The Role of the State and the Liberal 'Public Sphere', Steve Wright and Angela Mitropoulos [Arena Magazine, Feb-March 2002. p17]
Recent issues of Arena Magazine have hosted a useful -- if at times oblique -- debate about the role of the state. This is no idle discussion. What is at stake here can easily be discerned by noting, as one example, the federal government's recent efforts to criminalise dissent through so-called counter-terrorist laws. How best to respond to this situation? Jenny Hocking argues that it is necessary to uphold `our civic traditions', defend the rule of law, and so on (Arena Magazine no. 56). This is echoed in Guy Rundle's editorial for the same issue. Here, Rundle adds that such a defence has been impeded by `a Marxist interpretation of the state', one which he sees as having underestimated the importance of the `liberal political sphere'. In a version of the Arena editorial for The Paper, Rundle reproaches `the crude Marxist idea that the state is the mere representation of the ruling class' (30 November 2001). There, he goes on to suggest that the failure to defend `the liberal political sphere' will lead to `the darkest possibility' `that some of us will end up in prison sooner rather than later'. It is here, in the grammar of belonging, that Rundle reveals the limits of both `the liberal political sphere' and his approach. We will come back to this.
First, let us note that there is no argument from us about the pressing need to ward off these latest efforts to repress dissent. But to understand the recent anti-dissent legislation via the prism of the `liberal political sphere' or `our civic traditions' actually means conceding the basic terms of the debate to advocates of the new legislation. In particular, it means denying that the rule of law embodying such `civic traditions' and delineating the `liberal political sphere' is intimately connected with those exceptions from the rule of law that have already imposed that `darkest possibility' upon internees at Woomera and elsewhere. If we escape the grammatical enclosure of the nation-state, those interned in Woomera, Port Hedland and Maribyrnong are `some of us'.
Therefore, while Hocking can take comfort in `our civic traditions' (the presumption of innocence, trial, etc.), she by-passes the fact that these cannot be accessed by those in the internment camps while they are under the jurisdiction of `our civic traditions'. Not having had citizenship conferred on them by the state or via the enduring doctrine of `blood and soil', they are non-persons from the perspective of the state. Similarly, while Rundle cites the US Patriot Act as an instance of the assault on the `liberal political sphere', he does not grant any particular meaning to the fact that this law targets immigrants and non-citizens. As for the state's treatment of citizens, under the terms of `our civic traditions' all that is required to violate their rights is to redefine them as `foreign' or acting under a `foreign influence'. S11 protesters were `un-Australian', as were communists during the McCarthyist period and IWW members during World War I. Moreover, citizenship can be conferred but also (as Agamben shows) revoked by the state as, for instance, the prelude to the internment of German Jews in the camps. The rule of law and the state of exception are intimately connected -- one presupposes the other. In Australia, a state founded on the twin principles of invasion and penal servitude continues to oscillate between the rule of law and the state of exception, generally along a xenophobic axis. Envision the nation-state as the supposed guardian of freedoms and one concedes the essentially xenophobic form and outline of `our civic traditions'.
Secondly, counterposing a defence of the `liberal political sphere' to `crude Marxist ideas' might rhetorically provide the former with the demeanour of forward motion, but it does not quite conceal the sense of a strategy based on defending something that is past, or passing quickly. For if, as Rundle contends, we are witnessing the `beginnings of the shutdown of the liberal political sphere', then surely the call to defend this sphere is outdated. Because far from being a free-floating notion which can be chosen or abandoned at will, the so-called liberal political sphere and its accessories (the rule of law, the presumption of innocence, the separation of powers, etc.) are premissed not only on a deeply xenophobic logic as noted above, but also on elements that no longer exist.
What is different today? Money moves more freely; people are increasingly confined. Far from being a paradox, it is the logic of enclosure which binds together these two apparently inconsistent processes within the Fortress Australia version of `actually-existing neo-liberalism' -- just as the enclosure of the commons underlay its original foundation. Nevertheless, certain elements have altered dramatically: for instance, the jurisdictional demarcations of the Cold War, which (much like the conflicts between Church and State or King and Parliament of previous times that inaugurated the `liberal political sphere') placed determinate limits on jurisdictional authority and provided the space in which the separation of powers was enacted. Today, the international state complex has no limits, and (juridically at least) no outside. Escape from this is -- as the movement of millions of undocumented migrants shows -- less a strategy to be proclaimed by intellectuals than a reality that is already occurring.
Finally, therefore, and however isolated they may currently be, struggles to challenge the twin pincers of enclosure are something other than the expressions of a `liberal political sphere', which by definition is always constituted through the tyranny of citizenship, that is, the mutual indifference characteristic of market relations and the exclusion of all those who do not belong to the nation-state. To put it another way: it is only by moving beyond efforts to `protect the state from itself' that we can begin to glimpse those other practices that, even within the apparent banality of daily routine, already gesture towards an emerging `non-state public sphere', one wherein bodies can be something more, and other, than things.
