In the opening chapter of this boundary-pushing book, Lauren Wilcox commits to offering her readers an account of International Relations (IR) that pays attention to “the ways in which bodies are both produced and productive” (3). Wilcox's analysis shows how pain and violence are sites at which embodied identities are produced and, conversely, how bodies inflict pain and perpetrate violence in ways that both shore up and confound existing sociopolitical orders. This analysis is motivated by a desire to correct the myopia of a discipline that frequently “misses how often violence is productive” (5); by paying close attention to the perpetration of different forms of violence, “we can see how violence constitutes differently embodied subjects” (5).
Wilcox maps the performative constitution of subjectivity across five sites of political practice: the detention of suspected “terrorists: and “enemy combatants” at the United States' military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; suicide bombing; the management and monitoring of bodies moving across borders, inter alia through the usage of “full body scanners”; the deployment of new military technologies such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs); and interventions undertaken under the banner of the “Responsibility to Protect,” as outlined in the 2001 report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty and endorsed by the General Assembly in the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document (A/RES/60/1).
The book presents three core arguments about embodiment using these sites as vehicles for the analysis of power and violence. Wilcox argues that we cannot escape embodiment when theorizing subjectivity, although it has been largely overlooked in conventional IR. Bodies are constituted in and through politics (thus bodies are themselves political), but bodies are also constituted in and through violence (hence, violence is productive [190]). The novelty of the arguments hinges on the claim that the fleshy dimensions of the subject have been scarcely theorized in IR, and although there have been some feminist engagements with “messy bodies” in IR (see Shepherd Reference Shepherd, Beeson and Bisley2010, 188)—most of which Wilcox engages with to some degree—this is a reasonable starting point for an investigation.
The brief sketch Wilcox provides of theorizations of the body as presented in conventional IR theories (such as they are) will be useful to readers unfamiliar with the particular pathologies of the self-styled discipline of the state (18–22). The point that conventional IR theories talk much of the actions of bodies and little—if at all—of the ways in which those bodies come to matter, in Butlerian terms, is well made. Laying such a foundation enables Wilcox to proceed swiftly on with the more interesting and provocative elements of the book.
The first of these is the theorization of pain that Wilcox undertakes. Building on the influential work of Elaine Scarry, Wilcox gives an account of pain “as a lived relationship with others,” (69) which is both intriguing and intuitively useful. Such a theorization is particularly useful for a discipline such as IR, which is, in both its naming and its analytical focus, obsessed with relationships. It is also—although this is much less frequently acknowledged—a discipline obsessed with the production of pain: what do we imagine will be the conclusion of strategic deliberations about military strikes if not bodies in pain? And yet, as Wilcox points out, these are not questions that arise in conventional theorizations of global politics.
The body in IR is not often made visible in terms of the technopolitics of subjectivity. (Cristina Masters' [Reference Masters2005] pioneering work on this topic is an exception here.) Wilcox's contribution to this set of debates effectively and insightfully extends the arguments presented in the book, arguments that otherwise might remain within the parameters of debates about performativity and the “violent reproduction” of both state and gender identity, as I have termed it (Shepherd Reference Shepherd2006, Reference Shepherd2008, Reference Shepherd2013; see also Butler Reference Butler2004, Reference Butler2010; McLeod Reference McLeod2015). The technopolitics of the body, which constitute the body not through acts of physical punishment but through rendering it intelligible in pixels, the ones and zeroes of data transmission from one computer to another, require that we think differently about violence in the digital age: this is a theory of performativity that conceives of “informationalization” as both a form of violence and a constitutive practice (105).
At its heart, this is political theory. Wilcox makes a powerful and important argument about the needs of the state (as an abstract, political “body”) in the course of theorizing (actual, messy) bodies. She explores “the symbolic power of bodily integrity” not only in the context of suicide bombing, where the body is disintegrated yet still productive of particular configurations of power (such that “our” violence—rational, clean, legitimate, and righteous—is pitted against “their” violence—irrational, dirty, illegitimate, and wrong), but also in the context of border security and surveillance, where discourses of threat and risk are organized by the assumption that a “good” (read: safe) body is an integrated body. The point about the body needing to turn a legible face to the scrutiny of the state is an important one (106); ultimately the state requires not only integrity, but also stability. Bodies that change—as well as bodies that “leak,” as Wilcox elaborates (93–100), defy classification, fail to maintain a semblance of coherence, or are otherwise deviant—are a problem to be managed through the exercise of biopower.
But it is the work on posthuman embodiment that I found most fascinating in this book; Wilcox develops a theorization of the body as manifest in technopolitics (137–144), as constituted through informationalization, and this is the most exciting and innovative dimension of her work. The theorizations of power and violence offered throughout the book are both viable and sustainable, if comfortably within the parameters of existing poststructural engagements with the body. Wilcox demands that we recognize violence as the manifestation of and resistance to instability, simultaneously both the management of subjects and the mode of their production (202). But it is the theorization of our subjectivity as always already constituted in an ephemeral data projection, of which we can access only traces, that shows how we are embodied not only as “fleshy subjects,” but also as the machine: our “boundaries are drawn in and through technologies” (138) in ways that we can only just begin to comprehend. Wilcox offers political theory, but not only this: it is a wide-ranging and discomfiting proposal of the future of the body in our present that invites us to think very differently indeed about the work that bodies do in service of security and the state.
