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Frdric Gros, Le principe scurit Gallimard: Paris 2012, 21, paperback 304 pp, 978 2 07 013350 5

Jacob Collins

THE BIRTH OF BIOSECURITY?

It now seems clear that biopolitics, or something like it, is going to be a key category for addressing what transpires in the twenty-first century. The concept, still in its infancy, has been theorized in a number of suggestiveand, philosophically, often very sophisticatedways, and yet it remains largely an elusive entity. The assumption made by theorists of biopolitics, who rely almost exclusively on the late work of Foucault, is that the modern state is somehow engaged in controlling, managing or manipulating aspects of our biological life that were once off limits or at least marginal to its practices. Issues relating to health, disease, sexuality, food production and air quality are the analytical objects of biopolitical theory. One of the obvious strengths of this approach is its attention to facets of contemporary life about which people care deeply (as public outcry in the us over food labelling, soda sizes, fracking, gay marriage and availability of the flu vaccine would seem to confirm). Yet for all its concern with everyday life, the conclusions reached in biopolitical analysis have been speculative at best, emotional and handwringing at worst. Moreover, the foremost studies in the field have come out of the higher echelons of political and literary theory. Frdric Gross Le principe scurit promises a more accessible discussion of these issues, focusing on the problem of security, from Seneca to sms. Gros is a philosopher trained at the cole normale suprieure in Paris, and currently teaches at Paris xii (Crteil). His heart is on the lefthe has written in defence of the Roma and their shameful expulsion from France by Sarkozyand his philosophical sympathies are thoroughly Foucauldian. Gros discoveredwith a sort of stupefactionFoucaults work during his first year at university in 1986, shortly after the death of the philosopher,

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and has since become an expert on his oeuvre, editing Foucaults two final Collge de France lecture series, 198384, as Le gouvernement de soi et des autres and Le courage de la vrit (200809). While his early work is either about Foucault or heavily indebted to hima Que sais-je? on the man himself, a book on madness and art, another on justice and punishmentGros has begun to carve out his own identity as a philosopher. In particular he has demonstrated a clear talent for the philosophical essay, that mode of writing which brings into focus aspects of daily life that are often taken for granted, and thereby subtly examines our intellectual commitments, much in the way Roland Barthess early essays did. His 2009 Walking: A Philosophy surveyed, through the eyes of great philosophers, the psychic states associated with different kinds of human ambulation. More in line with the inquiries of Le principe scurit was 2006s States of Violence, which followed changing conceptions of warfare in the West, from the obsession with heroism in Classical Greece to the contemporary preference for privatized militaries and risk-averse engagements. In the final pages, Gros announces that the collapse of the wall has installed a new distribution of violence that resonates according to two rationales which announce the irreversible decline of war and peace: intervention and security. The former locks states into a market-style rationality that no longer recognizes victory or defeat, but only degrees of success and efficacy. War is replaced by states of violence anarchic, uncertain, dispersed. Security, the other vector of recent world history, is taken up in his new book. Gros takes a nominalist approach to the concept of security, defining it, at the outset, in four different ways (all of them taken from the dictionary). Moreover, each signification corresponds to a discrete epoch in the history of the West. The first meaning is tranquillity of the mind. Security in this sense is what one would call today serenity: a state of mental equilibrium, a disposition of the mind that is full of tranquillity, quietude and confidence. This was the predominant signification during the Roman Empire, as demonstrated in the work of three philosophical traditions: Stoicism, Epicureanism and Scepticism. Why Gros begins with the Romans or with this particular notion of security is never explained, but he pushes forward immediately with a run-through of each traditions configuration of security. For Stoics like Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, the proper response to the generalized insecurity of the external world was to maintain a sense of absolute interior security. The mind was to be vigilant in de-dramatizing our representations of the world, reducing our feeling of responsibility for that which is beyond our control. For both the Epicureans and the Sceptics the principle of security was centred more directly on Epicuruss notion of ataraxia, typically translated as peace of mind. Pleasure for the Epicureans, says Gros, was not about satisfaction of desire or absence of pain, but about

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fullness of the soul, obtained by techniqueslike acquiring a community of friends and calling to mind moments of happinessmeant to ward off false pleasures. Sceptics like Sextus Empiricus thought the key to ataraxia was maintaining silence: if nothing was certain, then dogmatism and assertion were the source of misery. Only by the suspension of judgement could some semblance of internal security be maintained. The second meaning of security is absence of danger, designating an objective situation where risk is no longer present. For Gros, millenarian Christians in the Middle Ages specialized in this domain of security. Relying on the work of Paul and Augustine, thinkers like Joachim of Fiore adopted a radical utopian programme that involved the projection of an absolutely harmonious state of humanity devoid of all violence, aggression and hate. Born of a religious impulse to rid the world of evil, the millenarian movement had an obvious political edge, reflected in the profusion of doctrines supporting universal monarchy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For the likes of Tommasso Campanella and Guillaume Postel, its appeal lay in the absolute unity of the governed, the absence of conflict and the kind of stability it could guarantee on earth. Montesquieu was later to break this association in his Reflections on Universal Monarchy, condemning it precisely in the name of security. Its next register is more overtly political, denoting the rights and guarantees that the statenow distinct from empireoffers its citizens as a way of maintaining public order. Here, Gros breaks down state security into its three constitutive elements: law, the military and the policea project that takes him across four centuries, the mid-seventeenth to the mid-twentieth. The legal dimension occasions a rendezvous with the early modern contract theorists, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke and Rousseau. As with his discussion of Roman philosophy, Gros moves quickly through their ideas without sacrificing (too much) nuance. The contract theorists counterposed a natural state where life, liberty, equality and property were unstable, to a civil state in which they all became guaranteed. The price of this security was the obedience of all subjects to a common power. For the military component of security, Gros invokes the Westphalian system dating from the mid-seventeenth century, a point at which reason of state was unfixed from theological foundations and sovereignty became integrally linked to the capacity to make war. The narrative impatiently jumps forward here to the Cold War, showing the latters complete departure from realist calculations: security in this era was no longer about a balance of relatively equal powers, but about the promise of mutually assured destruction between two world powersan arrangement that transformed the patchwork international system into a Manichean struggle of two aligned camps. Finally, the police aspect of state security was relatively minimal in the seventeenth century, only to grow

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dramatically in the nineteenth and twentieth. Reverting to Foucauldian language, Gros describes police work as regulatory in nature, an art of detail that favoured normalizing procedures. Its other rationality is that of maintaining public order against perceived enemies, a capacity that was abused in two ways in the twentieth century: first, by state-of-exception theorists like Schmitt and Benjamin who appealed to this exact security concern as grounds for suspending certain clauses of the liberal constitution; second, by totalitarian movements, which didnt so much suspend legal guarantees as ignore them. In fact, the police were instrumentalhere Gros follows Hannah Arendtin mobilizing the people around the Partys ideology, and helped these regimes to define their own version of law. Surveillance procedures multiplied, as did pressures on the population to conform through the agency of the police. Finally, there is the biopolitical register of security, defined more generically as the continuity of a process, or that which allows the normal functioning of an activity, or again, as the control of flows. For Gros this meaning comprehends a number of procedures vital to the workings of the modern state, namely its attempts to securitize food, energy, sanitation, affect and people. Gros elects to class these things under the heading of biosecuritya term he takes from un reports on genetically modified species and anthrax attacks, and redefines as the measures necessary to protect, control and regulate the vital core [noyau] of the individual. The states techniques of protection address the human being as a penetrable organism, one that is constantly susceptible to pathogens and contaminated resources. There is also a supra-national discourse of biosecurity that aims to protect vulnerable populations, groups subject to high rates of mortality as a result of political violence or precarious conditions of existence. The international community, which has come to replace the old superpower rivalry, decides in which cases to intervenea thoroughly affective politics, according to Gros. He names control as another practice of biosecurity, whose intent is to trace human beings, principally by matching individuals to documents or files. What Gros has in mind here are tracking deviceslike gps and rfid, radio-frequency identificationthat enable private and public security forces to identify and localize criminals (but also non-criminals and animals). Profiling in all its variationsfor advertising/spyware, medical insurance, potential criminalsis a key part of this logic, which seeks to securitize the world by delivering it from hesitations, opacities and doubts. There is a global dimension of this drive for transparency that terrifies Gros because it operates as a network, a powerful, flexible, anti-dialectical structure which cannot be localized, let alone defeated. The last technique of biosecurity is that of regulation, whose job it is to manage flows, or more specifically, to

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manage a milieu. Security in this sense does not attempt to prohibit or order but to incite or discourage. This could apply to crime, whereby incentives to illegal activity are reduced, or to economic activity, whereby obstacles to the free circulation of goods are dissolved. This latter process taken to its logical conclusion brings us neoliberalism, the utopia of an auto-regulating society that institutes its own equilibrium (this will be very familiar to readers of Foucaults late-70s lectures at the Collge). After exploring the different and discrete significations of security over four lengthy chapters, Gros attempts to stitch them together in the conclusion and produce a more panoramic view of the problem. Speaking to Le Monde, he has distinguished his own method from Foucaults in the following terms:
In working on madness, war and now security my goal is not to write a history or do an archaeology, but to show how these notions are in fact closely interrelated. Far from having the purity of geometrical concepts, these ideas are constituted as foyers de sens [centres of meaning] that appear at certain moments of history and never really disappear.

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How does this work in real time? Gros claims that some ideas, like the Stoic conception of the self, become cultural tropes. In this case, the Stoic idea of security could have been appropriated by the Roman emperorspresumably through the offices of Marcus Aureliusand then later reworked by the Christian philosophers living under Roman government. Gros also maintains that some ideas are capable of being reactivated, as when the socialist movements of the twentieth century reawakened the Christian millenarian currents of the Middle Ageswhat we might call the Sleeping Beauty theory of ideas. Gros argues that some ideas have an internal tension, a discrepancy between intention and result. This pertains specifically to the logic of the state: its first goal is to ensure the wellbeing of its citizens, which it tries to ground juridically; but when public order proves to be an enduring problem, it transfers responsibility to the police. The latter, being unable to maintain public order forever, will have to adopt military tactics and techniques to better ensure public safety, now seriously jeopardizing the juridical ideals that initiated the whole process. Hence reason of state falls prey to this internal conflict of interest. Finally, Gros believes that some ideas or practices are susceptible to external contradiction, which in this case refers to the recent tendency for security provisions to be privatized, outsourced or financialized. The reason this is a contradiction is that the kind of security offered by the state is supposed to be a permanent guarantee for its citizens, whereas the market, steered by profit motives, relies on a state of permanent insecurity. For Gros, securityin all of its prior iterationsfunctioned as a

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principle of balance or equilibrium. But once financialized and subjected to constant speculation, it becomes the harbinger of catastrophe. The final paragraphs, which invoke the dystopic language of Benjamin and Agamben, sketch a future that is already decipherable: every object, every individual is turned into a financial asset; the capacity for political decision-making is undermined as the logic of risk assessmentbased on a complex calculus of possible threatsbecomes pervasive; the environment is rapidly and irreversibly degraded; and social inequalities are accelerated exponentially. Since markets have an aversion to intervention, little can be done to halt or undo this process, and thus security becomes synonymous with Benjamins notion of catastrophe: when everything continues as before. Folded within the four chapters of Le principe scurit is a labyrinth of schema and multi-partite distinctions, yet the text is fluid and easily accessible to non-specialists. What Le principe scurit shows (more than argues) is how multiple meanings of security are embedded in contemporary culture as the accretion of certain ideas and practices. The Stoic technique for attaining spiritual tranquillity, the eschatology of Christian millenarians and the political theory of early modern jurists and philosophers emerge not only as precedents for the current order, but as layered realities of it as well. If I am extrapolating correctly from Gross argument, the present regime of bio security short-circuits the accumulated practices that constitute the self, political ideology and the liberal state, destabilizing their timeworn respectability. It is in this way that Le principe scurit differs from the existing literature on biopolitics: bare life for Grosor what he calls the vulnerability of the individualis the outcome of subtle changes in our psychology, changes conditioned and produced by external events. Gros captures this nicely in a passage from States of Violence describing new modalities of warfare: There is not so much a loss of ethical substance as the reconfiguration of the relation to death, but this time it is as the unilateral destruction of the other, something that in return allows the subject to define himself. The analysis here is compelling: conceptions of war change our relationship to death, to others and to our self. The bulk of biopolitical theory and the fast-growing field of security studies appeal in some way to legal norms. There is a liberal American narrative, for instance, that signals a turn toward the rhetoric of (national) security with the post-9/11 Bush Administration. Security in this sense is a scaremongering tactic meant to keep the people beholden to its government, and becomes a pretext for the revocation of civil liberties. Gros, on the contrary, says almost nothing about these kinds of dangers and infringements, as he is primarily interested in the more metaphysical significations of liberty what individuals are capable of thinking and doing. The tradition of Arendt and Nussbaum relies on classical notions of citizenship, while the radical

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Italian theory of Negri and Agamben considers the relationship between sovereignty, citizenship and biological life. Gros seldom has recourse to these constructions. There is another, less favourable way of looking at Le principe scurit. For one, the concept of security itself has no ontological grounding in the text. To give four different definitions and isolate them each to one historical epoch is plainly to give no definition at all. Most of the time, they are allsave the last one, of biosecuritymetaphors of balance or equilibrium. In one sentence of the conclusion they are tellingly lumped together as such: Security in its most general sense designates a conformity of things to themselves, and the psychic stability that can be deduced from it. Is this recognizable as security? With such an arbitrary grounding, what is to prevent us from invoking its other significations? A glance at the same dictionary Gros uses also produces the following entries for security: The ensemble of legislative and administrative measures that have as their object to protect workers and their families against certain risks; or again, The guarantee enjoyed by persons who practise jobs and professions of being maintained in the exercise thereof. In other words, security in French also refers to social and job security, respectively. These meanings are likely ignored by Gros because they cannot be easily accommodated by the idea of balance. The elision is indicative of two larger problems. One is that Gros tends to address modern people either as consumers (of commercial products and social goods) or as passive recipients (of security practices). If the goal is to capture the psychology unique to biosecuritytechniques that render the subject ever more vulnerablehow can the economic side of life be completely ignored? Conditions of production are directly relevant to our self-conception and to the biological circumstances of our life, as Arendt repeatedly emphasized in The Human Condition. Job securityor lack thereofhas to be one of the greatest sources of psychological insecurity today. The other problem signalled by this omission relates to Gross historicophilosophical narrative. How can one come to a proper understanding of security without invoking social security, which was the dominant connotation of the term for a whole historical period, certainly in Europe and evenif more brieflyin the us? A recent report by the oecd shows that, on average across its member countries, public social spending-to-gdp ratios have increased from around 19 per cent in 2007 to around 22 per cent today, with much of this going to spending on unemployment compensation and cash benefits to older people. Even in the us, where national security asserted a certain primacy during the Cold War and after September 11, social security remains a sensitive issue for most Americansthe famous third rail of domestic politics. For Gros to have ignored this connotation in an account of the psychology of security seems surprising. Then again,

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such an acknowledgement would not fit very neatly within the Foucauldian worldview, in which what is latest is always potentially or actually worse. One of the few places where Gros invokes economic forces is in the final pages, where he calls attention to the financialization and privatization of security now taking place; but it springs from nowhere, last-minute evidence of an apocalypse to come. A crucial wager of Le principe scurit is that its relative dearth of analysis will be made up for by its descriptive richness, which covers many significations of security and two thousand years of history. It is not clear, however, that Gros has added any real historical depth to our understanding of biopolitics. For the Stoic conception of security to matter in the present requires thinking either that ataraxia continues to structure our sense of the good life, or that Roman philosophy affected history so profoundly, as Gros insinuates, that it set in motion an irreversible chain of consequences. Neither argument is very compelling. Gros also supposes that Christian eschatology provided the psychological disposition underlying the socialist revolutions of the twentieth century. The parallel will not convince historians: Methodism is often taken to have saved England from proletarian revolution in the nineteenth century. In fact, the back-story Gros provides could conceivably be excised from the book, leaving the latter two security regimes for contemplation. It is here, where modern calculations first come sharply into focusthanks to Gross work in this departmentthat a meaningful history of security should begin. How does Le principe scurit compare to Foucaults work on security? For one, it suffers from the same tendency to ontologize power: it simply acts that way, disconnected from any holders or specific aims. Of his own lateral method of advance, Foucault wrote in the postface to Security, Territory, Population: I am like the crawfish, I move sideways. Gros believes he has avoided this tendency, claiming I have much less taste for ruptures and discontinuities than Foucault; but the supposed continuities of security are, as we have seen, lacking in explanatory weight. In fact, the strongest point of the book is Gross impressive taxonomy of modern practices of security, for which the crawfish method is essential. Security looked as if it would be a central concept in Foucaults late-70s lectures, but it was dropped as he became more interested in the concept of governmentality. What he said on the subject was mostly provisional, but it was clear that it was essential to understanding the market rationality of liberalism: the apparatus of security lets things happen. Not that everything is left alone, but laisser-faire is indispensable at a certain level: allowing prices to rise, allowing scarcity to develop. Security tends to have more conceptual clarity in Foucaults texts, even if its contexts are opaque. In Le principe scurit, the emphasis is reversed, privileging the empirics of security at the expense of conceptual

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rigour. It is also worth noting that whereas the economics of liberalism are front-and-centre in Foucaults account, they make a significant appearance only in the final pages of Le principe scurit, and have little relation to the conceptualization of the problem. Finally, what Foucault has and Gros does not is a fleshed-out theory of the subject. The shortcoming becomes apparent when Gros sidesteps what should be a key issue of Le principe scurit: the degree to which our conception of self is shaped by governmental and commercial practicesthe psychology of security. Foucaults anti-humanism could account, sometimes improbably, for the powerful influence of external logics on our selfconception. Gross subject by contrast always seems more stable, posses sing durable, time-tested techniques for dealing with a chaotic external world. In this regard, Gros is unable to solve a problem that plagues much current work on security and biopolitics: while there is no doubt an unsettling increase in surveillance technology, consumer profiling, collection of biological data, tracking capabilitiesall of which might be archived and some day abused by the stateit remains unclear how this will necessarily curtail liberties and rights, impoverish our conception of the world, endanger social relations or accelerate inequalities. It may change many things, but invoking the apocalypse seems hasty. Such is the imaginary of Gross book. Indeed, the future does look bleak, but I doubt that Gros has given us a compelling way to understand it.

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