balibar on nationalism and exclusion

“Nationalism is the organic ideology that corresponds to the national institution, and this institution rests upon the formulation of a rule of exclusion, of visible or invisible ‘borders,’ materialized in laws and practices. Exclusion – or at least unequal (‘preferential’) access to particular goods and rights depending on whether one is a national or a foreigner, or belongs to the community or not – is thus the very essence of the nation-form. As a structure, the nation-form produces and perpetuates a differentiation that it must defend. One could say that the nation-form resists the suppression or indefinite extension of borders. It constitutes an institutional means of preserving the rule of exclusion or insisting upon its necessity.” (23)

in We, the People of Europe?

figure of abandonment – yet another dissertation outline

Introduction The Figure of the Refugee: Abandonment, Mobility and a Coming Politics 

The binding theme of this dissertation is the imagining of a politics beginning with the figure of the refugee, rather than the figure of the citizen, or the worker. Navigating through the past, present, and future, the chapters undertake several projects that are bound together in the figure of the refugee, a binding that will become clear in the ways the refugee actively un-binds all that we usually find stable in the political.

The figure of the refugee is a figure we should be troubled by, as both a figure that is indeed the effect of real-world processes of violence and emergency and a figure that is becoming evermore the de facto foundation of political membership today. However, what this dissertation argues is that this figure of the refugee has indeed been central to the political as it has been conceived and constructed, at least since early modernity and certainly by the era of state-formation inaugurated with the Treaties of Westphalia in 1648. The entire nation-state system is predicated upon an abandonment of particular bodies and subjectivities.

To some extent, the logic of abandonment articulated here is in direct contradiction to Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, which was and is a mode of power predicated upon the securing of territory and its population, and “making them live” and encouraging productivity. But a basic limitation constrains Foucault’s work: due to his use of a particular form of archive and his narrow Francophone focus, he rarely engaged with what we would call today globalization, or truly global phenomena, and certainly not with what we might call a global politics. Foucault inherits a legacy in Western political thought that limits the political to specific bounded spaces and populations. This is not to say that his philosophical and political insights should be rejected out of hand, but it is to say that the conditions of the political have changed drastically since the early 1980s. While I am sure that he witnessed early globalization, he did not really write about it, save his lecture course entitle The Birth of Biopolitics, which was really a course on economic liberalism, rather than ruminations on a global political space, per se. Instead, I argue that if we take the archive to mean not just the physical space of an archive in a library, but also contemporary practices of politics, we can develop a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the political, power relations, and philosophy.

My basic argument in this dissertation is that:

a) We must conceive of political space differently; rather than as a given territory coextensive with police or military control, it is instead various processes and moments of boundedness and unboundedness, or territorialization and deterritorialization, primarily conceived through a concept of non-linear territoriality. Non-linear territoriality lays bare the myth of sovereign political space, and instead privileges the ways sovereignty is always multiple, layered, and contested, as well as the fact of human mobility that often carries territoriality from one space to another without drawing a contiguity in between. Contemporary political theory must deal primarily with the impending death of the nation-state, the effacement of identity, and bare life, and it must do so while avoiding the traditional fantasy of territory.

b) Beginning with a different conception of political space, a global political space, inevitably leads to the undeniable conclusion that the vast majority of the world’s population at any given time is actually far from secure in their livelihoods, and are in fact living precarious lives under conditions of abandonment. There are numerous factors at play here, and abandonment is certainly not experienced homogeneously. (In a way, the abandonment that characterizes global political life is akin to Marx’s understanding of alienation as a social, political, and economic phenomenon.)

c) This characteristic abandonment is both a precondition for and a result of Western political theory and the constitutive exclusions that characterize its conception of the political, from the Greek polis to the nation-state. Given this ontological fact, we must redefine political theory beginning with a figure of abandonment, what I designate here ‘the figure of the refugee.’

The dissertation will take the following form:

Chapter 1 State-Formation, Colonialism, and Abandonment

This chapter grapples with the refugee as a liberal political technology of spatial correction. My hypothesis is that the concept of refugee first takes root in the immediate aftermath of the Treaties of Westphalia, precisely to solve the problem of how to deal with populations that become superfluous after the initiation of processes of nation building.

Somewhat differently than dominant definitions of liberalism – which locates liberalism as an 18^th and 19^th century phenomenon – I posit liberalism as coextensive with the nation-state and the colonial project, primarily because these are the immediate preconditions that make self-conscious liberalism possible. Hobbes, Locke, Montesquiue, Mill, and others in the liberal tradition are expressions of political thought only possible within colonialism and the nation-state. To risk a conceptual slippage at this point is acceptable, because it denies liberalism its self-valorizing narrative and locates it more precisely with the practices that served as the immediate conditions of possibility for notions of ‘the citizen,’ ‘the nation,’ ‘the people,’ and ‘limited government,’ among others, to emerge.

The first goal of this chapter is to provide an overview of the schism of humanity inaugurated by liberal practice and thought, that identifies particular bodies and subjectivities as worthy of political membership, other bodies as worthy of exclusion owing to their membership in other polities, and yet other bodies as completely unworthy of the consideration of political membership at all. This latter category included African slaves, and indigenous populations in the Americas, Australia, Africa, and Asia. The first order of business for this dissertation is to understand the concept of “refugee” in light of this hierarchization of humanity.

The second goal of this chapter is to locate the concept of abandonment as crystalized in particular relationships at this time. Unlike much of the field of cultural studies, or even much political theory, I resist the notion of community or state-formation as involving a constitutive othering, a process Agamben details in Homo Sacer as “the ban.” What I would add to this conversation is that instead of an “inclusive exclusion,” or the inclusion in the political by the legal, formal exclusion of a body from the polity, what we have is the effective abandonment of those not even deemed worthy of the ban in the first instance. This is not simply the splitting of hairs with Agamben on historical fact; it is instead a recognition that the ban is a relation already predicated upon a division of humanity that allows for the sovereign, and law, to exist in the first place.

Chapter 2 (Dis)locating Control: Transmigration and Precarity

This chapter is located entirely in the present, and is an attempt to understand the relationships among territory and borders, state practices of migration control (including refugee movements), and precarious life. While the previous chapter took a historical view on the concept of abandonment, this chapter seeks to understand the way states continue to produce abandoned lives through a set of processes that, in sum, are in fact a system of global apartheid that continuously renders a significant portion, if not a majority, of the global populace absolutely precarious.

Taking up various literatures, from border studies to political science, I argue that contemporary states operate in ways that assume non-linear territoriality, even when they retain discourses of sovereign state space and the strict control of human mobility. States, non-governmental organizations, and supra-national entities (such as the European Union’s Frontex), work together to enforce what is effectively a topographical borderlands that no longer takes the national sovereign bounded space to be its primary “container.” I argue that before 1980 (to set a somewhat arbitrary date) the form of biopolitics envisaged by Foucault could operate discursively, as states were primarily concerned with securing their populations and making them more productive. Due to a variety of factors, the present moment has shifted to being characterized by non-linear territoriality, a topographical policing space of networked and overlapping strategies and technologies, and the abject abandonment of particular bodies and subjectivities. What emerges is something other than liberalism, although clearly related to it, and the impossibility of continuing to define political membership through either the category of ‘citizen’ or ‘worker.’

Chapter 3 Refugee Studies and the Management of Abandonment

This chapter argues that the field of Refugee Studies emerged, largely after 1980, in direct response to the intensification of abandonment in a deliberate attempt to manage its most deleterious effects, yet in ways that would leave the international state system fundamentally unchanged. In short, this chapter details the ways that the field of Refugee Studies is complicit in an ongoing process of legitimation of the nation-state system and the violence that maintains that system. The main argument in this chapter is that ‘the figure of the refugee’ produced by the field of Refugee Studies (including self-assumed Critical Refugee Studies) is in fact a depoliticized figure that is only, and always already, posited as an object of management.

Chapter 4 Securitization and Abandonment: The Governmentality of Abandonment

This chapter builds on the previous chapter to bring in other fields, especially Security Studies, Political Science, and the related, but distinct, academic field of Human Rights Studies to capture a complete picture of what I call the “governmentality of abandonment.”

Chapter 5 A Politics to Come: The Figure of the Refugee in Political Theory

Finally, in this chapter (or several chapters), I begin to imagine a politics to come based on the figure of the refugee that would essentially be the dialectically opposite figure posited in the governmentality of abandonment. This chapter effectively hinges on the previous chapters; the former chapters attempted to understand the relation between historic and contemporary forms of abandonment, this latter chapter takes the figure of abandonment and reimagines a political theory that takes it and notions of non-linear territoriality as organizing rubrics for a new concept of the political.

Part 1

In the first part of this chapter, I demonstrate the ways that the figure of abandonment, the figure of the refugee, has haunted our various conceptions of the political since the colonial/liberal era (perhaps, simply, modernity) began. The figure of the refugee here operates as a figure that dis-figures, or profanes, those ‘sacred’ categories of the political: the Citizen, Man, Rights, the worker, the nation-state.

Part 2 (perhaps Chapter 6?)

In the second part of this chapter, I dissect the well-established discussion of the concept of ‘community’ that began in the 1980s. Important authors here would include Nancy, Blanchot, Agamben, Esposito, Miranda Joseph, Derrida, and others.

Conclusion

This final chapter will sketch out provisional conclusions taken from the dissertation as a whole.

research statement – the figure of the refugee

I was working on this for a presentation in my department, which has since fallen through. But I thought I would post it here, as I found it to be a pretty useful exercise.

*****

As a scholar, I am primarily interested in the problematics of political transformation, in both actually-existing and ideal forms. My work aims toward understanding politics and political phenomena genealogically and/or archaeologically, using Foucault’s and Agamben’s approaches to understanding concepts, practices, and discourses. In particular, I have been trying to understand the development of borders and bordering practices as an aspect of political sovereignty, and how current developments in the enforcement of human mobility would change that border/sovereignty relation. As a part of this project I have been studying European and American migration histories, popular and political responses to migration, and the laws and policies that enable specific regimes of policing practices. For my dissertation, I am turning toward a study of the figure of the refugee. This study explores the discourses of political membership from the point of view of politics’ excess populations, those deemed surplus to the constitution of a polity and expelled from a territory.

There are (at least) three basic strands to the dissertation. The first strand is to understand the phenomenon of forced displacement throughout history. Understanding, for example, the shift from an order of political exile of individuals to an order of mass displacement can illuminate changing patterns in politics, and lay bare some underexplored workings of the nation-state. I see the figure of the refugee as constituted by the nation-state, a state-effect, countering popular ahistorical assertions in the field of Refugee Studies that refugees have always existed. I also see the figure of the refugee, however, as an autonomous figure, marking the limits of the state and a potential revolutionary subject.

The second strand is to understand how the nation-state has operated through a process of interiorization, or the production of an interiority through a dual process of conquest and pacification. This is related to the first strand, in that this portion of the study is dedicated to the processes behind and discourses related to state formation itself. How and why is it that the process of state formation produces excess populations? This question is a step back from the preceding strand, from an understanding of the production of the refugee subject to an understanding of the production of the nation-state as the primary institution governing human movement. In other words, a move from the subject to the structural milieu.

The third strand is a consideration of the figure of the refugee as part of a coherent global system of complementary, but distinct, structures of state and capital. I argue that the effect of nation-state formation and continual processes of primitive accumulation is the production of an ever-growing surplus population. Unlike past eras, however, today’s surplus populations have nowhere to go, and therefore exist as an exterior population present in the interior. This phenomenon is what has given rise to a novel regime of contradictory practices of policing, monitoring, and controlling migration flows. The surplus population in past eras were expelled and, generally, only open to primitive accumulation after state formation; now, however, with states encompassing the entire territorial scope of the globe, there is no longer room for state formation, but capital would like to enclose, productivize, and capture surplus populations nonetheless. This means that globalization is not merely the shift to an immaterial or information economy, but is also the making-refugee of the economy. This process is ongoing, and opens up a vast and growing population of peoples to class conflict, but the composition of this “class” must be produced in conjunction with flexible workers in the knowledge economy.

To sum up, the questions posed in the dissertation revolve around a set of interlocking questions:

• What are the mechanisms, technologies, and practices by which states have mobilized to control human mobility? What can we learn about the state, power, and politics from these practices?
• How are states and capital operating in distinct, complementary, and contradictory ways that produce precarious migration flows, and how does this form of precarity articulate with longer-standing forms of labor flexibilization? How can we weaponize this precarity against capital and the state?
• How can political thought be opened into new directions by beginning with the figure of the refugee, rather than, for example, the citizen?

the politics of human migration: states, borders, enforcement practices exam reading list

Giorgio Agamben, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

———, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 2008).

———, trans. Kevin Attell, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

———, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, Means Without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Didier Bigo, “Immigration Controls and Free Movement in Europe,” International Review of the Red Cross 91(875), September 2009: 579-591.

———, “Security and Immigration: Toward a Critique of the Governmentality of Unease,” Alternatives 27(Special Issue), 2002: 63-92.

———, “Ethnicity, State, and World-System: Comments on the Ways of Making History,” International Political Science Review 19(3), 1998: 305-310.

———, “Detention of Foreigners, States of Exception, and the Social Practices of Control of the Banopticon,” in Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007): 3-34.

Didier Bigo and Elspeth Guild, Controlling Frontiers: Free Movement into and within Europe (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2005).

Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010).

Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

Kitty Calavita, Immigrants at the Margins: Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Howard Campbell and Josiah Heyman, “Slantwise: Beyond Domination and Resistance on the Border,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 36(1), 2007; 3-30.

Mathew Coleman, “Immigration Geopolitics Beyond the Mexico-US Border,” Antipode 39(1), 2007: 54-76.

———, “Between Public Policy and Foreign Policy: U.S. Immigration Law Reform and the Undocumented Migrant,” Urban Geography 29(1), 2008: 4-28.

Michael Collyer, “In-Between Places: Trans-Saharan Transit Migrants in Morocco and the Fragmented Journey to Europe,” Antipode 39(4), 2007: 668-690.

———, “Migrants, Migration and the Security Paradigm: Constraints and Opportunities,” Mediterranean Politics 11(2), 2006: 255-270.

———, “Secret Agents: Anarchists, Islamists and Responses to Political Active Refugees in London,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 28(2), 2005: 278-303.

Galina Cornelisse, Immigration Detention and Human Rights: Rethinking Territorial Sovereignty. (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 2010).

Catherine Dauvergne, Making People Illegal: What Globalization Means for Migration Law (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Josiah Heyman, “Entrapment Processes and Immigrant Communities in a Time of Heightened Border Vigilance,” Human Organization 66(4), 2007: 354-360.

Jef Huysmans, The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU (New York: Routledge, 2006).

Jennifer Hyndman, Managing Displacement: Refugees and the Politics of Humanitarianism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

Alison Mountz, Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

Jennifer Ridgley, “Cities of Refuge: Immigration Enforcement, Police, and the Insurgent Genealogies of Citizenship in U.S. Sanctuary Cities,” Urban Geography 29(1), 2008: 53-77.

Lucy E. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

Michael Samers, Migration (New York: Routledge, 2010).

Saskia Sassen, A Sociology of Globalization (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007).

———, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

Monica Varsanyi, “Immigration Policing Through the Backdoor: City Ordinances, The ‘Right to the City,’ and the Exclusion of Undocumented Day Laborers,” Urban Geography 29(1), 2008: 29-52.

William Walters, “Secure Borders, Safe Haven, Domopolitics,” Citizenship Studies 8(3), 2004: 237-260.

 

France and the Roma

I’m busy putting together a proposal for a travel grant, so I’d like to rehearse some of the abstract and proposal here. I’m also in the midst of putting together as comprehensive as possible a bibliography on France’s recent actions against the Roma in English, French, and some Italian sources (as the “controversy” has spilled over the Alps, where Rome has an even worse track record on the issue). Feel free to post links to media sources or references to articles, books, etc. To see what I have already, here is a link to my Digg site, which is dedicated to this bibliography.

*****

Proposal Abstract (very rough right now):

In late July 2010, a French immigration enforcement decision sent shockwaves around Europe and the world. The French government was to begin “getting tough” on illegal camps of an ethnic group often (and often incorrectly) labeled as nomadic: the Roma, or less accurately, Gypsies. Amid rampant speculation of French president Sarkozy’s pandering to his conservative base in the midst of dismal approval ratings, his government initiated the identification, destruction, and detainment of about 300 Roma encampments and hundreds of Roma families. France has a population of about 400,000-500,000 Roma, the vast majority of whom are French citizens and settled permanently in traditional housing. However, a small portion of the Roma in France live in semi-permanent camps on the outskirts of major cities.

Of primary concern to many were two issues: 1) the historical persecution of the Roma (and other similar groups, such as the Sinti) in Europe, including targeted extermination during World War II by the Nazis, and 2) an historical backdrop leading to international legal conventions guaranteeing the Roma the right to move and settle within the European Union. Observers, from EU Justice Commissioner [name] to philosopher Jacques Ranciere, raised objections to France’s decision. Many commentators were concerned specifically with the human rights implications of the forced removal of a group that has historically been singled out in Europe for their ethnic background and sometimes refusal to live by established European norms.

However, few commentators in the public forum have addressed the most pressing issues at hand: an inability or refusal to find another way to address issues of human mobility create conditions for future insecurity.

This pilot-study research project will include fieldwork at existing Roma encampments, archival research on French and EU policies, interviews with government ministers, and interviews and participant observation with non-governmental organizations. The goal of this project is to begin to conceptualize the role of human mobility in the contemporary political moment. Preliminary research goals include:

1)   To observe the functioning of state practices which control human movement.

2)   To observe a population considered “migrant” and their practices of movement, resistence, and acquiescence (i.e. how and why do migrant populations themselves buy into – or not – logics of State control of movement).

3)   To observe how NGOs and governments work together and against one another to control, direct, and channel flows of human movement.

4)   To observe the interrelationship between NGOs and the State.

5)   To understand how technologies of surveillance and control affect space, movement, and the distribution of people wherein.

6)   To theorize the relation between movement, constraint, and the contemporary performance of State sovereignty.

[Photos from the New York Times]

Immigration and the Performance of Sovereignty

“If politics today seems to be going through a protracted eclipse and appears in a subaltern position with respect to religion, economics, and even the law, that is so because, to the extent to which it has been losing sight of its own ontological status, it has failed to confront the transformations that gradually have emptied out its categories and concepts.” ~Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End

Taking only this passage at face value, one could read Agamben as just another globalist, a fetishist of globalization, technoligization, hyper-flows, and so on. Theorists of globalization (notably, Arjun Appadurai, Thomas Friedman) stress ‘new’ phenomena such as the heightened mobility of human persons (occurring both ‘legally,’ through the functioning of neoliberal capital and its necessarily mobile workforce; and ‘illegally,’ through the double phenomena of human migration brought about by new(ish) technologies and the increasing declaration of more and more practices as ‘illegal’); the global flows of capital, especially when capital moves in and out of a single country perhaps hundreds or thousands of time each day; and other such practices that seem to have “emptied out” the “categories and concepts” which have formerly made up our politics. But Agamben is not referring to these ‘globalized’ phenomena, at least not directly.

In several essays, Agamben refers to the figure of the refugee and its potential in founding a new politics. Why the figure of the refugee? What does he mean when he says that politics has been protracted by religion, economics, and law? How do these questions relate to one another, and why are they important in the current context?

Since at least the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, state sovereignty has been a discourse that has been relatively normalized (this is not to say uncontested) to the point where by the 1900s – wherein supranational organizations and treaties are constituted in radically new assemblages (the UN, NATO, Warsaw Compact, the EU, etc.) – sovereignty becomes the definitive organizing principle of international politics. The Weberian notion of the state becomes widespread; then, once contested by smaller and/or developing states, falls out of favor and is replaced by the notion that a state need not necessarily exercise a legitimate monopoly of force over its territories to retain its sovereignty (1933 and 1967 Montevideo Conventions). The era of broad-based civil warfare, as opposed to international warfare, becomes well established, eroding the strong sense of sovereignty inaugurated by Westphalia and ultimately theorized by Weber. Political postmodernism is fully established by the 1960s.

Globalization theorists are primarily useful only for demarcating the boundaries of postmodern politics and simply observing “what is…” that is to say, what is for only a select group of people. When they tell us that national borders are no longer meaningful distinctions, that either the fact of human migration or the fact of transnational capitalism as practiced through truly global corporations simply render borders meaningless, they are ignoring the performative notion of the state – indeed, a performative notion that still exercises an everyday complication for the millions of people who supposedly are redefining state sovereignty.

Every day, thousands of people cross borders, a phenomenon that has been occurring for as long as there have been people. Whether the border was a river, a mountain range, or an arbitrary boundary between one ‘nation’ and another, people have been crossing them. This is no new phenomenon. What has changed, especially since the end of World War I, is the increasing legalization of the process and practice of human migration. In other words, nations have been increasing the practice of declaring some people ‘legal’ and others ‘illegal.’

This brings me back to the question of refugees. There have always been refugees of some sort or another, at least in the sense that ‘nations’ have always produced an excess, whether that excess was produced primarily economically, politically, religiously, ethnically, or otherwise, or even through some combination of these. People have always been prompted to migrate because they have faced the choice of life lived one way or another, facilitated by picking up and moving. This category of people moves diagonally across gridded space, transversally – Deleuze and Guattari would call them nomads. What has changed is an ever-increasing striation of the space over which they travel and of the practices in which they partake.

States actively perform sovereignty by exerting pressure upon the refugee body (taken both individually and collectively).

Sovereignty is not something that simply exists, because nation-state borders are not things that exist naturally in the world. Even at the aforementioned natural borders – rivers, mountains, etc. – groups of people who were culturally or ethnically similar crossed them, and often lived astride them. So borders are not natural in any human sense, any sense of demarcating an ‘us’ from a ‘them.’ Instead, “Borders breed uneven geographies of power and status…Political borders designate a constitutive outside, a basis for identity formation against the identity or threat of something else,” notes Jennifer Hyndman in Managing Displacement: Refugees and the Politics of Humanitarianism.

The management of refugees is perhaps the ultimate form of biopolitics, as it is a normalized state of exception wherein the inclusion by exclusion of the refugee truly becomes the nomos of the earth, in ways that the historically-specific form of the Nazi deathcamp cannot. Agamben is right to point to the refugee as the founding figure of a new politics, because the refugee occupies a qualitatively different threshold than does homo sacer or the Musselman, both of which are produced in the paradigmatic Nazi camp. This is an important thing to understand when thinking about Agamben – there is no necessary parallelism between Sangatte (and here, and more here) and Auschwitz. The paradigmatic structure of the camp is indeed present in both, but it is necessary also to focus on how and why they each produce a differentiated figure.

On Anarchism

It’s probably a bit odd that I haven’t really had any direct postings yet on my political leanings, which are only latent in some of the earlier ones. And since I’m not exactly a prolific poster, it may be difficult still to figure me out at all. So, on the suggestion of a classmate/friend/blogger, I’m posting some preliminary remarks on my vision of anarchism.

On Anarchism

“We, the revolutionary anarchists, are the advocates of education for all the people, of the emancipation and the widest possible expansion of social life. Therefore we are the enemies of the State and all forms of the statist principle.” ~Bakunin

“This fiction of a pseudorepresentative government serves to conceal the domination of the masses by a handful of privileged elite; an elite elected by hordes of people who are rounded up and do not know for whom or for what they vote. Upon this artificial and abstract expression of what they falsely imagine to be the will of the people and of which the real living people have not the least idea, they construct both the theory of statism as well as the theory of so-called revolutionary dictatorship.” ~Bakunin

Anarchism is most often (popularly, at least) identified with the term chaos. When one comes out of the anarchist closet, the first reaction always seems to be along the lines of “well, won’t everyone just kill one another?”. This reaction is true when speaking of local or global politics. For example, Neoconservative international relations is entirely predicated on the assumption of a “state of anarchy” in which nation-states cannot predict each others’ actions, and given this global state of affairs it only makes sense to arm your own country to the teeth, maintain strict boundaries wherein absolute sovereignty may be established, and wars are fought to maintain order ripped out of chaos. One need not look any farther than the U.S. invasion of Iraq to see this form of international relations at work. But, at best, this is a weak form of anarchism that is only anarchy as such due to an etymological definition, not due to a theoretical formation.

It is important to distinguish between the mere fact of “without rulers” – or a weak anarchism – and the highly developed line of thinking of anarchism as a social and political theory (more properly, theories) – a strong anarchism. So, what I will articulate here under the term “anarchism” will be an elaboration of a strong sense of theoretical anarchism; one that can form the basis of a form-of-life that is social and political, not merely the absence of “rulers” but also the presence of self-organization.

Anarchism at its most basic level is desire for and action towards the non-existence of the State combined with a constant movement away from the sedimentation of institutionalized power in other non-State forms. At this most basic level, it is merely the recognition of the idea that people can and will self-organize in myriad ways without the need for a State hierarchy, systems of domination, or processes of accumulation of wealth. That’s it. It is not (yet) an assertion of anything else. It is not utopian or dystopian, normative or ethical.

People often take this non-existence of the state to be simply the weak form of anarchism stated above: the total chaos of non-organization. But this cannot be true, for coextensive with the evolution of humanity are forms of self-organization. And since humans, unlike amoebas, are endowed with some level of higher order thinking that allows us to reflect on and critique our own self-organization, we get highly complex social forms developing rather early. As Deleuze and Guattari note, the State is not some evolutionary moment (especially one in which we believe that evolution and social forms have culminated in such a form), but is coeval with human social forms. The State, in fact, is the history of conquering one group and overlaying the conquerors’ form-of-life over the conquered. Archaeologically speaking, we continue to find evidence of older and older complex societies that resemble what, even today, we know as States. But we also find evidence of non-State organization (Deleuze and Guattari refer to nomads as the paradigmatic example). The State, really, is one form-of-life that has an uncanny ability to capture and transform many other forms within it (in the same way capitalism can and does).

It is exactly this history that opens up space to begin to speak of anarchism as a complex social system, rather than some prehistoric state in which the social contract became necessary to prevent us all from killing one another in perpetuity.

Liberalism begins with the Hobbesian state of nature, which is anarchistic in a weak sense, in which the natural state of human relations is the war of each against all. In other words, liberalism is predicated on the idea that the natural state of human existence is to kill everyone else (Outside of the family group or tribe? I need to review my Hobbes…). So, the social contract is theorized in order to “fix” the problem, and part of the “fix” is the establishment of some entity that governs human relations. But liberal political theory wants to posit that this contract is predicated on the rational, autonomous, humanist subject, which means that at some point in history, human beings actually spelled out and agreed upon such a contract, setting in motion thousands of years of linear history culminating in the modern nation-state. Or, if we buy into European and/or American exceptionalism, only those societies which were most civilized and most fully human established a social contract – because, of course, Africa, Asia, and the America of the First Nations were not capable of such a thing.

Liberals tend to dismiss the revolutionary claims of anarchism (or marxism, or whatever) based on the ideas that it isn’t practical, or that it’s utopic. What they tend to ignore, though, is the specific historicity of their own position, and the fact that liberalism is the product of a highly contentious process over several hundred years that is historically contingent not teleologically transcendent. In other words, they are so beholden to their own ideology that they can’t even see that another world is possible. More specifically, they can’t see the fact that at the time that the Enlightenment gave rise to the possibility of liberalism it was itself revolutionary, utopic, and relatively undeveloped. All of which are criticisms lobbed at anarchism today as to why it (supposedly) won’t or can’t work.

Others try to define anarchism (such as here) through recourse to notions of human nature, or an absolute libertarianism. The idea of, I do what I want, when I want, though, is just as weak as the fictional “state of nature” posited by Hobbes. There is no human nature other than the biological impulse to self organize along with other complex systems (see DeLanda’s book on complexity theory). And supporting an absolute libertarianism actually feeds back into the myth of the state of nature, rather than recognizing that humans are social beings, and that there must always already be some sort of norming procedure that coheres a given community together. Yes, there is a fine line between community norms and domination, and key to an anarchistic form-of-life is the constant evaluation and negotiation of those norms, but it is not an absence of norms nor a permissive anything goes. Communities WILL establish norms and people WILL transgress those norms which WILL provoke some sort of a response from the community. Libertarian anarchism, then, is deeply flawed in that by relying solely upon vague notions of absolute human freedom they neglect the very nature of complex human life, which is communal. And with communities come norms.

What separates an anarchist form-of-life from other forms of social organization, then, is that all community norms are the result of an immanence, rather than a transcendent Law or State.

[Anyway, I said I would put down some introductory comments, and these are exactly that. They are by no means complete or even coherent at this point.]

Intro to Paper

I’m working on a paper for a Comparative Studies course on Foucault. This is a (rough, rough) version of the introduction to the paper. Thoughts are welcome.

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“In short, I’d argue that the logic of intensification is Foucault’s primary mechanism for explaining historical change: the emergence of new modes of power happens through the lightening, saturation, becoming-more-efficient, and transversal linkage of existing practices.”[1]

Contemporary discussions of power almost always have to engage with the work of Michel Foucault in order to be taken seriously. No other philosopher (or theorist, or historian, or whatever Foucault chose to call himself that week) has had as much impact on the analysis of power in recent history. Arguably, he has had the greatest effect on the concept of power since the great theorists of sovereignty, such as Machiavelli. However, Foucault never intended to present a unified theory of power; instead he focused on the disjunctures, the changes that have developed in history by looking for power’s effects. He worked deductively, combing through archives until a pattern of effects emerged that he then turned into a paradigm. The example of the panopticon is probably the most famous paradigm to emerge from Foucault’s work, but there are others: his analyses of sovereign, disciplinary, and bio- powers, his engagement with sovereign power, and his articulation of governmentality being the others.

Foucault died in 1984, in the midst of a new direction in his work, a direction in which the subject was emerging as the central concern of his project. In fact, he goes so far as to say that his project had been deeply concerned with the subject throughout his entire career. (INSERT QUOTE). Many of Foucault’s interlocutors have begun to interpret this “ethical turn,” meaning the ethics or practices of the self upon the self, as a recognition that his previous modes of analysis, namely archaeology and disciplinary power, were insufficient and needed to be moved beyond.[2] But I am uncomfortable with this interpretation, and I do not believe that Foucault believed so based on his collected writings when all of the “periods” in his work are held side-by-side. In fact, Nealon makes this argument quite convincingly in Foucault Beyond Foucault and it needs little elaboration here. What is abundantly clear from Nealon’s book is that the historical changes that occur, which require new analytics of power based on the intensification of previous modes of power relations, are central to understanding power in Foucault. Therefore, I assert that he must be read through the lens of historical materialism: the analytics of power elaborated in Foucault are primarily historical phenomena that play a minor role in the present, mostly as nodes in the network of new intensifications of power relationships in the present.

Essentially, the abundance of writing which apply Foucault’s concepts, such as disciplinary power or biopower, to the present in order to affirm the disciplinarity of certain institutions (i.e. schools) or the effects of biopower operating on bodies (i.e. HIV/AIDS policies), while perhaps useful in some ways are in actuality missing the point. This is not to say that someone cannot do a historical analysis of a previously unexplored institution or phenomenon and use discipline as an analytical matrix. It is to say that if we take Foucault’s genealogy seriously in terms of it being able to intervene in the present, we must move beyond the constant reaffirmation of Foucault’s analytics of power to ones better suited to intervene 25 years after his death. What Foucault could only imagine, and what The Birth of Biopolitics only hinted at, are the extreme changes in the realm of the political since the mid-1980s. Without overblowing the significance of these things individually, the combination of these forces is significant and requires new interventions with new analytics of power: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War; the end (or at least significant respite) of a serious, global challenge to capitalism, liberal democracy, and now neoliberalism; the rise of technology, especially the internet; the sharp increase in the fighting of civil wars leading to mass numbers of refugees and internally displaced persons not seen since World War II; the roaring comeback of sovereign power post-9/11; and more. These historical events cannot simply have Foucault’s analytics of power applied to them, as the historical conditions for, as an example, the re-emergence of sovereign power do not mirror the conditions of sovereign power in 15^th century Europe. This particular paper will focus on finding and beginning to articulate an analytics of power which can be applied to the contemporary workings of the nation-state that intensifies Foucault’s own categories but moves beyond them.

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[1] Jeffrey T. Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 38.

[2] For a more complete critical summary of the “conventional wisdom” on Foucault’s shifts in project, see Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault, 24-38.