archive : s0metim3s

Four remarks on an emergent z world

1.

Discussions of the state of emergency so often render the world in dismal and bloody hues sketched by some transcendent hand that they function as little more than occasions for lyrical indignation or, worse, simply fuel the exquisite sense of urgency that drives the activist—and therefore putatively transcendent—economy of demonstrations, symbolic protests, etc. To be sure, times are grim. But they have been so for most of the world, for a very, very long time. And neither pessimism nor optimism will enable this moment to be seized for what it might be. Nor, as someone once said, do we lack communication. What seems to me glossed over in usual accounts of the state of emergency is a proposition that may seem too terrible to consider but which, if one is inclined to embrace politics as risk and not retreat, is also a chance. My first suggestion is simple: if it appears to ‘us’ as if the present is an exceptional moment in the history of the world, this is not because it is indeed an exceptional experience for the world, but because ‘we’—what it means to say ‘we’—have come unusually close to a sense of the world.

Let me put this another way: insofar as understandings of the state of emergency continue to present the instance of the emergency as an intrinsic but, nevertheless, temporary aspect of the normal functioning of the law, then the chance to desert from the field of war without deserting the world will be lost.

In “Necropolitics”, Achille Mbembe notes that the concept of the state of emergency, as understood by Carl Schmitt, perfectly corresponds that of the colony in which, as he put it, ‘peace’ takes the form of ‘war without end’. For Mbembe, the colonies are “the location par excellence where the controls and guarantees of judicial order can be suspended.” They are, he adds, “the zone where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the service of ‘civilization’.” [Public Culture 15:1, 2003] In “Colonialism Brought Home”, Lorenzo Veracini discusses in some detail the “emergence of colonial forms in metropolitan contexts”. This not only suggests the much-touted ‘Westernisation’ of the world but also “the ongoing colonialization” of its colonial centres. [Borderlands 14:1, 2005] In understanding this, it might be possible to refuse war, and the emergency, in a way that the ‘exit-strategies’ demanded by so-called antiwar campaigns have not.

And so, from a perspective which declines to vouchsafe the partitioning of the world, the world has not ceased being at war, in one form or another, for centuries. This it is possible to know, despite the parochialism and nationalism of what passes for news and the history of the world. It is possible to grasp this despite the customary redefinitions of immense and organised violence as police actions, humanitarian interventions, civil wars and so forth. With respect to the world then, the state of emergency is not something that arrived with the introduction of so-called anti-terror laws in the UK, Australia, the US or Europe.

Nor is it the exception to the norm which suddenly takes shape under the geopoliticised heading of ‘war has come home’, as British and Australian governments introduce ‘shoot to kill’ policing, or as Blackwater mercenaries relocated from Iraq patrol the streets of New Orleans. Such accounts would have us grant the division of the world into states of ‘exception’ and ‘normal states’—or, at the very least, to recapitulate to a sense of who ‘us’ is along those lines. Something that, in any event, is what the borders, ramparts and checkpoints around aforementioned states have always sought to accomplish—but have failed to do. In this failure, the world has arrived.

2.

Mbembe and others have discussed the emergence of the mobile war machine at length, for instance: the mercenary and ‘green-card’ armies, urban militias and regional warlords who might lease their soldiers to another power. He remarks that this plasticity in the organisation of military force is related to the erosion of the postcolonial states’ capacity to build the economic bases of order, as well as “the management of the multitudes”. But this is not discussed in more detail and, in his account,”the multitudes” seem to exist as objects of that machinery, interned and/or unleashed according to its logic. Yet, the global civil war that capitalism must of necessity be as it comes to constitute the world as a world market, was—for a time and therefore ‘for us’—contained by the enclosures of the ‘Third World’.

Today, that very demarcation has become unstuck, mobile. The logic that drives the war machine—and therefore its inclination toward either territorialisation or deterritorialisation in any given case—is not the control over resources or territory as such, but control over people, their movements, locations and lives. Territory here is the creation of differential and segmented markets, including the aggregation and organisation of people as labour by which to extract resources. Therefore, the recent mobilisation of war machinery is due to the historically unprecedented movements of people from ‘periphery’ to ‘core’ since the late 1960s. The inability of postcolonial states to secure order is not simply a function of their enforced ‘underdevelopment’ by capital and colonial states, but also their inabililty to satisfy demands for, and therefore contain movements that seek, a better life.

And so, the deterritorialisation of the extra-legal zone, if you will, comes about because, as Veracini has argued, “while measures aimed at the control of migration flows are inevitably framed in the language of national sovereignty, they ultimately establish a system of flexible degrees of border integration—a colonial system of regional integration.” In another sense, this indicates a spatial elasticity of the very threshold between ‘the rule of law’ and its exceptions. Most notably, this has included the introduction of automatic and extra-judicial internment of boat arrivals by the Australian Government in 1998, to the more recent excision of parts of Australia from the so-called ‘migration zone’, the export of Australian military and judicial authorities to countries in the Pacific deemed to be at risk of becoming ‘failed states’, the siting of Australian migration officials at airports around the world, offshore internment camps, and, not least, the drawing up of inter-state agreements in which other states agree to function as Australian border police in return for aid and suchlike.

Following Australia, whose experimental fervour in this regard might be seen as a function of its position in the ‘South’ but not of it, similar processes are also underway as part of European integration, with eastern European states gaining entry on condition of becoming migrant processing zones, or African states agreeing to act as internment camps by proxy. It is perhaps not necessary here to reiterate the case of Guantanamo Bay, the subcontracting of torture and so on which has accompanied the declaration of a permanent war on ‘non-state’ combatants, except to note the extent to which the threshold between ‘war’ and ‘peace’ has acquired a motility precisely through a flexible, moving definition of ‘lawlessness’, in which everyone is a suspect and can be summarily detained without cause given or examined, and against whom anything becomes permitted.

3.

To reiterate, as Mbembe shows, the concept of the state of emergency closely approximates the geopolitical relation of ‘core’ and ‘periphery’. This is analogous to, and I think constituted by, a more complex play of the differences and connections between the ostensible contractual freedoms of wage labour and the bonds of slavery. Where the wage contract is formally the equivalent of ‘the rule of law’, forced labour assumes the character of the exception. To be sure, the so-called freedoms of wage labour are premised on what can never be entirely feasible, that is: to treat one’s self, absolutely and without limit, as property, a thing. In this sense, the distinction with slavery amounts to little more than the internalisation of command as habit, just as the the so-called ‘normal state’ against which ‘the state of exception’ might be distinguished is perhaps nothing other than the habituation to a particular organisation of violence—say, the state’s monopoly of violence—as the norm.

Nevertheless, it is the case that the rise of precarious working conditions in certain sectors in the metropoles, as well as the increasing resort to workfare or ‘work for the dole’ regimes, once again seems to mark out the theme of the ‘exception to the norm’, in this case as the deviation from the normal functioning of capitalism and work. So here, again, it may well be crucial to note that slavery is indeed the norm, even while it takes the form of contracts signed under threat of starvation or, at the very least, impoverishment, just as the workhouses and forced labour did not disappear but were exported from Europe. And so, the grammar of the contract as barely-veiled coercion become more pronounced as the line between ‘the West’ and ‘the colony’ becomes more porous.

Responding to the suggestion that currently proposed changes to work arrangements amounted to slavery, the Australian Prime Minister repeats the mantra: “Everyone who wants a job will have one”. Without the persistent threat of the example that the exception provides—that someone be made an example of and that such examples circulate as the affective, othered component of labour market competition—the contract no longer appears as the semblance of a voluntary agreement, as the expression of a choice. Even so, the thin—but tangible and segmented—demarcation between contract and compulsion falters because the geopolitical demarcations in which it once existed through have been traversed not, in the first instance by capital, but by those who attempted to flee its most ferocious workings.

4.

Capitalism is not simply the extraction of surplus value. It is also a system of value as such in which non-value is declared. Veracini notes in passing the fluidity of biometric technologies by which distinctions were made for “the strategic purpose of distinguishing between ‘laborious’ and ‘dangerous’ classes”. He also notes that such technologies travelled in many instances from colonised countries to colonial states. But on the broader question of value, Schmitt knew this, at least: “Those who posit a value always also posit, eo ipso, a non-value. The sense of this positing of non-value is the annihilation of non-value.” Moreover, the “logic of value and non-value unfolds all of its destructive consequence, and forces the creation of ever newer and deeper discriminations, criminalizations, and devaluations, up to the point of the annihilation of every life unworthy of existing.”

Therefore, just as it becomes necessary to open the analysis of the state of emergency to the world, it becomes just as important to refuse the inclination to render the world as a commonplace, a community if you will. Undoubtedly, there is no other world than this one. But that this world is all there is, that it is finite, does not suggest that those who inhabit it are the same, part of some common humanity and therefore destined, if fortunate enough, to be measured by the same values. Such is the idealised version of a world given over to the market and ruin in the same instance, the world that is not only ‘Westernised’ but ‘colonialised’.

But, still, there are openings. That the trauma of New Orleans consisted, for so many, in the ‘This couldn’t be happening here or now, here and now, in this place’ is certainly an index of the extent to which a geopolitically partitioned understanding of the emergency remains. Levinas argued that trauma is an encounter with the other and an opening toward the ethical. That insight might be shifted from its philosophic register to suggest that such traumatic moments are also the manifestation of the world, both the cracks of the world and the possibility of an opening toward it.

How, therefore, might it be possible to avoid a reiteration of the exception that attends the sovereign decision in the very attempt to take leave of the state of emergency? Put another way: how might it be possible to share the experience of the emergency that is the world—of the emergence of the world against its biopolitical fracture—that is not also the reinscription of a universal measure?
Not sharing conceived as the restoration of loss or as compensation, for which there would have to be a measure that, itself, would remain indifferent to difference—a calculus which works through Halliburton no more than certain notions of justice and redemption. Nor sharing as communion, even less as identity. Each of these forms of ‘sharing’ renounce—or simply digest—finitude and difference. As Levinas also noted, death is “the death of other people”. Therefore, if one only responds to catastrophe if it can be apostrophised as one’s own personal catastrophe, then one will always succumb to the response-management systems of sovereignty and its exceptions: the annihilation of non-value that accompanies the measure of value. What’s at stake here is how one responds to the other, to others in their very difference from ‘us’. For world to be otherwise, it cannot be regarded as either ‘our world’ or folded into the claim that ‘we are the world’. The world is not a property that might be distributed (according to what measure?) or redeemed as one might cash in a banknote. But it is, nevertheless, a world that is shared. So then, sharing without presupposition and always posed as a question of one’s relation toward finitude, difference and alterity at each moment one is called upon to decide who ‘we’ are, what might be shared and with whom, how the world can be.

Here, the risks are perhaps no less formidable than are the hazards of continuing as before. But to risk nothing is to acquiesce to the interminable anxiety that crystallises around the ‘total war’ rather than chance the pleasures, sadness and stirrings of being in the world.