Militariality

This essay argues that the US is in the midst of a transformation from governmentality to militariality, a transformation achieving normalization with the official passing-into-law of the post-9/11 Homeland Security Act and the USA Patriot Act, and the coming-to-actuality of preemptive warfare with the US declaration of war against Iraq. The political regime, progressively acting directly on the civil register, diminishes the civil register to the point of its eventual erasure. With the erosion of the civil register it becomes clearer that "metamilitarization" appears increasingly as an essential technique of the polity rather than an exceptional measure. Moreover, in this stratocracy the environment itself is transformed biopolitically and co-opted for militarization: the ecosystem achieves visibility in the military problematic on the basis of its problematization as a potential target of terrorism, and thus as a military problem. Reconstellated in the new stratocracy, environmental activism becomes environmentality.