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Society
for Cultural Anthropology
Culture@Large
“Rethinking Sovereignty”
Theorizing in the Global Context
Organized by Vincanne Adams
Washington, D. C., 2001
Sovereignty as a concept and as a peculiar arrangement of
power has been the topic of a wide variety of anthropological
debate and inquiry of late. To some extent these debates pick
up where Foucault’s understanding of biopolitics left
off, placing questions about forms of discipline and governance
in the context of globalization and attempting to explain
the mechanics of subject-making in terms of economic, state,
and repressive power as well as the liberatory politics such
efforts might inspire. Discussions emergent from philosophy,
history, literary criticism and economics have engaged anthropologists
to formulate a broad set of conceptual frameworks for dealing
with questions of sovereignty in its bodily, local, national,
and global dimensions. Emergent in part from the rise of globalism
in the world economy and the anticipation of a post-national
moment, scholars have questioned the mechanisms of a global
sovereignty in configurations of empire and the subordination
of the nation-state to regimes of capitalist domination (Hardt
and Negri’s work). Elsewhere recognition of postcolonial
nationalisms has spawned discussion about the recent emergence
of nation-states, as hopeful apparatuses of national sovereignty
in the decline of empire (John Kelly’s response). More
recently, questions of “global terrorism” raise
interesting possibilities of the spectre of empire, as national
sovereignty is subordinated to political concerns circulating
in and through rhetorics of global economic and security demands.
That would be the sense of urgency of these questions because
they became so visible post 9/11. From Negri and Hardt’s
use of Lenin, for example, “If you want to avoid civil
war” he said, “You must become imperialists.”
Today, however, we, and they, consider the inability to name
the enemy in terms of a sovereign state. Rather, we find the
enemy through internal recognition—those within (immigrants,
citizens like you and me)—posing the possibility of
“civil war” as the inevitable conceptual outcome,
after all.
Debates about the legal ambiguities built into sovereignty
raise questions about the violence afforded the modern state
toward its own citizens. Internally, within state systems,
declarations of a “state of emergency” renew potentially
catastrophic regimes of incarceration, racial profiling, and
repression in the name of the sovereign’s “duty”
to protect bare or “naked” life. This brings us
to questions of internal governance. How might we theorize
beyond state/agency dualisms to capture the biopolitical as
the contemporary means of governance, even (or expecially)
when it harms? Veena Das’ work addresses these questions
in terms of the illegibility of the state and the law—the
blurring of the rational and magical to unwittingly conscript
citizens into subjugation. I look forward to Joao’s
response to this essay.
What peculiar aspects of sovereignty open up spaces for governance
that link the biological body to the body social? Post-Foucaultian
inquiries by Agamben concerning this question have identified
mechanisms by which the state is able to insert itself into
citizen bodies as a measure of sovereign power, enacting specific
forms of violence by the rule of the exception through which
sovereign power is defined, turning all life and all political
battles into battles, again, over bare life.
At the same time that global political arrangements reinforce
these internal possibilities, global arrangements of economic
and market forces also potentially disrupt the easy coherence
of state sovereignty and internal governance. Global technologies
that propose transcendence of national boundaries render the
body superfluous to the enterprise of governance, disrupting
the easy coherence of state and subject. Genetic technologies
dissolve the body itself into networks of scientific communication
and transregional operations of biomedical science and profit
capitalism. What might be said of the sovereignty of the body
at this juncture? (I believe Margaret Lock will tell us much
here).
Finally, efforts to convey experiences of modern subjectivity
that lay beyond the ethical frameworks already delineated
within sovereign regimes remains a persistent concern and
pursuit not just for anthropologists but for many others across
the disciplines. What are the possibilities for ethnographic
work under conditions of erasure that are built into sovereign
regimes, given their ethical, legal, political infrastructures?
How does an analytic of sovereignty make this task of expression
easier or more difficult? (Mariella will be left with the
burden of summarizing here, in response to Margaret’s
work).
This session is organized around the presentation of scholars
who are writing and thinking about sovereignty in new and
compelling ways that are differently localized in relation
to one another. The panel does not begin, nor with it end,
I think, with a definitive statement of sovereignty. Rather,
it aims to provide a space within which we can hear about
recent work, offering collectively an analytics of sovereignty
in relation to the specificity of its ethnographic locations.
It also aims to provide a means for generating responses to
these efforts across disciplines and across the various localizations
of this work.
Program
Michael Hardt (Literature, Duke) 30 min
Discussant: John Kelly (Chicago) 15 min
Veena Das (Johns Hopkins) 30 min
Discussant: Joao Biehl (Princeton) 15 min
15 min break
Giorgio Agamben (Philosophy, University of Verona) 30 min
Discussant: Stefania Pandolfo (Berkeley) 15 min
Margaret Lock (McGill) 30 min
Discussant: Mariella Pandolfi (Univ of Montreal) 15 min
30 min for discussion with the audience
Abstracts
HARDT, Michael (Literature, Duke University, co-author with
Antonio Negri of EMPIRE) SOVEREIGNTY AND COUNTERPOWER During
the modern era, the dominant concept of democracy was tied
to national sovereignty and the bounded national space. Democracy
was conceived principally through the representative institutions
that sustained a notion of the people. In the contemporary
world, national sovereignty is gradually ceding its position
to a new, unbounded form of sovereignty, which Negri and I
identify as Empire. Correspondingly, as democratic institutions
lose the footing they had in the national space, the mechanisms
of representation itself lose their effectiveness and the
concept of the people becomes increasingly abstract and ungraspable.
As we rethink sovereignty in the contemporary era of shifting
national and global relations, we need also to rethink the
concept of democracy. We need to conceive a democracy that
is no longer popular but one that is grounded in the multitude—a
democracy that is non-representative or differently representative.
To reconceive democracy we should begin with the concept of
counterpower as a new foundation. Counterpower consists primarily
of three elements: resistance, insurrection, and constituent
power. Rethinking these elements in our contemporary context
could provide a new ground on which to invent a new notion
of democracy.
DAS,
Veena (Johns Hopkins University) THE SIGNATURE OF THE STATE
I argue in this paper that the idea of the state as a rational
entity engaged in maintaining public order by keeping violence
in abeyance is in a dialectical relation with another notion
- that of the state as a spectral presence in the life of
the communities it seeks to regulate. The iterability of utterances
and actions in which the signature of the state can detach
itself from its origin and be grafted to other structures
and other chains of signification appears in stark relief
in the enthnography I present from low income neighbourhoods.
How does the state then claim legitimacy in the face of obvious
forgeries, corruption within it own procedures, and the mimesis
of its structures? In order to understand this I turn to the
realm of excuses a classical subject in the Austin's analysis
of language but not often used in understanding the realm
of politics. I show that in this region of language we encounter
vulnerability of action and vulnerability of utterances but
that this very vulnerability in the natural economy of language
becomes a form of power in the entangled circulations between
state and community.
GIORGIO AGEMBEN, a philosopher from the University of Verona,
will be one of our featured panelists. (This is not his abstract.
It is a description of his work in relation to this session)
Two of Agamben’s recent books offer insights about sovereignty
that may be of use to anthropology: Homo Sacer: sovereign
power and bare life, and Remnants of Auschwitz. In Homo Sacer,
Agamben explores the violence engendered by legal ambiguities
of sovereign power in the modern state. Developing an exploration
of biopower begun by Foucault, his analysis shows how sovereignty
authorizes a “power over life” by the rule of
the exception—being both above the law as its constituting
force and safeguard of the law in its deployment. He recognizes
this as a position of danger when, under modern conditions,
ideas of the sacred are entwined with sovereign power-- when
the sacred is shattered into all aspects of bare biological
life, making life itself the sacred terrain for all forms
of governance, including the right to kill or to make live.
In Remnants, Agemben interrogates the ethical terrain of modern
sovereignty through language and discourse. He recognizes
the incommensurate abilities for modern life to both produce
unspeakable violence and offer a linguistic or ethical infrastructure
that could render the experience of this violence knowable.
In the erasure produced in its wake, one grasps a sense of
the essence of life itself as a remnant, a recognition of
the human who survives the inhumane as a witness.
LOCK,
Margaret (McGill University) BIG PHARMA, THE LIFE INDUSTRY,
AND THE CONTROL OF BARE LIFE The rigorous enforcement of intellectual
property rights (IPR) has become a top priority in recent
years in the enactment of foreign policy, notably by the US
government. It is asserted by agrochemical-pharmaceutical
conglomerates, that IPR are essential for research and development
and those countries who have contested the patenting of plant
material taken from their territories have been subjected
to economic sanctions. International trade negotiations are
forums where the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property
Rights (TRIPS) are regularly reviewed with the result that,
increasingly, monopolies, generally in the form of patents,
that have formerly fallen under the domain of national law
have been seriously eroded. Efforts made by governments in
the “developing” world to balance the interests
of innovators with those of society are seriously damaged
as moves to “harmonize” patent law worldwide are
gradually brought about. In contrast, the patenting of human
genes in the “developed” world has met with some
government opposition, resulting in a catastrophic but brief
NASDAQ slump. Using specific case studies, including those
of the patenting of genes associated with breast cancer and
Alzheimer’s disease, and of basmati rice strains, arguments
about empire, sovereignty, globalized inequalities, biopower,
and resistance will be revisited with particular emphasis
on implementation and regulation of genetic technologies in
a domain where uncertainty, scientific disagreement, closed
doors, and promissory capital hold sway.
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