this is a bit I'm writing
all the spots but the quotes are me -
If you use it please note me
if you cite it, if you quote it - give credit where it's due
I will not include a bib. with names and dates (but they are in-text cited) - no titles beyond the as yet, apopolologies in requium
comments, critique, criticism contestation welcome
addendum: it's about 8-9 pages minus footnotes which I refuse to cut and paste indvidually and the -ography
not html formatted and not easily ad-text digested
pps means I intend to annotate - add a FootNote
oh, and yes, no I'm not finished - like a pre-draft
shalom
title: 20k Leagues of Mediocrity [???]
<c>Biopolitics
I will begin by looking to some of the constitutional contradictions produced in the passage of the USA Patriot Act. The fundamental alterations to the Bill of Rights (fn) and the blurring of jurisdictional powers (fn) concomitant with the claiming, exercising and expanding of unitary executive privileges and exceptionality have precipitated in the confessed commission of the illegal monitoring of national communications traffics by the NSA. Without ignoring or foreclosing any questions surrounding intentionality, I will shift towards a partial examination of effects. How is this intrusion into privacy (mis)understood as necessary? How does this (mis)understanding manifest as discourse? as silence? as (in)action? How is it heard? How is it spoken? As a legitimized illegality, how does it operate panoptically? Resonating in multiple registers, what reverberations percolate and permutate multiple experiencings of alterity? Where does the policing of potential slip into a persistant perceptual prosecution? How does/is/might such an environment foster with neo-biological (fn) furor an exhumation and/or reinvigoration of racialized and ethnicized prejudices? As an awaiting, an appraisal, a watchfulness, how do flattened representations of both self and other circulate? How does this observation mentality towards and within Islam, its practitioners, and the peoples of South East Asian and Middle Eastern cultures and heritages specifically as well as upon on-conformity more generally +? Framing unity and solidarity monolithically, difference is labeled deviance, critique is collapsed into criticism - discourse and dialogue are reduced to a binary where the State unilaterally - speaks itself as Truth in, of, and as singularity, allthewhile evincing fear, suspicion and injustice as unfortunate necessities inextricably linked to the progress of securing the Homeland. Enmeshed within the complexities, contradictions, collusions, and contestations of social, economic, ideological, military and political histories, realities and aspirations, how do events live as spectacle, as the spectacular(ized), as reminder, as rejoinder - as a call to action and as an enactment of strength in a oneness which is uniform? What everyday violences become effaced - sewn up within the creases of time and conflict, or are brushed off the cuffs of dominance as so much noisome dust - erased as unremarkable.
kw: nationalism, hegemony, empiricism, religion, ideology and the naturalization of power
introducing policy
Law does no more than symbolically consecrate - ... [(a) the] recording [the (re)inscribing of social realities] in a form which renders it both eternal and universal
Bordieux; 1972:188
The relationship between earth, terra. territory, and terror has changed ...
technoscience ... blurs the distinction between war and terrorism
Borradori (D); 2003:101
Following the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in September of 2001, Congress rushed to enact the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (USA Patriot Act) of 2001 (Public Law 107-56)
time to enact.ppl.that read it.
As a response to the attacks, the USA Patriot Act aimed in part to ameliorate what were framed as obstructions to information gathering and sharing by US and foreign intelligence agencies. Additionally, it sought to take advantage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Acts (FISA) flexible warrants in the gathering and monitoring of information and electronic communications. It also sought to interrupt and seize terrorist funding and to impose mandatory detention and deportation for suspected (non US only?) terrorist activities. In examining this legislation and some of its effects, we cannot ignore the ways in which "notions of honor, patronage, and ... appropriate behavior ... have shaped the construction of politics ... in profound ways" (Hansen; 2001:226). Additionally, and more importantly for this inquiry, we must attend to the ways in which these notions themselves shift in relation to policies.
Alongside these governmental acts, a media campaign reiterating and reinforcing certain US ideals of freedom (fn), democracy (fn?) and capitalism (fn). Operating congruently with messages emphasizing heightened awareness regarding "suspicious" persons and activities, how have these messages served to create and reenforce an othering towards Islam and its actual or perceived practitioners? How does it act as "a kind of media noise concerning pseudo-actuality [that] falls like silence ... impos[ing] silence on everything that speaks and acts" (Derrida; 2002:90). These messages reflect, as Alexander and Mohanty note, dominant ideas of "nation and citizenship [which are] largely premised within normative parameters of masculinity and heterosexuality" (1997:xiv). They stand in direct contrast to notions of poly-amorphous "multiculturalism [which] is an assault not on Europe or Europeans but on Eurocentrism ... relativiz[ing] ... it as a geographical fiction that flattens ... cultural diversity" (Stam; 1997:191).
Extending the binary of "with us or for the terrorists", the Bush administration claimed a strategic position endorsing proactive military intervention in pursuing its declared War on Terror. It is a policy which reflects what Banerjee names "hegemonic masculinity ... [e]quat[ing] weakness with the feminine and strength with the masculine" (2005:105). In the non-specificity regarding the nature and source of the threat it allows for a free-floating anxiety to surface. What is understood as response glides (at times imperceptibly) into reaction - or reactivity. As Foucault says, it is "the theor[ization] of character ... [functioning within and through] establish[ment] and reve[lation] ... between objects of need and between visible individuals .... [It] make[s] possible ... the designation ... the derivation ... the [(dis)jointed] articulation ... and the attribution of certain representations [and certain relations] to certain others" (1978:203). It speaks a sense of self as same and identity as singular in contradistinction to an (an)other named different, deviant and dangerous. It is a rhetoric which circulates in concert with "the techniques and rationalities that produce the state ... simultaneously producing economy and society as fields to be governed and framed through politics" (emphasis added; Stepputat; 2001:303). People come to be understood - seen, observed and measured - within a tabulated field, a discursively constructed table, where alterity is named suspect and diversity, dialogue and differance (fn) become flattened and silenced under auspices of homogeneity in the name of strength and unity.
It is an identitarian policing evocative of majoritarianism (fn) whence "the supervision of normality ... firmly encased in a medicine or a psychiatry [is] provided ... with a sort of ‘scientificity’ ... supported by a juridical apparatus ... g[i]v[ing] it [and its policing a] legal justification" (Foucault; 1977:296). Even as "[p]atriarchy and male dominance have meant that masculinity has been seen [and constructed] as immutable and natural" (Banerjee, 2005:7), we must "insist that the word ‘patria’ is not merely masculine in gender but names the father as the source of legitimate identity" (Spivak; 1988:130). This intertwining of these notions: self, family, home and nation - circulates discursively alongside so many other binaries, reductively manifesting (one of) its opposite(s) in representations of others.
Following the 9-11 tragedy, images of militarized Islamic fundamentalism floated out upon the media waves into the seas of a shocked and awed public. Innundating a public still reeling, still casting about for some sense amidst the grief and tragedy, understanding was framed. "They hate us for our freedom," Bush has said. (fn). America has named itself, as inheritor and legatee of Western European enlightenment traditions, to embody the guarantee and as this embodiment to be entitled to act as guerrelous guarantor, as saviour and securer of the perpetuation of American idea(l)s of self as same, as true, as manifest, destined and universal. It is partially, as Collins notes, precisely "[b]ecause American citizenship is so often taken for granted ... [that] we often have difficulty seeing not only how deeply nationalistic U.S. society is, but how its nationalisms affect us" (2000:230). Diverse histories become flattened and the United States soil, soaked in blood since even before its inception, comes to be taken as birthright. It is an inheritance of, as Berry says, the "assimilation and separation ...rooted in the nature and expression of Eurocentrism" (2000:109). The violences enacted upon bodies and minds, selves, families, communities and cultures of slaves, immigrants and so many Others become defaced, erased or rewritten in the grand narratives of progress.
And where are we to even begin to address this? As Said tells us, "criticism must think of itself as life-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, [dominionism (fn) (?),] and abuse; its social goals are noncoercive knowledge[s] produced in [and by] the interests of human freedom[s]" (1983:29). We stand amidships upon sea-legs perhaps newly known drifting within latitudes of "the dualism[s constructed] between culture and nature ... pervad[ing] our culture .... [Dualisms which are further compounded by] a patriarchal ideology which privileges culture over nature" (Jackson; 1998:134). Like so many thieves come in the night, a tyrannical, a piratical voicing names itself as singularity, as truth, as justice and democracy operating under the auspices of objectivity, impartiality, science and reason we are riding high upon waves sinking and casting so many ships adrift in the tidal "confusion of surface appearance[s] with underlying realit[ies, of] symptoms with causes" (Kabeer; 1994:73).
It is as an ocean upon which we navigate discursively, dialogically and polyvocally where revenants (fn) man the helm, and the trajectory seems more a travesty of dead reckoning than a true course set by, of and for the interests of the masses left to man the rigging. It is as a journey from here to there where we are arrived reflecting phantasmagorically a "binary thinking, [where] one element is objectified as the Other, and is viewed as an object to be manipulated and controlled" (Collins; 2000:70). It is, as Kabeer says, a "promotion of particular world views ... constructed [upon] a hierarchy which privileges certain kinds of information ... certain kinds of knowers ... [and certain] views [of] reality in an essentially [antagonistic and] atomistic way" (1994:72). As Kandiyoti notes, the "definitions of who and what constitutes the nation have a crucial bearing on [our] notions of national unity and alternative claims to sovereignty as well as on the sorts of gender relations that should inform the nationalist project (fn)" (original emphases; xxxx:378).
While I could here perhaps delve further into (un)certain murky depths regarding ideas of nationalisms, important here is the ways in which intentions manifest effects; how "the attempt[s] to draw rigid cultural boundaries ... reify [and flatten] culture[s]" (Roseberry; 1994:49-50). The "assumptions on which full group membership are based ... all negate ... [subaltern] realities" (Collins; 2000:12). "[W]e should", as Khattak cogently reminds us, "always be critical of our expectations from confrontations that are ostensibly about good versus evil, rather than justice and empowerment" (2004:229). Even as it is "[w]hen the significance of legal hegemonies goes unrecognized, [and] they become even more powerful because they are assumed, quite incorrectly, to be natural or benign" (Nader; 2003:10). We need to interrogate " the manner in which collective identities, nation self-images, and political cultures are negotiated, reworked and reconstructed" (Norval; 2001:184). It is precisely the specific manifestations of a US "[m]ajoritarian nationalism, imbricated via bio-political state and cultural ascendency, [that] hinges upon and facilitates the homogenization of populations and individuals to mobilize human beings [to be maximized] as resources for state productivity" (Chatterji; 2004:324) that we must examine further.
We are drawn to what Foucault has called the limits of representation, as well as those of "discourse", which as Said has told us, "did not simply disappear but became invisible .... [Further, ] if it [did] disappear it did so for political reasons, the better for it to be used for political reasons, the better for it to be used to practice a more insidious form of control over its material[s] and its subjects" (1983:219). Although, as Spivak reminds us, "no rigorous definition of anything is ultimately possible" (1988:77); from the shifting sands eddying within the breakwaters of experience understanding is sieved and framed through cultural lenses. Through a selective delimitation and circulation (or silencing) of difference, dissent, and dialogue, populations and cultures become dis-membered, re-membered (fn Bhabha) and re-presented. They are made to manifest through a violent rendering as apparently transparent - flattened and characterized. "Domination always involves attempts to objectify ... subordinate group[s]. ... The foundations of intersecting oppositions (and oppressions) become grounded in interdependent concepts of binary thinking, oppositional difference, objectification and social hierarchy" (Collins; 2000:71).
Power, however, operates micro-dynamically. It circulates within the interstices of differánce (fn) that dominance would attempt to sew up in the patterning of culture as cut from a single (divine) cloth. As Radcliffe says, "[t]he formulations of state spatial power are not created and fixed once and for all, but rest on quotidian work - including ideological, representational , and material work - carried out by diverse social subjects, themselves reproduced within the inventories and power effects of state territoriality" (2001:143). Possibilities and potentials proliferate, seeping through the seams. Even as "[h]egemony is about obtaining consent and legitimacy, about dominance and subordination, [it engenders multiplicities] both constraining and enabling" (Nader; 2002:119). While "the nation-state is [(or should be)] a legitimate representation of the will and interests of its citizens" (Hansen & Stepputat; 2001:7); causality in this formulation must not be read as linear. Power resides multiply and manifests in differánce, even (and perhaps especially) where dominance tries to (re)enforce a homogeneity.
As Foucault notes, the nation-state enacts "a policy of coercions that act upon the body, [as] a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behaviour[s]. ... [It operates] a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down, rearranges it. ... Discipline is a political anatomy of detail" (1977:138-9). A discursive discipline can be seen at work "controlling ... the very ways in which the future may or may not be thought" (Butler; 2004:92). It can be heard to speak "a colonization of the mind" where, as Shohat recalls, "bodies, language, and thought [become] regulated to a disciplining, corrective, normalising machine" (2002:265). "[A]t the basis of the state, of power, of legitimacy, we find, purely and simply, violence" (Hansen & Stepputat; 2001:15).
As a matter of course, "the production or shaping of culture occurs in ... context[s] of unequal access to power" (Roseberry; 1994:48), but one must note the predominance of an "[i]deology [that] does not question the foundation[s], the limits, or the root[s] of representation[s] .... [And yet, i]t situates all knowledge[s] in [this unexamined] space of representations ... formulat[ing] the knowledge of ... [an essential, universal and universalizable] law ... providing its organization [an artifactual reality]. ... [It] superimpose[s] all knowledge upon a representation ... [charting a course of tabulation, categorization and hierarchy which come to live as ] immedia[te and (in)]escap[able]" (Foucault; 1970:240-1). It is here that a "knowledge of history, a recognition of the importance of ... circumstance, an analytical capacity for making distinctions [act as specific ballast, for they all] ... trouble the quasi-religious authority of being comfortably at home among one’s people, supported by known powers and acceptable values, protected against the [alien, oppositional and threatening] outside" (Said; 1983:15-6). As Foucault says, "it is [precisely] in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together" (1976:100).
All speech involves risk. We risk exposing ourselves, our ideas and our ideals to contradiction, to contestation. But rather than compounding our frailty, it is this heterogenous and poly-vocal dialogue which stands to clarify common struggles and aspirations. We must question this iteration that would name itself final, as beyond erring and interrogation even while it runs errantly amok upon a trajectory which brooks little latitude for a substantive change in course. As Nader says, "law is often not a neutral regulator of power but instead the vehicle by which different parties attempt to gain and maintain [a] control [by] and [the] legitimation of a given social unit" (2002:117). As Yanow says, "policy recommendations are collective expressions of individuals’ identities, articulated in and through groups ... [where] state ... endorse[ment] ... represent[s] ... a public endorsement of that [particular] collective identity as the [entire] polity’s identity .... [They come to live socially as] a victory of one groups identity over that of another" (2000:89).
As Maguire says, "our research must go beyond documenting [the] "what is" to proposing alternative[s] and imaginative vision[s] of what "should be" (Westkott, 1979)" (1987:104). But the purpose here is not to advocate for the imposition of a difference enacted reactively, which risks reproducing the very problematics it would address. For meaningful and lasting change to happen, it must not merely be made, but constructed. Whereas "[c]orporate commercialism feeds on and develops some of the basest tendencies of human nature ... [-] fetishiz[ing] love, foment[ing] rank consumerism, generat[ing] mediocrity, augment[ing] selfish tendencies and encourag[ing] aggressiveness" (Jameson; 1998:104); in constructing a truer democratic unity in, of and from diversity (fn hospitality) where "man [sic] appears in his [sic] position as an object of knowledge and a subject that knows" (Foucault; 1970:312), our "challenge [becomes] to rethink the human ... [and the] racial and ethnic frames [within] which the recognizably [(less-than)] human is currently constituted" (Butler;2004:90).
While Habermas endorses the notion that "conflicts arise from distortion[s] in communication" (original emphasis; Borradori; 2003:35), and it is a supposition that enjoys popular purchase - we must extend the discourse beyond the voicing of a/some dominance which would speak itself as the sole inheritor and inscriptor of truth and justice. As Butler says, "[w]e do not need to ground ourselves in a single model of communication, a single model of reason, a single notion of the subject before we are able to act" (2004:48). The impossibility of any absolute clear communication must not act to silence us. Neither must we allow it to stamp out the voices of alterity which evidence contestation to norms held unproblematically assumed. We must necessarily explode conceptions of singularity and universality ere we can hope to speak, hear or be heard in a manner responsable. It is, as Nader evinces, "[w]hen disputes are framed as ‘communication problems,’ [that] discourses about facts and legal rights become disputes about feelings and relationships" (2002:145). Just as "[t]he production of legitimacy, that is the naturalization of power, requires [a] constant enactment of [and by] the state as [the] symbolic center of society, the source of governance, the arbiter of conflicts, [and] the site of authorization" (Hansen; 2001:225), critical discourse must exhibit a similar vigilance and flexibility in its evocation reconceptualizing notions such as truth, freedom, justice and democracy.
Even as it is "the polity [which] tells an identity story through its drafting, discussing, passing, and enacting of a policy ... [rendering] policy meaning ... indeterminate ... [as] there are multiple ‘readers’ as well as ‘recordings’ of policy and agency ‘texts’" (Yanow; 2000:60); these discursive (im)possibilities are themselves rendered finite by the authority and expertise afforded to those speaking as well as the popular circulation with certain discourses are broadcast. In so many ways it is the periphery which defines the center. As Asad affirms, it is "the state’s abstract character [which] precisely ... enables it to define and sustain the margin [as well as its own centrality and dominance] through a range of administrative practices" (2004:281). In this light, "law is of critical importance to anthropology because of [it’s] central role in transmitting hegemonies" (Nader; 2003:70).
As Mahmood says, "the regulation of ... [apparently] quotidian practices is of eminant political concern because they play a crucial role in the shaping of civic and public sensibilities" (2005:73-4). Simultaneously, we must recognize that "[d]isciplinary power has as its correlative an individuality that is not only analytical and ‘cellular’, but also [names itself as] natural and ‘organic’" (Foucault; 977:156). It is, as bell hooks says, necessary to "explore various ways to communicate with one another cross-culturally if we are to develop political solidarity" (1997:406). Understanding must not be assumed and taken a priori as evoking some similarity which speaks to and is ascribed as universality. "According to Ibn Mada’ it [becomes] absurd ... to associate grammar with a logic of understanding, since [it] assume[s], and [even goes] so far as to create by retrospection, ideas about ... use and meaning ... impl[ying] a hidden level beneath words, available only to initiates" (Said; 1983:36). And when the world itself comes to be read as text, and the panoply of discourse and differences bleeds off the edge of the page remarkable primarily as marker for that boundary, that border beyond which distinction becomes narrated as deviance, as defiance - defaced, effaced as unremarkable or beyond the pale within which whiteness and majoritiarianism names itself to be norm.
It is a point of erasure which I will take as a point of departure into realms - not uncharted, or unchartable, but where we are told ‘here there be monsters’. It is a discursion - a discursive voyage into thinking, as Foucault asks us, "[w]hat, then, [are] the connection[s], the difficult link[s] between being and thought?" (1970:325). Positioned as upon some precipice, poised to dive off a cliff simultaneously made latent and manifest, "[w]e are at once acted upon and acting, and our ‘responsibility’ lies in the juncture between the two" (Butler; 2004:16). Throwing ourselves into the turbulent waves of an "authorit[y] exercising individual control [and] function[ing] according to a double mode; that of binary division and branding" (Foucault; 1977:199), we stand as well to crash upon the rocky shores of an "armed masculinity [which] intersects with ... idea[s] of nation ... [and] disseminat[ing] ... ideolog[ies] centered on enacting [an] aggressive, [and] sometimes violent defense of the national community" (Banerjee; 2005:2).
It is a position not placed and privileged as above or superior, but poised at a liminality whose very naming would deny. It is a proximity we can never claim, and yet which we must inhabit impossibly. As Bachetta and Powers note, "right-wing individual and collective [notions of] empowerment are specifically anti-Other" (2002:14). It is here where we can position ourselves as multiple, libidinously contingent and historically specific that we may hope to begin a continuing of resistance to the "systems of oppression", which all, as Collins reminds us "rely on [a] harnessing of [the exotic] and the erotic" (2000:128). It is a situated position from which we may begin to contest "the claim that ethnic homogeneity enhances the prospects of social stability", - a claim, which Nader rightly notes, "remains wholly unsubstantiated" (1997:71).
To quote Collins, "[t]he significance of the hegemonic domain of power lies in its ability to shape unconciousness via the manipulation of ideas, symbols, and ideologies" (2000:285). "[T]he apparent boundedness and coherence of ‘a culture’ [is] something made rather than found; the ‘wholeness’ of the holistically understood object [or subject of culture] appears more ... narrative device than ... objectively present empirical truth" (Gupta & Ferguson; 1997:2). And at the edges of this marginality, we are called as well to remind, that furthermore "‘community’ [itself] is never simply [a] recognition of cultural similarity or social contiguity but a categorical identity ... premised on various forms of exclusion[, inclusion,] ... constructions of otherness [and sameness] (ibid.:13). The reduction of culture to an abstract analytical of sameness spoken as a universal(ized/izable) oneness renders the absolute other equally - it is an absolute equality constructed as assimilability voicing tolerance not hospitality (fn) - peripheralizing "essentialism", which as Spivak tells us, "is trap" (1988:89). Reading Knauft to clarify, "essentialism makes simplistic or universalizing assumptions about [dominion,] domination, [de.nom.ination] and uncritically assumes the possibilites or impossibilities of resistance on ... [various ascriptions and] particular form[s] of collective identity" (1996:255). It is an evocation not only to one of the operations of dominance - producing monolithic representations of self and other within a binary calculus of absolute (in)difference - but speaks as well to the dangers inherent in merely inverting this equation.
Through an absurd inversion, the is as is names itself as always having been and as an always which will ever be. A putative progress casts a foreshortened shadow upon the complexities, contradictions, contestations and distinctions that live in unsteady relations, and corporeally (in)form the explosive vibrancy of the (im)possibility of democracy (fn Derrida: democracy to come). While the moment seems to rill as then downstream here towards a course into the empirical (Imperical), positivist, scientific, quantified and economized; I am rather as would again opt to shift the bearing towards some of the effects of this institutionalized othering. We must attempt to think ways in which, "[r]ather than simply a domain of sharing and commonality, culture [might be reconfigured] ... as a site of difference and contestation ... [as] a rich field of cultural-political practices" (Gupta & Ferguson; 1997:5).
As Chatterji tells us, "[n]ationalism’s dominant discourse invites a privileged relation to ‘truth’ and its production, to ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’. Nationalism’s practice establishes a relation to authoritative discourse, manufacturing legitimacy, in part, through [a quantified and qualified] distribution of speech and memory in the body politic" (2004:325). The consolidation of media, enabled by FCC deregulation (fn), the selective "leaking" of "insider information" by anonymous senior administration officials, and the monovocality exhibited by the Republican House and Senate members (fn) in pushing through Neo-Conservative policies under the (dis)guises of patriotism, freedom, democracy and security have operated as "[d]ecentered and uneven processes of ideological penetration naturaliz[ing] the workings of power" (Nader; 2002:13). They manifest "controlling images [that] are hegemonic and taken for granted, ... becom[ing] virtually impossible to escape" (Collins; 2000:90). It is a distillation - a stilling - of discourse, whence the spigot come nozzle saturates the US population in a mediatized tele(an)aesthetics.
As Nader says, these "[c]ontrolling ideologies reinforce dominant players" (2002:189). It is a "talk of democracy" and of freedom which, as Fischer notes, "all too often serves as little more than a thinly veiled guise for elite governance" (2000:1). It is a "[h]egemony [ ... it] is [an] internalized domination, whereby control becomes normalized [and, more importantly naturalized]" (Nader; 2002:216). This is not to say that these techniques remain ever unobserved, even as they would preserve themselves as spectralized presences that need never be named. Loci of agency and contestation exist at multiple levels throughout these sedimented strata. It is a narrative construction of which we must ask: "What has happened to the value of critique as a democratic value?" (Butler; 2004:42). We should look as well to "how ... [a] Christian morality operates as mind colonization ... [as well as,] how coercive harmony operates to silence disputing ... peoples who [become (re)presented as] speak[ing] or act[ing] angrily" (Nader; 2002:126-7). How might we think, as per "Sengal and Davis ... [into] religious fundamentalism[s as being] ... linked to the failure[s] of nationalist and socialist movements to bring about liberation from oppression[s?]" (Alexander & Mohanty; 1997:xxv).
Of course, as Salhoub-Kevorkian reminds us, "[i]t [is] not sufficient to struggle against the haunting phantoms of history, domination, oppression, and gender injustice[s]; we also need ... to combat the machinery that preserve[s], activate[s], and nourishe[s] them" (2002:183). In order "to meet the specifically global challenges of our time[s], social critique and ethical responsibility require[s?] the deconstruction of falsely neutral and hegemonic ideals [and discourses]" (Borradori; 2003:17). We must critically examine these taken-for-granted spaces of our always-already and everyday inhabit(at)ions, and choose to confront the very real "suspicion that our problems lie as much in our categories of thought as in the sheer facts of ... matter[s] themselves" (Jameson; 1998:75).
Identity Policing: Unity, Strength and Othering
The need for unity is often misnamed as a need for homogeneity.
Lorde (1997:377)
As Stepputat says, one of the "central question[s] to be addressed ... [is] how the state monopolizes the power to categorize people and to make [those] categories stick (Corrigan and Sayer 1985)" (2001:285). We are moving deeper into discursive currents in which people come to be seen, understood and misrepresented within a "theor[ization] of knowledge" (Bordieux; 1972:165) where identities are constructed (around and upon individuals to be known, and by individuals who may know fn: Foucault D&P) within universalizing frames as simultaneously and oppositionally either free, rational and modern or as fixed, anarchic and archaic. This is "a dimension of political theory because" Bordieux goes on to clarify, "the specifically symbolic power to impose ... principles of the construction of reality - in particular social reality - is a major dimension of political power" (ibid.). In wading into these muddied waters which dominance would claim as accurately reflecting the depths of individualized and collective interiority, "an attach[ing] of identities to subjects ... t[ying] subjects to their own identities" like so many mariners and albatrosses, which Gupta and Ferguson posit to be "one of the modes of operation of power ... then resistance [must] serve ... to reshape subjects by untying or untidying that [artificially clear] relationship" (1997:20).
And from what vantage are we to begin? Cast adrift, as if in stone, upon a sea where seeing would be prescribed and vision proscribed - with an apparently limitless horizon, salt-water waves welling in all directions as so many walls affording neither windows through which to see nor doors through which to walk; we need not scan the infinite distance as if in some telescopic hope of salvation. For, even "[a]s modern forms of governmentality penetrate and shape human life[s] in so many ways, [and] the practices and sites of governance have ... become ever more dispersed, [and] diversified" (Hansen & Stepputat; 2001:16), they are simultaneously "ever more ... fraught with internal inconsistencies and contradictions" (ibid.). The system continues to assert itself as exerting a self-correcting behaviour necessary for its inevitable success - but the course is far from set in the stars, as much as these multiple captains and helms(wo)men would proclaim that they are steering us into a/some inevitability.
As some manifestation of dynasty, we can observe as Kothari notes, a "comprehensive conditioning of the middle class mind that anything that appears to weaken the government at the Centre [sic] weakens the ... state, and anything that weakens the state weakens the constitutional fabric of ‘democracy’" (1989:20). The hyper-mediatization of terror-alert statuses, and the attendant sensationalism with which the Bush regime has chosen to pursue its self-proclaimed Global War on Terror (GWoT) has created "[a] generalized panic [which] works in tandem with the shoring-up of the sovereign state [the extension of executive privileges] and the suspension of civil liberties" (Butler; 2004:39). It is an exceptionality
tragedy
grief
exceptionalism and exploitation