Questions....

Mieville makes a compelling case for thinking about international law and its relationship to imperialism when making the point that “capitalism is juridical capitalism” (260).   There are a lot of arguments happening in this text with histories (political theory versus international relations theory, for example) that I’m not well versed, which makes it difficult to find a solid entry point into this conversation beyond mere summary.

However, many things stood out for me as questions rather than as responses per se.  The statement that “without violence there could be no legal form and without imperialism there could be no international law” (293) is an assertion that I agreed with as I was reading the text, but am trying to get some critical distance to understand the implications more deeply.  He doesn’t mention Weber’s well known definition of the state: “an entity which successfully claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence” (or I’ve read elsewhere interpreted as “legitimate use of physical force in a given territory”).  Given this definition, is Mieville interested in redefining the state?  It seems like this widely accepted definition of the state accepts that violence is inherent to it.  He does seem to gesture toward Weber on page 286 in this citation: ‘International law comprehends as actors only continuing monopolies of force’, but he quickly leaves that and goes on to criticize the interpretation of force, like in the Gulf War in the 1990s.  Is he arguing for a dismantling of the state? 

His argument from there seems to suggest that the state and the law mutually constitute one another and actually anticipate international law.   I guess I’m getting lost in the logic being employed as he separates the state from international law at certain points in the argument when talking about “imperialism as a structuring process of the modern international system” (291) in his discussion from pages 291-293.  It's like he thinks the state is structurally important to his argument, but he doesn't critique the state due to his focus on international law...but there is no international law without the state.  So, I'm just trying to get my head around what the implications are for the state in this argument.  In equating the law with capitalism, does he think that communist states would abolish the need for law?  Because then you are still left with the state issue, right?

Another basic question I have is: how is Mieville’s investment in a Marxist approach to international law rooted in class struggle in tension with a postmodern approach, which would seek to breakdown the framework?  His argument about civilization is provoking this question:  “It would be a postmodern commonplace to claim that civilization (or anything else) is defined by its ‘other’, in this case the ‘uncivilised’.  However, in this instance the crucial antithesis of ‘civilised’ was semi-civilised—those states which were neither beyond the purview of law, nor sovereign, but ‘quasi-sovereign’” (247-248).  He concludes that section by stating that “because ‘civilisation’ is not a discursive strategy for ‘othering’, but a result of the paradoxes of actually-existing sovereignty (248).  I understand that he is rooting this in a historical and specific moment and thus, he is suggesting that its specificity means that it isn’t discursive, right?  But it seems to me that the need for interpretation in some ways implicates its discursivity….?  I was left puzzling over what the advantages of a postmodern approach might be in this discussion.

Finally, this is totally random, but all I could think of at certain points when thinking about how "the law is constituted by relations of violence" (286) was how these questions relate to the issues that Judith Butler raises in "Burning Acts".

the law

I'm not very familiar with law or writing about law, so I'm just going to share some of bits I got from this piece, in no necessarily coherent order.

Clarifying questions:
1) I'm sure we were going to do this anyway, but could we talk about Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" and exactly what his argument is laying out for us? I think I'm getting the gist but sometimes he loses me. Important connections to Mieville that I see include natural/positive law and policing.

2) Page 136-7: could we possibly go over how China Mieville's Between Equal Rights connects law, violence  sovereignty, and self-help in this section? Not quite sure I'm getting it. What does "self-help" mean?

Some important quotes from that area are: "To understand, as Pashukanis clearly does, that robbery (non-consensual possession of another's commodity) goes hand-in-hand with trade (consensual trade of commodities), is to understand that violence is implicit in the commodity, and therefore legal, form." (134)
"Law and violence are inextricably linked as regulators of sovereign claims." (135)

Other questions:
3) In the quotes above and especially in talking about McDougal, Mieville makes the important observation that "Interpretation is not something we do to understand the law, it is the process that is law" (39). He also says that "Having dispensed with formalism, law must be part of the political process. This means that law itself is a political process, and the 'meanings' and applications of legal norms cannot be pre-determined. They are constituted in interpretation, contextually" (41). This makes a lot of sense to me and also brings up questions of translation--ultimately I think one of Mieville's main points is that law is translated into all these possibilities, both positive and negative, but because it is based on violence and capital/commodification, law is "fundamentally unreformable" (3)*. The end of law would mean global emancipation (318). But how do we imagine this end of law, and wouldn't there always be a problem of translation?

4) Random but related to what we've been talking about.... an excerpt from Naoki Sakai's "Modernity and Its Critique: The Problem of Universalism and Particularism":

the West is never content with what it is recognized as by its others; it is always urged to approach others in order to ceaselessly transform its self-image; it continually seeks itself in the midst of interaction with the Other; it would never be satisfied with being recognized but would wish to recognize others; it would rather be a supplier of recognition than a receiver thereof. In short, the West must represent the moment of the universal under which particulars are subsumed. Indeed, the West is particular in itself, but it also constitutes the universal point of reference in relation to which others recognize themselves as particularities. And, in this regard, the West thinks itself to be ubiquitous. (95)

particularism and universalism do not form an antimony but mutually reinforce each other. As a matter of fact, particularism has never been a truly disturbing enemy of universalism or vice versa. Precisely because both are closed off to the individual who can never be transformed into the subject or what infinitely transcends the universal, neither universalism nor particularism is able to come across the Other; otherness is always reduced to the Other, and thus repressed, excluded, and eliminated in them both. And after all, what we normally call universalism is a particularism thinking itself as universalism, and it is worthwhile doubting whether universalism could ever exist otherwise. (98)

I thought this could be a point in thinking about genocides and the Holocaust--if we say that the Holocaust cannot be compared, we are making it particular (or are we making it universal, as the thing every other genocide is compared to?), and this just gets us into the problem of never getting us out of this universalism/particularism loop. Just a side note..... I feel there's more to say about this but can't think right now.


*important quotes i want to point out but don't have time to contextualize:
"disputation and contestation is intrinsic to the commodity, in the fact that its private ownership implies the exclusion of others. Similarly, violence--coercion--is at the heart of the commodity form, and thus the contract. For a commodity meaningfully to be 'mine-not-yours'--which is, after all, central to the fact that it is a commodity to be exchanged--some forceful capabilites are implied. If there were nothing to defend its 'mine-ness', there would be nothing to stop it becoming 'yours', and then it would no longer be a commodity, as I would not be exchanging it. Coercion is implicit." (126)
International law "is the dialectical result of the very process of conflictual, expanding inter-polity interaction in an age of early state forms and mercantile colonialism. [. . .] International law embodies the violence of colonialism and the abstraction of commodity exchange. It is . . . that international law is colonialism" (169)
"Colonialism is in the very form, the structure of international law itself, predicated on global trade between inherently unequal polities, with unequal coercive violence implied in the very commodity form. This unequal coercion is what forces particular content into the legal form." (178)
sovereignty is a "theory of independence, not equality" (185)