archive : s0metim3s

My two remarks (and a half) at the Measure for Measure workshop:

One

The border is that place, or set of procedures, through which the distinction, but also the acquaintance, between value and use-value is arranged. In that sense, the border deliberates upon a kind of dialectic, the filtering of differences by indifference and abstraction, the imposition of measures of both what is useful – as in what particular kinds of skilled labour, and the very definition of skill, that may be useful to any given national economy – and what is different (or indifferent) in an innovatory sense. In this regard, the border is a filter. And, as with the categories of value, the encounter at the border here is an encounter of terms that that are internal to capital.

But the border is also the processes which enact the distinction between value and non-value. By which I mean: the border does not merely filter, it also excludes, constitutes that which is deemed worthless, superfluous, not amenable to measure. At the border, one is not only confronted with questions about the potential for value-creation, and with the imposition of indifference as a result of these questions. There are also determinations of worthlessness, of that which is without value. The border excludes both absolutely and selectively; includes on certain conditions and with particular consequences.

In this sense, the border cannot be thought on one or the other side of debates about whether value might be conceived in dialectical or immanent terms. It can only be understood, I think, as the tension and difficulty that resides between those two positions. In this sense, it remains important, I would argue, to give an account of a certain dialectic and its pertinence, but to also refuse to grant this dialectic a status beyond its specifically historical appearances, just as it is crucial to refute those theories of immanence which mutate into a version of dialectical positivism insofar as they do not confront the question of non-value that accompanies all determinations of value.

Two

This is why, for me, the paramount question of recognition that is posed at the border – namely: Who goes there? – is a question to be analysed and not assumed. To present the question of the border as a condition of invisibility, or to characterise certain kinds of purportedly non-regular or ‘devalued’ forms of labour (unpaid, indentured, precarious and so on) as invisible is I think to, almost, inexorably install the answers of inclusion, recognition, visibility, identity.

Undoubtedly, the themes of visibility and invisibility are a commonplace of struggles around migration and their representation. The undocumented, and migrant workers in particular strata of the workforce, are routinely characterised as being invisible, as ghosts, or as hidden. There are some obvious reasons for this; not least that, being undocumented, one rarely has recourse to certain rights that those with papers do.

But, to assume that the problem of the deprivation of rights flows from the condition of being undocumented – as if this condition does not come about within a complex set of procedures and relations – is to fail to address the fact that the very move by which rights are accorded, or through which recognition is granted, implies the existence of a power to deny or withdraw rights and recognition. That is, value assumes the category of non-value. And, as theorists as diverse as Foucault, Arendt and Schmitt have indicated in quite divergent ways, this does not necessarily involve annihilating that which is decreed to be superfluous or without value; but it does mean the preparation for such.

More significantly, though, if one actually considers the kinds of practices undocumented migrants, but increasingly all kind of migrants and, indeed, all kind of movements, are subjected to, there is such an excess of surveillance that, to argue that the problem migrants face is one on invisibility is, I think, absurd.

In any case, recognition requires an external or transcendental criterion of judgement and of measure. This is why theories of immanence cannot speak of recognition without reinstating dialectics, and why dialectical ones must have recourse to a transcendental plane.

If I might end this with a couple of blunt points.

First, I do not think the eminence of visibility and recognition, particularly as they play out in discussions of migration, is merely a consequence of the conditions that obtain in migration. Indeed, given those conditions, which are increasingly shaped by internment and deportation, by surveillance and biometrics, the persistence of an ocular politics flows not from the necessities of unauthorised migration but from, first, a kind of Platonic sense of the political, but more recently the obligations and forms of exploitation of cognitive labour. To put it simply, cognitive labour is geared toward visibility and recognition. This is how it is strives to be valued, exploited, and so forth. By contrast, often the safest thing for undocumented migrants to do is to remain clandestine, invisible, unrecognised.

All of this is not to suggest that clandestinity is a virtue, any more than visibility is. It is to argue that it is necessary to ask how certain strategies and approaches come to be assumed as having value, to ask how differences in the labour market and their legal codifications coincide with differences in political strategies assumed to be of the Left, to ask – in short – whether political monotheism might not be the corollary of determinations of value that are, at the same time, determinations of non-value.

Secondly, I am not suggesting here that the most pertinent question is that of the absolute limits of value. Clearly, this absolute limit coincides with processes that, theoretically at least, promise a kind of infinite flexibility, mutation and inclusiveness. But, utopian characterisations of capitalist development aside, what is also clear is that value here continues to mean comparison. And comparison means competition. There are, I would argue, other forms of relation and of politics possible, ones that do not have recourse to notions of equality and its measures, or of rights and its proprieties, or for that matter of deciding which strata or kinds of labour might assume a hegemonic disposition.

I suppose the question that seems to follow from this is how does one recognise these other forms, or make them visible. But perhaps this is the wrong question to ask, insofar as this question itself assumes all sorts of things about who adopts this task of making visible, why, and whether the plane of visibility is indeed where politics – or a transformation of politics and the political – takes place.

But if there is one other thing I am certain of, it’s that politics exists in and through the kinetic. It may involve visibility, or representation or, for that matter, theory – but all of those only accrue meaning and its transformation in the process of movement.