Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception

Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception By Brian Massumi Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015 320 pages $24.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Brian Massumi's latest addition to our understanding of power may be the most important addition to strategy since On War. To Massumi, an ontopower is power that is able to alter perception about a chain of effects, altering the future of the original (41). It is, as its Greek prefix would indicate, a living power. Massumi's protagonist is the idea of preemption as strategy, and he describes in his book the underlying assumptions on which preemption becomes the only response available to threats. Preemption, because it occurs before the threat emerges, must have as its ontological premise the ability to define a threat after its destruction has occurred. Preemption, in its truest sense, requires perceptions bent to fit the action. In other words, what could be a threat should be attacked because it could attack you. Preemption changes premise from fact to potential. What Massumi does very well is translate a philosophy of action into epistemological methods. He uses the word "operationalization," familiar to military planners, to describe this process. This word means "to make into an action." True to its assumptions, ontopower requires descriptions of the environmental system as full of threats. What may be surprising to some, the two dominant descriptive paradigms of modern life, neoconservatism and neoliberalism (43), synthesize a need for this power, one that benefits from an ability to reorganize the complexity of the environment. One militarizes the environment and the other benefits from the creative destruction of the capitalist order. It is in this way preemption, an ontology, becomes epistemology. To Massumi, the juxtopostion of deterrence and preemption creates a new era in security studies. Deterrence is policy; it is the rationalization of competition between peers who are against unitary actors. Preemption supposes there is no benefit for rationalizing. The Cold War was deterrence, but we have entered a new era where threats require responses faster than policy can provide. Massumi makes the point, if our actions create the enemy, then preemption only requires a threat because the threat could become an enemy. But, preemption disturbs equilibriums. It creates reactions that cannot be predicted, and uncertainty is a vague, uneasy threat, and so on. One does not preempt something you can deter, and you do not deter something that can be preempted. Preemption is the logical conclusion of the liberal state's inability to provide security, what Massumi calls the "perception attack. …