Mbembe and Williams

This week I am particularly interested in Achille Mbembe's "Necropolitics" and Randall Williams's introduction to The Divided World.

1) Interestingly enough, I believe Mark Driscoll's Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan's Imperialism, 1895-1945 takes one of its jumping off points from Mbembe's "Necropolitics." I read Driscoll's book last year in a class on Japanese imperialism, and it's a good example of how to use Mbembe's ideas for something much larger.

In the book, Driscoll wants to "foreground the ways human and nonhuman resources stolen from colonial and domestic peripheries, together with excessive profits jacked from colonized renters and subaltern wage laborers, built Japan's imperial behemoth" (6).
Driscoll cites Mbembe, for example, here:

Reframing Marx's language and transcoding it into the mass cultural discourse of Tokyo in the 1920s, capitalists depend on the mugging grotesque of the living, erotic labor of subaltern and proletarian others for their very existence. Although some of the secondary and tertiary effects of Japan's imperialism could arguably be construed as "modernizing" for those who still accept that idiom, the suffering of colonized subaltern laborers enduring existential states Mbembe (2003) defines as "being-in-pain" was its primary cause. [. . .] So in this book I link dialectically the necro-logic of expropriation--colonial pillage and capitalist profiteering, what I call, following the Japanese sociologist Akagami Yoshitsuge (1931), the grotesque--with the bio-logic of creative, desiring life, what I call, after Minakata and his followers, the erotic. (6-7)

Driscoll does this complicated thing going from biopolitical (subjectivities left to fend for themselves or living labor),  neuropolitics (commodified, dead labor where the subject lives for commodities rather than for life), to necropolitics in very much the Mbembian sense (undead death or subjectivities who are de-ontologized and killed off).

So I think there's a lot we can do with this but i'd like to go over some questions, like what does Mbembe exactly mean in becoming a subject (14)? He says the human becomes a subject "in the struggle and work through which he or she confronts death. [. . .] Becoming subject therefore supposes upholding the work of death" (14).

2) in working with both Mbembe and Williams, there is also the ideas of sovereignty and decolonization movements. Sovereignty, according to Mbembe, is the "power and capacity to dictate who may live and who must die" (11). how can sovereignty work with decolonization? the obvious way it works is that decolonized subjects are taking sovereignty and basically power over their bodies/lives back into their own hands. but from there, what? do we run into the problems that mieville brought up with property and enclosures, that the sovereign is the singularity that merely follows in the path of what came before in terms of labor and property?
Richard Falk notes that "human rights progress, while definitely subversive of statist pretensions in certain key aspects, still remained generally compatible with the maintenance of existing geopolitical structures of authority and wealth in the world and, as such, exerted only a marginal influence" and mainly looked "outward to identify abuses in Communist and Third World countries" (qtd. in Williams 16), much less in their own backyard in the Pacific.
so to that end, are sovereignty and decolonization at odds? if they work together as they do in the hawaiian sovereignty movement, can this lead to decolonization and something more?
i feel like there's something more to this but can't tease it out....

3) hey, finally got around to looking up that DEFEND HAWAII thing. This is the website and this is what they say about their products, which are mostly tshirts and apparel with the logo:

Our mission is to DEFEND HAWAII
Hawaii is often referred to as ‘the melting pot’ because our diversity in PEOPLE as well as cultures. When Hawaii is home base, literal location is not a factor. The familiar tread, tying us, is always ALOHA. DEFEND HAWAII simply strives to preserve the notion, to DEFEND the Aloha Spirit, the Hawaii way of life. Wherever you are, you’re PROUD to be from Hawaii, representing the culture and it’s essences.
Our AR-15 Logo is often questioned, but a gun is the strongest symbolized statement for the word DEFEND. The logo is not meant to provoke violence, but rather figuratively suggest protection by the highest means. We’re here to plant the proverbial seed, initiate a positive thought process. To Defend Hawaii, is to Defend Aloha..

So, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, written in 1947. Basically I tried to take from it what I could, since I am not well versed in philosophy or Marxism or communism, especially in the specific contexts that Merleau-Ponty is talking about. I will write down some points below....

1) Merleau-Ponty has created the best in-a-nutshell definition of Marxism:

"In essence Marxism is the idea that history has a meaning--in other words, that it is intelligible and has a direction--that it is moving toward the power of the proletariat, which as the essential factor of production is capable of resolving the contradictions of capitalism, of organizing a humane appropriation of nature, and, as the 'universal class,' able to transcend national and social conflicts as well as the struggle between man and man. To be a Marxist is to believe that economic problems and cultural or human problems are a single problem and the proletariat as history has shaped it holds the solution to that problem." (129-130)

Another good thing on Marxism:

"Marxism had understood that it is inevitable that our understanding of history should be partial since every consciousness is itself historically situated. . . . Marxism discovered . . . a new foundation for historical truth in the spontaneous logic of human existence, in the proletariat's self-recognition and the real development of the revolution. Marxism rested on the profound idea that human perspectives, however relative, are absolute because there is nothing else and no destiny. We grasp the absolute through our total praxis, if not through our knowledge--or, rather, men's mutual praxis is the absolute" (18)

I think this and his later description of how the unification of the proletariat (even though it is an eventual failure) (located on 147) is a really great description of Marxism for the clueless (ie, me), so I appreciate his frank talk about it. 

2) As far as I can tell, Merleau-Ponty has very contextual, specific things he's talking about but every once in a while surfaces and has these tidbits of interest/wisdom that I've latched onto. I focused on some of the History and Terror ones. His talk on History is interesting and useful particularly because he wants to talk about history as subjective and not teleological. He says that the "paradox of history" is that it is " a contingent future... appears here a harsh notion of responsibility, based not on what men intended but what they find they have achieved in light of the event" (42). So the notion of historical contingency--that history or your place in it is related to intersections of things and not free floating is such an integral point. In another section he says "The Terror of History culminates in Revolution and History is Terror because there is contingency. Everyone looks through the facts for his motives and then erects a schematization of the future which cannot be strictly proved" (91), and that "History is Terror because we have to move into it not by any straight line that is always easy to trace, but by taking our bearings at every moment in a general situation which is changing" (94). So from this, I'm taking that Terror is the not knowing of history/future? not quite sure what he means....

Also, his notion of historical responsibility is interesting, if we want to talk about that, and I think can be related to Arendt. 

3) Violence! He has some interesting stuff to say on violence. For instance, "The original violence which is the foundation of all other forms of violence, is that exerted by History when objectified as an incomprehensible Will before which all individual opinions are compounded as equally fragile hypotheses" (19). An objective history is the original violence.... I think I see his point and I can see how powerful it can be, but not sure how this is the originary violence? 

Then, Merleau-Ponty argues that revolution is violence (i think?):

"A revolution, even when founded on a philosophy of history, is a forced revolution and it is violence; correlatively, opposition in the name of humanism can be counterrevolutionary. [. . .] The irony of fate. . . brings to light not just the terror which each man holds for every other man but, above all, that basic Terror in each of us which comes from the awareness of his historical responsibility" (93). 

Bolded for emphasis and interest. So I think this links back to history and the original violence of history, since revolution is fought based on history? 

Yet later, Merleau-Ponty says that "We do not have a choice between purity and violence but between different kinds of violence. Inasmuch as we are incarnate beings, violence is our lot" (109). So we're stuck with violence but we wanna avoid these other instances of violence and where does that leave us? 

I'm probably just reading these tidbits and not sticking them contextually but some discussion and clarification on this would be wonderful!

Thoughts on Arendt so far

So I only read Hannah Arendt's Imperialism section and have just started into Totalitarianism, skipped the first part. So these are what my questions are drawing on...

1) Ok so this totally might seem random but there is something interesting when Arendt says

"When, in the era of imperialism, businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of successful businessmen and 'thought in continents,' these private practices and devices were gradually transformed into rules and principles for the conduct of public affairs." (138)

What arrests me here is the arrangement of imperialism and the phrase "thinking in continents." It's said that Cecil Rhodes "thought in continents," in keeping with his "expansion is everything" (124), so I want to ask why continents? Even for Robert Young (who we read in Chris Connery's class a few weeks ago) wants to call postcolonial thought "tricontinental thought" because it was born out of the Tricontinental Conference in 1966. The irony of this is that it was held in Havana, in Cuba, an island, and we might suppose that islands feel so closely to one continent or another that they are subsumed with it. And we also might suppose that continents are the ones with superior power of any kind in comparison to islands. However, islands are a bit trickier than that and hard to claim or incorporate into any one territory.
Perhaps the mistake with imperialism and expansion was that they were thinking in continents and thus not sustainably, but with the "insanity" of unlimited expansion.  I still don't think we've gotten outta this mindset...

2) Was bothered by some statements made by Arendt and wasn't sure how to take them?

"Colonization took place in America and Australia, the two continents that, without a culture and a history of their own, had fallen into the hands of Europeans" (186)

"The word 'race' has a precise meaning only when and where peoples are confronted with such tribes of which they have no historical record and which do not know any history of their own. [. . .] races in this sense were found only in regions where nature was particularly hostile. What made them different from other human beings was not at all the color of their skin but the fact that they behaved like a part of nature, that they treated nature as their undisputed master, that they had not created a human world, a human reality, and that therefore nature had remained, in all its majesty, the only overwhelming reality--compared to which they appeared to be phantoms, unreal and ghostlike. They were, as it were, 'natural' human beings who lacked the specifically human character, the specifically human reality, so that when European men massacred them they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder." (192)

These are two examples of things that bothered me... what are Arendt's politics? From these two statements which at least appear to take things seriously and aren't trying to be ironic or anything, she casts judgement and apparently erases the indigenous from America and Australia, and then seems to call for civilized human vs. barbarian discourse. Some of her other statements seem helpful and profound, so a bit difficult to reconcile them....

3) Some of her interesting and useful stuff is here. For example, for racism Arendt says: "no matter whether racism appears as the natural result of a catastrophe or as the conscious instrument for bringing it about, it is always closely tied to contempt for labor, hatred of territorial limitation, general rootlessness, and an activistic faith in one's own divine chosenness" (197). I think this is really useful in thinking about the origins of racism and what the idea of another race threatens.
Then there's what Arendt says about human rights:

"From the beginning the paradox involved in the declaration of inalienable human rights was that it reckoned with an 'abstract' human being who seemed to exist nowhere, for even savages lived in some kind of social order. If a tribal or other 'backward' community did not enjoy human rights, it was obviously because as a whole it had not yet reached that stage of civilization, the stage of popular and national sovereignty, but was opposed by foreign or native despots. The whole question of human rights, therefore, was quickly and inextricably blended with the question of national emancipation; only the emancipated sovereignty of the people, of one's own people, seemed to be able to ensure them." (291)

"The calamity of the rightless is . . . that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever." (295) 

Again, there is this savage/barbarian and civilized dichotomy, but Arendt has a point about these human rights that are somehow unenforceable, which she says on page 293. Moreover, her discussion in the chapter talks about how certain ideas obscure the fact that we ignore groups of people and do not take responsibility for humanity as a whole, particularly by breaking ourselves up into smaller, divided groups. This a) seems related to China Mieville and his discussion on the failures of international law and self-determination and b) We just read Octavia Butler in my TAship and perhaps one solution to human rights or the universal human is NOT about each of us finding a complete and total sense of agency but seeing ourselves in mutual symbiosis with each other, mutually dependent, which we are anyway and what i'm sure green peace and the like have been saying all along. But it's more useful to think about it in the way that maybe we should switch our formulations and think not necessarily that the first step is self-determination or complete agency, but agency with compromises and mutual symbiosis.

Thoughts on After Evil

This response focuses on Robert Meister's After Evil. Posting on what i've read thus far....

Themes brought up: time (especially the now/present), physical bodies, pain, framework of victim/perpetrator/beneficiary, recognition, different kinds of justice, affect, subjectivity.....

1) Meister's discussion of the genre of human rights discourse as a narrative is really interesting, and I think it's pretty clear to see what he's talking about just by watching in particular the TV show Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU). Let me first just say that I love this show with its characters and the questions it raises, but the narrative and how it raises its questions are things to consider, since I have always seen it as a spectacle, a pornography of rape, incest, abuse, and victimization. The subjects of this drama are women, children, immigrants, people of color all cast as victims deemed 'special' and are interrogated by the police investigators and district attorneys to tell their stories of pain and horror, often repeatedly. We often don't see the actual rape or crime occur, but see its aftereffects. Thus, "the victim's original torture is narrated as a secret humiliation and defeat and its public exposure as a dramatic reversal of fortune that brings about eventual moral victory. Such narratives take place against a scene of private darkness followed by one of public light. (Past torture had to be done in secret--it could not have been broadcast; the description of that torture has to be public, it cannot be covered up if healing is to occur)" (Meister 67). As Meister further says, "It is thus not bodily pain itself but the narrative genre used to depict it that creates moral feeling in the audience. If accounts of physical pain used the conventions of pornography or eschatology, they might evoke feelings in their audience of moral superiority or moral vulnerability or both" (67). SVU is sort of like a miniature, individualized version of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Meister talks about that makes it seem more privatized and individual than an institution or human rights culture, as Meister puts it. SVU also takes up the role of victim and perpetrator, as well as beneficiaries, trying to expose others as part of the crime but also incorporating us, the viewers into the narrative. We are the "people who may want to feel bad about the conditions described but who would be made highly uncomfortable if the victim were portrayed as blaming them. In social melodrama the victim is always constructed as innocent (morally undamaged by suffering) so that the melodrama's audience, which is likely to include beneficiaries of such suffering, can understand themselves as bystanders who are capable of feeling compassion without fear" (63-4).
I'm just thinking through SVU here to think about how this new Human Rights Discourse can be seen in our everyday lives.


2) Some interesting connections or points brought up with the pastness of evil, guilt, blame, appropriateness, confession, compassion, and overcoming.
I find that the word "overcoming" is used a lot in conversations about discrimination or disadvantages that people must get over, and Meister mentions it when he says "the historical victims of slavery could never claim to be a national majority and now claim to have finally 'overcome' only as a consequence of Barack Obama's election as president" (83), where "overcome" is used as a way to prolong transition, deferring "closure in order to make permanent the project of national recovery" (83). Meister further says that "national recovery from a history of racial oppression requires both a continuing awareness of the dangers of relapse and a constant vigilance against the repetition of past patterns and practices. This argument implies that we can never recover from our past unless we believe ourselves to be in permanent recovery--that we are never in greater danger of reviving racism than when we believe ourselves to have overcome it" (101). This is never more perfectly said and embodied in the idea of "post-race." If social justice discourse sets itself up as overcoming injustices (or evils), isn't this a continuation of the postponement of justice? how do we frame our discourse differently so that we are not caught in a cyclical battle?


3) What is justice/just/justness? What does justice look like, and do we all have the same definition of justice? There is justice-as-struggle and justice-as-reconciliation, but what do these justices mean, and are they different?


4) the perpetrator/victim/beneficiary appear to be unstable categories--people can straddle many areas and sometimes are privileged depending on the situation (see 33, 53). meister primarily associates this with identification with a certain category. these categories can be useful but also can be turned around, with the perpetrators/beneficiaries identifying as victims. it still seems to go back to the melodramatic good vs evil, wrongdoer vs wronged--how do we get out of this?

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)

The Commons

Reading about the Magna Carta in Peter Linebaugh's The Magna Carta Manifesto this week and especially the idea of the commons brings me back to the UN Convention on genocide to consider--what else is missing?
I think we briefly mentioned this last class but one thing missing from genocide and the destruction of a group of people is dispossession. There is nothing in the UN Convention on genocide about (re)moving people from one place to another and the trauma of being cut off from the land and the people. Dispossession goes back to the commons. Without the commons and the very earth that gives sustenance and subsistence, there can be no people. I might be using commons as a noun and not a verb here, but dispossession also involves the loss of "sharing, agency, and equality" (Linebaugh 279), since after all, "the commons is an activity and, if anything, it expresses relationships in society that are inseparable from relations to nature" (Linebaugh 279). What could be more expressive of the relationship between people and earth sustaining each other?

Linebaugh points out that the Magna Carta has been used extensively, and often for purposes that contradict the text when looking at it as a whole, or for purposes that just need an old law to back it up so we can say that it hails from tradition. But tradition, Linebaugh says, brings it back to the commons and the relationship between land, people, and their protection from greedy and domineering kings who would take away sustenance and livelihood. The Magna Carta gives back and protects the peoples right to, in essence, life, or as Linebaugh details, first economic, then political and legal rights. Bringing us back to the Magna Carta would let us reinterpret its use and evaluate its value and application today.

This leads me to some thoughts on access to a sort of commons we have today. I know that California is a bit different but in Hawai'i you are supposed to be allowed access to the beach for sustenance. Writing about this, poet Juliana Spahr says:

Public Access Shoreline Hawai'i vs. Hawai'i Country Planning Commission, 1995 WL 515898 protects indigenous Hawaiians' traditional and customary rights of access to gather plants, harvest trees, and take game. In this decision the court said about the balance between the rights of private landowners and the rights of persons exercising traditional Hawaiian culture that "the western concept of exclusivity is not universally applicable in Hawai'i" (Spahr 116)

Even if you aren't staying at the hotel, legally, all beaches in Hawai'i are public property. Supposedly, the state owns the beach up to the high water mark. However, what this means in terms of access is open to debate. [. . .] The confusion benefits property owners. (98-9)

This website explains the whole thing better than I can, but in essence, beaches are supposed to be publicly accessible. More important than recreation, it links back to a sort of commons to the beach and the ocean, a "sea of islands" (Hau'ofa) rather than suntanning.

Hawai'i's Public Trust Doctrine can be found here and California's Public Trust Doctrine can be found here (I don't expect anyone to read it, just putting links for references and just in case).

Last questions:
What, then, are the commons? Linebaugh lists several on p.239-240. Are there different types of commons for different folks? Internet commons or land commons?
If common rights are the things Linebaugh lists on p.45, how is this different from human rights? Should they be different, and why are they different? Are human rights, for example, more individual and should we perhaps think of human rights as more collective?

Genocide's tension, etc.

 Thoughts on the reading: 

To use the term "genocide" to describe a process has continuously troubled me, as McDonnell and Moses lay out in their conclusion of "Lemkin as Historian of Genocide in the Americas." Like them, I am also struck by the notion that on one hand, calling something a genocide brings attention to the event. On the other hand, genocide has struck me as a term for "victims" or peoples that somehow lack historical agency, perhaps because it conjures images of prisons, camps, and lifeless bodies. It somehow seems to turn away from "the continuity of folk cultures that persisted just as they changed" (McDonnell and Moses 521) as these people employ survival strategies. Maybe because of the Jewish presence in media, the genocide of the Holocaust never seems like the Jewish people are lost to history, but for Native American and Hawaiian genocides, there is a certain "pastness" that at least in my experience, appears to cling, which goes back to Lemkin's idea of genocide as cultural death--could this be related to Renato Rosaldo's "imperialist nostalgia?"* 

Moreover, if Lemkin "regarded the extinction of culture as genocide" and "equated culture with high culture" (McDonnell and Moses 514), does this mean he did not believe in such a thing as decolonization? What did he think of decolonization? 

Another question that came up for me while reading Las Casas (it's a bit random and different from my other question): Most of the places, especially in the beginning of Las Casas's account speaks of the islands of the Indies, and one of the main points Las Casas makes is that these islands go from "populous and filled with native-born peoples" (5) to "uninhabited and despoiled of people" (7). Do reports that Las Casas writes against and even Las Casas's account itself help contribute to the idea of islands as solitary and isolated? Elizabeth DeLoughrey notes in Routes and Roots that Western empires used “western models of passive and empty space such as terra and aqua nullius, which were used to justify territorial expansion” (3) that separates the routes of connection among island archipelagoes. 

*a mood of nostalgia that makes racial domination appear innocent and pure; people mourning the passing or transformation of what they have caused to be transformed. Imperialist nostalgia revolves around a paradox: A person kills somebody and then mourns the victim; or someone deliberately alters a life form and then regrets that things have not remained as they were. . . Imperialist nostalgia uses a pose of "innocent yearning" both to capture peoples' imagination and to conceal its complicity with often brutal domination (R. Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis), quickie def. from here.