State of Exception and the Politics of Identity

8/17/2019 State of Exception and the Politics of Identity

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State of Exception and the politics

of Identity

Tezozomoc3/31/2011


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Sovereignty

Sovereignty 1

James J. Sheehan, in his 2005 Presidential Address to the

American Historical Association, entitled “The Problem of

Sovereignty in European History”, begins his lecture as follows:

What is the problem of sovereignty? It is, first of all, a problem ofdefinition. Sovereignty is obviously a political concept, but

unlike political concepts such as democracy or monarchy , it is

not about the location of power (the sovereign, Hobbes wrote,

can be “the one or the many”); unlike parliament or bureaucracy ,

it does not describe institutions that exercise power; and unlikeorder or justice, it does not define the purposes of power.


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Sovereignty

Sovereignty 2

The concept of sovereignty has to do with the relationship of

political power to other forms of authority. Sovereignty assumes,

first of all, that political power is distinct from other organizations

in the community – religious, familial, economic. Second,sovereignty asserts that this public authority is preeminent and

autonomous, that is, superior to institutions within the

community and independent from those outside. In theory, the

sovereign can be no one’s vassal: at home, sovereigns are

masters; abroad, they are the equals of other sovereigns.


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Political Theology

In his Political Theology (1922), Carl Schmitt

(1888-1985) established the essential

proximity between the state of emergency

and sovereignty. But although his famousdefinition of the sovereign as "the one who

can proclaim a state of emergency" has been

commented on many times, we still lack a

genuine theory of the state of emergency

within public law.


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Theory of Sovereignty

Schmitt's theory of sovereignty can be read as the response to

Benjamin's critique of violence. What is the problem Benjamin

poses in his "Critique of Violence"? For him, the question is how

to establish the possibility of a future violence outside of, or

beyond the law, a violence which could rupture the dialecticbetween the violence that poses and the one that conserves the

law. Benjamin calls this other violence "pure," "divine," or

"revolutionary." That which the law cannot stand, that which it

resents as an intolerable menace, is the existence of a violence

that would be exterior to it, and this not only because its finalitieswould be incompatible with the purpose of the legal order, but

because of the "simple fact of its exteriority."


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Walter Benjamin

Benjamin reformulates the opposition in order to turn

it against Schmitt: once the possibility of a state of

emergency, in which the exception and the norm are

temporally and spatially distinct, has fallen away,what becomes effective is the state of emergency in

which we are living, and where we can no longer

distinguish the rule. In this case, all fiction of a bond

between it and law disappears: there is only a zone

of anomy dominated by pure violence with no legal

cover.


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Western Political Systems

The Western political system thus seems to be a double apparatus,

founded in a dialectic between two heterogeneous and, as it were,

antithetical elements; nomos and anomy, legal right and pure violence,

the law and the forms of life whose articulation is to be guaranteed by

the state of emergency. As long as these elements remain separated,

their dialectic works, but when they tend toward a reciprocal

indetermination and to a fusion into a unique power with two sides,

when the state of emergency becomes the rule, the political system

transforms into an apparatus of death. We ask: why does nomos have

a constitutive need for anomy? Why does the politics of the West have

to measure up to this interior void? What, then, is the substance of the political, if it is essentially assigned

to this legal vacuum? As long as we are not able to respond to these

questions, we can no more respond to this other question whose echo

traverses all of Western political history: what does it mean to act

politically?


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Dick Pels – Property and Power. A study in intellectual Rivalry

Dick Pels (Amsterdam, 26 February 1948) was

Professor of Sociology at Brunel University (West

London), and is currently working as a free-lance

writer and political commentator in the Netherlands.Previously, he has held teaching and research

appointments at the universities of Amsterdam,

Groningen, Harvard, and Cape Town. Among his

books are Property and Power. A Study in Intellectual

Rivalry (Routledge, 1998)


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Dominion

1. Control or the exercise of control;

sovereignty:


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‘ propertyless ’ nature of power and the ‘powerless’ nature of property .

‘ propertyless’ nature of power and the

‘powerless’ nature of property .


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Modern distinction between property

This modern distinction between property, the rule over things by the

individual, and sovereignty, the rule—as it was originally conceived—over all

individuals by the prince, was absent from the doctrines of the church

fathers, whose conception of dominion still reflected the highly fragmented,

stratified, and interfused system of personal obligation and land tenure

which had developed after the economic contraction and political

disintegration of the Roman world.


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Feudal Sovereignty

No one within the feudal compass could claim to exercise the concentrated,

‘pointlike’ sovereignty which became a familiar conception only at a later period;

no one could claim to own the land in the typically Roman sense of holding

property as an absolute and exclusive privilege against all the world. Everyone,

from the king down to the meanest peasant, exercised a portion of dominion

over it, without anyone holding it in full severalty, i.e. as a walled-in areaforbidden to all others.

But since the legists of Renaissance Bologna first rebuilt the edifice of Roman

law, and reanimated the typically Antique distinction between dominium and

imperium, property and sovereignty were characteristically relegated to discrete

realms of factuality and seen as governed by essentially dissimilar principles.

With amazing regularity and concord, political thinkers came to repeat Seneca’s

maxim that ‘to kings belonged authority over all, to private persons, property’.

Bartolus, Du Moulin, Bodin, Grotius, and numerous others reappropriated this

motto. Francis Bacon recognized ‘a true and received division of law into ius

publicum and ius privatum, the one being the sinews of property, and the other

of government’ (cit. Lawson 1958:90).


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Dynamics of Property/Power


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Diamond Pattern from Domain to disposition


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Meaning Shifts


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The Ruin of Representation


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The Logic of Difference Iris Marion Young

Historically, Young argues, group-based oppression and conflict has been most

extreme when it is grounded in a conception of difference as otherness and

exclusion. This, in turn, presupposes a "logic of identity" according to which

groups’ natures are defined as essential and/or substantial. For example, men

and women have been stereotyped as rational or emotional, public or private,

and one group makes use of these essential or substantive differences tosubjugate the other group. The obvious problem with the logic of identity is that

whatever group tends to dominate, to have the most privilege and power, will

represent themselves as active human subjects and represent everyone else as

"others," not up to the level of the original, until and unless they find a way to

conform to the definition of the individual or the citizen established by the

dominant group. The long, sad history of colonialism and racism attest to this

disparity and conformism. The "others," those who have been colonized orenslaved, have found themselves judged "lacking" in relation to the dominant

group: "The privileged and dominating group defines its own positive worth by

negatively valuing the Others and projecting onto them as an essence or nature

the attributes of evil, filth, bodily matter; these oppositions legitimate the

dehumanized use of the despised group as sweat labor and domestic servants,

while the dominant group reserves for itself the leisure, refined surroundings,and high culture that mark civilization."


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The Norm

In western nations, the white bourgeois male is taken to be the

norm and model for the female and for all minorities; against this

standard all other humans are considered lacking and deficient.

Additionally, within this schema, mind is given priority over

body, reason over emotion, activity over passivity. In eachcase the valued member of the pair is valued absolutely. Thus,

any variation or contextual valuation of differences is denied or

repressed. Any attributes of specific groups that do not fit into

the schema of genus, species, and differences must be either

assimilated to one of the accepted categories (as inferiorcopies) or denied and suppressed.


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Aristotle

Aristotle's conceptualization does not simply create

hierarchies of thought; rather it serves to legitimate or

justify certain visual, linguistic, social, and political

practices that developed around the demand forintelligibility, rigidity, and hegemony. Therefore,

merely reconceptualizing difference is not enough to

restore difference as difference; rather, the ruin of

representation can be accomplished only on the level

of actual practices.


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Logic of Identity vs. Logic of Difference

To challenge the logic of identity and the conception of group identity as

essence or substance, Young proposes something very much like what we will

find in the work of Gilles Deleuze. That is, she proposes a logic of relation that is

less a relational arrangement than a conception of difference that begins with

the fact of heterogeneity and the interrelation of groups. I would prefer to call

this a logic of difference, since it must be stressed that relation in this case doesnot refer to some notion of relativity, and that Young is not arguing for relativity.

Conceiving of groups on the basis of a logic of relations or a logic of difference

means that different groups can no longer be evaluated in terms of the

categorical definitions demanded by the structure genus, species, and

difference, for this leaves the nonprivileged groups with the designation of

merely contingent "other," or even with no designation at all.

Ultimately, Young suggests, "social movements of oppressed or disadvantaged

groups need a political vision different from both the assimilationist and

separatist ideals . . . a politics that treats difference as variation and specificity,

rather than exclusive opposition.”


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Regimes of Signs

Gilles Deleuze (IPA: [ʒil dəløz]), (January 18, 1925 – November 4, 1995) was a French philosopher of the late 20th century.

From the early 1960s until his death, Deleuze wrote many influential works on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art.

In a classical liberal model of society, morality begins fromindividuals, who bear abstract natural rights or duties set bythemselves or a God. Following Deleuze’s rejection of any

metaphysics based on identity, Deleuze criticizes the notion ofan individual as an arresting or halting of differentiation (as theetymology of the word "individual" suggests). Guided by theethical naturalism of Spinoza and Nietzsche, Deleuze insteadseeks to understand individuals and their moralities as productsof the organization of pre-individual desires and powers.

Deleuze describes history as a congealing and regimentation of"desiring-production" (a concept combining features of Freudiandrives and Marxist labor) into the modern individual (typicallyneurotic and repressed), the nation-state (a society ofcontinuous control), and capitalism (an anarchy domesticated

into infantilizing commodification).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPAhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_18http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1925http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_4http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1995http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_philosophyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literaturehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filmhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine_arthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine_arthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filmhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literaturehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_philosophyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1995http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_4http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1925http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_18http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA


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Regimes of Signs (cont)

“Semiotics, in general, is the study of signs and their signification. As noticed byGenosko (1998), Deleuze and Guattari’s semiotics present a conceptual mix of Peirce’s logic of relatives and Hjelmslev’s linguistics; both frameworks are takento oppose Saussurean semiology. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) assert thatcontent is not a signified, neither expression is a signifier: instead both arevariables in common assemblage. An a-signifying rupture ensures transfer fromthe form of expression to the form of content. Dyadic, or binary, signification

gives way to the triadic, a-signifying semiotics, and Deleuze and Guattari employPeircean notion of a diagram as a constructive part of sign-dynamics. A diagramis a bridge, a diagonal connection that, by means of double articulations,connects planes of expression and content leading to the emergence of newforms. Fixed and rigid signifieds give way to the production of new meanings inaccord with the logic of sense (Deleuze 1990). Concepts that exist in a triadicrelationship with percepts and affects express events rather than essences andshould be understood not in a traditional representational manner of analytic

philosophy, which would submit a line to a point, but as a pluralistic, a-signifying,distribution of lines and planes. “

--Inna Semetsky, Ph.D., “The Phenomenology of Tarot, or: The Further Adventures of a Postmodern Fool “,http://www.trinity.edu/org/tricksters/trixway/current/Vol%204/Vol4_1/Semetsky.pdf


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Regimes of Signs (cont)

For Deleuze, the theory of signs is meaningless without the relation between signs and thecorresponding apprenticeship in practice. Reading Proust from the perspective of triadicsemiotics, Deleuze notices the dynamic character of signs, that is, their having an“increasingly intimate” (Deleuze 2000: 88) relation with their enfolded and involutedmeanings so that truth becomes contingent and subordinate to interpretation. Meanings arenot given but depends on signs entering “into the surface organization which ensures theresonance of two series” (Deleuze 1990: 104), the latter converging on a paradoxicaldifferentiator, which becomes “both word and object at once” (Deleuze 1990: 51).

Yet, semiotics cannot be reduced to just linguistic signs. There are extra-linguistic semioticcategories too, such as memories, images, or immaterial artistic signs, which areapprehended in terms of neither objective nor subjective criteria but learned in practice interms of immanent problematic instances and their practical effects. Analogously, a formalabstract machine exceeds its application to (Chomskian) philosophy of language; insteadsemiotics is applied to psychological, biological, social, technological, aesthetic, andincorporeal codings (Guattari 1995). Semiotically, discursive and non-discursiive formationsare connected by virtue of transversal communication, transversality being a concept thatencompasses psychic, social, and even ontological dimensions. As a semiotic category,

transversality exceeds verbal communication and applies to diverse regimes of signs; --Inna Semetsky, Ph.D., “The Phenomenology of Tarot, or: The Further Adventures of a Postmodern Fool “,

http://www.trinity.edu/org/tricksters/trixway/current/Vol%204/Vol4_1/Semetsky.pdf


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Baruch Spinoza and Conatus(Passions)

The Dutch lone thinker and optician Baruch Spinoza (1632 - 1677) is most known for hismetaphysical doctrine of monism - one substance, God or Nature. Immanence instead oftranscendence. "There is only one substance which can be understood to depend on noother thing whatsoever, namely God" he claimed. The substance is expressed or actualisedin two attributes, Extension and Thought, of which there are infinitely more, but unknown tohuman senses. The two attributes are within substance/God/nature, but need a third kindexistence to "enter" the world, i.e. modi, infinite and finite modes which as the attributes allare immanently within substance, or God, or as we might prefer to call all that exists, Nature.

There is nothing outside Nature. No goal, no finalism, no teleology. No externaltranscendent Creator, but a participating infinite existence that exists on one plane ofimmanence. This concept of God is not personal, but abstract and more like a principle ofexplanation. One does not need another relation to God than the intellectual love,scientiaintuitiva, which may lead to the state of beatitudo (an individual salvation, which is supportedby a commonwealth though but in the end apolitical, see Smith, p. 388).

Since all is in God as substance, political matters are also a part of God. All pieces hangtogether. Laws of nature and laws of the mind are the same . "The only philsopher of theday who succeded in providing a coherent theory of nature, of human passion and desire,or reason and of legal and moral norms is Spinoza", Harris states (in Deugd ed. 1984 p. 64),his 16- 17th century forerunners in political theory Grotius, Pufendorf and Hobbes were alllimited in some ways.

-- Jan Sjunnesson, “POWER AND DESIRE IN THE POLITICAL ONTOLOGY OF SPINOZA AND DELEUZE/GUATTARi”, Dept of philosophy, Uppsala Univ, Sweden, May 1998


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Conatus

No thing can be exterminated except by an eternal force, Spinozastates , referring to the concept of conatus. (latin for "striving- to-exist"). This "life-force", power to exist, is what the thing is, itsessence, Spinoza maintains, in his major work from 1677, the Ethics,part III, prop 7: "The striving by which each thing strives to perservein its being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing ".

"Spinoza’s true politics is his metaphysics" Negri says (1992). Thepolitical implications of his metaphysics are his definition of things bytheir capacity of act ( potentia agendi ). This capacity is enhanced ordiminished according to the affects or passions that encounter modes,how they are being affected, affect others or let others, by theirpassions, rule them. If there exists nothing else but the acting powers

of human individuals, it follows that the power of the state and itsgovernment is nothing but the disposition of all the citizens’ powerstogether, i.e. democracy in a sense before it got its liberalinterpretation. And since power gives rights, people have as muchrights as they have power, contra Hobbes who saw men as giving uptheir powers in a fictious contract.


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Passions

Power has two equal sides, the power to existand to be affected . Above all we seek in allways to become active, yes even joyful !Production of affects (chosen actions from

self-preservation, conatus) and sensibility tobe affected. Their sum is constant (either youdecide, or someone else). This sensibility maybe chosen, actively, internally caused , orpassive, externally caused. Most of our livesare filled with passive affections, since we donot understand the real causes behind thingsand events.


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Rights

If we grant men their necessary passions, we may buildup a secure state. Politicians who relie on good faith arenot long-lived and would prepare his own destruction, aMachiavellian theme, the difference is that Machiavelli

recognised a civic virtue in all men that possibly couldground a stable state, whereas Spinoza kept thevirtuous way open only to the wise. The multitude(people,) neither could nor wanted to walk the narrowroad to higher political or theoretical interests.

Machiavelli resigned himself to the people’s passions("They should know better!"), but Spinoza noted thatthey probably neither should nor could ("No, they’reonly natural !").


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Right as Power

Spinoza starts his theory of right from a stateof nature, as in Hobbes, but this right is equalto the power of the right - holder. The contractis not an abstract entity which keeps a societystable. Rather all rules must depend on power,

i.e. Machiavellian force or Spinozist (divine)power in all beings.

"Nobody can so completely transfer to another

all his right, and consequently all his power,as to cease to be a human being/. . ./It musttherefore be granted that the individualreserves to himself a considerable part of hisright, which therefore depends on nobody’s

decision but his own" (TTP, ch.17).


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Government or governmentality

the totality of practices, by which one can

constitute, define, organize, instrumentalize

the strategies which individuals in their liberty

can have in regard to each other. It is freeindividuals who try to control, to determine, to

delimit the liberty of others and, in order to do

that, they dispose of certain instruments to

govern others (Foucault 1987b: 130-31).

--Roger Alan Deacon, Fabricating Foucault


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Power as Sovereignty

Power as sovereignty conceives of both power and knowledge in the formof a tree, maturing over time: primarily vertical and hierarchical, with rootsand branches, top and bottom, dominant and dominated; where everysubject knows its place in a relatively fixed if historically mutating order ofthings; and where discourses and texts are grouped into specializeddisciplines and fields and ranged in order of importance. Power asgovernance conceives of both power and knowledge in the form of a web,“a fine, differentiated, continuous network”—institutionally-supported,knowledge-producing and discipline-effecting relays—“that connects pointsand intersects with its own skein” (Foucault 1979e: 89; 1986c: 22):simultaneously vertical and horizontal, hierarchical and lateral, with nodesand interstices in multiple, complex and contested interconnection such thatwhat is dominant or subordinate is not always clearly apparent even ifalways potentially present; where different and shifting locations may beoccupied by diverse subjects; and where discourses and texts referconstantly to other texts across genre distinctions. Power conceived in thisway as a web of strategic or war-like relations is appropriate for our rapidlyevolving “epoch of simultaneity” (Foucault 1986c: 22), the age ofinformation and virtual reality in which what only recently was a global

village is now being produced as a global body, in all senses of the word(body politic; body of knowledge; body corporate; and, not least, the


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Power Relations

Power relations produce responses, or instigate reactions, whichare relational and thus internal to them, not least because theoperation of power presupposes free subjects faced with severalpossible ways of behaving or comporting themselves. To speak ofthe productivity of power relations also allows one to conceive of

power outside of binary oppositions or, at the very least, assimultaneously negative and positive: power relations may inhibitthe possibility of some actions and increase the possibility ofothers.

The productivity of power relations are tied to their propensity to

provoke, oblige, entice, gratify and discipline. Power incites, itinduces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the extremeit constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way ofacting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of theiracting or being capable of action (SP: 220).


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Power Relations

“techniques of power are invented to meet the demands ofproduction. I mean production here in the broad sense—it can be amatter of the ‘production’ of destruction, as with the army” (Foucault1980a: 161). To reiterate: “not only ‘production’ in the strict sense,but also the production of knowledge and skills in the school, the

production of health in the hospitals, the production of destructiveforce in the army” (DP: 219), and not least the manufacture ofthose being educated, healed or destroyed (Foucault, quoted inMacey 1993: 288).

Much of Foucault’s work, however, argued that forms of knowledgeare to a large degree the fabricated effects of complex relations of

power (which may indeed include but are not confined to an‘infrastructure’). Contrary to the conventional humanist wisdom, it isnot truth but power which limits power: “it is the power over selfwhich will regulate the power over others”, reducing the ever -present potential for domination to “a minimum” (Foucault 1987b:129, 119).


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Power Relations

What I wanted to show [in The History of Sexuality] is how power

relations can materially penetrate the body in depth, without

depending even on the mediation of the subject’s own

representations. If power takes hold on the body, it isn’t through its

having first to be interiorized in people’s consciousnesses (Foucault1980a: 186).

The problem is not changing people’s consciousness—or what’s in

their heads—but the political, economic, institutional regime of the

production of truth. It’s not a matter of emancipating truth from

every system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is

already power), but of detaching the power of truth from the forms

of hegemony, social, economic, and cultural, within which it

operates at the present time (Foucault 1984a: 74-5).


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The Individual

The individual at the heart of Western humanist thought (whetheras natural hero or as bête noire), is not a natural essence but an‘artifact’, “a reality fabricated” (DP: 194; see also 1976a: 170), arecent and fragile product of disciplinary mechanisms which werebuilt upon Christian practices of confession and examination, and

came into their own during the Enlightenment. Indeed, Westernindividualism, far from being a common human experience, is infact “an eccentricity among cultures” (Morris 1972: 2), albeit anextremely useful and productive one. The individual, an ambiguousbeing whose personal rights are nevertheless subjected to the lawsof nature and society, is also only one among many “subjected

sovereignties” invented by humanism (albeit perhaps the mostimportant of these inventions): there are also the soul (ruling thebody, but subjected to God), consciousness (sovereign in a contextof judgment, but subjected to the necessities of truth), ... [and] basicfreedom (sovereign within, but accepting the demands of anoutside world and ‘aligned with destiny’) (Foucault 1977a: 221).


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Knowledge

‘Man/woman’, the self -conscious, reflective and creative author ofscientific knowledge and the empowered agent of progressivesocial transformation, is a recent product of a centuries-longprocess which can be traced back through various brands ofChristianity and mysticism to at least Greek Stoicism.

While the human sciences are unique in having as their object aknowing subject, the natural sciences share their embeddedness inspecifically social practices: “the sciences of man were born at themoment when the procedures of surveillance and record-taking ofindividuals were established”, while the sciences of nature—fromgeography and astronomy to medicine, botany and zoology—grew

out of general practices of investigation modelled on the religious oradministrative inquisitio of the early Middle Ages or derived fromlate-eighteenth century travellers’ tales (Foucault 1980a: 74; 2000a:49-50), just as, in Greece, “mathematics were born from techniquesof measurement” (DP: 226; AK: 189).


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Ideology

Theories of ideology are completely oblivious to the presence of

power relations in and around the truths they ironically seek to

defend against power, and thus persist in targeting those they

assume to have been duped rather than those, including those

engaged in ideology-critique, who take for granted the power ofscience.


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Logic of Difference

Iris Marion Young (2 January 1949 - 1 August 2006) was

Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and

affiliated with the Center for Gender Studies and the Human Rights

program there. Her research covered contemporary political theory,

feminist social theory, and normative analysis of public policy.

Documents

State of Exception and the Politics of Identity