This essay has been peer-reviewed by “Frictionless Sovereignty” special issue editor (Ryan Bishop), and the b2o: An Online Journal editorial board.

When Donald Trump addressed the UN General Assembly in New York on September 25, 2018, something seemingly unprecedented happened: in response to his boasting about the achievements of his presidency, the General Assembly erupted into spontaneous laughter. Never before had the President of the US, the leader of the most powerful state on earth, been openly laughed at like that.

This episode concerning the most powerful sovereign today is useful to present the frictionlessness of sovereignty as an antinomy. On the one hand, there are those for whom sovereignty is never frictionless. Rather, sovereignty is always the response to the exception (Schmitt), an excess (Bataille), a series of ruptures that indicate attempts to discipline or normalize that which is “abnormal” (Foucault), the product of how living is configured in the zone of indistinction (Agamben), or the response to the “rogue” (Derrida).

To this list we could easily add thinkers before the twentieth century, such as Machiavelli (for whom the prince is not subject to any morality and hence he can use any means—which is to say, frictions—to perpetuate his power), or Hobbes (who views the Leviathan as the “king of the proud” who need to be restrained), or even Rousseau (always lamenting the faults of modern civilization that make the sovereign right to capital punishment necessary).

There are significant differences between the various positions in this tradition. But the idea that unites all the thinkers noted above is that the frictionlessness of sovereignty is nothing but a chimera, a delusion whose only utility consists in the effects it produces—effects that manifest the operation of sovereignty’s power.

On the other hand, there is another long tradition that posits the possibility of a frictionless sovereignty. We can find this idea in Plato’s ideal state, in Augustine’s city of God, or in More’s utopia. There are two immediately recognizable characteristics of this ancient and early modern conception of a frictionless sovereignty. First, it is anti-democratic in the sense that the demos (the vulgus or varia multitudo) is seen as the source of friction and all these authors imagine ways to bypass it. Second, frictionless sovereignty is an ideal that cannot be actualized in reality. Thus, for instance, Augustine posits in fact two cities of God, one on earth that functions as the unreachable destination of the “pilgrims,” and one that is the real city of God, which is eschatological.

In the twentieth century this frictionless sovereignty—surprisingly, given its history—leads to different conceptions of democracy, albeit a democracy as not reliant on the people. Thus, we find theories such as Schumpeter’s that associate democracy with the calculation of individual interest which is in turn guaranteed through economic activity. This leads ultimately to the neoliberal conception of the “sweetness of commerce” as the pacifying agent of modernity (Albert Hirschman). Alternatively, there is an increasing proliferation of theories of deliberative democracy. The main representatives here are Rawls and Habermas. Deliberative democracy pursues an ideal according to which rationality can guarantee consensus and hence a harmonious sovereignty.

These more recent versions of a frictionless sovereignty also share two key characteristics. First, they repress the passions so as to arrive at different conceptions of rationality that supposedly purge the political of conflict. Second, the frictional is again unrealizable but in a different way. In the theories that rely on economics, the frictional is the financial horizon of the “death of sovereignty” in the era of neoliberal globalization. In deliberative democratic theories that tend to lean heavily on Kant’s moral theory, the frictional is the transcendental horizon of the coincidence of morality and politics.

Where, in this vast picture, can we situate the laughter that greeted Trump at the UN Assembly? The laughter indicates some friction but nothing of the sort envisaged by any of the former thinkers listed above. But this laughter does register enough friction nonetheless to be incommensurate with the passionless pursuit either of individual interest or rational deliberation.

Does this mean that we can simply ignore this burst of laughter as irrelevant to sovereignty after all? This may appear as a forced conclusion, one that strives to evade the need for an explanation of a reaction to a sovereign’s words. Does it mean, then, that the laughter of the delegates in the US undermines the distinction entailed by frictionless sovereignty, that is, sovereignty as either reliant on friction or as dependent on a horizon that is completely devoid of friction?

Instead of seeing laughter as miraculously overcoming a distinction that, as the above outline suggests, is sedimented in the history of political thought from antiquity to the present, maybe laughter shows that this was not a stable distinction to begin with. This is to treat the distinction at the heart of frictionless sovereignty as an antinomy. An antinomy not in the strictly Kantian sense, whereby a middle term comes to mediate and resolve the distinction by showing that the premises of each side were deficient. Rather, an antinomy in the more original sense of the word, that is, as something that is adjacent to the law in such a way as to challenge and resist it.

Let me be clear: I do not hold that any kind of laughter of necessity is a form of resistance. The laughter of the court jester, for example, can be an attempt to expend the drive to laugh in an innocuous way so as to eschew any challenge to instituted power. Laughter is not ipso facto subversive. Rather, laughter can enact resistance when it is directed against sedimented and hence hegemonic forms. For instance, I have argued elsewhere that Kafka’s laughter is directed primarily against the idea of an individual that has an autonomous free will, whereby Kafka’s laughter also suggests an alternative conception of freedom (Vardoulakis 2016).

The case of the laughter at the UN General Assembly shows how laughter can challenge and resist the framework within which sovereignty is thought. The reason is that laughter points to something that remains obscured in how we think sovereignty today—namely, authority. Further, this is important in how we think of sovereignty today, in an age where authoritarianism and populism threaten to deform the face of politics. Let me explain by starting with authority.

If we reflect on the incident at the UN that I opened with, it is not as unusual as it may at first appear. It repeats an experience that we all have encountered, namely, how laughter marks the reduced authority of someone who occupies a position of power. For instance, the child’s laughter at an instruction of the parent or a teacher indicates the diminution of the authority of the one laughed at. As Hannah Arendt puts it, laughter is the “surest way” to undermine authority (Arendt 1970, 45). The reason that the event in the UN General Assembly seemed so strange is that we have forgotten nowadays the important role authority plays in how we understand power.

Further, this example shows the inverse relation of populist authoritarianism and authority. The increase of authoritarianism through populist politics and by appeal to “post-truth” strategies exhibits a parallel decrease in authority. How are we to understand this phenomenon? First, we need to understand exactly what authority means.

For around two millennia, authority was a pivotal political concept, so much so that people often did not even provide a definition when talking about it, since everyone knew that one has authority when one cannot be argued with (Arendt 1961). Or, as Spinoza puts it, authority is “impervious to argumentation” (Spinoza 2001, 139). The fact that authority was supposed to remain unchallenged was also signified by external markers, a tradition that remains alive today: e.g. the gown of the judge indicates that his verdict cannot be confuted in the courtroom, or the uniform of the army general signifies that lower ranked officers cannot challenge his commands (Kojève 2014).

Authority is not the same as political power. As the example of Trump shows, one can enjoy sovereign power but lack authority. This is already clearly defined by Cicero in antiquity, when he insists that in the Roman Republic power rests with the people’s tribunes whereas authority only with the Senate (Cicero 1928, 492). In fact, the discrepancy between authority and sovereign power is a significant distinction to help us evaluate the health of the polity. For instance, Spinoza argues that Moses was the exemplary figure to combine authority with sovereign power, but this meant that he remained unchallenged, which was a precipitating factor in the destruction of the Jewish state (Spinoza 2001, chapter 17; see also Vardoulakis 2020).

Nor does the assertion of authority necessarily coincide with a diminished capacity of the polity to function democratically. In certain instances, people need to defer to the authority of one who has the expertise to make decisions about complex issues on their behalf, just as in our everyday life we readily defer to the authority of a doctor to treat a medical ailment. Spinoza was one of the few thinkers who was both a democrat and highly invested in examining the phenomenon of authority, which led him to explore the tension between the democratic imperative to disputation and the requirement for authority to be obeyed. Spinoza shows that this tension can be productive for a well-functioning democracy (Vardoulakis 2020).

Trump is a good example of the inverse relation of authoritarianism and authority. One of the oft-repeated promises of his 2016 presidential campaign was that he was going to “drain the swamp” of Washington DC. During his administration, this translated in the shrinking of the civil service and in the appointment of officials without experience to significant posts. In other words, Trump systematically undermined the importance of authority understood as the political and administrative expertise in the running of government. This has been a significant factor in the diminution of his own personal authority and an important reason why world leaders regarded as laughable his boasting about his presidency at the UN.

The inverse relation of authority and authoritarianism is not new. Marx also describes it in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Marx 1976a; see Vardoulakis 2013). Not unlike Trump, Louis Bonaparte is an authoritarian ruler and a populist—Marx says that he won over the poorer people by giving them champagne and sausages. Further, just like Trump, no one took him particularly seriously and no one thought that he was competent enough to lead France. And yet he prevailed to found the Second French Empire.

We can also glean this inverse relation in the late work of Hannah Arendt (Arendt 1970), where it is presented as the inverse relation of violence—explicitly associated with authoritarianism and totalitarianism—and power—linked with authority.

So, if understanding the function of authority is important in discerning the operation of power and in achieving our democratic ideals, then why is authority hardly discussed in political philosophy and theory today? According to a historical explanation, the power of authority starts waning since the Reformation, which precipitates a progressive change of its meaning, a process that the French revolution further accelerates (Marcuse 1973). This has led scholars to argue that authority is absent from our world today (Arendt 1961). But examples such as the ones offered above indicate that far from being absent from our world, authority still plays a determinative role through its inverse relation to authoritarianism.

A more plausible explanation for the absence of attention to authority today is a series of powerful shifts in academic discourse in the first half of the twentieth century that have also influenced the general discourse about politics. The most important are the following:

1. 1. The shift of the meaning of authority to designate political power. Here, Weber’s work is critical. In German, the term “Herrschaft” comes to signify almost exclusively political authority, while the term “Authorität” denotes almost invariably ecclesiastical authority. Using the term Herrschaft, Weber develops his influential analysis of the charismatic leader who is authoritarian or fascist (Weber 2004), thereby obscuring the importance of a figure of authority in the sense of someone who cannot be argued with.
   2. The gradual confinement of the meaning of authority to the psychological sphere. This is particularly due to the influence of behavioral psychology, and a particular landmark are the Milgram experiments (Milgram 1974). Even though psychoanalytic studies on authority are not be confused with behaviorism, they also tend to evade its political import (see Sennett 1980).
   3. The substitution of authority with authoritarianism as an object of study in political philosophy and theory. Here the Frankfurt School is particularly important (see Adorno 1950), especially because of the influential insight that authoritarianism not only is opposed to democracy, but in fact it uses the population to prop itself.
   4. The intense focus on totalitarianism as a system of governance that transcends the individual, which, as Hannah Arendt demonstrates (1962), was critical for understanding the rise of fascism, totalitarianism, and the Holocaust.

The effect of Weber’s work has been to narrow the use of the word “authority” to refer only to political authority within an established state so as to function as a near synonym of sovereignty. All work in the past quarter century uses the term authority in this way (e.g. the most significant monograph Huemer 2013; work on political theory such as Flathman 1980 or Wendt 2016 or legal studies such as Raz 1979 or Edmundson 2010). The rich, two-millennial tradition that determines authority as a figure that cannot be argued with and which is incommensurate with power has all but disappeared from view.

Further, the circumscription of authority into psychology has shifted our view from authority’s political significance. The only political implication suggested by Milgram’s experiments is that regimes such as the USSR that rely on obedience deprive individuals from their freedom. But such political inferences that go beyond the immediate object of study of behavioral psychology seem more of an expedient expression of a shared opinion in the Zeitgeist of the Cold War.

To compound the above, the Frankfurt School and Arendt have helped focus on political phenomena such as authoritarianism at the expense of authority, while paying scant attention on their inverse relation. This does not mean that the inverse relation of authority and authoritarianism was never noted. But the most perspicacious examples of the presentation of the inverse relation of authority and authoritarianism from around that time remain free from the influence of a political theory and political philosophy that systematically seeks to repress the importance of the traditional concept of authority. I am thinking here of works of art such as Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) that presents an authoritarian figure whose affectations are so laughable as to be devoid of all authority.

The critical purchase of Weber, critical theory and Arendt is undisputed in shaping the political discussion as well as our understanding of politics today. For instance, since Trump’s election, there is a renewed interest in Arendt’s work on totalitarianism and its contemporary relevance (Berkowitz 2017). Or the rise of populism as a threat to democracy that simultaneously leads to the rise of authoritarianism is customarily interpreted along the framework provided by the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, according to which authoritarianism is possible through the populist manipulation of the people (see Brown et al., 2018).

The few attempts in political theory to rescue the concept of authority are conducted with the provision of overcoming the traditional concept of authority—according to which one has authority when one cannot be argued with (Arendt 1961; Kojève 2014; Ricoeur 2007). Thus Richard Flathman interrogates the relation of authority and “the authoritative” in The Practice of Political Authority but the framing does not allow him to note the inverse relation of authority and authoritarianism. Bonnie Honig (Honig 1993) attempts to rescue a concept of authority through a re-interpretation of Arendt, but her strategy is again to leave behind the “outdated” concept of authority and present authority instead as a form of a performative that, like the Declaration of Independence, can provide a foundation that allows for the new. It allows for what Honig refers to as “(re)founding.”

No matter how perceptive such analyses are, they find it hard to account for phenomena such as the laughter at Trump in the UN Assembly. They also fall short in recognizing the discrepancy between sovereign power and authority, and they forget about the positive role that authority can play in a democratic polity. As a result of forgetting authority, contemporary discourse often lapses into a despair about the fate of democracy when authoritarianism is on the march (Brown et al., 2018). This despair is due to the perception that sovereignty in neoliberalism no longer encounters enough political resistance or friction.

There is a grave danger to democracy when authority is obscured from view while authoritarianism flourishes. The reason is that authority does not disappear. Rather, it is displaced in ways that authorize those in power to promote their interests. For instance, it is beneficial to Trump to lack authority because this allows the religious right in the US to authorize him to act on their behalf. This authorization is supported by having a Vice President who is aligned with the religious right. And it essentially moves Trump to subvert institutions such as the High Court by installing judges likely to regress on a host of issues such as civil and reproductive rights.

This process of authorization often operates on the logic of the least evil (Weizman 2012). The majority of the religious right in the US do not like Trump and they do not really want to vote for him. Rather, they voted for him in 2016 and they continue to support him because he is seen as more likely to serve their interests. The fact that he lacks authority makes it more likely that he will support the base who elected him, and vice versa. Democracy is in grave danger of being overwhelmed with short term interests and populist leadership if the function of authority is not taken into account.

My resolution of the antinomy of sovereignty suggests that the analytic power of the political discourse is stunted when the discourse is too squarely focused on authoritarianism as the expense of authority. Well-analyzed and systematically research phenomena such as authoritarianism and populism may be enriched when the traditional concept of authority is also introduced, since it is the concept of authority as impervious to argumentation that has had such a determinative influence on how key political ideas developed over two millennia—concepts that still determine how political practice and its understanding unfold today.

For this, we need to keep the inverse relation of authority and authoritarianism in sight. It is actually Arendt who in her late work describes the inverse relation of authority. As I note above, her earlier work contributed to the idea that authority is absent from our world today (Arendt 1961, Arendt 1962), replaced by categories such as totalitarianism. However, in On Violence (Arendt 1970) she draws a distinction between power, which is explicitly linked to authority, and violence, associated with authoritarianism and totalitarianism. A key feature of this distinction is their inverse relation. This is presented from both sides. First, “tyranny … [is] the most violent and least powerful of forms of government” (Arendt 1970, 41), and, second, “every decrease in power is an open invitation to violence” (Arendt 1970, 87). The decrease of authoritarianism contributes to the increase of authority and the decrease of authority to the increase of authoritarianism.

Even though Arendt notes the inverse relation and provides a quasi-phenomenological description, especially in the third chapter of On Violence, still nowhere does she note why this inverse relation matter for a democratic politics. This is another way of saying that Arendt does not note the paradox of a sovereignty that is both frictionless and imbued in friction when she considers the relation of power and violence, or of authority and authoritarianism. I hold that an answer to explore this paradox of frictionless sovereignty requires that we note the way in which authority contributes to the well-functioning of a democratic polity.

The traditional definition of authority as being “impervious to argumentation” (Spinoza 2001, 139) may appear at first to be a threat to democracy in the sense that authority appears to stifle the pluralism of ideas that democracy thrives on. This is certainly true, and that’s why a democrat like Spinoza is fiercely critical of figures of authority. Because a leader with too much authority stifles the public disputes that are necessary for democracy, the ancient Athenians had an extraordinary law, according to which when a leader became popular, he was expelled from the city (Nietzsche 2016). We certainly need to remain vigilant when we encounter authority.

But there is also another side to it. It consists in that, by its definition as being beyond dispute, authority raises the possibility of truth. When the judge delivers a verdict in the courtroom, the judge is assumed to be extracting the truth from the given evidence. When a general issues a command, the troops assume that it conforms with a battle strategy and the information the general has at his disposal. A teacher has authority in the classroom when it is assumed that the teacher is communicating true knowledge to the students.

The judge and the general may of course be wrong. They may have made a mistake. And the knowledge the teacher is communicating may have been superseded. It is possible to make judgments about the judge, the general and the teacher because they aspire to a certain truth. By contrast, when a populist authoritarian like Trump proclaims “send them home,” the visible racism of such a statement unburdens Trump of any appeal to veracity. This diminishes his authority but also makes it impossible to critique a populist leader by appeal to truth. Authoritarianism does not need truth. Conversely, to speak with authority, one aspires to be beyond dispute, not because one is simply attracting support, but because one espouses a position that others also can see as tenable—as true.

A figure of authority puts an end to a dispute or conversation by virtue of the fact of being perceived to occupy the truth. But no one has absolute authority. The possibility always remains that one will be able to offer a more compelling account of the true (Lucchese 2009). A figure of authority can never be certain that someone else will not raise their voice in reaction (Vardoulakis 2020). Allowing for the operation of authority is the opposite of a “society of the spectacle” where everyone is encouraged to raise their voice, in unified conformity, so that their voice in fact no longer matters.

Authority is important for democracy because it enables the voice raised to make a point matter. Paying attention to authority in the political discourse is to encourage everyone to take responsibility as an indispensable condition for the optimal operation of democracy. Even though there will never be any guarantee that the right decisions will be taken, and even though mistakes will be made, democracy can only operate when the voice is not lost in a crowd that mindlessly follows an authoritarian figure. Thus authority shows that friction is indispensable for a determination of political power.

But there is another side too. Authority requires the possibility of friction but it also requires the idea of the frictionlessness of sovereignty. The most readily available illustration is in cases of crisis or emergency. During a medical emergency, we defer to the authority of the doctors. During a financial crisis we listen to the economists. In the case of a pandemic, the politicians and the public seek the expert advice of public health authorities.

In political philosophy, the need to submit to authority in certain circumstances is often discussed. In the seventeenth century, this was customarily done with reference to the figure of Moses (Vardoulakis 2019). Leading the Jews through the desert in search for a state, Moses demanded authority. The attainment of the end required that his authority is strong, which was the case since it was both theological and political as he was both a prophet and the political leader of his people (Ricoeur 2007).

This tradition that valorizes the function of obedience to authority does not suggest that the value of political judgment is secondary or diminished. It does not mean that the political decisions we are called upon to make and which create the political friction described earlier disappear. To the contrary, it points to the paradox according to which under certain conditions the prudent or rational thing to do is to suspend one’s judgment and to submit to someone else’s authority. This paradoxical function of authority, suspended between the possibilities of challenging it or submitting to it, can lead to a radical democratic position, as for instance in the political philosophy of Spinoza (Vardoulakis 2020).

So what does the antinomy of the frictionless sovereignty teach us? It shows that interminable resistance and frictionless obedience are the obverse sides of the same coin, namely, authority. Not only is authority not eliminated in our “post-modern” world. Moreover, it shows the precariousness of our political judgment to obey or disobey. And because our political judgments are unstable, never purely rational and hence impossible to lead to an absolute truth, it puts the onus on the political agents—individuals, associations, organizations, parties, states and state alliances—to remain vigilant about the way in which they may fail or succeed.

Let me put this in a different way: If the idea that sovereignty relies on friction often leads to a despair about our contemporary political predicament that lacks resistance, and if an illusion of frictionless sovereignty defers our political fulfilment to some unattainable future—then a politics attuned to authority may have, unexpectedly, the capacity to galvanize our energies and to bring us face to face with the exigency to assess our circumstances so as to decide whether we ought to obey or disobey. In this sense, authority has the capacity to generate a space where contestation, dissensus and disagreement can be allowed to be productive forces that make possible “the space in between” (as Arendt puts it) where the political thrives.

 

Dimitris Vardoulakis was the inaugural chair of Philosophy at Western Sydney University. He is the author of The Doppelgänger: Literature’s Philosophy (2010), Sovereignty and its Other: Toward the Dejustification of Violence (2013), Freedom from the Free Will: On Kafka’s Laughter (2016), Stasis Before the State: Nine Theses on Agonistic Democracy (2018), and Spinoza, the Epicurean: Authority and Utility in Materialism (2020). He is the director of “Thinking Out Loud: The Sydney Lectures in Philosophy and Society,” and the co-editor of the book series “Incitements” (Edinburgh University Press).

 

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This essay has been peer-reviewed by “Frictionless Sovereignty” special issue editor (Ryan Bishop), and the b2o: An Online Journal editorial board.

The question of sovereignty is poorly formulated if we confuse it with the autonomous decision of an individual (Bataille 1989: 311)

On 2^nd August 2007, a Russian submersible mission (MIR-1, launched from the Akademik Federov) planted a flag at the estimated North Pole, on the Arctic seabed. Part of the activities of International Polar Year, its purpose was the exploration of the Russian continental shelf, discovering how much sea or seabed Russia could claim as its own.[1] Since then, popular, technical and academic writings have mused on the strange situation of sovereignty in the polar regions. Ownership of territory in either region is heavily contested, as both sea and land ice melts, freeing up the dream of access to colossal mineral reserves. But as I hope to demonstrate below, sovereignty couched in terms of possession, performative power and control will not work in the Antarctic. I will restate the seemingly obvious exceptionality of that continent’s situation, in order to supersede the apparently postcolonial critique posited by Klaus Dodds in particular, wherein there is nothing exceptional in the case of Antarctica. I will argue that our models of sovereignty, as applied to the polar regions, but especially in the Antarctic, fall dramatically short when they do not recognize the exceptional, or should I say, exemplary, nature of sovereignty that pertains there. I turn to Carl Schmitt’s anti-liberal presentation of sovereignty, thereby moving beyond the simplistic attribution of sovereignty to ownership and control, whether under a ‘sovereign’ parliament, people or body of law. Like Derrida, in his later writings on the borders of law, I presume a paradoxically rethought Rousseauian reading of Schmitt that accepts the latter’s proto-deconstruction of sovereignty and its legal basis and function, whilst rejecting the implication that therefore we should have a strong executive leader who embodies the sovereign decision-making capacity. This rejection is not just based on ideological rejection of Schmitt’s views, but also on a refusal of his retention of decisionist faith in subjective priority over a subsidiary object world. Ultimately, I believe that in traversing Schmitt’s thinking about the “nomos”, or legal terrain, of territory, we are brought to a position where we can grasp the strangeness of the Antarctic, without suffering any Romanticist delusions about its inherent hostility to humanity even as it stands as a paragon of the world ecology.

Sovereignty in the Antarctic is a dynamic process that addresses the fundament (and absence thereof) of sovereignty. Beyond banal difference intuited through the apparent a-biotic nature of that continent lies a deeper difference that emerges after reflection on precisely how the Antarctic resembles (or not) other polities. To this end, I consider Jessica O’Reilly’s model of the “technocratic Antarctic”, which identifies the ways in which the Antarctic does function politically, rather than imagining it as a place either so special it cannot be considered in any normative way, or as so normal it cannot be thought of in its specificity. I reintroduce the thought of Georges Bataille on sovereignty as loss, as willed absence, along with Kathryn Yussof on extractivism and excessive anti-geology.

In the end, what is ‘polar’ about polar sovereignty will be seen to be not about physical poles, but about the fluctuating quality of that sovereignty, as an example of the heterogeneous, “characterized by the strong polarization of its elements” (Bataille 2018: 31). Where Bataille intends this idea to apply to the opposition of pure and impure, high and low, I extend the idea to the double exceptionality of the Antarctic. The first of these (pure, high) is the basic legal distinction between it and the rest of the global legal system, the second (impure and low) is the resistance the continent has to that system, as it is a refusal, a renunciation of sovereignty that Bataille will identify as true sovereignty. He intended the method of heterology to extend beyond the realm of sacred objects, actions and situations, imagining a world of oppositional yet non-dialectical ‘outsides’ to the normatively formed world. These trade against one another as well as against the standard ‘inside’ of rationalistically conceived, liberal laws, morals, structure and habits. So in this instance, the norm is a legally sovereign power with whatever rights accrue to it, legitimated by international law norms. The non-norm is the absent sovereignty of the Antarctic, with one ‘pole’ the consensual agreement not to own the continent. The other ‘pole’ is the deconstructed sovereignty that actually persists in the distorted, experimental yet also excessive or “heterogeneous processes” (Bataille 1985: 156) of sovereignty that play out in the Antarctic.

When MIR-1 landed its flag, it was playing out a standard move in the ongoing spatial-legal conception of turning bare space into territory, i.e. bringing it under control. Several existing States claim rights over portions of the undersea Arctic, based on already-inhabited proximate land. All claimants have inhabitants that live inside the Arctic circle, and so this is not a colonialism based on a new conquest over indigenous peoples (leaving aside debates about existing occupation, ownership and indigeneity). It is a form of primordial colonialism, spatial control, but one that post-colonialism finds hard to grasp, not least because we could imagine it to be post-colonial colonialization. Schmitt, alternatively, identifies the drawing of lines, the process of enclosure, as itself an act, a sovereign act of power. This does not exhaust his ideas on the matter, particularly where the law of the sea is concerned, but actually the Arctic is only witnessing one level of sovereignty discussion, the most basic (or wrong, as Rousseau and Schmitt would concur), which is about ownership of already-existing, already-defined spaces. Nothing novel or unusual is playing out in the Arctic: while five states have coastal rights that extend to 200 miles from the end of the continental shelf, the rest is under the jurisdiction of the UN convention on the law of the sea.[2] There is no sovereignty hole, in legal terms, over or under the Arctic.

The Antarctic is very different, firstly because it has no indigenous human population. Any colonization we could refer to must refer us back to the colonization that is all human occupation of territory, as opposed to the age of world-domination, extractionism and slavery propagated by leading European powers between 1492 and whenever (or if) we deem this period to have ended. The continent was unattainable, except to the imagination, to the extent that the first documented sightings were in the late 18^th century, incidental discoveries made by representatives of leading colonial powers such as Britain and France. In the early 19^th century, sightings of and landings on the core continent were made by Russian and American ships, as well as further voyages made by European nations. But the lack of obvious colonial reward meant that there was a long gap until renewed attention in the late 19^th century led to a scramble to establish territorial control through exploration. Once again, a long gap ensued after the 1910s, with some interest in the course of World War Two, and the intervening period notable mostly for Richard E. Byrd’s overflying expeditions. It was only the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58 that sparked nations’ interests in controlling the spaces of the Antarctic. The Soviet Union and the USA were interested in ownership but had no legal claim through either discovery or occupation, so pioneered the method of depositing bases into territory that could be claimed later. Their vested interest was also part of how the Antarctic would end up as a landmass outside of normal banal sovereign claims, a status confirmed in the 1959 Antarctic Treaty.

The Antarctic has never been fully integrated into the global régime of existing power hierarchies and nation-based histories, even if it is fully caught up in a more Foucauldian power network based on intersections between power and knowledge, and power as a system of actions, laws, discourses, technical procedures and protocols. Even today it is sparsely inhabited–there is no indigenous population as such, but a transient population of between 1000 and 4000 mostly scientists, with 25000 or so tourists visiting every year. But in terms of national presence, it is more like a freeport, a department store full of concessions, or a world science fair. Thirty countries have some sort of research base there, 68 in total (see O’Reilly 2017: 67), and not only in their ‘own’ zones.

Territorial claims have been suspended since the creation of the Antarctic Treaty (which came into force in 1961), the founding document for the Antarctic Treaty System. This ‘system’ ties together a group of treaties that have accumulated over time, and allows space for further development. The Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) is the model of governance for the continent, and is trans-, supra- and non-national in nature, with 53 countries signed up to the System.[3] This system suspends all territorial claims, in favor of a neutralized sovereign space (not a space of pooled sovereignty).[4] There are extensions of rules and subsequent protocols, but the Antarctic is designated under the original treaty, and ensuing treaty system, as a neutral, demilitarized non-nuclear zone.[5] Countries with territorial claims have made sure to place bases that are permanent within the relevant zones, as have many others. The discourse on Antarctica is rife with discussion about either land claims or about mineral wealth, particularly offshore (the ATS extends ‘northward’ to 60% south and controls exploitation of wildlife too).[6]

In the far south, there seems to be an almost utopian model of future environment-based governance. Alternatively, some argue, what we see in the Antarctic is only a mock-up of post-sovereign co-existence and instead it is a zone of neocolonial, retrocolonial and postcolonial tactics. Klaus Dodds and Mark Nuttall refer to “polar orientalism” (2016: 145), even if they also question claims that there is a current or new “scramble” for the Antarctic. Furthermore, far from being outside of the rest of the world, the Antarctic does have a legal régime, and cannot be said to be autonomous, separate from the world.[7] All of the research stations are supplied and populated from elsewhere. The culture of the Antarctic is global before the dwellers arrive, while they are there and after (O’Reilly 2017: 174). In addition to the treaty, the dwellers in bases are subject to control of their actions by their ‘own’ government, while the work that is the reason for inhabiting the continent is networked globally. Both polar regions though, are thought of in very standard terms of sovereignty, as opposed to a more Schmittian way of thinking the exception, and sovereignty as the capacity to exert power based on the decision of exemplarity. Wygene Chong, for example, observes that sovereignty is “the ability of a state to exercise its supreme authority over territory” (Chong 2017: 436); Ruth Davis regards national sovereign rights and claims as being protected, if not ratified (Davis 2014: 289).

So while sovereign rights are seen as contested, polar discourse reverts continually to national territorial claims in a way that barely captures the nature of sovereignty in the Antarctic. Schmitt’s idea that sovereignty is the power to decide whether an exceptional situation prevails (such as war, famine, ecological catastrophe, states of emergency in general) underpins every moment that the exception does not prevail, where the negative decision is made that there is no exception, which is how it is a “general concept in the theory of the state, and not merely […] a construct applied to any emergency decree or state of siege” (Schmitt 2005: 5). Giorgio Agamben proposes a more political and military way in which the exception becomes the norm in the form of “the camp” and the biopolitical regime of control in place in contemporary global society (see Agamben, 1998, 2005). Current discussion (with the key exception of Kathryn Yussof) expends considerable effort to bring polar regions into the norms of global culture and legality, and the legal exceptionality identified by Schmitt as the key to sovereignty absents itself. I would argue that instead of incorporating the Antarctic into measurable and discursively safe politics, the strangeness of its model, like Derrida’s rogue state, exemplifies exceptionality as a global model of sovereignty (Derrida 2005). The fact that exceptionality is not exclusively benign is also a means of tempering any over-utopian enthusiasm for the Antarctic as model of future progressive socio-legal structure.

Dodds and Nuttall, as longstanding social critics of Antarctic policy and politics, do not wish to acknowledge the specificity of either polar region:

For those who wrote on polar geopolitics in the past, the Arctic and Antarctic were often positioned as ‘exceptional spaces’, exceptional in their size, location, remoteness and even their connectivity to wider global, political, legal and economic networks and practices. (Dodds and Nuttall 2016: 24)

They insist that the Arctic is “less an isolated frontier region [but] a transnational and neo-liberalized space connected to global flaws, risks and networks” (2016: 28), and that both poles are equally connected and networked, fully integrated into a global polity. That’s probably true, but their inclination to undo the exceptionality of Antarctica raises more questions. At one level, they are perfectly right, there is nothing so special about the polar regions that they can be thought of as exceptional. Sovereignty debates, they say, are about spurious claims to ownership that are complicit with exploitative agendas. As Bataille would say, such a supposedly critical view merely corroborates the modern bourgeois belief in sovereignty as possession, as “the world of accumulation is the world rid of the values of traditional sovereignty, in which things have ‘value’” (Bataille 1989: 423). Yussof extends this critique of the limits of simply calling out exploitation in terms of redistribution when such does not include a deep critique of extractive, slave-based economic development that preceded Western capitalism. Such extractivism aligns mineral discovery and removal with the use and transport of enslaved people:

Both these modes of extracting value–as property and as properties— generate surplus. It is the grammar of geology–the inhuman–that establishes the stability of the object of property for extraction. The process of geologic materialization in the making of matter as value is transferred onto subjects and transmutes those subjects through a material and color economy that is organized as ontologically different from the human (who is accorded agency in the pursuit of rights, freedom and property). (Yusoff 2018: 71)

While Yussof has addressed the Antarctic elsewhere (see for example Yusoff 2009), her critique of extractivism highlights the belief that the governance and power dynamics can be part of global power systems and networks without for all that being ‘just the same’ as every other space or place. Imposing a model of limited sovereignty based on good or bad possession will not assist either understanding or critique.

Jessica O’Reilly completely dismantles the idea that the Antarctic is not exceptional–and her case is not made through the bare natural facts or an idealism about the Antarctic Treaty System, but through an acknowledgement that the Antarctic’s specificity arises through the convergence of science, bureaucracy and nature, meaning that the continent is governed technocratically, and therefore in clearly defined ways that are substantially and almost ontologically different to anywhere else, notwithstanding the Foucauldian perspective she herself raises. Perhaps with Dodds and Nuttall’s worrying statement in mind about what they wish to call “narratives of ecological catastrophe” (Dodds and Nuttall 2016: 56), she writes that “the imagined environment is not just a social construction, it is also nature impacted by human actions and decisions” (O’Reilly 2017: 17). This physical difference only takes on meaning when processed into technocracy, acquiring its status as bedrock after its legal processing. The meshed exceptionality of how the Antarctic is run opens up pockets of Schmittian sovereignty. O’Reilly writes that “if states pay close attention to the procedural, bureaucratic activities involved in the approval process they can almost always do what they wish in the Antarctic with little if any, intervention” (2017: 129). The only possible intervention is that of observers, who can monitor activities if they see fit, and then report to the Committee that oversees the treaty system. If there is international idealism about the model of governance in Antarctica, it is not about a misreading of state vested interests acting under cover of a truce, it is to do with a strong belief in the value of competence, skills, discipline and the power of co-operative technocracy:

While technocratic management elsewhere might feel like a nerdy burden, a leftover of 1950s efficiency politics, in Antarctica, technocracy is part of a utopian environmental future. Among Antarctic people, the broad consensus is that governance informed by scientific knowledge has the potential to improve human and nonhuman lives and homes. (O’Reilly 2017: 171).

Not only is the Antarctic a legal pioneer in terms of the future permanent exceptionality of sovereignty, it is also a precursor of the tech-libertarianism of social media and software services. What could be more ideal for a soft-tech-engineered future than a place with well-meaning skill as surrogate for democracy?

O’Reilly’s model is far from blind to the presence of executive power, nor to its strangeness, but of course it does not near the hyperbolic and almost actor-less execution of power that underlies Schmitt’s Land and Sea (1942) and The Nomos of the Earth (1950). Both of these texts physicalize the constructive power of spaces, borders and the law in a process of total delineation. For Schmitt, power becomes global through the assumption of a global space that is itself divided. Without the line (most specifically of the division of world between Spain and Portugal in 1493), there is no whole. In Land and Sea, Schmitt argues that with that line, through the Atlantic, Spain was given the Western part of the world, Portugal the East, and this “papal line of partition from 1493 stands at the beginning of the battle for the new fundamental order, for the new nomos of the earth” (Schmitt 2015: loc 1432).

Lines construe the spaces between, the space without and space as jurisdiction. One fundamental line is that separating the domain of the line, which is the land, and the non-domain outside of lines, which is the sea. This latter is ostensibly free of lines because it is subject to protocols and transgressions beyond Earth-bound and Earth–binding power: “the firm land consists of its division into state dominions; the high sea is free, i.e., state-free and subject to the authority of no state dominion” (Schmitt 2015: loc 1514). Schmitt’s model of sovereignty means that this is not a simple distinction, but one deeply bound up with English maritime force, particularly through the extra-legal activity of piracy in the 16^th century. What looks like absence of law is actually a domain of prospective sovereign action, properly outside of sovereign territories.

Schmitt attributes a deep, ontological effect to newly discovered or revealed zones of the planet, “new lands and seas” change the human spatial experience, “not only the outermost human horizon, but even the structure of the concept of space itself is altered” (2015: loc 1249):

There is more to a spatial revolution than landing in a heretofore unknown place. A spatial revolution involves a change in the concepts of space encompassing all the levels and domains of human existence. (2015: loc 1355)

Although Schmitt is not referring to the Antarctic, this notion of a spatio-legally avant-garde location remains, in what is a still-new space, a non-territory, the governance of which continues to subvert international law. The key to these changes that Schmitt sees in discovery is not the opening of a horizon but the closing of zones inside lines, the enclosure itself the expression of an almost autonomous sovereignty, such that “world history is a history of land-appropriations” (2015: loc 1398). Land is in fact appropriation, the only way it can become the ground for being understood as the location upon which it occurs. Land-appropriation precedes all other legal orders as the land contains essential value, that is brought out through human labor, and then further framed by enclosure:

The earth is bound by law in three ways. She contains law within herself, as a reward of labor; she manifests law above herself, as fixed boundaries; and she sustains law above herself, as a public sign of order. Law is bound to the earth and related to the earth. (Schmitt 2003: 42)

It is as if law is the first and primary growth, once humans are near (are there humans before they begin to frame the earth with their labor?). Appropriation seems to become the originary condition for both human and earth to exist, with one the appropriator, the other the unwilling/unwitting supplier. The legal order of social existence comes into being before all other forms, an ur-form that has always already extracted itself from deep within the earth. The law is the order of nomos, as “nomos is the measure by which the land in a particular order is divided and situated” (Schmitt 2003: 70). This excessive and doubtless unwitting re-statement of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality establishes power as always precedent to power, an authority that allows authority to act. It is possible that the only sovereignty is the act of dividing that brings the potential for sovereignty into being, outside of any legitimacy, founding an order which can reflect on itself as having granted authority for itself to have come into being. This, at least, is what Derrida sees as the para-legitimacy of the moment of law’s inception (Derrida 1992: 14 and passim) and as that which underpins claims made by dominant global powers about curtailing the activities of rogue states, thereby acting as rogues themselves (Derrida 2005: 96).

While the sea is outside sovereignty, piracy and imperialism act in fully sovereign disdain for all that lies within demarcated lands. Land is also outside of sovereignty, until European powers discover it. Only Europe possesses lines and line-making capacity (the world is under a “Eurocentric model of international law” observes Schmitt [2003: 39]), and everywhere is as legally empty as Antarctica was: it doesn’t matter if anyone else is already there, the capacity to acquire land or power is “properly” European, in variants of Anthony VI’s world-splitting and shaping decree of 1493—“the non-European soil of the rest of the earth in this global, but not yet completely Eurocentric spatial order was free, i.e. free to be occupied by European states” (2003: 142).  It is upon this act (as well as Spanish king Philip III’s 1605 order to religiously convert all of the southernmost continent) that Chile and Argentina base their Antarctic claims, as inheritors of Spanish territorial rights. In other words, they summon a colonial right (not neo-, but proto-), through a sovereign act of global violence made by a papal institution that no longer has that power, to an empire that no longer exists, via countries no longer subject to it, to what was then a properly undiscovered land, as opposed to a place that Christians were just waiting to discover through mass murder of any local populations. The lines between Spanish and Portuguese colonizations were just that, between themselves, “internal divisions between two land-appropriating Christian princes within the framework of one and the same spatial order” (Schmitt 2003: 92). The sea was the freedom of manoeuver between brethren colonizers, and non-European lands were effectively part of the sea until one or more European powers took a direct interest.

In fact the sea’s non-jurisdiction is like the exceptionality of the line-drawing, power-framing that is the shaping of land as territory (and like that of Fred Moten’s cut that establishes what is beyond the break, outside and radical, thereby enclosing that which it is not [Moten 2003: 6]). The sea is very much a location, or perhaps, vector, of sovereignty, albeit of sovereignty that exceeds land-based jurisdictional power. Polar regions are not only not outside of this discussion, but exemplify it–their exceptionality still not regularized into State-form, and yet hosts to sovereignty in multiple interlocked strata. Much that is in Schmitt’s texts seems prophetic, such as when he states that current uncertainty over ownership and access is not a type of vacuum: “that which is coming is not therefore only measurelessness or a nothingness hostile to nomos’” (Schmitt 2015: loc 1729). If there is a vacuum, a spread of the law of the sea, in some ways, then this is a constitutive vacuum, which once seen in light of Schmitt’s spatialization of sovereignty, is both odder and more exemplary than ever. The polar regions, the Antarctic in particular, are where land and sea literally and geosocially, as Yusoff has it (Yusoff 2017: 108), deconstruct the concept of sovereignty even as they assure its functionality (through pragmatic technocracy and sovereignty as constant, unclosed and speculative line-making). Yusoff agues that

stratification is a confrontation with the spatial arrangements of the social divisions of materiality and the claims to power that are enlarged by harnessing the geopower of the substratum, an arrangement of power that is both exceeded by and complicated by geologic elements. (2017: 105)

The strata are in play even as potential–perhaps particularly in our era, as potential, as resources require a deepening of extractionist economics. The polar regions are almost entirely subsumable as strata beneath the rest of world and national jurisdiction, and therefore, far from being out of play, are that which awaits incorporation into purportedly sovereign resource control. Despite the global and local scalings of stratification of sovereignty and sovereign process in and around the Antarctic, it is the mesh of those layers in a system of lines and, it could be said, contours, that politically define the stratification specific to the Antarctic. This also includes the absence, or the absenting of lines in willful de-sovereign-ing process.

As sea and land infiltrate one another in a legal and/or representational way, we should recall O’Reilly’s clear-sighted integration of the materiality of the Antarctic into sovereignty. The Antarctic, just as much as the Arctic, is actually (at least in human experiential terms), a combination of land and sea. The 2 km of ice “has been constituted by particular physical and temporal engagements” (Antonello 2017: 79) and will at some stage become sea with colossal impact for the rest of the world, and as it begins to do that, the law of the mercenary sea begins to hold–a holding that is precisely allowed in the withholding of ‘proper’ sovereignty claimed by a small group of States. The Antarctic has not been allowed to become land, despite the presence of lines as arbitrarily drawn as those that marked European divisions of Africa or the post-imperial middle East. This non- or extra-legitimate space is subject to further non-legitimate incursion because there is only the presence, not the force, of sovereign power in the Antarctic. Sovereignty deadens the continent even as it constructs it. This sovereignty is that of the line-drawing, not of the would-be occupying powers or even that of the techno-elite, and this is a sovereignty that is always already beyond borders, a sovereignty generated from within lines (i.e. by existing powers) but that exceeds. In fact, this can always be traced back to the moment that Rousseau defines as the consent to enclosure: “the first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying ‘This is mine’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society” (Rousseau 1984: 109). This, then, is sovereignty that exceeds political control, as it is that which defines, permits and delineates this power. Whilst we are never outside of sovereignty, sovereignty is an outside that generates the ‘norm’, or normative functioning of law, power and politics, and the Antarctic in this instance is not exceptional but exemplary. In other words, the exception to the exceptionality of sovereignty that helps exemplify the exceptionality that is sovereignty.

This sovereign non-power is part of what Schmitt describes as sovereignty–for all the decisionist power that his model offers (in Political Theology), it also includes the “power” to capitulate and abdicate (Schmitt 2005: 10). For Paul W. Kahn, this power is itself exemplary (Kahn 2012: 59). All sovereign power is outside of legitimized, legalistic and formal law (Derrida 1992)–and so when there is no legitimized power, we could imagine that we are in a state of perfect if slightly unexpected Schmittian sovereignty. The geophysical politics of the Antarctic continent have set up capitulation that is loss without a loser or victor, a renunciation, as rogue sovereigntist Georges Bataille would put it when referring to Stalin’s Soviet Union (1989: 291-302, 313). Far from there being no sovereignty in the Antarctic, or there being a new model, the novelty lies in the way it expresses as its norm the excessive capacity that is sovereignty. For Bataille, sovereignty is precisely the residue or surplus of order, that which drops away from norms, and the Antarctic has become an extravagant site of sovereignty as experimental excess.

For Bataille, sovereignty is about loss–about seeking to attain traditional types of sovereignty where individual power and state power meet in one person (or the doubled bodies of the king), and then failing. Sovereignty is the reaching of a pinnacle in excessive behavior such that the individual is lost within that excess–and sovereignty “dissolves into NOTHING” (1989: 204). The relation of sovereign to non-sovereign, and to the rule, are consistent between Bataille and Schmitt, if not exactly the same. Where Schmitt has sovereignty as the thing that exceeds the rule, for Bataille, the rule brings value to what he calls “irregularity” (1989: 408). Similarly, where Schmitt has executive power as the power of the outside that defines the system, Bataille defines sovereignty (when writing in the 1930s) as heterogeneity.

Heterogeneity is that which lies outside homogeneous, normal, normative society. Beyond rules, it is a mode of action and process that is barely human, mostly not even human. It is not just what is outside, but what troubles the solidity of inside by being its ejected other: “The heterogeneous world includes everything resulting from unproductive expenditure” (Bataille 1985: 142), and so “compared to everyday life, heterogeneous existence can be represented as something other, as incommensurate” (Bataille 1985: 143). Heterogeneity can be both high and low, a parallel polarity (Bataille 1985: 144)–Schmitt’s dictatorial control exerted through the inward-moving force of sovereignty is high, the black mass, the festival, drunkenness, non-reproductive erotic activity are low. Circling us slowly back over the Antarctic, like the overflying Admiral Richard E. Byrd, dreaming of the hole into a hollow earth, Bataille’s heterogeneous sovereignty pinpoints a sovereignty that can cross between human actors and the spaces they bring into geosocial being (see Yusoff 2017: 109).[8] The presence of humans brings an exceptionality that is not about emptiness, but about the very refusal of detail (on the surface at least) that humans can pick out as meaning–a space populated instead by regulatory detail. The very system of rules in position in the Antarctic is part of a meshed sovereignty, that in turn allows a Schmittian sovereignty within it (free movement and site-establishing of actors within all zones), whilst holding distantly at bay the restricted form of sovereignty that is taken to exist in the form of spatial control, mastery over a passive object and against the acts or desires of other autonomous self-identical actors.

But the Antarctic is not just the surface, it is also hidden lakes, sediments, and ultimately a continent of actual land: the nomos is immured within and beneath the treatyspace, and at the same time, the sea lies ready not just as ice, but deep within it. And within that, lies a new biota ready to emerge. All, or at least some, of this will rise as the accursed [geo] share, and is being explored and hypothesized all the time, almost as if it were fictional.[9] This potential explosion, or currently, repressed excess, that lies beneath (or in the abjection of the most barren zone on the exposed planet, the Dry Valleys), signals Bataille’s interest in the cosmic principle of explosive destruction that powers everything else, that allows anything else to be. He writes that “if excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit, it must be spent, willing or not, gloriously or catastrophically” (Bataille 1988: 21). Within the comforting whole of the ice sheets lies a dirtier, unknown part that is one of the lures for restricted sovereignty in the form of resource ownership or access. As it is, it remains a Bataillean excess, excluded from the world of utility. Its “base matter is external and foreign to ideal human aspirations, and it refuses to allow itself to be reduced to the great ontological machines resulting from those aspirations” (“Base Materialism and Gnosticism”, Bataille 1985: 51). It maps onto the low heterogeneity of excessive human behavior, only more so–fully apathetic, a world that is actually beneath the current surface, it is a mockery of regulation of the world above, whether constitutional-military, or treaty-based. Unlike Bataille’s sovereign self-losing individual or society, or Schmitt’s system-overcoming Leader, the Antarctic does not permit any type of sovereignty other than that which exceeds the human without the human trying. This is not from a Romantic or legalist perspective on the difficulty of terrain or temperature, but has always already arisen as the result of human interaction with the geologistic [hidden] excess of the solid Antarctic through its thickly membraneous liquid surface. As Schmitt is aware in both Land and Sea and The Nomos of the Earth, the distinction between land and sea laws is a classic nested opposition where the difference between them connects the two opposites such that they undermine and inform each other (Balkin 1990: 3). But with Bataille, we can see that the existing actual law of the sea, and the technocracy of the Antarctic (acting as a limp prosthesis of state sovereignty), actually diminish each other as they merge. Each sovereign domain deflates, drops, but never far enough. Never low enough. Finally, we cannot actually grasp the sovereignty that has come into being even though it lies within a domain that is almost ultra-rationalistic and crypto-legal. And the sovereignty that works there, that has become the nothingness Schmitt said it could not be, is precisely what then informs the shape and practice of sovereignty everywhere else, the excess from which the restricted order emerges.

“The brain is the parody of the equator” (“Solar Anus”, Bataille 1985: 5).

 

Paul Hegarty is professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Nottingham, and co-lead of their Creative and Digital research cluster. He has published widely on cultural theory, with an emphasis on sound and music. He is currently working on the soundscapes of distributed French cultures and his latest book on music, Annihilating Noise, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury.

 

References

Agamben, Giorgio (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

— (2005 [2003]) State of Exception, trans. Kevin Atell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

 

Antonello, Alessandro (2017) “Engaging and Narrating the Antarctic Ice Sheet.” Environmental History 22:1, 77-100.

 

Balkin, J. M. (1990) “Nested Oppositions.” Yale Law Journal 99:7, 1669-1705.

 

Bataille, Georges (1985) Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

 

— (1988 [1949) The Accursed Share, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone.

 

— (1989) The Accursed Share vols II and III, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone.

 

— (2018) “Definition of Heterology.” Theory, Culture and Society, special issue: Bataille and Heterology, eds. Marina Galletti and Roy Boyne. 35: 4-5, 29-40.

 

Chong, Wygene (2017) “Thawing the Ice: A Solution to Contemporary Antarctic Sovereignty.” Polar Record. 53:4, 436-47.

 

Davis, Ruth (2014) “The Durability of the “Antarctic model” and Southern Ocean Governance,” in Tim Stephens and David L. VanderZwaag (eds.)  Polar Oceans Governance in an Era of Environmental Change. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 287-307.

 

Derrida, Jacques (1992) “The Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’,” in Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson (eds.) Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 3-67.

 

—. (2005 [2003]) Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

 

Dodds, Klaus and Mark Nuttall (2016) The Scramble for the Poles. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity.

 

Kahn, Paul W. (2012) Political Theology: Four New Chapters on The Concept of Sovereignty. New York: Columbia University Press.

 

Moten, Fred (2003) In The Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

 

O’Reilly, Jessica (2017) The Technocratic Antarctic: An Ethnography of Scientific Expertise and Environmental Governance. New York: Cornell University Press.

 

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1984 [1755]) A Discourse on Inequality, trans. Maurice Cranston. London: Penguin.

 

Schmitt, Carl (2005 [1922]) Political Theology: Four Chapters on The Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

 

— (2003 [1950]). The Nomos of the Earth, trans. G. L. Ulmen. New York: Telos.

 

— (2015 [1942]) Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation, trans. Samuel Garrett Zeitlin. New York: Telos. Kindle edition.

 

Yusoff, Kathryn (2009) “Excess, Catastrophe, and Climate Change.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 27, 1010-29.

 

— (2017) “Geosocial Strata”. Theory Culture Society, special edition, Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene. 34:2-3, 105-27.

 

— (2018) Nine Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

[1] This maritime territorial zone is known as the Exclusive Economic Zone, which is the area of sea adjacent to a recognized coastline, as defined by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

[2] These are Russia, Denmark (via Greenland), Canada, USA and Norway.

[3] For more on the current and historical parameters and practice of the ATS, see the website of the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research (SCAR), at https://www.scar.org/policy/antarctic-treaty-system/. Accessed 29 January 2020.

[4] The original claimants to Antarctic territory are, Norway, Britain, New Zealand, Australia, France, Argentine, Chile. Debates about ‘postcolonial’ or decolonizing readings of the ‘poles’ are hampered by the presence of ‘postcolonial’ régimes’ assertions of land rights. New forms of territorial claim have been developed – India grounds its claims on the transcontinental connection in place in Gondwanaland (550 million years BCE to 180 million years BCE) in a geopolitical scaling of time and land (see O’Reilly 2017: 122-24, detailing India’s contribution to the 2006 Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting). Despite a push to open up mineral extraction against the hegemonic ATS, India’s official position reflects full compliance with the Treaty, as evidenced in this 2020 bill: http://www.ncaor.gov.in/files/Indian%20Antarctic%20Bill%20/Indian%20Antarctic%20Bill%2015Jan2020.pdf. Accessed 2 February 2020.

[5] In fact, it specifies that no nuclear explosions are allowed to take place there. A 1998 Protocol on Environmental Protection clarifies that no mineral extraction is allowed (see the protocol here, on the ATS site, https://www.ats.aq/e/protocol.html. Accessed 29 January 2020. In the meantime, extensive mineral research, in parallel with extractive research, is in practice underway, based on the ‘neutral’ scientific model of exploring under the ice. The protocol is up for review in 2048.

[6] Technically, the manoeuvering by the countries that have some sort of base in the Antarctic is irrelevant, as the ATS explicitly rules out the acquisition of territorial rights in the period of its existence.

[7] The inhabitation of the continent is in fact generated as global flow as opposed to being the result of a steady-state population.

[8] Byrd was a pioneering aviation explorer of the Antarctic from 1928 onward. In later life, he seems to have come to believe that, in the course of his circumpolar navigations, he saw the way into what was revealed to be a hollow earth.

[9] Bataille writes that “knowledge is never sovereign” (1989: 202). Also see Yussof, 2009. Yussof correctly points out the value of using Bataille’s ideas of unknowing, which is a part of his model of sovereignty, to grasp the potential extent of change from climate crisis and deviation from a technoscientific imaginary of control.

This essay has been peer-reviewed by “Frictionless Sovereignty” special issue editor (Ryan Bishop), and the b2o: An Online Journal editorial board.

“… the West has never been further from being able to live a true humanism – a humanism made to the measure of the world.” (Césaire 1955: 73)

This article is the abstracted result of my having witnessed the racialized infrastructures of European bordering practices in an apparent frictionless sovereign territory: the Schengen area. Embodying whiteness and holding European Union passport privilege in this context and situation, I was allowed to witness these events without any real danger to my person. I am hoping to remain cautious, however, of how my privileged position might be doubled in writing. An academic reflection could become a parasitical tool and an appropriative parsing of a traumatic experience that does not belong to me. I will therefore not engage in detailing the experience or what it has produced for those involved. I will, however, briefly recount some of the acts of policing I witnessed and how they constituted borders for some bodies where no borders exist for others.[1]

In the middle of the night in May 2019, Austrian police took a woman and her two children off a train, leaving them in the train station of Villach, 20 kilometers before the border with Italy. The Austrian train inspectors and the police officers took this action on valid ticket holders and refused them re-entry into Italy on the basis of them not having European passports. The family was, however, holding valid travel documents issued by Italy, which should have granted them access across the Schengen space of Austria (under the 1951 Refugee Convention) and moreover a return to the issuing country. Instead, after being taken off the train, they were “advised” to seek the local Austrian asylum seekers’ centre, risking refusal and possibly detention. An attempt to board the next train to Italy many hours later was met with direct obstruction by two Italian Carabinieri (dispatched to this site in Austria) and two local Austrian police officers, alongside train employees. As holders of valid travel documents, the family was able to eventually return to Italy by bus (however, not on the main Austrian lines but an adjacent low-cost one).

My aim in this article, starting from the events I have just recounted, is to reflect on the current Schengen area at the peak of anti-immigration law-making, and on the racial infrastructure underpinning Schengen territories and their governance. I argue that the existence and application of Schengen Border Codes articulates states of exception in the already racialized assemblages of European regulating and policing, making visible the friction in the promises of frictionless sovereignty of the Schengen Area and turning (some) bodies into borders. I do this work with the support of brilliant black scholars who have taken up similar questions, worked extensively on them and have produced critical responses to excessively cited white European scholarship in this area. Specifically, I will approach these issues through Alexander Weheliye’s deployment of habeas viscus—having flesh–and his emphasis on black feminist theory’s contribution to the revision of conceptions of the human that stem from “the world of Man” (via Sylvia Wynter) and liberal modern humanism. By Man, Weheliye means the configuration of the heteromasculine, white, propertied, liberal subject produced from a type of surplus of the human, through exploitation which renders anyone outside of this formation as “exploitable nonhumans, literal legal no-bodies” (2014a: 135). I aim to show how Europe is bound to Man’s legal apparatus and how Man’s juridical machine articulates itself in embodied bordering practices, even in non-border sites and in areas where movement should be frictionless, given the Schengen Agreement.

These instances of border policing have often been approached in academic reflections via the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. About these writers, who are all too frequently cited in work about biopolitics and population control, as well as about bare life, law and power respectively, Weheliye states that their disavowal from engagement with black studies and the black struggles of their times is what makes their concepts “transportable to a variety of spatio-temporal contexts” (2014a: 6). Their lack of consideration of an explicitly racialized viewpoint, available and expressed by various authors like Frantz Fanon, Nahum Chandler, or Sylvia Wynter, gives Foucault and Agamben’s concepts a “veneer of universalism”. In the case of Foucault in particular, Weheliye brings to our attention that he chose not to engage with the knowledge on race and power produced by the Black Panther Party through its struggle in the prison abolition movement, and did not seriously respond to the work of U.S. black feminist activists like Angela Davis. This cannot be anything but a stubborn omission, given Foucault’s involvement with the prison abolition movement in France and in Algiers (Weheliye, 2014a: 62-63). Other authors have read this and other Foucauldian omissions as non-engagement with efforts towards dismantling the white, male epistemic subject (Rodríguez). In the case of Agamben, Weheliye engages in a thorough critique, detailing how the former’s constant universalizing of the state of exception and seeing “bare life and the state of exception as exclusively legal categories” (Weheliye: 83) undermines the possibility of a situated, embodied conception of the flesh. The point regarding both these authors remains plainly that “their major theoretical formulations were developed often in distinction or without recourse to the long histories of globalised racial power” as Dhanveer Singh Brar sharply notes in a review of Weheliye’s book (Brar 2014: 145).

In contrast, for Weheliye, habeas viscus posits “one modality of imagining the relational ontological totality of the human” (Weheliye: 4) in a given spatiotemporal context, a situated configuration that manifests in a determinate present, not a messianic tomorrow. I follow this Weheliyan route rather than the abundant Agambenian and Foucauldian interpretations produced in studies on anti-immigration law-making in Europe, as it produces a much more grounded position on what having flesh and having a body means as perpetual exception in the always already racialized assemblages of legal frameworks and policing powers, applied in this case to spaces of transit within the Schengen territories.

Furthermore, I will centre the discussion on how these racialized assemblages open up, once more, questions of being human. Weheliye critiques the notion of the human which emerged with white colonial thought, extends to the continued omissions and universalising which happens in French theory, and continues to white feminist critical thought, such as the influential work of Judith Butler in gender studies, violence, and law. He points out that these theories, like most of post-1960s critical thought do not engage seriously and attentively with the work of contemporaneous black authors, such as Aimé Césaire, who cautioned about the double danger of including black subjects in the universalising category of Man or their relegation to the particulars of ethnography, something that writers like Hortense Spillers, Sylvia Wynter and Saidiya Hartman expand upon and continue to explore in readings of documents and histories of black lived experience. Weheliye also calls forth some of the theoretical propositions of new materialism and certain posthumanist incarnations for comparatively summoning chattel slavery and black experience of that historical period to set up legal structures for animal rights. In the cases where the engagement is not simply superficial or tokenistic, Weheliye states, the question of racialization in relation to the notion of the human is another form in which “black subjects […] must bear the burden of representing the final frontier of speciesism” (2014a: 11).

On the specifics of how crossing lines and making frontiers and comparative processes meet, he continues:

Comparativity frequently serves as a shibboleth that allows minoritized groups to gain recognition (and privileges, rights etc.) from hegemonic powers (through the law, for instance) who, as a general rule, only grant a certain number of exceptions access to the spheres of full humanity, sentience, citizenship, and so on. (Weheliye 2014a: 13)

Thus, following this call against a larger “grammar of comparison”, which brings with it a jargon of tabulation, measuring and calculability of black suffering, I will focus on the ways in which current European Union immigration law and its promises of frictionless sovereignty in fact open up the racialized foundations of European law-making and the frictions made visible by the passing of bodies over borders. The roots of anti-black racism in legal structures and the ways in which academic knowledge has made anti-blackness into a universal thought currency is what allows for the questions Weheliye raises to be asked of the European context. The bodies are the borders, seeking not exceptional recognition as human, but always already holding full expression and power to show the law as a racialized assemblage and the Schengen area in which this takes place as a prime instantiation of racialized infrastructure at work.

The Rule of Exception: A Question of the Human

“The universalization of exception disables thinking humanity creatively.” (Weheliye 2014a: 11)

European states ruled by right majority governments, with leaders like Italy’s former Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini, have set the precedent of threatening to cease the implementation of the Schengen Agreement, aiming to stop free movement across intra-Schengen borders (the so-called Salvini Decree abolished the issuing of residence permits on humanitarian reasons). Such suspension can only be done in exceptional cases, the conditions for which had not been met at the point of this request as far as the European Trade Union Confederation was concerned. Thus, the friction at the border between Schengen member states has been enacted through legally vague states of exception, not declared as such but in fact existing through the instantiation of added codes and emergency provisions, on the bodies of those crossing. Sites where bodies as borders are made visible in current racialized assemblages are often infrastructural nodes, like train stations and bus depots, as has been my first hand experience in the border town of Villach in Austria. Fully embedded in capitalist infrastructure, in circuits and flows, these spaces have become more and more spaces of incarceration and deportation, alongside other forms of violence and abuse. This is not a new situation across Europe of the last five years. As a temporary prison or camp, like in the case of Budapest’s Keleti, the train station has also acted as centre-piece for legitimizing an illusion of alignment for Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s rule with his political agenda. Additionally, Brussels’s Central Station has been portrayed as the fear-mongering site at the “heart of Europe,” which right-wing media often uses as its visual trope for a refugee “take-over”.

Major European train stations are not the focus of this article but instead I will attend to a particular intra-Schengen border policing that currently happens between Austria and Italy, as witnessed in a rail station in the small town of Villach, one of the last Austrian stops before crossing into Northern Italy. Small nodes like this, under-observed by non—governmental organisations and activists due to reduced capacity are sites that can offer some understanding about how EU Law and its exceptions are made visible as racialized assemblages. Yet more importantly, what was made apparent in this case was not how the rule of exception functions on site but the “hieroglyphs of flesh” (Weheliye) onto which historical and current scales of colonialism and border crossing meet, as racialized assemblages and infrastructures. I expand upon these issues in section two.

In what follows, I will take up Alexander Weheliye’s critique of Agamben’s “state of exception” (1998) as temporally bound, to argue for the former’s proposition that “exception” is yet another instantiation of what he identifies as racialized populations “suspended in a perpetual state of emergency” (Weheliye: 2014a). Mirroring that thought, I claim in this article that my observation from witnessing policing of borders outside of border points themselves can be seen as an insight into how the entirety of the legal framework of the EU project can come under scrutiny. Such a route resists thinking this one instance as a state of exception, as the legal framework of Schengen law-making sets it up to be.

Countries like Italy and Austria, both holding their respective fascist pasts, currently right-wing party ruled[2] and sharing a border, have been making their own provisions, emergencies, exceptions and threats based on a particular set of codes added to the Schengen Agreement and EU Law and entitled the Schengen Border Codes.[3]

As the “Asylum Information Database”[1] (2018) built by the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) states:

Notwithstanding that the issue of refugees’ access to the territory has traditionally been associated with the external borders of the EU (and therefore a handful of countries), the reintroduction of internal border controls in the Schengen area in the last three years has resulted in border control becoming a regular activity throughout the continent. The intra-Schengen dimension of the debate, and practice in countries such as France, Austria, Sweden or Germany, remain highly pertinent in the light of successive prolongations of border controls. (Mouzourakis, 2018: 6, emphasis added)

The reintroduction of internal borders was possible because of the Schengen Border Codes, an addendum to the Schengen Agreement and EU Law. The premise for creating the Border Codes is unsurprisingly in line with what the ECRE has observed about EU policy discourse and how it “places particular emphasis on combatting irregular migration” yet without defining exactly what irregular means. Nevertheless, “irregularity” is what is being monitored and controlled not only at the “level of access to the territory” (Schengen Area entry points, a handful of states as mentioned above) but also on an intra-territorial dimension. The frictionless promise and premise of the Schengen area can be suspended on the basis of the above-mentioned irregularity, but also on a similarly ill-defined “context of foreseeable events”. The latter often includes “terrorist threats”, as well as the equally poorly defined term of “ secondary movements”, or simply having a “land border” with a state that is a Schengen Area entry point (e.g. Austria justifies its current period of reintroduction of Border Codes based on “secondary movements, risk related terrorist and organized crime, situation at the external borders; land borders with Hungary and Slovenia”.[4]

The exceptionality of irregularity and the future threat cast as foreseeable event are the two bases onto which countries part of Schengen Agreement can introduce these internal borders:

At the moment, temporarily reintroduced internal border controls are maintained by France on all of its borders, Austria on the Hungarian and Slovenian land borders, Germany on its Austrian land border, Denmark on its German border, Sweden on nearly all of its borders, and Norway on all of its borders. With the exception of France, which motivates the reintroduction of border controls on the basis of terrorist threats, these countries maintain internal border controls on the ground of ‘security threats’ arising from ‘continuous secondary movements’ of migrants in Europe. Where internal border controls are reintroduced, the relevant provisions of the Schengen Border Codes relating to controls at the external borders apply mutatis mutandis to such border crossings, implying that persons not complying with entry conditions and not belonging to one of the groups listed in Article 6(5) must be issued a refusal of entry. (Mouzourakis, 2018: 8, emphasis added)

As seen from these documents and the wide application of Border Codes under various ambiguous and unspecific terms, what happens at intra-Schengen borders in the EU is a state of generalised exception. Giorgio Agamben takes the camps as prime sites of exception and argues that it “has become an important, if not constitutive, metaphor of modernity, an ideal space of governance, order, categorization and discipline that in multiple forms functions as the necessary but uncomfortable and sometimes disavowed support of the reproduction of ‘normal’ citizenship and community life” (Agamben 1998: 166–80). What Weheliye, against Agamben, proposes is that the exception is perpetual for racialized bodies and therefore the exception does not provide any valuable interest or lens for understanding the law or how it works. The camp or asylum only leave one with “bare life” and the law. Moreover, having a body before the law (habeas corpus) only makes one more trapped in the inconsistencies, exceptions and, as seen in the Schengen Border Codes, vaguely defined territory of its conditions. In the case of “bare life” the predominant lexicon becomes that of resistance and in that of habeas corpus, subjection only takes place through legal agency. According to Weheliye, both rely on a conception and assumption of “full, self-present and coherent subjects” (2014a: 1). Thus, the crux of the matter is not having a body or being before the law but a much larger question of how the law defines the category of the human. In other words, for Weheliye this is a question of habeas viscus (having flesh) versus habeas corpus (having body before the law) or Agamben’s “bare life”. One exists other than before the law, as fleshly body, as embodied. The mode of being before the law assumes either subsumption or resistance as two major lenses and lexicons to see and speak the human through. These have a “prerequisite comparative tabulation of suffering” (Weheliye 2014a: 1) meaning that bodies are either granted status of human or gain it. This happens most often on the basis of the law, biology and economy and the result is a parsing out of fully human, not-quite-human, non-human.

This over-reliance on the law and having a body before it (habeas corpus) is one side of the coin to the Agambean “bare life”, of barely having a constituting position that does not amount to much because it is confined to the space of the camp. What Weheliye points out is how this reasoning, which Agamben undertakes, produces a trap for the conceptual potential of “bare life” as it “falls victim to a legal dogmatism that equates humanity and personhood with a status bequeathed or revoked by juridical sovereignty in much the same way as human rights discourse and habeas corpus do” (2014a: 131). But most importantly, for the context and situation discussed in the case of states like Italy and Austria and the current rise in right-wing immigration agendas seen in continuity with their respective fascist pasts, the promise of revolution in historical-materialist terms as expressed by Marx, W.E.B. Du Bois or Benjamin is excised in Agamben and what is left is a “defanged legal messianism far removed from the traditions of the oppressed” (2014a: 132). Weheliye critiques Agamben for his omission and disregard of the Benjaminian postulates which come from historical materialism and the role of the oppressed in instating a “real state of exception”, that is an excavation into the past and a revolutionary mission carrying with it the pedagogies of the oppressed. Instead, Agamben asks for rupture through redemption and fulfilment of a past inheritance or task. In turn, Weheliye argues for habeas viscus as he rests on the multitude of work done by black feminist authors such as Hortense Spillers and Saidiya Hartman in the histories of chattel slavery and the Middle Passage, and the varied pedagogies of the vagrant and fugitive flesh, which have amounted from these authors’ insights. What their lessons build towards, for Weheliye, against the overly cited white philosophers heralding the logic of measurement, calculation and law is that “habeas viscus diverges from the discourses and institutions that yoke the flesh to political violence in the modus of deviance” (2014a: 130). The critique to the subsumption and resistance binary, which Weheliye underscores his project on maintains the revolutionary as a constant in the experiences, histories and pedagogies emerging from black suffering. He is nevertheless mindful not to turn deviance into the spectacular and instead aims towards fugitivity as ground for thinking the human.

EU Law as Racialized Assemblage

“The dream of governance in general, is to go beyond representation as a form of sovereignty.” (Harney and Moten 2013: 56)

How does racialized infrastructure work in the Schengen Area and in the generalized case of application of Border Codes for intra-Schengen movement? Recently, Brexit as the sovereign fiction of the U.K. has become a reality and it will introduce even further friction at border points such as Calais. Concomitantly, it has triggered other European Union nation states, like Italy, to ask for “exits”. Italy considering leaving the European Union is arguably part of a larger “desperate times require desperate measures” type of discourse, which started with threats of leaving the Schengen agreement (Schengen Visa Info, 2019). What Matteo Salvini was hoping to achieve with this threat was precisely to make sure that asylum seekers are not able to cross in-between borders inside of the Schengen area. His argument had been constructed around EU states not respecting entry laws, as an issue of intra-European state friction: “We are forced to do so, as the Italian law is not being respected by the Dutch government, in compliance with the European Union.” What he then suggested was that a direct consequence of this would be that refugees and asylum seekers can travel between Schengen states freely, which was already not true, because Italy and Austria had imposed irregular checks since Border Codes were introduced. The exceptionalism of the law was already there and it already ruled at the moment it was demanded, based on even further exceptionalism.

The suspension of the Schengen Agreement can only happen in exceptional circumstances. The General Secretary of the European Trade Union, Luca Visentini made note of one founding premise of law-making, that every rule has an exception but claimed that there is no exception in this case; therefore, Italy’s demands to exit the Agreement were denied. Visentini even went on to state that suspension is not a solution because “asylum seekers […] are already being checked by the border police.” The argument is de facto the following: the Schengen agreement is in place and respected, there is no exceptional situation, therefore Italy’s claim is unfounded and there are no grounds for leaving the agreement. At the same time the border checks (not a norm but not yet considered an exception either) are also in place, so there cannot be free movement of asylum seekers in between Schengen states. Firstly, it comes as a consequence that some legal body or authority had already been decided this at some point in the past but not made public; it is already a form of exception since the free movement and no border checks of EU-registered population was supposed to be guaranteed by the Schengen agreement itself. Furthermore, once asylum seekers are registered in EU databases, they should also be able to move freely inside of EU. However, the Secretary’s statement suggests that a “more is more” approach is taken as the border controls are “going out of [their] way to check ‘free’ movement at the border, asylum seekers are identified and denied entrance in certain countries.” Secondly, this already existing exception that is perpetual is projected and amplified into the future: “border police, […] are currently doing a great job and are, if anything, short on personnel and resources, as the Police trade unions have rightly pointed out.” The increase in police powers and in the collaborative practices of police across Schengen states has already been enabled by the Prüm convention and treaty of 2005, when Schengen state police authorities were given capabilities for “cross-border observations and chases have been made possible as well as the exchange of data (fingerprints, DNA, vehicles)” (Van der Woude 2020: 125).

The over-arching consequence of increased policing powers and the experience in Austria show that once out of Italy, where they have been registered, migrants travelling across Schengen borders are going to be treated as un-registered “uncontrolled migrants” once more, as if they had just entered Fortress Europe. Austrian border police collaborates with Italian border police and also with non-border police forces in both states to enforce this logic of risk to national security–they are behaving as if Salvini’s threat has already taken into action, as if the “fore-seeable event” has been indeed foreseen and thus is being acted upon.

With the Border Codes being in place at different times and for various reasons, it is unlikely that the wider population would have knowledge of which and what exception stands, which intra-Schengen border checks apply and when they are deemed legal or not. However, the abuses around intra-border checks have already been documented by ECRE since 2017, for each country. Here are the notes for Italy:

Beyond well-reported barriers to disembarkation in Italian ports in the course of 2018, access to the territory by land is equally problematic. Since the end of February 2017, readmission measures have been initiated against people arriving in Italy from Austria via train. Controls have reportedly been based on racial profiling, intercepting mostly Afghan and Pakistani nationals. Italian authorities apply more stringent controls on regional trains arriving from Austria. If people do not hold valid documentation to enter Italy, they are immediately directed back to the same train by which they arrived, to travel towards Innsbruck, Wörgl and Kufstein [detention centers]. People are not provided with written notifications or explanations of the reasons for their readmission. They are not allowed to seek asylum or to benefit from linguistic assistance and their individual circumstances are not examined.  (Mouzourakis 2018: 12, emphasis added)

The collaboration of these two states started before the exceptional provisions of the Border Codes applied and some of the observations from the reports now extend to those holding valid documents. It makes it not only confusing to those being checked but also a logical conundrum, as was the case in the policing instance I witnessed: holders of valid documents, having been issued asylum seeker papers in Italy, have exited the state to travel in a Schengen space of the neighboring Austrian territory. They are denied re-entry into Italy because they do not hold EU passports, and directed to re-start the asylum seeking process in Austria. Notwithstanding the complications and possible risk of detention camps or direct deportation, had they received asylum seeker papers from Austria, they would still be unable to return to Italy on the same grounds, namely that they do not hold EU passports but only travel permits, which again do grant them the right to pass by the 1951 Refugee Convention. It simply does not make sense and it also applies in reverse; the ECRE general report mentions for Austria:

A similar practice is applied vis-à-vis trains following the opposite direction along the Italian border. According to the testimonies of migrants returned to Italy, when police intercepts people coming from Italy, it orders them to return to Italy without starting of (sic) any formal procedure or without providing them with a written decision. Migrants have reported not being able to communicate with the Austrian police and to express their intention to seek asylum or–in some cases–to declare their minor age, namely due to the absence of linguistic mediators.  (Mouzourakis 2018: 13, emphasis added)

Although these practices have been documented prior to the introduction of Border Codes, the “threat” had always already been there at least as far as these two countries were concerned and they were already acting on it, transforming the small nodes such as the Villach train station in Austria into detention-like spaces, extending the exception spatially into the racialized infrastructures of the Schengen space. The end goal and the undisclosed “threat” being fought against has been reducing the number of registered asylum seekers in the EU databases. As an excerpt from AIDA Austria country report (Knapp, 2018) goes to show, the quotas for asylum seeking applications granted are reduced every year: 37.500 (2016) to 30.000 (2017, 2018) to 25.000 (2019)–including family reunification cases. Further to the Schengen Border Codes, Austria released the Austrian Asylum Act in 2016, including the provision of quotas and an emergency regime, which will allow, when the quotas are reached, the Austrian authorities “to reject people who make an asylum application at the border before providing them with the opportunity to formally lodge their application” (Mouzourakis 2018: 10), as the general report mentions. The specific Austrian report goes on to explain that: “in 2016, ‘special provisions to maintain public order during border checks’ were added to the Asylum Act. When the provision (discussed publicly as ‘emergency provision’) enters into force through a decree of the federal government, asylum seekers no longer have access to the asylum procedure in Austria” (Knapp 2018: 18). Thus, not only is Austria using all the provisions that the Schengen Border Codes allow in terms of intra-state border controls, but it makes sure to stretch the realm of what a national-level legislator can do under a supranational legal framework like that of the EU. Van der Wounde’s (2020) study on multi-scalar border and criminal law aspects involved in the application of Schengen Border Codes supports what I have outlined so far in this article. Van der Wounde mentions article 23 of the Schengen Border Codes, which allows countries to exercise police powers and to carry out identity checks.[5] A set of issues are involved in this multi-scalar framework. Firstly, the performance of jurisdiction becomes negotiated on the ground inside and between different policing forces, depending on the capacities and structures of each nation state (with Italy and Portugal for instance reporting the involvement of armed forces, alongside immigration authorities, customs and border guard agencies). Secondly, as per provisions of article 23, these checks cannot be performed at the border, so they are done within a short range of the border (one small train station before the border, as in the case of Villach in Austria). Thirdly, the legal mandate on which these checks operate is “a mixture of administrative and criminal law” and thus “equipping enforcement agencies with both crime and immigration powers and responsibilities” (Van der Woude 2020: 119). The reason for this mixture is the initial basis onto which the Border Codes and the exception of free intra-Schengen mobility argument have been constructed–as a threat to national security.

Certainly, nation-state interest is directed to a racially-informed control of the population and the actions of measuring, calculation and tabulation are important for the exercising of this control, yet I argue that it is valuable to start from the propositions Weheliye makes about the everydayness and everynightness of having flesh/having a body in an always already racialized assemblage. This assemblage contains and is in relationship with law-making operations and policy, and the racist infrastructure part of racial capitalism, which became globally “hyper-apparent in the ‘War on Terror’, where the link between the two and how the terror-industrial complex feeds into (infra)structural violence of the everyday” (Rana 2016: 124). Infrastructural racism and biopolitical calculations form articulations “of the flesh as a racializing assemblage in the world of Man [which] cannot be apprehended by legal recognition and inclusion” (Weheliye 73). What is needed, according to Weheliye is the “disarticulation of the flesh from the law” as a disarticulation of flesh and property or more conceptually, a disarticulation and decoupling from both “bare life and from Habeas Corpus.” This sits in tension with Agamben and his conception of “state of exception” and “bare life” as “exclusively legal categories” and rests on a longer tradition of critical thinking on oppression coming from black writers such as Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter, on whom Weheliye relies to argue that the major problem with “bare life” is that “Agamben fails to introduce any sort of invention into existence […] and for him invention can occur only after the abolition of present life” (Weheliye 2014a: 83). What modalities of existence does, in turn, the Weheliyan habeas viscus conjure up? The project at stake here is “imagining the relational ontological totality of the human” (2014a: 4) in the context of racial capitalism and racial infrastructures.

The railway station in the small town of Villach, Austria acted as the setting for witnessing acts of border policing that not only should not have happened at the border itself, given the right to movement of people across Schengen states (including, in this case, asylum seekers with registration papers from a Schengen country–issued by the Italian authorities), but should definitely not have happened in a town approximately 20 km away from the Austrian border with the North of Italy. This article so far has paid close attention to a single, small node and a moment of policing not as an exceptional case, but as a way of engaging with the multi-scalar issues of racialized infrastructure and bordering practices. It has shown how Italian and Austrian officers engaged in collaborative border policing of this town as if this was indeed the border, and not a simple node in the frictionless travel promises of the Schengen area, including for those already registered as asylum seekers in one Schengen state. Their actions, as Van der Wounde’s study clearly expresses, is a mixture of criminal law and immigration law being enforced at the intersection of Italian and Austrian jurisdictions. This not being in fact a border and those policing it not being in fact immigration officers but having been given legal jurisdiction over bodies, they drew the border with these bodies. Clearly not a question of being sans papiers, since documentation was held and shown, it remained unclear and unexplained by either Austrian police or Italian Carabinieri why passports were required in this case. As the reports cited in the previous section have shown, the push from Austria and Italy to introduce internal border controls in the Schengen area has been coupled with racial profiling and increased checks on trains. But if the studies cited mostly referred to those seeking asylum and aiming to get to Italy to do so, then the experience witnessed in this small train station shows how similar profiling, checks and refusal of entry applies to those who have already been documented and are seeking to return to the issuing country.

So far, I have argued that this experience shows how the added Border Codes to the Schengen Agreement and additional law-making that the Austrian and Italian governments have compiled in their creation of legal states of exception only contribute to an erosion of the human, producing “the universalizing of exception [which] disables thinking humanity creatively” (Weheliye 2014a: 11). It shows how modern racializing assemblages reinstate what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney have called “the dream of governance”, which they argue is “to go beyond representation as a form of sovereignty, to auto-generating representation, in the double sense. Those who can represent themselves will also be those who re-present themselves as interests in one and the same move, collapsing the distinction” (2013: 56, emphasis added). This node underlines the promise of the Schengen area towards state sovereignty and its ambition of going beyond representation, yet remaining inside the realms of governanance, of legal representation, of habeas corpus presenting itself before the law. What this instance shows is that the dream of sovereignty and that of biopolitical calculation, tabulation, measure and control need the state of exception to co-function in this particular space that is the Schengen Area.

Schengen as Promise of Frictionless Sovereignty

“Relationality is frictional.” (Tsing 2006, cited in Kaiser and Thiele: 4)

The European Schengen Area is arguably a specific type of imagined space for frictionless sovereignty. The promise of the Schengen area is free movement of goods and people, the promise of a friction-less territory, and also a promise of state sovereignty maintained. This double promise, as shown so far, has historically, even from its constituting moments, been hard to keep. The law is the point where the double bind in the promise becomes a tension, particularly in the hinging of frictionless sovereignty. The existence and application of Schengen Border Codes, when read in their relation to the racial infrastructures of Fortress Europe and the state of exception making bodies into borders, also bring into relation the areas that “rub the wrong way” in both the promise of free movement and the fiction that is sovereignty. This section will build on previously mentioned Weheliyan critiques of the messianic in Agamben’s conception, and juxtapose these to the notion of friction as situated, relational, and embodied. I interpret these frictions as opening up what Fred Moten calls the “the illusory coherence in/and spatio-temporal constitution of sovereignty” (2017, emphasis added). This maintained illusion of coherence is part of a larger condition of the sovereign, what Moten reading Frantz Fanon highlights as a neurosis, “the habitual attempt to regulate the general, generative disorder” (2013: 137). For the neurosis driven by the sovereign condition there is no space for expression, for affirmation given to flesh unless it is considered bare life, even if that space comes into being through the friction of nation states in various states of exception, legal or not. The questions of sovereignty and bodies, sovereignty and death in the sense of calculation, power, and control is something that Achille Mbembe takes up via Giorgio Agamben through a discussion of bare or mere life and necropolitics. Recognising Mbembe’s contribution, this is nevertheless a line of argument this article is aiming to critique, particularly insofar as in it, a passage happens from human “into the categories of meat and of flesh, of being reduced to mere and simple life” (Mbembe 2005: 161). Yet flesh, when not abstracted in this way, moves, shakes and makes visible the illusory coherence of sovereignty, as Weheliye argues. Flesh makes this illusion crumble in more than one way. The aspect of sovereignty that refers to exerting power on bare life as calculation and control is what comes into question when having flesh becomes central to understanding the infra-structural and legal constitutions of sovereignty as racialized assemblages. This stands in opposition to a view of sovereignty as “a mark of something originary, of a will that is self-born and unaccountable,” something apparent in Carl Schmitt’s work on political theology (Hansen and Stepputat 2005: 15).

As one of Agamben’s prominent influences, Carl Schmitt’s work has been picked up in critical theory with some consideration given to his central role in the German Nazi party but surprisingly, with a good degree of academic redemption. “In Schmitt’s view, sovereignty does not have the form of law; it lies behind, and makes possible the authority of the law” (Hansen and Stepputat 2005: 16). Weheliye states that Agamben “infuses [his work] with Carl Schmitt’s thoughts on sovereignty” (2014a: 33). Agamben takes from Schmitt the premise that the sovereign decides on the state of exception and that this is part and parcel of the law. Furthermore, Agamben engages with sovereign power over bodies and populations through bare life, making possible the reduction of life to an abstracted form of flesh, only visible when it appears in calculation. As Weheliye shows, Agamben insists on the bond with and abandonment to the law of every living being but does not address the fact that the “the state of exception does not apply equally to all, since the exclusion of and violence perpetrated against some groups is anchored in the law” (Weheliye 2014a: 87). For Schmitt, where Agamben takes his influence, “the Earth is bound to Law” (Schmitt 1950: 42) and “nomos is the measure by which land in a particular order is divided an situated” (Schmitt, 1950, 71) therefore tabulation, calculation and measurement are inherently bound to law. The nomos is of and in the Earth, and the law is in there too, bound up with the Earth. Thus, any exception to this relation between law and Earth belongs to the powers of the sovereign and it is a legal decision. In other words, the decisions of the sovereign are also bound up with law and Earth (soil and blood) and they are legal decisions. In Schmitt’s later work, The Nomos of The Earth (1950) there seems to be a shift from the sovereign decision central to his earlier work to nomos because this term “emphasizes much more the idea of ‘concrete order’” (Antaki 2004: 323). In the next section, I will focus on how Schmitt’s arguments about the nomos have been criticized for holding the illusory coherence of sovereignty, if not through decisionism, perhaps even more worryingly, though an argument of bounded-ness, of friction-less relation between law, soil, of divvying up and parcelling out that extends from colonial thought and disregards whole sections of populations as belonging to the category of the human.

Map and Territory: Also a Question of the Human

“The existence of black life disenchants Western humanism.”  (Weheliye 2014b: 5)

To return to the main points raised in the first section of this article and the central argument in Weheliye’s project: the concept under critical revision is that of the human, as an assemblage accounting for gender, racialization, coloniality, slavery, political violence, especially shaped and sharpened in the work of Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers. The challenge of this revision rests in centring black feminist epistemology “without mapping these questions [of the human] onto a mutually exclusive struggle between either the free-flowing terra nullius of the universally applicable or the terra cognitus of the ethnographically detained” (Weheliye 2014a: 24, my emphasis).

Terra nullius as principle in International Law has been set in place to justify claims that territory may be acquired by a state’s occupation of it. It implies, of course, that before occupation, this was the territory of feral beasts, human or non-human. Terra nullius is also, not surprisingly, the legal term connected to the Berlin Conference (1884-5) and the colonial occupation in the African continent. What conception of the human can then arise from the idea of “the free-flowing terra nullius of the universally applicable”? Whiteness, imperialism, the world of Man and that of colonialist occupation function as ontological and epistemological grounds.

On the other hand, terra cognitus designates the known, the acquainted with but also the tried and proved, the knowledge stemming corporeally, from the body and from lived experience. This, however is the knowledge of Man, hence the play on gender in the formulation Weheliye chooses in Latin; this is undoubtedly the terra cognitus of the world of Man. What conception of the human arises from “the terra cognitus of the ethnographically detained”? Weheliye argues that what arises is the particular epistemology, the exception and the particular land claim that are often relegated to identitarian claims and stuck in the space associated with the group identity, or of territory associated with that identity. He continues by stating that in the Western epistemological system of value, black studies has been relegated to the disciplinary particular of ethnic studies, ethnographically detained, and that this relegation has been doubled by a disregard for black life which “has represented a negative ontological ground for the Western order of things at least for the last five hundred years” (Weheliye 2014b: 5). He goes on to argue that the underlining ground for this epistemological parsing has at its core a dichotomy between black life and other types of life, whereas black studies understands the human “not [as] an ontological fait accompli” (Weheliye 2014a: 7). If the human is not a given, completed and bound up in legal structures dictated by the sovereign by decision, the human should also not be defined and bound up by the world of Man, particularly through nomos. Quite the opposite, as Anna Jurkevics underlines, following Hannah Arendt, “the nomos should stay open to contestation in the future. The world and the nomos are rooted and concrete, but not static, in the Arendtian conception” (Jurkevics 2017: 358).

If the nomos stays open to contestation then the question of the human can move between the universal and the particular, between identity and rootedness into a space or territory with the situated knowledge that arises from that position, conceptualizing and making sense of human experience as a whole. What we could define as human thus interfaces between these positions and spaces, mapping and parsing out through the entangled dimensions these open up, rather than belonging to one or the other.

For Schmitt, the word nomos (law) is primordially and primarily tied to land and opens up questions of excess and exception. In what follows, I will consider Jurkevics’s article, which engages with Hannah Arendt’s indirect critiques of Schmitt and particularly with his view of nomos as intrinsically imperial and racist, which will bring us back to Weheliye’s argument on the racialized assemblage of legal and institutional infrastructures and the question of the human, once more.

This critique of Schmitt is put together by Anna Jurkevics in her research resting on evidence from marginalia written by Hannah Arendt in her copy of Nomos of the Earth, pointing to what she calls “an incisive critique of Schmitt’s geopolitics and International Law” (2017: 346). Jurkevics argues that the relevance of this find is not purely identifying a never published historical conversation but that its implications are mostly contemporary. According to her article, in the U.S. context and academic debate Arendt’s notes on the book open up new and important questions on the use of Schmitt’s concept of nomos in scholarly work as “a tool against American empire in the post 9/11 era” (Jurkevics 2017: 1). One could say that by extension, this critique could have effect on how Schmitt’s work has been deployed in critical conversations around risk, terror threats and attacks. In the case of Europe, the EU and Schengen area, the intrinsically imperialist nomos that Fortress Europe is enforcing as violent geopolitics could expose the use of Schmitt’s concept into critical questioning as well. Jurkevics argues that a scholarly deployment of Schmitt “will have to grapple a contradiction, exposed by Arendt, that lies at the core of Schmitt’s geopolitics, namely that he both embraces conquest and repudiates imperialism” (2017: 346).

Europe is bound to law, exception is also law and to be human means to have a body before that law. This opens up implications for the Jus Publicum Europaeum–the principle of equality of states in International Law, as it was codified in Europe in 1814. If we follow Arendt’s critique of nomos, as a philosophical as well as historical concept, it is apparent that for Schmitt this concept is “based on the idea of land-appropriation, and is thus imperialist” (Jurkevics 2017: 352) and that this appropriation happens primarily through conquest. Such is the history of European Law defined through conquest of territories outside of it. This imperialist set of legal prescriptions in tied into the history of European law-making through colonialism and it has structural implications on how any current legal configurations, like the Schengen Agreement and the Schengen Border Codes can be considered as lawful, especially towards those bodies whom could be considered worthy of standing before these laws of Man:

Arendt’s concern about justice comes out most vehemently in her comments about Schmitt’s history of colonialism. In this account, some land-appropriations established a new nomos while others did not. Schmitt is interested in understanding the land-appropriations that constituted a new nomos; he is not interested in the wrongs that resulted from them. Arendt responds firmly: ‘‘that jurists do not know what justice is does not give Schmitt the right to equate injustice and law-making.’’ (marginalia: 50). Arendt wants him to admit that these land-appropriations are unjust, are the original sin of a new order, instead of equating them with law. (Jurkevics 2017: 351)

Essentially, the central questions that Arendt raises are around what the source of law is, according to Schmitt and also, where is it situated? Jurkevics clarifies that most likely Schmitt’s answer would be “that law springs from the soil in the moment that it is captured, cultivated, and bounded” (Jurkevics 2017: 349). Citing Arendt’s further marginalia in her own copy of The Nomos of The Earth, Jurkevics provides an answer to a later issue stemming from the same problem of nomos, as Arendt had seen it: the fact that “Schmitt misunderstood that Nazi ideology was, in the first place, racist, not geopolitical (marginalia: 211)” (cited in Jurkevics 2017: 349). As plurality does not feature for Schmitt in the same way that it plays a role in understanding the relationship between law and politics for Arendt, “she complains repeatedly that people, human beings, are cut out of his account” (Jurkevics 2017: 349) and the focus is on earth as soil and battleground. These sites of conquest are for Schmitt central to law-making and thus, as central sites of conquest and abuse, as the linguistic source of the word nomos itself indicates (from nemein, as nehmen/to take and as teilen/to divide).

Land-capture or occupation or conquest is obviously the sine qua non of land-division. But questions of right first arise with division, which accords each his own- …questions of right come about during the divvying up of the New World only once it comes to division…before the acquisition comes the division and not conquest! (marginalia: 108) (Jukevics 2017: 352)

This key point in Arendt’s critique rests on the fact that for Schmitt, appropriation comes before division, which is essentially an imperialist view. Parsing out land and making territory is preceded by conquest and Arendt raises questions of right around divvying up processes, like those involved in colonial conquest and their role in justifying and legitimating a historically fascist European rule. If Arendt’s marginalia notes have served here to compose a grounded critique of Schmitt, then that is their limit and the reason is mainly Arendt’s own anti-Black racism as pointed out in growing contemporary scholarship on Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1962), On Violence (1970) and most strikingly, Reflections on Little Rock (1959).  For example, in a reading of On Violence, Chad Kautzer makes the case that mobilizing Arendt’s ideas about the instrumentality of violence as a resource in producing critical reading of contemporary violence could risk giving way to spaces where her thinking is “complicit with the violent logic of a different order” (Kautzer 2019: 2). That order, Kautzer goes on to argue, is that of legal and state violence, especially when considered as a racialized assemblage, meaning a constellation which enforces the role of the white vigilante and “charges those who resist it with breaching the peace” (2019: 1). The reason for the former is that Arendt did not directly address state violence which emerges through social issues and particularly structural racism and white privilege, even when writing at the time of International decolonial struggles and the height of the Black Power movement in the United States. She consistently ignored the issue of structural state racism and actively deemed black liberation movements that involved forms of violence as “irrational, provocative and […] clearly unjustified” (Kautzer 2019: 11), going as far as arguing that there is an inherent “lawlessness” to Black communities, which makes them responsible for further “white backlash” (Arendt, 1968 cited in Kautzer 2019: 10). These readings are echoed in Patricia Owens’ analysis of the ideas put forth in On Violence. Apart from “her consistent refusal to analyse the colonial and imperial origins of racial conflict in the United States” (Owens 2017: 403), Arendt also openly disagrees with Sartre and Fanon, refuses to recognize the Third World as a transnational site in decolonial struggles, and considers it a mere inversion of imperialist ideas of territory, concocted by the European New Left. She thus excises any agency from the proponents of these struggles in these sites in the world and re-centers European knowledge production as a site of power. Furthermore, if in The Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt makes “dubious attempts to sever the historical and political link between racism in America and the forms of imperial racism” (Owens 2017: 414) then in The Human Condition she states in no unclear terms: “universal experience is not a substitute for particularity and plurality” (Owens 2017: 416).

In short, translating to the issues raised in this article so far, Arendt, who has been extensively cited in contemporary scholarship on European migration deals with imperialism and colonialism in the same terms, drawing up divisions between nature and culture and between terra nullius and terra cognitus, tensions between the universal of the terra nullius and the particular of identitarian land claims. She replicates exactly the same division, which further down the argumentative line leads her to the question of the human. Most explicitly in works like The Human Condition, Arendt draws divisions between those “more or less ‘cultured’, more or less free, and thus more or less fully human” (Owens 2017: 412). She might not rely on evolutionism but reaches the same anti-Black conclusion, which makes her deem African tribal communities as never fully human (Owens 2017: 412). The Euro-centrism and anti-primitivism that Arendt upholds throughout her work thus falls into the same world of Man, as the white colonial rule over land and people, where law incorporates everything. Overall, this amounts to an argument that stands together with a third critic of Arendt’s most obvious anti-Black racist piece, Reflections on Little Rock, Michael D. Burroughs (2015: 52), who writes that it is “white ignorance [which] constitutes a fundamental epistemic error” for Arendt’s line of argumentation.

Divvying, even when division precedes conquest as Arendt’s correction of Schmitt shows, is an ontological and epistemological form of violence, when the human is conceived through the world of Man. It excludes the possibility of being for anything outside of the figure of Man as the secular, modern and Western version of the human. Weheliye’s propositions insist on disarticulating the flesh from the law, and call for imagining a modality of existence that is tied up neither with the sovereign nor the nomos. For Weheliye, miniscule moments, shards of hope, scraps of food “swarm the ether of Man’s legal apparatus, which does not mean that these formations annul the brutal validity of bare life, biopolitics, necropolitics, social death, or racializing assemblages but that Man’s juridical machine can never exhaust the plentitude of our world” (Weheliye 2014a: 131). In this process of disarticulation, which follows black thought and lived experience foremost, we could start to hopefully think and be with “enfleshed modalities of humanity” (ibid: 13).

Conclusion

This article has emerged from an experience of witnessing how European Law is enacted on racialized bodies during current anti-immigration efforts of nation-states that are part of the European Schengen territories, like Italy and Austria. It has offered an abstracted reflection on how the human body, in its enfleshed being, becomes the border, even when the promise of no borders marks the foundations of such a project of friction-less sovereignty. Europe is bound to law and an essential source of European Law’s mutation over centuries of application into its current wide-reaching iteration is imperial and colonial violence based in conquest of soil, bodies, and blood. Academic thought upon which we often rest our critiques of these laws replicate anti-black and other forms of racism stemming from the liberal humanities of the world of Man. Black scholars and black studies have consistently offered knowledge and experience, which should be considered sources and not alternatives to the current challenge of thinking the human and beyond. The aim has been to centre this knowledge in the interpretation of current bordering practices, which try to make bodies appear before the law through enforcement and articulation. What became apparent in setting an event against the legal framework of Schengen Border Codes, regulatory regimes, and jurisdictions is that the border becomes visible in the “hieroglyphs of flesh” Weheliye mentions, producing friction in the dream and promise of frictionless sovereignty.

 

Mihaela Brebenel is a screen and visual studies researcher. They are interested in feminist and queer practices, as well as the aesthetics and politics of screen (and other) technologies. They work as Lecturer in Digital Cultures at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton and are part of Archaeologies of Media and Technology Research group.

 

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Weheliye, Alexander G. (2014a) Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Weheliye, Alexander G. (2014b) “Introduction.” The Black Scholar 44:2, 5–10. https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2014.11413682.

Wynter, Sylvia (2006) “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Reimprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, Of Désêtre” in Lewis R. Gordon (ed.) A Companion to African-American Studies, Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 107–18.

 

[1] “The Asylum Information Database is a database managed by ECRE, containing information on asylum procedures, reception conditions, detention and content of international protection across 23 European countries. This includes 20 European Union (EU) Member States (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Germany, Spain, France, Greece, Croatia, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, Slovenia, and United Kingdom) and 3 non-EU countries (Switzerland, Serbia, Turkey).”n.p.

[1] I would like to thank Ryan Bishop for his editorial guidance and patient support in the development of this article and beyond. Scott Wark, Grace Tillyard, Peter Rees and Charlotte Terrell have made this time of academic writing in quarantine feel nurturing by offering great support on versions of this article. Thank you also to peers Ilona Jurkonytė and Nikolaus Perneczky for your careful notes and attention to the script. And in the most heartfelt way to Ariya, for her ways of holding space and being present.

[2] In Austria’s case, the more recent and insidious collaboration of the Green Party with known conservative parties in supporting anti-immigration policies is particularly notable. See Oprakto (2020).

[3] The rush to close borders in between Schengen states has never been more clear than in the current pandemic, where with the outbreak of COVID 19, there has been a return to hard borders between all EU member states, again leaving refugees and asylum seekers outside of the structures of care they are legally and humanly entitled to.

[4] https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/what-we-do/policies/borders-and-visas/schengen/reintroduction-border-control_en

[5] Article 23 states that these discretionary policing activities can take place as long as “(1) the exercise of these powers cannot be considered equivalent to the exercise of border checks, (2) the police measures do not have border control as an objective, (3) are based on general police information and experience regarding possible threats to public security and aim, in particular, to combat cross-border crime and, lastly, (4) as long as the measures are devised and executed in a manner clearly distinct from systematic checks on persons at the external borders and are carried out on the basis of spot-checks” (Van der Woude 2020, 118).

This essay has been peer-reviewed by “Frictionless Sovereignty” special issue editor (Ryan Bishop), and the b2o: An Online Journal editorial board.

Introduction: Times of Becoming and Elusive Realization: The Challenges for Sovereignty

Theories of sovereignty often presume territory and human control of it. Current (non-)urban conditions, however, posit an urban yet to arrive that is also, at the same time, already reaching its limits in terms of geological, atmospheric and human life implications, which in turn, affects the concept and actualization of sovereignty. Under these conditions, sovereignty becomes as strained and constrained, modified and modifying, as the urban yet to arrive. Sharing some of the messianic dimensions of the temporal formulations found in Jacques Derrida’s “the democracy to come,” the urban yet to arrive also operates with a more sinister teleology, one leading to an ineluctable fatalism of foregone human organizational conclusions. But the manner in which these conclusions emerge leave some options for derailing specific elements of the urban inevitability and its relationship to an ever-unstable sense of sovereignty. These options appear in the (non-)human “horizon” of spatial, temporal and sovereign formations: the horizon as an opening and also a limit, a perpetual state of becoming and an elusive realization. The theoretical designations of (non-)urban humans and (non-)urban sovereignty allow us to address several interlocking conundrums and dimensions pertaining to space, control, subjects and contradictory temporalities, thus opening inquiry into the influence of sovereignty on urban processes and vice versa. In line with a seeming global homogenization of urbanization processes, which apparently converge diverse people and places toward a single vanishing point, there are parallel trajectories where the extensiveness of urbanization mutates “all over the place” in the “strange” intersections of divergent logics. Here the urban is something already vanished in its familiar terms, and specific and supposedly urban places are layered with countervailing networks, scales and forces that make it difficult to determine what or who is sovereign in any particular instance.  What we know as urban is already finished even as urbanization processes would seem to be in the process of “finishing off” its residents. Thus several different terminal temporalities converge on various scales to undo the aspirational horizon and delimit possibilities.

From the onset of the Cold War and the emergence of globalization as we came to know it in the second half of the 20^th century, state-driven mobility and the triumph of the eternal “now” constituted by tele-technologies integral to Cold War global surveillance merged with business, economics, architecture and spatial practices, making the divisions between military, economic and political domains remarkably fluid (if discernible at all), and thus allowing one to fold into the other as the need arises. The deterritorialization of economic regimes through military technicity thrived during the Cold War and accelerated in the post-Cold War constructions of mobile sovereignty. The demand for global surveillance that characterized the Cold War and the Truman Doctrine–which stated that any action anywhere in the world could be considered as having direct impact on US interests and thus legitimated any and all actions on behalf of the nation-state–revealed the extent to which sovereignty no longer demanded attachment to territory and was extendable to other spatial regimes; that it had become in some manner of application as well as within the political imaginary “frictionless.”

Indeed, sovereignty and its attention or priorities could be shifted as interests dictated: present when desired, absent when not; mobile, strategic, selective. Mobile sovereignty during the Cold War/post-colonial moment, however, merely reiterated and updated the mobile sovereignty of colonialism, which maintained sovereignty over non-contiguous lands. Fungible frontiers constitute mobile, frictionless sovereignty, gliding over barriers intended to constrain it and keep one form at the border’s edge of another. This deterritorialization of economic, state and military apparatuses, therefore, has significantly altered understandings of built and “un-built” urban space and has done so by combining the vertical order of discipline and accumulation with the horizontal structures of dispersed control to arrive at forms of sovereignty still reliant upon violence (now including the violence of information and calculation as power and leverage) as the prerogative of the state but with extensions of this prerogative to spaces and territories not necessarily under that state’s explicit jurisdiction.

These conditions that supposedly make mobile sovereignty frictionless, materially realizable and immaterially imaginable, form an immediate context for an urban yet to arrive that manifests these sovereign dreams. At the same time, the urban also prevents, often without volition or intentionality, the realization of mobile sovereignty’s desires while presenting consistently new forms of resistance. The drives toward frictionless sovereignty have resulted in the implementation of tele-technologies, most especially multiple polyscalar autonomous remote sensing systems, that strike at the heart of formations of political subjectivity at individual and collective scales. The urban yet to arrive emerges in and through the never-ending extensivity of urban forms and operations made possible by the same financial, technological and noetic desires and apparatuses underpinning frictionless sovereignty. Each necessitates and realizes the other: inextricably intertwined and mutually dependent and influential. These rhythms and temporalities of consolidation and dispersal, intensive and extensive open up spaces of indetermination in their “back and forth” recalibrations.

Accounting for Black Time

For centuries predating the 19^th century “Age of Civilization” colonialism, black bodies served as vehicles for extensive sovereignty both within the global slave trade and within national territorial control. The US deployed these bodies for economic gain while also furthering nation-state independence by distancing itself governmentally from European countries that had begun to implement and further abolitionist causes. The UK emancipated enslaved bodies in the Caribbean and Canada, as well as the UK itself, to articulate its own sovereign reach. In the current moment of frictionless sovereignty and its attendant strategic yet increased “borderizing” of the globe, black bodies as borders (pace Mbembe, 2018) especially in the Global South, serve as urban, economic, governmental and corporeal sites of limited mobility and geopolitical power. If polyscalar sensing systems can and do service surveillance capitalism and thus the phantasm of frictionless sovereignty, especially as the most advanced manifestations of planetary calculation and computation, then the bodies that are most surveilled, detained, deported and calculated for control within these systems also constitute sites of intractable friction and potential subversion of an accelerated geopolitical status quo. As the redistribution of bodies and resources within these global systems shore up specific sovereign claims, those targeted for enclosure, containment and the performance of power incarnate become ensnared by biometric borders that have discounted them as global citizens, much less as cogent agents. In so doing, the discounted become, ironically, the most counted of all because they do not count and thus must be accounted for at borders and other sites of imposed friction. Within regimes of frictionless sovereignty, the fusion of these multi-scaled tele-technological systems of calculation, measurement and control of environmental conditions and population surveillance with the mobile border that is the black body constitutes two sides of a contradictory geopolitical coin for sovereign claims and the enactment of them. On the one side, the Cold War technological inheritance of frictionless information gathering, calculation, surveillance and remote control; on the other, the embodied surplus of said inheritance and results, as always in inflated claims of absolute command and control, in unintended consequences–both negative and positive–for all cases.

An additional entry point to think about these conundrums around sovereignty centers on the purported sovereignty of urbanization as now an all-encompassing force. One of the most productive strands in contemporary urban research has been the focus on extended urbanization, which is but an element of the urban yet to arrive. Here, urbanization not only becomes more extensive as an ongoing, increasingly dominant process of spatial production and realignment, with a coherent set of constitutive dynamics, but also extends itself into a wider multiplicity of situations and histories (Brenner 2014). The extension of urbanization mirrors in logics, logistics, infrastructural capacity and general desires those operative in and through frictionless sovereignty. Both offer a particular working-out of dilemmas, tipping points, and conjunctures faced by settlements, and this working-out entails various equations of subsumption, adaptation, erasure, remaking, conciliation, and improvisation. Urbanization, as with frictionless sovereignty, is then something that not only spreads out as a function of its own internal operations, but is something contributed to through an intensely differentiated process of encounter, enabling it to change gears and operate through a wider range of appearances and instantiations (McGee and Greenberg 2002, Monte-Mór 2014, Keil 2018, Schmid 2018).

Notions of extending thus simultaneously complement and problematize our understandings of the workings of sovereignty. Far from a withdrawal from the volatilities of the world, sovereignty was to be a structured medium of touching—the ways in which political entities were to touch upon each other, through the mechanisms of bordering, of securing an internal coherence within borders. But this tethering to the tug and pull of communal organization formed through the structuring and ideological affordances of sovereignty become attenuated and ameliorated when converted to the apparent selectiveness of frictionless sovereignty as all strategically deterritorialized claims to sovereign control past also experienced.

Extensivity is far from being simply virtuous or destructive. It is a process that continually repositions what exists in a particular place, at times dissipating the sense of boundedness that permitted particular forms of self-recognition and, at other times, hardening boundaries as a defensive, immunological maneuver against the disturbances ushered in by virtue of being situated in a larger world of relevant connectivity (Esposito 2004). The sufficiency of any place, territory relies upon a metabolic functioning—i.e. inputs, flows, and regulations of materials and the generation of infrastructures of coordination and interoperability (Swilling et al 2013, Demaria and Schindler 2016). As these are situated within a larger “surrounds” to which they are variously articulated, the compositions and character of connectivity play a decisive role in terms of how a place maintains itself as a specific entity, a particular moment of “throwntogetherness” (Massey 2005).

The “surrounds” of urban space in the contemporary moment must now be extended to the sensing systems of planetary computation and control constitutive of the horizons for contemporary geopolitical and economic formulations, ones predicated on sustained and maintained inequities. Katherine McKittrick discusses the surrounds as the contexts that perpetuated plantation organization, geographies and life. As such the racial and spatial economy of the plantation contains within it, as extrapolated from theoretical frames expounded by Caribbean economist George Beckford, the outlines of contemporary urbanism, especially in, but by no means limited to, the Global South (McKittrick 8). She argues that the extended concept of the plantation serves as “the shadow” for her “tracing of the geographic workings of dispossession, which intends to contextualize the plantation as a location that might also open up a discussion of black life within the context of contemporary global cities and futures” (5). “The plantation” as site of self-contained economy, politics, law, built environment and surveillance “spatializes early conceptions of urban life within a racial economy,” (8) one that necessitated visual regimes of observation, tracking and control (as also explored by Achille Mbembe and Nick Mirzoeff among others). The routinized violence of the plantation that haunts contemporary urban formations and built environments demands visual regimes of oversight and episcopal control, like that offered by satellites and other massive complex systems of surveillance and futural prediction. Thus the surrounds, that which is non-urban, nonetheless falls under the watchful and gathering sovereign gaze when it suits the urban for it to do so and becomes no longer watched over but merely overlooked when not. The selective perception of and engagement with the surrounds necessary for sustaining urban existence and control of its extended space perfectly illustrates an important tenet of frictionless sovereignty: maximum benefit with minimum responsibility. The concomitant risk is that, particularly in contemporary modalities of calculation, maximum benefits from specific and limited inputs will often deliver unanticipated results. Such is evident in all the ways in which urban populations are released from or “let go” of specific forms of anchorage to circulate across increasingly disjointed urban landscapes, consolidating basins of attraction here and there without aspirations for long term institutional emplacement.

Satellites of Time: Activating Urban Relations

The etymology of satellite, from the Latin satellit-, relates to an attendant, the member of a bodyguard. There is an episcopal or overseeing function operative in the term, a protector but one that is (supposedly) under one’s own control not vice versa. The role of these systems in the operations of frictionless sovereignty becomes an essential element of the surrounds that further constitute contemporary urban space and populations in ways foreshadowed by plantation organization and existence. The “plantation futures” we experience in the present results in part through these teletechnological systems of Cold War origin and deployment turned to global divisions of economic distributions. McKittrick writes that “the city is the commercial expression of the plantation and its marginalized masses,” with the plantation as “a persistent but ugly blueprint of our contemporary spatial troubles” (2013:12)–a blueprint reinscribed and intensified by large-scale teletechnological systems of calculation and remote control articulate the desires of mobile, frictionless sovereignty such that the urban of the black body happens “elsewhere” and not in the site from whence control ensues and to where benefits of said control accrue. But as with the plantation and slave uprisings, the belief in total control then and now is ill-founded and haunted by the specter of failure and fatality. Planetary computation understands this well although its narrative of self-justification rarely indicates it.

Implicit in the relevance of sovereignty as a concept are considerations regarding for whom a particular set of circumstances matter, and to what degree? How far do particular events and outcomes exert a particular impact? How does the substantialization of such events and outcomes take place, from where do they draw force and efficacy? These are fundamental questions informing the particular manners in which urbanization becomes something more extensive as a form of extending, of offering particular mechanisms of problem-solving and anchorage, in addition to problem-creation and disconnection.

For the degrees of urbanization are not a matter of how particular instances of the urban conform or deviate from some kind of overarching normative functioning, but rather how the urban “shows up” in any specific instance of observation; that it is a mobile conceptualization, perhaps even a grammar of operationalization potentially present in any place (Halbert and Attuyer 2014). The conceptual challenge then is not to decide upon whether something is urban or not, but rather to dynamically account for its oscillating appearances over time and what forms it might take with various regimes of sovereign claims. The conceptual urban operates fully in prescriptive mode while the lived urban is intractably in need of the descriptive. In other words, any place is articulated to something that exceeds its normative frames of recognition—its boundedness, categorization, or sense of internal coherence. Even the most seemingly cut off places derive their relative isolation or detachment through an engineered history of relations that act to maintain that detachment (Scheer, 2016, Keil 2018). Thus what might be considered “rural” is partly a byproduct of densities elsewhere as well as their strategic relationships with, dependencies upon and support of those densities; a hinterland perhaps on the surface marginal to the operations of big city machines but nevertheless possible because of them. Ineluctably though the rural is wholly and fully constructed through the urban, not least in the sense that structuralism, for example, would cast the relationship. And the rural supports, maintains and supplies the urban. The divide is one of symbiotic relationality.

Relations are always materialized, even with invisible computational systems.  They are not simply abstract mediating frameworks, but concrete objects. Relations are concretized, not as the interaction of definitive substances or forms of life. Rather, they are concretized via the specific media in which they take place, the destination of the transmitted information, the name in which any messaging is enunciated, and the content of that which is transmitted and its particular procedural codification (Hui 2015).  In other words, the very process of extending–the very acts of touching, engaging, intersecting, inserting, and resonating—is the materialization of the relation, the articulation of one place, one operation, one functioning to another at the heart of urbanization processes.

Extending is not simply a matter of urbanization overspilling its familiar forms or reaching out into various hinterlands. Extending also entails the expansion of the value form, of the experience of residing and operating in urban contexts. It entails the extension of time from unilateral trajectories of past, present, and future, into temporal experiences that thoroughly entangle these designations into a complex weaving of cycles, ruptures, continuities, and inversions (Stavrides 2010, Bunnell and Goh 2012, Moreno 2018). Thus urbanization does not accumulate or posit a clear historical line. Whereas various administrative instruments, territory-making, and governance frameworks may attempt to impose developmental histories to urban space, their fluctuations and frequent revisions are always attempting to grasp the intersection of different “time lines” that bring various materials and populations within their ambit.

When too many variables are potentially relevant to the success or failure of an urban policy or intervention, and when computing speed and capacity simply generate additional uncertainty over what constitutes a fortuitous disposition, uncertainty, itself, becomes valorized as a critical urban resource (Cooper and Konings 2015). With this, then, is an instigation of a temporality set loose from calculation, something that encompasses and exceeds speculation. Such temporality not only operates within the rubrics of the financialization of risk as a means of hedging a multiplicity of probable futures for how a specific infrastructure will operate and the value it will have. This instigation also aims to posit infrastructure as detached from reason, within a scenario that cannot be fully calculated now, and which imbues it with an adaptability to futures where no matter what happens there is possibility of recouping something which itself cannot be specified.

Real estate development increasingly functions on the basis of a materialized hedge that positions any particular investment as an instrument to have something to “say” about what eventually might happen. The objective is to be in a position to shape eventualities without clear foresight or available empirical evidence as what the content of those eventualities might be. It is a process that renders past history largely irrelevant to the capacity to act within a future present. The prospect of utility or profitability in the present is devalued in favor of simply the affirmation of a fact on the ground, the decisiveness of a maneuver that is perceived as providing the opportunity to tend to and shape that which is coming—something not specifiable in terms of the present.

For if, as Luciana Parisi (2013) points out, programmatic calculation is not simply the executions of instructions but a machine ecology thoroughly infected with randomness, then digital infrastructures potentiate unapprehendable scenarios not easily subsumed to the dictates of technocapitalism yet almost always adaptable to them. As soon as actualities come together, as soon as supposedly discrete events and objects feel each other out, are placed in some kind of relationship with each other, are assessed in terms of their impact on each other or their respective genealogies of appearance, no matter how prescriptive or limiting their interactions might be, they always suggest a potential of what might have taken place, of non-denumerable dispositions. The compositions of gatherings, the particular ways they unfold, who can do what with whom, when, and how, are critical then for how a worldly sensibility embodied within larger deployments of environmental and other planetary sensing is rendered for a specifically human endurance and of making the world appear to us in ways that open up multiple spaces for its reshaping (Hansen 2015).

This notion of worldly sensibility can be contrasted to the standardization of time, supposedly an accomplishment of the urban. Much has been written about the homogeneous character of time in a globalized world where every space appears accessible to scrutiny, where trading floors somewhere are always open, and where spatial products seem to adopt similar forms and modes of operation (Augé 2009). There is the well-worn image of the businessperson constantly in motion whose life plays out in a series of cities where airports, hotels, restaurants, conference centers, upscale residential communities and leisure zones all look the same. Simply from the look of things, she would never know where she is located on any given occasion.

The disjointed circadian rhythms of the incessant traveler are the primary means through which she then recognizes the difference among her locations, if not evened out by the affective flatlines of pharmaceutical interventions. Within a universe of non-stop transactions, differentiations between night and day, work and play, friendship and commerce are frequently blurred, as are the objectives of social interchange. While instrumentality may prevail as the predominant modus operandi of action, it is often not clear to what purpose such instrumentality is deployed. Certainly, self-aggrandizement may be the aim of the instrumental, but the self to be aggrandized becomes an increasingly elusive and vague entity, partially reflected in the incapacity of persons to be alone, to be detached from the media of connectivity. We find, then, an urban resident that is always “activated”, always in need of new experiences and relationships.

Cities and the Interweaving of Times

On the other hand, the nearly decimated publicity of urban life gives rise to cities that are intensely divided and segregated. The “public city”—with its commitment to an equitable distribution of affordances, even when acknowledged as a near impossible goal—sought to imbue urban existence with a common orientation, a shared knowledge among different walks of life where each person participated in a relationship that superseded those differences, anchored them in a way of interacting that made each relevant and resourceful for the other (Ghertner 2014). In principle, this was the precept of postcolonial national sovereignty. Now, throughout most of the urban world, residents come to view themselves as residing in divergent zones that have little to do with each other even when structurally it is possible to chart out the multiple and complex interdependencies. Even as the rationales of urban administration fluctuate between establishing more spatially encompassing territories of coordination or decentralizing competencies and municipal power, the coherence of the city as a felt object, a locus of shared existence across a demarcated territory has largely dissipated. Commonality is increasingly dependent upon the trappings of large symbolic maneuvers, e.g. mega-events, sports teams, or nationalistic invocations.

Institutions of any kind find it increasingly difficult to suture together the different spaces and times of urban residents. In some cities shared religious identification might produce a strong sense of commonality, witness the mega-churches in Lagos or Singapore, even as they intensely compete with each other. Or, more typically generate thousands of small units. Micro-territories become sites of intense competition over loyalties and trading opportunities. The wealthy and middle class retreat to highly secured zones set apart from the unruly fabric of the “old city” as the poor find limited security in their own highly defended zones often impervious to any official policing. Ironically, the sustenance of a semblance of what we might recognize as community life is increasingly the byproduct of a situation where particular territories are “hemmed” in by insalubrious environmental conditions, poor transport infrastructure, or where they become the accidental pockets of continuity in a surrounds that has undergone substantial spatial transformation (Roberts 2017).

As more residents are pushed out or voluntarily locate themselves at the physical peripheries of cities, time is increasingly measured in terms of commuting and traffic. In Mexico City and Jakarta, four hours is the average daily commute time. For families, accomplishments of care, of maintaining a sense of household cohesion are measured in terms of small affective attainments (Lee 2015), e.g., the ability of a mother to return home in time to say bedtime prayers with her children. In many poor neighborhoods of Delhi, male breadwinners only are at home on weekends because available work is so far away, leaving not only domestic management to women but the maintenance of the district itself—work that is not recognized by the men, who when they return on the weekend tend to act as if they remain the ones in charge. There is simply not sufficient time to curate the once intensely textured social fabric that intertwined diverse lives with each other. So when it is claimed that “cities are running out of time”, the invocation not only refers to the exigencies of dealing with the urban footprint on climate change, but an exhaustion of time as a resource to develop a narrative of associativity and relationality, the cultivation of a sense of common belonging, mutual attentiveness and protection, which was to be offered by the cultivation of sovereign polities. These sovereign profferings, like the community they presume and invoke within negation, remain yet to arrive.

While the ever-mutating axioms of capital appear capable of continuous refiguring functional operational territories that articulate space and time in ways generative of value and thus livelihood, their translation into the local vernaculars of how things are done are not frictionless. Faced with the problematic disjunctions precipitated in the confrontation with capital, vernacular ways of doing things must find ways to individuate themselves within these axioms. If this is the case, the generalizability and singularity of urban formations can be narrated but not without causing a particular spatio-temporal collapse. For, the resultant relations are not just those of integration, subsumption, or fragmentation. Something else happens through a complex mirroring process, a series of parallax recursions and gazes that suffuse ambiguity into the differentiating inscription—i.e., is it local or global, here or there, them or us? It becomes difficult to determine what time it is. Is it the continuity of some “same old story”, the incessant reproduction of the endlessly “new”, or the non-contradictory simultaneity of contradiction itself?  While we can be sure that relations both compose and are composed—depending on the scale of observation and the starting point of a specific narration (e.g. Luhmann 2013)—we can never be certain about which of these dimensions we are observing at any given moment.

Here, the matter of time becomes critical, especially the extensiveness of urban temporalities. If capital has colonized space and bodies, and the particularities of their operations and forms, it has also colonized time, not by subsuming it into a standardized format, but through enabling multiple temporalities to co-exist as instantiations of flexible rhythms and continuous adjustment. Here the time of capital innovation, the bazaar, the just-in-time logistical operation, the rhythms of religious obligations, and the empty time of endless waiting–for work, social status, services–all persist in seeming disconnection. Yet these are “times” that are available to each other, not according to templates or experiences in which they are recognized, but as extensions of each other. The bazaar, for example, has become, in many instances, not only the financial machine of a working class or a petit bourgeoisie, but a means of “working” out blockages or insufficiencies in otherwise intensely neoliberal forms of entrepreneurship.

Just as notions of the urban are being extended across multiple spatial and temporal formations, so too the modes of divergent inhabitation no longer are contained by or cohered within the once predominant form of the human as “anthropos”. Cities are no longer the embodiment of urbanization. To think “the city as urban” perhaps was the correlate to thinking inhabitation as human. The difficulty of thinking the urban beyond the apparent coherence of the urban is perhaps part and parcel of the same conundrum of trying to think the inhabitants of the city as exclusively or primarily human (Colebrook 2015; Wagner 2011).

The city existed as the locus through which certain of its inhabitants could reflect on their being as a singular prerogative untranslatable across other modalities of existence. It was the place that formed a “we” unrelated to anything but itself. Yet this “we” was inscribed as the node whose interests and aspirations were to be concretized through the expropriation and enclosure of critical metabolic relations (Cohen 2012, 2016). The city’s formation of the “human” also required the occlusion of a wide range of human activity before it became labor, activity that could not be easily translated or reduced to laboring bodies.

Here, the figure of the black body looms large as something that cannot be settled even as it clears the way for settlement. Here, the unsettled, dismembered, taken apart body, not immediately convertible into the figure of sheer labor, elaborates an almost phantasmagorical space of intersections—part human, part vegetative, monstrous, demonic, exotic, liminal, libidinal. Here is the interweaving of the body with bush, dirt, swamp, rain and cacophonies and rhythms. This is a space beyond inhabitation, but yet one that can be lived-with (Spillers 1987, 2003; King 2016).

This is a geography that is displaced from any certain utterance or exposition. It is a geography constituted from the lapses in a surveilling and punitive gaze that cannot maintain its sovereignty if it looks too long or too longingly. It is constituted by the illusions of self-assurance of domination’s efficacy, where the masters think that there is no need to look upon what is essentially nothing anyway. The job of subjugation is already done.

The conversion of blackness into forced labor and a monstrous form of human exceptionality in the long march of “moderns” to a bell jar existence in rarified enclosures of sense and domesticity has kept cities alive. In contrast to the white urban body with its sense of individual responsibility and free will, black bodies were to intertwine themselves into thick fabrics of complementarity and affordances, of dust becoming flesh and flesh neon; with everything packed into a density of contact, of the discrepant rubbing up against each other in multiple frictions, sparks that ignite chain reactions. Without these webs of many crammed causations looking out for any possible vehicle of release, there would have been no city. Blackness was not simply then a vehicle to space things out, to engender order, but also to connote the chaos of intermingling, the loss of boundaries and the dissipations of propriety. The black body was an urban body; forced to extend itself into various manifestations to preclude exhaustive extractions. It is a body renewed beyond the form of the contract, beyond discernible modalities of social reproduction. It is the “real inhabitant” of peripheries extending themselves across the world.

The “publicity” of the “public city” held out the possibility of equivalent access to the ability to make life in the city, but according measures of proportionality that could make urban citizens comparable. A “black city” refuses such measures and possibilities; they are forever postponed, something that will never be there as we might understand it, yet always present as an invention taking place—“out there” but yet immediately present as a promise whose fulfillment is “besides” the point of wherever residents might be located. The black body functions as parousia of the ever-extensive urban within frictionless sovereignty: a corporeal insertion resulting in temporal dislocation and disruption of the moment–friction in the operations of frictionless sovereignty.

A Promising Dispossession: Sensing the Time of the “might be”

The blackness of urban life is also found in the inexplicable instances of what might be seen as a form of rogue care. In the aftermaths of incessant eviction and evisceration of the attempts of black people to abide by the terms of normative urban existence, of being situated in the most toxic and uncertain environmental conditions, blackness also connotes an intertwining with ruined landscapes, of making abodes, gardens, ceremonies, and infrastructures of support and communication that operate under the radar, that are less visual artefacts than structures of feeling or forms of “remote sensing”. This is not to underestimate the casualities or precarity of livelihoods. It is not to turn attention away from the substantial accomplishments of alternative urbanisms that can be historically recorded—i.e the Black Metropolis of Chicago, the vital Afrofuturist urban landscapes of pre-World War II Detroit, and the black power movements of the 1960s and 1970s that generated a wide range of new local institutions (Hunter and Robinson 2016). Rather, it is to indicate that within the aftermaths of containment or erasure of these more visible accomplishments, that unincorporable remainders do exist.

At the same time, “addressing” the mobilities of black bodies, the very mechanics of extending themselves across space become the “venues” for the policing operations that are the concretizations of nostalgias for sovereignty. Whereas the objective of domesticating inhabitation—of situating urban residents in particular formats of everyday living, with their concomitant visibilities, responsibilities and attainments, may still prevail, acts of governing are no longer primarily predicated on the success or failure of these efforts. Rather, as Diren Valayden (2016) points out, a “society of targeting” emerges based on the tracking, monitoring and targeting of mobilities. This interception can take many forms, ranging from everyday harassment that forces a person to avoid certain areas at certain times, targeted assassinations of “suspected” terrorists, the use of urban designs such as anti-homelessness spikes and narrow benches (backed by laws against panhandling), the sudden demolition of “illegal structures” and temporary homes, use of private security guards, and extensive border patrols. It is designed simply to make particular kinds of movement and inhabitation impossible, and to shift problematic populations and practices elsewhere–the peripatetic solution to undesirable dwelling. But these strange geographies also suggest that targeting has its limits and cannot always penetrate the dissimilitude that these geographies engender, unless it reverts to random firing all over the place.

This dispossession of clarity may increasingly be a prerequisite for the deployment of collective effort that lives in conditions of what might be taking place—something that exceeds the available vernaculars of verification or affirmation—which is experienced as not all that far from what is taking place. The practical organization of everyday life—the melding of different personal dispositions and ways of doing things—does require a sense of internal consolidation and coherence that is composed and communicated. Yet, the capacity of residents to get by, cooperate, and sometimes act in concert requires them to live as if they were always, at the same time, living somewhere else. So, the interface between the concrete empirical status of their identifiable location, their modes and practices of dwelling and the ways their lives cut across territories and recognitions of all kinds—the what might be taking place—presents a particular conundrum. If there are facets of the urban then that extend themselves to a wide range of uses under the radar, the question is how to engage them, maximize their resourcefulness but at the same time being cognizant of the importance of their opacity, of not rendering them visible in ways that increase their vulnerability. Sovereignty lingers here as a kind of promise, an eventual means that the subjugated can emerge to truly govern their own emancipatory forms of subjecthood: yet another horizon yet to arrive.

Certain practices of an urban majority may be useful to think strategically about this conundrum. Residents of cities across the South have been recipients of many promises—for better livelihoods, democracy, and wellbeing. But they also avoided becoming preoccupied with whatever was promised. Through their own steady, incremental efforts to continuously work on their conditions, to turn them into resources, and to recalibrate relations of all kinds in face of the volatilities of the larger city, promises became something else besides lures, manipulations, or meaningless inheritances of citizenship. Rather, promises were induced as the by-products of the districts’ own efforts to prompt municipal governments to “show their cards”, to divulge their weaknesses in the face of the capacity of these districts to attain a certain self-sufficiency. This self-sufficiency was manifested in the capacity of these districts to ensure large levels of variation in ways of doing things while not devolving into incessant conflict and to attain a sense of progress without being overwhelmed by specific measures or fears of failure. Promises were important, then, less for what they offered than for their presence as a particular modality of disclosure, as something that kept matters open for deliberation rather than as the specification of a destination to which residents were committed.

This is evident in a practice that many residents in Rio de Janeiro refer to as “ficou na promessa” (“staying with the promise”). This is an orientation to the future both staked out in clear terms of sufficiency and sustenance and an ability to not experience failure if those terms never were actualized. It was also a willingness to experience their realization in unfamiliar forms. Residents may have continuously pushed their particular agendas and aspirations, but were willing to be indifferent to them as well. For, endurance was an atmosphere of abiding, of a willingness to “stand-by” various trajectories of possible futures. Stand-by entailed both the sense of waiting to see how things unfolded and a commitment to see through various initiatives to improve livelihoods and environment.  It is a willingness to operate “in reserve”, prepared to make something out of dispositions seemingly out of their control. So here, histories of strategic indifference, of detachment to aspirations being embodied by specific forms, address the conundrum of vulnerable opacities indicated before. Rather than investment in particular forms that singularly embody specific attainments or aspirations, it is more important to think about the capacity of actors to recognize possibilities in the most seemingly banal or obscure landscapes, over which dreams of sovereignty would never really be imagined.

These conditions are then antecedents for the urban human and for the prospects of a life that exceeds both the capacity of the urban to individuate life, to enhance its productivity, and to consider how human life itself might be remade to insulate it from the adverse conditions that urbanization itself largely generated. That which is to come, that which is to be invented either as new beginning or end, that which constrains any invention, and that which can be considered left out, removed from full participation in human life—all intersect in ways that upend clear distinctions between the inside and out, the urban and non-urban.

In any remaking of an urban human, it is important to reiterate the relationship of the urban human to calculation. The shift from the ideal of “universal computation” as a means of complex problem-solving as articulated in the 1960s by corporations such as IBM to the realities of planetary computation and algorithmic governance in the 21^st century has resulted in new, emergent and as yet unarticulated geopolitical formations that have shifted the status of the political subject in relation to distributed and increasingly protean forms of sovereignty (Bishop 2018, Bratton 2016).

Instead of individuals belonging within nested scales of territories, from household to nations, formations of political subjects now can be deliberated across all kinds of “imaginary communities”—where individuals are viewed, ranked and compared according to categories of interest, consumption, behavioral tendencies, religious affiliation which cut across the conventional territories of belonging.  Just as with cities, individuals can be targeted for all kinds of reasons, given what they have done in the past, their online activity, their consumption patterns, or circuits of travel. In these emergent, vague and often unformed situations in which the political subject finds its (collective and individuated) self constituted and taken apart, the foundational political concepts of the self in relation to others are being transformed in the very act of becoming a subject. And it occurs through a particular slice of the manifold planetary computational systems in which subjection occurs: polyscalar autonomous remote sensing systems. These systems are used for both utopian and totalitarian goals, but inevitably yield mixed and contradictory results (Bishop 2018). With the emergence of these polyscalar autonomous remote sensing systems, positions of agency no longer operate as the exclusive rights of humans or the political traditions of humans. Persons, as individuals, aggregates, traffic patterns or even “herds”, are tracked and targeted in relationship to movements of all kinds, whether it be weather, goods, cellphone conversations, and credit purchases, to name a few.  Nonetheless positions of political agency and subjects still operate largely within imaginaries determined by long-term human traditions, while simultaneously being extended and multiplied through the multi-scaled non-human agential systems.

If the inhabitation of an extending urban life points to an emergent form of subjectivity for which there is yet a coherent language, it is still subject to being drawn into the normative vernaculars of urban life and control, particularly in terms of attempting to pre-empt, contain or limit the potentially wayward horizons of urbanization itself.  As the reassertion of populist imaginaries, nationalistic revanchism and religious passions demonstrate, the assertion of sovereign selves becomes more erratic and errant, but nonetheless captivating of attention even as their very material conditions are being rearranged (Mazzarella 2019).

So, the old technics of sovereignty and political subjectivity have invariably and irrevocably shifted, but nonetheless they, too, make up an obdurate refrain, that which rules and holds sovereignty: monarch, state or algorithm. Mbembe (2017) asks, what forms of detachment from such technics are possible through different ways of speaking, writing, and sensing? What is in the very materiality of speaking, writing and sensing that offers different forms for the enactment of human life? The challenge is how to detach from a loop where narrowly drawn political and religious sentiment as a desire for old fashion sovereignty and definitive belonging are valorized as resistance to the calculation of every facet of life and the commodification of feeling. It means detaching from diffuse notions of interdependency and mutual responsibility as a way out of resurgent populisms.

What can be taken from the protocols and technologies of calculation and remote sensing that would highlight the sensorial capacities associated with the materialities of forests, deserts, and seas and that could stitch together alliances among urban residents across territories– beyond self contained diasporas, or religious belongings. Instead of counting on urbanization to eventually standardize and equilibrate a consensually determined model of the “good human”, why not embrace urbanization’s capacities to take the human apart in the assemblage of new bodies of sense and feeling? Important work has been done here in queer and feminist studies (Barad 2011, Frost 2014, Chen 2012, Luciano and Chen 2011, Giraud 2019).

Urban life has perhaps always held out the promise of new bodies that could be made, even if the modalities of such production heretofore have relied upon the unmaking of others. But paying attention to what the unmade did and without a specific horizon of restitution is important in an abolitionist method of urban rescaling where inoperable relations might recompose what it means to be both urban and human—where each extends the other beyond the exhausted vernaculars of self-fulfillment.

Coda

“Extended urbanization” can be found in the hyperactive hinterlands of many megacities, where residents and operators increasingly talk about their inability to construct a coherent narrative about where things are going and yet to arrive. Too many on the surface seemingly contradictory trajectories of development, too many alternations between types of economies and built environments, too many strange contiguities of ways of life in order to tell a clear story, to put things in a coherent frame. And so at the household, kinship and associational level, people “spread out”, distribute their investments, time, and attention in order to cover the different possible angles: attenuation in all areas as a means of differently scaled futures investing. But also at level of the sensorium, people talk about the need to pay attention to a diffuse background.

What this seems to do is combine a willingness to suspend the judgment that what you see is what things are, an acknowledgement that beyond the immediacy of a person’s context there is a field of vision that can be grasped and composed in excess of what is presented, and a belief that this willingness to see in a different way, a way that does not tie everything together into a coherent image, will enable the person to better navigate the ins and outs of everyday urban life. It is the horizon of possibilities and impediments. So it is a willingness to extend oneself into things, into a kind of non-sovereign position of sensing. And this is the correlate to the “lesson from blackness” about extending into and across the earth.

Extended urbanization, as a concept, is coextensive with extended sovereignty (or distributed sovereignty) of the state, as well as the subject. It can also be found in the remote sensing systems—as can the extended and frictionless sovereignty of the state. It therefore fuels a kind of extended sovereignty of the subject, at least in the imaginary. However, reinscriptions of the sovereign subject should be apprehended with scepticism, no matter how apparently desirable, liberatory or revolutionary. Even when that subjectivity is under assault in the kinds of complexly contradictory urban settings just delineated, recourse to the sovereign self/subject reinforces old stories of will, agency and control that are mere phantasms as the lack of coherent narratives indicate. The extension of self (urbanism and sovereignty) leads to lessons from blackness because it is an extension that is not predicated on a whole self in control of itself and its environment–as in transitive grammatical constructions–but a contingent, malleable way of being in the world.

This has some important lessons for thinking sovereignty as often constituted and assumed from specific Western perspectives, ones opposed to values held up by Western nation-states and their subjects/citizens often presented asymmetrical power relations as a priori. A non-sovereign position of sensing simultaneously embraces elements of the large-scale sensing systems while eschewing others. The role of a controlling self/entity that allows for extension of, or merely extends, subjecthood is in fact a connection back to the sovereign subject, but one that is changed through the process.

 

Ryan Bishop is Professor of Global Art and Politics at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. His most recent book is Technocrats of the Imagination: Art, Technology and the Military-Industrial Avant-garde (co-authored with John Beck, 2020), and he is co-editor of Cultural Politics (Duke UP) and its book series “A Cultural Politics Book” (Duke UP).

 

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“Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 500)

Smooth Sovereignty

To begin, consider for a moment one of the most famous images of sovereignty, the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan:

Intended to capture Hobbes’ social contract theory in a single image, the figure of the Leviathan that is shown here finds its raison d’être in Hobbes’ theory of the state of nature. Roughly, and speaking in a way that I will have to nuance later, state of nature theory posits that in the beginning, people (I hesitate to write “humans”) were living in a state of nature. Pessimistic theorists of the political—like Hobbes–envision this as an undesirable state in which people are like wolves to each other (hence, my hesitation).[2] Optimistic theorists of the political think otherwise. In both cases, people eventually come together to draw up a contract–hence, Hobbes’ renown as a contract theorist–to determine how they want to live together. This contract is a set of laws or a constitution by which a group chooses to live. The group thus institutes what Hobbes calls a Leviathan, Commonwealth, or State, an artificial man who represents them. Such a Leviathan is designed, in Hobbes, against the possibility of civil war, but the fear that the state of nature might erupt again is always there in the Hobbesian model. We therefore live in fear—of both the civil war and of the sovereign who is meant to hold it at bay.

The frontispiece of Hobbes shows all of this. It shows a figure of sovereignty—I again hesitate to call it an actual human being—spectrally hovering over a landscape. It is unclear where this figure is standing, whether it is part of the landscape or not. Certainly, it resides outside of the walls that mark the town over which it looms. In its right hand, the figure holds a sword, symbol of earthly power. In its left, it holds a religious staff, symbol of spiritual power—and note that the staff appears to reach into the landscape over which the sovereign rises. With the exception of the head and the hands, the body of this sovereign is made up of the bodies of its subjects—those who instituted the sovereign and find themselves represented in the body of the king.[3] They all look up towards the sovereign, who gazes outside of the image, at the reader. This image needs to be read vertically: starting with the Latin quote from the book of Job at the top (“there is no power on earth that compares to him”), one lowers one’s gaze towards the bottom half of the image, which is split between images of earthly power on the left and images of spiritual power on the right. In the middle hangs a curtain, perhaps hiding where the sovereign is standing (its feet, as has been shown,[4] would likely rest precisely where Hobbes’ name is written on the curtain).

Now consider Michel Foucault’s reading of Hobbes in “Society Must Be Defended”. Foucault forces one to adjust the state of nature narrative. The state of nature is not one of perpetual, actual war in the way we have imagined it. The problem in the state of nature, Hobbes suggests (according to Foucault), is “equality” (Foucault 2003, 90). People are too equal in strength; there isn’t enough difference. And this leads to a “primitive war” as “the immediate effect of nondifferences, or at least insufficient differences” (Ibid.).[5] “If there were great differences, if there really were obvious disparities between men, it is quite obvious that war would immediately come to an end” (Ibid.).[6] Why? Because it would be obvious who the strong are, and who the weak are, and either there would be a clash and the strong would win, or there would be no clash because the weak would be smart enough to refrain from engaging in one (See: Ibid., 91). To live peacefully, people need to institute inequality or difference. This is how the sovereign comes about—a radically unequal power, marking absolute difference. “Differences lead to peace” (Ibid.). This gets people out of the state of nature and its petty war of representations, its “anarchy” (Ibid.) and “theatre” (Ibid., 92) of minor differences.

Hobbes has three models of sovereignty: one by institution (people come together and close a contract, institute a sovereign) (Foucault 2003, 93); one by acquisition (one country violently conquers another, which is defeated) (Ibid., 94). Interestingly, Foucault points out that while we would call the latter conquest (“domination” [Ibid., 95]), for Hobbes it is ultimately not because the defeated will institute the new sovereign, will accept the conqueror as their sovereign. Why? Because they want to live. But this is not a biopolitical will to live: it is institution bound up in fear (of death—we are firmly within the realm of sovereignty) (See: Ibid., 96). Hobbes compares the latter form of sovereignty to (and this is the third model) the child’s dependency on their mother: they depend on the mother to live, or rather to avoid death (See: Ibid., 96). On this basis, Foucault presents Hobbes as a theorist against war, as a theorist of peace who took war as his fundamental adversary in his work (See: Ibid., 97). Hobbes sought to “eliminate” (Ibid.) war from politics. According to Foucault, he theorized what I will call here—overstating the case somewhat–a smooth sovereignty.

Foucault then mobilizes (See: Foucault 2003, 99 and after) English political history to drive a rift into Hobbes’ work. He refuses for the violence of conquest to be swept under the carpet. He practices a political historicism against Hobbes’ state of peace. He follows the Levellers and the Diggers et cetera in their attempt to keep revolution and rebellion—“war against the state”, as Melinda Cooper in her reading of the lecture specifies (Cooper 2004, 516) –alive. There is always an alternative; the norm was violently put into place. In sum: Foucault takes it up for war against Hobbes as a theorist of peace.

At the very end of his lecture, Foucault attacks “dialectical materialism”, evidence that he is working through his relation to Marx in his Collège de France lectures (as Stuart Elden for example has shown [See: Elden 2016]). Jacques Bidet, author of Foucault With Marx, explains that likely what Foucault is attacking here is a “‘Hegelian’ Marx, thinker of the totality and its historical unfolding to the point where social contradictions are overcome” (Bidet 2016, 4). Foucault’s attack, at the end of the lecture on Hobbes as a theorist who seeks to eliminate war, may be against a Marx as a “Hegelian” thinker who ultimately sweeps the negative under the carpet.

There are plenty of other reasons, Bidet goes on, why Foucault may have taken up Marx in this context: Marx’ account of politics, which focused on class struggle and the economic determinism that triggered it, was simply not nuanced enough for Foucault to paint an adequate political picture. Bidet notes much later in his book Foucault’s criticism of Marx’ use of the word “struggle”, which “passes over in silence precisely what is meant by struggle” (Bidet 2016, 127). This in particular resonates with Foucault’s criticism of Hobbes as a theorist against war. Bidet writes that in Foucault’s view “Marxism ultimately neutralizes [the “politics is war”] paradigm by performing a dialectical operation on it: at the end of the revolutionary process, after the final reversal of economic domination, antagonism comes to be re-absorbed within a new contractual order of joint concertation among all. But Foucault refuses this final utopia” (Ibid., 173-174). “Under the new form of state domination, he discerns the war that is begun ever anew” (Ibid., 174). “The Marxists’ dialectic”, in Foucault’s view, “occults the fact of war” (Ibid., 175).

I intend to comment elsewhere on how all of this makes Foucault appear as somewhat of a Schmittian–and Bidet indeed writes of “Foucault’s wink to Carl Schmitt, for whom the fundamental [political] category is also that of war” (Bidet 2016, 176) –, who seeks to keep alive a political pluriverse—against[7] Hobbes, who defends a political universe. When it comes to a concept of the political, Foucault’s reading of Hobbes shows that he is more with Schmitt than with Hobbes. In order to accept such a wink, however, one has to overlook at least one important difference between Foucault and Schmitt. When it comes to Foucault’s advocacy of politics as war, Foucault is recuperating from Hobbes a war against the state; but that is crucially not what Schmitt advocates. (As Chantal Mouffe points out, Schmitt locates the enemy outside of democratic association. He doesn’t think a democratic pluralism within [See: Mouffe 1999, 5].[8]) The source of Foucault’s concept of the political may not so much have been Schmitt, but the Black Panther Party, as Brady Heiner Thomas has argued (See: Thomas 2007). Melinda Cooper remarks on this difference to reveal, as she puts it, “some provocative points of intersection and discord” between Foucault and Schmitt, leading to the conclusion that in fact Foucault and Schmitt “were engaged in a violent argument with each other” (Cooper 2004, 515). There is no doubt, I think, that she is right.

The reason I have rehearsed Foucault’s reading of Hobbes here, however, is to show how Foucault, in response to what he perceives to be the theorization of a smooth sovereignty in Hobbes, takes it up for a theory of sovereignty that has to be rooted in friction. Whenever there is sovereignty, there is war; “There is no escape” (Foucault 2003, 111), as Foucault writes, from this political and historical fact. From the Diggers’ understanding that “[l]aws, power, and government are the obverse of war”, summarized powerfully in the line “Government means their war against us; rebellion is our war against them” (Ibid., 108),[9] Foucault ultimately arrives at this conclusion:

Yet the fact remains that you see here the first formulation of the idea that any law, whatever it may be, every form of sovereignty, whatever it may be, and any type of power, whatever it may be, has to be analyzed not in terms of natural right and the establishment of sovereignty, but in terms of the unending movement—which has no historical end—of the shifting relations that make some dominant over others. (Ibid., 109)

We have here then a powerful refutation of any understanding of sovereignty as frictionless—of any theory of smooth sovereignty, as I called it earlier on.

But what are the consequences of such a position for the political concept of sovereignty? Below, I intend to address that question through a case-study that can be productively analyzed in the framework laid out above: the situation of black lives in the United States today. As my reference to Brady Heiner Thomas already revealed, this situation is historically inscribed in Foucault’s theorization of politics during the mid-1970s, through Foucault’s (unacknowledged) encounter with race relations in the U.S. and the writings of the Black Panther Party. What follows is an attempt to write in the tracks of that inscription.

After a brief reading of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me that focuses on the presence of sovereignty in that book, I seek to negotiate specifically the continued relevance of sovereignty for the situation of black life in the U.S. today. Following Achille Mbembe’s theorization of necropolitics, I distinguish between two sovereign inscriptions of black life within sovereign power: one associated with Hegel’s dialectics, the other with Bataille and the break with dialectics. I then turn to Frantz Fanon and Mbembe’s reading of Fanon (in Critique of Black Reason) to show how this tension between Hegel and Bataille can already be found in Fanon’s plea for absolute (rather than dialectical) violence, which is however formulated as part of a constructive call for national liberation that would rein this violence back in. That said, the constructive element of Fanon’s project was hardly conservative in any straightforward way: he had in mind a national liberation based on the creation of a new man, one that thus preserved traces of both the Bataillean and Hegelian inscriptions of black life in sovereign power that Mbembe distinguishes. “Sovereignty” in Fanon must be negotiated between those two traces. (It’s also worth adding, as I will discuss below, that the relation between black life and sovereignty may very well exceed both: neither Hegelian dialectics nor Bataillean transgression, perhaps the para-ontological understanding of blackness can find political meaning here as a continuous unsettling that’s neither with Hegel nor with Bataille, and as such precisely—as David Marriott has argued–non-sovereign [See: Marriott 2016].)[10] Mbembe’s “critique” reveals this negotiation between Hegel and Bataille as well in that it appears to be torn between a more conservative articulation that would remain within critique’s limits, and a more radical one that would seek to transgress them—a transgression that, in Bataille, nevertheless remains sovereign in name. It is perhaps that nominal remainder of sovereignty that indicates that the risk of transgression is great: indeed, in his most transgressive moments, Mbembe also risks to promote (as I intend to show) the kind of exceptionalist sovereignty that Coates’ work exposes.

More than 50 years after the founding of the Black Panther Party in 1966, and at a time when the “horizontalist” Black Lives Matter movement is violently clashing in the U.S. with both the status quo and new “vertical” formations on the Right, this article asks whether there can be a future for sovereignty when it comes to black life in the U.S.? Can there be an Afro-Futurism of sovereignty? Can Fanon’s call for national liberation and the articulation it was briefly given in Black Panther politics still take on new meanings today? Can there be a dream of sovereignty—and it is worth emphasizing that sovereignty, to a certain extent, is always a dream–that is not a white Dream? Who are its dreamers? What might they dream? Such questions seem particularly important today, when sovereignty has reemerged on the Right. Liberalism is exhausted. Sovereignty is making a come-back as part of a repoliticization against liberalism, and neoliberalism (though this last point is contestable[11]). But where is this sovereignty going to go? Unless the Left participates in this conversation and contributes to rethinking sovereignty from within, they may not stand a chance against the Right’s revitalization of sovereignty’s old specter. In closing, I consider how an alliance between African-American and Native American politics may in spite of their differences prove to be productive on this count.

State of Exception and Necropolitics

In his book Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates shows, although he does not use these terms, that black life in the U.S. is caught up in a state of exception (See: Coates 2015). In his discussion of black life’s exposure to sovereign power, he focuses on the pair black life/police in view of the ongoing police shootings of young black men—in some cases, children–in the U.S. As Coates notes, perhaps the most troubling element apart from these people’s deaths, is that they are killed with impunity: “These shooters were investigated, exonerated, and promptly returned to the streets, where, so emboldened, they shot again” (Ibid, 78). It is the element of impunity that clearly renders black life in this situation “sacred”, in Giorgio Agamben’s understanding of this term: outside of human law, exposed to be killed without legal consequence (“vogelfrei”, as I have argued elsewhere [See: Boever 2009]). It is this element that turns black people’s “fear to rage”: the fact that the murderers “cannot be subpoenaed … will not bend under indictment” (Coates 2015, 83).

That we are talking about a situation of sovereignty here is partly made clear in Coates’ text through the specifics of the police killing that he focuses on, which involves an officer from Prince George’s County (in Baltimore state) and a young black man called Prince Carmen Jones. Prince Jones is shot one night, while going to visit his fiancée, by a cop who claims Jones was trying to run him over with his jeep. Jones had been approached by the cop, gun drawn; the cop had been undercover, in other words was in plain clothes, and had shown no badge. He was, in other words, “a man in a criminal’s costume” (as Coates points out [Coates 2015, 81]), and Coates confesses with horror that “I knew what I would have done with such a man confronting me, gun drawn, mere feet from my family’s home” (Ibid.). The suggestion is, presumably, that he would have done the same: he too may have tried to run over the cop. The point about the “criminal’s costume” is sharpened a few pages later, when we finally find out something that Coates obviously knew from the onset: “The officer who killed Prince Jones was black” (Ibid., 83).

It is hard to overlook the sovereign overtones of the confrontation (one prince versus another). To be clear: while Coates presents the lives of young black men to be caught up in a state of exception, he also insists that in the U.S. this exception has become the rule. “In America,” he writes later on, “it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage” (Coates 2015, 103). In other words, America is another name for a place where the state of exception of black life has always been the rule. It is another name for what Agamben, working with a European frame of reference that ignores the situation of black lives in the U.S. entirely, calls a camp: any situation in which the exception becomes the rule. The police, indeed, “reflect America in all of its will and fear”, as he notes earlier on, “and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies—the sprawling carceral state, the random detection of black people, the torture of suspects—are the product of democratic will” (Ibid., 79). The charge, if we put Coates and Agamben together, is harsh: democratic America equals black Auschwitz. Or, without Agamben’s frame of reference: slavery never ended.[12]

In the Prince Jones killing we confront the particular perversity of black Auschwitz, namely black-on-black violence, which is fuelled, Coates suggests, by what he calls “the Dream”. By this, he means the white people’s Dream, the Dream of a white America. He calls those who share such a Dream, “Dreamers”. Black people in the U.S. carry not only “the burden of living among Dreamers”; they also have the “extra burden of your country telling you the Dream is just, noble, and real, and you are crazy for seeing the corruption and smelling the sulfur” (Coates 2015, 106). Perversely, it is “the Dream” that may in part explain the black-on-black violence that Coates is analyzing closely: it is “the Dream” that may explain the cop’s reaction to Prince Jones, in the same way that it is “the Dream” that may explain Jones’ reaction to the cop. Part of the “criminal’s costume”, in other words, and one can hardly call it a costume, is the blackness of both the victim and the murderer—a blackness that “the Dream” criminalizes and that makes black people kill each other due to the white people’s racist fear. When Coates shudders in horror at the realization of what he would have done—the same–, he is also shuddering in horror at the extent to which “the Dream” has infected him, the extent to which it has turned him against his own people. Between the World and Me is an attempt to puncture this “Dream”, to force something between the reality of Coates’ life and the psychotic construction of “the Dream” in which it is caught up.[13] In Between the World and Me, Coates is attacking a white sovereignty not just in terms of the physical violence that it wields but in terms of the psychic phantasy that backs it up.

To be a black man in the U.S. means that the police “had my body, could do with that body whatever they pleased” (Coates 2015, 76). Coates ties this situation to the history of slavery in the U.S., and thus to the history of European colonialism and the relentless and ongoing “plunder of black life” that they present. Obsessed with the Civil War, in which 600,000 people died in a conflict about the practice of slavery, Coates notes that “it had been glossed over in my education, and in popular culture, representations of the war and its reasons seemed obscured … as if … someone was trying to hide the books” (Ibid., 99). There is a way in which it seems, therefore, as if the Civil War never happened—and certainly when considering the situation of black lives today, that appears to be what Coates is forced to conclude. The heritage of destroying the black body, far from having ended with the Civil War, continues.

Coates’ references to the history of slavery and colonialism enable us to characterize the situation in the U.S. that he analyzes not only as a state of exception and more specifically a camp, but also as a necropolitical situation, to use Achille Mbembe’s productive notion (See: Mbembe 2003). Indeed, Mbembe focuses on those histories to develop the notion of necropolitics, which he situates closely—perhaps too closely–to the work of both Agamben and Michel Foucault. I say “perhaps too closely” for while Foucault in his work on power distinguishes between sovereignty as the power to take life or let live (the power of death) and biopolitics as the power to make life (to foster, generate, optimize it), Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics brings those two aspects of power together as one. Mbembe is compelled to make this deconstructive move due to the situations (and the particular histories) he is looking at, which include slavery and colonialism—both situations that neither Foucault nor Agamben pay much attention to. As scholars like Paul Gilroy (See: Gilroy 2010) or Alexander Weheliye (See: Weheliye 2014) have pointed out,[14] Foucault uses the term “colonialism” largely metaphorically; by characterizing the object of sovereign power as “bare” life, Agamben is incapable of thinking the importance of race in biopolitics. Both of those notions are important in Mbembe’s discourse, and this forces him to take up some distance from both Agamben and in particular Foucault, to whom he is nevertheless indebted. He does not share their euro-centrism, and this produces a shift in the theory. One way to summarize this would be that Mbembe, for his investigation of biopolitics, is operating from the position of those who die. He is interested in the “wounded or slain body” and how it is “inscribed in the order of power” (Mbembe 2003, 12).

On this last count, Mbembe considers two different inscriptions: the Hegelian one and that of Bataille. In Hegel, whose dialectical model Mbembe focuses on, the human being confronts death in negating nature by creating a world. It is through this exposure that the human being “truly becomes a subject” (Mbembe 2003, 14). To become a subject, then, “supposes upholding the work of death”, in the sense that life “assumes death and lives with it” (Ibid., 15). Death can thus become part of an “economy of absolute knowledge and meaning” (Ibid.). Negation drives the dialectic forward, but that forward movement is also the negation of the negation. There is death but it can productively become part of life.

Not so in Bataille, whose work Mbembe discusses in contrast: “Bataille firmly anchors death in the realm of absolute expenditure”, an expenditure that he calls “sovereign” (Mbembe 2003, 15). For Bataille, sovereignty thus breaks with the Hegelian dialectic, a break that is marked through its relation to death: “it is the refusal to accept the limits that the fear of death would have the subject respect” (Ibid., 16). The sovereign world, for Bataille, “is the world in which the limit of death is done away with” (Ibid.), as Mbembe quotes. Sovereignty therefore becomes a name for “the violation of all prohibitions” (Ibid.):

Politics, in this case, is not the forward dialectical movement of reason [as in Hegel]. Politics can only be traced as a spiral transgression, as that difference that disorients the very idea of the limit. More specifically, politics is the difference put into play by the violation of the taboo. (Ibid.)

But how does Bataille’s position relate to necropolitics?

In the opening paragraphs of his text, Mbembe distinguishes between what he appears to characterize as the violence of sovereignty and what he refers to as “the power of absolute negativity”. The latter he glosses with Arendt, and her claim that the concentration camps introduce us to a negativity of death that is outside of the life/death binary. Necropolitics, it seems, investigates such a negativity, the power of such absolute negativity, in the sense that it investigates the “camp” in which life—and in particular black life—is caught up. At the same time, however, necropolitics and the biopolitical sovereignty that it names are presented in Mbembe’s text along Hegelian lines, as conservative in the sense that they refer to “the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations” (Mbembe 2003, 14). In other words, they refer to the way in which dead bodies can become part of an economy of knowledge and meaning.

I would characterize such an economy here based on the associations that Mbembe sets up as the economy of slavery and colonialism. But it is also the economy that Coates confronts in his close-reading of the death of black lives in the U.S. It is Mbembe who, in combination with Coates, enables us to mark this contemporary American situation as the situation of slavery and colonialism continued.

But Mbembe can arguably also show us, via Bataille, that such a Hegelian situation need not be the only one. There is also the absolute expenditure of death, which would not allow such instrumentalization of black death as part of the white people’s Dream. In other words, while Bataille appears to be associated with the absolute power of negativity that is in turn associated with the state of exception of the camp, there is also a way in which Bataille can become associated with another state of exception that would break with all of this.

Fanon, Once More

On this last count, Mbembe’s negotiation of Hegel and Bataille connects to Frantz Fanon, and the peculiar role of dialectics in his work. With Fanon, of course, there is no doubt: we are in the colonial situation, it is the colonial situation—the French presence in Algeria—that Fanon confronts. I am thinking in particular of the chapter from The Wretched of the Earth titled “Concerning Violence” (in the Constance Farrington translation)/ “On Violence” (in the Richard Philcox translation).[15] Born in Martinique, Fanon had studied psychiatry in France, and had been assigned to a hospital in Algeria. He quits his job there and joins the Front de Libération Nationale, the anti-colonial resistance fighters—as a Martiniquan/French citizen, not as an Algerian, not as Algeria’s colonial subject (even if he identified with the latter and ultimately became Algerian).[16] There is dialectics in Fanon’s text, but one feels that it is stuck in the basic opposition without synthesis: colonized confronts colonizer violently, but no progress, no compromise, no rational deliberation is possible (“Challenging the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of viewpoints”, he writes [Fanon 2004, 6]). Indeed, Fanon’s text is an affront to liberalism (Fanon writes about “the liberal intentions of the colonial authorities”, for example [Ibid., 30])—he rather snarkily attacks liberalism’s “gentleman’s agreement” (Ibid., 2) –and to the ways liberalism can be tied to colonialism to make history “move forward” (to evoke the Hegelian narrative).

Against this, Fanon asserts “absolute violence” (Fanon 1968, 37)[17]: the need to kick the colonizer out, and decolonize (which, as he notes, involves many levels of existence). It is a call “for total disorder” (Fanon 2004, 2),[18] “tabula rasa” (Ibid., 1). “[E]very obstacle encountered” must be “smash[ed]” (Ibid., 3). “[A]ny method which does not include violence” must be rejected (Ibid., 24). There is only one way to affirm that decolonization has been successful: do those who used to be the last now come first?[19] The point is to take the colonizer’s place (See: Ibid., 23). If that is not accomplished, nothing has been done.

It is true that there are moments in the text where the usefulness of violence also appears to be drawn into question, as when Fanon writes that “the question is not so much responding to violence with more violence but rather how to defuse the crisis” (Fanon 2004, 33).[20] Indeed, Mbembe has noted in Critique of Black Reason that “Fanon was conscious of the fact that, by choosing ‘counter-violence’, the colonized were opening the door to a disastrous reciprocity” (Mbembe 2017, 166). But the general orientation is unmistakable: violence is needed to end the madness. Absolute violence—non-dialectical violence. Tabula rasa. Absolute break. Cut. Out and out, as Philcox renders it (the translation is flawed, but its repetition of the “out” is useful here—it does render the outside-ness of ab-solute). Looking forward to Mbembe, this reads like Bataille’s absolute expenditure applied in the colonial context. In his reading of Fanon, Mbembe also recognizes that he proposes violence as the only way forward.

Nevertheless, it is not quite the only way. For it is crucial that the broader, constructive context in which, for Fanon, this destruction takes place is that of “national liberation, national reawakening, restoration of the nation to the people or Commonwealth” (Fanon 2004, 1). In short, it is that of… sovereignty. This is in many ways a remarkable point, and one can understand it, of course, in view of the fact that the colonized are, precisely, without their own nation-state. And it is certainly not as if Fanon was not aware of the problems of nationalist politics, of what he called “the pitfalls [mésaventures] of national consciousness”. But in this chapter he consciously leaves the portrayal of “the rise of a new nation, the establishment of a new state, its diplomatic relations and its economic and political orientation” (Ibid.) aside to focus on the violent break.[21] What will happen, however, when the absolute violence, the out and out violence for which he calls, is reined back in, is folded back into the national liberation that he calls for at the beginning of his text? What will happen when it becomes sovereign in that way again? Bataille of course calls his absolute expenditure sovereign in response to such a “conservative” folding within, precisely to attack the old sense of sovereignty. To an extent, those questions point to the problem of all revolutions, which ultimately fold their constituting power back into constituted power. How to run with constituting power appears to be the question. And more radically even: how to run with destituent power, apart from the constitutional gesture?

“National liberation.” Can we even think in those terms still, today? Could we call for a project of national liberation in response to the colonialism that the U.S., today, continues to practice on the black lives that live within its borders? We can think of the project of the Black Panthers, which involved a close study of law, and in some cases a rewriting of key documents of U.S. political history, as an attempt toward national liberation from colonialism and slavery. But within the limits of national sovereignty—at least for a brief while, before internationalism took over. An attempt to cleanse sovereignty from colonialism and slavery, to claim a sovereignty outside of the white people’s dream. Violence clearly has a role in this project. But what is its end? Is it an end? Is it pure means?

Consider in this context Kadir Nelson’s New Yorker cover “After Dr. King”, an alternative image of sovereignty: a black body of sovereign power that gathers within it the unhappy subjects who question the established sovereignty’s competency to protect them.

While it gives us an image of black sovereignty, it would be important to note that its central figure is that of Martin Luther King. Can the New Yorker cover be imagined with Malcolm X on it?[22] (Ta-Nehisi Coates notes Malcolm’s association with violence and his own dislike of it.) Or does the figure of King ultimately reconcile the violence of the subjects it carries within, and is Nelson’s image the ultimate Hegelian reconciliation of political violence and the avoidance of civil war? Would the Malcolm X cover have offended the New Yorker’s liberal sensibilities too much (the force of Bataille is certainly stronger in Malcolm than it was in King)? Does the King image continue, in that sense, the old sovereignty—plenty of similarities, after all, between Nelson’s image and the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan—rather than bring the tabula rasa that Fanon calls for? And perhaps Fanon too, when he folds violence back into “national” liberation, ultimately does not live up to the radicality of his own position: complete rejection of the nation-state.

Nelson’s New Yorker cover “Say Their Names” can be seen as his most recent engagement with this problematic, this time in reference to George Floyd’s murder, and with Floyd embodying what Coates calls the U.S. “heritage” of violence against black bodies:

Such visual renderings of the problematic of sovereignty can be found elsewhere as well. Consider, for example, Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (Disney, 2018), which problematically casts as its villain Killmonger, who wants to use the precious metal vibranium of King T’Challa’s Wakanda to liberate oppressed black people worldwide.

If I mention the Black Panther, it is partly because Coates has been involved in the comic book’s reimagining for the age of Black Lives Matter. The Black Panther poster, with the troubling tagline “Long Live the King,” clearly inscribes the film’s politics in the negotiations of sovereignty that I have opened up here.

When Fanon called for national liberation, however, he likely did not want “that old sovereignty” again. That might be the reason why, in his text, he also mentions “the creation of new men” (Fanon 2004, 2) as the result of the project of decolonization. Everything must start, he seems to say, from the creation of a new people, a new human being. It is from there that a new sovereignty might come along. This, among other things, enables David Macey to write in his biography of Fanon that “For Fanon, the nation is a product of the will, and a form of consciousness which is not to be defined in ethnic terms” (Macey 2012, 374). Mbembe focuses on Fanon’s notion of a new human being (rather than a new black man) in his book Critique of Black Reason. It is Fanon who, in Black Skin, White Masks, said that “Black” was “only a fiction” (Mbembe 2017, 159). “For him”, Mbembe notes, “the name referred not to a biological reality or skin color but to ‘one of the historical forms of the condition imposed on humans’” (Ibid.). Mbembe distinguishes Fanon’s position on this count from that of his teacher, Césaire, one of the key thinkers of “Négritude”. While Césaire as per Mbembe’s account is obviously no Senghor (the other thinker of negritude), Mbembe still presents him as more essentialist than Fanon, in the sense that he affirmed a negritude that Fanon ultimately[23] wanted to go beyond. Mbembe points out, however, that in Césaire’s “Black”, there was a universalism that was proposed, a universalism that could only emerge from “blackness” and the difference that it marks—a difference that reveals the world. For that revelation, blackness was essential. “But,” Mbembe asks, “how can we reread Césaire without Fanon” (who wrote after him)? For him, it is difficult, if not impossible.

This has everything to do with the notion of “critique” which names Mbembe’s project. As long as we are reading Césaire, we remain on the conservative side of critique, even if Césaire opens up the possibility of transgression. The transgression only arrives, however, with Fanon, who seeks to go beyond the notion of “Black” and imagines a world “freed from the burden of race” (a formula Mbembe repeats at least twice in his book—it closes the book as well [Mbembe 2017, 167, 183). “If there is one thing that will never die in Fanon”, Mbembe writes, “it is the project of the collective rise of humanity … Each human subject, each people, was to engage in a grand project of self-transformation, in a struggle to the death, without reserve. They had to take it on as their own. They could not delegate it to others” (Ibid., 162). The echoes here are multiple: struggle to the death—that’s Hegel, of course, the master-slave dialectic. But struggle without reserve: that’s Bataille’s absolute expenditure, the break with economy. Finally, the project of self-transformation: here we get echoes of the Enlightenment project and the “care of the self” that Foucault was so interested in toward the end of his life (the stuff that, according to some critics, made him vulnerable to neoliberalism [See: Zamora and Behrent, 2016]). It is no coincidence, I think, that the chapter I have been quoting from here is titled “The Clinic of the Subject”, which, in addition to echoing Fanon’s training as a psychiatrist, is also a very Foucaultian title.

So a number of questions emerge: at the level of subject formation, Mbembe seeks to present Fanon as more Bataille than Hegel.[24] But at the level of Fanon’s political project, this distinction—Hegel or Bataille—was undecided; it seemed that Fanon’s call for national liberation was perhaps more Hegel than Bataille. To be sure, if a national liberation is to be built around Bataille’s kind of subjectivity, then surely it will be very different from the old sovereignty and its dialectical transformation. We would get a break with dialectics here, that would bring about a truly new sovereignty rather than its dialectically accomplished next step. If this comes with the project of total self-transformation, the question remains how this would relate to the neoliberal, entrepreneurial subject. While Fanon of course could not foresee this question, Mbembe does address it in his introduction, where he presents neoliberalism as one of “three critical moments in the biography of the vertiginous assemblage that is Blackness and race” (Mbembe 2017, 2). Neoliberalism, defined as “a phase in the history of humanity dominated by the industries of Silicon Valley and digital technology” (Ibid., 3), has a “tendency to universalize the Black condition”, by which he means “practices [that] borrow as much from the slaving logic of capture and predation as from the colonial logic of occupation and extraction, as well as from the civil wars and raiding of earlier epochs” (Ibid., 4). It is a key component in what Mbembe calls “the Becoming Black of the world” (Ibid., 6). At no point does Mbembe discuss, however, how the language of self-transformation in Fanon could also become part of such a project.

There remains the third path that I alluded to in my introduction: the para-ontological understanding of blackness that would mark, next to both Hegel and Bataille, sovereignty’s continuous unsettling—its non-sovereignty, as I have suggested. Fred Moten has developed the notion of the para-ontological (after Nahum Chandler, and, by R.A. Judy’s account, Oskar Becker [Moten 2020]) in response to Western ontology which is, he argues, a “white” ontology that under the guise of universality refuses to think blackness. As he puts it in a lengthy, beautifully lyrical and intensely political article titled “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh)”:

[B]lackness is prior to ontology. … blackness is the anoriginal displacement of ontology … ontology’s anti- and ante-foundation, ontology’s underground, the irreparable disturbance of ontology’s time and space. (Moten 2013, 739)

Blackness—both in an identitarian way, as a condition that is particularly felt by black bodies, but also in a more general sense, as a structural condition that does not depend on one’s skin color (Moten distinguishes between “blackness and blacks” [Moten 2013, 749])—is precisely not covered by the ontological, and it is to move towards the philosophical thinking of blackness that Moten proposes his notion. The para-ontological, in such a project, captures what resides “next to” or “para” ontology. It captures the “nothingness” of blackness, the particular “nothingness”—which is evidently not nothing—that it marks. In my introduction, I have suggested reading this position politically, as a para-sovereign position

Moten turns in this context to Far Eastern thought and specifically the notion of “wu” (無, “nothing”). Moten brings this daoist notion of an active emptiness together with a black para-ontology and politics of resistance that can—in his view—be associated with Fanon (See: Moten 2013, 750). The thought of the dao, and specifically of “wu”, is a thought that puts being on hold rather than “in the hold” (Ibid.) as Moten’s reference to the slave-ship has it. Yet it is also through its attention to “the hold” that black studies (as Moten sees it) “disrupts” (Ibid., 751) the “nothingness” of Far Eastern thought, forcing “‘the real presence’ of blackness” (Ibid.) back into it and working both with and against the suspension that “wu” brings. There is, clearly, something to be learned from and resisted within the para-ontological. In the words of Abdelkebir Khatibi, another thinker of the dao, what’s needed here is a “double critique” (Khatibi 1983, 12), both of the para-ontological (as subject genitive: the para-ontological suspends, in the way that “wu” suspends) and of the para-ontological (as object genitive: the para-ontological is suspended by “‘the real presence’ of blackness”).

Moten’s choice (after Chandler) for and understanding of the preposition “para” or “next to” is worth pausing over in the context of my discussion of sovereignty, because it marks a moving sideways rather than up or down or inside or out. If up/down or in/out can easily be appropriated within the dialectical (Hegelian) and transgressive (Bataillean) models of sovereignty that I previously found in Mbembe, this is more difficult to do with the horizontal dynamic of the next to, which posits itself on the same plane as whatever it pre-poses. But does this lateral unsettling take us out of sovereignty? It seems that even in the intervention of such a sideways move, the para maintains a hyphenation to the ontological, some kind of connection—that of a mere dash—to what it unsettles. Read politically, this would also apply, then, to the para-ontological approach to sovereignty, in which some connection to sovereignty would be maintained by the mere presence of a dash. There is always the temptation of overlooking this dash, and rewriting this continuous unsettling as an outside—more radical than Bataille’s, which still calls itself sovereign. Moten in fact flirts with such an outside. “On the one hand”, he writes, “blackness and ontology are unavailable to each other” (Moten 2013, 749)—and the project of para-ontology seeks to remedy that situation. “On the other hand”, he continues, “blackness must free itself from ontological expectation, must refuse subjection to ontology’s sanction against the very idea of black subjectivity” (Ibid.). The more radical conclusion, then—following the invitation of this “other hand”–would simply be to reject ontology altogether, a rejection that would lead to non-sovereignty. But Moten might consider such a conclusion irresponsible from the point of view of a history in which whiteness and blackness have been co-constituted in ontology, through ontology, and in/through sovereignty. In other words: while blackness might desire the outside, it may not be afforded such luxury from the point of history. Indeed, none of us may.

Critique and Indigenous Politics

“If we owe Fanon a debt,” Mbembe writes, it is for the idea that in every human subject there is something indomitable and fundamentally intangible that no domination—no matter what form it takes—can eliminate, contain, or suppress, at least not completely. Fanon tried to grasp how this could be reanimated and brought back to life in a colonial context that in truth is different from ours, even if its double—institutional racism—remains our own beast. For this reason, his work presents a kind of fibrous lignite, a weapon of steel, for the oppressed in the world today. (Mbembe 2017, 170)

It is worth noting, in the context of a discussion of sovereignty, the potential complicity of such a discourse with exceptionalism, and some of the problems this raises. This becomes clear in Mbembe’s book. When, a few pages later, Mbembe turns to the politics of art in this context, he writes:

Here the primary function of the work of art has never been to represent, illustrate, or narrate reality. It has always been in its nature simultaneously to confuse and mimic original forms and appearances. … But at the same time it constantly redoubled the original object, deforming it, distancing itself from it, and most of all conjuring with it. … In this way the time of a work of art is the moment when daily life is liberated from the accepted rules and is devoid of both obstacles and guilt. (Ibid., 173)

I can follow this final passage all the way up to its last sentence. But I do not think its grand, concluding statement—liberation from accepted rules, being devoid of obstacles and guilt—follows logically, or evokes the same politics, as the language of constantly redoubling, deforming, and distancing that Mbembe uses earlier on. I am concerned about how the final line promotes an exceptionalism—“liberation from the accepted rules”, “devoid of both obstacles and guilt”–that the previous language actually dismantles. I like the dismantling better. It marks an immanent criticism of sovereignty that may be more efficient, politically, at dismantling sovereign exceptions than Mbembe’s final sentence.

Given this conclusion, however, one should not be surprised by the final paragraph of the chapter: to be African, it proclaims, is to be “a man free from everything, and therefore able to invent himself. A true politics of identity consists on constantly nourishing, fulfilling, and refulfilling the capacity for self-invention. Afro-centrism is a hypostatic variant of the desire of those of African origin to need only to justify themselves to themselves” (Mbembe 2017, 178). Mbembe prefers here a world that is constituted by the relation to the Other—and it is the human that introduces that otherness into blackness, which he argues must be “clouded” (Ibid., 173). This will be the beginning—via Fanon—of the “post-Césairian era” (Ibid.). Again, one wonders whether “clouding”—a term he uses earlier in the chapter—can mean the same as “free from everything”; one wonders whether “post” can really refer to the radical break that seems to be alluded to here. Ultimately, Mbembe’s critique appears to be torn between a more conservative articulation that would remain within the critique’s limits, and a more radical one that would seek to transgress it. Given that he relies for his critique largely on Fanon, this should come as no surprise, as I have shown that Fanon himself, too, is caught up within this tension of staying within (Hegel) and going beyond (Bataille). Everything in “On Violence” points to the beyond; and yet, the constructive part of its project—not addressed in the chapter—takes place “within” national liberation. Ultimately, what haunts the difference between those two positions is the problematic of sovereignty itself: of its paradoxical association both with an outside and a within (“I who am outside of the law, declare that there is nothing outside of the law”, as Agamben captures the paradox of sovereignty). And, of course, of an even greater sovereignty—absolute violence, absolute expenditure—that, as the sovereignty of sovereignties, may ultimately do no more than perpetuate sovereignty’s exceptionalism. The third path, as I’ve also suggested, would be that of non-sovereignty.

Indeed, it may be that for black life, the project of sovereignty is over, that Fanon’s call for national liberation and the inspiration if provided for the Black Panther Party are a thing of the past, for good. Joan Cocks, focusing on the Israel/Palestine situation and Indigenous politics, has laid out some very good reasons for this (See: Cocks 2014). But if that is so—if sovereignty should indeed be seen as a thing of the past–it seems crucial at a time when sovereignty is going through a revival on the Right, in open conflict with the “horizontalist” Black Lives Matter movement today, that new forms of collective organization are proposed against sovereignty. Are those non-sovereign forms of collective organization? Do they claim sovereignty otherwise? How do they effectuate their power?

It is interesting to compare historical narratives of sovereignty as they are presented in different disciplines. In political theory, studies of sovereignty usually tell the story of sovereignty’s decline after WWII due to transnational political developments such as European integration or human rights politics. In Indigenous Studies, however, scholars tend to note that “following World War II, sovereignty emerged not as a new but as a particularly valued term within indigenous discourses to signify a multiplicity of legal and social rights to political, economic, and cultural self-determination” (Barker 2005, 1). Precisely when the term is on the wane in the West, where it was born, it is on the rise as an emancipatory tool for example for those communities “within” the West that seek to contest their subjection to another sovereign power. Those communities turned toward the term sovereignty, as Joanne Barker explains, in part to refuse the label “minority group”: “Instead, sovereignty defined indigenous peoples with concrete rights to self-determination, territorial integrity, and cultural autonomy under international customary law” (Barker 2005, 18). Of course, while refusing the label “minority group”, the communities instead adopt the term “sovereignty”, which was born and shaped in Europe. There may be a deeper problem here, as scholars like Elizabeth Povinelli have noted (See: Povinelli 2002), with the (Hegelian) politics of “recognition” (“Anerkennung”, in Hegel’s celebrated master/slave-dialectic) and how it tends to confirm the master’s terms. Indeed, it might seem strange to use the term “sovereignty” both to refer to the camp-like situation of black life in the U.S as exposed by Coates,[25] and now for these Indigenous struggles for self-determination. But such strangeness marks what Barker characterizes as the “contingency” of sovereignty, the fact that “[t]here is no fixed meaning for what sovereignty is—what it means by definition, what it implies in public debate, or how it has been conceptualized in international, national, or indigenous law” (Barker 2005, 21). The passage is worth quoting in full:

Sovereignty—and its related histories, perspectives, and identities—is embedded within specific social relations in which it is invoked, and given meaning. How and when it emerges and functions are determined by the “located” political agendas and cultural perspectives of those who rearticulate it into public debate or political document to do a specific work of opposition, invitation, or accommodation. It is no more possible to stabilize what sovereignty means and how it matters to those who invoke it than it is to forget the historical and cultural embeddedness of indigenous peoples’ multiple and contradictory political perspectives and agendas for empowerment, decolonization, and social justice. (Ibid.)

Sovereignty is, as I have indicated elsewhere (See: Boever 2016), plastic and it is this plasticity that any critique of sovereignty needs to assess. This is also to say that sovereignty is not sovereign—a claim that should be distinguished from the call for non-sovereignty.

If indigenous sovereignty thus emerges as a kind of serious playground or site of experimentation to think through new democratic possibilities today, it is precisely because it enables an immanent critique of sovereignty, as a politics of sovereignty that can only be critical. This is so, as Barker points out in her introduction to the book Critically Sovereign, for two reasons: on the one hand, because native sovereignty relates critically to the sovereignty of the nation-state, as a sovereignty that contests the power of another; second, because native sovereignty itself suffers from many of the same problems as the sovereignty of the nation-state, and therefore some of the criticisms that have been levelled against the sovereignty of the nation-state also apply to native sovereignty. In essence, this criticality revolves around the fact that when it comes to the indigenous politics of sovereignty, one can distinguish between two kinds: that which takes place “in relation to the state” and that which takes place “within the state” (Barker 2017, 8). Whereas the former relates to native sovereignty’s relation to the sovereignty of the nation-state, the latter operates within the sovereignty of the nation-state, and to participate in the latter can be—and has been—perceived as participating in the imperial and colonial politics of oppression of the sovereign nation-state. This is why what Barker refers to as “Civil Rights politics” does not cover the relation between indigeneity and sovereignty. It only covers the politics “within the state” part of the relation. In addition, one should also consider indigenous sovereignty’s relation to the sovereignty of the nation-state and the tensions it lays bare.

Barker articulates this (as well as other key parts of the critical sovereignty she develops) through a focus on “gender, sexuality, feminism” within her exploration of native sovereignty. She points out, for example, how the call for “women’s and gay’s liberation and civil rights equality … has been narrated as racializing and classing gender and sexuality in such a way as to further a liberal humanist normalization of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, male dominance, and white privilege” (Barker 2017, 12). In other words, there is a subject-formation that is operative in such liberation struggles, and while this does not cover the full story of those struggles, this is an important aspect of them that should be drawn out. Any hegemonic formation, in the terms developed by Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, will produce a counter-hegemonic formation; any rendering legible produces illegibility as Barker (via Judith Butler) puts it—there are always traces of internal exclusion or exception. It is from those traces—from those frictions, if you will–that politics develops. Indigenous approaches to for example gender and sexuality can be interesting in this context because they can “defy binary logics and analyses” (Ibid., 13)—and those include, it should be pointed out, discourses of a “third” (which ultimately in their very attempt to posit a third appear to confirm a pre-existing binary). The point of Barker’s approach appears to be to “defamiliarize gender, sexuality, and feminist studies to unpack the constructedness of gender and sexuality and problematize feminist theory and method within Indigenous contexts” (Ibid., 14). Indigenous politics are interesting in this context as well because when for example indigenous women seek to pursue a feminist politics to redress their own status in their communities, they run into resistance because their tribe members perceive them to be sleeping with the enemy—to be “non- or anti-Indigenous sovereignty within their communities” (Ibid., 20). “They accused the women of being complicit with a long history of colonization and racism that imposed, often violently, non-Indian principles and institutions on Indigenous people” (Ibid.). So gender, sexuality, and feminism have a difficult place within native sovereignties, and it is precisely around the notion of sovereignty that this difficulty gets played out.

Barker’s introduction also contains hope for the future, though. Such hope articulates itself around a poetic project of remaking—of remaking masculinity for example; but also of remaking the world. This is about asserting a sovereignty that would not fall into the old traps of sovereignty—that would not reify, for example, “heterosexist ideologies that serve conditions of imperial-colonial oppression” (Barker 2017, 24). It would be a remaking that might confront “the social realities of heterosexism and homophobia” within indigenous communities (Ibid., 25). In other words, “Indigenous manhood and masculinity [need to be redefined] in a society predicated on the violent oppression and exploitation of Indigenous women and girls and the racially motivated dispossession and genocide of Indigenous peoples” (Ibid., 26). It is precisely here, in the project of not opposing the violent sovereignty of the oppressor with a call for a violent sovereignty of the oppressed—with the Fanonian attempt to go beyond such a dialectical opposition—that the possibility of an Indigenous future opens up, an Indigenous Futurism (of sovereignty). It is because of the very particular position that Indigenous sovereignty is in that this becomes possible. And this is the reason, I think, why so many contemporary theorists of sovereignty turn to this example to pursue a redefined politics of sovereignty today. The turn towards indigenous sovereignty enables, precisely, what Barker labels a “critical” sovereignty. It enables what one could, more precisely, call a “critique” of sovereignty where the power we call sovereign is not abandoned, not rejected, but transgressively transformed from within in view of the abuses it has enabled and the possibilities for emancipation it has opened up.

Now, the situations of African-American life and Native American life in the U.S. are of course not the same, as scholars have pointed out; African Americans and Native Americans have been governed in different ways, through different strategies and with different purposes. Their histories are connected in complicated ways. Nevertheless, it seems that when it comes to the issue of sovereignty, and to the debates between those who propose to reject it and those who pragmatically adopt it (in some cases to resist being labelled a “minority group”), an alliance between African-American and Native American thinking about sovereignty may be fruitful. It may lead to a situation where the exceptionalism that tends to get a negative rap opens up to democratic possibilities, as Bonnie Honig has considered in her work (See: Honig 2011), and counter-sovereignties are developed (as Honig has proposed in her book on Antigone [See: Honig 2013]). When it comes to actively taking on those sovereignties on the Right that are finding new life today, such democratic re-elaborations of sovereignty may be the most effective—at least until other, better options come along to defeat fascism.

 

Arne De Boever teaches American Studies in the School of Critical Studies and the MA Aesthetics and Politics program at the California Institute of the Arts (USA). He is the author of States of Exception in the Contemporary Novel (Continuum, 2012), Narrative Care (Bloomsbury, 2013), Plastic Sovereignties (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), Finance Fictions (Fordham University Press, 2018), and Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism (Minnesota University Press, 2019). His book François Jullien’s Unexceptional Thought: A Critical Introduction is forthcoming with Rowman & Littlefield (2020).

 

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[1] I would like to thank Sarah Brouillette and in particular Olivia C. Harrison, AdouMaliq Simone, and Ryan Bishop for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of this article.

[2] Donna Haraway would ask us to consider to what extent this Hobbesian claim is based on the observation of how actual wolves live together (Haraway 2008).

[3] The king has two bodies: an earthly, biological one and a spiritual, symbolic one. This image shows the king’s symbolic body. It is because of this two-body problematic that we have the acclamation, “The king is dead, long live the king!”—the biological king is dead, long live the symbolic body of the king, which is immortal. There is barely a pause between the two parts of the acclamation to ensure the continuity of power. See: Kantorowicz, 2016.

[4] See: Agamben, 2015.

[5] Foucault, “Society”, 90.

[6] Ibid., 90.

[7] The validity of this “against” may have to be contested. That certainly appears to be Agamben’s project, against Foucault, in: Agamben, Stasis. He presents Hobbes there as a thinker of the dissolved multitude of civil war rather than as a theorist of the people. So rather than being a theorist of peace, Hobbes is a theorist of civil war. Following Agamben, one would have to conclude that Foucault blames Hobbes for a position that is not his.

[8] Andreas Kalyvas’s reading of Schmitt’s Constitutional Theory—in many ways an aberrant work in Schmitt’s oeuvre—also begs us to differ: Kalyvas 1999-2000.

[9] Ibid., 108.

[10] I would like to thank AbouMaliq Simone for reminding me of this third path. I take the phrase “continuous unsettling” from his generous comments on my article, which drew my attention to: Marriott 2016.

[11] It seems, rather, that today exceptionalist sovereignty and neoliberalism need to be thought together: Scheuerman 1997; Biebricher 2014; Mirowski 2014.

[12] To be clear, I would not want to suggest here that the European frame of reference, in particular the reference to Auschwitz, is somehow needed to draw out the gravity of the situation of black lives in the U.S. Certainly when “camp” is used as the paradigm to capture the specific historical situation of black lives in the U.S., the specificity of that situation and the localization of the notion of camp that it requires would need to acknowledged. Ava DuVernay’s documentary film 13^th (Kandoo Films/Netflix, 2016) does some of that work, relying in part on: Alexander 2012.

[13] This something partly gets a geographical name in Coates’ book: Paris. It is in Paris where Coates realizes that there are places where he is not other people’s problem. Black people are not the problem of Paris; one should add that that dubious privilege is reserved for the Arabs, though Coates does not state this explicitly. In his turning to Paris as refuge, Coates is of course not alone: James Baldwin, Richard Wright, William Gardner Smith, and others, had done the same before him.

[14] Weheliye 2014, 56 and further. To be clear, Gilroy points to the usefulness of the camp to analyze the situation of black lives in the U.S., but also emphasizes Agamben’s blindness to race.

[15] I will refer here to two English translations of Fanon’s text: Fanon 1968 and Philcox 2004. For the French original, see Fanon 2002.

[16] There is an affiliation across colonial situations that, in view of discussions of Fanon’s work such as Robert Young’s (Young 2001), needs to be acknowledged here: the “I” of the native in Fanon’s text cannot straightforwardly be identified with Fanon himself, as in Algeria he was not a native or “indigène”, a term that Philcox unfortunately renders as “colonial subject” (Fanon 2004, 15). Fanon arrived in Algeria as a French citizen, which as a Martiniquan he had become after 1946, when Martinique became a “department” of the French state.

[17] This is the Farrington translation. Fanon’s original French has “violence absolue” (Fanon 2002, 41). Philcox renders this as “out and out violence” (Fanon 2004, 3).

[18] Farrington renders this as “complete disorder” (Fanon 1968, 36). The original French has “désordre absolu” (Fanon 2002, 39).

[19] When Fanon offers this line, he is referencing the New Testament, which casts the decolonized community he imagines in “messianic” terms. This is so even if he compares Christianity to DDT earlier on in his text.

[20] Farrington’s rendering is more correct: “the question is not always to reply to it by greater violence, but rather to see how to relax the tension” (Fanon 1968, 73). Here is Fanon: “la question n’est pas toujours d’y répondre par une plus grande violence mais plutôt de voir comment désamorcer la crise” (Fanon 2002, 72).

[21] Nigel Gibson gets this negotiation exactly right in the context of a discussion of dialectics: Gibson 2007.

[22] Nelson in fact did another cover for The New Yorker that had Malcolm X on it, but he appeared there as part of a group of African-American figures at the center of which was the (much more acceptable) figure of James Baldwin. The other cover can be accessed at: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/cover-story-2017-01-16.

[23] David Macey observes that around 1961, “Fanon had reached, or perhaps returned to, the Sartrean position of which he had been so critical in Peau noire, masques blancs [Black Skin, White Masks]: negritude had been no more than a ‘racist anti-racism’ that had to be transcended. Negritude could exist only in the context of white domination” (Macey 2012: 372).

[24] The exact relation of this position to Foucault is complicated and will have to be discussed on another occasion.

[25] I should note that while Agamben himself has paid no attention to Indigenous politics, his work has proved quite productive in Indigenous Studies. As Circe Sturm observes, “For scholars working in Native North America, settler-colonial theory becomes especially productive when placed in conversation with Giorgio Agamben’s ideas on state sovereignty” (Sturm 2017, 342).