Security Bonds: On Feeling Power and the Fiction of an Animal Governmentality

Abstract

FIGHTING POWER, Feeling Power In theatre of unconditional War on Terror declared by U.S. after 9/11 attacks on its homeland, few spectacles can rival raid on Osama bin Laden's living quarters in Pakistan in May of 2011. Although this paramilitary drama seemed to embroil exclusively human actors, news quickly spread through global media that one member of elite team of U.S. Navy seals that descended on bin Laden's Abbottabad compound was canine. Cairo, a Belgian Malinois whose tracking sense proved vital in deadliest manhunt of early twenty-first century, emerged from U.S. mission a national hero thanks to his zealous part in sniffing founder of al-Qaeda. Dogs have become visibly embedded in groundwork and fantasy of a state of security that, radiating out from U.S. Department of Homeland Security, is today global in its means and effects. Other Military Working Dogs (mwds) besides Cairo have figured prominently in a post-9/11 order of security. Perhaps most notorious are those German shepherds shown with their human handlers in trophy photographs taken by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib, poised to unleash their powers of psychic and physical terror on Iraqi prisoners. MWDs and police dogs are now routinely referred to in idiom of security as K9s, an abbreviated homophone for canines that places them in technological series with other weaponry like M-16 family of combat rifles or UH-60 series of Black Hawk helicopters used in raid on bin Laden's compound. That is, security dogs are fetishized as optimally efficient fighting machines whose performance is augmented by sleek layers of combat gear supplied by military outfitters like K9 Storm, a Canadian-based company in business of cladding new dogs of war. Alongside valorization of dogs' fighting power in service of global policing and security, in what follows I begin tracing a particular genealogy of biopower in which it is not only dogs' powers of detecting and detaining but simultaneously their feeling power, and more specifically their capacity for loving attachment, that is cultivated as an instrument of unconditional security. This particular genealogy of feeling power sparks much thornier, speculative question of how we might think of other species as subjects of, and to, governmentality, a question prompted by participatory spirit that seems to animate other species' involvements in modern states of war and peace. (1) Cairo's role in bin Laden raid, for instance, appeared to be more than that of a K9 machine expertly trained to follow orders but, rather, to be that of a keen, self-motivated animal subjectively identified with spirit of mission. The genealogy of feeling power that I set out to trace through modern dog stories nests inside--even as it complicates--the remarkable history of governmentality that Foucault traces in his College de France lectures, where he distinguishes regimes of sovereign and disciplinary power from biopolitical apparatuses of security that begin to emerge in Europe in eighteenth century (Security). Foucault links rise of police and security to a form of political reason concerned with management of (human) population at level of its species existence, a biopolitical model of government whose techniques he traces back to early pastoral power of Church. In Foucault's analysis, figure of a human shepherd is metaphorical of an art of government that caringly ministers to a flock of sheep, itself metaphorical for population as a new subject of State biopower (Security 11). Yet there is no mention in his lectures of role sheepdogs literally and historically play in pastoral economies, where they function as prosthetic strong-arm of a shepherd. (2) This omission in his study of pastoral power is doubtless due, first, to fact that Foucault treats the sheep-fold (130) solely as a political metaphor and, second, to Foucault's view that pastoral power in its secular, state form does not require (law) enforcement since governmentality operates by inculcating very conduct of conduct, that is, self-conduct of subjects who govern themselves. …