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).

“[A] borderline concept is not a vague concept, but one pertaining to the outermost sphere. This definition of sovereignty must therefore be associated with a borderline case and not with routine.”

–Carl Schmitt, Political Theology

Carl Schmitt’s famous formulation, “[s]overeign is he who decides on the exception”, has several key components (2005: 5). Schmitt argues that the sovereign shows himself by making the genuine and pure decision, which amounts to some kind of formal revelation, and by deciding what constitutes the exceptional case, which amounts to some kind of extraordinary substantive moment. The decision on what counts as, and therefore what to do about, the exception occurs during states of emergency, peril, siege, catastrophe, urgency, need, or crisis, at a time that requires suspension of the existing order to maintain structural order. The sovereign, in these instances, acts as the borderline; he is both inside and outside of the law, deploying the extralegal exception against the routine accumulation of legal rules and norms. In lineal language, this accumulation is the excess of faintly illustrated lines, symptomatic of political liberalism, which the firmly inscribed borderline supersedes. At the outermost sphere and in the most extreme circumstance: there and then the superior exception explains the inferior rule. In the revelatory and extraordinary decision, the sovereign is made visible. We see through the haze of plurality; we see, finally, who decides.

Schmitt’s absolutist rendering of the line establishes the moment of sovereignty as a moment without friction. Sovereign decision overwhelms un-sovereign indecision. Norms, rules, and the usual order, which in everyday life possess their own internal contingencies and frictions, offer no resistance. His theory of sovereignty pursues a frictionless and transcendent action, by way of an abrasive and aesthetic abstraction. The border causes friction by definition. Schmitt uses the Kantian term Grenzbegriff, which suggests the limit or boundary inherent to human sense experience. He establishes a mutually comprehensible idea to articulate his theory of sovereignty. As Tracy B. Strong notes, this limit or boundary “looks in two directions, marking the line between that which is subject to law—where sovereignty reigns—and that which is not—potentially the space of the exception” (2005: xiii).

Schmitt’s borderline concept exposes frictionless sovereignty as an oxymoron, because the frictionless exception overwhelms that which is subject to law. It erases all other lines—over which sovereignty reigns—through its inscription of the hard line. It also exposes frictionless sovereignty as a redundancy, because it represents a desirable ideal—potentially the space of the exception—as an unattainable imaginary. These apparent contradictions arise from the fact that norms predicate the existence of the exception, so the moral or aesthetic preference for the exception must incorporate the general ubiquity of norms. One cannot exist without the other. The sovereign decision should be understood as both a spatial and temporal intervention. Definite but impermanent, omniscient but imperceptible, the decision cannot be anticipated before its appearance. It has no past but the torpor it explodes; no future but the memory of its decisive moment. For Schmitt, the borderline, which locates the exact place and moment of friction, produces the frictionless decision.

*

Schmitt’s reverence for the sovereign decision within the political domain is borne of a particular historical moment in Germany. There were twenty separate coalitions during Weimar, with the longest period of government lasting two years. His anxiety about open-ended deliberation speaks to this political landscape. Schmitt deems the contemporary theory of law as both a “deteriorated […] normativism [and] a degenerate decisionism”, which produces “a formless mixture, unsuitable for any structure” (2005: 3). He wanted to delineate legal form and have the German state modify putatively liberal texts such as the Versailles Treaty and the Weimar Constitution to allow for decisive political action. According to him, degenerate compromise must be sacrificed for the pure decision, which cuts through legal formlessness and decomposition, while rendering new demarcations and delineations.

For Schmitt, the unanticipated wins the day. His sovereign decision takes its unique authority from the fact that “the precise details of an emergency cannot be anticipated, nor can one spell out what may take place in such a case, especially when it is truly a matter of an extreme emergency of how it is to be eliminated” (2005: 6–7). The unanticipated emergency thus requires the unanticipated decision, which eliminates the emergency. Its authority is predicated on suddenness, absolute insight, and pure revelation, which transcends hopeful fortune-telling and prescient formula. Schmitt acts against what he sees as the essence of political liberalism: the ineffective institutional modus operandi that runs contrary to natural political behavior. In his view, what defines much of liberal democratic politics is the temporal desire for pre-emptive policies, established contingencies, and the overriding ability to anticipate. The obsessive need for planning and precision produces suffused and complicated procedures that amount to vague, gestural and meaningless politics.

In both Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, Schmitt sees the burgeoning practice of political liberalism as necessarily one of interminable conversation and limitless discussion. The Second Reich’s tense hybrid of autocratic and popular rule, which is followed by the incipient parliamentary democracy of the interwar period, deformed and sullied the genuine sovereign decision through the eternal stream of amendments, diktats, regulations, rules, and norms. In their most abstract form, these processes can be understood as the excess of lines, whose multiplicities accumulate to produce an image beyond politically effective action and distinction. The decision on how to eliminate the extreme emergency is one of erasing these faint, illustrative lines and replacing them with the ultimate line, the borderline. The sovereign ability to take the lives of lineaments inflicts mass death upon complicated lineal excess, which in turn restores meaningful political identity through a single, firm inscription. Schmitt’s critique of liberalism is predicated on the elimination of lines; this trope features throughout his work, starting in his early culture critiques.

*

Published in 1918 in the journal SUMMA, edited by the essayist Franz Blei, “The Buribunks” is exemplary of Schmitt’s literary fiction. At its centre are perpetual diary-keepers whose sole purpose is to obsessively document the present, so as to preclude the uncertain future. The article is seventeen pages of imaginative speculation, published on the cusp of two eras, as the desultory Kaiserreich made way for the democratic promise of the Weimar republic. It satirizes and ironizes the putatively liberal tendency of the historical moment: futile anticipation of the political event. This tendency is what the sovereign decision on the exception, theorised four years later in Political Theology (1922), negates and overwhelms. Schmitt’s early literary works locate the problem of sovereign authority; his major political works intend to remedy it. In “The Buribunks”, he ridicules the process of accumulating details, which he assigns to the world of legal positivism, the juridical landscape with which he was closely acquainted. In Political Theology, he theorizes sovereignty as the borderline, which satisfies his cravings for political clarity and visibility; it provides the effective counterpoint to the liberal politics of dense accumulation and hazy pluralism.

Schmitt’s literary and political approaches draw on aesthetic sensibilities. Modernisms, as contemporary aesthetic modes, likewise consider questions of sovereignty through satire, irony, and ridicule. Schmitt participated in the cultural tumult of the early twentieth century. He read and critically appraised writers as varied as Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Hugo Ball, and Wyndham Lewis. Placing Schmitt amid literary modernisms that precede and follow him is a more complicated task; it relies on a broader theoretical apparatus. Critics such as Peter Bürger have connected Schmitt’s desire for the exception to “an aestheticist Lebensphilosophie”, which reveals modernist motifs of abruptness, suddenness, and departure in his thought (1992: 434). Yet, Schmitt’s borderline is a complex force; it is not merely a cipher for rupture, discontinuity, and shock. His necessarily imprecise and undetailed exception provides a challenge for literary modernisms, in which anticipation is often forlorn and lineaments are uncertain. Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty is a product of his cravings for legal order within social disorder, for decision over discussion, and for establishing pure images within chaotic political forms. He moves from being a cultural to a political thinker through his fictions, which should be read against a range of modernist writers. Problems arising from aesthetics can be brought into potentially political formulations, which offer solutions apprehended through the unique effects of literature.

Considering Schmitt’s text “The Buribunks”, this article argues how Schmitt’s coterminous critique—of the accumulation of detail, and of the anticipation of the event—reveals tendencies towards modernism in his ideological anti-liberalism. It outlines the aesthetic sensibilities of Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty and how these inform his resurgent intellectual and academic popularity, expressing also his kinship to contemporary philosophical modernisms. Considering examples of anticipation and sovereignty in the works of Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, and Samuel Beckett, this article proposes that in “The Buribunks” Schmitt employs a modernist critique, or a form of critique that anticipates legacies of modernism, to comprehend the inherent follies of political liberalism. For Schmitt, the forlorn accumulation of details, understood as the excess of lines, produces a foolhardy state of anticipation. His theory of sovereignty, understood as the borderline, intends to eliminate this state.

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Schmitt elaborates on the sovereign decision through appeals to form and analogy. He cannot create a political concept without turning to the language of rendering and line drawing. Schmitt simultaneously critiques liberalism and advocates decisive sovereignty by evoking lines and spaces between the lines. This echoes contemporary modernist theory. In Paul Klee’s pedagogical sketches, for example, medial lines function within a work of art. They also delineate areas on a map, showing terrain, territories and land mass. Necessarily free, abstract and meandering, the movement of the active line gives birth to space. When hardened, the active is inscribed as the medial line, constructing boundaries and borders. These limits mark both figurative and literal planes, generating geometric and representational areas (1968: 16–20; see also de Bruyn 2014). The transformation of the line, one that moves from the purely aesthetic to the potentially political, and from play to utility, is significant for Schmitt through to his later work on Nomos and Raum (see Schmitt 2003; 2019).

Sybille Krämer considers the concept of the line through multiple spatial and temporal configurations. The existence of lines broadly “depends on the phenomenon of the plane” and their drawing incorporates “the temporal succession of a gesture [which] becomes the spatial simultaneity of a mark”. This speaks to Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty, in which the imposition of the borderline creates the symbolic space that surrounds it. This symbolic space can be understood as the phenomenon of the plane; the temporal succession of norms, meanwhile, produces the conditions within which the exceptional mark of the borderline eventually appears. Schmitt’s borderline is deliberately visible and multifaceted. It is simultaneously an act of inscription and of erasure, a single firm stroke that effaces innumerable faint etchings. Krämer describes the components of the silhouette in a way reminiscent of the borderline, insofar as both forge distinctions and suggest motion. The silhouette functions as “an instrument of metamorphosis” and as “a medium of transmission and transgression” (2016: 10-17). Schmitt, too, employed the silhouette form in his early literary critiques. So, to formulate Schmitt’s borderline as a purely political entity—one of norms and exceptions, only—is to ignore its irreducibly aesthetic sensibilities.

Schmitt cannot resist what he calls “systematic analogy” when invoking the theological precepts for his political concepts. Memorably, he states that the miracle in theology corresponds to the exception in politics. Metaphors he deems less valuable merely “yield colourful symbols and pictures” (2005: 37). At unpredictable times, according to Schmitt, “the power of real life breaks through the crust of mechanism that has become torpid by repetition” (2005: 15). This formulation, one of disputably Nietzschean provenance, does not preclude anticipation of the decisive event. The crusting of the mechanism, which supresses or undoes some vital element of human life, functions as a dulled anticipatory image. Visible through their density and accumulation, the excess of rules and norms reveals the torpor of political liberalism. Within the mass of procedures, little can be discerned or clarified because of the surplus of lines. This is what the metaphor of the exception acts against: details, details, details. Schmitt craves the elimination of these details, which paradoxically articulates their visibility. To transpose these details into lines—into the torpid repetitions that reveal the crusted mechanism—is to anticipate, through the formation of a dense image, the apparently unanticipated exception.

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Schmitt both embraces and rejects the aesthetic domain in his political theory, which inspires a broader inspection of aesthetics in his thought. George Kateb writes persuasively on the frictions between aestheticism and morality within Schmitt’s concept of the political, arguing that to advocate senseless fighting in an abstract agon is to tend towards an aestheticized understanding of politics. Schmitt’s reluctant cravings for form, line and analogy in his theory of sovereignty are thus suggestive of Kateb’s tripartite classification:

1. 1. 1. a craving for form, shape, shapeliness, definition, or definiteness; a craving for coherence or unity; a craving for purity or consistency; a craving for discernible identity and ease of identification; a craving for pattern; a craving for clarification or sharp boundaries and stark contrasts; a craving for dualism or bipolarity;
      2. a craving for style, for stylization; a craving for decorum, for comme il faut; a craving for suitability, for “fit”; a craving for appropriate appearances;
      3. a craving for striking surfaces, for color or colorfulness; a craving for novelty (2000: 14).

Sets A and B illustrate Schmitt’s aesthetic methodology. These cravings produce the concept of the sovereign decision, which in turn inspires the novelty of the exception, illustrated in set C. Critically reading these aesthetic sensibilities is important because of his complicated insistence on the aesthetic as both a dangerous domain of intellectual life and as a trivial mode of perception. This is worth noting because his polemical strategy of disavowal subordinates the aesthetic to the political domain.

That Schmitt is at once dismissive and troubled by “aesthetic characterization” elicits an involuntary irony, since he conceives his concepts through the aesthetic mode, through language founded in literature and art (2005: 65). This partly explains why his work on sovereignty persists today and has influenced some major humanities theorists, including Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben. Mouffe uses Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction to articulate a political theory of agonistic pluralism applicable to current forms of social democracy (1999). Derrida deploys Schmitt to theorize the politics of friendship, as well as to interrogate the bestial symbols that represent sovereignty in various cultural forms (2005; 2009; 2011). Agamben draws upon Schmitt’s political philosophy to diagnose in modern societies examples of permanent emergencies, regimes of biopower and conditions of bare life (1998; 2005).

Schmitt seems to be experiencing a second life outside of academia, too. The jurist of the Third Reich and famed twentieth century political theorist is now fodder for editorials in the Atlantic, the Financial Times, and the London Review of Books. Authoritarian conservatives, amoral leftists and self-flagellating liberals have acknowledged, appropriated and claimed affinity to Schmitt’s work. He is invoked to apprehend crises as disparate as Brexit, the rise of Steve Bannon, identity politics, and the electoral successes of demagogues such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Jair Bolsonaro. Even outwardly liberal political and administrative leaders use the language of emergency and enemy when trying to articulate global disasters such as COVID-19. For many, Schmitt helps to clarify the tumultuous present in all its contradictions (see Owen 2019; 2020).

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Schmitt’s appeal is threefold. Firstly, he tries to demystify politics. To be political, in his retelling, is to be a truly meaningful person, one above frivolous moral, economic, and aesthetic identities. The political life is thus the essential life. Secondly, his apparent intellect and card-carrying Nazism provide an appalling and seductive framing that anticipates a disastrous era of totalitarian politics. This is why so many commentators are attracted to him today, despite his embroilment with National Socialism. Through him, they can perform moral disgust while claiming insight into a worrying future. Lastly, his mystique is intensified by the way he constructs his ideas. He uses pithy axioms about legal order and state decision-making that are as slippery as they are suggestive. We can do a lot with them. His outward suitability for the present is thus explicable: his thought promises meaningful political identity; he possesses second sight; his language seems appealingly vague.

Prescribing Schmitt, whose ideas seem fixed but can be transposed into innumerable iterations, makes sense. His ideas, aided by concrete-looking definitions and linguistic slippages, seek to be understood intuitively and instinctively, to be immediately visible. But there is ambiguity in his thought. His virile heuristics function as symbolic spaces, within which commentators paint current policies, cravings and sensibilities. They pick any color: a dash of Erdoğan, a lick of Xi Jinping, a blot of Salvini, a shade of Johnson. In one New Statesman article, the headline foregrounds “the terrifying rehabilitation of Nazi scholar Carl Schmitt”, beneath which it notes his prescience for understanding the political phenomenon of Brexit “only too well” (Earle 2019). Powered by a polarized energy, commentators valorize Schmitt’s thought while gesturing at moral aberrations within it. They color in their appreciation of the abstraction. His theory of sovereignty thus functions potently as a symbolic space within which aesthetic sensibilities can be expressed. His borderline concept gestures towards the gaps either side of it. In Eric L. Santner’s words, these gaps amount to “fissures or caesuras in the space of meaning” (2006: xv). The borderline generates the possibility of not only symbols but of symbolic space, a free area of meaning to be identified and rendered upon.

Schmitt appeals across belief spectrums and media platforms because of the ostensible clarity and deliberate ambiguity of his conceptual schema. His language is as precise as it is amenable, his ideas as fixed as they are promiscuous. He deals in axioms and aphorisms, which extend his popularity to depraved internet forums. Noting the attraction of Schmitt for contemporary scholars, Jens Meierhenrich and Oliver Simons point to “the aesthetic and emotional appeal of [his] conceptual interventions”, which often trump their “explanatory power” (2017: 25, 17). Yet, emphasis on Schmitt’s rhetorical and polemical skill overlooks the aesthetic sensibilities that provide much of his explanatory power and which pervade his work. He is politically persuasive because his work draws on aesthetic sensibilities and fulfils aesthetic cravings. This discussion must negotiate in turn the troubling recuperation of Schmitt as a critic of liberalism and the troubling, sustaining legacy of Schmitt as a symbol of intelligent fascism. Analysing his literary approach allows us to cut through and past these versions of Schmitt.

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Literary aesthetics are bound up with broader political, philosophical and legal debates. The story of modern sovereignty is thus inseparable from the tropes of early-twentieth century modernism. Schmitt’s formulation of sovereignty brings into relief the complicated use of symbols in modernism to understand a radically changing international order. His theological allusions foreground symbols that purport to represent as well as resist traditional ideas of sovereignty. His appeal to seriousness and political existentialism, which grounds his theory of sovereignty, encourages the tragicomic retort found within the credo of modernism: that the artistically realizable human condition is undercut by the fallibility of perception and the complex powers of literature. As it is conventionally told, innovations in modernist prose destabilized the omniscience of third-person narration while movements in modernist art complicated the authority of perceptive realism. Because the sovereign author has a disruptive attitude towards content, form, and style, his or her work no longer claims to hold emancipatory or empathetic value. These developments confront Schmitt’s anxiety about the aesthetic domain, because modernism’s desire to critique and undermine itself reaffirms its importance to intellectual life and risks displacing the ultimate political domain.

The innovations, movements, and destabilizations wrought by modernism paradoxically draw attention to the fixed scaffolding that sustains the realms of literature and art. By acknowledging their innate failures, the modernist author and artist provide a deceptive, trickier opponent than that of the romantic poet, whose desire for intellectual primacy is never hidden, and who, as a result, provides a clear antithesis to Schmitt’s political sovereign. In Political Romanticism (1919), Schmitt summarizes “the romantic treatment of the universe” as one concerned with:

The instant, the dreaded second, [that] is also transformed into a point. The present is nothing other than the punctual boundary between past and future. It connects both “by means of limitation.” It is “ossification, crystallization” (Novalis). A circle can be wrapped around it as the center. It can also be the point at which the tangent of infinity is contiguous with the circle of the finite. It is also, however, the point of departure for a line into the infinite that can extend in any direction. Thus every event is transformed into a fantastic and dreamlike ambiguity, and every object can become anything. The “universe is the elongation of my beloved.” Conversely, “the beloved is the abbreviation of the universe.” “Every individual is the center of a system of emanation.” Instead of mystical forces, the emanations are geometric lines (1991: 76).

Schmitt, in his broad-brush polemical disdain, conflates the individual egoism of the romantic poet with the egalitarian geometry of the modernist artist; he acknowledges, though, that it is “not the geometric line, but rather the arabesque that is romantic” (1991: 74). This distinction heeds the idea that modernisms, more so than romanticisms, were self-critical, self-reflexive and acutely aware of literary forms and artistic traditions. They thus pose different, difficult questions about the nature of aesthetics that haunt Schmitt throughout his work. Critically reading his theory of sovereignty both with and against developments of modernism illuminates his writings on representation, parliamentary democracy, the political, myth, symbol, humanity, and Nomos.

Friedrich Kittler includes a lengthy, translated extract of “The Buribunks” in his book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999). Geoffrey Winthrop-Young notes one pivotal issue of Kittler’s broad theoretical stance:

[…] discontinuity—a forceful, at times polemical emphasis on ruptures, breaks and caesuras designed to obliterate any attempt to infuse history with gradualist, progressive, teleological or dialectical notions. History is not smooth; it doesn’t lead out of the cave of early illusions into the mature blaze of enlightenment; it does not exhibit any growing intelligibility; and it cannot be reduced to a fanciful relay of revolutionary subjects (2006: 10).

Discontinuity is likewise crucial to understanding Schmitt’s treatment of history in “The Buribunks”. The narrator dismisses the limited efforts of Leporello, Don Juan’s servant, who lacks the ambition and ability to document his master’s life in precise detail and perfect continuity. He makes errors and omissions and possesses neither a methodological framework nor an obvious strategy. He has no interest in his subject or in the demographic factors that surround his subject. He does not write about Don Juan in context: not with reference to statistics, politics, law, economy, or society. He lacks the tools and motivation for extended scientific enquiry and is bereft of the chronic self-awareness required to project his own life onto the documentation of his subject (2019: 102–04). Schmitt ironically portrays the narrator’s dismissiveness towards Leporello as a blind belief in the relentless meaning of historical record. Schmitt’s assessment of this complacency is central to his understanding of the question of sovereignty.

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The decision, according to Schmitt, “emanates from nothingness” and “contains a moment of indifference from the perspective of content, because [it] is not traceable in the last detail to its premises and because the circumstance that requires a decision remains an independently determining moment” (2005: 32, 30). Schmitt privileges decision ahead of indecision, exposing what looks like an essential desire for form over content. This desire is a defining component of literary modernism. Gopal Balakrishnan concludes that Schmitt’s writings:

[…] contain a number of sharp, composite images of an era characterized by the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous. They are attempts to capture the experience of the end of several overlapping eras in European history at an explosive convergence of turning points [during …] a seemingly irreversible devaluation of the dominant political traditions of the belle époque: conservatism, liberalism and moderate socialism (2000: 268).

This highfalutin summary illustrates the scholarly desire to place Schmitt’s politics in his literary context. Modernisms sought ways to redress the poverty of meaning engendered by hyper-detailed, anticipatory political liberalism. “The Buribunks” helps assess whether his writings are ‘modernist texts par excellence’ (2000: 268).

Schmitt, after all, sought to advance a theory against anticipation, through which to remedy the political crisis of the period. The modernist literary mission is one historically premised on rupture and transformation. It is the dominant mode through which the collapsing orders of the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, and beyond were challenged and comprehended. This apprehension of crisis and collapse is particularly striking in the apparently politically dispassionate works of Anglophone modernism, in writers such as Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner. Schmitt is likewise concerned with the relationship between modernity and crisis. Yet, the classic modernist characterization of rupture and transformation—often as a predicate for newness—is neither sufficient, nor accurate, for evaluating his relationship to aesthetic modernism. It is more persuasive to argue that Schmitt, alert to the political potential of disorder, desires new understandings of order, and that in various periods and modes of modernism there is a similar excitement in disorder combined with a yearning for order. This affective combination produces subversive responses to ideas of continuity amid seismic social and political change.

A melancholy intellectualism defines political and artistic approaches to the early to mid-twentieth century. The contemporary diagnosis of state failure corresponds to the modernist diagnosis of aesthetic failure. Political philosophy of the period tends to grapple with anticipation, as do literary modernisms; in both, there is a desire for the not-quite-yet to disrupt and clarify the age. Melancholy, failure, and anticipation thus constitute the Schmitt-modernist diagnosis of sovereignty. Robert B. Pippin usefully pinpoints these intellectual states as integral to philosophical modernism, because modernity shifted from its “repetitive […] culture of melancholy”, which was “morbidly fixated on failure”, towards:

[…] the realization of an even more radical notion of historical time, without purpose or structure, but infinitely repetitive, one which thereby eliminates any notion of decisive, revolutionary moments, [which] might make possible a “confirmation” of this life, not an anticipation of a future or different or missed life (1999: xi, 152, 156).

In the modern period, Pippin continues, “[w]e require a profound sense of the infinite repeatability, and so of such infinite sameness, to avoid the false hopes that inspire melancholy” (1999: 157). Just as Schmitt tried to reinstitute the authority of the decision to counter widespread political failure, currents within philosophical modernism sought to extinguish and replace the sovereign decision with an infinite series of repetitions that would preclude its existence. Through a melancholic vision, they desired a future that could not be seen, traced, or expected. Yet, their diagnoses were drastically different. By cross-stitching the states of melancholy, failure, and anticipation into an intricate mesh, and by drawing upon intellectual traditions that privilege these states within modernism, Pippin suggests that they are inextricable, interminable and co-productive. In this spirit, this article argues, Schmitt and literary modernisms make major appeals to structural continuity, to the interplay of order and disorder, and to the reorderings of political and artistic forms. Modernist writers not only invoke rupture, transformation and newness to address the period but also draw on the symbolic and social orders of repetition, reorder and restraint, which can correspond to the states of melancholy, failure and anticipation.

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Tragedies wrought by intimacy and deception, without obvious villains, are studded throughout literature. Schmitt’s regular readings of Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), another literary figure emblematic of sovereign façade, firmly places his intellectual concerns within this genre of proto-modernist writing. Melville gives these words to the title character, the displaced captain of the ship San Dominick:

[…] you were with me all day; stood with me, talked with me, looked at me, ate with me, drank with me; and yet, your last act was to clutch for a villain, not only an innocent man, but the most pitiable of all men. To such degree may malign machinations and deceptions impose. So far may even the best man err, in judging the conduct of one with the recesses of whose condition he is not acquainted. But you were forced to it; and you were in time undeceived. Would that, in both respects, it was so ever, and with all men (1998: 158).

Benito Cereno is addressing his rescuer, Amasa Delano, who has been deceived by a series of extravagant performances. Slaves, led by the manipulative Babo, have taken control of the ship and, to avoid detection, retained Cereno as their leader, a silhouette of authority. Cereno’s position is rendered into a façade, and his erratic behaviour arouses Delano’s suspicions until the truth aches to be let out. It is the seminal tale of intimacy and deception, how often one arises from the other, and how difficult it is to locate good and evil in desperate circumstances. Melville’s tragedy of the false sovereign spoke powerfully to Schmitt, particularly in his post-World War II thinking.

Many works of modernist literature anticipate a late, symbolically crumbling but institutionally resilient global imperialism. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) famously depicts the brooding melancholy, cataclysmic shocks and subsequent confusions that destabilized European understandings of sovereignty and post-national orders. Lauren Benton, who exemplifies the contemporary law and literature approach to sovereignty, notes how the novella imagines and reformulates “the wilderness [which] threatened to lure men into the usurpation of sovereign authority, [and] into delusions of kingliness that might have borne some superficial similarity to [Colonel] Kurtz’s interior empire”. Benton states that “Conrad worried about dark places upriver where nature ruled”. In his depiction of the Congo, “the big trees were kings” (2009: 42). Uncertain spaces of looming nature form key modernist tropes of sovereign anxiety. Yet, Benton alludes to modernist literature in her discussion of sovereignty without fully realising its unique potential for explaining the nature of sovereign authority. Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty, which rejects the accumulation of detail as a predicate for anticipation, echoes the modernist tendency to use ill-defined symbols for a radically changing order. Conrad shows the forces of nature as tantalizing and deceptive, and as able to encourage phantasmal forms of sovereignty; in doing so, they preclude the genuine, visible decision. Suggestive of Schmitt, Lord Jim (1900) features disciplinary regimes defined by racialized conceptions of sovereignty, while Nostromo (1904) contains a republic founded on the state of emergency (Rehn 2012; Adams 2003).

Conrad’s fiction is broadly elusive, foreboding and anticipatory. In his short story “The Secret Sharer” (1910), central to his collection ‘Twixt Land and Sea (1912),  Conrad malforms the timeworn symbols of the severed head and the festering cadaver, reproducing sovereign anxieties about decapitation and decay. In the darkness, the unnamed ship captain recalls first misidentifying his doppelgänger, the stowaway Leggatt, as a headless corpse, before placing himself onto the figure whose “shadowy dark head”, like his, “seemed to nod imperceptibly”. The captain remembers facing his abyssal “reflection in the depths of a sombre and immense mirror” (2008: 86­–88). The deception of the sovereign exists through his nominal memories: his melancholy sense of aloneness, his failed authority and consequent disorientation, his anticipatory fear of violent displacement, and his complicated desire for doubling. Opposed to Schmitt’s clear delineation of land and sea, Conrad’s suggestion of betwixt and between represents sovereignty as a contested space, which can be dubiously reconstructed as one of unambiguous decision. Daniel R. Schwarz notes that the captain, through his relationship to Leggatt, “discovered within himself the ability to act decisively that he had lacked” (1982: 2). The sometimes vivid, sometimes hazy, retrospective monologue functions as an immediate present, which places the reader amid the character’s psychic and moral development. By steering the ship away from land and its associated dangers, the captain obtains the appearance of resolve and command. By looking backwards but presenting forwards, Conrad identifies the captain’s figurative movement into the assured and respected sovereign. The narrator’s reminiscence reveals that he who now decides is whoever once commanded, a past source of disputed agency, retrospectively known and yet still necessarily unknowable.

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Schmitt’s cultural prescription in the years leading up to the publication of “The Buribunks” is literary, complicated and contradictory. His early works include “Silhouettes” (1913), a series of unflattering portraits of cultural figures, the politician Walther Rathenau among them. Although Schmitt avoided evaluating modernist novels from Mann, Musil, and Alfred Döblin, he did produce a monograph on Theodor Däubler’s long poem “The Northern Light” (1915). Published in a widely read literary journal, “The Buribunks” echoes the title of Mann’s novel Buddenbrooks (1901), and acts as a pivot for discussing Musil’s ideas. Schmitt’s literary criticism inflects our understanding of his political and legal tracts. His desire to base the concept of sovereignty on the state of exception, and to shape the political as the supreme domain of human action and intellectual life, draws on his anxieties about the aesthetic domain while assimilating the rhetorical styles of his culture critiques.

For Schmitt, the literary approach provides an apt diagnostic method to seek out the problems of law and politics. His interest in motifs and images is consistent and long lasting. His 1923 essay “Roman Catholicism and Political Form” considers forms of political representation, and his 1938 book on Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan interrogates ideas of political symbolism. He wrote his major works during the Weimar period, namely Political Theology and The Concept of the Political (1932). Schmitt published articles defending the Nazi Party from 1933 to 1936, after which he was ousted due to intellectual differences and internal criticisms. Using literary forms to distance himself from his National Socialist affiliation, he crafted a childlike fable of history, Land and Sea (1942). Many of his intellectual concerns came full circle. He wrote his 1910 university doctoral thesis in criminal law on guilt and returned explicitly to this theme in his Shakespearean critique Hamlet or Hecuba (1956). This marked a body of thought preoccupied throughout by aesthetic considerations, translated into subjects of sovereign decision, states of exception, and the concept of the political in the Weimar period.

This is to suggest that throughout his life, Schmitt never loses sight of the literary scene. This allows for consideration of a broad range of literary figures. Melville and Conrad produce ill-defined anticipatory symbols in their writings. Reading Schmitt’s later work on Nomos and the katechon encourages comparison with Beckett. His attempts to reconcile ideas of sovereignty and anticipation are suggestive of Schmitt’s permanent anxieties about the liberal, technocratic desire to record, document and accumulate details. These processes undermine the visibility of the sovereign decision and the clarity of political life. About contemporary analogies of the state, Schmitt writes:

It may be left open what the state is in its essence—a machine or an organism, a person or an institution, a society or a community, an enterprise or a beehive, or perhaps even a basic procedural order. These definitions and images anticipate too much meaning, interpretation, illustration, and construction (2007: 19).

Beckett, a very different sort of modernist writer to Melville and Conrad, blurs further the function of analogies and anticipatory symbols. Beckett depicts the futility of too much meaning, interpretation, illustration and construction. In works such as Waiting for Godot (1953), through to lesser-known short fictions such as the 1030-word “Ping” (1967), Beckett gestures towards the unknowable qualities of the future. These gestures suggest guesses, form possibilities and indicate ominous threats; together these elements constitute an inhibited epistemological effort, an attempt of literary detail, and a distinctive aesthetic method, which renders anticipation within symbolic spaces while destabilizing their surrounding contours.

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The symbol or figure of the katechon, originating from St. Paul’s Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, denotes the great restrainer that is able to hold back the Anti-Christ. Schmitt’s post-war development of the katechon concept, which he retrospectively applies to his early theories of sovereignty, can be brought to bear in discussions of Beckett’s works, which contain comic and forlorn undertakings of presumed authorities and messiahs. Ambiguities of mid-twentieth century cultural life redefine the sovereign decision, which now includes the decision to do nothing: to commit no action. Paralysis is key for Schmitt’s understanding of the katechon, particularly “[t]he belief that someone or something restrains the end of the world is the only explanation which reconciles the eschatological paralysis of all human efforts with the historical greatness like that of the Christian Empire of the German kings” (2003: 60). The purpose of Schmitt’s amorphous katechon is to delay and engender anticipation of the Second Coming. This suggests the innate value of ostensibly melancholic waiting; the katechon lends agency to what appears to be stasis.

Schmitt’s literary method is bound up with his use of the katechon. One of his final published works, Political Theology II (1970), which cites negative influences ranging from Goethe to Brecht, “presents a certain literary obscurantism with references made to arcane sources, oblique hints, suggestive undertones, double meanings, crafted ironies and symbolic figurations” (2008: 3). Michael Hoelzl suggests more comparisons with Beckett: Waiting for Godot is “a truly political book” because the decision not to act, as depicted through Vladimir and Estragon, is fundamentally political. In turn, the time that occurs between inaction and action is defined by anticipation, which must be theorized by the katechon concept. As Hoelzl notes, “[t]he katechon is the only possible explanation to bridge the gap between the paralysis of all human efforts and innerworldly ambition. The katechon defines the space between the radically spiritual and the purely political” (2010: 99, 108). How, then, do Beckett’s aesthetic sensibilities function within this polarized symbolic space?

In “Ping”, the katechon is the ping sound that accompanies a barely visible figure struggling through what appears to be its final moments of consciousness. The figure exists in a small box bordered with white walls that trigger glimpsed traces of memories, that is, the lines of the past. The story begins with “[a]ll known”, and for the following 1028 words, the narrator, the figure, and the reader fall into a condition of “known not”. The repetitious, anticipatory form is broken by punctures of silence and the sound of ping. It ends on something definitive, “ping over”. The movements between beginning and ending, between acknowledgement and the event, constitute anticipation in the text. The critic Michael Wood states that in Beckett, “the future is not a place, and not much of a time” (1981). Wood understands the future as temporal and spatial, suggesting that Beckett’s works lack these markers and delineations. Yet, for Beckett, the future remains crucially a setting, considered through measurements and observable geometry. In “Ping”, “one yard” mirrors “one second”. Beckett articulates demarcated space through fractured and percussive time, and successive time through confined and overwhelming space (1967: 25–26).

Schmitt’s life-long literary preoccupations tease further comparisons with Beckett’s prose shorts, many of which contain apparently atemporal renderings. These pieces are residual, the cast-offs and reformulations of longer pieces. They are discrete in isolation but offer refractions of the human condition viewed together. Using the shorter form, Beckett maintains the state of anticipation through distorted movements that are difficult to discern. These may be extended, quick, sparse and frantic, but they always suggest linearity. Paralysis does not necessitate stasis; to be fixed in time is not a moral preference, or a source of inherent value, or a desirable method of representation. These pieces retain movement and almost replicate artworks, sketches and compositions. As in visual art, Beckett evokes stillness and chronology. He proposes that the reader looks around and across the text just as the viewer looks around and across a painting. As in music, Beckett offers permutations, repetitions, modulations and deviations. He keeps the reader’s ear to a metronome before producing onomatopoeic interruptions, a twang or, in this instance, a ping.

*

Melville, Conrad and Beckett offer diverse temporal strands of literary modernism that blur and refocus symbols within states of delay and waiting. These bring into relief Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty and facilitate a critical approach for understanding his rendering of anticipation in “The Buribunks”, a parody of institutionalized egoism and false forms of sovereign decision. Scholars have variously described the text as “surrealistic”, “a dystopia”, a mockery of “the secular ritual of confession”, “a satire of detached intellectualism”, an ironic “world history of inscription”, “a critique of modern subjectivity”, and a “biting caricature of the boheme and of positivism” (Bredekamp 1999: 251; Balke 2017: 633, 644; Meierhenrich and Simons 2017: 7; Kittler, 1999: 231; Mehring 2014: 86; Kennedy 2004: 44). Such characterisations both subvert and suggest its position as a modernist text. We have modes and genres of modernism, but these are contemptuous of the putative aesthetic subjectivities that modernisms desired to represent. Schmitt uses the text to interrogate systemic failures of technological modernity and scientific progress. He depicts institutions as conspicuous and unwieldy, the practice of historicism as self-important and futile, and the individual as devitalized, as abstracted from value and meaning. For Reinhart Koselleck, the conditions of institutionalism, historicism and individualism form a “negative utopia”, in which the diary keeping Buribunks represent “the interior […] turned outward”. The public accumulation of interiority constitutes a project of surveillance, which he calls “a mode of the performance of perfected terror” (2002: 93). Schmitt renders interiority as a hard surface, or as another unit of measurement, to critique the belief that history can be mastered, decided upon, and anticipated.

“The Buribunks” arrives on the cusp of Schmitt’s apparently decisive shift from cultural to political thought. Through techniques of extended irony and self-reflexive footnotes, Schmitt challenges the Wilhelmine culture that had failed to respond to his call for political clarity and visibility. From modernist origins and his discovery of early avant-garde movements, he assaults an inert, debased and embedded institutionalism. It is the most mature manifestation of his early critique of liberalism, which he reads as a vehicle for the obsessive accumulation of details that produces needless anticipation of the event. He sought to critique an age that venerated rules and norms, celebrated scientific arrogance, idolized selfhood and valorized technological advance:

From an early discovery of modernism and expressionism, Schmitt created the figure of liberalism that guided his analysis of Weimar’s institutions, a gesalt and doctrine that was part romantic and part positivistic and that was the spirit of his age. […] Schmitt’s antiliberalism was literary and theological at its core (2004: 40).

Schmitt uses the chaotic starting points of aesthetic modernism against his enemy figure of liberalism. Many currents of contemporary modernisms were likewise sceptical of the tendency to accumulate details, to endlessly discuss, and to attempt to mitigate the otherwise unanticipated event.

“The Buribunks” is a product of Schmitt’s combined experiences within the legal academy and under military command. The text offers an alternate society in which the desire to produce continual lines of information is held as the highest virtue, which is evidenced by a vast institutional framework. Organizations have lengthy and ludicrous initialisms, which constitute the populated landscape of the Buribunks. There are, among other things, “400,000 buribunkological dissertations (20 divisions!)”, the “International Buribunkological Institute for Ferker and Related Research (IBIFERR)”, and “the Buribunk and Ferker Research Panel Commission (BAFREPAC)”. Schmitt in turn creates a linear history of the Buribunks, one that eventually leads to the supreme state of Buribunkdom, which is the purest realm of the Buribunks. He begins his visionary history with Leporello, who mostly notes the sexual exploits of Don Juan, before tracing the dynasty of the Buribunks’ forerunners, including the fictional creations of Ferker and Schnekke. These scholars’ incipient, failed attempts at self-illustration lay the ground for the perfect world of accumulated knowledge. In this ultimate universe, the Buribunks give meaning to their existence by incessantly detailing it. Their concluding philosophy is thus one of inclusive and simultaneous “I-ness” (2019: 99–100, 104–108, 110). Such rampant officialdom, matched with unchecked egoism, fuels Schmitt’s critique of liberal progress, particularly its emphasis on common laws and on the central sovereign subject of the modern individual.

*

In “The Buribunks”, the obsessive process of anticipation debilitates the body. The Buribunks undergo physiological changes because of their diary keeping. Their growing intellect correlates with “an enlarged mouth”, for example. Consciousness and selfhood produce corporeal effects on anatomical surfaces. Schmitt creates an alternative rendering of the human body, comprised of deformed faces, creaturely habits and machine-like tendencies. He further invokes the body to outline the sense of uncertainty that provokes extreme anticipation. The dread with which the Buribunks view the future is described as “the dark body”—imposing, fearful, racialized—which is precluded by an obsessive, anticipatory present. The Buribunks ignore the sovereign decision, as Schmitt understands it, in favour of the accumulative detail that generates outward order. This constitutes the manipulation of the material world from an institutionalized distance, which is disguised as the simple frictions of the collective good. The Buribunks are biophysically transformed through their vast data production and bureaucratic surveillance. Their deification of communal processes thwarts the pursuit of human meaningfulness. For Schmitt, the desire to produce excessive temporal proximity leads to psychological indulgence, not physical vitality.

Schmitt compares the study of the Buribunks to popular contemporary anthropological assessments. He interrogates the correlation between intellect and physiognomy by mockingly invoking the example of tribes and employing a sort of ironic racism: “[…] lesser peoples, Polynesians, Terra del Fuegoans, Ba-Ronga-Niggers, and other tribes incapable of an education, have a relatively small mouth, even though they are cannibals, the close connection between the enlarged mouth and a higher intellect becomes a probability” (2019: 101, 110). This prefaces his writings the following year, wherein:

[p]rimitive peoples—humanity as childlike—are also bearers of these unlimited possibilities. The contradiction between rational limitation and the irrational profusion of possibilities is romantically eliminated because another equally real but still unlimited reality is played off against limited reality: in opposition to the rationalistic, mechanized state, the childlike people; in opposition to the man already limited by his profession and accomplishments, the child who plays with all possibilities; in opposition to the clear line of the classical, the primitive in its infinity of meanings (1991: 69).

Schmitt compares plurality of meaning to a childlike primitivism, and single linearity to a form of classical thinking. He traduces infinite possibilities and valorizes the delimiting power of the borderline. This amounts to using racial anthropology as dubious shorthand for illustrating his anxieties about lineal excess. Through literary techniques, Schmitt’s racist thought emerges. These passages function as portents for his anti-Semitic characterizations of Jews in his 1938 book on Leviathan and in texts such as Land and Sea (1942).

The defining message of “The Buribunks” is that to excessively quantify and repeat is to perpetually anticipate. This commitment to research means that the study of the Buribunks is valued more than the Buribunks themselves. Schmitt calls this mode of enquiry “scientific buribunkology”, which amounts to a chronically aware self-justifying meta-sphere of learning (2019: 99). It is smug, circular, overly referential and ever inwardly expanding. This continued expansion leads to indelibility. To create, to manufacture, and to multiply constitutes success and supremacy. This economy functions at maximum output and at optimum delineation. This functioning holds innate value because quantity is made into quality by virtue of its facticity. This predates Schmitt’s critique of liberalism, which he thinks “discusses and negotiates every political detail […] in the hope that the definitive dispute, the decisive bloody battle, can be transformed into a parliamentary debate and permit the decision to be suspended forever in everlasting discussion” (2005: 63). Schmitt polemically dramatized parliamentary democracy as a mode of government made up exclusively of discussion. His ironic appraisal of scientific buribunkology presages his appraisal of political liberalism.

*

Schmitt complicates the self-proclaimed values of the liberal Enlightenment, which he would later taunt for its belief:

[…] in a clear and simple upward line of human progress. Progress would above all result in the intellectual and moral perfection of humanity. The line moved between two points: from religious fanaticism to intellectual liberty, from dogma to criticism, from superstition to enlightenment, from darkness to light (2007: 73).

He suggests the Enlightenment was more accurately a part of the “successive stages of the changing central domains [which] are conceived neither as a continuous line of ‘progress’ upwards nor the opposite” (2007: 82). In “The Buribunks”, constant documentation is a source of fact beyond mere science. This sense of superiority and of the supreme idea of fact makes scientific buribunkology the overwhelming and most conclusive sphere of knowledge and understanding, even “more than theology, jurisprudence or philosophy”. Any refusal to keep a diary must be “justified and described in detail”; the disobedient Buribunks will otherwise face elimination to the lowest class in the system. For them, elimination is a fate worse than death. With echoes of Beckett, Schmitt states that “[t]he wheel of progress passes silently over the silent one”. Such a punitive measure enforces a simple idea: that in this world, even nothing must be reproduced in detail.

Schmitt sardonically expresses the oversaturated and falsely unifying nature of the Buribunks’ project: “[w]hat would all research be without the secret weaving of the spirit which transforms life-less details into a living organism and for the purpose of repeated comprehension elevates every act of perception to a process of re-membrance”. Schmitt creates textual ambiguity in his use of “organisator” in the original German, because it can be translated as: “[…] the secret weaving of the spirit which organises life-less details”. The study of scientific buribunkology forms the logical endgame for an academy obsessed with both organisation and transformation, which is inscribed through both quantitative and qualitative output. Schmitt remains sceptical of details that are rationalized, contextualized and historicized. He ironically scolds the inchoate and prototypical Leporello, who has “less of an urge to gather reliable research into details—nowhere does he trace the deeper connections of the specific conquest”. As a sign of intellectual progress in scientific buribunkology, “entries of an erotic, demonic, satirical, political and so on nature are grouped together (under the strictest observation of the copyright law pertaining to each entry)”. Life is sterile, relative to the mode of scientific inquiry that seeks to understand it. Memory, otherwise clipped and intangible, is solidified and certified on repeat. This predates Schmitt’s metaphor of the crusted mechanism, consisting of rules and norms that have grown torpid by repetition, which his exception seeks to overcome.

Endless lines, details, repetitions, conversations, and discussions: these constitute Schmitt’s critique of the state of anticipation, that which denies sovereignty and the political. Schmitt wishes to “trace the outlines of [the] sociological architecture” and provide an “[o]utline of a philosophy of the Buribunks”. The central claim in the Buribunks’ manifesto is: “thinking is nothing other than soundless speech; speaking nothing but scriptless writing; writing nothing but anticipated publishing and therefore publishing is identical with writing, with such minor differences that they may safely be disregarded” (2019: 100–10). The Buribunks write and publish simultaneously, and by doing so, they distort notions of time and of the body. Through their extreme efforts to anticipate, they merge their commodity with their labor. As Schmitt notes while in postwar detention, “[o]ur life acquires furrows and lines through our labors, through our productivity in work and profession” (2017: 46). In the biophysical imperative to transform themselves, the Buribunks face a process which makes it impossible to discern between I, the typewriter, and history. Historical reality denotes the past, the midwife the present, and the dark body the future. This use of language precipitates Schmitt’s full embrace of legal and political solutions to the problem of sovereignty. His satirically loose use of metaphor in “The Buribunks” illustrates his resistance to claims that a mere image could anticipate the exception. In Political Theology, he resorts to the crusted mechanism and the torpor of repetition for his dulled anticipatory symbolism. His use of metaphor concedes to aesthetic sensibilities within his theory of sovereignty. His cravings for the borderline produce a distorted silhouette, a phantasm of the immediate sovereign decision.

*

In “The Buribunks”, Schmitt renders what-is-to-come as the imperceptible abyss, in which “the future lies there as dull and indifferent as the keyboard of a typewriter, like a dark rat hole from which one second after another (like one rat after another) emerges into the light of the past”. This anticipates Beckett’s desolate and repeat pronouncements within “Ping”, the moments of history that are smothered by quantified one-second intervals. Schmitt writes that the Buribunks capture blinking rats, so as to record one second of clock time. By doing this, “the fearful anticipation of the future loses its horror”. Death is no longer a source of anxiety, because it is obsessively anticipated. The final judgement is a mere rat-second of neutral value, observed through complete and earnest clarity. Writing history as it writes them, the Buribunks extinguish the “illusion of singularity” and “deceive world history’s deceitfulness” (2019: 110–11). Immortality and posterity are achieved through outwitting history and establishing absolute facts, culminating in true ethics, founded in facticity. Schmitt laughs once more at the tendency to accumulate details in the state of anticipation, prefacing his mockery of the legal and political aim “to regulate the exception as precisely as possible […] to spell out in detail the case in which the law suspends itself” (2005: 13). For Schmitt, to spell out the sovereign decision is impossible and undesirable. The active cannot become the medial: in envisioning the exception, he sees only the borderline. Yet, the symbolic spaces that the borderline generates do not simply constitute pure political forms or systematic analogies but offer vast planes within which aesthetic sensibilities can be, and indeed are, articulated.

Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty attempts to preclude anticipation, and in doing so, it aims to establish a meaningful political identity, the essence of human life. Thus, Schmitt wishes to eliminate the lines and frictions of political liberalism. This craving is illustrated, somewhat innocuously, by his shifting attitude towards two of his contemporaries. After his early infatuation, leading to an effusive monograph, he ended his friendship with the poet Däubler. In his post-war diaries, Schmitt is instead drawn to the language, symbolism and companionship of Konrad Weiß. Only in retrospect did he understand the breakdown and the blossoming of these relationships. Akin to Hegel’s interpretation of the owl of Minerva, Schmitt states that “just as the grain of wood grows in a tree […] [this change] belongs to the lines of our life, which we can trace later but not foresee or determine in the midst of its development” (2017: 44). This evokes much that is central to his theory of sovereignty. In the moment of decision, the sovereign is made visible, but the immediate image does not precipitate knowledge and understanding, nor can it be anticipated beforehand. Instead, the capacity to judge through hindsight colours Schmitt’s method of political diagnosis, which sought to minimise the value and desirability of anticipation in politics, to render pointless and inhuman the lines of prediction that define political liberalism.

This political diagnosis has literary origins. To recall, Schmitt reads Melville’s Benito Cereno both as a noble tragedy of reminiscence and as a forlorn fable of human obligation. Following “the voiceless end” of his usurper Babo, Cereno, the erstwhile sovereign, reconciles himself with his own imminent demise. Delano, his rescuer, urges him to observe the unlimited possibilities of the future. He implores the captain to prepare for the sun to rise, for the sea and sky to turn blue, and for the leaves to turn over. The response is one of gloom, melancholy and debilitation. Why does Benito Cereno not seek solace in these accumulated details, in tracing the lines of his life, and in recognising the apparently perpetual truths of the natural world?

“Because they have no memory,” he dejectedly replied; “because they are not human” (1998: 158).

 

Joseph Owen is writing a doctoral thesis on Carl Schmitt, modernism and sovereignty at University of Southampton.

 

References

Adams, David (2003) Colonial Odysseys: Empire and Epic in the Modernist Novel. London: Cornell University Press.

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

— (2005) State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Balakrishnan, Gopal (2000) The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt. London: Verso.

Beckett, Samuel (1967) “Ping.” Encounter February 1967, 25–26.

Benton, Lauren (2009) A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400­–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bradley, Arthur, and Paul Fletcher (eds.) (2010) The Politics to Come: Power, Modernity and the Messianic. London: Continuum.

Bredekamp, Horst, Melissa Thorson Hause, Melissa and Jackson Bond (1999) “From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt, via Thomas Hobbes.” Critical Inquiry 25:2, 247–66.

de Bruyn, Erich C.H. (2014) “Beyond the Line, or a Political Geometry of Contemporary Art.” Grey Room 57, 24–49.

Conrad, Joseph (2008) ’Twixt Land and Sea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Derrida, Jacques (2009) The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

— (2011) The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 2, trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

— (2005) Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins. London: Verso.

Earle, Samuel (2019) “The terrifying rehabilitation of Nazi scholar Carl Schmitt.” New Statesman 10 April.

Faietti, Marzia, and Gerhard Wolf (eds.) (2016) The Power of Line: Linea III. Munich: Hirmer.

Kateb, George (2000) “Aestheticism and Morality: Their Cooperation and Hostility.” Political Theory 28:1, 5­–37.

Kennedy, Ellen (2004) Constitutional Failure: Carl Schmitt in Weimar. London: Duke University Press.

Kittler, Friedrich (1999) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Klee, Paul (1968) Pedagogical Sketchbook, trans. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. London: Faber & Faber.

Koselleck, Reinhart (2002) The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Mehring, Reinhard (2014) Carl Schmitt: A Biography, trans. Daniel Steuer. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Meierhenrich, Jens and Simons, Oliver (eds.) (2017) The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Melville, Herman (1998) Billy Budd & Other Stories. Ware: Wordsworth Classics.

Mouffe, Chantal (ed.) (1999) The Challenge of Carl Schmitt. London: Verso.

Owen, Joseph (2019) “Why journalists reviving Carl Schmitt are playing a precarious game.” Prospect 11 September 2019.

— (2020) “States of Emergency, Metaphors of Virus, and COVID-19.” Verso Books 31 March 2020.

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Santner, Eric L. (2006) On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. London: University of Chicago Press.

Schmitt, Carl (2019) “The Buribunks. An essay on the philosophy of history,” trans. Gert Reifarth and Laura Petersen. Griffith Law Review 28:2, 99–112.

— (2007) The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

— (2017) Ex Captivitate Salus: Experiences, 1945-47,eds. Andreas Kalyvas and Federico Finchelstein, trans. Matthew Hannah. Cambridge: Polity Press.

— (2003) The Nomos of the Earth: in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen. New York: Telos Press.

— (1991) Political Romanticism, trans. Guy Oakes. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

— (2005) Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

— (2008) Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Political Theology, trans. Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward. Cambridge: Polity Press.

— (2019) Three Untimely Pieces, trans. James L. Kelley. Norman, OK: Romanity Press.

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Wood, Michael (1981) “Comedy of Ignorance.” New York Review of Books April 30.

Defined as the “right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself” (1990: 136), Michel Foucault’s notion of sovereignty has acquired an exceptional degree of current salience. This is so especially in light of its possibly contrastive relation to the de-centralized force and discourse of “governmentality”[1], a neologism that Foucault developed in his later writings around the topic of bio-politics. Directly addressing the emergence of neoliberalism in advanced industrial societies in the post-War period, Foucault’s lectures on biopolitical governance suggest the breakage of contemporary modalities of organized violence from their precedents.[2] Defined, most broadly, as the “power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die”–and in apparent tension with the sovereign’s right to kill–the concept of biopolitics has found renewed significance for what many identify, today, as our own moment of late-liberalism. Two decades into the millennium, the current historical conjuncture does not break from the sovereign’s historical right to “things, time, bodies”, as much as enfold and accelerate that power into intensified forms of rationalized violence.  Modes of sociality associated with the neoliberal organization of markets remain entangled with twentieth-century formations of sovereign power. In the bid to optimize (re)productivity on an hitherto unprecedented scale, markets are underpinned by the sovereign “right to seizure” even as they extend this traditional prerogative of the twentieth-century state into facets of both organic life, as well as the elements of life’s geo-physical environment.

In what follows, we approach the hegemonic subject of neoliberal governance through its most constitutive fantasy–what we propose as the figure, and associated idioms, of “frictionless sovereignty”. The re-imagination of sovereignty as a domain of fluid mobility has enabled the neoliberal re-organization of state and economy across the global North and South–that is to say, across disparate if interlinked histories of the territorially bound nation-state that have long been associated with the period of post-War development and decolonization, respectively. Even further, for our purposes, frictionless sovereignty is no less than the noetic precondition for imagining the limits of human life in its relation to non-life, under current conditions of extractive capitalism. In the wake of successive crises in transnational financial markets over the past decade, the search for new sources of wealth-accumulation shifts capital investment strategically to the technologies of deep-earth/-ocean extraction. To follow Elizabeth Povinelli’s mode of periodization, at the conjuncture of our “late-liberalism,” the representation of bio-ontological differences, together with the associated truth-claims of such differences, come to light as the primary object of transnational markets and their management. As a rhetorical convocation of socio-political existence under regimes of neoliberal governance, the idioms, moods and contentions of frictionless sovereignty serve, altogether, to assemble the domain of “life” as at once different from its immersive geo-physical environment and as the infinitely extensible exercise of sovereign right over the markers, materialities and distribution of such difference.

Evoked in the image of the borderless exchange of finance, goods, information, or personnel, the idiomatics of an immaterial (“frictionless”) subjectivity are underpinned, today, by a mode of capitalism for which the organization of markets are increasingly tied to the management of orders of life and non-life. As such, our proposition of frictionless sovereignty serves to historicize the “globalist” parameters of neoliberal governance by situating these in the proliferation of bio-political differences across, under and above territorially bound formations of sovereignty. More significantly, frictionless sovereignty indexes the experience of the increasingly erodible nature of these very differentiations, insofar as the unbundled movement of sovereignty renders its own border-concepts increasingly frangible.

What particular exposition of the biopolitical is offered through our current imagination of the elemental aspects of the environment–a moment marked by the urgent if inchoate knowledge of “geontopower [understood as] a set of discourse, affects and tactics used … to maintain or shape the coming relationship of the distinction between Life and Nonlife?” (Povinelli, 4).[3] What topographies of accumulation and unevenness surface in that late formation of the globalist imaginary–the specifically liquid element of the human milieu that once comprised the limit-term of the border, the partition, the humanly habitable, by overwriting these spatial socio-political orders of sovereignty with semiotic blankness, the “sublime” quality of oceanic indifference? (Connery 1996: 290).[4] In increasingly immersive figures of the sea-level, deep-water, or borderless oceanic mobility, the liquid element of the environment returns, today, through its own frictive contradictions, as having been historically co-located with the concept and technologies of twentieth-century sovereign landedness. Contemporary figurations of the “sea-level” do, indeed, retain legibility as the register of the global and its correlate, the frictionless mobility of neoliberal subjectivity if only insofar as the globe, as total world-picture, still appears as an unaccomplished object of representation (Connery 2001). But what is more: as horizonal histories of the autological, future-directed subject of liberalism fail under the pressure of anthropogenic capital, the idiom of the “sea-level” encroaches, in its turn, upon territorially grounded imaginations of sovereignty from the previous century, exposing these to the increasingly erodible difference  between land and sea–and therefore, perhaps, to the constitutive incoherence of the fantasy of frictionless sovereignty.

Frictionless Sovereignty

Sovereignty operates as a political technology emergent from and reliant on a complex nexus of relations, including political, spatial, temporal, economic, strategic, legal, technological (in multiple sense) and imaginative. Cornelia Vismann notes that a spatial and topographical basis for legal order and control (e.g. nomos and sovereignty) as found in Schmitt “contains two competing orders, that spatial order and the plane, the physical and the cartographical, the concrete and the abstract” (Vismann, 62). Schmitt links sovereignty to the land, nomos to the earth and abandons the sea (mostly) as frictionless and lawless. “Without an underlying structure territory begins to resemble the sea” (Vismann, 63). Sovereignty, however, for some time now has had no proper place, no grounded and stable topos, which prompted Schmitt’s romantic reimagining of the nomos in its Westphalian twilight if not total nuclear eclipse, a reimagining that helps foster the noetic imaginary and figurations of frictionless imaginary. The conversion of space to territory to sphere of influence has colonial roots in maritime law and is aided by the delocalization of politics and the state without ties to the earth necessarily.

Yet the imaginary compelled by deterritorialization and teletechnological reach and influence also holds in its nostalgic grip the land, the state, the Volk. If the increasing centrality of the notion of biopower to critical theory signals a shift from the territorially-based prerogatives of the Westphalian nation-state toward systems in which populations are spatially dispersed yet also “incite[d] … monitor[ed] [and] optimiz[ed]”, this proposition has, in turn, re-consolidated Carl Schmitt’s concept of the Grossraum within re-evaluations of geopolitical space in our current conjuncture. The idea of the Grossraum–literally, “large space”–emerges, for Schmitt, as a dominant principle of geopolitical order in the Western hemisphere with President Monroe’s proclamation in 1823 that the Americas were to be extrapolated from the space of European colonization even as the US arrogated to itself the right to defend these territories: the Monroe Doctrine. In this regard, it is closer to contemporary concepts of region, which appear to imply divisions of the earth into transnational groupings based on geographical contiguity, trade relations and mutual security concerns. As with his writings during World War II, most of Schmitt’s post-war theorizaton, though couched in juridico-historical academic discursive register, essentially maps onto a justification of the expansionist geopolitical actions of the Reich. The Reich then is constituted as an updated Monroe Doctrine protecting the rights of German speakers and German descendants external to national borders. However, by framing the nomos of sovereignty in its totalized relation to land and territory, Schmitt leaves the sea as a site devoid of legal and governmental scrutiny. In spite of his formulation having been thoroughly outstripped by events of the two world wars after which he was writing, and in spite of the demands to consider life and non-life within geo-elemental frames of human limitations, the sea remains a site of sovereignty confusions, contestations, claims and legal complexities.

Broaching Schmitt in discussions of sovereignty in the present moment is an act taken with trepidation, but also with a certain necessity due to its enduring “common-sense” purchase in the public discursive sphere. The deeply problematic nature of Schmitt’s Teutonic mythologizing of land and sovereignty in The Nomos of the Earth, coupled with the full on militarization of the ocean in his “children’s book” Land and Sea, hold appeal in many neoliberal sectors and might well be less a bellwether of frictionless sovereignty than an integral element, or even symptom, of it. In the guise of “the intellectual fascist,” Schmitt’s ambiguous position and stature, as well as his own writings, speak to the deeply paradoxical nature of the political subject–sovereign and otherwise–resident in frictionless sovereignty, and perhaps never more so than in his mythopoeic evocations of the ocean as ungovernable space: as territory (in potentia) without land and abstract volume made fractally incarnate. The semiotics of the oceanic that Schmitt invokes and renders problematic is emblematic of his thought (as Third Reich juridical justifier and apologist) and indicative of the post-World War II/Cold War moment that rendered frangible what had been held to be geopolitically unbreakable. At the same time, the ocean as frictionless, uncontainable, uncontrollable and ultimately sublime in its mysterious power maps pertinently onto the emergent modality of capital in Schmitt’s post-World War II moment that has now become constitutive of our collective horizon, a horizon bereft of emergence. However, in an inverse of the nomos and the fenced-in containment of land-based territory, the sea is perhaps the most frictive ideational space within the imagination of frictionless sovereignty, as rendered legible by the works discussed below.

In what follows, we present an exposition of recent artistic works that plot an itinerary of multi-scalar sensing, visual and extractive technologies–what we have discussed elsewhere as the constitutive prosthesis of autonomia, or the capacity for personal, moral and political self-governance[5]–as it extends from the twentieth-century imaginary of a territorially bound sovereignty into the ostensibly fluid terrain of water/water-borne bodies and materialities. We discuss Yo-HA’s “The Plastic Raft of Lampedusa” (a work exploring the materiality and global provenance of rafts that bear refugees from Africa to Europe), Susan Schuppli’s “Nature Represents Itself” (a simulation of the Deepwater Horizon spill through legal and aesthetic lenses to propose the ecological site as a material witness capable of representing its own damaged condition), and Charles Lim’s “SEA STATE” (an examination of the hegemonic visibilities that surround “magically” contracted boundaries of island/sea, as constituted, especially, within the postcolonial imaginary of Singapore).

Operating across discourses of corporate, governmental and, indeed, artistic sovereignty in the epoch of anthropogenic capital, these works function by operationalizing sensory losses, material suppressions in the presentation of evidence, or explosive auditory pauses to offer specific knowledge-claims around incompletely charted historical and political configurations of sovereignty. As a corollary to this exposition, we also invite reflection, via a sequencing of these works along the status and formation of aesthetic subjectivities under contemporary logics of frictionless sovereignty. In our readings, we explore what evidentiary, corroborative, or historical truth claims these “geo-ontological” works offer in their interrogation of the status of life as an interrogation of the technologies that order life.

Border: YoHA’s “The Plastic Raft of Lampedusa”

YoHa, an artist group formed by Graham Harwood and Matsuko Yokokoji, created the 2016 work “The Plastic Raft of the Lampedusa,” which they claim is not about the moral outrages or panics of migration or a meditation on the sea as a site to experience the sublime, but rather about the materiality of the plastic boats that journey through the unfixed spaces of the Mediterranean Sea, in “the space between different state actors and administrative disciplines.”[6] To contextualize this work, we can turn to an early 19^th century work on oceanic mobility by Robert Fulton, in which he writes “The Liberty of the Sea will be the happiness of the Earth.” This is the optimistic, cheery epigraph to a volume published by Robert Fulton in 1810, with the equally optimistic and cheery title Torpedo Warfare and Submarine Explosions. Liberty and happiness, it seems, come at a price, and one invariably linked to munitions, money and power. Fulton essentially revolutionized the US navy and did so through providing a striated and complex verticality to the ocean. As noted, for Carl Schmitt, “the nomos of the earth” is literally of the earth, of the ground. All of this stands in contrast to the sea, which “knows no such apparent unity of space and law, of order and orientation” and upon which “firm lines cannot be engraved” (2006: 42). As a site imagined as being freed from the order and control granted terrestrial dwelling, the ocean, in an overly-simplified manner for Schmitt, is lawless, rife for piracy or industry and a space of both freedom and fear.

“The Plastic Raft of the Lampedusa” sails aesthetically and precariously between Fulton’s aquatic extension of the nomos, the control and law of the land, to the ocean, and Schmitt’s unfettered space bereft of law and regulation. This same precarious sailing, appropriately enough, is taken up by refugees attempting to cross the Mediterranean as a space simultaneously strategically and conveniently the most surveilled and untouched by sovereign nation-states as they position themselves in relation to maritime law, international laws and human rights accords. After the codification of the rights and responsibilities of nation-states in the 1982 Convention of the Law of the Sea, maritime jurisdiction and law resulted in what some call “unbundled sovereignty” in which terrestrial sovereign rights and regulations are delinked from maritime rules predicated on state extent and specific rules. This confusion and complexity works to strategic advantage for states and strategic disadvantage for refugees. The means by which jurisdictional and legal concepts map onto, or not, geomorphical formations provides nation-states the cover to dodge humanitarian obligations and rights for migrants on the sea whilst protecting national sovereignty. As the continental margin slopes away from shore and border waters down to the abyssal plane, territorial claims recede and the high seas become Mare Liberum, a kind of free zone where sovereignty has little or no purchase… or so it is occasionally imagined and interpreted. Because the high seas fall outside of state sovereignty, they are reserved for non-exploitable peaceful purpose (UNCLOS, Article 88), but with an important caveat. A ship flying its national flag must abide through international law with its own national laws and is bound to aid all vessels in need, as long as their own ship is not imperilled by this action. But where and how the extraterritorial application of state sovereignty is applied remains obscure and contentious. Thus, in spite of these obligations, Watch the Med claims that thousands die by policy, in which the sea is cast as frontier: policies that have turned the Mediterranean into “a liquid border” saturated with teletechnological sensors and surveillance equipment, along with a well-articulated military presence to enforce EU visa laws to keep refugee claims and, now increasingly, somewhat spurious “terrorist” groups from shore.[7] As such, state ships flying under a national flag can, and often do, seek to detain ships predicated on territorial waters rights while dodging their international obligations to aid imperilled vessels. Drowning refugee subjects on the high seas, or the Mare Liberum, are adrift in a deeply convoluted and divisive legal, ethical and political space of variable norms of judicial sovereignty and international law–a space not devoid of sovereign control but rather one of excess and overabundance of conflicting maritime, international, national and economic rules.

This is also where the plastic boats laden with African refugees find themselves precariously placed in spite, and occasionally because of, the ambiguities in refugee rights conventions. Once launched, these boats are “imperilled vessels”. The plastic boats, along with their separate four-stroke engines, operate between different state actors and administrative regimes: manufactured in China, shipped by container to the EU, registered as a product for sale in the EU and therefore meeting EU safety standards, shipped by container south and sold in North Africa to be overstuffed with humans for the illegal and very perilous transit to Europe. The boat exemplifies numerous frictionless qualities of state technics as it navigates its way around the globe while the many impossible points of legal entry and safe harbour for the migrants reveal the friction within frictionless sovereignty that allows the latter to imagine the world as operating only in its image. The CE/ISO standards are the legal and administrative lubricant to move between states and economic regimes with ease. They provide both apparent safety for the users of the product but against liability on the part of the manufacturers or vendors, no matter their catastrophic failure.

YoHA’s project examines how the boat goes from factory production in China to the North African coast and why it goes through the EU on the way to its point of purchase. What levels of governance must it blithely sail through without friction or pause to reach Africa before boomeranging back? The boat, YoHa claims, eventually sails on the placeless placeness of the sea–or on the untethered oceanic freed of nomos and in the gaps of certain kinds of sovereign control. It sails here to fuel imaginaries of flight from the economic and governmental margins. In the Mediterranean, site of sacrifices to the gods in antiquity, the migrants often are sacrificed to our wealth and privilege, to our presumed desirability that draws these souls to our empowered centres. There is a stark display of necropolitics as necrosovereignty, to rephrase Achille Mbembe. And YoHA wants to unpick the phenomenological, imaginary, political and aesthetic performances of this necropolitics through the materiality of the parts of an inflatable raft. (They ran workshops of raft assembly in Shanghai and Berlin.) The artistic project becomes a vehicle to examine those technics of the state and commerce that intend to reduce friction in the flow of goods but not necessarily in the flow of people traveling on those goods–technics that constitute humans in constructed and strategic gaps of sovereignty on the sea. What often get elided are the generative and productive dimensions of these technics and the nearly algorithmic nature of ISO regulations that constitute the human as always a mediated and technical object: a sacrifice to “the blue economy” and its globally divided bounty.[8] In this piece, the sublime blankness offered by some oceanic imaginaries, political and aesthetic, becomes clearly demarcated and delineated space shot through with friction on multiple scales of unevenness, rupture and partition. The indifference of the ocean is but a symptom of specific geopolitical lacunae and repression, a wound in the waters not easily bandaged up by the unbundled sovereignty of contradictory treaties and their inconsistent application.

Deepwater: Susan Schuppli’s “Nature Represents Itself”

Susan Schuppli’s “Nature Represents Itself” presents the British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon oil spill in its legal and aesthetic form to propose the ecological site as a material witness fully capable of representing its own damaged condition.[9] This auto-representation of environmental disaster posits a new medium unique to the components of the disaster; in many ways, it is a visual analogue to Reza Negarestani’s philosophical fiction, Cyclonopedia, which fabulated the non-human revenging force of petroleum. Using computer simulations to make visible the operation of hydrocarbon combinations as the molecules dispersed in seawater, Schuppli created a computer-generated video of the gulf’s surface as well as deep subsurface plumes. Her work incorporates the multiple visual channels of the event just listed. And when the oilrig collapsed into the murky depths of the water, its image-making capacities and modes of image-capture platforms began to multiply across various technical media and distribution platforms in an act of dispersion and proliferation at the visual/technical levels that mimicked the disastrous distribution of petroleum into the Gulf of Mexico. Schuppli notes that “our public gaze was suspended between two media geographies”: the murky underwater imagery of the gushing oil resisting all attempts to stop it and the Earth observation satellite imagery from datasets charting the spill’s swelling across the surface of the water: an auto-generated disaster film. The latter images were widely distributed through television platforms due to their spectacular qualities while the underwater video stream, as monotonous as it was propulsive, was relegated to less-visited online platforms.

But what else might we be watching in Schuppli’s piece, especially when the moving images work in dialogue with its soundtrack, which is constituted of readings from court documents of the legal cases taken on behalf of the ocean and its rights? The frictionless sovereignty of BP in its deep sea extractive practices versus any claims of sovereignty from the immediate aquatic environment penetrated by the extraction, as well as other areas affected by the spill? Human versus non-human sovereign claims? The court case brought by “the rights of nature” under the principle of universal jurisdiction in the courts in Quito, Ecuador 26 November 2016, in defense of the rights of the sea and understood as an integral part of nature, as the bestower of life and to which we have legal responsibility. The Ecuadorian constitution of 2008 recognizes nature as a subject of rights based on the principle of universal jurisdiction in relation to the biopolitics of life fundamental to sovereignty theory and humanity’s integral relation to each part of nature for its continued existence. The lawsuit filed against BP, as an international corporation endowed with specific subject rights and obligations in international law, argues that the sea, in its vastness and mysterious depths, holds “the secrets of existence” and is “the birthplace of life as we know it.”[10] The direct plaintiff is nature, the sea, and the indirect plaintiff is the future of humankind that is being robbed by rapacious exploitation of non-renewable resources, fossil fuels, and the destruction of those elements of nature necessary to sustain human existence. The horizon of nature and the horizon of humanity conjoin in the suit because they are not recognized by international systems of rights founded on “the colonial model of legal positivism” that recognizes international corporations as sovereign subjects endowed with rights and the future of humanity and nature hold no such recognition. The horizons of various sovereign subjects are at stake in the legal suit and its clash with international law, the friction of the Ecuadorean constitution with its rights for nature and the frictionless international agreements favouring extraction and exploitation.

The Gulf of Mexico was made an unintentional canvas of human intervention and failure, as seen in the many images of the disaster taken by NASA’s pertinently named Terra satellite. Before being finally capped on 15 July 2010, approximately 4.1 billion barrels of crude oil had been emptied into the Gulf. As the oilrig burned and spewed plumes of dense smoke into the air, the real-time visual stream was primarily of the surfaces, with rudimentary underwater images provided through murky online sources. The visual register on screen in Schuppli’s work is that of the accident, which is a recurring feature of that axis where visual culture and technological infrastructure and political decision-making meet. As Paul Virilio consistently reminds us, the invention of any technology is also the invention of its failure, of its accidents.[11] The technology in its operation and its failure provide equally fodder for imagination planning, speculation and aesthetic production. This also applies to the speculative side: not merely inventing technologies, but inventing their accidents around which technological systems can be laid out in large-scale systems. Virilio in fact posited that the history of technology could better be queried and understood through a Museum of Disasters than our usual technophilic celebratory institutions. If such a site were to be built, Schuppli’s work could take a proud place there as one example of the long term legacy of petroculture as itself a planetary-scaled invention and engine of an accident, of a “slow violence” (cp. Rob Nixon), around which modern culture takes place, from transport to industry, from lifestyle to the variety of materials that sustain our sense of the everyday.

The visualizing technologies that Schuppli appropriates and reconstructs in “Nature Represents Itself” belongs to the battery of tools, including satellites, used to render the globe as simultaneously three-dimensional and two-dimensional object of visual control: 3-dimensional globe (a bounded sphere visible at all times) and a 2-dimensional flattened world without horizon (due to the complete surveillance of the entire planet all at the same time) thus making the earth’s surface a continual flat plane. The mastery afforded by our visual capacity to so manipulate the entire earth further fuels the ease of crossing time and space inherent in frictionless sovereignty. The desire to so control the planet properly took off early in the 20^th century and reached its apotheosis in the exoskeletal ring of satellites tracking all movements on the planet. The accelerated use of aerial photography to replace non-machine generated cartography emerged simultaneously with increased air flight technology, cinematic camera technology and World War I, as Virilio has often examined. These “vision machines” are the precursors of those Schuppli deploys in her piece, but the World War I machines were used for aerial surveillance of the battlefield, generating millions of images for “the purpose of the systematic exploration of traces of the enemy in the landscape for the sole purpose of destroying the same” (Virilio 2010: 66). The blending of eye, motor and weapon propels every form it captures toward its ruin. The “instrumental collage” formed over minute-by-minute aerial documentation of the battlefield–its movements, logistics, structures and personnel–created a new synergetic process of purely instrumental application of the long distance, ubiquitous military gaze: an unblinking and intensifying vision of potential annihilation that leads to NASA satellite streaming the Deepwater Horizon ecological disaster in real-time. In both cases from the last century, the image generation and image capture constitute proleptic gestures of what will no longer exist.

Read alongside each other, the internal “story-lines” of Yoh-HA and Schuppli’s works elaborate the entanglement between the governance of mobility within critical gaps in maritime laws of sovereignty, the emergent truth-claims, through those gaps, of an oceanic “subjectivity” that is neither zoomorphic nor anthropological in its juridical assertion of the right to life, and the artistic invocation, via de-individuated logics of departure, disposal and return, of a second-class population, governed in its (racialized) difference, according to strategically displaced costs of mortal risk. In After Fukushima: An Equivalence of Catastrophes, Jean-Luc Nancy describes the mise-en-scène of contemporary governmentality in a comparable light–crucially, within the symbolic parameters of volatile sea-levels–as the disastrous event that is at once military, geopolitical, technological, environmental and racist.[12] By citing the frictionless “equivalency” of each of each of these facets of sovereign rule, Nancy also suggests an affective economy that underpins its disposition. Insofar as each happening is economized and substituted for the experience of another, frictionless sovereignty tends toward a technically extensible, temporally illimitable, and internally organized extinction of difference–the “eco-technical”, then, as a horizonal tendency toward homogenization where each disaster is rendered in the affective equivalence of another, thereby eliding massive geopolitical asymmetries in relative wealth and risk-sharing in the strategic administration of life.

In this regard, Yo-HA and Schuppli’s works might be viewed diagnostically, as interventions into the idea of a horizonal future that still persists–immunologically, as it were–within “zones of affluence” under the homogenizing sign of “civilization” (Davis and Turpin).  Both works deploy the trope of deep water to rescale an economy of affective disinvestment in the epoch of anthropogenic capital. As financial austerity, precarity, and the repeated containment of sequential crises occur, in the other vector of extractive capitalism, as the cascading effects/affects of the neoliberal management of citizenries, the possibility of the ungovernable accident is driven more deeply into the cultural imaginary. By suspending a singular conception of a horizonal future from the scenario of the accident, both works obliquely address the structure of such a de-historicised, properly catastrophic imaginary–one that begins to conceive of a return, via the fantasized loss of technological advantage, to the unmarked ground of terra nullius.

The primitivity of the desert-island, together with its privileged synecdoche, the figure of the shipwrecked survivor, has stood as an orienting fiction of the Western literary imagination. It recurs today against the crisis of term of “climate-change,” as the the fantasy of unprecedented forms-of-life that might flourish anew on earthly waste and large-scale engineering projects. In what follows, we suggest that this late romance of the autological, self-inspirited subject of techno-liberalism finds its articulation less in fin-de-siècle accounts of (“Western”) civilizational collapse and the anthropogenic event of species-extinction, than in the inflection of this same narrative by twentieth-century mythologies of postcolonial emergence, transformation and resilience–processes that materially reconstitute sovereign territory, as Goethe’s Faust, in an early account of Kulturtechnik, reclaimed land from the sea.[13]

Landed-Sea: Charles Lim’s “SEA STATE”

The vitalism of the island-state of Singapore is inseparable from the legacy of its post-Independent identification, which continues to position Singapore, at some distance from its regional neighbors, as a populous, open, multi-racial garden-city. Colloquially celebrated as “The Singapore Story”, this popular national narrative stresses the city-state’s painstaking accomplishment of a history of civic peace (especially in light of foundational ethno-religious or revolutionary violence in the constitution of neighbouring nation-states) and the associated rewards of financial stability. The equitable distribution of social protections and access to public infrastructure (particularly Singapore’s impressive public housing and transport systems) signifies not only an essential moment in the making of an affluent middle-class society out of a history of uneven colonial development, but also the historic legitimacy that has traditionally been accorded to the nation’s regime of single-party rule. The efficacy of these related claims to national sovereignty certainly derive from totemistic evocations of a national founding in the moment of decolonization (in the figure of Lee Kuan Yew and his increasingly contested legacies) and a successful politics of  multiculturalism (in the peaceable governing of a multi-sectarian identity through the official pluralism of four “races”). Yet the real force of this dominant national imaginary is subtended more fundamentally, and, indeed, compellingly, by Singapore’s claim to economic exceptionalism in the region inter alia its leadership of International Maritime Capitals; its positioning as a global innovator in ‘green’ or sustainable urban planning;  and its dominance of corporate debt markets in the ASEAN region through its governance of multinational infrastructural investments.

Elaborated over nearly fifteen years, Charles Lim’s multimodal project SEA STATE (2005 – ) is an expansive, unfolding, episodic chronicle of the Singapore Straits and Straits of Johor–the channels that separate the landmass of Singapore from Malaysia and Indonesia, respectively. Organized into “ten chapters”, the work is comprised of videos, photographs, found objects, audio-archives, nautical maps, and three-dimensional digital prints. Undertaken first with the curatorial collaboration of Mustafa Shabbir of the National Gallery at the inception of both the museum and the project in 2005, and through significant field and laboratory-based research, the work chronicles the littoral waters around Singapore through the allusive motif of the “sea-state”–the measure of volatility in a large body of water, which progresses upwards through a ten-point scale, to account for the force, height and intervals of waves. The scalar motif conjoins the multifaceted dimensions of this nearly authorless imagination of the island-nation to the work’s overarching conceptual ambition, in the effort to de-sublimate residual visual attachments to sea. Through gripping reversals between the thoroughly legislated spaces of Singapore’s littoral waters and the dynamic extension of the city’s land-mass over its shoreline, SEA STATE re-orders the distribution of visibility accorded historically by the island-state to the elements of land and sea–thus fully de-symbolizing the force of national history (and the idealizing periodicities associated with the “growth story” of a sovereign territory), while suggesting Singapore’s properly contemporary significance for the bio-physical politics of a late-liberal, “globalist” conjuncture. We introduce the work through this three-dimensional print of a detail of Singapore’s sea-bed (2017), which serves emblematically within its parameters to indicate SEA STATE’s prolific uses of the grid, the survey and the nautical chart. Together with an imputed genealogy of colonial navigation, these devices are used to introduce verticality into the field of visibility. Staged, here, among other things, is a reversible line of sight–an archaeological redirection of technologies of visualization and governance, or the technics of state sovereignty, toward evidence of their own deep presence in the sedimented matter of the print.

In material as well as ideational inversions between land and sea, this “inside-out” image confuses morphological distinctions, lending volume, instead, to the boundary-line between the elements. Conjoining the layered time of ancient, epochal formations on the sea-bed to the infrastructure of digital capitalism, the piece strips the sea of conventional semiotic descriptors, exposing, instead, a topography of de-nationalised, hyper-connected surfaces. The modulations of this terrain are shaped and underscored as much by the element of water and the deep-time of geology as through de-materialized flows of information–as striking as the bared and degradable surface of the sea-bed is the uncanny visibility, accorded from a precise height, to the lines of fibre-optic communication cables impressed into the sand. These submarine cables are immediately suggestive of fossilised traces, signs, perhaps, of the symbolic and affective infrastructure that lends coherence to the proposition of Singapore as a sovereign “sea-state”. But they are, in every instance, apparent to the viewer in and as their delicate materiality. Surfacing from a location of profound invisibility–as technology–these infrastructural connectivities are exposed to the viewer of SEA STATE less as the representational markers of national identity than as sheer material evidence of the deep historical presence of authority in the matter and contours of biological life in Singapore.

Positioned on the southern tip of the Malaysian peninsula, Singapore’s history of rapid planned urban development suggests how the geophysical boundaries between island and sea have been historically experienced–notwithstanding the twentieth-century narrative of dirigiste postcolonial development, the various iterations, installations and media of  SEA STATE capture the boundary-line between land and sea as a state of constant motion. Built up in the 1950s in the decade before Independence on drained and reclaimed swampland, 87% of the shoreline today is constructed of concrete. Lacking crude-deposits of its own, Singapore tranships half of the world’s annual supply of crude oil, and a fifth of the world’s containers. Emerging into global visibility as the world’s second busiest port, Singapore’s identity remains tied, nevertheless, to its landmass, as land-reclamation projects accelerate to accommodate rapid urban development on the island. In historical memory, Singapore recalls its origins as a colonial sea-port, and its reliance, almost exclusively, on the ocean for the traffic in international goods, labour, and credit; the scale of transformation in this maritime legacy might be indexed through Singapore’s massive investments in industrial bases on the land; these serve as both processing stations and  transit points, not so much for the finished commodities of globalization, as for the crude oil and by-products that go into and out of the commodity-chain. While Singapore’s story of post-Independent autonomy is typically narrated through the dearth of indigenous resources-based industries on the island, that narrative of postcolonial resilience is repurposed today, as an account of how Singapore flourished through the 2007/8 banking crisis to consolidate itself, globally, as the Asian future of advanced industrial economies.[14]

Singapore’s self-positioning as a vanguard within the capitalist-horizonal coordinates of advanced societies attach it, on the one side, to robust twentieth-century mythologies of postcolonial emergence, and on the other, to its visible ascendancy within global finance, as a  regional guarantor of multinational debt. In oblique allusions to state-protected enterprises involving oil refining, landfill engineering, waste processing, and requisite flows of wage-labor–the analogical underside, as it were, to Singapore’s networked life and claim to culture–SEA STATE exemplifies the infrastructural axiomatics of protean, flexible, or accommodatory forms of resilience acquired by contemporary finance capital.[15]

Between 2002 and 2008, the islet of Pulau Sajahat disappeared off the northeast coast of Singapore. The visible shoreline of the island, indeed, its full one-hectare land-mass, was consumed not by rising sea-levels; it was subsumed, by proclamation of the Maritime and Port Authority, to reclamation projects intended toward the strategic extension of Singapore’s territorial coastline. As Pauline Yao notes in her own, evocative commentary on Lim’s art of oceanic sovereignty, the Maritime and Port Authority staged a symbolic rehearsal of such geophysical disappearance by erasing the island, a second time, from nautical charts of Singapore’s territory. Lim’s exercise in the measuring of such disappearance is, therefore, studied in every sense, returning duration to processes of de-materialization. SEA STATE  2, sequenced through the title “As Evil Disappears and Safe Seas Appear”, is directed by an unsettling materialism that insists past Pulau Sajahat’s vanishing–and even further, beyond the geologically-grounded proposition of a deep-past of rock and ancient sediment–on the continued existence of the entity’s depth and surface area. First exhibited in 2012 at Future Perfect in Singapore, prints, videos, 3-D-printed objects, and maps index, across this vanishing point in Singapore’s geography, the factuality of an island that persists in inverted, even inexorcisable form as a properly unrepresentable, if entirely measurable presence; surrounded, now, by land instead of water.

Deriving its name from jahat, the Malay word for dark magic, or just elemental trickery, the missing island is recalled obliquely in its historic notoriety as a harbor for pirates (and therefore, perhaps, as an ironic allusion to pre-modern, de-centred modalities of social violence)–in a stunning lexical reversal, Lim stages the “techno-shamanistic” exorcism of darkness itself from Singapore’s urban imaginary. [16] By sequencing the island through the indices of a disembodied factuality–rather than through material traces of the entity itself–Lim secularizes, above all, the ritualized erasures involved on the part of the Singapore government in its bid to secure the nation’s economic hegemony in the region.[17] In mapping divisions of wealth and labour onto littoral boundaries–in Evil Island, the process is linked to technics of territorial mapping and negotiation–SEA STATE 2 continues to allude to the works’ photographic constellation of dredging ships–rather than pirate vessels–to document the social life of sand. From this distance, sand acquires visibility not as an elemental aspect of the archipelago’s shared geological or even ideological past, but as a basic component in the industrialised uses of concrete–sand, in other words, is at the foundations of Singapore’s built environment. In their unremarkable industrial forms and the de-populated patterns of their traffic, the photographed vessels suggest, innocuously, that exchanges in sand outstrip even the transfers of working populations between islands in the archipelago. (Thus, coastal terrains in the region might lose people not only because of migration out to the service-economy of Singapore, but because coastal communities literally lose the land.) These photographic micro-essays suggest that the city-state consumes sand to create the very land that now “drowns” the missing island; their own slow, machinic appearance suggests how these processes negate the historicity of built-space itself by suppressing visible relations between work and the use-values of the environment.[18]

In the video works of SEA STATE 6, which debuted at the Venice Biennale in 2015, Lim presents an exposition of the underground construction of the first phase of the 427-foot-deep Jurong Rock Caverns on Jurong Island (itself a reclamation project that artificially conjoins seven separate land-masses into a continuous underground formation). The still image above is from a 6-minute video-loop in which Indonesian and South-Asian workers lay the foundations for the cave. There is theatricality in the action, framed by mining-lamps, as well as a painterly elongation of light as the men carry Lim’s sailboat–rather than a cable–deep into the Leviathan-like interiority of the ocean, punctuating their run with echoing shouts of effort. As Lim exhibited this most recent elaboration of SEA STATE in Venice, the caves stood as the first underground rock-formation deployed exclusively for oil storage in Southeast Asia. The need for containing massive volumes of oil produces, paradoxically, a further self-regulating infrastructural economy that is, in turn, tied back to the financing and construction of land-reclamation. The scale of these exchanges, imputed in Lim’s work, to the sublime enormity of the Jurong Caves, suggests massive infrastructural swaps between unevenly positioned sovereign states–transfers of wealth, as it were, between the coast-line impoverished, territorially diminutive island of Singapore and the sand-rich borders of Cambodia or Indonesia. Scored by the bodily movements and exhalations of imported labour, the Jurong Caves rise against their fantastical, even mystical appearance, as a corroboration of the deep force of sovereign authority as it arcs through and over the fundaments of bio-physical existence. The loop elaborates the distinction between (racialized, internally divided) life and its environment as catastrophically degradable–or otherwise, as a boundary-line so immersively monetized as to transfigure, with Faustian ingenuity, any residual experiential insistence on their difference.

The specular exchange we suggest, above, between the citations from Lim’s SEA STATE 6 and the details from As Evil Disappears proposes the quality and infrastructure of a total landedness that, in effect, defines the sea under conditions of extractive capitalism. Even further, by de-subjectivizing any position (‘perspective’) on such a conjuncture, devices of visualization, measurement and the infrastructure of digital capitalism are re-directed anthropogenically toward a reflection on their own historicity–an unfolding  attestation to  their own imprint in the frictionless extension of sovereignty over the sea, and, in this way, a gesture toward the massive imbalances of scale implied in the relative values of the island-state’s aggressively compounded territorial coastline, and the geography of its regional neighbors. To the degree that such astounding geophysical asymmetries also imply the enmeshment of the island in economic and existential precarity, it is, in SEA STATE’s account, a relation of interdependency that remains phenomenologically invisible to the landed view-point. Capturing the Straits of Johor through unnerving impressions of bio-physical vulnerability, the staggered chapters of SEA STATE disclose the claims of the oceanic, constructing, in the process, an alternative genealogy to the hegemonic visibilities of national sovereignty.

In a tour de force account of contemporary artistic developments in Singapore over the last decade, Michael Fischer places Lim, at the outset of his detailed ethnography, as intimating an “ecological biophysical future, and thus, also a critical-anthropological” vision not reducible to the symbolics of postcolonial identity (Fischer, 4-5). We might extend that study, with and against the periodicities of conventional art-history, to propose that the spaces between Evil Island and the video-installations of SEA STATE 6 wrest the question of a global futurity–together with the catastrophic imagination of the accident–from the horizonal periodicities of the nation to lead chronology, together with its limit-term, the advent of the Anthropocene, into the sea. Captured with flattened affect as the “life-line” for land-based dwelling, the trope of the sea-level entangles the claim to frictionless development in scenes of unprecedented eco-technical destruction, even while returning specificity to the prospect of the industrial accident. In explosive auditory evidence of the shouts of laboring men, and across a compressed visual history of the construction of the perpetually ‘disappearing’ difference between land and sea, SEA STATE eschews the romance of Singapore’s maritime import as a post/colonial port city for a dispassionate materialism that places the island’s elemental presence in the world alongside technics of visualization, extraction and information. The sea, as assembled by Lim, is neither infinite potentiality nor the theater of tragic negation (say, for example, in the origin-myth of the South-East Asian nation in a precolonial sea-faring life-world erased from historical memory, first, by the agents of imperial dominance, and then again, perhaps, by the depredations of state-led modernization).[19] Instead, the sea emerges into renewed visibility only after its subjection to totalizing processes of socialization–as a rationalized body of knowledge, in other words, capable of advancing corroborative or evidential truth-claims about our contemporary conjuncture while inviting us to imagine a departure, altogether, from the postulates of frictionless sovereignty.

Chiasmus: Oceanic/Aesthetic Subjectivity

We discuss the artworks of YoHA, Susan Schuppli and Charles Lim as indices of the various gaps and fissures in the otherwise seamless visualization of the world of frictionless sovereignty, so often imagined in its most simplistic and default economic guise. The topoi of unevenness operative in the current structure of capitalism function despite and through the oceanic imaginary; a space impervious to lines of legislated division emerges, shot through with deep-water striations of power and contention, resistance and claim, Life and its ultimate event-horizon, extinction. In the exchanges between these three pieces, an alternative notion of regional contiguities through the sea emerges–not through the demarcation of conventional territories or the refolding of the work’s contention back to the representation of an originary “water-borne” identity, but through a dynamic, on-going nexus of circulation whose materials and movement are subject to different modalities of governmentality; and are constitutive of the particular “distributed” subjectivities evoked in each piece. Neither fully frictional nor frictionless but incessantly fictionalized, the distributed subjectivities of the sea surface their discrete, self-corroborating “stories” even as these tend, in the epoch of anthropogenic capital, toward an overarching account of the water’s universal disposition. Eloquently invoked in these three pieces, the technics through which prevailing regimes of bio-ontological difference are regulated, are, themselves, offered as an aesthetic value–the reflective means for thinking the ineluctable contradictions and willed lacunae of the frictionless. The same phantasmagorical formulations that subtend the oceanic imaginary to underscore and mould geopolitical, economic and eco-technical operations materially and immaterially, reconstitute the aesthetic subject immanently, as a critical agent.

 

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).

Tania Roy is Senior Lecturer and Chair of the Graduate Programme in English Literature at the National University of Singapore. She is the author of The Architects of Late Style in India: Aesthetic Form after the Twentieth-century Novel (Routledge, 2019), an examination of T.W. Adorno’ s aesthetics of lateness, with reference to mid- late twentieth century Indian modernism, and its contemporary artistic legacies. Her related interests, including numerous publications on contemporary visual art in post-liberalized India, with an emphasis on the memory work in its relation to civic violence, have appeared or are forthcoming in Political Culture, Theory Culture and Society, European Paradigms and Journal of Postcolonial Studies, and in several book chapters. She offers seminars in Critical Theory, especially the aesthetic of the Frankfurt School, postcolonial studies and world literature; and graduate topics on trauma studies and literature.

 

References

Bishop, Ryan (2018) “Felo de se: The Munus of Remote Sensing” boundary 2 45:4, pp. 41-63.

Connery, Christopher (1996) “The Oceanic Feeling and the Regional Imaginary”, in Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (eds) Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 284-311.

— (2001) “Ideologies of Land and Sea Alfred Thayer Mahan, Carl Schmitt, and the Shaping of Global Myth Elements” boundary 2. 28:2, 173-201.

Davis, Heather and Etienne Turpin (2015) Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among Aesthetics, Politics and Epistemologies. Open Humanities Press.

Fischer, Michael M. J. (2019) “Challenging Art as Cultural Systems for Cliff from the 21st Century: Light Shows, Shadow Plays, Pressure Points,” Geertz Memorial Lecture, Princeton University (ms.)

Foucault, Michel (1990) The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, Reissue edition. New York: Vintage.

— (2007) Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977-1978, trans. Graham Burchell. Basingstoke UK and NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1962) Faust, trans. Walter Kaufmann.  New York: Anchor Books.

Lau, Yanyi (2016) “Exclusive Interview with Charles Lim”, Artling, https://theartling.com/en/artzine/exclusive-interview-artist-charles-lim/ (website last accessed on 21/2/20).

Nancy, Jean-Luc (2014) After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes. trans. Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press.

Parikka, Jussi (2015) A Geology of Media. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Povinelli, Elizabeth (2005) “‘What’s Love Got to Do With It?’ The Race of Freedom and the Drag of Descent.” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Anthropology. 49: 2, pp. 173-181.

— (2016) Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Schmitt, Carl (2006) The Nomos of the Earth, trans. by G.L. Ulmen. New York: Telos Press.

Schuppli, Susan (2020) Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence. Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press.

Virilio, Paul (2009) Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e).

— (2010) The University of Disaster, trans. Julie Rose. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Vismann, Cornelia (2010) “Starting from Scratch: Concepts of Order in No Man’s Land,” in Bernd-Rudiger Hüppauf (ed) War, Violence and the Modern Condition. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Yao, Pauline J. (2015) “Close-up: Floating World”. Artforum 53:8.

 

[1] The term is introduced in the now widely disseminated lectures, Security, Territory, Population, given at the Collège de France between 1977 and 1978. In the following year, in a series of lectures published, somewhat misleadingly, as The Birth of Biopolitics,   appears to digress from the idea of biopower to examine German and Austrian post-War liberalism, together with the Chicago school, to advance and historically specify his account of governmentality within the paradigm of neoliberalism.

[2]While analysing the emergence of neoliberalism as a set of economic policies, Foucault framed neoliberalism (presciently, before the emergence of Thatcher and Reagan) not only in terms of a set of economic policies based on governance through monetarism, de-regulation, privatization and the securitization of borders, but also as a productive, subjectivizing power that marked, in the late twentieth-century, the emergence of a new paradigm in the governance of human beings. Where liberal modalities of governing optimize individual freedom, neoliberalism represented a mode of rationality that transformed the capacities of free-acting agents into the very technology through which individuals are governed, or otherwise, into a political strategy that produces the quality and capacities of agency, itself, into the tool of governable subjectivities.

[3] The concept of geontopower develops Povinelli’s earlier conceptualization of biopolitics, as it operated through the paradigm of multicultural recognition. Biopolitics subtends the order of “settler liberalism”, in other words, or an organization of society that distinguishes between future-oriented, self-inspiriting identities, the autological subject,  and those identified with genealogical origin–“indigenous” subjectivities, for example, that are imagined as delimited, through descent, by their communal obligations to the past (“What’s Love Got to Do with It?”). The provocation inherent to the term “settler liberalism” suggests that the “autonomous” subject of  liberal rights is comprehensible, currently, less as a citizen than as a “stakeholder” in the organizational logic of markets – a logic that at once affirms and de-legitimises difference for the purposes of extraction and accumulation through the assertion of ontological l differences between Life and Non-life (2016, 35).

[4] See Christopher L. Connery, “The Oceanic Feeling and the Regional Imaginary” for a discussion of the oceanic sublime.

[5] See Bishop (2018).

[6] See http://yoha.co.uk/node/1076 and https://transmediale.de/content/plastic-raft-of-lampedusa

[7] See http://watchthemed.net/index.php/page/index/1

[8] A related project by Thomas Keenan and Sohrab Mohebbi, with Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani, called “It is Obvious from the Map” charts the flows of migrant boats and how state actors use sea-based sensors to track them without having to offer humanitarian aid. Forensic Oceanography and Watch the Med offer explanations of rights at sea and attempt to use the same teletechnological sensory devices for exclusion to be converted into NGO oversight of national actions.

[9] See Schuppli (2020) for a fuller reading of the theoretical, ecological, legal and aesthetic frames within which her piece is placed.

[10] https://www.rainforest-rescue.org/news/3237/plaintiff-to-bp-for-nature-s-rights-in-ecuador-s-constitutional-court

[11] See, for example, Virilio’s Aesthetics of Disappearance and The University of Disaster.

[12] For Nancy, the prospect of the oceanic disaster actualizes the catastrophic logic indexed by Marx’s law of “general equivalence”: “This absorption [of values to the logic of substitution] implies a close connection between capitalism and technological development as we know it. More precisely, it is the connection of an equivalence and a limitless interchangeability of forces, products, agents or actors, meanings or values—since the value of any value is its equivalence. Catastrophes are not all of the same gravity, but they all connect with the totality of interdependences that make up general equivalence”. (5-6)

[13] In the less frequently read Second Act of Goethe’s Faust, the protagonist has transformed into a land developer intent on overcoming the boundary between land and sea through the mobilization of a massive labor force working day and night to realize his plans–the modernist drive for liberation undertaken with a Mephistophelian zeal (indeed aided by Mephistopheles himself). Faust’s plan to provide the proletariat a new kind of economic possibility through this development wishes to “open space for many millions/To live, not securely, but free for action” (lines 11563-4). The theoretical term Kulturtechnik originally applied to agrarian technics but has since migrated to other forms of human endeavors, from large-scale land development projects to literary studies and media studies. The Faust at the end of Goethe’s play can be recognized in numerous large-scale engineering projects of the present, including those addressed in the artworks discussed in this article.

[14] In a 2017 work entitled “Silent Clap of the Status Quo,” Lim constructs a video-archive of “Inspection-videos” of submarine tele-communication networks, suggesting how this “deep” archival information already striates the “phrase, ‘high seas’–a zone that is thought to be free from control of any individual nation or state [following’ Article 112 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.” The UNCLoS legislation  permits any state to lay cables on the bed of deep-sea waters – to paraphrase Lim’s presentation notes, this frictionless, extensible opening to sovereign claims upon the matter and value of the sea-bed is underpinned by a cultural depiction of “the sea [as] endless[ly] as unoccupiable.”

[15] The distribution of such imagined in/visibilities has strategic import: while the US, Japan and Europe appear to dominate the satellite communication industry, only 1 per cent of data transmission is accounted for through such infrastructure. Huawei, in 2019, completed a cable network from South America to Africa even as America continues to lobby stridently to block China from 5^th-generation wireless service infrastructure. We thank Mustafa Shabbir for alerting us to this detail, which stands, in the context of the essay, as another example of the exploitable–prolifically significant–fissures residing between legislative and cultural encodings of the sea-bed.

[16] Lim uses the word in an interview with Yunyi Lau, for Artling magazine in 2016, suggesting also the curatorial choices that have informed this processual work: in the context of curating the Singapore Pavilion and Lim’s SEA STATE 6 at the Venice Biennale Shabbir Hussain Mustafa borrows the phrase from the Thai curator Apinan Poshynanda to suggest, also, how, in economic guise, the claim to frictionless sovereignty produces fictions of infinite value from finite resources.

[17] Through the process of Lim’s documentation, the area of the sea that was subsumed to Singapore’s coastline remained under the legislation of the Maritime and Port Authority, to be subsequently erased from maritime maps once its entity was transferred to the Land Authority. The process of ‘transfer’ itself encodes the origins of Singapore as a post/colonial port-city into on-going loops of historical return, extension and transformation. In 1973, the Singapore state re-activated the colonial era law of Proclamation that originally enabled the (settler) state to possess land from its inhabitants, and which had been used historically for reclamation projects in the Straits. Proclamation–as both legal and rhetorical device–transfigures the phenomenological existence of both land sea to call up an account of the nation’s landed resilience in face of a resource poor environment–even while “radically desocial[izing]” the sea (Fischer, 8). The repurposed Foreshore Act enabled the post-Independent state to seize shorelines for the major land reclamations that today comprise the coastlines of the city (Fischer, 8).

[18] By the same token, the sea is exposed in its constant subjection to modalities of resocialization, which systematically remove coastal populations from what Lim terms, communal “bodies of knowledge”. Forms of domestic architecture of stilted long-houses on the water, related networks linking fishing routes to markets or the infrastructure of schools and roads, across to sailing techniques, design and crafting–these knowledge-forms exist in immanent, “practical interactions” with the sea, for Lim, especially in equatorial zones where the body is easily immersible in waters whose temperatures approximate “blood-heat” (conversation with the artist). Arguably, SEASTATE removes representation from these histories of habitability to document the resocialization of the sea since the proclamation of the Foreshore’s Act. The propulsive extension of Singapore’s sovereignty into surrounding water bodies is, in other words, a hegemonic mode of knowledge, advanced into both the ocean and its archipelagic contiguities with island-formations via the semiotic marks of legislation; visual technics of mapping; and the encoding of the modern state, in the grid and the survey, through the action of erasure.

[19] Instructive is the radical distance Lim’s work takes from modernist traditions of art-history associated with the “Nasuantara” paradigm, a regional model that emphasises oceanic histories of cultural traffic and therefore, attention to artistic traditions that imagine transnational ethnic solidarities (the 13^th century Old Javanese word is mobilized in its multiple geographical denotations, as signifying both “Indonesia” and “the Malay World”,  to inter-weave and relativize national art-histories).

First, galleries became accustomed to being places of sound, and then they became places full of the sound of voices. In the process, the traditional documentary “Voice of God” voice-over has species-hopped into the artworld. Much has been written about the acousmatic voice (a voice that one hears without seeing what causes it) and the power-relations it instates. We know that since at least about 500BC, the “underdetermination of the sonic source” in acousmatic listening has been understood to produce, in Brian Kane’s terms “auditory access to transcendental spheres […] a way of listening to essence, truth, profundity, ineffability or interiority” (Kane 2014: 9). In this essay I want to consider how the voiceover is used to usurp sensorial sovereignty in a single voice-driven art project that imagines, packages and promotes a distinctly 21^st-century model of sovereignty. I’m going to take as my case study Christopher Kulendran Thomas’ New Eelam project: a cloud-based housing subscription service promising a “more liquid form of citizenship beyond borders; citizenship by choice” (Kulendran Thomas 2017a: 108).[1] As advertising-as-art, it sells a dream of neoliberal sovereignty: a near-future in which “likeminded people” form cloud communities in unbounded geodesic space. However, the new economic model sustaining this hazy utopia is predicated upon a curiously homogenous (though mobile and globally distributed) demographic, and while it denounces the coup that precipitated the dissolution of the neo-Marxist autonomous state of Eelam and the annihilation of Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority, the project positions itself as irrecuperably post-political. A 2017 press release for the project states that the “authoritarian Sri Lankan president” carried out this act of genocide while “protected by a cloak of national sovereignty” (Kulendran Thomas 2017b). In its stead, Kulendran Thomas proposes a kind of deterritorialized hipster sovereignty premised on frictionless mobility and liquid citizenship.

New Eelam is a largescale multimedia project which, since 2016, has developed to comprise a website, “experience suites” (life-size models of domestic interiors, differently configured for each setting), and moving image works of various types which articulate and illustrate the concept. Individual iterations also incorporate a selection of prints, backlit tension fabrics, ceramics, furniture and sculptural works commissioned from other artists, as well as hydroponic planting systems, and assemblages drawn from Kulendran Thomas’s prior series, When Platitudes Become Form. Crucially, all of these components contrive to construct an elaborate (if distinctly minimalist) setting in which New Eelam promotional films and videos play and from which the New Eelam website can (e.g. via iPad) be easily accessed: a wrap-round, cross-media advertising “experience.”[2]

However, notwithstanding the complex and multifarious nature of this project-in-process, it is the voiceover and its non-sounding graphic ghost that do all of the work in New Eelam. The text we encounter either as evanescent voice or equally evanescent captions is what animates and gives purpose to all the rest of what would otherwise sum to no more than an unfolding series of unusually corporate-luxe IKEA show interiors. The films and videos—the former of which are composited from masses of found and (what looks like) stock footage, the latter of which can boast little more by way of an imagetrack than indifferently slick animations—derive all meaningful (if dubious) content from the project’s seductively voiced (if not always audible) self-description. My analysis will treat two components of the New Eelam project: the audible voiceover of the “speculative documentary” film, 60 Million Americans Can’t Be Wrong, and the inaudible nonvoice of the readable captions in the micro-video series, NE­_MV_01-08. What I’m going to argue is that New Eelam’s fantasy of sovereignty is channelled through the project’s undermining of sensorial sovereignty—via voices heard and unheard.

Liquid Citizenship and Nebulous Sovereignty

In 2009 in the wake of the destruction of Eelam, Sri Lankan President, Mahinda Rajapaska, announced: “We are a government who defeated terrorism at a time when others told us that it was not possible. The writ of the state now runs across every inch of our territory” (Parasam 2012: 903). The image Rajapaska invokes is of cartographically conceived space: what Eyal Weizman calls a “planar division of a territory” (Weizman 2002). In order to identify a site beyond this and every other “writ of […] state,” in his construction of New Eelam, Kulendran Thomas goes beyond Weizman’s verticality, Virilio’s oblique tri-dimensionality and Elden’s volumetric encompassing of “the earth; the air and the subsoil” (Elden 2013: 15). The territory of New Eelam is shaped by Supra-Euclidean dimensionality: the cloud is twice figured as “an entirely new dimension”, Google is saluted for its bravery in “operating in a completely different dimension”, and a reinvented Microsoft is recognized for having followed them into it (Kulendran Thomas 2017a: 102-107). Geographically dispersed, New Eelam understands its jurisdiction as, instead, generated by the “densely interconnected network” of like-minded individuals sharing “states of mind” in geodesic space (Kulendran Thomas 2019: 5). As to how this inter-psychic space relates to the more prosaic network of communally owned apartments all over the world’s most hipster-gentrified cities, this is less than fully articulated.

The terrain of New Eelam is conceived as in flux, “continually reshaping”, in process, in terra(less) formation within the cloud: “a distributed network rather than a territorially bounded nation” (Kulendran Thomas 2017a: 108-109). This makes it possible for the citizenship it offers to “transcend geography”, flowing beyond, past and through national boundaries in a victory of the politics of the vector over the politics of the envelope (2017a: 97; Wark 2004: 246). The exact process by which this is intended to occur remains nebulous. We hear that the locational lottery determining the “hereditary privilege” of nationality is to be replaced with a system of “citizenship by choice”: but how? In its initial form, New Eelam will be constituted immaterially, “with its idea liberated from its land” (Kulendran Thomas 2017a: 109). However, eventual condensation of this vaporous entity is imagined, with a moment anticipated when New Eelam’s “cloud formations could take physical shape at greater and greater scales and dimensions” (Kulendran Thomas 2017a: 114). Should examples be required, Tinder, Pokémon Go, Anonymous and the Arab Spring are offered as templates for how “cloud towns, cloud cities, and even cloud countries [could] materialise out of thin air” (Kulendran Thomas 2019: NE­_MV_06). As is evidenced by so many of the most perniciously fraught conflicts of recent decades, virgin territories can not usually be called into being on the basis of the whims, wishes or even most the urgent needs of would-be autonomous peoples. Perhaps the Vatican can provide a template: a deterritorialized sovereignty, summoned into being by the intersection of financial might and faith.

While it’s easy to envision a group of tech-utopians declaring their independence and so effecting a form of internal sovereignty, it’s quite a lot harder to imagine how or why any exchange of recognitions might be imagined between New Eelam and any of the incumbent powers from the “old World of Nations” out of which prospective New Eelamites are called to emigrate (Kulendran Thomas 2017a: 114). External sovereignty in the real world might prove as elusive as does elucidation. Extant power-relations between states and the technology companies whose tax bills they are so keen to waive make it possible to imagine a near future in which certain governments would nominally approve some form of novelty dual citizenship so that tech scions could swear part-allegiance to the cloud. It’s harder to envision the same governments ever handing over the land that would be required to host the population in its eventual physical incarnation—particularly if, as the closing statement to the film makes clear, the mission here is not one of “opposing incumbent systems by force” (Kulendran Thomas 2017a: 113). In this, as in much else, New Eelam’s future is already upon us. In The Stack, Benjamin Bratton poses the First Sino-Google War of 2009 as exemplary of “a geopolitical conflict between empires”: one that “pits a state that would dominate and determine the network sovereignty of information and energy flows versus a platform that would, by assembling users into another real network and imagined community, exceed, in deed if not letter, the last-instance sovereignty of the state and determine an alternate polity in its own image” (Bratton 2015: 112). The New Eelam project is a durational exercise in fantasizing about how such an alternate polity might function.

At the beginning of 60 Million Americans, the artist’s voiceover invites us to hark back to a halcyon “long ago” when “there was nothing more natural for the human species to explore new territories” (Kulendran Thomas 2017a: 97). Yet, even as “Our ancestors moved throughout the land, discovering new horizons and sharing what they had with each other” (Kulendran Thomas 2017a: 97), they also engaged in various more violently intrusively acts against those they encountered in the course of these bucolic adventures. Although there is no promise of violence, threats of mass exit abound: NE_MV_08 asks whether “every country will become a software country or risk losing its citizens” and NE_MV_07 asks “what will happen to nation states when everyone has the power to leave.” One wonders where, exactly, all of these exiles-elect will go.

Key to the legend of New Eelam is the framing of Google’s core business plan—“[making] its applications freely available in return for its users data and attention”—as “a new kind of social contract” (Kulendran Thomas 2017a: 105). However, notwithstanding the associations summoned by this term, it’s hard to equate the terms of the compact based “on the conveniences that could be provided by targeting the messaging that would be most interesting to each individual user at the place and time that it would be most relevant to them” (Kulendran Thomas 2017a: 105), with those conferred upon the contracting partners of, say, Hobbes or Rousseau. 60 Million Americans compares 21^st century democracy to the “crumbling monarchies” of 16/17^th-century Europe. But the only example offered for how this new cloud-state might operate comes by way of a reference to an experiment by the art collective, the Mycological Twist, who attempted to subvert the embedded social infrastructure of the survivalist videogame, Rust, by playing collaboratively rather than (as the game designers apparently expected) purely for individual gain. Gameplay, then, and a techno-utopian “design challenge […] to make the iPhone or Tesla of housing” (Bucknell 2019). We are apprised of no gameplan for how this new cloud-state will constitute or legislate itself beyond, perhaps, something akin to the flimsy agreements existing between users and providers on the likes of: Air BnB, Uber, Facebook etc.—a taking on faith that anyone sufficiently rightminded to subscribe or “partner” can be relied upon to behave ethically, civically or decently. But of course, as we’re already seeing, and as New Eelam surreptitiously acknowledges, it is very hard to prosecute misdemeanours committed by vaporously non-located global actants whose behavior is guaranteed only by the optimism of a bro-to-bro promise not to be evil.

The basis for New Eelam’s claims to the legitimacy of its sovereignty appears to derive in large part from the sheer size and might of the “really big companies” (Kulendran Thomas 2019: 03) it anticipates: the companies that, together, form a new ruling class whose “class power derives from ownership and control of the vector of information” (Wark 2019: 13). This is what McKenzie Wark has termed the “vectoralist class” (Wark 2019: 11). When one micro-video closes with the question—“so how will the biggest organizations of the future be governed?” (Kulendran Thomas 2019: 02)—we are cued to read it as rhetorical: the implication being that such “massively scalable organizations that are funded and built by the communities” (Kulendran Thomas 2019: 04) and enabled by blockchain technologies will simply be too big to govern. They will generate aporia that only they themselves can fill. As Bratton observes of Google, such platforms are both too big and too small for states to control (2015: 112). Immunity to subordination is guaranteed by their immunity from apprehension and, accordingly, accountability. In NE_MV_02, Vitalik Buterin’s Ethereum “community” is offered as an example of “more loosely defined ecosystem” of “fuzzy sets” that states “can’t target […] as easily as conventional companies”. The New Eelam line is that trust in these organizations will be generated by the confluence of anonymity, decentralization, ubiquity, collective ownership that derives from the fact that “in today’s informational economy where value is created through data, we are simultaneously the workers and the product that is sold to advertisers” (Kulendran Thomas 2019: 01). Or, in Wark’s terms, we are made subject to the vectoralist imperative “to be able to extract value not just from labor but from what Tiziana Terranova calls free labor” (2019: 115). New Eelam proposes that hugely powerful “decentralized autonomous organizations” will “command a deeper degree of trust than today’s big businesses because they will be owned and governed collectively by their users” (Kulendran Thomas 2019: 04). The promise it makes is that the intermediaries and intercessors of representative democracy will be rendered redundant by corporately-choreographed direct rule, but the nature of that rule remains up for grabs. The fact that the cryptologically blockchained programmable tokens in which these companies are held means they “can be owned by anyone” (Kulendran Thomas 2019: 04), also means they are open to manipulation by invisible forces other than the well-meaning, forward-thinking young professionals presumed to make up its putatively cooperative usership.

New Eelam spins itself as a collective united in “citizenship beyond national borders” and, in so doing, appears to hold out the promise of a whole new way for its subscribers to “feel part of something”. Its techno-optimist rhetoric is woolly with talk of cooperatives, belonging and Zuckerbergian “community”. But the more we prod at what is being promoted, the more it discloses itself as a means to be, instead, apart: not just from nationality, but (much more significantly) from society. Founded on the pursuit of self-actualization and unbounded autonomy this dream of corporate cooperative sovereignty is destined to develop as, instead, a metastasized nightmare of neoliberal hipster sovereignty of the individual. No legislation would protect against mega-corporations requiring an opt-in citizenship that ensures their membership will be formed of those least likely to need the kind of supports nation-states once guaranteed to the young, the sick, the old, the infirm. No rationale is offered for how or why these fuzzy corporate masses would ever make any decisions not immediately seen to be in their own interests. No explanation is provided for how this new “collective being” will deal with what Rousseau referred to as the “physical inequality as nature may have set up between men” (2003: 199-200) or, indeed, for the fluxing capacities of those physical beings across their lifetimes. No attempt is made to imply that there will be “no distinctions [drawn] between those of whom it is made up” (Rousseau 2003: 207). Nor is any plan made for when intrigues or factions arise, and “partial associations are formed at the expense of the great association”: inevitabilities of human interaction that were foreseeable in 1762 and remain grimly probable today (Rousseau 2003: 203). Instead, New Eelam seems to share with Facebook an intransigent faith in the moral rectitude of the mass, and its self-regulating destiny. In joining the cloud community, the New Eelamite undertakes no Rousseauian exchange, but only carries out a transaction. In subscribing to the scheme, no natural independence or strength must be offered up in exchange for the benefits to be conferred. Under the “luxury of communalism” that provides the infrastructure for a New Eelam life of constant globetrotting, there is no suggestion that one’s own property must be forfeited. Even bearing in mind half-hearted predictions about an eventual trickle-down effect, it’s a curious kind of communalism in which the powerful stand to retain their inherited advantages while paying to attain some new ones. At the end of 60 Million Americans, the voiceover asks: “if the way that housing works could be transformed through a new industrial revolution, what new social forms might this open up?” The likelihood is that instead of transforming social structures, this “new offshore economic system” will only accelerate and render more acute the extant situation (Kulendran Thomas 2019a: 111). As Wark puts it, however slow we have been to recognize this, “It is not the ideologies of humans that determines their social-technical existence, but their social-technical existence that determines their ideologies” (Wark 2019: 36). While New Eelam itself was only incorporated in 2016 and hasn’t (yet) taken over the world, the appeal of its fiction of techno-logically enabled autonomy is already familiar, already shaping everything about the delivery and practice of education, employment, social care.

This vision of sovereignty resonates curiously with that espoused in the more openly hard-right libertarian book of prophesy, The Sovereign Individual (1997), by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg. Marketed as a handbook to the near future, The Sovereign Individual anticipates the advent of the “genuine privatization of sovereignty” (Davidson & Rees-Mogg 1997: 321), made possible by the destruction of the nation state by “microprocessing” and a resultant “eclipse of politics” (Davidson & Rees-Mogg 1997: 15). Like Kulendran Thomas, they cite Alfred O. Hirschman as antecedent. And like him, they offer a vision of liquid movement (for some) in which “Ultimately, persons of substance will be able to travel without documents at all” (Davidson & Rees-Mogg 1997: 321) and massive cyber corporations will enjoy a revolutionary “transcendence of frontiers and territories” that puts them beyond government (Davidson & Rees-Mogg 1997: 23). In keeping with their respective times, Kulendran Thomas artfully avoids acknowledging the vast inequalities that his system will support, but Davidson and Rees-Mogg are unabashed in admitting—or, rather, celebrating—the fact that “this will be increasingly a ‘winners take all’ world” (Davidson & Rees-Mogg 1997: 300). They write of how “the Information Revolution will liberate individuals as never before”, leaving individuals “almost entirely free to invent their own work and realize the full benefits of their own productivity” (Davidson & Rees-Mogg 1997: 17-18), under a new employment system compared (amusingly) to opera. Not everyone can be the prima donna. So, while “[g]enius will be unleashed” (Davidson & Rees-Mogg 1997: 18), “the return for ordinary performance is bound to fall” (Davidson & Rees-Mogg 1997: 300). Even Davidson and Rees-Mogg’s (1997: 28) direly dystopian late-twentieth-century vision of a world in which “denationalized citizens will no longer be citizens as we know them, but customers”, couldn’t quite predict how the workers of the neoliberal 21^st century would come to be deprived of not alone their wages but also contract-guaranteed hours, workplaces, and the scantest security. Their forecasts of how HNW individuals “will no longer be obliged to live in a high-tax jurisdiction in order to earn high income” as “governments that attempt to charge too much as the price of domicile will merely drive away their best customers” (Davidson & Rees-Mogg 1997: 21) read like the withheld corporate documents, the secret memos that underpin and explain the nature of the New Eelam mission: for it is this—exemption from tax—that is surely being signalled but never explicitly advertised as one of the perks of New Eelamite liquid citizenship. The packaging is different but the core content here is strikingly similar. New Eelam sells an updated, redesigned version of individual sovereignty, cloaked by the more palatable, millennial-marketable apparel of the autophagic “sharing economy.”

New Eelam promises that, as a consequence of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, unfettered individuals freed by technology of the burdens of any form of social bond or responsibility will come to flow through the world unconstrained by borders, laws, taxes, or society itself. Beyond the established California Ideology of technology as “good in essence” (Wark 2019: 73), the transcendence of time and space is frequently celebrated as a victory for technology in terms that often carries curiously super-human/divine associations. Rees-Mogg and Davidson wrote of how the “most successful and ambitious […] truly Sovereign Individuals” would “compete and interact on terms that echo the relations among the gods in Greek myth”, carrying through this disturbing analogy to describe how, upon a cyberspace “Mount Olympus”, these divine beings will escape politics, transform the nature of governments, “[shrink] the realm of compulsion” (which we might otherwise term responsibility, and “[widen] the scope of private control over resources” (Davidson & Rees-Mogg 1997: 18-19). This celestial note will re-sound, when I come to discuss the mutation of the documentary Voice of God within the evolution of the New Eelam project.

Exit, Voice and Loyalty

The intentional community invoked by New Eelam is one of “entire cloud countries” based on “citizenship by choice rather than by hereditary privilege.” In 60 Million Americans Can’t Be Wrong, the voiceover energetically sets about legitimizing the viability of the choice to opt out of a society you deem to have gone astray: the replacement of democratic rule with consumer choice. It cites Albert O. Hirschman as evangelist of mass exit as solution and describes his 1970 book, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, as “quietly influential” among Silicon Valley Techno-libertarians. We hear that Hirschman: “looks at how customers, members of citizens tend to exercise their democratic voice—for example through complaints, suggestions, votes or protests—only when they believe an organization is open to change; whereas, if they realise that the system can’t be changed from within, they leave” (Kulendran Thomas 2017a: 101). However, as noted above, citizens of a nation state cannot usually simply turn up in a new country, revoke their prior citizenship and adopt a new one. In fact, Hirschman even admits this kink in his model, when he writes of how the exit option is very nearly unavailable “in such basic social organizations as the family, the state, or the church” (and, in economic terms, in “pure monopoly”) (Hirschman 1970: 33).

Later in the book, Hirschman admits of the friction produced when non-liquid citizens leave one country for another: acknowledging that “the emigrant makes a difficult decision and usually pays a high price in severing many strong affective ties” and referring to an additional payment “extracted as [the emigrant] is being initiated into a new environment and adjusting to it” (Hirschman 1970: 113). When New Eelam promises that with cloud citizenship, “the whole world could be home” (Kulendran Thomas 2017a: 114), it also promises the replication, in each global apartment, of an eidetic, neo-international style, Air BnB interior design aesthetic This promise of identical experiences “wherever you need to be” smoothes away the prospect of any adjustment process as “you” transition between cities. It erases that irritating degree of difference once considered the purpose of international travel. What it doesn’t have a design hack for is the more pressing, and ever more present rub of walls, borders, biometric passports, quotas, social insurance numbers and right-to-work visas.[3] 60 Million Americans conspicuously avoids mentioning any such sticky issues. But before the artist’s voice starts to bamboozle us, the film’s unvoiced prologue prefaces what follows with montaged media footage of migrants frantically attempting to cross walls and borders. Similarly, when the voiceover guides us through its condensed lesson on Hirschman’s concept of voice as “any attempt at all to change, rather than to escape from, an objectionable state of affairs”, it does so over montaged footage of tear-gassed riots, protests, Black Lives Matter marches: images featuring a high proportion of people of color. However, when the voiceover speaks of exit, the images we see of people leaving are homogenous and highly freighted: of white people packing up files and folders, walking out of office buildings with boxes—images familiar to us (whether associatively or actually) from the media coverage of the activities of banks in the crash. The bodies that exit are besuited, unmolested (except, perhaps, by paparazzi) and moving independently. These are the people that can leave, walk out unscathed. What Hirschman calls “the neatness of exit” is available only to certain subjects, certain bodies, certain sets of papers. And the film acknowledges that with one channel (onscreen), even as it denies it with another (the voiceover). From the outset, the voice is established as manipulative, dogmatic, stage-manager. We have been warned.

For Hirschman, voice equates to “any attempt at all to change, rather than to escape from, an objectionable state of affairs” (Hirschman 1970: 30). While voice operates here in its habitual metaphorical mode—as a figure for the expression of political feeling, as the “use” of one’s political “voice”—it is not entirely abstracted from the voice as sound, its sonorous potential. He writes of how, in an “age of protest”, “dissatisfied consumers (or members of an organization) [….] can ‘kick up a fuss’”, as a means to induce improvement. They might also make “individual or collective petition to the management directly in charge, through appeal to a higher authority with the intention of forcing a change in management, or through various types of actions and protests, including those that are meant to mobilize public opinion” (Hirschman 1970: 30). Perhaps some of what makes it possible for the “exit option” to take on such power is the diminution of the potency of the “voice” that was its counterpart. Where for Hirschman, it was broadly but tangibly conceived, in the rhetoric of 21^st century techno-power, voice has become impossibly, untenably elastic. Mark Zuckerberg’s highly contentious October 2019 oration on free speech at the University of Georgetown exemplifies the degree of its attenuation as metaphor. In a speech that argued the necessity of promulgating false political advertising as free speech, the Facebook CEO starts from the presumption that voice equates to having access to his social media platform. This is what makes it possible for him to claim that, as a result of the company’s efforts to connect the world, “a lot more people now have a voice” (Zuckerberg 2019). The broadcasting of one’s views, breakfast or holiday photos all constitute equivalent exercise of that voice; but we are also advised that “Voting is voice”—and, shortly after, that “political ads are an important part of voice”—even when they lie (Zuckerberg 2019). Although the speech makes numerous ill-judged (and justly ill-received) references to Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, and Zuckerberg makes a point of how the platform is used by activities and protestors, the overall effect is to neutralize voice by conflating actual political expression with the means for self-expression within an algorithmically-artefacted silo in which political reality can be manipulated (for the profit of tech companies) by malign agents to geo-politically significant ends.[4]

Using one’s voice need not be noisy. Mladen Dolar describes the operation of the necessarily scriptoral, and so silenced, electoral voice of the individual voter, marking their anonymous, secret X (Dolar 2006: 111-112). And somewhere, buried deep within even Hirschman’s notion of the vox populi is a remnant of the inner voice as moral arbiter: the inaudible, unignorable “materialisation of conscience” (Riley 2004: 67). This  “still small voice” which, as Denise Riley points out, was in its original Biblical manifestation an external divine voice that later came to be conceived as internal, integrated within the moral human psyche (2004: 67). Dolar writes of the “internal voice of a moral injunction, the voice which issues warnings, commands, admonishments, the voice which cannot be silenced if one has acted wrongly”, and tracks it from Socrates through Rousseau, Kant and Heidegger, to conclude that this internal voice is always marked an external at the interior, or the Other within the Self (Dolar 2006: 102). Hirschman’s voice that means “to make an attempt at changing the practices, policies, and outputs of the firm from which one buys or of the organization to which one belongs” (Hirschman 1970: 30), signifies engagement and activity as opposed to withdrawal, and noise as opposed to quietism— trying to improve the situation for the common good, rather than removing oneself. Thus externalized and exercised, vocality comes to sound like morality: an attempt at fixing the problem, rather than leaving it for others to deal with. Abandoning the electoral voice in favor of “the exit option” may mean jettisoning this moral voice, too.

No real attempt is made to suggest that the departure of New Eelam’s newly freed, sovereign liquid citizens is intended to bring about a major change-of-mind or policy in the nation-states they would presume to leave behind. Rather, the New Eelamite skips away, unconcerned for the future of a state they no longer recognize. For Hirschman, the “neatness of exit” is posed against “the messiness and heartbreak of voice” (Hirschman 1970: 107). The curious melding of the physiological and psychological in “heartbreak” illustrates his embodied, moral, engaged concept of “voice”. Making a fuss—protest, activism, complaint—is figured as both more emotionally strenuous and more corporeally invested than the apparently easier, tidier “exit option”. Of course, how one weighs such costs might depend on one’s vantage point. Hirschman takes as one of his examples of exit in action “the progressive settlement of the frontier” in the United States by disgruntled Europeans, and later by Americans moving from East to West (Hirschman 1970: 107). This image resonates with New Eelam’s colonially acquisitive and extensive drive to make it so “the whole world could be home” (Kulendran Thomas 2017a: 114). While Hirschman acknowledges the fact that the settler fantasy of American nationhood “provided everyone with a paradigm of problem-solving” by making it imaginable for Americans “to think about solving their problems through ‘physical flight’”, he extends little thought to the “heartbreak” experienced by the pre-existing populations of this un-empty vast country (Hirschman 1970: 107). However this might have been received in 1970, the seemingly uncritical re-presentation of these ideas in the 21^st century should give us pause, particularly when we hear it so flippantly framed in 60 Million Americans: “Where they actually built it wasn’t all that new to the native populations that they displaced. But for those that they had left behind back home, it was a bold experiment, in a different way of life” (Kulendran Thomas 2017a: 100). The ethical implications of the voice-V-exit dilemma acquire an additional charge when the choice is framed as that between “kicking up a fuss” at home and colonial expansion—and consequent population displacement—abroad.

While Hirschman’s vision is predicated on the expectation that migrant exiters would come to be citizen-subjects in their new homes, Kulendran Thomas has no such plan. There is no suggestion that this “new social contract” will entail any new (or, indeed, the maintenance of any vestigial) civic obligations or care responsibilities. The New Eelamites would also, presumably, be freed from the yokes of taxes, national insurance, social responsibility. Thus freed, the New Eelamites would not come together to constitute the geodesically cosy communities so vaguely but insistently implied in the advertising. Instead, in the absence of any other blueprint for a new society, each liquid citizen opts out in order to attain the status of monadic-nomadic: or sovereign citizen of the cloud. In light of the growth and politics of the sovereign citizenship movement in the US, the decision to model New Eelam’s aspirational atomization of society on an arty takeover of a survivalist videogame no longer looks arbitrary or accidental. Having outlined the form of its model sovereignty, I want to move now to consider how New Eelam articulates the dream of sovereignty it espouses, and how that dream is belied by the ways in which it is “voiced”, by the voice used to sell its mass exit strategy.

Liquid Voice

Bodiless, unbounded by the banality of being anchored within a visible mortal, the documentary “Voice of God” attempts to insinuate itself into our thinking as straight truth, spoken from the authorizing position that denies it is a position at all. It speaks as though from on high, from outside of, or on behalf of the text, from everywhere and nowhere at once. When the voice is thus preserved from identification with a single mortal being, as Carolyn Abbate (1989: 69) notes “power accrues to the utterance and not the person; words are also freer, something more than the speech of a human being”. The acousmatic voice is, as Brian Kane (2014: 213) puts it, “the voice of obedience and belief”. We hear this “spirit without a body” (Dolar 2006: 62), ineluctably, as “the voice of the master” (Kane: 213). And as Dolar (2006: 77) observes, the “acousmatic master […] is more of a master than his banal visible versions”. Pooja Rangan (2017: 283) writes of the various moves by which documentary film tried to cast off these troubling pretentions to the divine, the authoritative, expert who speaks for a (presumed or predestined to be) voiceless other. And yet, it seems that these lessons never passed into the artworld, where the Voice of God thunders on, unabated and unabashed, in installations, on speakers and over headphones. In art, as in film, the “voice that hides itself behind a veil” does so, Kane tells us, ‘in order to enjoy the power of omnipotence […] omniscience” and “omnipresence” (Kane: 213, 217). All of these omni-capacities (as various deities would confirm) are very helpful when you want to go about enthralling a public. They sum to a curiously charged arsenal for an artist-author to deploy in a work of art that takes the form of propaganda.

In the context of New Eelam’s status as elaborate advertising platform for a potential lifestyle subscription, Doane’s (1980: 42) assertion that the documentary voiceover “speaks without mediation to the audience, by-passing the ‘characters’ and establishing a complicity between itself and the spectator” is particularly interesting. The tone of the voiceover in 60 Million Americans is pitched to cultivate just such a complicity, cueing its audience (just as advertisers do) with chummy implications of the hearer’s pre-existing inculcation with the attitudes and beliefs that would propel them to subscribe. Its “‘voice on high’ […] which speaks from a position of superior knowledge” (Silverman 1988: 48) seems to address its listeners as at least potential (if not already fully subscribed) acolytes, sure to align themselves with its message, just as soon as they come into possession of this same superior knowledge. As Doane, Silverman and Bonitzer variously remind us, the voiceover’s unlocalizable, disembodied position puts it both outside of time and space and beyond criticism. Acousmaticity stems critique. Without an identifiable speaker to address, it is difficult to produce an adequate rebuttal. This inaccessibility to judgement takes on a new significance in the context of a project that is already resisting interpretation as to its politics, its apparently blank earnestness.

60 Million Americans, the film that constitutes the core of the New Eelam project, is pitched as a “speculative documentary”. A single voiceover voiced by Christopher Kulendran Thomas himself overspeaks its whole, maintaining throughout a vocal style that could be characterized as breezy, bright, public academic. Youthful, anonymous, confidently leading its auditors across yet-unnavigated future, territories, the voice we hear is the sort of voice that explains the indispensability of an app you never knew you needed, and the obsolescence of everything upon which you have heretofore relied. Its solicitous tone—hollow with optimism—is that of the millennial entrepreneur offering not stock, product or service, but “an opportunity” to join the team. It is the voice of the TED-talk That Will Absolutely Blow Your Mind—except, crucially, like the traditional documentary voiceover, it is acousmatic: a voice shorn clear of its speaker. The artist’s vocal performance is smooth, but not machinic. Emphasis is applied where needed, in a manner that is at once subtly expressive (for which: read authentic) and controlled. The recording abjures all of the disfluencies and preparatory sounds that mark oral performances. The mouth’s wetness, the pneumatic system’s breathiness, the muscular exertions of vocalizing, leave no trace on this text. Nor does the artist’s body ever appear onscreen. Indeed, while the credit line for this film includes five separate entries, and cites the contributions of nine individuals, no reference is made to the voiceover or the (presumably laborious) process of its voicing (recording, editing, production)—mindful, perhaps, of Dolar’s warnings (and, before him, those of the Wizard of Oz) as to how discousmatization would cause the banalization of the once “omnipotent, charismatic character”, the crumbling of the voice’s aura, the loss of its fascination and power and (inevitably) “something like castrating effects” (Dolar 2006: 67). This voice is not just disembodied; it denies it ever had anything to do with the “someone in flesh and bone [to borrow Cavarero’s phrase] who emits it” (Cavarero 2005: 4).

The classical disembodied voiceover always arrives to its listener from “a place which is absolutely other. […] Absolutely other and absolutely indeterminable. In this sense, transcendent” (Silverman 1988: 164). Conversely, when the voice in cinema speaks from out of a body, then that body is “anchored in a given space” through the evocation of the voice’s emplaced interaction with its location. All that could “spatialize the voice, […] localize it, give it depth and thus lend to the characters the consistency of the real” (Doane 1980: 36)—reverberation, room tone, sound perspective, etc.—is suppressed in Kulendran Thomas’s voiceover. The recording discloses a contrived paucity of both the “territory sounds” that might root our invisible speaker in an audible environment, and what Chion calls “materializing sound indices”: those markers of the concrete materiality of sound production whose absence we register as purity, ethereality, abstraction (Chion 1994: 114). The quality of sound-recording on 60 Million Americans is clean, almost impossibly so: antiseptic in its eschewal of all diegetic traces of the world beyond the text: no discernible elements of auditory setting. However hard we listen, we learn nothing about the space in which it was recorded. Kaja Silverman (1988: 49) diagnoses the process by which the voice that, in the acousmatic situation, attains transcendence, “loses power and authority with every corporeal encroachment, from a regional accent or idiosyncratic ‘grain’ to definitive localization in the image”. No risk of any such diminution of power and authority threatens this voice without a name, without a point-of-view and without an indexically-invoked “existent in flesh and bone […] a throat, a particular body” (Cavarero 2005: 177). As in a TED- talk, the delivery of information is structured and paced so as to be maximally digestible, maximally intelligible. When information is this easy to come by, the means by which we acquire it are almost impossible to keep in view. This, then, is the liquid voice, that spills smoothly across borders, possessed as it is of no grain, nothing to stick, or be noticed. Voice as very concertedly vanishing mediator. From out of nowhere, the liquid voice flows clear, almost imperceptibly, intangibly, immaterially into the open channels of our ears. It does all it can to effect frictionless transmission. To slip down easy. And to do so, it takes two distinct and yet interdependent forms.

The figure of the ear as the body perceiving organ of least resistance is well rehearsed in the literature on sound and listening. As Brandon Labelle acknowledges, “to give one’s ear […] is to give the body over, for a distribution of agency” (Labelle 2014: x). “The power of the voice [says Dolar] stems from the fact that it is so hard to keep at bay—it hits us from the inside” (Dolar 2006: 78). This anxiety about how what we hear gets inside us, this penetration of the body by the voice of an another, has seeded innumerable metaphors, the most frequently invoked among them being, of course, that of the ear’s tragic lidlessness.[5] Connor sends us back to the derivation of “obedience” from the Latin “audire”, observing that “if a god or tyrant wants to ensure unquestioning obedience, he had better make sure that he never discloses himself to the sight of his people, but manifests himself and his commands through the ear” (Connor 2000: 23). François Bonnet invokes Bernard de Clairvaux’s fantastically circular commentary on a sermon from the Song of Songs, in which the ear is elevated as that which “catches the truth, as truth comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes by the word of God, and the word of God is truth” (Bonnet 2016: 29). There is, presumably, no rightful sensorial sovereignty of the hearer before its God, but when the word of another invades aurally, can we presume to be able to shut it out? Although de Clairvaux constructs his ear in opposition to an easily deceivable eye, to be open to the word of God is also to be susceptible, surely, to other material that co-opts this channel. All of this makes the voice an infamously effective medium for propaganda.

As Dolar observes, “all phenomena of totalitarianism tend to hinge overbearingly on the voice, which in a quid pro quo tends to replace the authority of the letter, or put its validity into question”, supplanting the law (Dolar 2006: 113). Pointing us to Carl Schmitt’s declarations as to the “immediate and most intense” positive law manifested in the Führer’s oral guidelines, Dolar argues that the voice “is structurally in the same position as sovereignty, which means that it can suspend the validity of the law and inaugurate the state of emergency”. It “stands at the point of exception which threatens to become the rule” (Dolar 2006: 118-120). In Dolar’s warnings about how “the moment this voice is taken as something positive and compelling on its own, we enter the realm where obnoxious consequences are quick to follow” (Dolar 2006: 120), we might recognize a strangely doubled inversion of Cavarero’s belief in the power of the relational and specific voice-qua-voice, esteemed even before it says anything. Cavarero’s always already in-convocation political voice does not speak alone, or in a vacuum. It channels its particularity, its Arendtian political potentiality (and, accordingly, its humanity) materially. It is the furthest thing from the appallingly singular, dematerialized Voice of God. For Cavarero, “the speech that is politics explicitly stands in opposition to the universal abstractions of the semantic and its disciplining valence; this speech emphasizes the corporeal roots of the very practice of speaking, along with the embodied existence as she is communicated in speech” (Cavarero 2005: 206). It seems apt, then, that the voice in which Kulendran Thomas’s postpolitical project revives, transmits and reorients Hirschman’s proposition is itself so minimally material and, as the project evolves, ever less sonorous.

While Hitler’s words derived their motive force from the “limitless and unbound” (Dolar 2006: 113) voice-as-missile that always directs us back to the furiously gesticulating, spitting, screaming body on stage, “the Stalinist ruler”, Dolar writes, “endeavors to efface himself and his voice” (Dolar 2006: 118-119). But Dolar then goes on to argue that while the Stalinist weak voice was “a mere appendage to the letter, yet this staging, in order to exhibit the letter as all the more objective, independent of the subjectivity of its executor—this reduction was the source of the Stalinist’s power” (Dolar 2006: 119). It was, he claims, as a result of the very tininess of the self-effacing Stalinist voice that this “hidden appendage” (Dolar 2006: 119) could decide the validity of the letter, which is to say the law. I want to turn now to think about how New Eelam further dematerializes voice beyond acousmaticity to deliver its post-political extirpation of voice as option. In the last part of this essay, I will consider the effect of the friction-defraying suspension of sonority enacted when New Eelam moves from audible voice to ephemerally visible nonvoice.

Mutation: From Voice to Nonvoice

Micro-videos are ultra-short moving image pieces pervasive across social media platforms: popular, appositely, with advertisers and propagandaists alike. As they play, they tend to display short segments of text (a clause, a very short sentence), sequentially, and at a comfortable reading speed. Or, indeed, at the speed of a speaker on a mission to persuade. They do so, crucially, without overtly disrupting the reader-viewer’s experience. Where pop-up advertising interjected loudly into our browsing, these captions permeate an unbroken browsing experience, unobtrusively. Across illimitably scrollable screens, undifferentiated, apparently sourceless evanescent liquid voices speak to us transcendentally, silently, without friction. “Truth” appears: transient, traceless, in flow, in flight, and evaporating even as you read. The micro-video’s suppression of sonorous voice, and its replacement with flowing text, derived from the need for such videos to be embedded within a feed without eroding the goodwill of users by loudly advertising the distracted viewer’s online practices to their workplaces. Text was initially a sort of surreptitious supplement to the voice. Latterly, “content-providers” appear to have jettisoned sound in favour of fleeting text alone.

At New Eelam: Spike Island in 2019, the exhibition formation established in earlier iterations—which typically enshrine a large screen showing 60 Million Americans Can’t Be Wrong at the heart of an experience-suite—was accompanied by the installation, in a sort of vestibular exo-chamber wrapping round the main gallery of eight new works: a series of “micro-videos”, titled NE_MV_01-08 (2019). The exhibition architecture and layout ensure that the viewer will encounter these after having first processed through the temple-like environment of the experience-suite, through which Kulendran Thomas’s voiceover pervades.

The snack-sized works (running from 56-107 seconds in length) that are so displayed assemble a readily digestible case for why the tenor of our times might compel New Eelamites to manifest their sovereign citizenship. Their mission is to characterize the 21^st century in terms of a series of exception-al transformations: something like what Klaus Schwab, prophet of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, calls “megatrends” (Schwab 2016). New Eelam supplies eight broadly conceived reasons why normal nation-state citizenship should be suspended. Approaching the eight micro-videos in sequence these are: the fourth industrial revolution; the proliferation of organizations run as fuzzy sets; the claim that distributed ledger technologies are outperforming the profit-generating of targeted advertising; the contention that blockchain technologies enable co-operative corporate ownership and governance; the reorientation of social groupings towards geodesic, rather than geographic networks; the condensation of the cloud—in physical form; a putative new ease of movement; and the global power of software.

The micro-video form was born out of advertising’s desire to better infiltrate and indoctrinate, without generating any friction for the passive scrollers who must not be irritated out of breaking—even momentarily—their connection to the ‘feed’ that drips them billable ads. In 2016, the New York Times reported Mark Zuckerberg’s prophesy of an audio-visual future: “where video is first, with video at the heart of all of our apps and services” (Isaac 2016). Video is where the social and the commercial sides of Facebook’s inextricably entangled “offering” coalesce: preferred medium for “sharing” footage of first steps and promotions on no-sag yoga pants alike. Micro-video is the material Moebius strip of the interaction between the two ends of the Facebook business model, and not without reason. For, as Mike Isaac puts it in the same article, “The more acclimated users are to seeing video content on Facebook, the thinking goes, the less disruptive it will be for people to view video ads alongside them” (Isaac 2016). It is the apparent lack of any discernible edge marking where the “social” stops and the “commercial” begins that gives the functionally split but aesthetically unified micro-video its potently smooth form.

At New Eelam: Bristol, the micro-videos were presented on eight perfectly square (1:1) screens: mimetically recalling the square and vertical video  [>1:1] formats that have in recent years colonized the majority of social media channels (including TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Periscope). The vertical/square aspect ratio revolution came about because these formats reduce the need for scrolling viewers to reorient phones or heads in order to take in the whole of the frame. They sand away the rough edges that might otherwise cause friction between infinite units of media content as they rub up against and flow into each other. By minimizing visual snagging, they ensure smooth and uninterrupted “feed” of visually congruent “content” to the user-viewer-customer-data provider (Facebook for Business 2016). In scrolling, the user takes in commercial and social content in an unbroken flow, the space between two blinks. What makes this possible is the presumption of autoplay, which Facebook introduced as “an easier way to watch videos on Facebook” in 2013 (Mayes 2013).

In February 2016, Facebook introduced an auto-captioning tool for advertisers.[6] So when, in May 2018, Google Chrome announced a new Autoplay Policy, enabling autoplay only where “The content is muted, or does include any audio (video only),”[7] advertisers knew what to do. As a result,  we have entered a new age of the intertitle—or something very like it. But whereas the intertitles of the early 20^th century were interspersed (respectfully) between image frames, in the era of Steyerl’s “poor image” (Steyerl 2009) no one is too worried about overlaying text over disposable image, making this standard practice both for digital marketers and, accordingly, setting the terms for the New Eelam micro-videos. While it would be nice to think the intertitle’s second coming was prompted by a desire to enhance access for Deaf/deaf consumers, captioning increases billable view time and makes it easier to tag videos with searchable SEO metadata. Tracking the conversations about this development, it’s clear that advertisers first panicked about the muting of the voiceovers that had served them so long and so profitably. However, they quickly realised that the transposition of voice into moving text had the capacity to free the content being conveyed from the last, peskily specific, mortal and subjective remnants of grain or materiality that even the acousmatic voice could never quite cast off. The digital marketing blogosphere is abuzz with dramatic claims about increased brand recognition, advert recall, message association,[8] intended to soothe advertisers panicked by reporting on the proportion of these videos that are being watched on mute.[9] Now, columns designed to help advertisers “[Make] Video Ads That Work on Facebook’s Silent Screen” abound.[10] In a strange transfiguring of video’s audio-visual functioning, the burden of information transfer has shifted from the advertising voiceover to the caption stream, and sound has receded to become a nice but nonessential optional extra. This is exactly what we see in NE_MV_01-08: short, captioned, square videos with negligibly significant sound provided on the single-user headphone set that connects to each separate screen.

Sensorial Sovereignty

The music piped into each set of headphones is an unremarkably bland sort of ambient techno: a sonic signalling of nothing more than the era of its manufacture and the technology involved. Its function is much less musical than it is structural. The presence of the headphones produces a viewing regime that is necessarily “singular and solitary” (Young 2016: 10). They lock us into place, and into separate “pods” at each of eight viewing stations, from which we are addressed by the nonvoice of each micro-video. Precisely because gallery audiences have become so accustomed to significant semantic content being delivered via headphones, hearing viewers will almost automatically apply them. They cue us to listen, to tune in, if only to an inner reading voice. Thus installed as reader-viewers, we are clamped by the ear—not in any sonically meaningful way, as we might otherwise have been by a voiceover—but physically: leashed by the short cable running between each screen and its own (though interchangeable) set of headphones. Much as white noise works to screen from distraction, the audio tracks by Dan Bodan and Tony Quiroga block out the sounds of the gallery that might otherwise distract us from attending entirely to what is playing out, in evanescent text, on the screen. A fully smooth and enclosing experience is ensured. Via a mix of real and spectral sensory inputs, the intermittently captive audience is liberated from collective hearing into individual viewing, and made newly permeable to the liquid, legible flow.

Brian Kane (2014: 222) has persuasively demonstrated the overlooking of “technè” in Mladen Dolar’s influential account of the acousmatic. Pettman describes the mutation of the acousmatic voice in the digital age as a two-stage process, comprising first, “the umbilical break from the image” and secondly, the dematerialization of the voice “to a second degree, so that even its medium of capture is no longer graspable […] its portability, its mutability, its absolute liberation from the image, and its saturating ubiquity” (Pettman 2017: 41). I want to suggest that the transition we are witnessing from voice to fluid, fluent text—in New Eelam, as in its advertising context, and more widely—represents the next phase in this process as Cavarero’s (2005: 1) “sonorous materiality” is sloughed off and the voice comes to operate in this still more dematerialized way. The minimally material acousmatic voice is replaced by the fully frictionless immateriality of the textual nonvoice that has no sonic presence and is only ever briefly, partially visible: gone before it can be subjected to scrutiny. In becoming nonvoiced, the micro-video text acquires elements of both Labelle’s (2014: 87-89) unvoice that is inner, preparatory, and Norie Neumark’s (2017: 125) that plays performatively between presence and absence. In the micro-videos, New Eelam’s liquid voice evolves into a liquid nonvoice. In the process, it attains the character of a sort of hyper-acousmatic. I want to propose that the textual nonvoice we’re seeing in the gallery can be identified as a further evolution in a progressive dematerialization of vocality: a second-order mutation along a line that could be mapped from synchronized voice to voiceoff, to voiceover, now to be extended through into the nonvoice’s final, full abstraction as temporally apprehended text.

In documentary, as Pooja Rangan observes, the “voice of god” is attributed “to the body of the film text itself” (2017: 284). In 1980, Mary Ann Doane (Doane 1980: 46) was already warning of the bad faith principles underlying efforts to correct the documentary voiceover’s tendencies towards authority and aggressivity, observing that, by doing away with the central narrator, new documentary formats promoted “the illusion that reality speaks and is not spoken, that the film is not a constructed discourse”. When the overtly authoritative Voice of God cedes to the liquid nonvoice, a similar phenomenon arises. Since the advent of sound in cinema inaugurated the demise of the intertitle as quasi-literary form, writing that appears onscreen has come to be seen (and, increasingly, produced) as an automatic emanation of the film text itself. Whereas intertitles had been recognised as writing, the more recent mainstream cinema has grown used to apprehending all such text as equivalent to the subtitles and closed captions that are broadly considered as purely functional and so, necessarily objective and authorless.[11] As Mark Andrejevic (Andrejevic 2018: 259) describes, the aspiration after framelessness—the fetishizing of “the view from nowhere/everywhere”—epitomizes the logic of big data. Just as the vectoralist megacorps insist on being identified as platforms rather than publishers, so the trachea-circumventing micro-video not only “conceals its own work and posits itself as a voice without a subject” (Doane 1980: 46); it posits itself surreptitiously as a voice without (even) a voice as such, without a position, a perspective, even a source. If the acousmatic voiceover aspires to project the anonymity of its speaker, then the micro-video pretends never to have had a writer at all.

In the replacement of the Voice of God with captions, the extra-intently vanishing mediator that was the acousmatic voice becomes inaudible and doubly vanished, as its each exclamation disappears to be succeeded by the next. The reader never apprehends the whole thing all at once. Instead, morsels of easily digestible writing are meted out at a pace determined by the artist.

The text of NE_MV_07 reads:

You can change your government by voting.

Or you can choose a new government by moving somewhere new.

The world’s wealthiest people already choose where they are legally resident because they can.

And some of the world’s poorest people leave their countries because they have to.

But now moving to somewhere is becoming easier for everyone in the middle too.

So what will happen to nation states when everyone has the power to leave?

The audacity of syllogistic illogic on display here is, in itself, fascinating. Can one really “choose a new government by moving somewhere new”? And in what dimension is “moving somewhere […] becoming easier for everyone in the middle too”? What mythical middle is this, that is not witnessing the dwindling of their roaming rights? That “too” is particularly intriguing. Whereas the third and fourth propositions are initially set up to demonstrate the gap between those that leave “because they can” and those that must “because they have to”, the adverb, “too” retroactively makes of this comparison a litany of like claims. We are left with the astonishing implication that migration is getting easier for everyone: rich, poor and middling, too. This is not the only such sleight of hand. But it is one much more readily accepted—when, as in the case in the installation, the text appears piecemeal across the screen, with the last statement vanishing before the next one takes its place. Chion (irrepressible neologophane) posits the term entrelire, for “glimpsing or seeing briefly or indistinctly” words on the cinema screen: cautioning that the half, brief, or indistinct reading resulting “was not aleatory and fortuitous but a structuring element of the film”, and proposes that we consider such snatched sightings as “Fleeting Impression[s] on First Viewing” (Chion 2017: 125-126). Within the viewing dispositif of the gallery, with the playback controls available to curatorial digits only, writing turns temporal, rather than spatial. In becoming, like the voice, temporally unfolding, the written word approaches what Cavarero (2005: 82) privileges as “the dynamic flux of the vocal”. Putting text in motion enables it to share in Bonnet’s (2016: 7) “irreducible fugacity” of sound. In the case of the New Eelam micro-videos, the rapid replacement of each statement with its successor thwarts any attempts we might make to weigh the syllogistic logic at play. Cognitive dissonance rings out more resoundingly when we are not simultaneously being swept along by a rapidly changing image track and, particularly, when we have the means to stop, slow down, double back across and between pages.

If, as Pettman (2017: 82) argues, voice is really in the ear of the beholder, then my contention is that the inner ear, that is, in Riley’s terms “designed to pick up this voice which owns nothing by way of articulation” (2004: 58), can be the arbiter of its vocality. With the transubstantiation of voice into this scrolling text, the external (though invasive) documentary voice is replaced by an athorybal internal voice that arises in the body of the reader-viewer: the inner voice of the silent reader. There is much, beyond raw grain, that allows us to recognize familiar voices—much as we can recognise the prose style or stylistic “voice” of a particular text. Patterns of flow and pause, lexicon, syntax, punctuation, grammatical idiosyncrasies: all of this conspires, in the micro-video’s streaming text, to produce the impression that we are in the presence of a coherent, if self-effacing, non-sonorous voice. The micro-video dictates to us, its reader-listeners, much as would any canny rhetorician: delivering information in manageable chunks, on a rhythm keyed to maximise auditory comprehension and memory. Punctuated exactly as much as is needed to score (the internal voice’s) non/vocal delivery, it uses italics for emphasis, and question marks in abundance: affectively activating typographical marks that reach towards the reader, making us feel involved, soliciting our continued attention. What the inner ear hears of the inner voice is not pure internality but something inherently infused with and inflected by, what has been taken in from outside (Riley 2004: 73). Because we read the New Eelam nonvoice in the immediate context of the New Eelam voiceover, and because of the non-sonorous features (not to mention the ideologies) they share, we experience our inner voicing of these words as a kind of internal takeover or possession. We read Kulendran Thomas’ words in an internally projected imitation of his voice that we experience as our own. Our inner and his external voices become not just mixed but inseparably intertwined. In encountering his logic, we experience no friction, because the voice speaking is already on the inside. In this sealed in, separated off moment, there can be little more than an infrathin difference between internal and external, self-generated belief and insidiously imposed ideology.

Peter Middleton cites Jesper Svenbro account of how, for the Ancient Greeks, “reading felt invasive to because they imagined that to read was to lend one’s voice and become ‘the instrument necessary for the text to be realized’ (Svenbro 46) in what they sometimes understood as an almost sexual penetration of the self” (Middleton 2005: 83). We can presume that for most modern readers, the experience of silent reading is less threatening of psychic disaggregation. However, this notion of reading as colonization or bodily takeover—an intrusive, even penetrative wresting of the body’s sensorial autonomy—can help to elucidate what happens when, a) as in New Eelam: Spike Island, the athorybal text is presented in an environment that is already awash with the audible acousmatic voice, b) the writing style (aka the “voice”) of the text we read is identical with that of the text we hear, and c) we are shut off from other sensory distractions, rooted in place and set up to pay attention. Escaping earshot of the documentary voice, we experience the shift from hearing to reading as a reclamation of our sensorial autonomy. Wooed by the talk of sharing and community, and becalmed by the aural absence of an authority (or even an author to the text we read) we are primed to imagine that no-one is in charge: to imagine ourselves momentarily sovereign, if only of our private viewing-reading experience. And yet, the artist’s voice can still be heard as a trickle of soundbleed, as we move between the screens installed along this enwrapping corridor, each with their own set of headphones. Catena-like, the distanced tones of his voicebleed thread the listening stations together. As a result, we are freed from the ambit of his sonorous voice only each time we apply the headphones, and turn towards a screen to take in his nonvoice that rehearses—grammatically, syntactically, lexically—the idiolectically and rhythmically distinct character of what we are hearing, what is being carried in the soundbleed from the main exhibition space into the spaces between the works in this surrounding vestibule.[12]

The New Eeelam micro-videos trap us in an unfurling text that pulls us along at the speed and in a rhythm of its own design. As is the case with the audible voiceover, the audience is marshalled to apprehend written text in the manner ordained by an author that refuses to die. In the piecemeal unspooling of the micro-video text, the spatiotemporal axis of regular reading is suspended. Text turns temporal, rather than spatial. In flow rather than fixed. For Bonnet (2016: 211), what makes the ear “the organ of the ‘unproven’; the unverifiable” is because “[w]hat is heard is already no longer there. […] Listening is doomed to form certainties on the basis of evanescent phenomena.” The same applies when what is heard was only ever voiced internally, and heard by the inner ear, in the act of inaudible (though never really silent) phrase-by-phrase reading. Writing on screen necessarily vexes the temporality of the moving image (Chion 2017: 170). But what is certain is that when writing moves across the spatiotemporal axis: from spatial to temporal, from Lessing’s Nebeneinander to Nacheinander, the reader’s critical agency is undermined. Rather than becoming redundant, at the point of the text’s coming into written being, the author of the micro-video persists—hanging around to determine and delimit the conditions under which we engage with its text. The move from encompassing, inescapable voice to mutely ubiquitous nonvoice seems like a shift in direction, but it is in fact a ramping up.

Friction-free

Langdon Winner categorized as “inherently political technologies” those “man-made systems that appear to require or be strongly compatible with particular kinds of political relationships” (Winner 1986: 22). While Pythagoras reportedly installed his magic curtain so that his students could apprehend his words without distraction, the micro-video’s nonvoice is expressly engineered to run in the margins of everything else going on. As one marketer puts it: “Rather than compete for a viewer’s undivided attention, silent video allows your brand to smoothly join in their ongoing media experience. People are much more likely to accept your brand’s messaging when they can watch it without going through the additional steps of pausing their Spotify stream or muting their latest Netflix binge” (Breaux 2018). Counselling fellow marketers dismayed by the muting of their autoplay videos, the same advertizing guru compares its technique to that of a speaker who “[moves] closer to the intended recipient” in order to “[whisper] [….] ideas in their ear?” (Breaux 2018).[13] If radio could be indicted by Adorno (2002: 94-96) for projecting an illusion of “disinterested, impartial authority” while funnelling a smoothed-out stream of hate-politics and product-endorsement directly into the defenceless ears/homes of the masses, then what of the operation of a constantly rolling “feed” whose political messaging and advertising have both been designed to “speak” surreptitiously and yet specifically, to your interests, credit rating and prejudices? From sidebars and abandoned windows, the liquid voice of inaudibly voiced video trickles into our consciousness, via our fractally distracted peripheral vision. Chatting away as soon as a hovering cursor activates its kinetic autoplay stream, it addresses us in our most intimate settings: our beds, our breakfast tables, our pockets. And yet while there undoubtedly is a two-way informational flow afoot here (our details, purchases, pauses, our keystrokes, our eye-movements are being logged), the flow of speech is singularly (Schmitt would say dictatorially) unidirectional.

The supersmooth voiceover to 60 Million Americans deploys all of the locationless, sourceless, minimally material acousmatic’s coercive power. The micro-video’s nonvoice completes and extends this process. Hypostatizing the acousmatic effect, it removes all trace of sonorous materiality, specific embodiment and the relationality it implies. The voiceover attenuates the listener’s interpretive agency; the micro-video’s unvoice forecloses it altogether. Critical autonomy is diminished. Even, arguably, “readerly sovereignty”. Thus voided of the capacity to critically analyze the rhetoric we are fed, irradiated by pseudo-celestial light and comfortably ensconced in an always-already familiar and aspirational grotto to globalized hipsterdom, we may be bamboozled into buying in to a nebulous, noxious concept of liquid citizenship. But hopefully—in the instant of our exit from the immersive, seductive, New Eelam installation and before we have subscribed to sovereign citizenship—we are given cause to pause. New Eelam’s multi-modal liquid voice is the channel by which this cross-sensory bewitching is achieved. It is the means by which its fantasy of individual sovereignty and smooth exit is made to seem real, unmotivated, familiar and benign. We quit the space of the construct and the spell lifts—leaving us, hopefully, more alert to the manipulations of voice and nonvoice elsewhere, everywhere in our midst.

 

Sarah Hayden is associate professor of literature and visual culture at the University of Southampton and leads the AHRC Leadership Fellowship project “Voices in the Gallery.” She is author of Curious Disciplines: Mina Loy and Avant-Garde Artisthood (2018) and coauthor (with Paul Hegarty) of Peter Roehr — Field Pulsations (2018).

 

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— (2020) Public Facebook Post, 14.55 on June 5.

[1] Kulendran Thomas works with curator, Annika Kuhlmann, who is Creative Director of New Eelam.

[2] For a detailed treatment of the New Eelam “experience-suite” environments, see the author’s “When Attitudes become Platitudes, Live in the Cloud: dematerialization in the work of Christopher Kulendran Thomas”. Cultural Politics 16:2 (forthcoming July 2020).

[3] Nor does it anticipate the further complication, congestion and outlawing of border-crossings that could result during a global pandemic. Both the New Eelam project and this essay pre-date the advent of the SARS 2/Covid 19 pandemic: a period within which even the most customarily mobile were suddenly required to “shelter in place”. It remains to be seen how New Eelam (and the world) will adapt.

[4] In the summer of 2020, significant public attention was again drawn to Zuckerberg’s “vocal” position on free speech. On 25^th May, George Floyd was killed by a policeman kneeling on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. When this atrocity gave rise to widespread protests against police violence, Facebook chose to publish a statement from Trump that was “widely interpreted as a threat and potential incitement to violence” (Wong 2020). Notwithstanding the threat implied and the specific, historically racist resonances of the language used, the president’s inflammatory statement was determined by Zuckerberg not to constitute a breach of the company’s Community Standards on Violence and Incitement. Opposition to this decision was expressed by many within the company (who expressed outrage publicly, staged walkouts and resigned), among civil rights leaders (including Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and Color of Change) and more broadly in the press, on the streets and on social media platforms (Hern and Waterson 2020). In a statement on June 5^th, Zuckerberg continued to express his commitment to “free expression” in terms of a notably malleable concept of “voice”, writing that “we will continue to stand for giving everyone a voice”, promising that a review of the platform’s decision-making processes would “take into account many voices” and vowing “to review whether we need to change anything structurally to make sure the right groups and voices are at the table” (Zuckerberg 2020). Reporting on the company’s behaviour in this affair many, including the New York Times (Isaac, Kang and Frenkel 2020) cited the platform’s recent exploitation as a tool to incite genocide in Myanmar (Mozur 2018). Subseqent to the company’s consequent adoption of new policies in that region, Facebook released a statement on February 5^th 2019 assuring users that “We don’t want anyone to use Facebook to incite or promote violence, no matter who they are” (Facebook Newsroom 2019). As of early June 2020, Trump appears to have exceptional status in this regard.

[5] In The Listening Reader, Sam Belinfante successfully tracks this tired-out trope all the way back to Rabelais in Gargantua and Pantagruel.

[6] See https://www.facebook.com/business/news/updated-features-for-video-ads.

[7] See https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/audio-video/autoplay.

[8] See Facebook for Business (2016a and 2016b), and Breaux 2018.

[9] A September 2016 New York Times piece by Sapna Maheshwari and Katie Bennier cited various conflicting reports putting that figure at 50% (Facebook themselves), 94% (Margin Agency) and 82% (Omnicom’s BBDO). See Maheswari and Benner 2016 and Patel 2016.

[10] See, for example, Forbes 2018.

[11] Out of this context, contemporary artists such as Christine Sun Kim and Liza Sylvestre are demonstrating just how far the closed caption can be pushed past this utilitarian deployment into infinitely more creative functions. See Watlington 2019.

[12] Rangan (2017: 284) contends that the documentary voiceover always has about it “a visualist, object-centred philosophy, that “keeps at bay the impermanence, instability, and unboundedness implied by the phenomenality of sound”. Perhaps this quirk of the minimally material Voice of God helps to smooth the transition (which feels not at all jarring) when it mutates from sonorous output/input to scrolling text.

[13] This framing of the silent micro-video’s textual nonvoice as a whisper is an apt one, and not alone because of its overt associations with intimacy, subterfuge and subtle insinuation. Whispering involves no vibration of the vocal cords. As such, it is in phonological terms, unvoiced, and sonically erases its source. Xinghua Li (2011: 21) cites a Carnegie Mellon study suggesting that, while the voiced voice might well supply a unique identifiable, voiceprint pace Cavarero, whispering dramatically reduces the registration of identifiable features as “Voiced fricatives and stops lose their voicing. Nasals become faint. Regular tonalities of the speech mostly disappear”. Li writes of the “gesture of self-erasure of whispering” (Li 2011: 31), and Labelle (2014: 149) of the whisper as a “‘meta-voice.’”