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..

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)