Networks of friends and enemies: A hermeneutic-paranoid approach

Eva Horn

“Der Feind ist unsere eigene Frage als Gestalt. / The enemy is the figure of our own question .” (Carl Schmitt) Enmity, or, according to Carl Schmitt, the “distinction of friends and enemies” implies a preconceived modelization of the enemy that informs and underlies all specific identification of actual or potential enemies. The dominant modelization of the enemy in the Western intelligence and military community is currently the idea of a rhizomatic, decentralized “terror network.” If this new, post Cold War figure of the enemy is truly “the figure of our own question,” in which way does this enemy model reflect the failures, blind spots or discontents of our political culture? The conceptualization of the enemy as a network might reveal more about the vulnerability in an interconnected society than about the enemy as such. To what extent is this figuration of the enemy the (wishful or paranoid) mirror-image of our own situation?

“Einen Text verstehen, heißt die Frage verstehen, auf die der Text eine Antwort ist./Understanding a text means understanding the question to which the text is an answer.” (H.G. Gadamer)

Current discourses on terrorism and conflict tend to rely on a mainly organizational, tactical and technological approach that seems to be insufficient to analyze the specific “cultures of violence” that form the broad social, cultural and theological basis of religious terrorism. The contexts and the specificity of religious terrorism is often reduced to a formula of ‘tactics/technology + ideology.’ What would it mean to try to understand the question to which these new forms of terrorism are the answer or solution? What are the terms, concepts and shared interpretations in which its agents describe their activities and their aims? What are the narratives that keep the networks together and give a common framework to terrorists and the societies they come from? Networks consist not so much of nodes, hubs and agents but of relations. What keeps/brings the new, aggressive networks together and what seems to make them less vulnerable to disruptions and infiltration, are traditional bonds such as trust, authority, shared cultural habits and backgrounds: the new enemy networks are actually networks of “friends.” It might therefore make sense to distinguish different types of networks, not so much according to their structure (centralized or multi-hub etc.) but taking into account the common content and social relations that constitute them.

“Paranoia is nothing less than the onset, the leading edge that everything is connected, everything in Creation, a secondary illumination.” (Thomas Pynchon)

Current reflections on networks are marked by an almost hysterical ambivalence: on the one hand “interconnectivity is just another word for vulnerability,” on the other hand, global networks are celebrated as the unprecedented availability of information, interaction, and goods (for some). From this ambivalence, two scenarios emerge and compete: Security being defined as the exclusion of risks (or contingency) and the defense against alterity (or “disorder”), global interconnectivity is actually a danger to security. However, networks can also be seen as compensating or attenuating the insecurity in modern societies, given a different definition of security: as much as interconnectivity makes systems vulnerable to escalation, intrusion or disruption, it also allows for feed-back, transparency and inclusion of alterity. A productive, in Pynchon’s sense “illuminated” form of paranoia as a way of perceiving the unavoidable, pervasive and risky but also creative power of interconnectivity implies the need to remodel the concept of security beyond its traditional tenets of defense, prevention/pre-emption and total control.