‘The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) and a consortium of ten partner organizations hosted an international “war game” from July 28, 2008 through July 30, 2008.

The future consequences of global climate change remain unclear, but the economic, social, political, and military risks for all nations have the potential to be catastrophic. This exercise used war gaming and scenario planning techniques to assess the potential threats and responses to global climate change. Such techniques have proven to be useful to militaries and businesses all over the world in understanding and dealing with complex and uncertain contingencies’.

http://www.cnas.org/climatewargame/ 

This is an abstract for a conference on biopolitics in Taiwan, where (if it happens) I’ll be speaking with Jon Solomon and Brett Neilson. Jon Solomon’s work got me thinking about translation, which I never really thought about before. This is strange, because I was actually trying to be a translator at one point.

‘The experimental logic of the pharmaceutical and biotech industries is currently in upheaval. Not only have the last few years witnessed an accelerated off-shoring of clinical trials to India and China, both of which are heavily promoting their commercial bioscience sector, but the very standard of human subject experimentation (the randomized controlled clinical trial) is itself being subject to all kinds of reform. With the introduction of phase 0 clinical trials and the push to replace controlled trials with flexible designs, we are moving away from a model of the clinical trial conceived of as reproducible test to something which resembles the ‘true experiment’ extolled by recent philosophies of science (Hans-Jörg Rheinberger; Isabelle Stengers).

Developing a comparative analysis of the clinical trial in China and North America, this paper argues that human subject experimentation should be considered as a form of ‘experimental’ labour in which exposure itself is the service to be valorized. Not only is the conduct of clinical trials increasingly transactional (with web-sites and newspapers advertising casual work in phase I studies) but it is also being proposed as a form of ‘work for health care’ for the growing number of working uninsured in both China and North America. The clinic therefore emerges as an export labour zone in ‘experimental body work.’

This paper reflects on the tensions inherent in an ‘innovation process’ which both insists on the untranslatability of invention (novelty as radical surprise) while recognizing that the latter must also be translated, reproduced and standardized. The imperative of a generalized translation can be detected at multiple levels of the clinical trial complex: in the demand for ‘translational research’ which would successfully move the experiment from the lab to the clinic; in the effort to ‘harmonize’ international regulations concerning trial regulations, clinical practice, ethical standards, product specifications and IP, all of which are required to make a product commercially viable; and in moves to include ‘non-standard’, non-white male populations within the profile of the human subject. All of these calls for translatability coexist uneasily with the dynamics of ‘innovation’ which at another level depends on an extreme destandardization of life chances and the continuous production of extreme bodily events in order to generate anything of value at all.’

Wendy Brown in her essay American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism and De-Democratization, begins ‘with a set of formal concerns about the relation between a neoliberalism contoured by globalized capital but given a particular twist in each local context where it dwells, and a distinctly American neoconservatism that also has cousins in other fundamentalist and religiously inflected responses to late modernity but is homegrown and internally diverse even in the American context.’ Her questions: ‘How does a project that empties the world of meaning, that cheapens and deracinates life and openly exploits desire, intersect one centered on fixing and and enforcing meanings, conserving certain ways of life, and repressing and regulating desire? … And what might be the role of evangelical Christianity on one side and hyper-demonized enemies to the American state on the other in facilitating this marriage’ Political Theory 34:6 (2006).

Apart from having problems with the way in which the critique of neoliberalism is formulated (that which deracinates life and desire, a critique which already calls for its moralizing response) and drawing a blank at the very mention of de-democratization, I think the question of this intersection (tension) is spot on. Its a tension which doesn’t even call for or adumbrate resolution, certainly not in the form of the nation-state (Hegel’s state was one such resolution of the contradictions between the classical liberalism of Adam Smith, the family and the state). Maybe this is one of the reasons that God or the divine is so often invoked in contemporary neoconservatisms (even US neoconservatism, which though apparently a-theological has a very heavy investment in Zionism), because the divine undercuts the resolution of the nation-state, can affirm transnational alliances and gets right into the blood and guts of the everyday and the sexual. Neoconservatism is not biopolitical.

Heidegger, in his strange but oh so contemporary Contributions to Philosophy, defines the ‘event’ not in terms of the sacred or the institutional-religious in the strict sense of the term, but as that moment "in which the problem of god (or gods) matters to us once again." It was the biopolitical strictures of National Socialism, its rootedness in the biological nation, which bothered him most. His philosophy of the event (qua appropriation) is a much more abstract formulation of the moment of political decision, which is why I think it can incorporate different historical instantiations of neoconservatism.

‘The intrinsic complexity of living systems … does not impose a dramatic limit on any possibility of experimentation. What it imposes is the necessity for an intelligent experimentation, which assumes the risky responsibility of asking relevant questions. Every question is a wager concerning what the interrogated object is sensitive to, and no method is neutral with respect to this problem. The problem of relevance does not lead to irrationalism, but to the ever-present risk of "silencing" the very thing one is interrogating’ Isabelle Stengers Power and Invention, 17, on experimentation, its possibilities and limits.

Lesson - try not to silence your object! 

Interesting - for her the eventual limits of experimentation, at least in its ambition to approximate the reproducible test, is related to the question of temporality. ‘The distinctive temporality of the object studied’. But she adds - ‘from the moment the experimentation is not addressed to an established fact but to a being produced by history and capable of history, it is addressed to something that is certainly not a subject in the human sense of the term, but is not a pure object either.’ But what does she mean by history?

The transformations of the clinical trial - which stem from a critique of the reproducible test more than anything - are similarly concerned with this notion of the unpredictable temporality of (self-)experiment.

thinking about ways to write in this space, which is exposure itself, and not making it just reading notes - which I’m also pathologically secretive about… i thought i should resurrect my old note books and diaries, which are more of the same, raw exposure, but at least out of date, which takes the edge of things. sometimes i read these old pencil-written pages (usually a blunt pencil) and think this is good writing - concise, with a weight like a teardrop, going absolutely nowhere. But unpublishable. So here is a place they can be. This dead drop of mid-winter in sydney is unimaginable in terms of European seasons. The exposure, that yellow clamour of light which just glints of everything, the chopped up water, glass-scapes. Saturday we went to cockatoo island. It is australia itself in many ways (at least as i know it), mission, penal colony, orphanage, submarine and ship docks, reclaimed aboriginal land, briefly, i remember seeing the flag flying once when i came back to sydney … basically a chunk of sandstone cliff-face, with open wind-swept hangars, outsized industrial machinery and gloweringly deep ship repair canals, you look down and you sense the deepness. but so close to home, to the home i grew up in, just across the shore

panther is here