Abstract
Enemy. With contemporary politics bound up in ceaseless debates over migrants and refugees, terrorists from within and without, the tyranny of both Right and Left, we might finally admit that if there is ever to be a language spoken by all, the first words agreed upon and uttered will be those used to name the enemy. In his most recent book, The Universal Adversary: Security, Capital and “The Enemies of All Mankind” Mark Neocleous demonstrates just this, disassembling liberal modernity’s politics of enmity, locating a group of fascinating components—the disgruntled Worker, the Zombie, the Devil and the Pirate—to offer a theoretical schematic with which to confront the most intractable problems of our time. Here Neocleous shows his readers how they come to know, or rather how they are made to know the monster, terrorist, criminal and perhaps the nature of evil itself. As with his previous books, Neocleous’ most recent offering is a rigorous work of political theory, stitched together by a rich and lively collection of case studies, historical evidence and anecdotes drawn from across the cultural register. As the title implies, the book concerns the force that animates bourgeois modernity—security. Remaining faithful to the arguments he outlined previously in War Power, Police Power (2014), Critique of Security (2008) and farther back still in Fabrication of Social Order (2000) Neocleous does not for a minute entertain the liberal dream of security as a public good and argues rather forcefully that security, realized through the perpetual imagination of an enemy and mobilized in defense of capital, forms the bedrock upon which an unequal social order rests. To do so, Neocleous introduces his readers to the Universal Adversary Program, a fascinating, yet little-known project of the United States Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Not unlike the related Analytic Red Cell Program which emerged post-9/11, employing Hollywood script writers, novelists and other creatives to help the security state imagine the unimaginable and “know its unknowns”, the Universal Adversary Program is intended to “build a complex fictional picture of potential terrorists based on their motivations, capabilities, and intent—as well as their tactics, techniques, and procedures” (p. 15). In other words, by imagining the range of possible security threats the program assembles an all encompassing, totalizing adversary—a many headed-hydra for this the age of terror. Yet this is not simply the inspiration of a catchy title, rather the Universal Adversary Program perfectly illustrates the book’s key assertion, the ghostly, ambiguous, universal enemy, is always twinned by a similarly ghostly, if not universal police power, that has come to pervade nearly every facet of social life. It is here that the mantra of emergency and endless war is normalized through the ceaseless preparation for the inevitable attack of an unknown and unknowable enemy.
The book consists of four chapters, each of which presents a case study of a particular adversarial figure meant to embody a particular emergency and threat, which in turn accommodates the exhibition of sovereign power and the fabrication of social order—the stagecraft of statecraft. Chapter 1 outlines the Universal Adversary Program and takes up the figure of the disgruntled worker, which was specifically named alongside “foreign terrorists, domestic radical groups and state sponsored adversaries” in the original Universal Adversary Program charter. A perennial problem for capital, as Neocleous puts it, the disgruntled worker is bundled together with “foreign terrorists”, thereby positioning class war alongside, or within, the contemporary wars on crime/drugs/terror. The chapter goes on to outline an inventive genealogy linking today’s “disgruntled worker” to a centuries long struggle of the bourgeois order against a swelling, unruly, rabble class, a “swinish multitude” (p. 24), derided for living close to the land, foraging for subsistence and unclean in their own filth. The point made here is that emergency planning scenarios that name the threat of the “disgruntled worker” are in fact diagnostic of the security state’s fear of the disloyal worker, that troublesome figure unwilling to accept the ascribed position within an increasingly disparate and precarious social order. Alone, the disgruntled worker may very well take the shape of the mad “spree shorter”, gone “postal” for some unnamed grievance, but as a collective, the disgruntled worker is a more formidable enemy for capital, forming along the picket and strike line and taking a place across the bargaining table.
The threat of disgruntled, disloyal and organized labor outlined in Chapter 1, transitions seamlessly to Neocleous’ treatment of a figure that has overrun popular culture in recent years, the Zombie. In Chapter 2, Neocleous shows how today’s Zombie, a campy artifice of Cold-War era horror fiction, is employed by military, police and emergency agencies as a faceless, mimetic, if not apolitical planning tool. In so doing, Neocleous again reveals how the anxieties of capital always underlie the politics of security. Reading the many social myths advanced by Zombie films and texts, he illustrates how the panicked bourgeois imagination—knowing all too well, capital’s trajectory—has come to know human beings as subjects and objects at once. Fit only for menial tasks, the shambling masses of the global precariat, these mindless alienated workers, are the very embodiment of Marx’s dead labor. That the spread of zombification is often as mysterious as it is instantaneous suggests that a cure is illusory and thus, none are immune. Here the Zombie’s mimesis—traversing social categories of all kinds—portends the Hobbesian state of nature and the righteous necessity of Sovereign violence to defend the very boundaries of humanity and civilization. It is this notion of a “war for civilization” so well represented by the Zombie, which permeates popular culture and the fearful ideology of the security state. In a 2012 public service advertisement campaign meant to elicit “emergency preparedness” for instance, The Centers for Disease Control urged, “if you are prepared for a zombie apocalypse, you are prepared for anything”. Read through the anxious doctrine of the Universal Adversary, such a warning might be better understood as the instruction, once you’ve imagined killing a zombie, then you are able to kill the enemy.
Chapter 3 infuses contemporary security politics with political theology and political demonology via a confrontation with the Devil. The initial pages of this chapter sketch out the historical development of Satan as the arbiter of evil and thus the enemy of all mankind. From here, Neocleous shows how such demonological, adversarial thinking, was used to find the Devil in the “ungodly heathens” (p. 83) encountered by Christian colonists, thereby justifying their subsequent genocide as a righteous war between Satan and Christ. This spectral understanding of evil, all encompassing, able to inhabit nearly any social body, lent much power to the state as it emerged as the figurehead—the very hallmark of safety and security—in the imagined war with the Devil, the Christian God’s universal adversary. From the Colonial era witch-hunts aimed at rebellious women, to the 11 September attacks, this chapter details how the imagination of a Satanic evil was and is crucial to the constitution of the forces of security, police and war.
Lastly, Neocleous returns to contemporary US security state documents and discourse to demonstrate the links between terrorism and lawlessness of all kinds, to the ancient figure of the pirate. Here the suspension of law in which contemporary terrorists reside, is justified by the state’s long history of battle with the pirate, a figure which has always existed outside state authority, deterritorialized and mobile. Yet the pirate is not simply a threat to security, by flouting the most basic rights to private property, the pirate is specifically a threat to the capitalist state’s logic of accumulation. Here the pirate, who uses, takes, duplicates and imitates that which is “owned” by another, threatens to undermine the logic of capital and hence the security of the world. And so, the purveyors of pirated goods, like the swinish multitude, mindless dead labor and the rebellious men and women who run afoul of Christian law—these many faced adversaries—mobilize a deadly and all pervasive police power in a war for security, capital and civilization itself.
All in all, Universal Adversary does not disappoint. The book follows Mark Neocleous’ reputation for penetrating social theory and advances his considerable and influential body of work theorizing security, war and police power. If there is any room for critique, it would be that he perhaps did not stretch the concept of the Universal Adversary far enough. For some assistance in this regard, we need not look far. In 1987, appearing before the United Nations, Ronald Reagan the political demonologist par excellence, foreshadowed the logic of the Universal Adversary, when he spoke longingly of the unifying powers of an alien invasion: “[p]erhaps we need some outside universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.” Taking lead from Reagan’s desire to incite a common bond along species or even planetary lines, perhaps we can enlist Neocleous’ dissection of the adversarial thinking that helps fabricate the social order, to understand the boundary making processes of race and perhaps the human itself. After all, in the age of Black Lives Matter vs. Blue Lives Matter, we need such insights more than ever.