women’s oppression and the treatment of political violence and terrorism. Western law, as is the case in the United Kingdom, has a supplementary set of laws to deal specifically with terrorism despite the fact that there are bodies of criminal law in place that are able to adequately deal with the variation of crimes terrorists commit. Professor of law at the University of Leeds, Clive Walker explains:

There is the observation that terrorism is a specialised form of criminality which presents peculiar difficulties in terms of policing… there has been a recognition by successive governments, and to a large degree an acceptance by the electorate, that organised political crime is a special threat to liberty and democracy.

It is to be understood that on account of the fact that the Muslim men “abnormals” are today’s perpetrators threatening liberty and democracy through a special unique type of political violence, can then be consequently understood as to be inclined to commit other crimes that are also special and unique in nature. In this case, it is the crimes they commit against Muslim women. The crimes of perverse “abnormal” Muslim men must, thus, be understood and monitored within this exceptional framework: these are “abnormal” men who commit exceptional crimes that destroy liberty and democracy and have exceptional female victims whose lives are devoid of liberty and democracy as a result. To take Foucault’s analysis of the “abnormal” one step further, it thereby leaves the west with the “duty” to correct the delinquencies of the Muslim world by bringing liberty and democracy into the lives of the Muslim victims of patriarchal Muslim men, and to protect and sustain liberty and democracy in the west via military operation and vast expansive security apparatuses. One doesn’t have to hark much further back than Cameron’s 2011 speech at the Munich Security Conference to see how issues of western liberty, democracy and national security are linked to the exceptional threatening nature of patriarchal Muslim men and their consequent abuse of Muslim women.

Western feminism’s objectionable premise that the Muslim woman’s primary adversary is the “abnormal” Muslim man is irresponsible and dangerous. It has in fact enabled and shaped a one-dimensional discourse about the lives of Muslims and of the politics of the broader Muslim world. At worst, it has enabled hostile military intervention in already fragile nations. Furthermore, the unilateral feminist and political discourse about Muslim life entirely decontexualises and disregards the very real and life threatening realities of life under lawless wars and illegal occupation – of what it is like to live in a region where one is unable to access recourse from the bodies of international human rights law and habeas corpus.

The fetishism of the Muslim woman victim has created an aggressively antagonistic discourse that in turn renders Muslim women who reject the paternalistic resolve of liberal western feminism about Muslim women’s abuse as self-loathing enablers of their own oppression. As such, it is time for Muslim women to let this faction of the feminist movement know that they too do not own the debate on Muslim women’s liberation. There is nothing more offensive to the women of the Muslim world who see through the shallow hypocrisy of liberal western feminists claiming to defend freedom and liberty on one hand, while justifying and facilitating warmongering ideology which sees the destructive power structures of war and occupation invading their lives on the other. So long as the ideological war against Muslim patriarchy by liberal western feminists continues to tout the doctrine of the War on Terror, their hands will be covered in as much blood as their counterparts fighting in the battlefield.

On Friday the 8th of June 2012, a protest was held against the sexual harassment of women during political protests and every other aspect of their lives in Cairo, Egypt. During this protest women were once again harassed by factions outside of this protest group. The men within the group did their level best to defend the women amongst them – fighting with the thugs sent to disrupt the protest and chasing them off, and where necessary, getting targeted women to a place of safety. The very attack on the protest illustrates how much of a problem there is with sexual harassment in Egyptian society, both as a tool to silence political dissent, and in the general lives of women nationally.

Monitoring these events on twitter meant that I had an immediate overview of events on the ground – news came to me very rapidly of these attacks and counter attacks, and I was also privy to online discussions on how Egyptian women deal with sexual harassment on a daily basis. Articles were soon posted up on the Egyptian Independent and Associated Press web sites both cataloguing and condemning these acts. The Egyptian Independent wrote before the protest that:

The organizations said in a statement that the amount of sexual harassment and violence against female demonstrators in Tahrir Square and the surrounding streets has been “worryingly” increasing since the outbreak of the recent wave of protests following the verdict issued against former President Hosni Mubarak and senior Interior Ministry officials on 2 June.

Among the organizations that signed the statement were the Alliance of Feminist Organizations, the Feminist Egyptian Union, the Anti-Violence Union, and the women’s committees of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, the Socialist Popular Alliance Party, and the Egyptian Socialist Party.

The statement said: “Such acts succeed, unfortunately, in keeping women away from protests, especially during the night hours when female presence is significantly lower in the square compared to former [protests.]“

The article goes on to give examples by way of testimonies of victims of sexual harassment who were willing to speak out. One such person was Noha:

Noha, who was attacked in the square, said: “The square was very crowded on Sunday and I was sexually harassed but could not make out the attacker because it was so crowded. Since that day, I haven’t gone to the square, and I don’t intend to participate in any more demonstrations or marches, because I do not want to be harassed.”

As you can see by her testimony, the end result of her experiences at Tahrir Square left her feeling unable to participate in political activities at Tahrir Square and elsewhere simply because of the amount of sexual harassment prevalent at political demonstrations. Deena Adel said similar things on Twitter today as well:

“I’m one of the many, many females who stopped going to Tahrir almost completely because I’m too exhausted to deal with the sexual harassment.”

I can list many examples of the frustrations of both women and men at the level of sexual harassment experienced during political protests all over Egypt. The use of gangs of thugs to attack today’s protests means that quite often it is deliberately orchestrated in order to intimidate women and silence political dissent.

Someone with Orientalist leanings might be tempted to say that this is just an Egyptian or Arab, or even, Islamic problem, but cases of serious sexual assault on female protesters in US and UK protests put an end to this lie. During the G20 protests in Toronto, Canada in 2010 reports came in of unlawful strip searches of female detainees in custody of the RCMP. Tom Godfrey of the Winnipeg Sun reported the testimonies of several female detainees:

“I was throttled by a cop and later threatened with rape,” Amy Miller, of the Alternative Media Centre, said. “I saw young women being strip searched by men.”

Maryam Adriangi, of Toronto Community Mobilization Network, said she was also threatened with rape.

“I was harassed by police and had racist and sexist comments made against me,” Adriangi said.

She claimed she was picked up by police in Parkdale and placed in a prisoners’ wagon and driven around for five hours and released without charges. Network spokesman Sharmeen Khan said the more than 900 inmates were held “in disgraceful conditions” at the former film studio.

“The detainees weren’t given food or medication,” Khan said. “They had to wait hours to see a lawyer.”

Again, David Graeber writes of such tactics being used by the NYPD at the six month anniversary protest on the 17th of March 2012 for the Occupy protests:

“A few weeks ago I was with a few companions from Occupy Wall Street in Union Square when an old friend – I’ll call her Eileen – passed through, her hand in a cast.

‘What happened to you?’ I asked. ‘Oh, this?’ she held it up. ‘I was in Liberty Park on the 17th [the six month anniversary of the occupation]. When the cops were pushing us out the park, one of them yanked at my breast.’

‘Again?’ someone said. We had all been hearing stories like this. In fact, there had been continual reports of police officers groping women during the nightly evictions from Union Square itself over the previous two weeks.

‘Yeah so I screamed at the guy, I said, “You grabbed my boob! What are you, some kind of fucking pervert?” So they took me behind the lines and broke my wrists.’ Actually, she quickly clarified, only one wrist was literally broken… Police dragged her, partly by the hair, behind their lines and threw her to the ground, periodically shouting ‘Stop resisting!’ as she shouted back ‘I’m not resisting!’

So despite the patriarchy in Middle Eastern societies, which must also be combated, the sexual assault of female political protesters are not a unique phenomena solely encountered by women of that region, but is an actual biopolitical regulatory tactic employed by governments worldwide to silence political dissent. Reem Abdellatif wrote about these issues in a piece for the Global Post on the 22nd of May 2012. Here are the key paragraphs I would like to highlight from this article:

Though women are currently a crucial part of the Egyptian economy, society still lacks a fair legal system that would guarantee the rights of all citizens, according to Mozn Hassan, a self-described women rights defender and head of Nazra for Feminist Studies.

From “virginity tests” allegedly administered by the army upon Samira Ibrahim and dozens of other women to excessive violence strategically targeting female protesters like the “girl in the blue bra” — the women’s struggle has been closely tied to a larger movement against military rule in Egypt.

“A huge part of the idea of militarization in society involves targeting women,” said Hassan. “All of these events, including the virginity tests are a part of it all, this won’t end with presidential elections.”

Notice that a major factor in the use of sexual harassment and assault against females is listed here as the militarization in Egyptian society. Both Michel Foucault and Stephen Graham have had a lot to say about this within their writings – especially with regards to the New Military Urbanism that Stephen Graham wrote about in Cities Under Siege. Because of geopolitical and biopolitical considerations by the Egyptian military junta of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF), which currently govern Egypt both politically and militarily, along with heavy military subsidies by the US Administration, the likelihood of Colonial methods of governing their own people is very high. This goes back to the Foucauldian Boomerang Effect that Stephen Graham mentions often in his writings:

“It should never be forgotten that while colonization, with its techniques and its political and juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonization, on itself.” (Michel Foucault, Society must be Defended, p 103)

Egypt was colonised by Germany and, later, the United Kingdom in the early half of the twentieth century, and from when the military took over the governance of Egypt under Mubarak, Egypt became a self-colonising state. It suffices to say that the SCAF now acts as a proxy colonising power within Egypt for both the USA and Israel – to say any different would be to deny the evidence of our own eyes. The SCAF are heavily funded by the Pentagon, and their role is to prevent Egypt from ever becoming a threat to Israel, hence their constant meddling in the political reforms after the ousting of Mubarak. Why spend out millions colonising a country when you can get a client state’s government, like the SCAF, to do it all for you?

The use of sexual assault at political protests serves two biopolitical purposes: it makes such protests a very unwelcome environment for female protesters and discourages their participation while making many male protesters feel helpless in the face of government brutality, again. in order to discourage their participation as well. It is a tactic of fear, terrorism, used by the state against its populace.

“Terrorism; noun (1795 definition) – A system of government which seeks to control the populace through intimidation [political violence]. From the French Terrorismé, a word created to specifically describe the style of governance of Robespierre after the French Revolution.”

Further Reading:

On Foucault and Governance by Philip Brennan.