Blood-ties vs. Armies

The Imperative of military organization. I was just sitting at my desk chuckling, thinking about how the work that has taken up the last 2 months of my time has served many purposes for my employer. One of the purposes seems to be to emphasize the need my company has for my department. In large corporate bureaucracies, managers are a lot like samurai seeking to curry favor with the local daimyo, mafia street soldiers looking to rise up the ranks by earning, etc.

I don't blame my boss for doing what he has to do. In fact, I am thankful that he has consistently worked to create work for me and my co-workers to do. Our group has gone from being a glorified operations team that mostly tracks and fixes bugs, to a team that owns services from top to bottom. We own the machines, we monitor them, we fool around with the logs, we get paged at 2am if they break, etc. Soon, our services will, like a tree planting roots, become an integral part of the corporate ecosphere. We will be absorbed, borg-like, having achieved that most crucial of corporate achievements: we will be a dependency.

My boss' managers don't say to him, "how can I help you do you work?" but they say, "what work are you doing for me that gives me something to say to my boss?" What kick-back have you provided that our clan can contribute to the clan boss? The unique and interesting thing about corporate America is that we use military methodology to achieve our aims. Using bio-technology, which Foucault would consider a bio-power, a forming and sculpting, a shaping of the body and mind via repeated, precise motions and thoughts, corporations extract ever-increasing productivity out of their employees. This is fine, I'm not judging it. A corporation's job is to make money, and it means I have a job, and maybe one day I can start my own company and get in on the action.

I never understood why Foucault was so interested in the metaphor of war in his lectures in "Society Must Be Defended". It seemed really abstract. But when I had my little a-ha moment about why I am doing what I'm doing these days at work, it all kind of clicked. I think the bit about war stemmed naturally from his studies in Discipline and Punish, where he first elucidates the spread of the military disciplinary techniques to all western institutions: school, work, hospital, etc.

I have also been thinking about this topic in another light. I was reading this article this morning, and I'm also reading Robert Baer's See No Evil. I've talked about this before, but think about it in this context I've just written about. Westerners have a lot of trouble thinking about organizational entities in terms outside the bounds of a military-like hierarchical structure, for whom existence is in and of itself of value. Let me try to put it another way: it seems to me that westerners view the creation of institutions or groups is an inherent good, and further more, one of their reasons for being is simply to be. Growing in size, acquiring more "power", responsibility, etc. These are why groups form in the western view. That is, they are like armies, seeking to grow in size and power, to be able to conquer other armies.

Presently we are more refined in our militaristic practice. But the culture of bio-power, of using military training techniques to sculpt the minds and bodies of all people, has become transparent -- that is to say, it is everywhere around us, such that it has become invisible. It is like sunlight. I've been thinking about this in the context of Iraq. I think there are plenty of lower-level government agents and officials, like Robert Baer, who would be able to engage in this conversation, correcting my incorrect history, etc. -- but grasping the concept. But all we ever see in the papers is quotes from big Generals who say things like, "Well the Al Qaeda's were utilizing what we call an IED dependent counter-counter insurgent tactical strike operation, designed to weaken our point of presense on the enemy's periphery." They think of it as a tactical organization that exists for the sake of existing, whose goal is to exist as a militaristic concentration of power.

They have never dealt with people who have never been exposed to the bio-power conditioning techniques of the west. They can't conceive of the family, the bloodline, and the neighborhood as the central tenants of a group. Outside the West (Mexico in this case is not the West), it's all about family. Who's your cousin, who did she marry? What neighborhood are you from? It's about the power of the word and the bond. The reason individuals partake in the struggle is that something close to their heart is threatened. Their family, their neighborhood, etc. They don't care about forming an army and conquering. Someone has committed a sin -- like the American heathens have invaded -- and they need to be punished, which usually means getting killed. The whole idea and methodology of terrorism is born out of a community that is not just underequipped, I think they are wholly uninterested in empire-building, at least in the Western sense of it. They are not interested in the Roman style of conquest. I need to formulate this theory more thoroughly.

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