°Contract
Some of a draft on contractualism and borders.
The contract, as conceived in classical philosophy and beyond, is routinely defined in opposition to, or as the overcoming of, the “state of nature”. Indeed, whether it assumes the mythical proportions of the social contract or the more banal juridico-commercial moralism of the wage contract, it remains captivated by this bordering. To be sure, the demarcation is further serialised in commonplace pairs, and various social contract theorists may emphasise one of these more than the other; but it is the particular sense of the boundary-line that is significant here. On the one side what is deemed normal, essential, foundational what is, in other words, norm, essence or ground; on the other, pathology, anomaly, that which is extraneous – peace/war, free labour/slavery, civilised/barbarian, reason/emotion, and so on. The distinction can be construed as indicating a temporal passage, as in the progression or development from the state of nature to the social contract, presented as an origin story and, in doing so, disavowed or romanticised. Or, it can be suggestive of territorial boundaries, as Mbembe argues of the presentation of postcolonial spaces as zones of a permanent war. Or, further still, the division is regarded as proof of a capacity or, alternately, an incapacity for signing one’s name to a contract, revealed in an entire typology of markers said to be inherent. In most cases it will be a combination of all of these.
But the very sense of the dichotomisation of state of nature/contract, and the connotations that have been gathered around it, is irrevocably tied to the continually restaged historical event of the colonial encounter, of the constitution of Europe, its borders, both internal and external, the determination of “core” and “periphery” and, in particular, the export of borders as such in the centuries-long processes of colonisation. If Schmitt’s political theology turned around the existential vocabularies of friendship and enmity, his later characterisation of nomos – of the adhesion of being and law – is distinguished (if one leaves aside his primordial account of the settlement of the European peninsula) by the event of territorial colonial possession. Schmitt says of this event that it is ‘unrepeatable’, although he repeatedly gravitates around its various aspects, often theologised but just as often explicitly put.
Therefore, the apprehension of the contract as the foundational ordering and distribution of what will pass for politics is a deeply geo-philosophical exercise. It does not exhaust the sense of relation, even as it has come to be thought – and enforced – as the model of proper relation as such. Nor does the structure of the contract correspond with that of the promise, even as the assertion of their equivalence has long provided the pivot for the coalition of the geo-philosophical and the juridico-commercial in a transcendentalised language of equivalences. It is, rather a way in which war (among other things) is conceived as external, relegated to an outside – or, more precisely, the way in which juridical distinctions regarding violence are launched in a moralising register, as that which cannot be questioned but ought to be enforced.
For Kant, as for Hobbes before him, the status naturalis is unquestionably a state of war. And yet, this state of nature was but a philosophical prologue, a cautionary image and fabulous retrospectivity evoked in the midst of wars that were hardly the stuff of primordial history or entirely “outside”: the so-called English civil wars for Hobbes; the French Revolution and its aftermath for Kant; and, for both, the centuries of wars, revolts and conquests that created Europe as the ostensible realisation of contractual space, which is to say, the ius publicum Europaeum. In ‘Perpetual Peace’, while Kant may well begin by arguing that a peace treaty which provides for the resumption of war voids its legitimacy as a contract, he nevertheless proceeds to argue that the transition ‘from the state of nature to a civil state’ coincides with the recognition of borders between states and their non-infringement. In other words, the conditions of war are, for him as for others, the deficiency of borders. There are wars where there are not borders, or where borders are not recognised or infringed; and the war that conserves or restores the border is defined not as war but as policing, as the violence of “enforcement” and, thereby, the effacement of the conditions through which the monopolisation of violence is assembled.
And while Rousseau and Locke depicted the state of nature in much less ‘injurious’ terms than did either Kant and Hobbes, the premise and logic of the contract is the same. That is, in overtly defining the contract as the voluntary association of equivalent, accomplished and willing subjects, it is simultaneously presented as the condition of the political and – we cannot stress this enough – functions as the depoliticisation of its conditions. To put this another way: the contract is the means by which the political seeks to immunise itself, but perhaps less from some mythical state of nature, to which it becomes possible to transfer and ascribe all manner of presumable deviations, than from politics. In this sense, the contract is the “internal border” par excellence. It assumes both division and homogeneity, in other words: identity. On either side, the same holds sway, more or less. […]
Right on target! I’ve finally begun the actual drafting on very similar issues as well. Here’s one brilliant point by Balibar re social contract that I will be using:
The contractual bond is in fact the only one that thinks itself as absolutely homogeneous with the reciprocal action of individuals, presupposing only this equality. No other presuppositions? All theoreticians are in agreement that some desire for sociability, some interest in bringing together the forces and in limiting freedoms by one another, or some moral ideal, indispensable “motor forces,” would also be required. It will in fact be agreed that the proper form of the contract is that of a contract of association, and that the contract of subjection is an ideological artifact destined to divert the benefits of contractual form to the profit of an established power. But it remains a question whether the social contract can be thought as a mechanism that “socializes” equals purely by virtue of their equality. I think that the opposite is the case, that the social contract adds to equality a determination that compensates for its “excess” of universality. To this end equality itself must be thought as something other than a naked principle; it must be justified, or one must confer on it that which Derrida not long ago called an originary supplement.
the excerpt is from “Citizen/subject” in Who comes after the subject?
pomegranade [February 12, 2007 @ 2:20 pm]
I’m not so sure about Balibar’s ‘equaliberty’. I feel a little too haunted by Tocqueville, perhaps. But the sense of the ‘excess of universality’ is worth thinking through more.
I’ve been turning around the contract thing for a while, and it seemed to be emerging as a crucial hinge in thinking through so much, the Cronulla pogrom, ’social net-working’ … There’s some other touchstones/quotes for thinking through the contract in those essays that I’ve found important, Walter Benjamin in the latter piece, Rousseau in the former.
And oh, pom - I’ve spent the last week whining about having lent my copy of Balibar’s Masses, Classes, Ideas to someone years ago, and not quite recalling who, and wondering whether I can afford to pay around $90 for a new copy. For the chapter on Fichte and the internal border, most obviously … But I guess I should (also) lean over to the bookshelf and pull out Who Comes After the Subject? volume. Silly me, really.
(Oh, and I tried unpacking the first part a little last night, so some edits.)
s0metim3s [February 12, 2007 @ 2:56 pm]
It seems we are all writing on contracts lately! There’s some good stuff on the pre-history of contractual theory (i.e., Italian humanists, scholasticism, conciliarist movement, and the Reformation) in the two volumes of Quentin Skinner’s The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. He, of course, is a liberal - so there isn’t much criticism of the contract, however.
Craig [February 12, 2007 @ 11:34 pm]
Yes, at times Balibar sounds plain normative about equaliberty, but I find the above passage brilliant for defining the contract not as constitutive but as supplementary: not that equality gives rise to the contract, but on the contrary, the contract is insinuated to take away the “too much” equality, and supplement it with a spirit of community… to block the “insurgent” tendency it embodies.
Benjamin’s Critique of violence… i’ve decided to use it after reading indirectly about it in Agamben’s SoE. (i’m so curious about your Mute article, yet didn’t get a chance to look yet).
and what do you think about the way Linebaugh treats the contract as inscription of the common, of the multitude?
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thanks too for reading suggestions, Craig.
pomegranade [February 13, 2007 @ 9:49 am]
Re: Linebaugh, do you mean his treatment of the Magna Carta? I’ve only read some articles here and there, not the book; but it had limited appeal for me. I don’t really understand the distinction between customary and property rights, except for the work it does as a kind of Proudhonian gesture - though the historical detail he brings to bear can sometimes be interesting.
Part of the reason I want to talk about a lot of this stuff through the contract - and not, or not in the first instance, the concepts of sovereignty, bare life, etc - is that in invoking an absence/lack of rights, the exception and suchlike, the tendency is for the Left/readers to reach for a discourse of restoration, of plenitute, of the restitution of a fabled commonality, community (or is it ‘commonwealth’?). Which is to say, yuk.
PS. Craig, do you think you could post some notes on Skinner? So I don’t have to read it, obviously. :)
s0metim3s [February 13, 2007 @ 1:38 pm]
The book itself - both volumes - are pretty easy going. Skinner is a more of a historian of political thought than an outright political theorist and the work is designed as a survey of the Renaissance, Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Having said that, it is completely understandable that someone wouldn’t want to read nearly six hundred pages! I’ll post some stuff on Skinner eventually - especially the discussion of Bodin and constitutionalism - especially the limit on the power of the monarch that he calls “la police” (I want to think that one through some more). The concluding chapter in the second volume can be interestingly read with/against Foucault’s “governmentality” lecture. Not sure if Skinner would see it that way, though.
My studies in pre-seventeenth political theory are going to take me into Gierke’s book on natural law theories of society, a book called The Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship (about the relation between law and the discovery of history beyond annals and panegyrics), and two books on Bodin by Julian Franklin (one on Bodin’s pre-Six Books work and the other on the Six Books). After that, it is Hobbes and Locke. So, there should be some good notes (I hope) forthcoming.
Craig [February 13, 2007 @ 2:13 pm]
I look forward to reading them.
Btw, Keechang Kim gives Bodin a distinctive status in Aliens in Medieval Law, or at least according to Torpey’s review of that book (haven’t laid my hands on the book as yet).
s0metim3s [February 13, 2007 @ 2:29 pm]
What makes Bodin particularly interesting is that his turn to a defense of absolutism in the Six Books is largely a response to the Reformation - his Method for the Easy Comprehension of History presents a defense of constitutionalism and, hence, is a precursor to modern liberal popular sovereignty.
Craig [February 13, 2007 @ 3:04 pm]