MODERATOR’S NOTE: This is the second entry in a sustained theoretical discussion that Tezozomoc and Devon Peña have being sharing since 2003. For the first part in this series, please see the blog entry of May 6, 2008 at http://ejfood.blogspot.com/2008/05/tezozomoc-devon-pea-discuss-theory.htmls. Occasionally, it seems appropriate to post the resulting notes of our conversations to this blog. Between postings we continue these discussions through email, phone calls, and visits but our ideas do not always get posted or even written down and we are afraid much gets misplaced or obscured until resurfacing later in our ongoing chats, lectures, or publications. Hence, we offer a record of what we now view as an especially timely segment of these conversations. Since the June 2006 eviction of the farmers from their commons in the heart of South Central LA, a lot has happened. Instead of outlining the story of displacement and resurgence of some of the farmers at Willowbutton, we thought it wise to examine the past four years through the lens of a theoretical quandary that has long limited effective critical thinking and praxis among the so-called Left in the USA. This is the issue of what to do with the (neo)liberal State: Do we storm and take it over, burn it, ignore it, withdraw from it, or surround it? Now, with the emergence of a broad, mass-based movement against Arizona’s version of the “state of exception” (SB1070 and HB2281), we are compelled to bring this segment of our discussions to the public at this point in time, a key moment of potentiality of our coeval insurgency to sublate (aufheben) the crisis of the "Derivatives Depression" that underlies the rise of partisan strategies that use "laws that suspend the rule of law" to produce more docile subjectivities and suppress potential agencies of resistance.
THE STATE OF EXCEPTION AND PARTISAN VIOLENCE
DEVON: It may at first appear bizarre to start this phase of our discussions with a classic reactionary [sic] thinker like Carl Schmitt. You insisted and I agreed. After contemplating von Hayek in relation to Foucault in 2008, I figured this was bound to go someplace interesting. A caveat: For most of us college-aged in the sixties and early seventies, Schmitt immediately became associated with the birth pangs of ordoliberal or neoliberal thought cast as it was underneath the long shadow of Fascism. He was more than a Nazi collaborator; he was president of the
Vereinigung nationalsozialistischer Juristen (Union of National-Socialist Jurists). It seems curious that the postmodern Left was too busy deconstructing texts to really take this “episteme-politico” threat of the theory and practice of “the state of exception” seriously until well past 1980 and Reagan’s ascendancy to the White House. Walter Benjamin was prescient in his passionate opposition to Schmitt.
TEZOZOMOC: My interest in Schmitt comes from his critique of “liberal democracy” and how it has figured into the radical philosophies of contemporary thinkers like Agamben, Negri, Virno, and others. This line of thinking, with its insistence on the
political recomposition of power generated by the contradiction between the “regulatory functions” of the state of exception in maintaining hegemony and the constitution of autonomous subjectivities, seems to me to present us with the only way to approach the critique of liberal concepts of “justice” and “identity politics,” recalling that this conversation started with our efforts to elaborate what you had called an “alterNative” theory of action or agency that can resolve the strategic impasse afflicting environmental and food justice movements by focusing our attention on the nurturing of the capacity for the multitude to create institutions of autonomous collective action.
DEVON: It is hardly surprising that Schmitt provides an insightful critique of “liberal democracy” since he basically finds that it is so easy to suspend the rule of law, even under liberal democratic state formations. We are the example: The USA Patriot Act induced a permanent state of exception embodied by the Bush II and Obama Administrations and their suspension of the writ of
habeas corpus for persons within the territorial jurisdiction of this sovereign nation-state. Indeed, Schmitt insisted that a permanent state of exception is a defining quality of all modern sovereigns. And yet, we must still be more than cautious re-reading Schmitt since his political project does not even remotely correspond to the search for
autochthonous autonomy, a point I want to return to later. By the way, given recent email exchanges, I will say that the autochthonous autonomy idea, which I define simply as the notion of an indeterminate place-based participatory democracy, is pure Kropotkin meets Spinoza. I will ask you to “unpack” that notion in a later conversation since you have been re-reading Kropotkin in light of our shared concern for the role of cooperation and mutual aid among plants and animals and the implications this has for our rethinking of evolutionary biology and its effect on strategic analysis of the coupling of “natural” and “social” subsystems through mass movements like environmental justice. This is relevant here since Schmitt himself identified a “right of resistance” that emerges as a political project itself grounded in “natural law,” or the right of every human being to survive. For me that is the only
quaestio facti that matters.
TEZOZOMOC: Yes, Kroptkin is important to this project because he provides a very deep story illustrating the fact that competition and aggression are not always the premiere examples of the material drives underlying evolutionary selection or adaptation. Instead, cooperation and mutualism are also extant biological drives that compel life to adapt, change, and find its place-based fitness. This is, as you suggest, related to Schmitt’s notion of the “right of resistance.” I proposed, in a conversation we had in Seattle in 2003, that fitness, selection, and adaptation are categories of material species being and are significant sources of biocultural processes that require or encourage cooperation, mutual reliance, and reciprocity in many organisms. So, why not humans?
DEVON: This is a good platform from which to examine Kropotkin later. But for now, let’s return to Schmitt. Alexander Barder, in a paper presented to the International Studies Association a few years back, with the intriguing title of “Re-Territorializing the Global Order: Carl Schmitt and the Concept of
Grossraum Today,” expresses the significance of Schmitt’s projects in a manner that illustrates why I was at first alarmed by Leftist efforts to (re)read Schmitt for radical purposes. To me it seems almost like relying on Heidegger, or only on Nietzsche, instead of say, Spinoza, to reread Marx after Foucault. Here is Barder on Schmitt:
Much of the neo-liberal vision of globalization as an economic and political phenomenon stresses the progressive deterritorialization of the international system. It has also been argued that as a result of this deterritorialization states lose their predominance as unitary actors. [We need]…to ascertain the distinctly political implications of deterritorialization and its consequences for the constitution of a stable international legal order. [We must]…retrieve…a conception of spatiality articulated by the German jurist Carl Schmitt to account for the evolution of European legal order. Schmitt’s answer to the problem of order after the Second World War was the concept of the Grossraum or “large space” as a form of reterritorialization. [brackets added]
As far as strategies of “spatiality” go, this is
reterritorialization from the top-down and not relocalization from the bottom-up, right? That is my first challenge to you about the nature of the theoretical project Schmitt had his sights on, notwithstanding his interesting critique of liberal democracy. However, despite this challenge, for now lets focus on that critique. At its core, according to Tomislav Sunic, Schmitt was able to convey how liberalism’s insistence on “tolerance” for incommensurable difference is actually a trapdoor into what he called “apolitical democracy.” The struggle to recognize difference is viewed as a nearly insurmountable wedge against the possibilities of the consensus of the dominant case of like-minded folk who must after all construct and expand the effective living space of the
Grossraum to thrive as a “People.” Hence, the state of exception. In connection to this, Wendy Brown, especially in
Edgework and related
oeuvre, makes a much more radically persuasive “neomarxist” argument against liberal democracy that I wish to discuss later.
TEZOZOMOC: There is a difference, you are right, between the spatial politics of top-down reterritorialization and the bottom-up spatial politics of the social multitude seeking to reterritorialize their home places in a way by first having to
deterritorialize borders in an autonomous alternative to the neoliberal ruse of free trade agreements. For us, as the presumed objects of an undeclared partisan "legal civil war,” that which becomes lived in relation to others is the “essence” of social life and this can only unfold across space if other subjects are also already “located” in that space, or at least able to compete for their “fittest” position in a contested space. But this can also be a trapdoor into which the liberal democratic subject falls, drowning in a sea of incommensurable differences amidst the banal postmodern entrenchment of identity politics, which we must overcome to get past the current impasse. Schmitt’s most unique insight, in
The Theory of the Partisan, is that the opportunity for a “totalitarian” move arises from the pervasive anxiety, fear, and frustration associated with the discursive, symbolic, and materialist politics produced by entrenched identity differences even if he fails to see that these are but a veil under which lies the power of the commodity form. After all, national socialism is the capitalism of the partisans, aligned against the unruly and threatening multitude.
DEVON: Yes! This is happening in the USA today. Only the “camp” is a privatized “detention center” and the partisans call themselves “Minutemen” and “Tea Partiers.” At your suggestion, I have been re-reading Schmitt on the “theory of the partisan” and also some very interesting commentary that has emerged ever since Agamben’s third volume was translated and Bush launched the "War on terror" by signing the USA Patriot Act. Luke Mergner, author of the weblog, The Decline, makes the following excellent observation: “A partisan for Schmitt has four qualities: irregularity, mobility, intensity of political commitment, and a telluric (or territorial) attachment.” These are significant qualities and we must be aware that more than one positionality can embrace these qualities, albeit in nearly infinite variant convolutions. Mergner makes an additional significant statement:
The partisan is outside the law by virtue of his [sic] irregular status viz. the regular army. Schmitt argues convincingly that…[t]he line between combatants and non-combatants is precisely what the partisan must blur if he is to be effective. The telluric character of the partisan connotes for Schmitt a defensive posture rooted in tradition, land, and family.
Now clearly, what is happening in Arizona right now involves a not dissimilar case of partisan activists in organizations like the Minutemen and American Border Patrol, but even more broadly across a wide range of militias and networks of mobile individuals carrying concealed weapons and targeting “suspected illegal aliens.” We are being defined as the threat to their territorial attachments, and this compels the partisan activists to organize resistance against the perceived “
northward march of the virtual border” as they like to say in the extremist blogosphere. The blurring of subjectivities in this discourse involves the categories of “citizen” and “non-citizen,” but the ideological context identifies this as a form of cultural and political
combat – especially since immigration gets conflated with the “wars” on terror, drugs, and criminality. The right to territorial integrity, for a more limited class (and race) of liberty-loving people, is invoked to justify the use of violence against selected targets of the unruly multitude and this derives from the ability for partisan discourse to blur the boundary between citizen and non-citizen people of Mexican national-origin in remapping the zone of exclusion. Imagine this then as “the ecology of fear” provoked in part by their misreading of our autonomous resistance over the past three decades of the Mesoamerican Diaspora. For example, at South Central, the Diaspora farmers created a sort of “spatial sociality” that truly challenged the metropolitan
Grossraum because it posed the possibility of converting private enclosed space into commons place, what Jeff Hou calls “insurgent public space.” But in the context of a concern for the political ecological and epistemological consequences and challenges of the Mesoamerican Diaspora, the “large space” – especially after Salinas de Gotari and all the neoliberal nonsense in Mexico that happened well before NAFTA, including the privatization of the ejidos as a factor that contributed to the mass displacement of the people of rural Mexico – actually for us involves the
southward extension of the US-Mexico border to encompass, theoretically, the entire Western Hemisphere. It is relevant that, in contrast, the extreme right partisans in Arizona, including the Minutemen and American Border Patrol, widely circulate an alternate phrase to describe their struggle as being against “the
northward march of the virtual border.” This also reaches deep into each “forcibly individuated” and “surveilled” body every time they set their menacing gaze upon “suspected illegal aliens.”
TEZOZOMOC: You seem to be arguing that the “legal civil war” (SB 1070) involves a parallel process of partisan activism that operates at several spatial scales. There is a localized micropolitical and urban scale, and then perhaps regional, national, and hemispheric or transborder scales at which the battle over
Grossraum unfolds and moves, because it is all about
movement as transgressive flows of people, capital, and information?
DEVON: Yes, the partisans in Arizona are like an irregular army serving hegemonic spatial politics in the policing of citizenship and borders; no doubt. I also want to emphasize several pertinent complications. Foremost is a question of historical context and the fact that Schmitt was concerned with the partisan politics of his own peculiar mid-20th century European context and the challenges posed by what I would consider as the “failed State” forms left as wreckage in the aftermath of the collapse of Fascism’s
Grossraum. The “failed State” in our context is more likely to be thought of as Mexico, but I would equally insist that the neoliberal turn has also produced a “failed State” of the liberal democratic project in the USA. We should return to this issue of “failed States” later. Ethically, a related complication is how you go about justifying a source involving a thinker that played a role in the legitimation games of the Nazis and should have had a lot of explaining to do. It seems profoundly dangerous and a mistake to simply appropriate Schmitt’s critique of liberal democracy because we appreciate certain discerning conceptual features and strategic implications and feel we can integrate these somehow into an “autonomous” critique of the peculiarities of the American liberal democratic “experiment,” which has charted its own signature brand and course eventually leading to a convolution of neoconservative and neoliberal “schools” of governmentality that some critics, for good reason, have come to characterize as “Friendly Fascism.” Except, in Arizona, enmity rather than friendship seems to be the
modus vivendi.
TEZOZOMOC: These complications are crucial but we also need to take into account the yearning that the “Other” develops for the taste of “justice” as dispensed through the liberal democratic state for the sake of the so-called “public good.” The multitude learns to “want” integrative cooptation and then mistakes this for mutual recognition. The liberal state does not recognize difference; it merely rationalizes the possibility of varying degrees of tolerance of difference as a strategic technology of governmentality. This is what I mean when I use the phrase that it is really “Just Us” rather than “Justice.” Governmentality is the rule over difference through the feigning of respect and tolerance for diversity through the rule of law but is really a neoliberal ploy that maintains the position of the privileged positions by constantly identifying individuals for surveillance and disciplining action under conditions of the hegemonic administration of the conduct of conduct.
DEVON: That gap - the liberal democratic trapdoor - is what the partisans are filling with their politics of enmity. And then the multitude, conformed as individuated bodies seeking maximum utility and self-care, unintentionally and unaware make surveillance easier in part by making dissident groups and communities of resistance more readily “identifiable” and “legible” to the State because the more hyperbolic claims of identity politics end up making us easier targets for the administrators of the conduct of conduct. “Strategic invisibility” is therefore sometimes an antidote to the partisan gaze and its implicit threat of violence. Despite these cautionary sentiments, you have also indicated that Schmitt’s challenge to liberal democracy can be re-iterated in the problematic of the autonomous critique of the American Empire. I will only agree provisionally,
if we see this as an extension of the wreckage left in the wake of European (Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment) civilizations and their imperial projects, as well as of their eventual dissipation in the collapse of Western European hegemony after WWII, and the challenges of unification posed by postwar globalization and its deterritorializing discontents ever since the Americans – inspired by the Chicago School boys – unleashed the terror of the “shock doctrine” (cf. Naomi Klein’s book on “disaster capitalism”) first on the so-called “third world” from Chile to Mexico and then internally, especially since September 2008, through the strategic use of the finance capital and the credit crisis produced by, as Christian Marazzi insists, the “commodification of risk” in the form of fancy cognitive capitalist machines of desire like the “credit default swaps” that brought AIG down. Why does September seem like a favored month for initiating shock therapy? Regardless, the Chicago School ordoliberals have been there all along to provide support for this “irrational exuberance” as a political co-production of the state of exception.
TEZOZOMOC: Now we are going somewhere. Giorgio Agamben has identified in Schmitt these concepts of the “sovereign ban,” the “bare life,” and the “state of exception,” transforming these into the power/knowledge games of contemporary sovereigns that exempt the ruler(s) from the rule of law in the interests of the “public good.” But Agamben does not fully understand the contemporary context in the USA of Schmitt’s more purely “racialized” - or at least telluric - notions of partisan politics that underlie the current state of exception in Arizona. This is a truthful statement because it reveals that in a liberal democracy, power/knowledge games constitute varying capacities to define the terms of the exclusion of the “Other” as a subjectified “non-citizen” or “suspect illegal alien” who is not protected from slipping into brutal banishment, the
Homo sacer reduced to the “bare life,” essentially a body without legal protections.
DEVON: Agamben states this clearly when he makes the observation that “…modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system” (
State of Exception, p. 2). Of course Agamben does not anticipate the Arizona case wherein the citizens “eliminated” are targeted because they are associated with non-citizens whose presence is discursively magnified to more easily mark all their associates [sic] including citizens. During the 2008 election, the Arizona Republican Party challenged 100,000 Latina/o voters from exercising their franchise “for failure to prove U.S. citizenship.” This can be read as a first step toward a more generalized sovereign ban. Since Mexican-origin Americans can be integrated into the political system, this seems to me an example of what Schmitt called the “willed state of exception.” Perhaps we need to, strategically, turn this on its head? The bare life – as a preemptive strike by the partisans of the “undeclared” legal civil war – is the Empire’s antidote for the “malignancy of the unruly multitude.” This may actually constitute a response to the perceived threat posed by our demographic up well and resurgent struggles for re-commons and autonomy. Can we “reset” the bare life, as in some streams of queer theory, and go toward an inversion of the negative pole so that this moment of alterity is re-deployed in a declaration of “right livelihood” through withdrawal from engagement with the State and its “governmentalizing” agencies? Clearly, not in the sense that anyone should abandon the pursuit of juridical determinations that could produce more flexible outcomes and perhaps inadvertently open new spaces of autonomy? That is, instead of a diminished and severely marginalized subjectivity of strategic withdrawal, is it possible that those subject to the state(s) of exception can
counter with another exception by securing autonomous spaces for sustainable and resilient livelihoods? Is that not what South Central Farm represented? Can the sovereign ban be resisted if those “who look like illegal aliens” embody a generalized agency of anti-consumerism, self-reliance and mutual aid, cooperative labor, and other sources of cultural and social citizenship that can be more effectively coupled with an assertive confrontation against continued surveillance of our bodies by the partisan activists of the state of exception who want to deny any possibility of political or legal citizenship to these targeted categories of people, defined as an enemy?
TEZOZOMOC: This is similar to Alan Badiou’s position, and I am not yet convinced we can easily subvert the “bare life” along this trajectory because the concept, or actually its material conditions, is related to the idea that we can escape and crawl out of the trapdoor that takes us off the surface of “political life.” Yet, what lays at the surface is responsible for the self-defeating iterations that usually take place in the subaltern caverns of entrenched identity politics. I suppose, if we were to get past the identity politics of intersectionalist thinking, we might be able to invert the state of exception through our own, let’s call it for now the
agency of counter-exception.
DEVON: I agree and Badiou seems to have missed this key point you just made that the trapdoor takes us “off the surface” of political life. Withdrawal would not abolish the pertinent effects of the status of “suspect illegal aliens” that reduces many if not all of us to the
Homo sacer. Recognizing such a movement oddly requires that we cautiously recognize and appreciate the pre-figurative disdain for liberal democracy contained in Schmitt’s critique of the disenchanted forms of what are essentially commoditized “yearnings” that blocked “the People” from asserting their subjective autonomy. The old Nazi jurist shares this disdain “ontologically” with autonomists, but in a deeply inverted epistemological manner that ends up sustaining and reproducing the same “desiring machines” that manufacture the consumption of the material products of thought itself as lived through the empty subjects of an imagined homogenized origin that presupposes humans are always everywhere “naturalizing” nature to denaturalize themselves. The ordoliberals have always exhibited this disdain because they view liberalism as the quest for equality through an ever more-perfect [disciplining, qua regulatory] State. This is also why they hate socialists, communists, and even liberal welfare state Keynesians, whom they equate with the same dreaded interventionist and centralized bureaucratic State that chokes off the creativity and innovation of the anarchic free market. Hence, the resonance of Schmitt’s doctrine with the “anti-Big Government” foundational ethics of late American variants of neoconservatism. Wendy Brown reminds us that for Schmitt, as for von Hayek, and therefore by extension, the Chicago School, true freedom is but an “equal right to inequality.” Everything is sorted out by the market, including the possibility of slipping into the condition of the “bare life” that we are presumably constantly struggling to avoid trapped nonetheless as “consumers” in the administered production and reproduction of the multitude. We seem to live under a widespread illusion that this is the result of natural law expressed through individualized acts of “self-care” instead of being understood as our commonwealth. Do acts of “unauthorized social citizenship” among the subaltern multitude of the Mesoamerican Diaspora, who are directly experiencing the state of exception, somehow constitute a
counter-exception, as you have phrased it?
TEZOZOMOC: This is one principal contradiction: What could be more enticing for the deluded type, the fully self-actualizing and “autonomous” individual rational actor who is a member of the community of “qualified life,” than to benefit from a state of exception that distributes a merely “bare life” to “Others” as a consequence of the privileges accorded mostly white bodies by the neoconservative policing of citizenship and belonging? And yet: The unauthorized practices of social citizenship by the Mesoamerican multitude – against the denial of entry into the “protective cocoon” of political citizenship that is the convolution of the qualified life of the tyrannous passion of the partisans – presents an exception to the exception.
DEVON: We must elaborate this argument further. The political statecraft [sic] of a predominantly white Christian partisan identity exists and tries to consume history by “naturalizing” this self-referent as the penultimate defining “spirit” of the state of exception, and hence HB2281 and the attack on ethnic studies, which I assume is but a prelude to a more generalized attack on all critical thinking and pedagogy. This practice merely “moralizes” the partisan Empire’s hegemony and especially its monopolist claims to the use of militarist violence (see Hardt and Negri’s Empire) including the militarization of the border and the adoption of low-intensity counter-insurgency tactics both by the regulars and the partisans. This serves no other purpose than to impose this condition of the bare life since the neoliberal ontology requires that humans are only “free” in the sense that the “anarchic market” affords them the comfort of knowing that their prosperity, mere survival, or catastrophe are always the “natural law result” of their own limited agency as disconnected and individuated rational actors seeking perfect knowledge of prices in the insufferably eternal dance with the commodity form. The proper role of the neoliberal “minimalist” State then is to guarantee the partisan’s “national security,” even if it takes militia guns, drone-directed apprehensions, and interdiction forces that feed the gulag-styled deportation centers with the “intercepts” of a constant flow of desperate refuges created by NAFTA’s unleashing of a second wave of enclosures and environmental violence. The social forces, that might possibly disrupt partisan servicing of the American Empire’s constant deterritorializing
realpolitik, do not currently threaten this form of existence. It is an Imperial Ontology, seized by a paranoid ecology of fear, and this is why the current emerging mobilization against SB1070 and HB2281 is a deterministically important moment.
Another final complication to address in this phase of our conversation: We, the insurgent yet still largely polyphonic Left [sic], surely must recognize the possibilities inherent in an observation Wendy Brown makes about the differences between neoconservatism and neoliberalism. She states that
...neoliberalism figures a future in which cultural and national borders are largely erased, in which all relations, attachments, and endeavors are submitted to a monetary nexus, while neoconservatism scrambles to re-articulate and police cultural and national borders, the sacred, and the singular through discourses of patriotism, religiosity, and the West. (Wendy Brown 2006 “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization,” Political Theory 34: 699).
Based on this logic, then, I’ll make an apparently preposterous and trickster proposal: The reason Arizona right-wing powers are implementing SB1070 and other similar “laws that suspend the rule of law” is that the neoconservative power bloc in the state is scrambling to “police cultural and national borders.” Paradoxically, the Mesoamerican Diaspora is actually the perfect expression of the neoliberal erasure of borders, and this may be why neoconservatives are so fixated on re-articulating citizenship and policing borders. NAFTA inadvertently burst the speculative bubble of the exceptionalist American identity. Oh my!
Of course, these are rhetorical postulates, and the key political problematic for us I think is twofold: First, the challenge of strengthening the sources of “unauthorized practices of social citizenship” by out-of-status transnational peoples as a basis from which to mobilize effective demands for political citizenship and not just the ambiguous status of “legal alien,” “guest worker,” or “resident alien.” This is more than amnesty; it is a demand that we pose this problem: If NAFTA abolishes borders for capital, must future reiterations of the trade pact also open up the border for the transnational working class to seize an “equitable” position from which to at least engage in a direct institutional struggle for social and environmental justice against “unregulated” exploitation and oppression? Is this a type of non-reformist reform, to paraphrase Andre Gorz?
TEZOZOMOC: This takes us into a second parallax position that ensues from a shift to a focus on resistance and agency instead of a singular obsession with the critique of neoliberal governmentality through the deconstruction of an endless variety of technologies of self-care, whose “endless reiterations” render postmodern analysis anemically apolitical since the analyst can never complete a strategic study of something that is
always changing.
DEVON: All that is solid melts into air, Marx said. We can also think of that as the meta-theoretical problem of how we are now constantly having to renegotiate and refocus the “political recomposition analytics” of agency, strategically at least, in the midst of the challenges posed by the uses of the “sovereign ban” and “zones of exclusion” in neoconservative political projects today. This seems unnecessarily confusing because Leftist thinkers, Wendy Brown notwithstanding, have not yet discursively clarified how neoconservatism and neoliberalism operate as a Janus-faced political project unleashed, and often contradictorily integrated, into a singular hegemonic project that seeks to sustain American Empire through the partisan shock troops deployed against imagined and substantive insurrections of the unruly multitude. We can and must come to occupy spaces that are, paradoxically, opened up by the ability of neoliberal policies to promote a vision of deterritorialized “unruliness,” albeit for us through forms that resist Ayn Rand's chaotic form of “selfish rule” without borders. Can we counter-pose “communitary” values as an ethical basis for local participatory forms of autonomous governance derived from our mutual reliance interests and the reciprocity networks of the multitude in and through civil society as an alterNative form of place-based self-rule?
TEZOZOMOC: This brings us back to the definition of the state of exception. In Schmitt, this is similar to the corollary concept of “state of emergency” and basically reduces to the idea that “the sovereign…[has the]…ability to transcend the rule of law in the name of the public good.” That Schmitt and his Nazi protégés did not have to engage in a process of participatory consensus with all sectors is clear. Indeed Hitler used the partisans (Brown Shirts in this case) to limit any critical and open public discourse to define the “public good” and this continued even after the collapse of Nazism. Of course, the partisan threat of violence to limit the definition of the public good is precisely part of what led to the Holocaust version of the state of exception; imperial German culture being the other major component. This is a dead-end, epistemologically and ontologically, for everyone concerned. Yet the partisan subject stubbornly remains a nightmare reality in the politics of hate, fear, and exclusion unfolding in the USA today. For example, the writ of
habeas corpus is suspended in the name of national security, and the exception is incorporated as one side of a faultless and supposedly unmediated homology coeval with the so-called public good.
DEVON: The problem right now is
not that the partisan networks are effectively limiting public discourse through the menacing gaze and threats of violence against the Other; we are making sure of that right now through our mass mobilizations and public voice. Instead, the problem is that the partisan groups are effectively
blurring the categories of “Mexican” and “illegal alien” and of “citizen” and “non-citizen.” This remakes the extremist position so that it appears mainstream, patriotic, freedom-loving, and even perfectly constitutional. I think we can agree that the ability for the “Unitary Executive” (
Führer) to transcend the rule of law, even if acting to protect what might seem to a progressive or liberal democrat to always involve “contested” and even alternating concepts of the public good, is an
absolute violation of basic norms of “constitutive power,” per Foucault, as far as the foundational principles of liberal democracy are concerned – and by extension those of democratic socialism and perhaps even those of autonomous insurgencies. The Bush II administration conceptualized this in the infamous torture memos, its extraordinary rendition policy, and its total information surveillance programs. Among other “anti-terror” policies that underlie the demolition of
habeas corpus, the current state of exception at the federal level also transgresses previously fixed boundaries that have occasionally protected domestic citizens from unreasonable search and seizure and surveillance in the policing of terror, citizenship, and borders. I say, occasionally, because we should not forget the Repatriation Program, Operation Wetback, COINTELPRO, 1976 Eilberg Amendment, or Operation Gatekeeper. I hear the suspension of some of the basic principles of liberal democracy is making more conventionally conservative law professors and judges angry and nervous, and some are even a bit more interested in radical thought through a new found appreciation for classic Leftist (Marxist) warnings about the inherent antagonism between capitalism and democracy. Some very conservative jurists now fear what we have been interpreting in our conversation as an attempt to impose a “willed state of exception” through SB1070 and HB2281.
TEZOZOMOC: The “willed” state of exception may signal the start of a political shift in which the threat of partisan violence provokes a contradictory move by the sovereign, one that may not be entirely in the interests of, say, capitalist interests that oversee the CEO club of the state.
DEVON: We have a case in Arizona’s statutes where the sovereign ban has the effect of undermining, or at least disrupting, access to “sufficient” exploitable labor by the capitalists that control the agrifood sector. One has to wonder: Does this mean the partisans will now have to see if they can enter into and weather the underpaid and hazardous work of harvesting food for the nation’s table? That is obviously a rhetorical question and a more likely outcome is that the Arizona laws are simply increasing pressure for comprehensive federal immigration reform that will have to include “guestworker” provisions to guarantee the obtainment of surplus labor time in the agrifood sector.
TEZOZOMOC: So, you are saying that this “willed state of exception” is a structural response to the perceived manifold threats posed to the more intense telluric currents that qualify current partisan fervor. Are you are also implying that, in the end, this may include a significant electoral shift that may make the viability of the Republican/Tea Party mobilization in the American Southwest much more problematic?
DEVON: I am saying that the public and covert expressions of especially telluric and racialized partisan organizations are simply by-products of the “ecology of fear.” But this focus can mask the underlying structural violence of poverty that was born of a NAFTA-induced process of massive displacement, dispossession, and what I have tried in recent work to qualify as
translocalism instead of
transnationalism. I am also saying that the telluric threat erases any claims we might rearticulate on the basis of sustained intergenerational historical trauma among the ethnically and regionally diverse peoples of the Mesoamerican Diaspora. These alterNative tropes are being denied their immanence because the current discursive and legal zone of exclusion seldom slips above the conceptual horizon of the dominant mass media that myopically fail to recognize the full spectrum of forms of political life that populate the surface space of these prosaic American encounters.
TEZOZOMOC: Schmitt provides a fascinatingly relevant insight when he observes, in
Theory of the Partisan, that the “heart of the political is not enmity
per se but the distinction of friend and enemy” (65).
DEVON: Clausewitz’s most famous dictum is cited approvingly by Schmitt in the same passage: “War is the continuation of politics.” In Arizona, we can accurately invert this as the partisan's dictum: “Politics is a continuation of war,” recognizing the possibility that all Arizonans have now been forced, through partisan physical and epistemological violence, into a “culture war.” This was sparked by
correlative political projects that are pursuits of a neoconservative strategy to engage in
deconstitutive legal combat amidst an ecology of fear that feeds partisan violence and impinges on the policing of citizenship and borders. This is a state of exception that is being “willed” into existence by extremist groups that we must disqualify as renegades of democracy, albeit without reducing them to the object of our own recursive constructs and desires. The partisans cannot be reduced to dreaded hateful enemies of the future political reconstitution of American democracy. In other words, this combat is also
epistemological and this is why we have to establish a clear link in the public discourse between the policing of citizenship and the disciplining of dissent.
....To be continued
