Security in the Age of Foams: The Spheropolitics and (Auto-)Immunologies in the Globalized World

“The twenty-first century”, Peter Sloterdijk writes, “is virtually advertised as the ‘century of foam’”. By this statement, Sloterdijk wants to point our attention towards the steady and yet thorough immunitary transformations that are at work at the level of the modern containers or vessels of collective immunity. More specifically, under the impact of globalization and the organisational processes of late modernity, the immunological “monosphere” that is the nation state finds itself increasingly stripped of its former efficiencies in functioning as the sphere of both physical and symbolic protection. The ongoing erosion, fragmentation and displacement of the immunological properties of the prominent monospheres of modernity go hand in hand with the rise of a new immunitary paradigm made up of loose, decentralised and sometimes even deterritorialised foam-like constellations of individual “microspheres” – of small yet thoroughly climatised affective lifeworlds of protected being. As clearly evidenced by many of the issues of domestic and international security, such as migration, pandemics, peace-building or urban warfare, new and smaller-scale immunised lifeworlds emerge, co-emerge and intermingle all the time and everywhere – refugee camps, households, shopping malls, campuses, gated communities, green zones, no-go zones, etc. Since such immunised lifeworlds bring together – both theoretically and in everyday practice – bodies, spaces and atmospheres, this “great immunological transformation” serves as a particularly fitting diagnosis of contemporary politics and provides crucial insights into myriad socio-political processes and phenomena, local and international alike. This paper presents selected cross-sections of my ongoing research into the ways in which the changing morphologies and immunitary properties of the fluid, heterogeneous and globalizing plurospheres impact our understanding of some of the most well-established facets of security. It will show that the prism of immunity, informed by the spatio-amospheric dynamics of the foam, casts new light on some of the basic categories such as ontological security, biopolitics, human security and many others. Indeed, the key organising principles of the foam such as co-immunity, co-isolation and co-fragility carry much weight in the study of the world conditioned by forced neighbouring and animated by the stresses and the anxieties of co-habitation. To push the debate even further, the paper will show that the immunological paradigm also offers important insights into the workings of autoimmunological processes that are inevitably present in all immunitary systems. The prism of autoimmunity allows us to account for some of the paradoxes of security whereby an act of immunisation generates a series of unintentional blowbacks and produces the very sources and conditions of insecurity against which it originally set out to fight. The autoimmunitary paradigm will thus not only situate security theory into the immunological context of late modernity, but will also contextualise it within the autoimmunitary paradoxes of “post-national war” or, in Sloterdijk’s words, of the “universalised war of foams”.