by Arne De Boever

“Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 500)

Smooth Sovereignty

To begin, consider for a moment one of the most famous images of sovereignty, the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan:

Intended to capture Hobbes’ social contract theory in a single image, the figure of the Leviathan that is shown here finds its raison d’être in Hobbes’ theory of the state of nature. Roughly, and speaking in a way that I will have to nuance later, state of nature theory posits that in the beginning, people (I hesitate to write “humans”) were living in a state of nature. Pessimistic theorists of the political—like Hobbes–envision this as an undesirable state in which people are like wolves to each other (hence, my hesitation).[2] Optimistic theorists of the political think otherwise. In both cases, people eventually come together to draw up a contract–hence, Hobbes’ renown as a contract theorist–to determine how they want to live together. This contract is a set of laws or a constitution by which a group chooses to live. The group thus institutes what Hobbes calls a Leviathan, Commonwealth, or State, an artificial man who represents them. Such a Leviathan is designed, in Hobbes, against the possibility of civil war, but the fear that the state of nature might erupt again is always there in the Hobbesian model. We therefore live in fear—of both the civil war and of the sovereign who is meant to hold it at bay.

The frontispiece of Hobbes shows all of this. It shows a figure of sovereignty—I again hesitate to call it an actual human being—spectrally hovering over a landscape. It is unclear where this figure is standing, whether it is part of the landscape or not. Certainly, it resides outside of the walls that mark the town over which it looms. In its right hand, the figure holds a sword, symbol of earthly power. In its left, it holds a religious staff, symbol of spiritual power—and note that the staff appears to reach into the landscape over which the sovereign rises. With the exception of the head and the hands, the body of this sovereign is made up of the bodies of its subjects—those who instituted the sovereign and find themselves represented in the body of the king.[3] They all look up towards the sovereign, who gazes outside of the image, at the reader. This image needs to be read vertically: starting with the Latin quote from the book of Job at the top (“there is no power on earth that compares to him”), one lowers one’s gaze towards the bottom half of the image, which is split between images of earthly power on the left and images of spiritual power on the right. In the middle hangs a curtain, perhaps hiding where the sovereign is standing (its feet, as has been shown,[4] would likely rest precisely where Hobbes’ name is written on the curtain).

Now consider Michel Foucault’s reading of Hobbes in “Society Must Be Defended”. Foucault forces one to adjust the state of nature narrative. The state of nature is not one of perpetual, actual war in the way we have imagined it. The problem in the state of nature, Hobbes suggests (according to Foucault), is “equality” (Foucault 2003, 90). People are too equal in strength; there isn’t enough difference. And this leads to a “primitive war” as “the immediate effect of nondifferences, or at least insufficient differences” (Ibid.).[5] “If there were great differences, if there really were obvious disparities between men, it is quite obvious that war would immediately come to an end” (Ibid.).[6] Why? Because it would be obvious who the strong are, and who the weak are, and either there would be a clash and the strong would win, or there would be no clash because the weak would be smart enough to refrain from engaging in one (See: Ibid., 91). To live peacefully, people need to institute inequality or difference. This is how the sovereign comes about—a radically unequal power, marking absolute difference. “Differences lead to peace” (Ibid.). This gets people out of the state of nature and its petty war of representations, its “anarchy” (Ibid.) and “theatre” (Ibid., 92) of minor differences.

Hobbes has three models of sovereignty: one by institution (people come together and close a contract, institute a sovereign) (Foucault 2003, 93); one by acquisition (one country violently conquers another, which is defeated) (Ibid., 94). Interestingly, Foucault points out that while we would call the latter conquest (“domination” [Ibid., 95]), for Hobbes it is ultimately not because the defeated will institute the new sovereign, will accept the conqueror as their sovereign. Why? Because they want to live. But this is not a biopolitical will to live: it is institution bound up in fear (of death—we are firmly within the realm of sovereignty) (See: Ibid., 96). Hobbes compares the latter form of sovereignty to (and this is the third model) the child’s dependency on their mother: they depend on the mother to live, or rather to avoid death (See: Ibid., 96). On this basis, Foucault presents Hobbes as a theorist against war, as a theorist of peace who took war as his fundamental adversary in his work (See: Ibid., 97). Hobbes sought to “eliminate” (Ibid.) war from politics. According to Foucault, he theorized what I will call here—overstating the case somewhat–a smooth sovereignty.

Foucault then mobilizes (See: Foucault 2003, 99 and after) English political history to drive a rift into Hobbes’ work. He refuses for the violence of conquest to be swept under the carpet. He practices a political historicism against Hobbes’ state of peace. He follows the Levellers and the Diggers et cetera in their attempt to keep revolution and rebellion—“war against the state”, as Melinda Cooper in her reading of the lecture specifies (Cooper 2004, 516) –alive. There is always an alternative; the norm was violently put into place. In sum: Foucault takes it up for war against Hobbes as a theorist of peace.

At the very end of his lecture, Foucault attacks “dialectical materialism”, evidence that he is working through his relation to Marx in his Collège de France lectures (as Stuart Elden for example has shown [See: Elden 2016]). Jacques Bidet, author of Foucault With Marx, explains that likely what Foucault is attacking here is a “‘Hegelian’ Marx, thinker of the totality and its historical unfolding to the point where social contradictions are overcome” (Bidet 2016, 4). Foucault’s attack, at the end of the lecture on Hobbes as a theorist who seeks to eliminate war, may be against a Marx as a “Hegelian” thinker who ultimately sweeps the negative under the carpet.

There are plenty of other reasons, Bidet goes on, why Foucault may have taken up Marx in this context: Marx’ account of politics, which focused on class struggle and the economic determinism that triggered it, was simply not nuanced enough for Foucault to paint an adequate political picture. Bidet notes much later in his book Foucault’s criticism of Marx’ use of the word “struggle”, which “passes over in silence precisely what is meant by struggle” (Bidet 2016, 127). This in particular resonates with Foucault’s criticism of Hobbes as a theorist against war. Bidet writes that in Foucault’s view “Marxism ultimately neutralizes [the “politics is war”] paradigm by performing a dialectical operation on it: at the end of the revolutionary process, after the final reversal of economic domination, antagonism comes to be re-absorbed within a new contractual order of joint concertation among all. But Foucault refuses this final utopia” (Ibid., 173-174). “Under the new form of state domination, he discerns the war that is begun ever anew” (Ibid., 174). “The Marxists’ dialectic”, in Foucault’s view, “occults the fact of war” (Ibid., 175).

I intend to comment elsewhere on how all of this makes Foucault appear as somewhat of a Schmittian–and Bidet indeed writes of “Foucault’s wink to Carl Schmitt, for whom the fundamental [political] category is also that of war” (Bidet 2016, 176) –, who seeks to keep alive a political pluriverse—against[7] Hobbes, who defends a political universe. When it comes to a concept of the political, Foucault’s reading of Hobbes shows that he is more with Schmitt than with Hobbes. In order to accept such a wink, however, one has to overlook at least one important difference between Foucault and Schmitt. When it comes to Foucault’s advocacy of politics as war, Foucault is recuperating from Hobbes a war against the state; but that is crucially not what Schmitt advocates. (As Chantal Mouffe points out, Schmitt locates the enemy outside of democratic association. He doesn’t think a democratic pluralism within [See: Mouffe 1999, 5].[8]) The source of Foucault’s concept of the political may not so much have been Schmitt, but the Black Panther Party, as Brady Heiner Thomas has argued (See: Thomas 2007). Melinda Cooper remarks on this difference to reveal, as she puts it, “some provocative points of intersection and discord” between Foucault and Schmitt, leading to the conclusion that in fact Foucault and Schmitt “were engaged in a violent argument with each other” (Cooper 2004, 515). There is no doubt, I think, that she is right.

The reason I have rehearsed Foucault’s reading of Hobbes here, however, is to show how Foucault, in response to what he perceives to be the theorization of a smooth sovereignty in Hobbes, takes it up for a theory of sovereignty that has to be rooted in friction. Whenever there is sovereignty, there is war; “There is no escape” (Foucault 2003, 111), as Foucault writes, from this political and historical fact. From the Diggers’ understanding that “[l]aws, power, and government are the obverse of war”, summarized powerfully in the line “Government means their war against us; rebellion is our war against them” (Ibid., 108),[9] Foucault ultimately arrives at this conclusion:

Yet the fact remains that you see here the first formulation of the idea that any law, whatever it may be, every form of sovereignty, whatever it may be, and any type of power, whatever it may be, has to be analyzed not in terms of natural right and the establishment of sovereignty, but in terms of the unending movement—which has no historical end—of the shifting relations that make some dominant over others. (Ibid., 109)

We have here then a powerful refutation of any understanding of sovereignty as frictionless—of any theory of smooth sovereignty, as I called it earlier on.

But what are the consequences of such a position for the political concept of sovereignty? Below, I intend to address that question through a case-study that can be productively analyzed in the framework laid out above: the situation of black lives in the United States today. As my reference to Brady Heiner Thomas already revealed, this situation is historically inscribed in Foucault’s theorization of politics during the mid-1970s, through Foucault’s (unacknowledged) encounter with race relations in the U.S. and the writings of the Black Panther Party. What follows is an attempt to write in the tracks of that inscription.

After a brief reading of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me that focuses on the presence of sovereignty in that book, I seek to negotiate specifically the continued relevance of sovereignty for the situation of black life in the U.S. today. Following Achille Mbembe’s theorization of necropolitics, I distinguish between two sovereign inscriptions of black life within sovereign power: one associated with Hegel’s dialectics, the other with Bataille and the break with dialectics. I then turn to Frantz Fanon and Mbembe’s reading of Fanon (in Critique of Black Reason) to show how this tension between Hegel and Bataille can already be found in Fanon’s plea for absolute (rather than dialectical) violence, which is however formulated as part of a constructive call for national liberation that would rein this violence back in. That said, the constructive element of Fanon’s project was hardly conservative in any straightforward way: he had in mind a national liberation based on the creation of a new man, one that thus preserved traces of both the Bataillean and Hegelian inscriptions of black life in sovereign power that Mbembe distinguishes. “Sovereignty” in Fanon must be negotiated between those two traces. (It’s also worth adding, as I will discuss below, that the relation between black life and sovereignty may very well exceed both: neither Hegelian dialectics nor Bataillean transgression, perhaps the para-ontological understanding of blackness can find political meaning here as a continuous unsettling that’s neither with Hegel nor with Bataille, and as such precisely—as David Marriott has argued–non-sovereign [See: Marriott 2016].)[10] Mbembe’s “critique” reveals this negotiation between Hegel and Bataille as well in that it appears to be torn between a more conservative articulation that would remain within critique’s limits, and a more radical one that would seek to transgress them—a transgression that, in Bataille, nevertheless remains sovereign in name. It is perhaps that nominal remainder of sovereignty that indicates that the risk of transgression is great: indeed, in his most transgressive moments, Mbembe also risks to promote (as I intend to show) the kind of exceptionalist sovereignty that Coates’ work exposes.

More than 50 years after the founding of the Black Panther Party in 1966, and at a time when the “horizontalist” Black Lives Matter movement is violently clashing in the U.S. with both the status quo and new “vertical” formations on the Right, this article asks whether there can be a future for sovereignty when it comes to black life in the U.S.? Can there be an Afro-Futurism of sovereignty? Can Fanon’s call for national liberation and the articulation it was briefly given in Black Panther politics still take on new meanings today? Can there be a dream of sovereignty—and it is worth emphasizing that sovereignty, to a certain extent, is always a dream–that is not a white Dream? Who are its dreamers? What might they dream? Such questions seem particularly important today, when sovereignty has reemerged on the Right. Liberalism is exhausted. Sovereignty is making a come-back as part of a repoliticization against liberalism, and neoliberalism (though this last point is contestable[11]). But where is this sovereignty going to go? Unless the Left participates in this conversation and contributes to rethinking sovereignty from within, they may not stand a chance against the Right’s revitalization of sovereignty’s old specter. In closing, I consider how an alliance between African-American and Native American politics may in spite of their differences prove to be productive on this count.

State of Exception and Necropolitics

In his book Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates shows, although he does not use these terms, that black life in the U.S. is caught up in a state of exception (See: Coates 2015). In his discussion of black life’s exposure to sovereign power, he focuses on the pair black life/police in view of the ongoing police shootings of young black men—in some cases, children–in the U.S. As Coates notes, perhaps the most troubling element apart from these people’s deaths, is that they are killed with impunity: “These shooters were investigated, exonerated, and promptly returned to the streets, where, so emboldened, they shot again” (Ibid, 78). It is the element of impunity that clearly renders black life in this situation “sacred”, in Giorgio Agamben’s understanding of this term: outside of human law, exposed to be killed without legal consequence (“vogelfrei”, as I have argued elsewhere [See: Boever 2009]). It is this element that turns black people’s “fear to rage”: the fact that the murderers “cannot be subpoenaed … will not bend under indictment” (Coates 2015, 83).

That we are talking about a situation of sovereignty here is partly made clear in Coates’ text through the specifics of the police killing that he focuses on, which involves an officer from Prince George’s County (in Baltimore state) and a young black man called Prince Carmen Jones. Prince Jones is shot one night, while going to visit his fiancée, by a cop who claims Jones was trying to run him over with his jeep. Jones had been approached by the cop, gun drawn; the cop had been undercover, in other words was in plain clothes, and had shown no badge. He was, in other words, “a man in a criminal’s costume” (as Coates points out [Coates 2015, 81]), and Coates confesses with horror that “I knew what I would have done with such a man confronting me, gun drawn, mere feet from my family’s home” (Ibid.). The suggestion is, presumably, that he would have done the same: he too may have tried to run over the cop. The point about the “criminal’s costume” is sharpened a few pages later, when we finally find out something that Coates obviously knew from the onset: “The officer who killed Prince Jones was black” (Ibid., 83).

It is hard to overlook the sovereign overtones of the confrontation (one prince versus another). To be clear: while Coates presents the lives of young black men to be caught up in a state of exception, he also insists that in the U.S. this exception has become the rule. “In America,” he writes later on, “it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage” (Coates 2015, 103). In other words, America is another name for a place where the state of exception of black life has always been the rule. It is another name for what Agamben, working with a European frame of reference that ignores the situation of black lives in the U.S. entirely, calls a camp: any situation in which the exception becomes the rule. The police, indeed, “reflect America in all of its will and fear”, as he notes earlier on, “and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies—the sprawling carceral state, the random detection of black people, the torture of suspects—are the product of democratic will” (Ibid., 79). The charge, if we put Coates and Agamben together, is harsh: democratic America equals black Auschwitz. Or, without Agamben’s frame of reference: slavery never ended.[12]

In the Prince Jones killing we confront the particular perversity of black Auschwitz, namely black-on-black violence, which is fuelled, Coates suggests, by what he calls “the Dream”. By this, he means the white people’s Dream, the Dream of a white America. He calls those who share such a Dream, “Dreamers”. Black people in the U.S. carry not only “the burden of living among Dreamers”; they also have the “extra burden of your country telling you the Dream is just, noble, and real, and you are crazy for seeing the corruption and smelling the sulfur” (Coates 2015, 106). Perversely, it is “the Dream” that may in part explain the black-on-black violence that Coates is analyzing closely: it is “the Dream” that may explain the cop’s reaction to Prince Jones, in the same way that it is “the Dream” that may explain Jones’ reaction to the cop. Part of the “criminal’s costume”, in other words, and one can hardly call it a costume, is the blackness of both the victim and the murderer—a blackness that “the Dream” criminalizes and that makes black people kill each other due to the white people’s racist fear. When Coates shudders in horror at the realization of what he would have done—the same–, he is also shuddering in horror at the extent to which “the Dream” has infected him, the extent to which it has turned him against his own people. Between the World and Me is an attempt to puncture this “Dream”, to force something between the reality of Coates’ life and the psychotic construction of “the Dream” in which it is caught up.[13] In Between the World and Me, Coates is attacking a white sovereignty not just in terms of the physical violence that it wields but in terms of the psychic phantasy that backs it up.

To be a black man in the U.S. means that the police “had my body, could do with that body whatever they pleased” (Coates 2015, 76). Coates ties this situation to the history of slavery in the U.S., and thus to the history of European colonialism and the relentless and ongoing “plunder of black life” that they present. Obsessed with the Civil War, in which 600,000 people died in a conflict about the practice of slavery, Coates notes that “it had been glossed over in my education, and in popular culture, representations of the war and its reasons seemed obscured … as if … someone was trying to hide the books” (Ibid., 99). There is a way in which it seems, therefore, as if the Civil War never happened—and certainly when considering the situation of black lives today, that appears to be what Coates is forced to conclude. The heritage of destroying the black body, far from having ended with the Civil War, continues.

Coates’ references to the history of slavery and colonialism enable us to characterize the situation in the U.S. that he analyzes not only as a state of exception and more specifically a camp, but also as a necropolitical situation, to use Achille Mbembe’s productive notion (See: Mbembe 2003). Indeed, Mbembe focuses on those histories to develop the notion of necropolitics, which he situates closely—perhaps too closely–to the work of both Agamben and Michel Foucault. I say “perhaps too closely” for while Foucault in his work on power distinguishes between sovereignty as the power to take life or let live (the power of death) and biopolitics as the power to make life (to foster, generate, optimize it), Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics brings those two aspects of power together as one. Mbembe is compelled to make this deconstructive move due to the situations (and the particular histories) he is looking at, which include slavery and colonialism—both situations that neither Foucault nor Agamben pay much attention to. As scholars like Paul Gilroy (See: Gilroy 2010) or Alexander Weheliye (See: Weheliye 2014) have pointed out,[14] Foucault uses the term “colonialism” largely metaphorically; by characterizing the object of sovereign power as “bare” life, Agamben is incapable of thinking the importance of race in biopolitics. Both of those notions are important in Mbembe’s discourse, and this forces him to take up some distance from both Agamben and in particular Foucault, to whom he is nevertheless indebted. He does not share their euro-centrism, and this produces a shift in the theory. One way to summarize this would be that Mbembe, for his investigation of biopolitics, is operating from the position of those who die. He is interested in the “wounded or slain body” and how it is “inscribed in the order of power” (Mbembe 2003, 12).

On this last count, Mbembe considers two different inscriptions: the Hegelian one and that of Bataille. In Hegel, whose dialectical model Mbembe focuses on, the human being confronts death in negating nature by creating a world. It is through this exposure that the human being “truly becomes a subject” (Mbembe 2003, 14). To become a subject, then, “supposes upholding the work of death”, in the sense that life “assumes death and lives with it” (Ibid., 15). Death can thus become part of an “economy of absolute knowledge and meaning” (Ibid.). Negation drives the dialectic forward, but that forward movement is also the negation of the negation. There is death but it can productively become part of life.

Not so in Bataille, whose work Mbembe discusses in contrast: “Bataille firmly anchors death in the realm of absolute expenditure”, an expenditure that he calls “sovereign” (Mbembe 2003, 15). For Bataille, sovereignty thus breaks with the Hegelian dialectic, a break that is marked through its relation to death: “it is the refusal to accept the limits that the fear of death would have the subject respect” (Ibid., 16). The sovereign world, for Bataille, “is the world in which the limit of death is done away with” (Ibid.), as Mbembe quotes. Sovereignty therefore becomes a name for “the violation of all prohibitions” (Ibid.):

Politics, in this case, is not the forward dialectical movement of reason [as in Hegel]. Politics can only be traced as a spiral transgression, as that difference that disorients the very idea of the limit. More specifically, politics is the difference put into play by the violation of the taboo. (Ibid.)

But how does Bataille’s position relate to necropolitics?

In the opening paragraphs of his text, Mbembe distinguishes between what he appears to characterize as the violence of sovereignty and what he refers to as “the power of absolute negativity”. The latter he glosses with Arendt, and her claim that the concentration camps introduce us to a negativity of death that is outside of the life/death binary. Necropolitics, it seems, investigates such a negativity, the power of such absolute negativity, in the sense that it investigates the “camp” in which life—and in particular black life—is caught up. At the same time, however, necropolitics and the biopolitical sovereignty that it names are presented in Mbembe’s text along Hegelian lines, as conservative in the sense that they refer to “the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations” (Mbembe 2003, 14). In other words, they refer to the way in which dead bodies can become part of an economy of knowledge and meaning.

I would characterize such an economy here based on the associations that Mbembe sets up as the economy of slavery and colonialism. But it is also the economy that Coates confronts in his close-reading of the death of black lives in the U.S. It is Mbembe who, in combination with Coates, enables us to mark this contemporary American situation as the situation of slavery and colonialism continued.

But Mbembe can arguably also show us, via Bataille, that such a Hegelian situation need not be the only one. There is also the absolute expenditure of death, which would not allow such instrumentalization of black death as part of the white people’s Dream. In other words, while Bataille appears to be associated with the absolute power of negativity that is in turn associated with the state of exception of the camp, there is also a way in which Bataille can become associated with another state of exception that would break with all of this.

Fanon, Once More

On this last count, Mbembe’s negotiation of Hegel and Bataille connects to Frantz Fanon, and the peculiar role of dialectics in his work. With Fanon, of course, there is no doubt: we are in the colonial situation, it is the colonial situation—the French presence in Algeria—that Fanon confronts. I am thinking in particular of the chapter from The Wretched of the Earth titled “Concerning Violence” (in the Constance Farrington translation)/ “On Violence” (in the Richard Philcox translation).[15] Born in Martinique, Fanon had studied psychiatry in France, and had been assigned to a hospital in Algeria. He quits his job there and joins the Front de Libération Nationale, the anti-colonial resistance fighters—as a Martiniquan/French citizen, not as an Algerian, not as Algeria’s colonial subject (even if he identified with the latter and ultimately became Algerian).[16] There is dialectics in Fanon’s text, but one feels that it is stuck in the basic opposition without synthesis: colonized confronts colonizer violently, but no progress, no compromise, no rational deliberation is possible (“Challenging the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of viewpoints”, he writes [Fanon 2004, 6]). Indeed, Fanon’s text is an affront to liberalism (Fanon writes about “the liberal intentions of the colonial authorities”, for example [Ibid., 30])—he rather snarkily attacks liberalism’s “gentleman’s agreement” (Ibid., 2) –and to the ways liberalism can be tied to colonialism to make history “move forward” (to evoke the Hegelian narrative).

Against this, Fanon asserts “absolute violence” (Fanon 1968, 37)[17]: the need to kick the colonizer out, and decolonize (which, as he notes, involves many levels of existence). It is a call “for total disorder” (Fanon 2004, 2),[18] “tabula rasa” (Ibid., 1). “[E]very obstacle encountered” must be “smash[ed]” (Ibid., 3). “[A]ny method which does not include violence” must be rejected (Ibid., 24). There is only one way to affirm that decolonization has been successful: do those who used to be the last now come first?[19] The point is to take the colonizer’s place (See: Ibid., 23). If that is not accomplished, nothing has been done.

It is true that there are moments in the text where the usefulness of violence also appears to be drawn into question, as when Fanon writes that “the question is not so much responding to violence with more violence but rather how to defuse the crisis” (Fanon 2004, 33).[20] Indeed, Mbembe has noted in Critique of Black Reason that “Fanon was conscious of the fact that, by choosing ‘counter-violence’, the colonized were opening the door to a disastrous reciprocity” (Mbembe 2017, 166). But the general orientation is unmistakable: violence is needed to end the madness. Absolute violence—non-dialectical violence. Tabula rasa. Absolute break. Cut. Out and out, as Philcox renders it (the translation is flawed, but its repetition of the “out” is useful here—it does render the outside-ness of ab-solute). Looking forward to Mbembe, this reads like Bataille’s absolute expenditure applied in the colonial context. In his reading of Fanon, Mbembe also recognizes that he proposes violence as the only way forward.

Nevertheless, it is not quite the only way. For it is crucial that the broader, constructive context in which, for Fanon, this destruction takes place is that of “national liberation, national reawakening, restoration of the nation to the people or Commonwealth” (Fanon 2004, 1). In short, it is that of… sovereignty. This is in many ways a remarkable point, and one can understand it, of course, in view of the fact that the colonized are, precisely, without their own nation-state. And it is certainly not as if Fanon was not aware of the problems of nationalist politics, of what he called “the pitfalls [mésaventures] of national consciousness”. But in this chapter he consciously leaves the portrayal of “the rise of a new nation, the establishment of a new state, its diplomatic relations and its economic and political orientation” (Ibid.) aside to focus on the violent break.[21] What will happen, however, when the absolute violence, the out and out violence for which he calls, is reined back in, is folded back into the national liberation that he calls for at the beginning of his text? What will happen when it becomes sovereign in that way again? Bataille of course calls his absolute expenditure sovereign in response to such a “conservative” folding within, precisely to attack the old sense of sovereignty. To an extent, those questions point to the problem of all revolutions, which ultimately fold their constituting power back into constituted power. How to run with constituting power appears to be the question. And more radically even: how to run with destituent power, apart from the constitutional gesture?

“National liberation.” Can we even think in those terms still, today? Could we call for a project of national liberation in response to the colonialism that the U.S., today, continues to practice on the black lives that live within its borders? We can think of the project of the Black Panthers, which involved a close study of law, and in some cases a rewriting of key documents of U.S. political history, as an attempt toward national liberation from colonialism and slavery. But within the limits of national sovereignty—at least for a brief while, before internationalism took over. An attempt to cleanse sovereignty from colonialism and slavery, to claim a sovereignty outside of the white people’s dream. Violence clearly has a role in this project. But what is its end? Is it an end? Is it pure means?

Consider in this context Kadir Nelson’s New Yorker cover “After Dr. King”, an alternative image of sovereignty: a black body of sovereign power that gathers within it the unhappy subjects who question the established sovereignty’s competency to protect them.

While it gives us an image of black sovereignty, it would be important to note that its central figure is that of Martin Luther King. Can the New Yorker cover be imagined with Malcolm X on it?[22] (Ta-Nehisi Coates notes Malcolm’s association with violence and his own dislike of it.) Or does the figure of King ultimately reconcile the violence of the subjects it carries within, and is Nelson’s image the ultimate Hegelian reconciliation of political violence and the avoidance of civil war? Would the Malcolm X cover have offended the New Yorker’s liberal sensibilities too much (the force of Bataille is certainly stronger in Malcolm than it was in King)? Does the King image continue, in that sense, the old sovereignty—plenty of similarities, after all, between Nelson’s image and the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan—rather than bring the tabula rasa that Fanon calls for? And perhaps Fanon too, when he folds violence back into “national” liberation, ultimately does not live up to the radicality of his own position: complete rejection of the nation-state.

Nelson’s New Yorker cover “Say Their Names” can be seen as his most recent engagement with this problematic, this time in reference to George Floyd’s murder, and with Floyd embodying what Coates calls the U.S. “heritage” of violence against black bodies:

Such visual renderings of the problematic of sovereignty can be found elsewhere as well. Consider, for example, Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (Disney, 2018), which problematically casts as its villain Killmonger, who wants to use the precious metal vibranium of King T’Challa’s Wakanda to liberate oppressed black people worldwide.

If I mention the Black Panther, it is partly because Coates has been involved in the comic book’s reimagining for the age of Black Lives Matter. The Black Panther poster, with the troubling tagline “Long Live the King,” clearly inscribes the film’s politics in the negotiations of sovereignty that I have opened up here.

When Fanon called for national liberation, however, he likely did not want “that old sovereignty” again. That might be the reason why, in his text, he also mentions “the creation of new men” (Fanon 2004, 2) as the result of the project of decolonization. Everything must start, he seems to say, from the creation of a new people, a new human being. It is from there that a new sovereignty might come along. This, among other things, enables David Macey to write in his biography of Fanon that “For Fanon, the nation is a product of the will, and a form of consciousness which is not to be defined in ethnic terms” (Macey 2012, 374). Mbembe focuses on Fanon’s notion of a new human being (rather than a new black man) in his book Critique of Black Reason. It is Fanon who, in Black Skin, White Masks, said that “Black” was “only a fiction” (Mbembe 2017, 159). “For him”, Mbembe notes, “the name referred not to a biological reality or skin color but to ‘one of the historical forms of the condition imposed on humans’” (Ibid.). Mbembe distinguishes Fanon’s position on this count from that of his teacher, Césaire, one of the key thinkers of “Négritude”. While Césaire as per Mbembe’s account is obviously no Senghor (the other thinker of negritude), Mbembe still presents him as more essentialist than Fanon, in the sense that he affirmed a negritude that Fanon ultimately[23] wanted to go beyond. Mbembe points out, however, that in Césaire’s “Black”, there was a universalism that was proposed, a universalism that could only emerge from “blackness” and the difference that it marks—a difference that reveals the world. For that revelation, blackness was essential. “But,” Mbembe asks, “how can we reread Césaire without Fanon” (who wrote after him)? For him, it is difficult, if not impossible.

This has everything to do with the notion of “critique” which names Mbembe’s project. As long as we are reading Césaire, we remain on the conservative side of critique, even if Césaire opens up the possibility of transgression. The transgression only arrives, however, with Fanon, who seeks to go beyond the notion of “Black” and imagines a world “freed from the burden of race” (a formula Mbembe repeats at least twice in his book—it closes the book as well [Mbembe 2017, 167, 183). “If there is one thing that will never die in Fanon”, Mbembe writes, “it is the project of the collective rise of humanity … Each human subject, each people, was to engage in a grand project of self-transformation, in a struggle to the death, without reserve. They had to take it on as their own. They could not delegate it to others” (Ibid., 162). The echoes here are multiple: struggle to the death—that’s Hegel, of course, the master-slave dialectic. But struggle without reserve: that’s Bataille’s absolute expenditure, the break with economy. Finally, the project of self-transformation: here we get echoes of the Enlightenment project and the “care of the self” that Foucault was so interested in toward the end of his life (the stuff that, according to some critics, made him vulnerable to neoliberalism [See: Zamora and Behrent, 2016]). It is no coincidence, I think, that the chapter I have been quoting from here is titled “The Clinic of the Subject”, which, in addition to echoing Fanon’s training as a psychiatrist, is also a very Foucaultian title.

So a number of questions emerge: at the level of subject formation, Mbembe seeks to present Fanon as more Bataille than Hegel.[24] But at the level of Fanon’s political project, this distinction—Hegel or Bataille—was undecided; it seemed that Fanon’s call for national liberation was perhaps more Hegel than Bataille. To be sure, if a national liberation is to be built around Bataille’s kind of subjectivity, then surely it will be very different from the old sovereignty and its dialectical transformation. We would get a break with dialectics here, that would bring about a truly new sovereignty rather than its dialectically accomplished next step. If this comes with the project of total self-transformation, the question remains how this would relate to the neoliberal, entrepreneurial subject. While Fanon of course could not foresee this question, Mbembe does address it in his introduction, where he presents neoliberalism as one of “three critical moments in the biography of the vertiginous assemblage that is Blackness and race” (Mbembe 2017, 2). Neoliberalism, defined as “a phase in the history of humanity dominated by the industries of Silicon Valley and digital technology” (Ibid., 3), has a “tendency to universalize the Black condition”, by which he means “practices [that] borrow as much from the slaving logic of capture and predation as from the colonial logic of occupation and extraction, as well as from the civil wars and raiding of earlier epochs” (Ibid., 4). It is a key component in what Mbembe calls “the Becoming Black of the world” (Ibid., 6). At no point does Mbembe discuss, however, how the language of self-transformation in Fanon could also become part of such a project.

There remains the third path that I alluded to in my introduction: the para-ontological understanding of blackness that would mark, next to both Hegel and Bataille, sovereignty’s continuous unsettling—its non-sovereignty, as I have suggested. Fred Moten has developed the notion of the para-ontological (after Nahum Chandler, and, by R.A. Judy’s account, Oskar Becker [Moten 2020]) in response to Western ontology which is, he argues, a “white” ontology that under the guise of universality refuses to think blackness. As he puts it in a lengthy, beautifully lyrical and intensely political article titled “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh)”:

[B]lackness is prior to ontology. … blackness is the anoriginal displacement of ontology … ontology’s anti- and ante-foundation, ontology’s underground, the irreparable disturbance of ontology’s time and space. (Moten 2013, 739)

Blackness—both in an identitarian way, as a condition that is particularly felt by black bodies, but also in a more general sense, as a structural condition that does not depend on one’s skin color (Moten distinguishes between “blackness and blacks” [Moten 2013, 749])—is precisely not covered by the ontological, and it is to move towards the philosophical thinking of blackness that Moten proposes his notion. The para-ontological, in such a project, captures what resides “next to” or “para” ontology. It captures the “nothingness” of blackness, the particular “nothingness”—which is evidently not nothing—that it marks. In my introduction, I have suggested reading this position politically, as a para-sovereign position

Moten turns in this context to Far Eastern thought and specifically the notion of “wu” (無, “nothing”). Moten brings this daoist notion of an active emptiness together with a black para-ontology and politics of resistance that can—in his view—be associated with Fanon (See: Moten 2013, 750). The thought of the dao, and specifically of “wu”, is a thought that puts being on hold rather than “in the hold” (Ibid.) as Moten’s reference to the slave-ship has it. Yet it is also through its attention to “the hold” that black studies (as Moten sees it) “disrupts” (Ibid., 751) the “nothingness” of Far Eastern thought, forcing “‘the real presence’ of blackness” (Ibid.) back into it and working both with and against the suspension that “wu” brings. There is, clearly, something to be learned from and resisted within the para-ontological. In the words of Abdelkebir Khatibi, another thinker of the dao, what’s needed here is a “double critique” (Khatibi 1983, 12), both of the para-ontological (as subject genitive: the para-ontological suspends, in the way that “wu” suspends) and of the para-ontological (as object genitive: the para-ontological is suspended by “‘the real presence’ of blackness”).

Moten’s choice (after Chandler) for and understanding of the preposition “para” or “next to” is worth pausing over in the context of my discussion of sovereignty, because it marks a moving sideways rather than up or down or inside or out. If up/down or in/out can easily be appropriated within the dialectical (Hegelian) and transgressive (Bataillean) models of sovereignty that I previously found in Mbembe, this is more difficult to do with the horizontal dynamic of the next to, which posits itself on the same plane as whatever it pre-poses. But does this lateral unsettling take us out of sovereignty? It seems that even in the intervention of such a sideways move, the para maintains a hyphenation to the ontological, some kind of connection—that of a mere dash—to what it unsettles. Read politically, this would also apply, then, to the para-ontological approach to sovereignty, in which some connection to sovereignty would be maintained by the mere presence of a dash. There is always the temptation of overlooking this dash, and rewriting this continuous unsettling as an outside—more radical than Bataille’s, which still calls itself sovereign. Moten in fact flirts with such an outside. “On the one hand”, he writes, “blackness and ontology are unavailable to each other” (Moten 2013, 749)—and the project of para-ontology seeks to remedy that situation. “On the other hand”, he continues, “blackness must free itself from ontological expectation, must refuse subjection to ontology’s sanction against the very idea of black subjectivity” (Ibid.). The more radical conclusion, then—following the invitation of this “other hand”–would simply be to reject ontology altogether, a rejection that would lead to non-sovereignty. But Moten might consider such a conclusion irresponsible from the point of view of a history in which whiteness and blackness have been co-constituted in ontology, through ontology, and in/through sovereignty. In other words: while blackness might desire the outside, it may not be afforded such luxury from the point of history. Indeed, none of us may.

Critique and Indigenous Politics

“If we owe Fanon a debt,” Mbembe writes, it is for the idea that in every human subject there is something indomitable and fundamentally intangible that no domination—no matter what form it takes—can eliminate, contain, or suppress, at least not completely. Fanon tried to grasp how this could be reanimated and brought back to life in a colonial context that in truth is different from ours, even if its double—institutional racism—remains our own beast. For this reason, his work presents a kind of fibrous lignite, a weapon of steel, for the oppressed in the world today. (Mbembe 2017, 170)

It is worth noting, in the context of a discussion of sovereignty, the potential complicity of such a discourse with exceptionalism, and some of the problems this raises. This becomes clear in Mbembe’s book. When, a few pages later, Mbembe turns to the politics of art in this context, he writes:

Here the primary function of the work of art has never been to represent, illustrate, or narrate reality. It has always been in its nature simultaneously to confuse and mimic original forms and appearances. … But at the same time it constantly redoubled the original object, deforming it, distancing itself from it, and most of all conjuring with it. … In this way the time of a work of art is the moment when daily life is liberated from the accepted rules and is devoid of both obstacles and guilt. (Ibid., 173)

I can follow this final passage all the way up to its last sentence. But I do not think its grand, concluding statement—liberation from accepted rules, being devoid of obstacles and guilt—follows logically, or evokes the same politics, as the language of constantly redoubling, deforming, and distancing that Mbembe uses earlier on. I am concerned about how the final line promotes an exceptionalism—“liberation from the accepted rules”, “devoid of both obstacles and guilt”–that the previous language actually dismantles. I like the dismantling better. It marks an immanent criticism of sovereignty that may be more efficient, politically, at dismantling sovereign exceptions than Mbembe’s final sentence.

Given this conclusion, however, one should not be surprised by the final paragraph of the chapter: to be African, it proclaims, is to be “a man free from everything, and therefore able to invent himself. A true politics of identity consists on constantly nourishing, fulfilling, and refulfilling the capacity for self-invention. Afro-centrism is a hypostatic variant of the desire of those of African origin to need only to justify themselves to themselves” (Mbembe 2017, 178). Mbembe prefers here a world that is constituted by the relation to the Other—and it is the human that introduces that otherness into blackness, which he argues must be “clouded” (Ibid., 173). This will be the beginning—via Fanon—of the “post-Césairian era” (Ibid.). Again, one wonders whether “clouding”—a term he uses earlier in the chapter—can mean the same as “free from everything”; one wonders whether “post” can really refer to the radical break that seems to be alluded to here. Ultimately, Mbembe’s critique appears to be torn between a more conservative articulation that would remain within the critique’s limits, and a more radical one that would seek to transgress it. Given that he relies for his critique largely on Fanon, this should come as no surprise, as I have shown that Fanon himself, too, is caught up within this tension of staying within (Hegel) and going beyond (Bataille). Everything in “On Violence” points to the beyond; and yet, the constructive part of its project—not addressed in the chapter—takes place “within” national liberation. Ultimately, what haunts the difference between those two positions is the problematic of sovereignty itself: of its paradoxical association both with an outside and a within (“I who am outside of the law, declare that there is nothing outside of the law”, as Agamben captures the paradox of sovereignty). And, of course, of an even greater sovereignty—absolute violence, absolute expenditure—that, as the sovereignty of sovereignties, may ultimately do no more than perpetuate sovereignty’s exceptionalism. The third path, as I’ve also suggested, would be that of non-sovereignty.

Indeed, it may be that for black life, the project of sovereignty is over, that Fanon’s call for national liberation and the inspiration if provided for the Black Panther Party are a thing of the past, for good. Joan Cocks, focusing on the Israel/Palestine situation and Indigenous politics, has laid out some very good reasons for this (See: Cocks 2014). But if that is so—if sovereignty should indeed be seen as a thing of the past–it seems crucial at a time when sovereignty is going through a revival on the Right, in open conflict with the “horizontalist” Black Lives Matter movement today, that new forms of collective organization are proposed against sovereignty. Are those non-sovereign forms of collective organization? Do they claim sovereignty otherwise? How do they effectuate their power?

It is interesting to compare historical narratives of sovereignty as they are presented in different disciplines. In political theory, studies of sovereignty usually tell the story of sovereignty’s decline after WWII due to transnational political developments such as European integration or human rights politics. In Indigenous Studies, however, scholars tend to note that “following World War II, sovereignty emerged not as a new but as a particularly valued term within indigenous discourses to signify a multiplicity of legal and social rights to political, economic, and cultural self-determination” (Barker 2005, 1). Precisely when the term is on the wane in the West, where it was born, it is on the rise as an emancipatory tool for example for those communities “within” the West that seek to contest their subjection to another sovereign power. Those communities turned toward the term sovereignty, as Joanne Barker explains, in part to refuse the label “minority group”: “Instead, sovereignty defined indigenous peoples with concrete rights to self-determination, territorial integrity, and cultural autonomy under international customary law” (Barker 2005, 18). Of course, while refusing the label “minority group”, the communities instead adopt the term “sovereignty”, which was born and shaped in Europe. There may be a deeper problem here, as scholars like Elizabeth Povinelli have noted (See: Povinelli 2002), with the (Hegelian) politics of “recognition” (“Anerkennung”, in Hegel’s celebrated master/slave-dialectic) and how it tends to confirm the master’s terms. Indeed, it might seem strange to use the term “sovereignty” both to refer to the camp-like situation of black life in the U.S as exposed by Coates,[25] and now for these Indigenous struggles for self-determination. But such strangeness marks what Barker characterizes as the “contingency” of sovereignty, the fact that “[t]here is no fixed meaning for what sovereignty is—what it means by definition, what it implies in public debate, or how it has been conceptualized in international, national, or indigenous law” (Barker 2005, 21). The passage is worth quoting in full:

Sovereignty—and its related histories, perspectives, and identities—is embedded within specific social relations in which it is invoked, and given meaning. How and when it emerges and functions are determined by the “located” political agendas and cultural perspectives of those who rearticulate it into public debate or political document to do a specific work of opposition, invitation, or accommodation. It is no more possible to stabilize what sovereignty means and how it matters to those who invoke it than it is to forget the historical and cultural embeddedness of indigenous peoples’ multiple and contradictory political perspectives and agendas for empowerment, decolonization, and social justice. (Ibid.)

Sovereignty is, as I have indicated elsewhere (See: Boever 2016), plastic and it is this plasticity that any critique of sovereignty needs to assess. This is also to say that sovereignty is not sovereign—a claim that should be distinguished from the call for non-sovereignty.

If indigenous sovereignty thus emerges as a kind of serious playground or site of experimentation to think through new democratic possibilities today, it is precisely because it enables an immanent critique of sovereignty, as a politics of sovereignty that can only be critical. This is so, as Barker points out in her introduction to the book Critically Sovereign, for two reasons: on the one hand, because native sovereignty relates critically to the sovereignty of the nation-state, as a sovereignty that contests the power of another; second, because native sovereignty itself suffers from many of the same problems as the sovereignty of the nation-state, and therefore some of the criticisms that have been levelled against the sovereignty of the nation-state also apply to native sovereignty. In essence, this criticality revolves around the fact that when it comes to the indigenous politics of sovereignty, one can distinguish between two kinds: that which takes place “in relation to the state” and that which takes place “within the state” (Barker 2017, 8). Whereas the former relates to native sovereignty’s relation to the sovereignty of the nation-state, the latter operates within the sovereignty of the nation-state, and to participate in the latter can be—and has been—perceived as participating in the imperial and colonial politics of oppression of the sovereign nation-state. This is why what Barker refers to as “Civil Rights politics” does not cover the relation between indigeneity and sovereignty. It only covers the politics “within the state” part of the relation. In addition, one should also consider indigenous sovereignty’s relation to the sovereignty of the nation-state and the tensions it lays bare.

Barker articulates this (as well as other key parts of the critical sovereignty she develops) through a focus on “gender, sexuality, feminism” within her exploration of native sovereignty. She points out, for example, how the call for “women’s and gay’s liberation and civil rights equality … has been narrated as racializing and classing gender and sexuality in such a way as to further a liberal humanist normalization of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, male dominance, and white privilege” (Barker 2017, 12). In other words, there is a subject-formation that is operative in such liberation struggles, and while this does not cover the full story of those struggles, this is an important aspect of them that should be drawn out. Any hegemonic formation, in the terms developed by Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, will produce a counter-hegemonic formation; any rendering legible produces illegibility as Barker (via Judith Butler) puts it—there are always traces of internal exclusion or exception. It is from those traces—from those frictions, if you will–that politics develops. Indigenous approaches to for example gender and sexuality can be interesting in this context because they can “defy binary logics and analyses” (Ibid., 13)—and those include, it should be pointed out, discourses of a “third” (which ultimately in their very attempt to posit a third appear to confirm a pre-existing binary). The point of Barker’s approach appears to be to “defamiliarize gender, sexuality, and feminist studies to unpack the constructedness of gender and sexuality and problematize feminist theory and method within Indigenous contexts” (Ibid., 14). Indigenous politics are interesting in this context as well because when for example indigenous women seek to pursue a feminist politics to redress their own status in their communities, they run into resistance because their tribe members perceive them to be sleeping with the enemy—to be “non- or anti-Indigenous sovereignty within their communities” (Ibid., 20). “They accused the women of being complicit with a long history of colonization and racism that imposed, often violently, non-Indian principles and institutions on Indigenous people” (Ibid.). So gender, sexuality, and feminism have a difficult place within native sovereignties, and it is precisely around the notion of sovereignty that this difficulty gets played out.

Barker’s introduction also contains hope for the future, though. Such hope articulates itself around a poetic project of remaking—of remaking masculinity for example; but also of remaking the world. This is about asserting a sovereignty that would not fall into the old traps of sovereignty—that would not reify, for example, “heterosexist ideologies that serve conditions of imperial-colonial oppression” (Barker 2017, 24). It would be a remaking that might confront “the social realities of heterosexism and homophobia” within indigenous communities (Ibid., 25). In other words, “Indigenous manhood and masculinity [need to be redefined] in a society predicated on the violent oppression and exploitation of Indigenous women and girls and the racially motivated dispossession and genocide of Indigenous peoples” (Ibid., 26). It is precisely here, in the project of not opposing the violent sovereignty of the oppressor with a call for a violent sovereignty of the oppressed—with the Fanonian attempt to go beyond such a dialectical opposition—that the possibility of an Indigenous future opens up, an Indigenous Futurism (of sovereignty). It is because of the very particular position that Indigenous sovereignty is in that this becomes possible. And this is the reason, I think, why so many contemporary theorists of sovereignty turn to this example to pursue a redefined politics of sovereignty today. The turn towards indigenous sovereignty enables, precisely, what Barker labels a “critical” sovereignty. It enables what one could, more precisely, call a “critique” of sovereignty where the power we call sovereign is not abandoned, not rejected, but transgressively transformed from within in view of the abuses it has enabled and the possibilities for emancipation it has opened up.

Now, the situations of African-American life and Native American life in the U.S. are of course not the same, as scholars have pointed out; African Americans and Native Americans have been governed in different ways, through different strategies and with different purposes. Their histories are connected in complicated ways. Nevertheless, it seems that when it comes to the issue of sovereignty, and to the debates between those who propose to reject it and those who pragmatically adopt it (in some cases to resist being labelled a “minority group”), an alliance between African-American and Native American thinking about sovereignty may be fruitful. It may lead to a situation where the exceptionalism that tends to get a negative rap opens up to democratic possibilities, as Bonnie Honig has considered in her work (See: Honig 2011), and counter-sovereignties are developed (as Honig has proposed in her book on Antigone [See: Honig 2013]). When it comes to actively taking on those sovereignties on the Right that are finding new life today, such democratic re-elaborations of sovereignty may be the most effective—at least until other, better options come along to defeat fascism.

 

Arne De Boever teaches American Studies in the School of Critical Studies and the MA Aesthetics and Politics program at the California Institute of the Arts (USA). He is the author of States of Exception in the Contemporary Novel (Continuum, 2012), Narrative Care (Bloomsbury, 2013), Plastic Sovereignties (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), Finance Fictions (Fordham University Press, 2018), and Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism (Minnesota University Press, 2019). His book François Jullien’s Unexceptional Thought: A Critical Introduction is forthcoming with Rowman & Littlefield (2020).

 

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[1] I would like to thank Sarah Brouillette and in particular Olivia C. Harrison, AdouMaliq Simone, and Ryan Bishop for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of this article.

[2] Donna Haraway would ask us to consider to what extent this Hobbesian claim is based on the observation of how actual wolves live together (Haraway 2008).

[3] The king has two bodies: an earthly, biological one and a spiritual, symbolic one. This image shows the king’s symbolic body. It is because of this two-body problematic that we have the acclamation, “The king is dead, long live the king!”—the biological king is dead, long live the symbolic body of the king, which is immortal. There is barely a pause between the two parts of the acclamation to ensure the continuity of power. See: Kantorowicz, 2016.

[4] See: Agamben, 2015.

[5] Foucault, “Society”, 90.

[6] Ibid., 90.

[7] The validity of this “against” may have to be contested. That certainly appears to be Agamben’s project, against Foucault, in: Agamben, Stasis. He presents Hobbes there as a thinker of the dissolved multitude of civil war rather than as a theorist of the people. So rather than being a theorist of peace, Hobbes is a theorist of civil war. Following Agamben, one would have to conclude that Foucault blames Hobbes for a position that is not his.

[8] Andreas Kalyvas’s reading of Schmitt’s Constitutional Theory—in many ways an aberrant work in Schmitt’s oeuvre—also begs us to differ: Kalyvas 1999-2000.

[9] Ibid., 108.

[10] I would like to thank AbouMaliq Simone for reminding me of this third path. I take the phrase “continuous unsettling” from his generous comments on my article, which drew my attention to: Marriott 2016.

[11] It seems, rather, that today exceptionalist sovereignty and neoliberalism need to be thought together: Scheuerman 1997; Biebricher 2014; Mirowski 2014.

[12] To be clear, I would not want to suggest here that the European frame of reference, in particular the reference to Auschwitz, is somehow needed to draw out the gravity of the situation of black lives in the U.S. Certainly when “camp” is used as the paradigm to capture the specific historical situation of black lives in the U.S., the specificity of that situation and the localization of the notion of camp that it requires would need to acknowledged. Ava DuVernay’s documentary film 13^th (Kandoo Films/Netflix, 2016) does some of that work, relying in part on: Alexander 2012.

[13] This something partly gets a geographical name in Coates’ book: Paris. It is in Paris where Coates realizes that there are places where he is not other people’s problem. Black people are not the problem of Paris; one should add that that dubious privilege is reserved for the Arabs, though Coates does not state this explicitly. In his turning to Paris as refuge, Coates is of course not alone: James Baldwin, Richard Wright, William Gardner Smith, and others, had done the same before him.

[14] Weheliye 2014, 56 and further. To be clear, Gilroy points to the usefulness of the camp to analyze the situation of black lives in the U.S., but also emphasizes Agamben’s blindness to race.

[15] I will refer here to two English translations of Fanon’s text: Fanon 1968 and Philcox 2004. For the French original, see Fanon 2002.

[16] There is an affiliation across colonial situations that, in view of discussions of Fanon’s work such as Robert Young’s (Young 2001), needs to be acknowledged here: the “I” of the native in Fanon’s text cannot straightforwardly be identified with Fanon himself, as in Algeria he was not a native or “indigène”, a term that Philcox unfortunately renders as “colonial subject” (Fanon 2004, 15). Fanon arrived in Algeria as a French citizen, which as a Martiniquan he had become after 1946, when Martinique became a “department” of the French state.

[17] This is the Farrington translation. Fanon’s original French has “violence absolue” (Fanon 2002, 41). Philcox renders this as “out and out violence” (Fanon 2004, 3).

[18] Farrington renders this as “complete disorder” (Fanon 1968, 36). The original French has “désordre absolu” (Fanon 2002, 39).

[19] When Fanon offers this line, he is referencing the New Testament, which casts the decolonized community he imagines in “messianic” terms. This is so even if he compares Christianity to DDT earlier on in his text.

[20] Farrington’s rendering is more correct: “the question is not always to reply to it by greater violence, but rather to see how to relax the tension” (Fanon 1968, 73). Here is Fanon: “la question n’est pas toujours d’y répondre par une plus grande violence mais plutôt de voir comment désamorcer la crise” (Fanon 2002, 72).

[21] Nigel Gibson gets this negotiation exactly right in the context of a discussion of dialectics: Gibson 2007.

[22] Nelson in fact did another cover for The New Yorker that had Malcolm X on it, but he appeared there as part of a group of African-American figures at the center of which was the (much more acceptable) figure of James Baldwin. The other cover can be accessed at: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/cover-story-2017-01-16.

[23] David Macey observes that around 1961, “Fanon had reached, or perhaps returned to, the Sartrean position of which he had been so critical in Peau noire, masques blancs [Black Skin, White Masks]: negritude had been no more than a ‘racist anti-racism’ that had to be transcended. Negritude could exist only in the context of white domination” (Macey 2012: 372).

[24] The exact relation of this position to Foucault is complicated and will have to be discussed on another occasion.

[25] I should note that while Agamben himself has paid no attention to Indigenous politics, his work has proved quite productive in Indigenous Studies. As Circe Sturm observes, “For scholars working in Native North America, settler-colonial theory becomes especially productive when placed in conversation with Giorgio Agamben’s ideas on state sovereignty” (Sturm 2017, 342).

 

by Joseph Owen

“[A] borderline concept is not a vague concept, but one pertaining to the outermost sphere. This definition of sovereignty must therefore be associated with a borderline case and not with routine.”

–Carl Schmitt, Political Theology

Carl Schmitt’s famous formulation, “[s]overeign is he who decides on the exception”, has several key components (2005: 5). Schmitt argues that the sovereign shows himself by making the genuine and pure decision, which amounts to some kind of formal revelation, and by deciding what constitutes the exceptional case, which amounts to some kind of extraordinary substantive moment. The decision on what counts as, and therefore what to do about, the exception occurs during states of emergency, peril, siege, catastrophe, urgency, need, or crisis, at a time that requires suspension of the existing order to maintain structural order. The sovereign, in these instances, acts as the borderline; he is both inside and outside of the law, deploying the extralegal exception against the routine accumulation of legal rules and norms. In lineal language, this accumulation is the excess of faintly illustrated lines, symptomatic of political liberalism, which the firmly inscribed borderline supersedes. At the outermost sphere and in the most extreme circumstance: there and then the superior exception explains the inferior rule. In the revelatory and extraordinary decision, the sovereign is made visible. We see through the haze of plurality; we see, finally, who decides.

Schmitt’s absolutist rendering of the line establishes the moment of sovereignty as a moment without friction. Sovereign decision overwhelms un-sovereign indecision. Norms, rules, and the usual order, which in everyday life possess their own internal contingencies and frictions, offer no resistance. His theory of sovereignty pursues a frictionless and transcendent action, by way of an abrasive and aesthetic abstraction. The border causes friction by definition. Schmitt uses the Kantian term Grenzbegriff, which suggests the limit or boundary inherent to human sense experience. He establishes a mutually comprehensible idea to articulate his theory of sovereignty. As Tracy B. Strong notes, this limit or boundary “looks in two directions, marking the line between that which is subject to law—where sovereignty reigns—and that which is not—potentially the space of the exception” (2005: xiii).

Schmitt’s borderline concept exposes frictionless sovereignty as an oxymoron, because the frictionless exception overwhelms that which is subject to law. It erases all other lines—over which sovereignty reigns—through its inscription of the hard line. It also exposes frictionless sovereignty as a redundancy, because it represents a desirable ideal—potentially the space of the exception—as an unattainable imaginary. These apparent contradictions arise from the fact that norms predicate the existence of the exception, so the moral or aesthetic preference for the exception must incorporate the general ubiquity of norms. One cannot exist without the other. The sovereign decision should be understood as both a spatial and temporal intervention. Definite but impermanent, omniscient but imperceptible, the decision cannot be anticipated before its appearance. It has no past but the torpor it explodes; no future but the memory of its decisive moment. For Schmitt, the borderline, which locates the exact place and moment of friction, produces the frictionless decision.

*

Schmitt’s reverence for the sovereign decision within the political domain is borne of a particular historical moment in Germany. There were twenty separate coalitions during Weimar, with the longest period of government lasting two years. His anxiety about open-ended deliberation speaks to this political landscape. Schmitt deems the contemporary theory of law as both a “deteriorated […] normativism [and] a degenerate decisionism”, which produces “a formless mixture, unsuitable for any structure” (2005: 3). He wanted to delineate legal form and have the German state modify putatively liberal texts such as the Versailles Treaty and the Weimar Constitution to allow for decisive political action. According to him, degenerate compromise must be sacrificed for the pure decision, which cuts through legal formlessness and decomposition, while rendering new demarcations and delineations.

For Schmitt, the unanticipated wins the day. His sovereign decision takes its unique authority from the fact that “the precise details of an emergency cannot be anticipated, nor can one spell out what may take place in such a case, especially when it is truly a matter of an extreme emergency of how it is to be eliminated” (2005: 6–7). The unanticipated emergency thus requires the unanticipated decision, which eliminates the emergency. Its authority is predicated on suddenness, absolute insight, and pure revelation, which transcends hopeful fortune-telling and prescient formula. Schmitt acts against what he sees as the essence of political liberalism: the ineffective institutional modus operandi that runs contrary to natural political behavior. In his view, what defines much of liberal democratic politics is the temporal desire for pre-emptive policies, established contingencies, and the overriding ability to anticipate. The obsessive need for planning and precision produces suffused and complicated procedures that amount to vague, gestural and meaningless politics.

In both Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, Schmitt sees the burgeoning practice of political liberalism as necessarily one of interminable conversation and limitless discussion. The Second Reich’s tense hybrid of autocratic and popular rule, which is followed by the incipient parliamentary democracy of the interwar period, deformed and sullied the genuine sovereign decision through the eternal stream of amendments, diktats, regulations, rules, and norms. In their most abstract form, these processes can be understood as the excess of lines, whose multiplicities accumulate to produce an image beyond politically effective action and distinction. The decision on how to eliminate the extreme emergency is one of erasing these faint, illustrative lines and replacing them with the ultimate line, the borderline. The sovereign ability to take the lives of lineaments inflicts mass death upon complicated lineal excess, which in turn restores meaningful political identity through a single, firm inscription. Schmitt’s critique of liberalism is predicated on the elimination of lines; this trope features throughout his work, starting in his early culture critiques.

*

Published in 1918 in the journal SUMMA, edited by the essayist Franz Blei, “The Buribunks” is exemplary of Schmitt’s literary fiction. At its centre are perpetual diary-keepers whose sole purpose is to obsessively document the present, so as to preclude the uncertain future. The article is seventeen pages of imaginative speculation, published on the cusp of two eras, as the desultory Kaiserreich made way for the democratic promise of the Weimar republic. It satirizes and ironizes the putatively liberal tendency of the historical moment: futile anticipation of the political event. This tendency is what the sovereign decision on the exception, theorised four years later in Political Theology (1922), negates and overwhelms. Schmitt’s early literary works locate the problem of sovereign authority; his major political works intend to remedy it. In “The Buribunks”, he ridicules the process of accumulating details, which he assigns to the world of legal positivism, the juridical landscape with which he was closely acquainted. In Political Theology, he theorizes sovereignty as the borderline, which satisfies his cravings for political clarity and visibility; it provides the effective counterpoint to the liberal politics of dense accumulation and hazy pluralism.

Schmitt’s literary and political approaches draw on aesthetic sensibilities. Modernisms, as contemporary aesthetic modes, likewise consider questions of sovereignty through satire, irony, and ridicule. Schmitt participated in the cultural tumult of the early twentieth century. He read and critically appraised writers as varied as Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Hugo Ball, and Wyndham Lewis. Placing Schmitt amid literary modernisms that precede and follow him is a more complicated task; it relies on a broader theoretical apparatus. Critics such as Peter Bürger have connected Schmitt’s desire for the exception to “an aestheticist Lebensphilosophie”, which reveals modernist motifs of abruptness, suddenness, and departure in his thought (1992: 434). Yet, Schmitt’s borderline is a complex force; it is not merely a cipher for rupture, discontinuity, and shock. His necessarily imprecise and undetailed exception provides a challenge for literary modernisms, in which anticipation is often forlorn and lineaments are uncertain. Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty is a product of his cravings for legal order within social disorder, for decision over discussion, and for establishing pure images within chaotic political forms. He moves from being a cultural to a political thinker through his fictions, which should be read against a range of modernist writers. Problems arising from aesthetics can be brought into potentially political formulations, which offer solutions apprehended through the unique effects of literature.

Considering Schmitt’s text “The Buribunks”, this article argues how Schmitt’s coterminous critique—of the accumulation of detail, and of the anticipation of the event—reveals tendencies towards modernism in his ideological anti-liberalism. It outlines the aesthetic sensibilities of Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty and how these inform his resurgent intellectual and academic popularity, expressing also his kinship to contemporary philosophical modernisms. Considering examples of anticipation and sovereignty in the works of Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, and Samuel Beckett, this article proposes that in “The Buribunks” Schmitt employs a modernist critique, or a form of critique that anticipates legacies of modernism, to comprehend the inherent follies of political liberalism. For Schmitt, the forlorn accumulation of details, understood as the excess of lines, produces a foolhardy state of anticipation. His theory of sovereignty, understood as the borderline, intends to eliminate this state.

*

Schmitt elaborates on the sovereign decision through appeals to form and analogy. He cannot create a political concept without turning to the language of rendering and line drawing. Schmitt simultaneously critiques liberalism and advocates decisive sovereignty by evoking lines and spaces between the lines. This echoes contemporary modernist theory. In Paul Klee’s pedagogical sketches, for example, medial lines function within a work of art. They also delineate areas on a map, showing terrain, territories and land mass. Necessarily free, abstract and meandering, the movement of the active line gives birth to space. When hardened, the active is inscribed as the medial line, constructing boundaries and borders. These limits mark both figurative and literal planes, generating geometric and representational areas (1968: 16–20; see also de Bruyn 2014). The transformation of the line, one that moves from the purely aesthetic to the potentially political, and from play to utility, is significant for Schmitt through to his later work on Nomos and Raum (see Schmitt 2003; 2019).

Sybille Krämer considers the concept of the line through multiple spatial and temporal configurations. The existence of lines broadly “depends on the phenomenon of the plane” and their drawing incorporates “the temporal succession of a gesture [which] becomes the spatial simultaneity of a mark”. This speaks to Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty, in which the imposition of the borderline creates the symbolic space that surrounds it. This symbolic space can be understood as the phenomenon of the plane; the temporal succession of norms, meanwhile, produces the conditions within which the exceptional mark of the borderline eventually appears. Schmitt’s borderline is deliberately visible and multifaceted. It is simultaneously an act of inscription and of erasure, a single firm stroke that effaces innumerable faint etchings. Krämer describes the components of the silhouette in a way reminiscent of the borderline, insofar as both forge distinctions and suggest motion. The silhouette functions as “an instrument of metamorphosis” and as “a medium of transmission and transgression” (2016: 10-17). Schmitt, too, employed the silhouette form in his early literary critiques. So, to formulate Schmitt’s borderline as a purely political entity—one of norms and exceptions, only—is to ignore its irreducibly aesthetic sensibilities.

Schmitt cannot resist what he calls “systematic analogy” when invoking the theological precepts for his political concepts. Memorably, he states that the miracle in theology corresponds to the exception in politics. Metaphors he deems less valuable merely “yield colourful symbols and pictures” (2005: 37). At unpredictable times, according to Schmitt, “the power of real life breaks through the crust of mechanism that has become torpid by repetition” (2005: 15). This formulation, one of disputably Nietzschean provenance, does not preclude anticipation of the decisive event. The crusting of the mechanism, which supresses or undoes some vital element of human life, functions as a dulled anticipatory image. Visible through their density and accumulation, the excess of rules and norms reveals the torpor of political liberalism. Within the mass of procedures, little can be discerned or clarified because of the surplus of lines. This is what the metaphor of the exception acts against: details, details, details. Schmitt craves the elimination of these details, which paradoxically articulates their visibility. To transpose these details into lines—into the torpid repetitions that reveal the crusted mechanism—is to anticipate, through the formation of a dense image, the apparently unanticipated exception.

*

Schmitt both embraces and rejects the aesthetic domain in his political theory, which inspires a broader inspection of aesthetics in his thought. George Kateb writes persuasively on the frictions between aestheticism and morality within Schmitt’s concept of the political, arguing that to advocate senseless fighting in an abstract agon is to tend towards an aestheticized understanding of politics. Schmitt’s reluctant cravings for form, line and analogy in his theory of sovereignty are thus suggestive of Kateb’s tripartite classification:

1. 1. 1. a craving for form, shape, shapeliness, definition, or definiteness; a craving for coherence or unity; a craving for purity or consistency; a craving for discernible identity and ease of identification; a craving for pattern; a craving for clarification or sharp boundaries and stark contrasts; a craving for dualism or bipolarity;
      2. a craving for style, for stylization; a craving for decorum, for comme il faut; a craving for suitability, for “fit”; a craving for appropriate appearances;
      3. a craving for striking surfaces, for color or colorfulness; a craving for novelty (2000: 14).

Sets A and B illustrate Schmitt’s aesthetic methodology. These cravings produce the concept of the sovereign decision, which in turn inspires the novelty of the exception, illustrated in set C. Critically reading these aesthetic sensibilities is important because of his complicated insistence on the aesthetic as both a dangerous domain of intellectual life and as a trivial mode of perception. This is worth noting because his polemical strategy of disavowal subordinates the aesthetic to the political domain.

That Schmitt is at once dismissive and troubled by “aesthetic characterization” elicits an involuntary irony, since he conceives his concepts through the aesthetic mode, through language founded in literature and art (2005: 65). This partly explains why his work on sovereignty persists today and has influenced some major humanities theorists, including Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben. Mouffe uses Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction to articulate a political theory of agonistic pluralism applicable to current forms of social democracy (1999). Derrida deploys Schmitt to theorize the politics of friendship, as well as to interrogate the bestial symbols that represent sovereignty in various cultural forms (2005; 2009; 2011). Agamben draws upon Schmitt’s political philosophy to diagnose in modern societies examples of permanent emergencies, regimes of biopower and conditions of bare life (1998; 2005).

Schmitt seems to be experiencing a second life outside of academia, too. The jurist of the Third Reich and famed twentieth century political theorist is now fodder for editorials in the Atlantic, the Financial Times, and the London Review of Books. Authoritarian conservatives, amoral leftists and self-flagellating liberals have acknowledged, appropriated and claimed affinity to Schmitt’s work. He is invoked to apprehend crises as disparate as Brexit, the rise of Steve Bannon, identity politics, and the electoral successes of demagogues such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Jair Bolsonaro. Even outwardly liberal political and administrative leaders use the language of emergency and enemy when trying to articulate global disasters such as COVID-19. For many, Schmitt helps to clarify the tumultuous present in all its contradictions (see Owen 2019; 2020).

*

Schmitt’s appeal is threefold. Firstly, he tries to demystify politics. To be political, in his retelling, is to be a truly meaningful person, one above frivolous moral, economic, and aesthetic identities. The political life is thus the essential life. Secondly, his apparent intellect and card-carrying Nazism provide an appalling and seductive framing that anticipates a disastrous era of totalitarian politics. This is why so many commentators are attracted to him today, despite his embroilment with National Socialism. Through him, they can perform moral disgust while claiming insight into a worrying future. Lastly, his mystique is intensified by the way he constructs his ideas. He uses pithy axioms about legal order and state decision-making that are as slippery as they are suggestive. We can do a lot with them. His outward suitability for the present is thus explicable: his thought promises meaningful political identity; he possesses second sight; his language seems appealingly vague.

Prescribing Schmitt, whose ideas seem fixed but can be transposed into innumerable iterations, makes sense. His ideas, aided by concrete-looking definitions and linguistic slippages, seek to be understood intuitively and instinctively, to be immediately visible. But there is ambiguity in his thought. His virile heuristics function as symbolic spaces, within which commentators paint current policies, cravings and sensibilities. They pick any color: a dash of Erdoğan, a lick of Xi Jinping, a blot of Salvini, a shade of Johnson. In one New Statesman article, the headline foregrounds “the terrifying rehabilitation of Nazi scholar Carl Schmitt”, beneath which it notes his prescience for understanding the political phenomenon of Brexit “only too well” (Earle 2019). Powered by a polarized energy, commentators valorize Schmitt’s thought while gesturing at moral aberrations within it. They color in their appreciation of the abstraction. His theory of sovereignty thus functions potently as a symbolic space within which aesthetic sensibilities can be expressed. His borderline concept gestures towards the gaps either side of it. In Eric L. Santner’s words, these gaps amount to “fissures or caesuras in the space of meaning” (2006: xv). The borderline generates the possibility of not only symbols but of symbolic space, a free area of meaning to be identified and rendered upon.

Schmitt appeals across belief spectrums and media platforms because of the ostensible clarity and deliberate ambiguity of his conceptual schema. His language is as precise as it is amenable, his ideas as fixed as they are promiscuous. He deals in axioms and aphorisms, which extend his popularity to depraved internet forums. Noting the attraction of Schmitt for contemporary scholars, Jens Meierhenrich and Oliver Simons point to “the aesthetic and emotional appeal of [his] conceptual interventions”, which often trump their “explanatory power” (2017: 25, 17). Yet, emphasis on Schmitt’s rhetorical and polemical skill overlooks the aesthetic sensibilities that provide much of his explanatory power and which pervade his work. He is politically persuasive because his work draws on aesthetic sensibilities and fulfils aesthetic cravings. This discussion must negotiate in turn the troubling recuperation of Schmitt as a critic of liberalism and the troubling, sustaining legacy of Schmitt as a symbol of intelligent fascism. Analysing his literary approach allows us to cut through and past these versions of Schmitt.

*

Literary aesthetics are bound up with broader political, philosophical and legal debates. The story of modern sovereignty is thus inseparable from the tropes of early-twentieth century modernism. Schmitt’s formulation of sovereignty brings into relief the complicated use of symbols in modernism to understand a radically changing international order. His theological allusions foreground symbols that purport to represent as well as resist traditional ideas of sovereignty. His appeal to seriousness and political existentialism, which grounds his theory of sovereignty, encourages the tragicomic retort found within the credo of modernism: that the artistically realizable human condition is undercut by the fallibility of perception and the complex powers of literature. As it is conventionally told, innovations in modernist prose destabilized the omniscience of third-person narration while movements in modernist art complicated the authority of perceptive realism. Because the sovereign author has a disruptive attitude towards content, form, and style, his or her work no longer claims to hold emancipatory or empathetic value. These developments confront Schmitt’s anxiety about the aesthetic domain, because modernism’s desire to critique and undermine itself reaffirms its importance to intellectual life and risks displacing the ultimate political domain.

The innovations, movements, and destabilizations wrought by modernism paradoxically draw attention to the fixed scaffolding that sustains the realms of literature and art. By acknowledging their innate failures, the modernist author and artist provide a deceptive, trickier opponent than that of the romantic poet, whose desire for intellectual primacy is never hidden, and who, as a result, provides a clear antithesis to Schmitt’s political sovereign. In Political Romanticism (1919), Schmitt summarizes “the romantic treatment of the universe” as one concerned with:

The instant, the dreaded second, [that] is also transformed into a point. The present is nothing other than the punctual boundary between past and future. It connects both “by means of limitation.” It is “ossification, crystallization” (Novalis). A circle can be wrapped around it as the center. It can also be the point at which the tangent of infinity is contiguous with the circle of the finite. It is also, however, the point of departure for a line into the infinite that can extend in any direction. Thus every event is transformed into a fantastic and dreamlike ambiguity, and every object can become anything. The “universe is the elongation of my beloved.” Conversely, “the beloved is the abbreviation of the universe.” “Every individual is the center of a system of emanation.” Instead of mystical forces, the emanations are geometric lines (1991: 76).

Schmitt, in his broad-brush polemical disdain, conflates the individual egoism of the romantic poet with the egalitarian geometry of the modernist artist; he acknowledges, though, that it is “not the geometric line, but rather the arabesque that is romantic” (1991: 74). This distinction heeds the idea that modernisms, more so than romanticisms, were self-critical, self-reflexive and acutely aware of literary forms and artistic traditions. They thus pose different, difficult questions about the nature of aesthetics that haunt Schmitt throughout his work. Critically reading his theory of sovereignty both with and against developments of modernism illuminates his writings on representation, parliamentary democracy, the political, myth, symbol, humanity, and Nomos.

Friedrich Kittler includes a lengthy, translated extract of “The Buribunks” in his book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999). Geoffrey Winthrop-Young notes one pivotal issue of Kittler’s broad theoretical stance:

[…] discontinuity—a forceful, at times polemical emphasis on ruptures, breaks and caesuras designed to obliterate any attempt to infuse history with gradualist, progressive, teleological or dialectical notions. History is not smooth; it doesn’t lead out of the cave of early illusions into the mature blaze of enlightenment; it does not exhibit any growing intelligibility; and it cannot be reduced to a fanciful relay of revolutionary subjects (2006: 10).

Discontinuity is likewise crucial to understanding Schmitt’s treatment of history in “The Buribunks”. The narrator dismisses the limited efforts of Leporello, Don Juan’s servant, who lacks the ambition and ability to document his master’s life in precise detail and perfect continuity. He makes errors and omissions and possesses neither a methodological framework nor an obvious strategy. He has no interest in his subject or in the demographic factors that surround his subject. He does not write about Don Juan in context: not with reference to statistics, politics, law, economy, or society. He lacks the tools and motivation for extended scientific enquiry and is bereft of the chronic self-awareness required to project his own life onto the documentation of his subject (2019: 102–04). Schmitt ironically portrays the narrator’s dismissiveness towards Leporello as a blind belief in the relentless meaning of historical record. Schmitt’s assessment of this complacency is central to his understanding of the question of sovereignty.

*

The decision, according to Schmitt, “emanates from nothingness” and “contains a moment of indifference from the perspective of content, because [it] is not traceable in the last detail to its premises and because the circumstance that requires a decision remains an independently determining moment” (2005: 32, 30). Schmitt privileges decision ahead of indecision, exposing what looks like an essential desire for form over content. This desire is a defining component of literary modernism. Gopal Balakrishnan concludes that Schmitt’s writings:

[…] contain a number of sharp, composite images of an era characterized by the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous. They are attempts to capture the experience of the end of several overlapping eras in European history at an explosive convergence of turning points [during …] a seemingly irreversible devaluation of the dominant political traditions of the belle époque: conservatism, liberalism and moderate socialism (2000: 268).

This highfalutin summary illustrates the scholarly desire to place Schmitt’s politics in his literary context. Modernisms sought ways to redress the poverty of meaning engendered by hyper-detailed, anticipatory political liberalism. “The Buribunks” helps assess whether his writings are ‘modernist texts par excellence’ (2000: 268).

Schmitt, after all, sought to advance a theory against anticipation, through which to remedy the political crisis of the period. The modernist literary mission is one historically premised on rupture and transformation. It is the dominant mode through which the collapsing orders of the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, and beyond were challenged and comprehended. This apprehension of crisis and collapse is particularly striking in the apparently politically dispassionate works of Anglophone modernism, in writers such as Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner. Schmitt is likewise concerned with the relationship between modernity and crisis. Yet, the classic modernist characterization of rupture and transformation—often as a predicate for newness—is neither sufficient, nor accurate, for evaluating his relationship to aesthetic modernism. It is more persuasive to argue that Schmitt, alert to the political potential of disorder, desires new understandings of order, and that in various periods and modes of modernism there is a similar excitement in disorder combined with a yearning for order. This affective combination produces subversive responses to ideas of continuity amid seismic social and political change.

A melancholy intellectualism defines political and artistic approaches to the early to mid-twentieth century. The contemporary diagnosis of state failure corresponds to the modernist diagnosis of aesthetic failure. Political philosophy of the period tends to grapple with anticipation, as do literary modernisms; in both, there is a desire for the not-quite-yet to disrupt and clarify the age. Melancholy, failure, and anticipation thus constitute the Schmitt-modernist diagnosis of sovereignty. Robert B. Pippin usefully pinpoints these intellectual states as integral to philosophical modernism, because modernity shifted from its “repetitive […] culture of melancholy”, which was “morbidly fixated on failure”, towards:

[…] the realization of an even more radical notion of historical time, without purpose or structure, but infinitely repetitive, one which thereby eliminates any notion of decisive, revolutionary moments, [which] might make possible a “confirmation” of this life, not an anticipation of a future or different or missed life (1999: xi, 152, 156).

In the modern period, Pippin continues, “[w]e require a profound sense of the infinite repeatability, and so of such infinite sameness, to avoid the false hopes that inspire melancholy” (1999: 157). Just as Schmitt tried to reinstitute the authority of the decision to counter widespread political failure, currents within philosophical modernism sought to extinguish and replace the sovereign decision with an infinite series of repetitions that would preclude its existence. Through a melancholic vision, they desired a future that could not be seen, traced, or expected. Yet, their diagnoses were drastically different. By cross-stitching the states of melancholy, failure, and anticipation into an intricate mesh, and by drawing upon intellectual traditions that privilege these states within modernism, Pippin suggests that they are inextricable, interminable and co-productive. In this spirit, this article argues, Schmitt and literary modernisms make major appeals to structural continuity, to the interplay of order and disorder, and to the reorderings of political and artistic forms. Modernist writers not only invoke rupture, transformation and newness to address the period but also draw on the symbolic and social orders of repetition, reorder and restraint, which can correspond to the states of melancholy, failure and anticipation.

*

Tragedies wrought by intimacy and deception, without obvious villains, are studded throughout literature. Schmitt’s regular readings of Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), another literary figure emblematic of sovereign façade, firmly places his intellectual concerns within this genre of proto-modernist writing. Melville gives these words to the title character, the displaced captain of the ship San Dominick:

[…] you were with me all day; stood with me, talked with me, looked at me, ate with me, drank with me; and yet, your last act was to clutch for a villain, not only an innocent man, but the most pitiable of all men. To such degree may malign machinations and deceptions impose. So far may even the best man err, in judging the conduct of one with the recesses of whose condition he is not acquainted. But you were forced to it; and you were in time undeceived. Would that, in both respects, it was so ever, and with all men (1998: 158).

Benito Cereno is addressing his rescuer, Amasa Delano, who has been deceived by a series of extravagant performances. Slaves, led by the manipulative Babo, have taken control of the ship and, to avoid detection, retained Cereno as their leader, a silhouette of authority. Cereno’s position is rendered into a façade, and his erratic behaviour arouses Delano’s suspicions until the truth aches to be let out. It is the seminal tale of intimacy and deception, how often one arises from the other, and how difficult it is to locate good and evil in desperate circumstances. Melville’s tragedy of the false sovereign spoke powerfully to Schmitt, particularly in his post-World War II thinking.

Many works of modernist literature anticipate a late, symbolically crumbling but institutionally resilient global imperialism. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) famously depicts the brooding melancholy, cataclysmic shocks and subsequent confusions that destabilized European understandings of sovereignty and post-national orders. Lauren Benton, who exemplifies the contemporary law and literature approach to sovereignty, notes how the novella imagines and reformulates “the wilderness [which] threatened to lure men into the usurpation of sovereign authority, [and] into delusions of kingliness that might have borne some superficial similarity to [Colonel] Kurtz’s interior empire”. Benton states that “Conrad worried about dark places upriver where nature ruled”. In his depiction of the Congo, “the big trees were kings” (2009: 42). Uncertain spaces of looming nature form key modernist tropes of sovereign anxiety. Yet, Benton alludes to modernist literature in her discussion of sovereignty without fully realising its unique potential for explaining the nature of sovereign authority. Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty, which rejects the accumulation of detail as a predicate for anticipation, echoes the modernist tendency to use ill-defined symbols for a radically changing order. Conrad shows the forces of nature as tantalizing and deceptive, and as able to encourage phantasmal forms of sovereignty; in doing so, they preclude the genuine, visible decision. Suggestive of Schmitt, Lord Jim (1900) features disciplinary regimes defined by racialized conceptions of sovereignty, while Nostromo (1904) contains a republic founded on the state of emergency (Rehn 2012; Adams 2003).

Conrad’s fiction is broadly elusive, foreboding and anticipatory. In his short story “The Secret Sharer” (1910), central to his collection ‘Twixt Land and Sea (1912),  Conrad malforms the timeworn symbols of the severed head and the festering cadaver, reproducing sovereign anxieties about decapitation and decay. In the darkness, the unnamed ship captain recalls first misidentifying his doppelgänger, the stowaway Leggatt, as a headless corpse, before placing himself onto the figure whose “shadowy dark head”, like his, “seemed to nod imperceptibly”. The captain remembers facing his abyssal “reflection in the depths of a sombre and immense mirror” (2008: 86­–88). The deception of the sovereign exists through his nominal memories: his melancholy sense of aloneness, his failed authority and consequent disorientation, his anticipatory fear of violent displacement, and his complicated desire for doubling. Opposed to Schmitt’s clear delineation of land and sea, Conrad’s suggestion of betwixt and between represents sovereignty as a contested space, which can be dubiously reconstructed as one of unambiguous decision. Daniel R. Schwarz notes that the captain, through his relationship to Leggatt, “discovered within himself the ability to act decisively that he had lacked” (1982: 2). The sometimes vivid, sometimes hazy, retrospective monologue functions as an immediate present, which places the reader amid the character’s psychic and moral development. By steering the ship away from land and its associated dangers, the captain obtains the appearance of resolve and command. By looking backwards but presenting forwards, Conrad identifies the captain’s figurative movement into the assured and respected sovereign. The narrator’s reminiscence reveals that he who now decides is whoever once commanded, a past source of disputed agency, retrospectively known and yet still necessarily unknowable.

*

Schmitt’s cultural prescription in the years leading up to the publication of “The Buribunks” is literary, complicated and contradictory. His early works include “Silhouettes” (1913), a series of unflattering portraits of cultural figures, the politician Walther Rathenau among them. Although Schmitt avoided evaluating modernist novels from Mann, Musil, and Alfred Döblin, he did produce a monograph on Theodor Däubler’s long poem “The Northern Light” (1915). Published in a widely read literary journal, “The Buribunks” echoes the title of Mann’s novel Buddenbrooks (1901), and acts as a pivot for discussing Musil’s ideas. Schmitt’s literary criticism inflects our understanding of his political and legal tracts. His desire to base the concept of sovereignty on the state of exception, and to shape the political as the supreme domain of human action and intellectual life, draws on his anxieties about the aesthetic domain while assimilating the rhetorical styles of his culture critiques.

For Schmitt, the literary approach provides an apt diagnostic method to seek out the problems of law and politics. His interest in motifs and images is consistent and long lasting. His 1923 essay “Roman Catholicism and Political Form” considers forms of political representation, and his 1938 book on Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan interrogates ideas of political symbolism. He wrote his major works during the Weimar period, namely Political Theology and The Concept of the Political (1932). Schmitt published articles defending the Nazi Party from 1933 to 1936, after which he was ousted due to intellectual differences and internal criticisms. Using literary forms to distance himself from his National Socialist affiliation, he crafted a childlike fable of history, Land and Sea (1942). Many of his intellectual concerns came full circle. He wrote his 1910 university doctoral thesis in criminal law on guilt and returned explicitly to this theme in his Shakespearean critique Hamlet or Hecuba (1956). This marked a body of thought preoccupied throughout by aesthetic considerations, translated into subjects of sovereign decision, states of exception, and the concept of the political in the Weimar period.

This is to suggest that throughout his life, Schmitt never loses sight of the literary scene. This allows for consideration of a broad range of literary figures. Melville and Conrad produce ill-defined anticipatory symbols in their writings. Reading Schmitt’s later work on Nomos and the katechon encourages comparison with Beckett. His attempts to reconcile ideas of sovereignty and anticipation are suggestive of Schmitt’s permanent anxieties about the liberal, technocratic desire to record, document and accumulate details. These processes undermine the visibility of the sovereign decision and the clarity of political life. About contemporary analogies of the state, Schmitt writes:

It may be left open what the state is in its essence—a machine or an organism, a person or an institution, a society or a community, an enterprise or a beehive, or perhaps even a basic procedural order. These definitions and images anticipate too much meaning, interpretation, illustration, and construction (2007: 19).

Beckett, a very different sort of modernist writer to Melville and Conrad, blurs further the function of analogies and anticipatory symbols. Beckett depicts the futility of too much meaning, interpretation, illustration and construction. In works such as Waiting for Godot (1953), through to lesser-known short fictions such as the 1030-word “Ping” (1967), Beckett gestures towards the unknowable qualities of the future. These gestures suggest guesses, form possibilities and indicate ominous threats; together these elements constitute an inhibited epistemological effort, an attempt of literary detail, and a distinctive aesthetic method, which renders anticipation within symbolic spaces while destabilizing their surrounding contours.

*

The symbol or figure of the katechon, originating from St. Paul’s Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, denotes the great restrainer that is able to hold back the Anti-Christ. Schmitt’s post-war development of the katechon concept, which he retrospectively applies to his early theories of sovereignty, can be brought to bear in discussions of Beckett’s works, which contain comic and forlorn undertakings of presumed authorities and messiahs. Ambiguities of mid-twentieth century cultural life redefine the sovereign decision, which now includes the decision to do nothing: to commit no action. Paralysis is key for Schmitt’s understanding of the katechon, particularly “[t]he belief that someone or something restrains the end of the world is the only explanation which reconciles the eschatological paralysis of all human efforts with the historical greatness like that of the Christian Empire of the German kings” (2003: 60). The purpose of Schmitt’s amorphous katechon is to delay and engender anticipation of the Second Coming. This suggests the innate value of ostensibly melancholic waiting; the katechon lends agency to what appears to be stasis.

Schmitt’s literary method is bound up with his use of the katechon. One of his final published works, Political Theology II (1970), which cites negative influences ranging from Goethe to Brecht, “presents a certain literary obscurantism with references made to arcane sources, oblique hints, suggestive undertones, double meanings, crafted ironies and symbolic figurations” (2008: 3). Michael Hoelzl suggests more comparisons with Beckett: Waiting for Godot is “a truly political book” because the decision not to act, as depicted through Vladimir and Estragon, is fundamentally political. In turn, the time that occurs between inaction and action is defined by anticipation, which must be theorized by the katechon concept. As Hoelzl notes, “[t]he katechon is the only possible explanation to bridge the gap between the paralysis of all human efforts and innerworldly ambition. The katechon defines the space between the radically spiritual and the purely political” (2010: 99, 108). How, then, do Beckett’s aesthetic sensibilities function within this polarized symbolic space?

In “Ping”, the katechon is the ping sound that accompanies a barely visible figure struggling through what appears to be its final moments of consciousness. The figure exists in a small box bordered with white walls that trigger glimpsed traces of memories, that is, the lines of the past. The story begins with “[a]ll known”, and for the following 1028 words, the narrator, the figure, and the reader fall into a condition of “known not”. The repetitious, anticipatory form is broken by punctures of silence and the sound of ping. It ends on something definitive, “ping over”. The movements between beginning and ending, between acknowledgement and the event, constitute anticipation in the text. The critic Michael Wood states that in Beckett, “the future is not a place, and not much of a time” (1981). Wood understands the future as temporal and spatial, suggesting that Beckett’s works lack these markers and delineations. Yet, for Beckett, the future remains crucially a setting, considered through measurements and observable geometry. In “Ping”, “one yard” mirrors “one second”. Beckett articulates demarcated space through fractured and percussive time, and successive time through confined and overwhelming space (1967: 25–26).

Schmitt’s life-long literary preoccupations tease further comparisons with Beckett’s prose shorts, many of which contain apparently atemporal renderings. These pieces are residual, the cast-offs and reformulations of longer pieces. They are discrete in isolation but offer refractions of the human condition viewed together. Using the shorter form, Beckett maintains the state of anticipation through distorted movements that are difficult to discern. These may be extended, quick, sparse and frantic, but they always suggest linearity. Paralysis does not necessitate stasis; to be fixed in time is not a moral preference, or a source of inherent value, or a desirable method of representation. These pieces retain movement and almost replicate artworks, sketches and compositions. As in visual art, Beckett evokes stillness and chronology. He proposes that the reader looks around and across the text just as the viewer looks around and across a painting. As in music, Beckett offers permutations, repetitions, modulations and deviations. He keeps the reader’s ear to a metronome before producing onomatopoeic interruptions, a twang or, in this instance, a ping.

*

Melville, Conrad and Beckett offer diverse temporal strands of literary modernism that blur and refocus symbols within states of delay and waiting. These bring into relief Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty and facilitate a critical approach for understanding his rendering of anticipation in “The Buribunks”, a parody of institutionalized egoism and false forms of sovereign decision. Scholars have variously described the text as “surrealistic”, “a dystopia”, a mockery of “the secular ritual of confession”, “a satire of detached intellectualism”, an ironic “world history of inscription”, “a critique of modern subjectivity”, and a “biting caricature of the boheme and of positivism” (Bredekamp 1999: 251; Balke 2017: 633, 644; Meierhenrich and Simons 2017: 7; Kittler, 1999: 231; Mehring 2014: 86; Kennedy 2004: 44). Such characterisations both subvert and suggest its position as a modernist text. We have modes and genres of modernism, but these are contemptuous of the putative aesthetic subjectivities that modernisms desired to represent. Schmitt uses the text to interrogate systemic failures of technological modernity and scientific progress. He depicts institutions as conspicuous and unwieldy, the practice of historicism as self-important and futile, and the individual as devitalized, as abstracted from value and meaning. For Reinhart Koselleck, the conditions of institutionalism, historicism and individualism form a “negative utopia”, in which the diary keeping Buribunks represent “the interior […] turned outward”. The public accumulation of interiority constitutes a project of surveillance, which he calls “a mode of the performance of perfected terror” (2002: 93). Schmitt renders interiority as a hard surface, or as another unit of measurement, to critique the belief that history can be mastered, decided upon, and anticipated.

“The Buribunks” arrives on the cusp of Schmitt’s apparently decisive shift from cultural to political thought. Through techniques of extended irony and self-reflexive footnotes, Schmitt challenges the Wilhelmine culture that had failed to respond to his call for political clarity and visibility. From modernist origins and his discovery of early avant-garde movements, he assaults an inert, debased and embedded institutionalism. It is the most mature manifestation of his early critique of liberalism, which he reads as a vehicle for the obsessive accumulation of details that produces needless anticipation of the event. He sought to critique an age that venerated rules and norms, celebrated scientific arrogance, idolized selfhood and valorized technological advance:

From an early discovery of modernism and expressionism, Schmitt created the figure of liberalism that guided his analysis of Weimar’s institutions, a gesalt and doctrine that was part romantic and part positivistic and that was the spirit of his age. […] Schmitt’s antiliberalism was literary and theological at its core (2004: 40).

Schmitt uses the chaotic starting points of aesthetic modernism against his enemy figure of liberalism. Many currents of contemporary modernisms were likewise sceptical of the tendency to accumulate details, to endlessly discuss, and to attempt to mitigate the otherwise unanticipated event.

“The Buribunks” is a product of Schmitt’s combined experiences within the legal academy and under military command. The text offers an alternate society in which the desire to produce continual lines of information is held as the highest virtue, which is evidenced by a vast institutional framework. Organizations have lengthy and ludicrous initialisms, which constitute the populated landscape of the Buribunks. There are, among other things, “400,000 buribunkological dissertations (20 divisions!)”, the “International Buribunkological Institute for Ferker and Related Research (IBIFERR)”, and “the Buribunk and Ferker Research Panel Commission (BAFREPAC)”. Schmitt in turn creates a linear history of the Buribunks, one that eventually leads to the supreme state of Buribunkdom, which is the purest realm of the Buribunks. He begins his visionary history with Leporello, who mostly notes the sexual exploits of Don Juan, before tracing the dynasty of the Buribunks’ forerunners, including the fictional creations of Ferker and Schnekke. These scholars’ incipient, failed attempts at self-illustration lay the ground for the perfect world of accumulated knowledge. In this ultimate universe, the Buribunks give meaning to their existence by incessantly detailing it. Their concluding philosophy is thus one of inclusive and simultaneous “I-ness” (2019: 99–100, 104–108, 110). Such rampant officialdom, matched with unchecked egoism, fuels Schmitt’s critique of liberal progress, particularly its emphasis on common laws and on the central sovereign subject of the modern individual.

*

In “The Buribunks”, the obsessive process of anticipation debilitates the body. The Buribunks undergo physiological changes because of their diary keeping. Their growing intellect correlates with “an enlarged mouth”, for example. Consciousness and selfhood produce corporeal effects on anatomical surfaces. Schmitt creates an alternative rendering of the human body, comprised of deformed faces, creaturely habits and machine-like tendencies. He further invokes the body to outline the sense of uncertainty that provokes extreme anticipation. The dread with which the Buribunks view the future is described as “the dark body”—imposing, fearful, racialized—which is precluded by an obsessive, anticipatory present. The Buribunks ignore the sovereign decision, as Schmitt understands it, in favour of the accumulative detail that generates outward order. This constitutes the manipulation of the material world from an institutionalized distance, which is disguised as the simple frictions of the collective good. The Buribunks are biophysically transformed through their vast data production and bureaucratic surveillance. Their deification of communal processes thwarts the pursuit of human meaningfulness. For Schmitt, the desire to produce excessive temporal proximity leads to psychological indulgence, not physical vitality.

Schmitt compares the study of the Buribunks to popular contemporary anthropological assessments. He interrogates the correlation between intellect and physiognomy by mockingly invoking the example of tribes and employing a sort of ironic racism: “[…] lesser peoples, Polynesians, Terra del Fuegoans, Ba-Ronga-Niggers, and other tribes incapable of an education, have a relatively small mouth, even though they are cannibals, the close connection between the enlarged mouth and a higher intellect becomes a probability” (2019: 101, 110). This prefaces his writings the following year, wherein:

[p]rimitive peoples—humanity as childlike—are also bearers of these unlimited possibilities. The contradiction between rational limitation and the irrational profusion of possibilities is romantically eliminated because another equally real but still unlimited reality is played off against limited reality: in opposition to the rationalistic, mechanized state, the childlike people; in opposition to the man already limited by his profession and accomplishments, the child who plays with all possibilities; in opposition to the clear line of the classical, the primitive in its infinity of meanings (1991: 69).

Schmitt compares plurality of meaning to a childlike primitivism, and single linearity to a form of classical thinking. He traduces infinite possibilities and valorizes the delimiting power of the borderline. This amounts to using racial anthropology as dubious shorthand for illustrating his anxieties about lineal excess. Through literary techniques, Schmitt’s racist thought emerges. These passages function as portents for his anti-Semitic characterizations of Jews in his 1938 book on Leviathan and in texts such as Land and Sea (1942).

The defining message of “The Buribunks” is that to excessively quantify and repeat is to perpetually anticipate. This commitment to research means that the study of the Buribunks is valued more than the Buribunks themselves. Schmitt calls this mode of enquiry “scientific buribunkology”, which amounts to a chronically aware self-justifying meta-sphere of learning (2019: 99). It is smug, circular, overly referential and ever inwardly expanding. This continued expansion leads to indelibility. To create, to manufacture, and to multiply constitutes success and supremacy. This economy functions at maximum output and at optimum delineation. This functioning holds innate value because quantity is made into quality by virtue of its facticity. This predates Schmitt’s critique of liberalism, which he thinks “discusses and negotiates every political detail […] in the hope that the definitive dispute, the decisive bloody battle, can be transformed into a parliamentary debate and permit the decision to be suspended forever in everlasting discussion” (2005: 63). Schmitt polemically dramatized parliamentary democracy as a mode of government made up exclusively of discussion. His ironic appraisal of scientific buribunkology presages his appraisal of political liberalism.

*

Schmitt complicates the self-proclaimed values of the liberal Enlightenment, which he would later taunt for its belief:

[…] in a clear and simple upward line of human progress. Progress would above all result in the intellectual and moral perfection of humanity. The line moved between two points: from religious fanaticism to intellectual liberty, from dogma to criticism, from superstition to enlightenment, from darkness to light (2007: 73).

He suggests the Enlightenment was more accurately a part of the “successive stages of the changing central domains [which] are conceived neither as a continuous line of ‘progress’ upwards nor the opposite” (2007: 82). In “The Buribunks”, constant documentation is a source of fact beyond mere science. This sense of superiority and of the supreme idea of fact makes scientific buribunkology the overwhelming and most conclusive sphere of knowledge and understanding, even “more than theology, jurisprudence or philosophy”. Any refusal to keep a diary must be “justified and described in detail”; the disobedient Buribunks will otherwise face elimination to the lowest class in the system. For them, elimination is a fate worse than death. With echoes of Beckett, Schmitt states that “[t]he wheel of progress passes silently over the silent one”. Such a punitive measure enforces a simple idea: that in this world, even nothing must be reproduced in detail.

Schmitt sardonically expresses the oversaturated and falsely unifying nature of the Buribunks’ project: “[w]hat would all research be without the secret weaving of the spirit which transforms life-less details into a living organism and for the purpose of repeated comprehension elevates every act of perception to a process of re-membrance”. Schmitt creates textual ambiguity in his use of “organisator” in the original German, because it can be translated as: “[…] the secret weaving of the spirit which organises life-less details”. The study of scientific buribunkology forms the logical endgame for an academy obsessed with both organisation and transformation, which is inscribed through both quantitative and qualitative output. Schmitt remains sceptical of details that are rationalized, contextualized and historicized. He ironically scolds the inchoate and prototypical Leporello, who has “less of an urge to gather reliable research into details—nowhere does he trace the deeper connections of the specific conquest”. As a sign of intellectual progress in scientific buribunkology, “entries of an erotic, demonic, satirical, political and so on nature are grouped together (under the strictest observation of the copyright law pertaining to each entry)”. Life is sterile, relative to the mode of scientific inquiry that seeks to understand it. Memory, otherwise clipped and intangible, is solidified and certified on repeat. This predates Schmitt’s metaphor of the crusted mechanism, consisting of rules and norms that have grown torpid by repetition, which his exception seeks to overcome.

Endless lines, details, repetitions, conversations, and discussions: these constitute Schmitt’s critique of the state of anticipation, that which denies sovereignty and the political. Schmitt wishes to “trace the outlines of [the] sociological architecture” and provide an “[o]utline of a philosophy of the Buribunks”. The central claim in the Buribunks’ manifesto is: “thinking is nothing other than soundless speech; speaking nothing but scriptless writing; writing nothing but anticipated publishing and therefore publishing is identical with writing, with such minor differences that they may safely be disregarded” (2019: 100–10). The Buribunks write and publish simultaneously, and by doing so, they distort notions of time and of the body. Through their extreme efforts to anticipate, they merge their commodity with their labor. As Schmitt notes while in postwar detention, “[o]ur life acquires furrows and lines through our labors, through our productivity in work and profession” (2017: 46). In the biophysical imperative to transform themselves, the Buribunks face a process which makes it impossible to discern between I, the typewriter, and history. Historical reality denotes the past, the midwife the present, and the dark body the future. This use of language precipitates Schmitt’s full embrace of legal and political solutions to the problem of sovereignty. His satirically loose use of metaphor in “The Buribunks” illustrates his resistance to claims that a mere image could anticipate the exception. In Political Theology, he resorts to the crusted mechanism and the torpor of repetition for his dulled anticipatory symbolism. His use of metaphor concedes to aesthetic sensibilities within his theory of sovereignty. His cravings for the borderline produce a distorted silhouette, a phantasm of the immediate sovereign decision.

*

In “The Buribunks”, Schmitt renders what-is-to-come as the imperceptible abyss, in which “the future lies there as dull and indifferent as the keyboard of a typewriter, like a dark rat hole from which one second after another (like one rat after another) emerges into the light of the past”. This anticipates Beckett’s desolate and repeat pronouncements within “Ping”, the moments of history that are smothered by quantified one-second intervals. Schmitt writes that the Buribunks capture blinking rats, so as to record one second of clock time. By doing this, “the fearful anticipation of the future loses its horror”. Death is no longer a source of anxiety, because it is obsessively anticipated. The final judgement is a mere rat-second of neutral value, observed through complete and earnest clarity. Writing history as it writes them, the Buribunks extinguish the “illusion of singularity” and “deceive world history’s deceitfulness” (2019: 110–11). Immortality and posterity are achieved through outwitting history and establishing absolute facts, culminating in true ethics, founded in facticity. Schmitt laughs once more at the tendency to accumulate details in the state of anticipation, prefacing his mockery of the legal and political aim “to regulate the exception as precisely as possible […] to spell out in detail the case in which the law suspends itself” (2005: 13). For Schmitt, to spell out the sovereign decision is impossible and undesirable. The active cannot become the medial: in envisioning the exception, he sees only the borderline. Yet, the symbolic spaces that the borderline generates do not simply constitute pure political forms or systematic analogies but offer vast planes within which aesthetic sensibilities can be, and indeed are, articulated.

Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty attempts to preclude anticipation, and in doing so, it aims to establish a meaningful political identity, the essence of human life. Thus, Schmitt wishes to eliminate the lines and frictions of political liberalism. This craving is illustrated, somewhat innocuously, by his shifting attitude towards two of his contemporaries. After his early infatuation, leading to an effusive monograph, he ended his friendship with the poet Däubler. In his post-war diaries, Schmitt is instead drawn to the language, symbolism and companionship of Konrad Weiß. Only in retrospect did he understand the breakdown and the blossoming of these relationships. Akin to Hegel’s interpretation of the owl of Minerva, Schmitt states that “just as the grain of wood grows in a tree […] [this change] belongs to the lines of our life, which we can trace later but not foresee or determine in the midst of its development” (2017: 44). This evokes much that is central to his theory of sovereignty. In the moment of decision, the sovereign is made visible, but the immediate image does not precipitate knowledge and understanding, nor can it be anticipated beforehand. Instead, the capacity to judge through hindsight colours Schmitt’s method of political diagnosis, which sought to minimise the value and desirability of anticipation in politics, to render pointless and inhuman the lines of prediction that define political liberalism.

This political diagnosis has literary origins. To recall, Schmitt reads Melville’s Benito Cereno both as a noble tragedy of reminiscence and as a forlorn fable of human obligation. Following “the voiceless end” of his usurper Babo, Cereno, the erstwhile sovereign, reconciles himself with his own imminent demise. Delano, his rescuer, urges him to observe the unlimited possibilities of the future. He implores the captain to prepare for the sun to rise, for the sea and sky to turn blue, and for the leaves to turn over. The response is one of gloom, melancholy and debilitation. Why does Benito Cereno not seek solace in these accumulated details, in tracing the lines of his life, and in recognising the apparently perpetual truths of the natural world?

“Because they have no memory,” he dejectedly replied; “because they are not human” (1998: 158).

 

Joseph Owen is writing a doctoral thesis on Carl Schmitt, modernism and sovereignty at University of Southampton.

 

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Wood, Michael (1981) “Comedy of Ignorance.” New York Review of Books April 30.

 

by Ryan Bishop and Tania Roy

Defined as the “right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself” (1990: 136), Michel Foucault’s notion of sovereignty has acquired an exceptional degree of current salience. This is so especially in light of its possibly contrastive relation to the de-centralized force and discourse of “governmentality”[1], a neologism that Foucault developed in his later writings around the topic of bio-politics. Directly addressing the emergence of neoliberalism in advanced industrial societies in the post-War period, Foucault’s lectures on biopolitical governance suggest the breakage of contemporary modalities of organized violence from their precedents.[2] Defined, most broadly, as the “power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die”–and in apparent tension with the sovereign’s right to kill–the concept of biopolitics has found renewed significance for what many identify, today, as our own moment of late-liberalism. Two decades into the millennium, the current historical conjuncture does not break from the sovereign’s historical right to “things, time, bodies”, as much as enfold and accelerate that power into intensified forms of rationalized violence.  Modes of sociality associated with the neoliberal organization of markets remain entangled with twentieth-century formations of sovereign power. In the bid to optimize (re)productivity on an hitherto unprecedented scale, markets are underpinned by the sovereign “right to seizure” even as they extend this traditional prerogative of the twentieth-century state into facets of both organic life, as well as the elements of life’s geo-physical environment.

In what follows, we approach the hegemonic subject of neoliberal governance through its most constitutive fantasy–what we propose as the figure, and associated idioms, of “frictionless sovereignty”. The re-imagination of sovereignty as a domain of fluid mobility has enabled the neoliberal re-organization of state and economy across the global North and South–that is to say, across disparate if interlinked histories of the territorially bound nation-state that have long been associated with the period of post-War development and decolonization, respectively. Even further, for our purposes, frictionless sovereignty is no less than the noetic precondition for imagining the limits of human life in its relation to non-life, under current conditions of extractive capitalism. In the wake of successive crises in transnational financial markets over the past decade, the search for new sources of wealth-accumulation shifts capital investment strategically to the technologies of deep-earth/-ocean extraction. To follow Elizabeth Povinelli’s mode of periodization, at the conjuncture of our “late-liberalism,” the representation of bio-ontological differences, together with the associated truth-claims of such differences, come to light as the primary object of transnational markets and their management. As a rhetorical convocation of socio-political existence under regimes of neoliberal governance, the idioms, moods and contentions of frictionless sovereignty serve, altogether, to assemble the domain of “life” as at once different from its immersive geo-physical environment and as the infinitely extensible exercise of sovereign right over the markers, materialities and distribution of such difference.

Evoked in the image of the borderless exchange of finance, goods, information, or personnel, the idiomatics of an immaterial (“frictionless”) subjectivity are underpinned, today, by a mode of capitalism for which the organization of markets are increasingly tied to the management of orders of life and non-life. As such, our proposition of frictionless sovereignty serves to historicize the “globalist” parameters of neoliberal governance by situating these in the proliferation of bio-political differences across, under and above territorially bound formations of sovereignty. More significantly, frictionless sovereignty indexes the experience of the increasingly erodible nature of these very differentiations, insofar as the unbundled movement of sovereignty renders its own border-concepts increasingly frangible.

What particular exposition of the biopolitical is offered through our current imagination of the elemental aspects of the environment–a moment marked by the urgent if inchoate knowledge of “geontopower [understood as] a set of discourse, affects and tactics used … to maintain or shape the coming relationship of the distinction between Life and Nonlife?” (Povinelli, 4).[3] What topographies of accumulation and unevenness surface in that late formation of the globalist imaginary–the specifically liquid element of the human milieu that once comprised the limit-term of the border, the partition, the humanly habitable, by overwriting these spatial socio-political orders of sovereignty with semiotic blankness, the “sublime” quality of oceanic indifference? (Connery 1996: 290).[4] In increasingly immersive figures of the sea-level, deep-water, or borderless oceanic mobility, the liquid element of the environment returns, today, through its own frictive contradictions, as having been historically co-located with the concept and technologies of twentieth-century sovereign landedness. Contemporary figurations of the “sea-level” do, indeed, retain legibility as the register of the global and its correlate, the frictionless mobility of neoliberal subjectivity if only insofar as the globe, as total world-picture, still appears as an unaccomplished object of representation (Connery 2001). But what is more: as horizonal histories of the autological, future-directed subject of liberalism fail under the pressure of anthropogenic capital, the idiom of the “sea-level” encroaches, in its turn, upon territorially grounded imaginations of sovereignty from the previous century, exposing these to the increasingly erodible difference  between land and sea–and therefore, perhaps, to the constitutive incoherence of the fantasy of frictionless sovereignty.

Frictionless Sovereignty

Sovereignty operates as a political technology emergent from and reliant on a complex nexus of relations, including political, spatial, temporal, economic, strategic, legal, technological (in multiple sense) and imaginative. Cornelia Vismann notes that a spatial and topographical basis for legal order and control (e.g. nomos and sovereignty) as found in Schmitt “contains two competing orders, that spatial order and the plane, the physical and the cartographical, the concrete and the abstract” (Vismann, 62). Schmitt links sovereignty to the land, nomos to the earth and abandons the sea (mostly) as frictionless and lawless. “Without an underlying structure territory begins to resemble the sea” (Vismann, 63). Sovereignty, however, for some time now has had no proper place, no grounded and stable topos, which prompted Schmitt’s romantic reimagining of the nomos in its Westphalian twilight if not total nuclear eclipse, a reimagining that helps foster the noetic imaginary and figurations of frictionless imaginary. The conversion of space to territory to sphere of influence has colonial roots in maritime law and is aided by the delocalization of politics and the state without ties to the earth necessarily.

Yet the imaginary compelled by deterritorialization and teletechnological reach and influence also holds in its nostalgic grip the land, the state, the Volk. If the increasing centrality of the notion of biopower to critical theory signals a shift from the territorially-based prerogatives of the Westphalian nation-state toward systems in which populations are spatially dispersed yet also “incite[d] … monitor[ed] [and] optimiz[ed]”, this proposition has, in turn, re-consolidated Carl Schmitt’s concept of the Grossraum within re-evaluations of geopolitical space in our current conjuncture. The idea of the Grossraum–literally, “large space”–emerges, for Schmitt, as a dominant principle of geopolitical order in the Western hemisphere with President Monroe’s proclamation in 1823 that the Americas were to be extrapolated from the space of European colonization even as the US arrogated to itself the right to defend these territories: the Monroe Doctrine. In this regard, it is closer to contemporary concepts of region, which appear to imply divisions of the earth into transnational groupings based on geographical contiguity, trade relations and mutual security concerns. As with his writings during World War II, most of Schmitt’s post-war theorizaton, though couched in juridico-historical academic discursive register, essentially maps onto a justification of the expansionist geopolitical actions of the Reich. The Reich then is constituted as an updated Monroe Doctrine protecting the rights of German speakers and German descendants external to national borders. However, by framing the nomos of sovereignty in its totalized relation to land and territory, Schmitt leaves the sea as a site devoid of legal and governmental scrutiny. In spite of his formulation having been thoroughly outstripped by events of the two world wars after which he was writing, and in spite of the demands to consider life and non-life within geo-elemental frames of human limitations, the sea remains a site of sovereignty confusions, contestations, claims and legal complexities.

Broaching Schmitt in discussions of sovereignty in the present moment is an act taken with trepidation, but also with a certain necessity due to its enduring “common-sense” purchase in the public discursive sphere. The deeply problematic nature of Schmitt’s Teutonic mythologizing of land and sovereignty in The Nomos of the Earth, coupled with the full on militarization of the ocean in his “children’s book” Land and Sea, hold appeal in many neoliberal sectors and might well be less a bellwether of frictionless sovereignty than an integral element, or even symptom, of it. In the guise of “the intellectual fascist,” Schmitt’s ambiguous position and stature, as well as his own writings, speak to the deeply paradoxical nature of the political subject–sovereign and otherwise–resident in frictionless sovereignty, and perhaps never more so than in his mythopoeic evocations of the ocean as ungovernable space: as territory (in potentia) without land and abstract volume made fractally incarnate. The semiotics of the oceanic that Schmitt invokes and renders problematic is emblematic of his thought (as Third Reich juridical justifier and apologist) and indicative of the post-World War II/Cold War moment that rendered frangible what had been held to be geopolitically unbreakable. At the same time, the ocean as frictionless, uncontainable, uncontrollable and ultimately sublime in its mysterious power maps pertinently onto the emergent modality of capital in Schmitt’s post-World War II moment that has now become constitutive of our collective horizon, a horizon bereft of emergence. However, in an inverse of the nomos and the fenced-in containment of land-based territory, the sea is perhaps the most frictive ideational space within the imagination of frictionless sovereignty, as rendered legible by the works discussed below.

In what follows, we present an exposition of recent artistic works that plot an itinerary of multi-scalar sensing, visual and extractive technologies–what we have discussed elsewhere as the constitutive prosthesis of autonomia, or the capacity for personal, moral and political self-governance[5]–as it extends from the twentieth-century imaginary of a territorially bound sovereignty into the ostensibly fluid terrain of water/water-borne bodies and materialities. We discuss Yo-HA’s “The Plastic Raft of Lampedusa” (a work exploring the materiality and global provenance of rafts that bear refugees from Africa to Europe), Susan Schuppli’s “Nature Represents Itself” (a simulation of the Deepwater Horizon spill through legal and aesthetic lenses to propose the ecological site as a material witness capable of representing its own damaged condition), and Charles Lim’s “SEA STATE” (an examination of the hegemonic visibilities that surround “magically” contracted boundaries of island/sea, as constituted, especially, within the postcolonial imaginary of Singapore).

Operating across discourses of corporate, governmental and, indeed, artistic sovereignty in the epoch of anthropogenic capital, these works function by operationalizing sensory losses, material suppressions in the presentation of evidence, or explosive auditory pauses to offer specific knowledge-claims around incompletely charted historical and political configurations of sovereignty. As a corollary to this exposition, we also invite reflection, via a sequencing of these works along the status and formation of aesthetic subjectivities under contemporary logics of frictionless sovereignty. In our readings, we explore what evidentiary, corroborative, or historical truth claims these “geo-ontological” works offer in their interrogation of the status of life as an interrogation of the technologies that order life.

Border: YoHA’s “The Plastic Raft of Lampedusa”

YoHa, an artist group formed by Graham Harwood and Matsuko Yokokoji, created the 2016 work “The Plastic Raft of the Lampedusa,” which they claim is not about the moral outrages or panics of migration or a meditation on the sea as a site to experience the sublime, but rather about the materiality of the plastic boats that journey through the unfixed spaces of the Mediterranean Sea, in “the space between different state actors and administrative disciplines.”[6] To contextualize this work, we can turn to an early 19^th century work on oceanic mobility by Robert Fulton, in which he writes “The Liberty of the Sea will be the happiness of the Earth.” This is the optimistic, cheery epigraph to a volume published by Robert Fulton in 1810, with the equally optimistic and cheery title Torpedo Warfare and Submarine Explosions. Liberty and happiness, it seems, come at a price, and one invariably linked to munitions, money and power. Fulton essentially revolutionized the US navy and did so through providing a striated and complex verticality to the ocean. As noted, for Carl Schmitt, “the nomos of the earth” is literally of the earth, of the ground. All of this stands in contrast to the sea, which “knows no such apparent unity of space and law, of order and orientation” and upon which “firm lines cannot be engraved” (2006: 42). As a site imagined as being freed from the order and control granted terrestrial dwelling, the ocean, in an overly-simplified manner for Schmitt, is lawless, rife for piracy or industry and a space of both freedom and fear.

“The Plastic Raft of the Lampedusa” sails aesthetically and precariously between Fulton’s aquatic extension of the nomos, the control and law of the land, to the ocean, and Schmitt’s unfettered space bereft of law and regulation. This same precarious sailing, appropriately enough, is taken up by refugees attempting to cross the Mediterranean as a space simultaneously strategically and conveniently the most surveilled and untouched by sovereign nation-states as they position themselves in relation to maritime law, international laws and human rights accords. After the codification of the rights and responsibilities of nation-states in the 1982 Convention of the Law of the Sea, maritime jurisdiction and law resulted in what some call “unbundled sovereignty” in which terrestrial sovereign rights and regulations are delinked from maritime rules predicated on state extent and specific rules. This confusion and complexity works to strategic advantage for states and strategic disadvantage for refugees. The means by which jurisdictional and legal concepts map onto, or not, geomorphical formations provides nation-states the cover to dodge humanitarian obligations and rights for migrants on the sea whilst protecting national sovereignty. As the continental margin slopes away from shore and border waters down to the abyssal plane, territorial claims recede and the high seas become Mare Liberum, a kind of free zone where sovereignty has little or no purchase… or so it is occasionally imagined and interpreted. Because the high seas fall outside of state sovereignty, they are reserved for non-exploitable peaceful purpose (UNCLOS, Article 88), but with an important caveat. A ship flying its national flag must abide through international law with its own national laws and is bound to aid all vessels in need, as long as their own ship is not imperilled by this action. But where and how the extraterritorial application of state sovereignty is applied remains obscure and contentious. Thus, in spite of these obligations, Watch the Med claims that thousands die by policy, in which the sea is cast as frontier: policies that have turned the Mediterranean into “a liquid border” saturated with teletechnological sensors and surveillance equipment, along with a well-articulated military presence to enforce EU visa laws to keep refugee claims and, now increasingly, somewhat spurious “terrorist” groups from shore.[7] As such, state ships flying under a national flag can, and often do, seek to detain ships predicated on territorial waters rights while dodging their international obligations to aid imperilled vessels. Drowning refugee subjects on the high seas, or the Mare Liberum, are adrift in a deeply convoluted and divisive legal, ethical and political space of variable norms of judicial sovereignty and international law–a space not devoid of sovereign control but rather one of excess and overabundance of conflicting maritime, international, national and economic rules.

This is also where the plastic boats laden with African refugees find themselves precariously placed in spite, and occasionally because of, the ambiguities in refugee rights conventions. Once launched, these boats are “imperilled vessels”. The plastic boats, along with their separate four-stroke engines, operate between different state actors and administrative regimes: manufactured in China, shipped by container to the EU, registered as a product for sale in the EU and therefore meeting EU safety standards, shipped by container south and sold in North Africa to be overstuffed with humans for the illegal and very perilous transit to Europe. The boat exemplifies numerous frictionless qualities of state technics as it navigates its way around the globe while the many impossible points of legal entry and safe harbour for the migrants reveal the friction within frictionless sovereignty that allows the latter to imagine the world as operating only in its image. The CE/ISO standards are the legal and administrative lubricant to move between states and economic regimes with ease. They provide both apparent safety for the users of the product but against liability on the part of the manufacturers or vendors, no matter their catastrophic failure.

YoHA’s project examines how the boat goes from factory production in China to the North African coast and why it goes through the EU on the way to its point of purchase. What levels of governance must it blithely sail through without friction or pause to reach Africa before boomeranging back? The boat, YoHa claims, eventually sails on the placeless placeness of the sea–or on the untethered oceanic freed of nomos and in the gaps of certain kinds of sovereign control. It sails here to fuel imaginaries of flight from the economic and governmental margins. In the Mediterranean, site of sacrifices to the gods in antiquity, the migrants often are sacrificed to our wealth and privilege, to our presumed desirability that draws these souls to our empowered centres. There is a stark display of necropolitics as necrosovereignty, to rephrase Achille Mbembe. And YoHA wants to unpick the phenomenological, imaginary, political and aesthetic performances of this necropolitics through the materiality of the parts of an inflatable raft. (They ran workshops of raft assembly in Shanghai and Berlin.) The artistic project becomes a vehicle to examine those technics of the state and commerce that intend to reduce friction in the flow of goods but not necessarily in the flow of people traveling on those goods–technics that constitute humans in constructed and strategic gaps of sovereignty on the sea. What often get elided are the generative and productive dimensions of these technics and the nearly algorithmic nature of ISO regulations that constitute the human as always a mediated and technical object: a sacrifice to “the blue economy” and its globally divided bounty.[8] In this piece, the sublime blankness offered by some oceanic imaginaries, political and aesthetic, becomes clearly demarcated and delineated space shot through with friction on multiple scales of unevenness, rupture and partition. The indifference of the ocean is but a symptom of specific geopolitical lacunae and repression, a wound in the waters not easily bandaged up by the unbundled sovereignty of contradictory treaties and their inconsistent application.

Deepwater: Susan Schuppli’s “Nature Represents Itself”

Susan Schuppli’s “Nature Represents Itself” presents the British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon oil spill in its legal and aesthetic form to propose the ecological site as a material witness fully capable of representing its own damaged condition.[9] This auto-representation of environmental disaster posits a new medium unique to the components of the disaster; in many ways, it is a visual analogue to Reza Negarestani’s philosophical fiction, Cyclonopedia, which fabulated the non-human revenging force of petroleum. Using computer simulations to make visible the operation of hydrocarbon combinations as the molecules dispersed in seawater, Schuppli created a computer-generated video of the gulf’s surface as well as deep subsurface plumes. Her work incorporates the multiple visual channels of the event just listed. And when the oilrig collapsed into the murky depths of the water, its image-making capacities and modes of image-capture platforms began to multiply across various technical media and distribution platforms in an act of dispersion and proliferation at the visual/technical levels that mimicked the disastrous distribution of petroleum into the Gulf of Mexico. Schuppli notes that “our public gaze was suspended between two media geographies”: the murky underwater imagery of the gushing oil resisting all attempts to stop it and the Earth observation satellite imagery from datasets charting the spill’s swelling across the surface of the water: an auto-generated disaster film. The latter images were widely distributed through television platforms due to their spectacular qualities while the underwater video stream, as monotonous as it was propulsive, was relegated to less-visited online platforms.

But what else might we be watching in Schuppli’s piece, especially when the moving images work in dialogue with its soundtrack, which is constituted of readings from court documents of the legal cases taken on behalf of the ocean and its rights? The frictionless sovereignty of BP in its deep sea extractive practices versus any claims of sovereignty from the immediate aquatic environment penetrated by the extraction, as well as other areas affected by the spill? Human versus non-human sovereign claims? The court case brought by “the rights of nature” under the principle of universal jurisdiction in the courts in Quito, Ecuador 26 November 2016, in defense of the rights of the sea and understood as an integral part of nature, as the bestower of life and to which we have legal responsibility. The Ecuadorian constitution of 2008 recognizes nature as a subject of rights based on the principle of universal jurisdiction in relation to the biopolitics of life fundamental to sovereignty theory and humanity’s integral relation to each part of nature for its continued existence. The lawsuit filed against BP, as an international corporation endowed with specific subject rights and obligations in international law, argues that the sea, in its vastness and mysterious depths, holds “the secrets of existence” and is “the birthplace of life as we know it.”[10] The direct plaintiff is nature, the sea, and the indirect plaintiff is the future of humankind that is being robbed by rapacious exploitation of non-renewable resources, fossil fuels, and the destruction of those elements of nature necessary to sustain human existence. The horizon of nature and the horizon of humanity conjoin in the suit because they are not recognized by international systems of rights founded on “the colonial model of legal positivism” that recognizes international corporations as sovereign subjects endowed with rights and the future of humanity and nature hold no such recognition. The horizons of various sovereign subjects are at stake in the legal suit and its clash with international law, the friction of the Ecuadorean constitution with its rights for nature and the frictionless international agreements favouring extraction and exploitation.

The Gulf of Mexico was made an unintentional canvas of human intervention and failure, as seen in the many images of the disaster taken by NASA’s pertinently named Terra satellite. Before being finally capped on 15 July 2010, approximately 4.1 billion barrels of crude oil had been emptied into the Gulf. As the oilrig burned and spewed plumes of dense smoke into the air, the real-time visual stream was primarily of the surfaces, with rudimentary underwater images provided through murky online sources. The visual register on screen in Schuppli’s work is that of the accident, which is a recurring feature of that axis where visual culture and technological infrastructure and political decision-making meet. As Paul Virilio consistently reminds us, the invention of any technology is also the invention of its failure, of its accidents.[11] The technology in its operation and its failure provide equally fodder for imagination planning, speculation and aesthetic production. This also applies to the speculative side: not merely inventing technologies, but inventing their accidents around which technological systems can be laid out in large-scale systems. Virilio in fact posited that the history of technology could better be queried and understood through a Museum of Disasters than our usual technophilic celebratory institutions. If such a site were to be built, Schuppli’s work could take a proud place there as one example of the long term legacy of petroculture as itself a planetary-scaled invention and engine of an accident, of a “slow violence” (cp. Rob Nixon), around which modern culture takes place, from transport to industry, from lifestyle to the variety of materials that sustain our sense of the everyday.

The visualizing technologies that Schuppli appropriates and reconstructs in “Nature Represents Itself” belongs to the battery of tools, including satellites, used to render the globe as simultaneously three-dimensional and two-dimensional object of visual control: 3-dimensional globe (a bounded sphere visible at all times) and a 2-dimensional flattened world without horizon (due to the complete surveillance of the entire planet all at the same time) thus making the earth’s surface a continual flat plane. The mastery afforded by our visual capacity to so manipulate the entire earth further fuels the ease of crossing time and space inherent in frictionless sovereignty. The desire to so control the planet properly took off early in the 20^th century and reached its apotheosis in the exoskeletal ring of satellites tracking all movements on the planet. The accelerated use of aerial photography to replace non-machine generated cartography emerged simultaneously with increased air flight technology, cinematic camera technology and World War I, as Virilio has often examined. These “vision machines” are the precursors of those Schuppli deploys in her piece, but the World War I machines were used for aerial surveillance of the battlefield, generating millions of images for “the purpose of the systematic exploration of traces of the enemy in the landscape for the sole purpose of destroying the same” (Virilio 2010: 66). The blending of eye, motor and weapon propels every form it captures toward its ruin. The “instrumental collage” formed over minute-by-minute aerial documentation of the battlefield–its movements, logistics, structures and personnel–created a new synergetic process of purely instrumental application of the long distance, ubiquitous military gaze: an unblinking and intensifying vision of potential annihilation that leads to NASA satellite streaming the Deepwater Horizon ecological disaster in real-time. In both cases from the last century, the image generation and image capture constitute proleptic gestures of what will no longer exist.

Read alongside each other, the internal “story-lines” of Yoh-HA and Schuppli’s works elaborate the entanglement between the governance of mobility within critical gaps in maritime laws of sovereignty, the emergent truth-claims, through those gaps, of an oceanic “subjectivity” that is neither zoomorphic nor anthropological in its juridical assertion of the right to life, and the artistic invocation, via de-individuated logics of departure, disposal and return, of a second-class population, governed in its (racialized) difference, according to strategically displaced costs of mortal risk. In After Fukushima: An Equivalence of Catastrophes, Jean-Luc Nancy describes the mise-en-scène of contemporary governmentality in a comparable light–crucially, within the symbolic parameters of volatile sea-levels–as the disastrous event that is at once military, geopolitical, technological, environmental and racist.[12] By citing the frictionless “equivalency” of each of each of these facets of sovereign rule, Nancy also suggests an affective economy that underpins its disposition. Insofar as each happening is economized and substituted for the experience of another, frictionless sovereignty tends toward a technically extensible, temporally illimitable, and internally organized extinction of difference–the “eco-technical”, then, as a horizonal tendency toward homogenization where each disaster is rendered in the affective equivalence of another, thereby eliding massive geopolitical asymmetries in relative wealth and risk-sharing in the strategic administration of life.

In this regard, Yo-HA and Schuppli’s works might be viewed diagnostically, as interventions into the idea of a horizonal future that still persists–immunologically, as it were–within “zones of affluence” under the homogenizing sign of “civilization” (Davis and Turpin).  Both works deploy the trope of deep water to rescale an economy of affective disinvestment in the epoch of anthropogenic capital. As financial austerity, precarity, and the repeated containment of sequential crises occur, in the other vector of extractive capitalism, as the cascading effects/affects of the neoliberal management of citizenries, the possibility of the ungovernable accident is driven more deeply into the cultural imaginary. By suspending a singular conception of a horizonal future from the scenario of the accident, both works obliquely address the structure of such a de-historicised, properly catastrophic imaginary–one that begins to conceive of a return, via the fantasized loss of technological advantage, to the unmarked ground of terra nullius.

The primitivity of the desert-island, together with its privileged synecdoche, the figure of the shipwrecked survivor, has stood as an orienting fiction of the Western literary imagination. It recurs today against the crisis of term of “climate-change,” as the the fantasy of unprecedented forms-of-life that might flourish anew on earthly waste and large-scale engineering projects. In what follows, we suggest that this late romance of the autological, self-inspirited subject of techno-liberalism finds its articulation less in fin-de-siècle accounts of (“Western”) civilizational collapse and the anthropogenic event of species-extinction, than in the inflection of this same narrative by twentieth-century mythologies of postcolonial emergence, transformation and resilience–processes that materially reconstitute sovereign territory, as Goethe’s Faust, in an early account of Kulturtechnik, reclaimed land from the sea.[13]

Landed-Sea: Charles Lim’s “SEA STATE”

The vitalism of the island-state of Singapore is inseparable from the legacy of its post-Independent identification, which continues to position Singapore, at some distance from its regional neighbors, as a populous, open, multi-racial garden-city. Colloquially celebrated as “The Singapore Story”, this popular national narrative stresses the city-state’s painstaking accomplishment of a history of civic peace (especially in light of foundational ethno-religious or revolutionary violence in the constitution of neighbouring nation-states) and the associated rewards of financial stability. The equitable distribution of social protections and access to public infrastructure (particularly Singapore’s impressive public housing and transport systems) signifies not only an essential moment in the making of an affluent middle-class society out of a history of uneven colonial development, but also the historic legitimacy that has traditionally been accorded to the nation’s regime of single-party rule. The efficacy of these related claims to national sovereignty certainly derive from totemistic evocations of a national founding in the moment of decolonization (in the figure of Lee Kuan Yew and his increasingly contested legacies) and a successful politics of  multiculturalism (in the peaceable governing of a multi-sectarian identity through the official pluralism of four “races”). Yet the real force of this dominant national imaginary is subtended more fundamentally, and, indeed, compellingly, by Singapore’s claim to economic exceptionalism in the region inter alia its leadership of International Maritime Capitals; its positioning as a global innovator in ‘green’ or sustainable urban planning;  and its dominance of corporate debt markets in the ASEAN region through its governance of multinational infrastructural investments.

Elaborated over nearly fifteen years, Charles Lim’s multimodal project SEA STATE (2005 – ) is an expansive, unfolding, episodic chronicle of the Singapore Straits and Straits of Johor–the channels that separate the landmass of Singapore from Malaysia and Indonesia, respectively. Organized into “ten chapters”, the work is comprised of videos, photographs, found objects, audio-archives, nautical maps, and three-dimensional digital prints. Undertaken first with the curatorial collaboration of Mustafa Shabbir of the National Gallery at the inception of both the museum and the project in 2005, and through significant field and laboratory-based research, the work chronicles the littoral waters around Singapore through the allusive motif of the “sea-state”–the measure of volatility in a large body of water, which progresses upwards through a ten-point scale, to account for the force, height and intervals of waves. The scalar motif conjoins the multifaceted dimensions of this nearly authorless imagination of the island-nation to the work’s overarching conceptual ambition, in the effort to de-sublimate residual visual attachments to sea. Through gripping reversals between the thoroughly legislated spaces of Singapore’s littoral waters and the dynamic extension of the city’s land-mass over its shoreline, SEA STATE re-orders the distribution of visibility accorded historically by the island-state to the elements of land and sea–thus fully de-symbolizing the force of national history (and the idealizing periodicities associated with the “growth story” of a sovereign territory), while suggesting Singapore’s properly contemporary significance for the bio-physical politics of a late-liberal, “globalist” conjuncture. We introduce the work through this three-dimensional print of a detail of Singapore’s sea-bed (2017), which serves emblematically within its parameters to indicate SEA STATE’s prolific uses of the grid, the survey and the nautical chart. Together with an imputed genealogy of colonial navigation, these devices are used to introduce verticality into the field of visibility. Staged, here, among other things, is a reversible line of sight–an archaeological redirection of technologies of visualization and governance, or the technics of state sovereignty, toward evidence of their own deep presence in the sedimented matter of the print.

In material as well as ideational inversions between land and sea, this “inside-out” image confuses morphological distinctions, lending volume, instead, to the boundary-line between the elements. Conjoining the layered time of ancient, epochal formations on the sea-bed to the infrastructure of digital capitalism, the piece strips the sea of conventional semiotic descriptors, exposing, instead, a topography of de-nationalised, hyper-connected surfaces. The modulations of this terrain are shaped and underscored as much by the element of water and the deep-time of geology as through de-materialized flows of information–as striking as the bared and degradable surface of the sea-bed is the uncanny visibility, accorded from a precise height, to the lines of fibre-optic communication cables impressed into the sand. These submarine cables are immediately suggestive of fossilised traces, signs, perhaps, of the symbolic and affective infrastructure that lends coherence to the proposition of Singapore as a sovereign “sea-state”. But they are, in every instance, apparent to the viewer in and as their delicate materiality. Surfacing from a location of profound invisibility–as technology–these infrastructural connectivities are exposed to the viewer of SEA STATE less as the representational markers of national identity than as sheer material evidence of the deep historical presence of authority in the matter and contours of biological life in Singapore.

Positioned on the southern tip of the Malaysian peninsula, Singapore’s history of rapid planned urban development suggests how the geophysical boundaries between island and sea have been historically experienced–notwithstanding the twentieth-century narrative of dirigiste postcolonial development, the various iterations, installations and media of  SEA STATE capture the boundary-line between land and sea as a state of constant motion. Built up in the 1950s in the decade before Independence on drained and reclaimed swampland, 87% of the shoreline today is constructed of concrete. Lacking crude-deposits of its own, Singapore tranships half of the world’s annual supply of crude oil, and a fifth of the world’s containers. Emerging into global visibility as the world’s second busiest port, Singapore’s identity remains tied, nevertheless, to its landmass, as land-reclamation projects accelerate to accommodate rapid urban development on the island. In historical memory, Singapore recalls its origins as a colonial sea-port, and its reliance, almost exclusively, on the ocean for the traffic in international goods, labour, and credit; the scale of transformation in this maritime legacy might be indexed through Singapore’s massive investments in industrial bases on the land; these serve as both processing stations and  transit points, not so much for the finished commodities of globalization, as for the crude oil and by-products that go into and out of the commodity-chain. While Singapore’s story of post-Independent autonomy is typically narrated through the dearth of indigenous resources-based industries on the island, that narrative of postcolonial resilience is repurposed today, as an account of how Singapore flourished through the 2007/8 banking crisis to consolidate itself, globally, as the Asian future of advanced industrial economies.[14]

Singapore’s self-positioning as a vanguard within the capitalist-horizonal coordinates of advanced societies attach it, on the one side, to robust twentieth-century mythologies of postcolonial emergence, and on the other, to its visible ascendancy within global finance, as a  regional guarantor of multinational debt. In oblique allusions to state-protected enterprises involving oil refining, landfill engineering, waste processing, and requisite flows of wage-labor–the analogical underside, as it were, to Singapore’s networked life and claim to culture–SEA STATE exemplifies the infrastructural axiomatics of protean, flexible, or accommodatory forms of resilience acquired by contemporary finance capital.[15]

Between 2002 and 2008, the islet of Pulau Sajahat disappeared off the northeast coast of Singapore. The visible shoreline of the island, indeed, its full one-hectare land-mass, was consumed not by rising sea-levels; it was subsumed, by proclamation of the Maritime and Port Authority, to reclamation projects intended toward the strategic extension of Singapore’s territorial coastline. As Pauline Yao notes in her own, evocative commentary on Lim’s art of oceanic sovereignty, the Maritime and Port Authority staged a symbolic rehearsal of such geophysical disappearance by erasing the island, a second time, from nautical charts of Singapore’s territory. Lim’s exercise in the measuring of such disappearance is, therefore, studied in every sense, returning duration to processes of de-materialization. SEA STATE  2, sequenced through the title “As Evil Disappears and Safe Seas Appear”, is directed by an unsettling materialism that insists past Pulau Sajahat’s vanishing–and even further, beyond the geologically-grounded proposition of a deep-past of rock and ancient sediment–on the continued existence of the entity’s depth and surface area. First exhibited in 2012 at Future Perfect in Singapore, prints, videos, 3-D-printed objects, and maps index, across this vanishing point in Singapore’s geography, the factuality of an island that persists in inverted, even inexorcisable form as a properly unrepresentable, if entirely measurable presence; surrounded, now, by land instead of water.

Deriving its name from jahat, the Malay word for dark magic, or just elemental trickery, the missing island is recalled obliquely in its historic notoriety as a harbor for pirates (and therefore, perhaps, as an ironic allusion to pre-modern, de-centred modalities of social violence)–in a stunning lexical reversal, Lim stages the “techno-shamanistic” exorcism of darkness itself from Singapore’s urban imaginary. [16] By sequencing the island through the indices of a disembodied factuality–rather than through material traces of the entity itself–Lim secularizes, above all, the ritualized erasures involved on the part of the Singapore government in its bid to secure the nation’s economic hegemony in the region.[17] In mapping divisions of wealth and labour onto littoral boundaries–in Evil Island, the process is linked to technics of territorial mapping and negotiation–SEA STATE 2 continues to allude to the works’ photographic constellation of dredging ships–rather than pirate vessels–to document the social life of sand. From this distance, sand acquires visibility not as an elemental aspect of the archipelago’s shared geological or even ideological past, but as a basic component in the industrialised uses of concrete–sand, in other words, is at the foundations of Singapore’s built environment. In their unremarkable industrial forms and the de-populated patterns of their traffic, the photographed vessels suggest, innocuously, that exchanges in sand outstrip even the transfers of working populations between islands in the archipelago. (Thus, coastal terrains in the region might lose people not only because of migration out to the service-economy of Singapore, but because coastal communities literally lose the land.) These photographic micro-essays suggest that the city-state consumes sand to create the very land that now “drowns” the missing island; their own slow, machinic appearance suggests how these processes negate the historicity of built-space itself by suppressing visible relations between work and the use-values of the environment.[18]

In the video works of SEA STATE 6, which debuted at the Venice Biennale in 2015, Lim presents an exposition of the underground construction of the first phase of the 427-foot-deep Jurong Rock Caverns on Jurong Island (itself a reclamation project that artificially conjoins seven separate land-masses into a continuous underground formation). The still image above is from a 6-minute video-loop in which Indonesian and South-Asian workers lay the foundations for the cave. There is theatricality in the action, framed by mining-lamps, as well as a painterly elongation of light as the men carry Lim’s sailboat–rather than a cable–deep into the Leviathan-like interiority of the ocean, punctuating their run with echoing shouts of effort. As Lim exhibited this most recent elaboration of SEA STATE in Venice, the caves stood as the first underground rock-formation deployed exclusively for oil storage in Southeast Asia. The need for containing massive volumes of oil produces, paradoxically, a further self-regulating infrastructural economy that is, in turn, tied back to the financing and construction of land-reclamation. The scale of these exchanges, imputed in Lim’s work, to the sublime enormity of the Jurong Caves, suggests massive infrastructural swaps between unevenly positioned sovereign states–transfers of wealth, as it were, between the coast-line impoverished, territorially diminutive island of Singapore and the sand-rich borders of Cambodia or Indonesia. Scored by the bodily movements and exhalations of imported labour, the Jurong Caves rise against their fantastical, even mystical appearance, as a corroboration of the deep force of sovereign authority as it arcs through and over the fundaments of bio-physical existence. The loop elaborates the distinction between (racialized, internally divided) life and its environment as catastrophically degradable–or otherwise, as a boundary-line so immersively monetized as to transfigure, with Faustian ingenuity, any residual experiential insistence on their difference.

The specular exchange we suggest, above, between the citations from Lim’s SEA STATE 6 and the details from As Evil Disappears proposes the quality and infrastructure of a total landedness that, in effect, defines the sea under conditions of extractive capitalism. Even further, by de-subjectivizing any position (‘perspective’) on such a conjuncture, devices of visualization, measurement and the infrastructure of digital capitalism are re-directed anthropogenically toward a reflection on their own historicity–an unfolding  attestation to  their own imprint in the frictionless extension of sovereignty over the sea, and, in this way, a gesture toward the massive imbalances of scale implied in the relative values of the island-state’s aggressively compounded territorial coastline, and the geography of its regional neighbors. To the degree that such astounding geophysical asymmetries also imply the enmeshment of the island in economic and existential precarity, it is, in SEA STATE’s account, a relation of interdependency that remains phenomenologically invisible to the landed view-point. Capturing the Straits of Johor through unnerving impressions of bio-physical vulnerability, the staggered chapters of SEA STATE disclose the claims of the oceanic, constructing, in the process, an alternative genealogy to the hegemonic visibilities of national sovereignty.

In a tour de force account of contemporary artistic developments in Singapore over the last decade, Michael Fischer places Lim, at the outset of his detailed ethnography, as intimating an “ecological biophysical future, and thus, also a critical-anthropological” vision not reducible to the symbolics of postcolonial identity (Fischer, 4-5). We might extend that study, with and against the periodicities of conventional art-history, to propose that the spaces between Evil Island and the video-installations of SEA STATE 6 wrest the question of a global futurity–together with the catastrophic imagination of the accident–from the horizonal periodicities of the nation to lead chronology, together with its limit-term, the advent of the Anthropocene, into the sea. Captured with flattened affect as the “life-line” for land-based dwelling, the trope of the sea-level entangles the claim to frictionless development in scenes of unprecedented eco-technical destruction, even while returning specificity to the prospect of the industrial accident. In explosive auditory evidence of the shouts of laboring men, and across a compressed visual history of the construction of the perpetually ‘disappearing’ difference between land and sea, SEA STATE eschews the romance of Singapore’s maritime import as a post/colonial port city for a dispassionate materialism that places the island’s elemental presence in the world alongside technics of visualization, extraction and information. The sea, as assembled by Lim, is neither infinite potentiality nor the theater of tragic negation (say, for example, in the origin-myth of the South-East Asian nation in a precolonial sea-faring life-world erased from historical memory, first, by the agents of imperial dominance, and then again, perhaps, by the depredations of state-led modernization).[19] Instead, the sea emerges into renewed visibility only after its subjection to totalizing processes of socialization–as a rationalized body of knowledge, in other words, capable of advancing corroborative or evidential truth-claims about our contemporary conjuncture while inviting us to imagine a departure, altogether, from the postulates of frictionless sovereignty.

Chiasmus: Oceanic/Aesthetic Subjectivity

We discuss the artworks of YoHA, Susan Schuppli and Charles Lim as indices of the various gaps and fissures in the otherwise seamless visualization of the world of frictionless sovereignty, so often imagined in its most simplistic and default economic guise. The topoi of unevenness operative in the current structure of capitalism function despite and through the oceanic imaginary; a space impervious to lines of legislated division emerges, shot through with deep-water striations of power and contention, resistance and claim, Life and its ultimate event-horizon, extinction. In the exchanges between these three pieces, an alternative notion of regional contiguities through the sea emerges–not through the demarcation of conventional territories or the refolding of the work’s contention back to the representation of an originary “water-borne” identity, but through a dynamic, on-going nexus of circulation whose materials and movement are subject to different modalities of governmentality; and are constitutive of the particular “distributed” subjectivities evoked in each piece. Neither fully frictional nor frictionless but incessantly fictionalized, the distributed subjectivities of the sea surface their discrete, self-corroborating “stories” even as these tend, in the epoch of anthropogenic capital, toward an overarching account of the water’s universal disposition. Eloquently invoked in these three pieces, the technics through which prevailing regimes of bio-ontological difference are regulated, are, themselves, offered as an aesthetic value–the reflective means for thinking the ineluctable contradictions and willed lacunae of the frictionless. The same phantasmagorical formulations that subtend the oceanic imaginary to underscore and mould geopolitical, economic and eco-technical operations materially and immaterially, reconstitute the aesthetic subject immanently, as a critical agent.

 

Ryan Bishop is Professor of Global Art and Politics at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. His most recent book is Technocrats of the Imagination: Art, Technology and the Military-Industrial Avant-garde (co-authored with John Beck, 2020), and he is co-editor of Cultural Politics (Duke UP) and its book series “A Cultural Politics Book” (Duke UP).

Tania Roy is Senior Lecturer and Chair of the Graduate Programme in English Literature at the National University of Singapore. She is the author of The Architects of Late Style in India: Aesthetic Form after the Twentieth-century Novel (Routledge, 2019), an examination of T.W. Adorno’ s aesthetics of lateness, with reference to mid- late twentieth century Indian modernism, and its contemporary artistic legacies. Her related interests, including numerous publications on contemporary visual art in post-liberalized India, with an emphasis on the memory work in its relation to civic violence, have appeared or are forthcoming in Political Culture, Theory Culture and Society, European Paradigms and Journal of Postcolonial Studies, and in several book chapters. She offers seminars in Critical Theory, especially the aesthetic of the Frankfurt School, postcolonial studies and world literature; and graduate topics on trauma studies and literature.

 

References

Bishop, Ryan (2018) “Felo de se: The Munus of Remote Sensing” boundary 2 45:4, pp. 41-63.

Connery, Christopher (1996) “The Oceanic Feeling and the Regional Imaginary”, in Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (eds) Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 284-311.

— (2001) “Ideologies of Land and Sea Alfred Thayer Mahan, Carl Schmitt, and the Shaping of Global Myth Elements” boundary 2. 28:2, 173-201.

Davis, Heather and Etienne Turpin (2015) Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among Aesthetics, Politics and Epistemologies. Open Humanities Press.

Fischer, Michael M. J. (2019) “Challenging Art as Cultural Systems for Cliff from the 21st Century: Light Shows, Shadow Plays, Pressure Points,” Geertz Memorial Lecture, Princeton University (ms.)

Foucault, Michel (1990) The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, Reissue edition. New York: Vintage.

— (2007) Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977-1978, trans. Graham Burchell. Basingstoke UK and NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1962) Faust, trans. Walter Kaufmann.  New York: Anchor Books.

Lau, Yanyi (2016) “Exclusive Interview with Charles Lim”, Artling, https://theartling.com/en/artzine/exclusive-interview-artist-charles-lim/ (website last accessed on 21/2/20).

Nancy, Jean-Luc (2014) After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes. trans. Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press.

Parikka, Jussi (2015) A Geology of Media. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Povinelli, Elizabeth (2005) “‘What’s Love Got to Do With It?’ The Race of Freedom and the Drag of Descent.” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Anthropology. 49: 2, pp. 173-181.

— (2016) Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Schmitt, Carl (2006) The Nomos of the Earth, trans. by G.L. Ulmen. New York: Telos Press.

Schuppli, Susan (2020) Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence. Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press.

Virilio, Paul (2009) Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e).

— (2010) The University of Disaster, trans. Julie Rose. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Vismann, Cornelia (2010) “Starting from Scratch: Concepts of Order in No Man’s Land,” in Bernd-Rudiger Hüppauf (ed) War, Violence and the Modern Condition. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Yao, Pauline J. (2015) “Close-up: Floating World”. Artforum 53:8.

 

[1] The term is introduced in the now widely disseminated lectures, Security, Territory, Population, given at the Collège de France between 1977 and 1978. In the following year, in a series of lectures published, somewhat misleadingly, as The Birth of Biopolitics,   appears to digress from the idea of biopower to examine German and Austrian post-War liberalism, together with the Chicago school, to advance and historically specify his account of governmentality within the paradigm of neoliberalism.

[2]While analysing the emergence of neoliberalism as a set of economic policies, Foucault framed neoliberalism (presciently, before the emergence of Thatcher and Reagan) not only in terms of a set of economic policies based on governance through monetarism, de-regulation, privatization and the securitization of borders, but also as a productive, subjectivizing power that marked, in the late twentieth-century, the emergence of a new paradigm in the governance of human beings. Where liberal modalities of governing optimize individual freedom, neoliberalism represented a mode of rationality that transformed the capacities of free-acting agents into the very technology through which individuals are governed, or otherwise, into a political strategy that produces the quality and capacities of agency, itself, into the tool of governable subjectivities.

[3] The concept of geontopower develops Povinelli’s earlier conceptualization of biopolitics, as it operated through the paradigm of multicultural recognition. Biopolitics subtends the order of “settler liberalism”, in other words, or an organization of society that distinguishes between future-oriented, self-inspiriting identities, the autological subject,  and those identified with genealogical origin–“indigenous” subjectivities, for example, that are imagined as delimited, through descent, by their communal obligations to the past (“What’s Love Got to Do with It?”). The provocation inherent to the term “settler liberalism” suggests that the “autonomous” subject of  liberal rights is comprehensible, currently, less as a citizen than as a “stakeholder” in the organizational logic of markets – a logic that at once affirms and de-legitimises difference for the purposes of extraction and accumulation through the assertion of ontological l differences between Life and Non-life (2016, 35).

[4] See Christopher L. Connery, “The Oceanic Feeling and the Regional Imaginary” for a discussion of the oceanic sublime.

[5] See Bishop (2018).

[6] See http://yoha.co.uk/node/1076 and https://transmediale.de/content/plastic-raft-of-lampedusa

[7] See http://watchthemed.net/index.php/page/index/1

[8] A related project by Thomas Keenan and Sohrab Mohebbi, with Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani, called “It is Obvious from the Map” charts the flows of migrant boats and how state actors use sea-based sensors to track them without having to offer humanitarian aid. Forensic Oceanography and Watch the Med offer explanations of rights at sea and attempt to use the same teletechnological sensory devices for exclusion to be converted into NGO oversight of national actions.

[9] See Schuppli (2020) for a fuller reading of the theoretical, ecological, legal and aesthetic frames within which her piece is placed.

[10] https://www.rainforest-rescue.org/news/3237/plaintiff-to-bp-for-nature-s-rights-in-ecuador-s-constitutional-court

[11] See, for example, Virilio’s Aesthetics of Disappearance and The University of Disaster.

[12] For Nancy, the prospect of the oceanic disaster actualizes the catastrophic logic indexed by Marx’s law of “general equivalence”: “This absorption [of values to the logic of substitution] implies a close connection between capitalism and technological development as we know it. More precisely, it is the connection of an equivalence and a limitless interchangeability of forces, products, agents or actors, meanings or values—since the value of any value is its equivalence. Catastrophes are not all of the same gravity, but they all connect with the totality of interdependences that make up general equivalence”. (5-6)

[13] In the less frequently read Second Act of Goethe’s Faust, the protagonist has transformed into a land developer intent on overcoming the boundary between land and sea through the mobilization of a massive labor force working day and night to realize his plans–the modernist drive for liberation undertaken with a Mephistophelian zeal (indeed aided by Mephistopheles himself). Faust’s plan to provide the proletariat a new kind of economic possibility through this development wishes to “open space for many millions/To live, not securely, but free for action” (lines 11563-4). The theoretical term Kulturtechnik originally applied to agrarian technics but has since migrated to other forms of human endeavors, from large-scale land development projects to literary studies and media studies. The Faust at the end of Goethe’s play can be recognized in numerous large-scale engineering projects of the present, including those addressed in the artworks discussed in this article.

[14] In a 2017 work entitled “Silent Clap of the Status Quo,” Lim constructs a video-archive of “Inspection-videos” of submarine tele-communication networks, suggesting how this “deep” archival information already striates the “phrase, ‘high seas’–a zone that is thought to be free from control of any individual nation or state [following’ Article 112 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.” The UNCLoS legislation  permits any state to lay cables on the bed of deep-sea waters – to paraphrase Lim’s presentation notes, this frictionless, extensible opening to sovereign claims upon the matter and value of the sea-bed is underpinned by a cultural depiction of “the sea [as] endless[ly] as unoccupiable.”

[15] The distribution of such imagined in/visibilities has strategic import: while the US, Japan and Europe appear to dominate the satellite communication industry, only 1 per cent of data transmission is accounted for through such infrastructure. Huawei, in 2019, completed a cable network from South America to Africa even as America continues to lobby stridently to block China from 5^th-generation wireless service infrastructure. We thank Mustafa Shabbir for alerting us to this detail, which stands, in the context of the essay, as another example of the exploitable–prolifically significant–fissures residing between legislative and cultural encodings of the sea-bed.

[16] Lim uses the word in an interview with Yunyi Lau, for Artling magazine in 2016, suggesting also the curatorial choices that have informed this processual work: in the context of curating the Singapore Pavilion and Lim’s SEA STATE 6 at the Venice Biennale Shabbir Hussain Mustafa borrows the phrase from the Thai curator Apinan Poshynanda to suggest, also, how, in economic guise, the claim to frictionless sovereignty produces fictions of infinite value from finite resources.

[17] Through the process of Lim’s documentation, the area of the sea that was subsumed to Singapore’s coastline remained under the legislation of the Maritime and Port Authority, to be subsequently erased from maritime maps once its entity was transferred to the Land Authority. The process of ‘transfer’ itself encodes the origins of Singapore as a post/colonial port-city into on-going loops of historical return, extension and transformation. In 1973, the Singapore state re-activated the colonial era law of Proclamation that originally enabled the (settler) state to possess land from its inhabitants, and which had been used historically for reclamation projects in the Straits. Proclamation–as both legal and rhetorical device–transfigures the phenomenological existence of both land sea to call up an account of the nation’s landed resilience in face of a resource poor environment–even while “radically desocial[izing]” the sea (Fischer, 8). The repurposed Foreshore Act enabled the post-Independent state to seize shorelines for the major land reclamations that today comprise the coastlines of the city (Fischer, 8).

[18] By the same token, the sea is exposed in its constant subjection to modalities of resocialization, which systematically remove coastal populations from what Lim terms, communal “bodies of knowledge”. Forms of domestic architecture of stilted long-houses on the water, related networks linking fishing routes to markets or the infrastructure of schools and roads, across to sailing techniques, design and crafting–these knowledge-forms exist in immanent, “practical interactions” with the sea, for Lim, especially in equatorial zones where the body is easily immersible in waters whose temperatures approximate “blood-heat” (conversation with the artist). Arguably, SEASTATE removes representation from these histories of habitability to document the resocialization of the sea since the proclamation of the Foreshore’s Act. The propulsive extension of Singapore’s sovereignty into surrounding water bodies is, in other words, a hegemonic mode of knowledge, advanced into both the ocean and its archipelagic contiguities with island-formations via the semiotic marks of legislation; visual technics of mapping; and the encoding of the modern state, in the grid and the survey, through the action of erasure.

[19] Instructive is the radical distance Lim’s work takes from modernist traditions of art-history associated with the “Nasuantara” paradigm, a regional model that emphasises oceanic histories of cultural traffic and therefore, attention to artistic traditions that imagine transnational ethnic solidarities (the 13^th century Old Javanese word is mobilized in its multiple geographical denotations, as signifying both “Indonesia” and “the Malay World”,  to inter-weave and relativize national art-histories).

 

by Sarah Hayden

First, galleries became accustomed to being places of sound, and then they became places full of the sound of voices. In the process, the traditional documentary “Voice of God” voice-over has species-hopped into the artworld. Much has been written about the acousmatic voice (a voice that one hears without seeing what causes it) and the power-relations it instates. We know that since at least about 500BC, the “underdetermination of the sonic source” in acousmatic listening has been understood to produce, in Brian Kane’s terms “auditory access to transcendental spheres […] a way of listening to essence, truth, profundity, ineffability or interiority” (Kane 2014: 9). In this essay I want to consider how the voiceover is used to usurp sensorial sovereignty in a single voice-driven art project that imagines, packages and promotes a distinctly 21^st-century model of sovereignty. I’m going to take as my case study Christopher Kulendran Thomas’ New Eelam project: a cloud-based housing subscription service promising a “more liquid form of citizenship beyond borders; citizenship by choice” (Kulendran Thomas 2017a: 108).[1] As advertising-as-art, it sells a dream of neoliberal sovereignty: a near-future in which “likeminded people” form cloud communities in unbounded geodesic space. However, the new economic model sustaining this hazy utopia is predicated upon a curiously homogenous (though mobile and globally distributed) demographic, and while it denounces the coup that precipitated the dissolution of the neo-Marxist autonomous state of Eelam and the annihilation of Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority, the project positions itself as irrecuperably post-political. A 2017 press release for the project states that the “authoritarian Sri Lankan president” carried out this act of genocide while “protected by a cloak of national sovereignty” (Kulendran Thomas 2017b). In its stead, Kulendran Thomas proposes a kind of deterritorialized hipster sovereignty premised on frictionless mobility and liquid citizenship.

New Eelam is a largescale multimedia project which, since 2016, has developed to comprise a website, “experience suites” (life-size models of domestic interiors, differently configured for each setting), and moving image works of various types which articulate and illustrate the concept. Individual iterations also incorporate a selection of prints, backlit tension fabrics, ceramics, furniture and sculptural works commissioned from other artists, as well as hydroponic planting systems, and assemblages drawn from Kulendran Thomas’s prior series, When Platitudes Become Form. Crucially, all of these components contrive to construct an elaborate (if distinctly minimalist) setting in which New Eelam promotional films and videos play and from which the New Eelam website can (e.g. via iPad) be easily accessed: a wrap-round, cross-media advertising “experience.”[2]

However, notwithstanding the complex and multifarious nature of this project-in-process, it is the voiceover and its non-sounding graphic ghost that do all of the work in New Eelam. The text we encounter either as evanescent voice or equally evanescent captions is what animates and gives purpose to all the rest of what would otherwise sum to no more than an unfolding series of unusually corporate-luxe IKEA show interiors. The films and videos—the former of which are composited from masses of found and (what looks like) stock footage, the latter of which can boast little more by way of an imagetrack than indifferently slick animations—derive all meaningful (if dubious) content from the project’s seductively voiced (if not always audible) self-description. My analysis will treat two components of the New Eelam project: the audible voiceover of the “speculative documentary” film, 60 Million Americans Can’t Be Wrong, and the inaudible nonvoice of the readable captions in the micro-video series, NE­_MV_01-08. What I’m going to argue is that New Eelam’s fantasy of sovereignty is channelled through the project’s undermining of sensorial sovereignty—via voices heard and unheard.

Liquid Citizenship and Nebulous Sovereignty

In 2009 in the wake of the destruction of Eelam, Sri Lankan President, Mahinda Rajapaska, announced: “We are a government who defeated terrorism at a time when others told us that it was not possible. The writ of the state now runs across every inch of our territory” (Parasam 2012: 903). The image Rajapaska invokes is of cartographically conceived space: what Eyal Weizman calls a “planar division of a territory” (Weizman 2002). In order to identify a site beyond this and every other “writ of […] state,” in his construction of New Eelam, Kulendran Thomas goes beyond Weizman’s verticality, Virilio’s oblique tri-dimensionality and Elden’s volumetric encompassing of “the earth; the air and the subsoil” (Elden 2013: 15). The territory of New Eelam is shaped by Supra-Euclidean dimensionality: the cloud is twice figured as “an entirely new dimension”, Google is saluted for its bravery in “operating in a completely different dimension”, and a reinvented Microsoft is recognized for having followed them into it (Kulendran Thomas 2017a: 102-107). Geographically dispersed, New Eelam understands its jurisdiction as, instead, generated by the “densely interconnected network” of like-minded individuals sharing “states of mind” in geodesic space (Kulendran Thomas 2019: 5). As to how this inter-psychic space relates to the more prosaic network of communally owned apartments all over the world’s most hipster-gentrified cities, this is less than fully articulated.

The terrain of New Eelam is conceived as in flux, “continually reshaping”, in process, in terra(less) formation within the cloud: “a distributed network rather than a territorially bounded nation” (Kulendran Thomas 2017a: 108-109). This makes it possible for the citizenship it offers to “transcend geography”, flowing beyond, past and through national boundaries in a victory of the politics of the vector over the politics of the envelope (2017a: 97; Wark 2004: 246). The exact process by which this is intended to occur remains nebulous. We hear that the locational lottery determining the “hereditary privilege” of nationality is to be replaced with a system of “citizenship by choice”: but how? In its initial form, New Eelam will be constituted immaterially, “with its idea liberated from its land” (Kulendran Thomas 2017a: 109). However, eventual condensation of this vaporous entity is imagined, with a moment anticipated when New Eelam’s “cloud formations could take physical shape at greater and greater scales and dimensions” (Kulendran Thomas 2017a: 114). Should examples be required, Tinder, Pokémon Go, Anonymous and the Arab Spring are offered as templates for how “cloud towns, cloud cities, and even cloud countries [could] materialise out of thin air” (Kulendran Thomas 2019: NE­_MV_06). As is evidenced by so many of the most perniciously fraught conflicts of recent decades, virgin territories can not usually be called into being on the basis of the whims, wishes or even most the urgent needs of would-be autonomous peoples. Perhaps the Vatican can provide a template: a deterritorialized sovereignty, summoned into being by the intersection of financial might and faith.

While it’s easy to envision a group of tech-utopians declaring their independence and so effecting a form of internal sovereignty, it’s quite a lot harder to imagine how or why any exchange of recognitions might be imagined between New Eelam and any of the incumbent powers from the “old World of Nations” out of which prospective New Eelamites are called to emigrate (Kulendran Thomas 2017a: 114). External sovereignty in the real world might prove as elusive as does elucidation. Extant power-relations between states and the technology companies whose tax bills they are so keen to waive make it possible to imagine a near future in which certain governments would nominally approve some form of novelty dual citizenship so that tech scions could swear part-allegiance to the cloud. It’s harder to envision the same governments ever handing over the land that would be required to host the population in its eventual physical incarnation—particularly if, as the closing statement to the film makes clear, the mission here is not one of “opposing incumbent systems by force” (Kulendran Thomas 2017a: 113). In this, as in much else, New Eelam’s future is already upon us. In The Stack, Benjamin Bratton poses the First Sino-Google War of 2009 as exemplary of “a geopolitical conflict between empires”: one that “pits a state that would dominate and determine the network sovereignty of information and energy flows versus a platform that would, by assembling users into another real network and imagined community, exceed, in deed if not letter, the last-instance sovereignty of the state and determine an alternate polity in its own image” (Bratton 2015: 112). The New Eelam project is a durational exercise in fantasizing about how such an alternate polity might function.

At the beginning of 60 Million Americans, the artist’s voiceover invites us to hark back to a halcyon “long ago” when “there was nothing more natural for the human species to explore new territories” (Kulendran Thomas 2017a: 97). Yet, even as “Our ancestors moved throughout the land, discovering new horizons and sharing what they had with each other” (Kulendran Thomas 2017a: 97), they also engaged in various more violently intrusively acts against those they encountered in the course of these bucolic adventures. Although there is no promise of violence, threats of mass exit abound: NE_MV_08 asks whether “every country will become a software country or risk losing its citizens” and NE_MV_07 asks “what will happen to nation states when everyone has the power to leave.” One wonders where, exactly, all of these exiles-elect will go.

Key to the legend of New Eelam is the framing of Google’s core business plan—“[making] its applications freely available in return for its users data and attention”—as “a new kind of social contract” (Kulendran Thomas 2017a: 105). However, notwithstanding the associations summoned by this term, it’s hard to equate the terms of the compact based “on the conveniences that could be provided by targeting the messaging that would be most interesting to each individual user at the place and time that it would be most relevant to them” (Kulendran Thomas 2017a: 105), with those conferred upon the contracting partners of, say, Hobbes or Rousseau. 60 Million Americans compares 21^st century democracy to the “crumbling monarchies” of 16/17^th-century Europe. But the only example offered for how this new cloud-state might operate comes by way of a reference to an experiment by the art collective, the Mycological Twist, who attempted to subvert the embedded social infrastructure of the survivalist videogame, Rust, by playing collaboratively rather than (as the game designers apparently expected) purely for individual gain. Gameplay, then, and a techno-utopian “design challenge […] to make the iPhone or Tesla of housing” (Bucknell 2019). We are apprised of no gameplan for how this new cloud-state will constitute or legislate itself beyond, perhaps, something akin to the flimsy agreements existing between users and providers on the likes of: Air BnB, Uber, Facebook etc.—a taking on faith that anyone sufficiently rightminded to subscribe or “partner” can be relied upon to behave ethically, civically or decently. But of course, as we’re already seeing, and as New Eelam surreptitiously acknowledges, it is very hard to prosecute misdemeanours committed by vaporously non-located global actants whose behavior is guaranteed only by the optimism of a bro-to-bro promise not to be evil.

The basis for New Eelam’s claims to the legitimacy of its sovereignty appears to derive in large part from the sheer size and might of the “really big companies” (Kulendran Thomas 2019: 03) it anticipates: the companies that, together, form a new ruling class whose “class power derives from ownership and control of the vector of information” (Wark 2019: 13). This is what McKenzie Wark has termed the “vectoralist class” (Wark 2019: 11). When one micro-video closes with the question—“so how will the biggest organizations of the future be governed?” (Kulendran Thomas 2019: 02)—we are cued to read it as rhetorical: the implication being that such “massively scalable organizations that are funded and built by the communities” (Kulendran Thomas 2019: 04) and enabled by blockchain technologies will simply be too big to govern. They will generate aporia that only they themselves can fill. As Bratton observes of Google, such platforms are both too big and too small for states to control (2015: 112). Immunity to subordination is guaranteed by their immunity from apprehension and, accordingly, accountability. In NE_MV_02, Vitalik Buterin’s Ethereum “community” is offered as an example of “more loosely defined ecosystem” of “fuzzy sets” that states “can’t target […] as easily as conventional companies”. The New Eelam line is that trust in these organizations will be generated by the confluence of anonymity, decentralization, ubiquity, collective ownership that derives from the fact that “in today’s informational economy where value is created through data, we are simultaneously the workers and the product that is sold to advertisers” (Kulendran Thomas 2019: 01). Or, in Wark’s terms, we are made subject to the vectoralist imperative “to be able to extract value not just from labor but from what Tiziana Terranova calls free labor” (2019: 115). New Eelam proposes that hugely powerful “decentralized autonomous organizations” will “command a deeper degree of trust than today’s big businesses because they will be owned and governed collectively by their users” (Kulendran Thomas 2019: 04). The promise it makes is that the intermediaries and intercessors of representative democracy will be rendered redundant by corporately-choreographed direct rule, but the nature of that rule remains up for grabs. The fact that the cryptologically blockchained programmable tokens in which these companies are held means they “can be owned by anyone” (Kulendran Thomas 2019: 04), also means they are open to manipulation by invisible forces other than the well-meaning, forward-thinking young professionals presumed to make up its putatively cooperative usership.

New Eelam spins itself as a collective united in “citizenship beyond national borders” and, in so doing, appears to hold out the promise of a whole new way for its subscribers to “feel part of something”. Its techno-optimist rhetoric is woolly with talk of cooperatives, belonging and Zuckerbergian “community”. But the more we prod at what is being promoted, the more it discloses itself as a means to be, instead, apart: not just from nationality, but (much more significantly) from society. Founded on the pursuit of self-actualization and unbounded autonomy this dream of corporate cooperative sovereignty is destined to develop as, instead, a metastasized nightmare of neoliberal hipster sovereignty of the individual. No legislation would protect against mega-corporations requiring an opt-in citizenship that ensures their membership will be formed of those least likely to need the kind of supports nation-states once guaranteed to the young, the sick, the old, the infirm. No rationale is offered for how or why these fuzzy corporate masses would ever make any decisions not immediately seen to be in their own interests. No explanation is provided for how this new “collective being” will deal with what Rousseau referred to as the “physical inequality as nature may have set up between men” (2003: 199-200) or, indeed, for the fluxing capacities of those physical beings across their lifetimes. No attempt is made to imply that there will be “no distinctions [drawn] between those of whom it is made up” (Rousseau 2003: 207). Nor is any plan made for when intrigues or factions arise, and “partial associations are formed at the expense of the great association”: inevitabilities of human interaction that were foreseeable in 1762 and remain grimly probable today (Rousseau 2003: 203). Instead, New Eelam seems to share with Facebook an intransigent faith in the moral rectitude of the mass, and its self-regulating destiny. In joining the cloud community, the New Eelamite undertakes no Rousseauian exchange, but only carries out a transaction. In subscribing to the scheme, no natural independence or strength must be offered up in exchange for the benefits to be conferred. Under the “luxury of communalism” that provides the infrastructure for a New Eelam life of constant globetrotting, there is no suggestion that one’s own property must be forfeited. Even bearing in mind half-hearted predictions about an eventual trickle-down effect, it’s a curious kind of communalism in which the powerful stand to retain their inherited advantages while paying to attain some new ones. At the end of 60 Million Americans, the voiceover asks: “if the way that housing works could be transformed through a new industrial revolution, what new social forms might this open up?” The likelihood is that instead of transforming social structures, this “new offshore economic system” will only accelerate and render more acute the extant situation (Kulendran Thomas 2019a: 111). As Wark puts it, however slow we have been to recognize this, “It is not the ideologies of humans that determines their social-technical existence, but their social-technical existence that determines their ideologies” (Wark 2019: 36). While New Eelam itself was only incorporated in 2016 and hasn’t (yet) taken over the world, the appeal of its fiction of techno-logically enabled autonomy is already familiar, already shaping everything about the delivery and practice of education, employment, social care.

This vision of sovereignty resonates curiously with that espoused in the more openly hard-right libertarian book of prophesy, The Sovereign Individual (1997), by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg. Marketed as a handbook to the near future, The Sovereign Individual anticipates the advent of the “genuine privatization of sovereignty” (Davidson & Rees-Mogg 1997: 321), made possible by the destruction of the nation state by “microprocessing” and a resultant “eclipse of politics” (Davidson & Rees-Mogg 1997: 15). Like Kulendran Thomas, they cite Alfred O. Hirschman as antecedent. And like him, they offer a vision of liquid movement (for some) in which “Ultimately, persons of substance will be able to travel without documents at all” (Davidson & Rees-Mogg 1997: 321) and massive cyber corporations will enjoy a revolutionary “transcendence of frontiers and territories” that puts them beyond government (Davidson & Rees-Mogg 1997: 23). In keeping with their respective times, Kulendran Thomas artfully avoids acknowledging the vast inequalities that his system will support, but Davidson and Rees-Mogg are unabashed in admitting—or, rather, celebrating—the fact that “this will be increasingly a ‘winners take all’ world” (Davidson & Rees-Mogg 1997: 300). They write of how “the Information Revolution will liberate individuals as never before”, leaving individuals “almost entirely free to invent their own work and realize the full benefits of their own productivity” (Davidson & Rees-Mogg 1997: 17-18), under a new employment system compared (amusingly) to opera. Not everyone can be the prima donna. So, while “[g]enius will be unleashed” (Davidson & Rees-Mogg 1997: 18), “the return for ordinary performance is bound to fall” (Davidson & Rees-Mogg 1997: 300). Even Davidson and Rees-Mogg’s (1997: 28) direly dystopian late-twentieth-century vision of a world in which “denationalized citizens will no longer be citizens as we know them, but customers”, couldn’t quite predict how the workers of the neoliberal 21^st century would come to be deprived of not alone their wages but also contract-guaranteed hours, workplaces, and the scantest security. Their forecasts of how HNW individuals “will no longer be obliged to live in a high-tax jurisdiction in order to earn high income” as “governments that attempt to charge too much as the price of domicile will merely drive away their best customers” (Davidson & Rees-Mogg 1997: 21) read like the withheld corporate documents, the secret memos that underpin and explain the nature of the New Eelam mission: for it is this—exemption from tax—that is surely being signalled but never explicitly advertised as one of the perks of New Eelamite liquid citizenship. The packaging is different but the core content here is strikingly similar. New Eelam sells an updated, redesigned version of individual sovereignty, cloaked by the more palatable, millennial-marketable apparel of the autophagic “sharing economy.”

New Eelam promises that, as a consequence of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, unfettered individuals freed by technology of the burdens of any form of social bond or responsibility will come to flow through the world unconstrained by borders, laws, taxes, or society itself. Beyond the established California Ideology of technology as “good in essence” (Wark 2019: 73), the transcendence of time and space is frequently celebrated as a victory for technology in terms that often carries curiously super-human/divine associations. Rees-Mogg and Davidson wrote of how the “most successful and ambitious […] truly Sovereign Individuals” would “compete and interact on terms that echo the relations among the gods in Greek myth”, carrying through this disturbing analogy to describe how, upon a cyberspace “Mount Olympus”, these divine beings will escape politics, transform the nature of governments, “[shrink] the realm of compulsion” (which we might otherwise term responsibility, and “[widen] the scope of private control over resources” (Davidson & Rees-Mogg 1997: 18-19). This celestial note will re-sound, when I come to discuss the mutation of the documentary Voice of God within the evolution of the New Eelam project.

Exit, Voice and Loyalty

The intentional community invoked by New Eelam is one of “entire cloud countries” based on “citizenship by choice rather than by hereditary privilege.” In 60 Million Americans Can’t Be Wrong, the voiceover energetically sets about legitimizing the viability of the choice to opt out of a society you deem to have gone astray: the replacement of democratic rule with consumer choice. It cites Albert O. Hirschman as evangelist of mass exit as solution and describes his 1970 book, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, as “quietly influential” among Silicon Valley Techno-libertarians. We hear that Hirschman: “looks at how customers, members of citizens tend to exercise their democratic voice—for example through complaints, suggestions, votes or protests—only when they believe an organization is open to change; whereas, if they realise that the system can’t be changed from within, they leave” (Kulendran Thomas 2017a: 101). However, as noted above, citizens of a nation state cannot usually simply turn up in a new country, revoke their prior citizenship and adopt a new one. In fact, Hirschman even admits this kink in his model, when he writes of how the exit option is very nearly unavailable “in such basic social organizations as the family, the state, or the church” (and, in economic terms, in “pure monopoly”) (Hirschman 1970: 33).

Later in the book, Hirschman admits of the friction produced when non-liquid citizens leave one country for another: acknowledging that “the emigrant makes a difficult decision and usually pays a high price in severing many strong affective ties” and referring to an additional payment “extracted as [the emigrant] is being initiated into a new environment and adjusting to it” (Hirschman 1970: 113). When New Eelam promises that with cloud citizenship, “the whole world could be home” (Kulendran Thomas 2017a: 114), it also promises the replication, in each global apartment, of an eidetic, neo-international style, Air BnB interior design aesthetic This promise of identical experiences “wherever you need to be” smoothes away the prospect of any adjustment process as “you” transition between cities. It erases that irritating degree of difference once considered the purpose of international travel. What it doesn’t have a design hack for is the more pressing, and ever more present rub of walls, borders, biometric passports, quotas, social insurance numbers and right-to-work visas.[3] 60 Million Americans conspicuously avoids mentioning any such sticky issues. But before the artist’s voice starts to bamboozle us, the film’s unvoiced prologue prefaces what follows with montaged media footage of migrants frantically attempting to cross walls and borders. Similarly, when the voiceover guides us through its condensed lesson on Hirschman’s concept of voice as “any attempt at all to change, rather than to escape from, an objectionable state of affairs”, it does so over montaged footage of tear-gassed riots, protests, Black Lives Matter marches: images featuring a high proportion of people of color. However, when the voiceover speaks of exit, the images we see of people leaving are homogenous and highly freighted: of white people packing up files and folders, walking out of office buildings with boxes—images familiar to us (whether associatively or actually) from the media coverage of the activities of banks in the crash. The bodies that exit are besuited, unmolested (except, perhaps, by paparazzi) and moving independently. These are the people that can leave, walk out unscathed. What Hirschman calls “the neatness of exit” is available only to certain subjects, certain bodies, certain sets of papers. And the film acknowledges that with one channel (onscreen), even as it denies it with another (the voiceover). From the outset, the voice is established as manipulative, dogmatic, stage-manager. We have been warned.

For Hirschman, voice equates to “any attempt at all to change, rather than to escape from, an objectionable state of affairs” (Hirschman 1970: 30). While voice operates here in its habitual metaphorical mode—as a figure for the expression of political feeling, as the “use” of one’s political “voice”—it is not entirely abstracted from the voice as sound, its sonorous potential. He writes of how, in an “age of protest”, “dissatisfied consumers (or members of an organization) [….] can ‘kick up a fuss’”, as a means to induce improvement. They might also make “individual or collective petition to the management directly in charge, through appeal to a higher authority with the intention of forcing a change in management, or through various types of actions and protests, including those that are meant to mobilize public opinion” (Hirschman 1970: 30). Perhaps some of what makes it possible for the “exit option” to take on such power is the diminution of the potency of the “voice” that was its counterpart. Where for Hirschman, it was broadly but tangibly conceived, in the rhetoric of 21^st century techno-power, voice has become impossibly, untenably elastic. Mark Zuckerberg’s highly contentious October 2019 oration on free speech at the University of Georgetown exemplifies the degree of its attenuation as metaphor. In a speech that argued the necessity of promulgating false political advertising as free speech, the Facebook CEO starts from the presumption that voice equates to having access to his social media platform. This is what makes it possible for him to claim that, as a result of the company’s efforts to connect the world, “a lot more people now have a voice” (Zuckerberg 2019). The broadcasting of one’s views, breakfast or holiday photos all constitute equivalent exercise of that voice; but we are also advised that “Voting is voice”—and, shortly after, that “political ads are an important part of voice”—even when they lie (Zuckerberg 2019). Although the speech makes numerous ill-judged (and justly ill-received) references to Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, and Zuckerberg makes a point of how the platform is used by activities and protestors, the overall effect is to neutralize voice by conflating actual political expression with the means for self-expression within an algorithmically-artefacted silo in which political reality can be manipulated (for the profit of tech companies) by malign agents to geo-politically significant ends.[4]

Using one’s voice need not be noisy. Mladen Dolar describes the operation of the necessarily scriptoral, and so silenced, electoral voice of the individual voter, marking their anonymous, secret X (Dolar 2006: 111-112). And somewhere, buried deep within even Hirschman’s notion of the vox populi is a remnant of the inner voice as moral arbiter: the inaudible, unignorable “materialisation of conscience” (Riley 2004: 67). This  “still small voice” which, as Denise Riley points out, was in its original Biblical manifestation an external divine voice that later came to be conceived as internal, integrated within the moral human psyche (2004: 67). Dolar writes of the “internal voice of a moral injunction, the voice which issues warnings, commands, admonishments, the voice which cannot be silenced if one has acted wrongly”, and tracks it from Socrates through Rousseau, Kant and Heidegger, to conclude that this internal voice is always marked an external at the interior, or the Other within the Self (Dolar 2006: 102). Hirschman’s voice that means “to make an attempt at changing the practices, policies, and outputs of the firm from which one buys or of the organization to which one belongs” (Hirschman 1970: 30), signifies engagement and activity as opposed to withdrawal, and noise as opposed to quietism— trying to improve the situation for the common good, rather than removing oneself. Thus externalized and exercised, vocality comes to sound like morality: an attempt at fixing the problem, rather than leaving it for others to deal with. Abandoning the electoral voice in favor of “the exit option” may mean jettisoning this moral voice, too.

No real attempt is made to suggest that the departure of New Eelam’s newly freed, sovereign liquid citizens is intended to bring about a major change-of-mind or policy in the nation-states they would presume to leave behind. Rather, the New Eelamite skips away, unconcerned for the future of a state they no longer recognize. For Hirschman, the “neatness of exit” is posed against “the messiness and heartbreak of voice” (Hirschman 1970: 107). The curious melding of the physiological and psychological in “heartbreak” illustrates his embodied, moral, engaged concept of “voice”. Making a fuss—protest, activism, complaint—is figured as both more emotionally strenuous and more corporeally invested than the apparently easier, tidier “exit option”. Of course, how one weighs such costs might depend on one’s vantage point. Hirschman takes as one of his examples of exit in action “the progressive settlement of the frontier” in the United States by disgruntled Europeans, and later by Americans moving from East to West (Hirschman 1970: 107). This image resonates with New Eelam’s colonially acquisitive and extensive drive to make it so “the whole world could be home” (Kulendran Thomas 2017a: 114). While Hirschman acknowledges the fact that the settler fantasy of American nationhood “provided everyone with a paradigm of problem-solving” by making it imaginable for Americans “to think about solving their problems through ‘physical flight’”, he extends little thought to the “heartbreak” experienced by the pre-existing populations of this un-empty vast country (Hirschman 1970: 107). However this might have been received in 1970, the seemingly uncritical re-presentation of these ideas in the 21^st century should give us pause, particularly when we hear it so flippantly framed in 60 Million Americans: “Where they actually built it wasn’t all that new to the native populations that they displaced. But for those that they had left behind back home, it was a bold experiment, in a different way of life” (Kulendran Thomas 2017a: 100). The ethical implications of the voice-V-exit dilemma acquire an additional charge when the choice is framed as that between “kicking up a fuss” at home and colonial expansion—and consequent population displacement—abroad.

While Hirschman’s vision is predicated on the expectation that migrant exiters would come to be citizen-subjects in their new homes, Kulendran Thomas has no such plan. There is no suggestion that this “new social contract” will entail any new (or, indeed, the maintenance of any vestigial) civic obligations or care responsibilities. The New Eelamites would also, presumably, be freed from the yokes of taxes, national insurance, social responsibility. Thus freed, the New Eelamites would not come together to constitute the geodesically cosy communities so vaguely but insistently implied in the advertising. Instead, in the absence of any other blueprint for a new society, each liquid citizen opts out in order to attain the status of monadic-nomadic: or sovereign citizen of the cloud. In light of the growth and politics of the sovereign citizenship movement in the US, the decision to model New Eelam’s aspirational atomization of society on an arty takeover of a survivalist videogame no longer looks arbitrary or accidental. Having outlined the form of its model sovereignty, I want to move now to consider how New Eelam articulates the dream of sovereignty it espouses, and how that dream is belied by the ways in which it is “voiced”, by the voice used to sell its mass exit strategy.

Liquid Voice

Bodiless, unbounded by the banality of being anchored within a visible mortal, the documentary “Voice of God” attempts to insinuate itself into our thinking as straight truth, spoken from the authorizing position that denies it is a position at all. It speaks as though from on high, from outside of, or on behalf of the text, from everywhere and nowhere at once. When the voice is thus preserved from identification with a single mortal being, as Carolyn Abbate (1989: 69) notes “power accrues to the utterance and not the person; words are also freer, something more than the speech of a human being”. The acousmatic voice is, as Brian Kane (2014: 213) puts it, “the voice of obedience and belief”. We hear this “spirit without a body” (Dolar 2006: 62), ineluctably, as “the voice of the master” (Kane: 213). And as Dolar (2006: 77) observes, the “acousmatic master […] is more of a master than his banal visible versions”. Pooja Rangan (2017: 283) writes of the various moves by which documentary film tried to cast off these troubling pretentions to the divine, the authoritative, expert who speaks for a (presumed or predestined to be) voiceless other. And yet, it seems that these lessons never passed into the artworld, where the Voice of God thunders on, unabated and unabashed, in installations, on speakers and over headphones. In art, as in film, the “voice that hides itself behind a veil” does so, Kane tells us, ‘in order to enjoy the power of omnipotence […] omniscience” and “omnipresence” (Kane: 213, 217). All of these omni-capacities (as various deities would confirm) are very helpful when you want to go about enthralling a public. They sum to a curiously charged arsenal for an artist-author to deploy in a work of art that takes the form of propaganda.

In the context of New Eelam’s status as elaborate advertising platform for a potential lifestyle subscription, Doane’s (1980: 42) assertion that the documentary voiceover “speaks without mediation to the audience, by-passing the ‘characters’ and establishing a complicity between itself and the spectator” is particularly interesting. The tone of the voiceover in 60 Million Americans is pitched to cultivate just such a complicity, cueing its audience (just as advertisers do) with chummy implications of the hearer’s pre-existing inculcation with the attitudes and beliefs that would propel them to subscribe. Its “‘voice on high’ […] which speaks from a position of superior knowledge” (Silverman 1988: 48) seems to address its listeners as at least potential (if not already fully subscribed) acolytes, sure to align themselves with its message, just as soon as they come into possession of this same superior knowledge. As Doane, Silverman and Bonitzer variously remind us, the voiceover’s unlocalizable, disembodied position puts it both outside of time and space and beyond criticism. Acousmaticity stems critique. Without an identifiable speaker to address, it is difficult to produce an adequate rebuttal. This inaccessibility to judgement takes on a new significance in the context of a project that is already resisting interpretation as to its politics, its apparently blank earnestness.

60 Million Americans, the film that constitutes the core of the New Eelam project, is pitched as a “speculative documentary”. A single voiceover voiced by Christopher Kulendran Thomas himself overspeaks its whole, maintaining throughout a vocal style that could be characterized as breezy, bright, public academic. Youthful, anonymous, confidently leading its auditors across yet-unnavigated future, territories, the voice we hear is the sort of voice that explains the indispensability of an app you never knew you needed, and the obsolescence of everything upon which you have heretofore relied. Its solicitous tone—hollow with optimism—is that of the millennial entrepreneur offering not stock, product or service, but “an opportunity” to join the team. It is the voice of the TED-talk That Will Absolutely Blow Your Mind—except, crucially, like the traditional documentary voiceover, it is acousmatic: a voice shorn clear of its speaker. The artist’s vocal performance is smooth, but not machinic. Emphasis is applied where needed, in a manner that is at once subtly expressive (for which: read authentic) and controlled. The recording abjures all of the disfluencies and preparatory sounds that mark oral performances. The mouth’s wetness, the pneumatic system’s breathiness, the muscular exertions of vocalizing, leave no trace on this text. Nor does the artist’s body ever appear onscreen. Indeed, while the credit line for this film includes five separate entries, and cites the contributions of nine individuals, no reference is made to the voiceover or the (presumably laborious) process of its voicing (recording, editing, production)—mindful, perhaps, of Dolar’s warnings (and, before him, those of the Wizard of Oz) as to how discousmatization would cause the banalization of the once “omnipotent, charismatic character”, the crumbling of the voice’s aura, the loss of its fascination and power and (inevitably) “something like castrating effects” (Dolar 2006: 67). This voice is not just disembodied; it denies it ever had anything to do with the “someone in flesh and bone [to borrow Cavarero’s phrase] who emits it” (Cavarero 2005: 4).

The classical disembodied voiceover always arrives to its listener from “a place which is absolutely other. […] Absolutely other and absolutely indeterminable. In this sense, transcendent” (Silverman 1988: 164). Conversely, when the voice in cinema speaks from out of a body, then that body is “anchored in a given space” through the evocation of the voice’s emplaced interaction with its location. All that could “spatialize the voice, […] localize it, give it depth and thus lend to the characters the consistency of the real” (Doane 1980: 36)—reverberation, room tone, sound perspective, etc.—is suppressed in Kulendran Thomas’s voiceover. The recording discloses a contrived paucity of both the “territory sounds” that might root our invisible speaker in an audible environment, and what Chion calls “materializing sound indices”: those markers of the concrete materiality of sound production whose absence we register as purity, ethereality, abstraction (Chion 1994: 114). The quality of sound-recording on 60 Million Americans is clean, almost impossibly so: antiseptic in its eschewal of all diegetic traces of the world beyond the text: no discernible elements of auditory setting. However hard we listen, we learn nothing about the space in which it was recorded. Kaja Silverman (1988: 49) diagnoses the process by which the voice that, in the acousmatic situation, attains transcendence, “loses power and authority with every corporeal encroachment, from a regional accent or idiosyncratic ‘grain’ to definitive localization in the image”. No risk of any such diminution of power and authority threatens this voice without a name, without a point-of-view and without an indexically-invoked “existent in flesh and bone […] a throat, a particular body” (Cavarero 2005: 177). As in a TED- talk, the delivery of information is structured and paced so as to be maximally digestible, maximally intelligible. When information is this easy to come by, the means by which we acquire it are almost impossible to keep in view. This, then, is the liquid voice, that spills smoothly across borders, possessed as it is of no grain, nothing to stick, or be noticed. Voice as very concertedly vanishing mediator. From out of nowhere, the liquid voice flows clear, almost imperceptibly, intangibly, immaterially into the open channels of our ears. It does all it can to effect frictionless transmission. To slip down easy. And to do so, it takes two distinct and yet interdependent forms.

The figure of the ear as the body perceiving organ of least resistance is well rehearsed in the literature on sound and listening. As Brandon Labelle acknowledges, “to give one’s ear […] is to give the body over, for a distribution of agency” (Labelle 2014: x). “The power of the voice [says Dolar] stems from the fact that it is so hard to keep at bay—it hits us from the inside” (Dolar 2006: 78). This anxiety about how what we hear gets inside us, this penetration of the body by the voice of an another, has seeded innumerable metaphors, the most frequently invoked among them being, of course, that of the ear’s tragic lidlessness.[5] Connor sends us back to the derivation of “obedience” from the Latin “audire”, observing that “if a god or tyrant wants to ensure unquestioning obedience, he had better make sure that he never discloses himself to the sight of his people, but manifests himself and his commands through the ear” (Connor 2000: 23). François Bonnet invokes Bernard de Clairvaux’s fantastically circular commentary on a sermon from the Song of Songs, in which the ear is elevated as that which “catches the truth, as truth comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes by the word of God, and the word of God is truth” (Bonnet 2016: 29). There is, presumably, no rightful sensorial sovereignty of the hearer before its God, but when the word of another invades aurally, can we presume to be able to shut it out? Although de Clairvaux constructs his ear in opposition to an easily deceivable eye, to be open to the word of God is also to be susceptible, surely, to other material that co-opts this channel. All of this makes the voice an infamously effective medium for propaganda.

As Dolar observes, “all phenomena of totalitarianism tend to hinge overbearingly on the voice, which in a quid pro quo tends to replace the authority of the letter, or put its validity into question”, supplanting the law (Dolar 2006: 113). Pointing us to Carl Schmitt’s declarations as to the “immediate and most intense” positive law manifested in the Führer’s oral guidelines, Dolar argues that the voice “is structurally in the same position as sovereignty, which means that it can suspend the validity of the law and inaugurate the state of emergency”. It “stands at the point of exception which threatens to become the rule” (Dolar 2006: 118-120). In Dolar’s warnings about how “the moment this voice is taken as something positive and compelling on its own, we enter the realm where obnoxious consequences are quick to follow” (Dolar 2006: 120), we might recognize a strangely doubled inversion of Cavarero’s belief in the power of the relational and specific voice-qua-voice, esteemed even before it says anything. Cavarero’s always already in-convocation political voice does not speak alone, or in a vacuum. It channels its particularity, its Arendtian political potentiality (and, accordingly, its humanity) materially. It is the furthest thing from the appallingly singular, dematerialized Voice of God. For Cavarero, “the speech that is politics explicitly stands in opposition to the universal abstractions of the semantic and its disciplining valence; this speech emphasizes the corporeal roots of the very practice of speaking, along with the embodied existence as she is communicated in speech” (Cavarero 2005: 206). It seems apt, then, that the voice in which Kulendran Thomas’s postpolitical project revives, transmits and reorients Hirschman’s proposition is itself so minimally material and, as the project evolves, ever less sonorous.

While Hitler’s words derived their motive force from the “limitless and unbound” (Dolar 2006: 113) voice-as-missile that always directs us back to the furiously gesticulating, spitting, screaming body on stage, “the Stalinist ruler”, Dolar writes, “endeavors to efface himself and his voice” (Dolar 2006: 118-119). But Dolar then goes on to argue that while the Stalinist weak voice was “a mere appendage to the letter, yet this staging, in order to exhibit the letter as all the more objective, independent of the subjectivity of its executor—this reduction was the source of the Stalinist’s power” (Dolar 2006: 119). It was, he claims, as a result of the very tininess of the self-effacing Stalinist voice that this “hidden appendage” (Dolar 2006: 119) could decide the validity of the letter, which is to say the law. I want to turn now to think about how New Eelam further dematerializes voice beyond acousmaticity to deliver its post-political extirpation of voice as option. In the last part of this essay, I will consider the effect of the friction-defraying suspension of sonority enacted when New Eelam moves from audible voice to ephemerally visible nonvoice.

Mutation: From Voice to Nonvoice

Micro-videos are ultra-short moving image pieces pervasive across social media platforms: popular, appositely, with advertisers and propagandaists alike. As they play, they tend to display short segments of text (a clause, a very short sentence), sequentially, and at a comfortable reading speed. Or, indeed, at the speed of a speaker on a mission to persuade. They do so, crucially, without overtly disrupting the reader-viewer’s experience. Where pop-up advertising interjected loudly into our browsing, these captions permeate an unbroken browsing experience, unobtrusively. Across illimitably scrollable screens, undifferentiated, apparently sourceless evanescent liquid voices speak to us transcendentally, silently, without friction. “Truth” appears: transient, traceless, in flow, in flight, and evaporating even as you read. The micro-video’s suppression of sonorous voice, and its replacement with flowing text, derived from the need for such videos to be embedded within a feed without eroding the goodwill of users by loudly advertising the distracted viewer’s online practices to their workplaces. Text was initially a sort of surreptitious supplement to the voice. Latterly, “content-providers” appear to have jettisoned sound in favour of fleeting text alone.

At New Eelam: Spike Island in 2019, the exhibition formation established in earlier iterations—which typically enshrine a large screen showing 60 Million Americans Can’t Be Wrong at the heart of an experience-suite—was accompanied by the installation, in a sort of vestibular exo-chamber wrapping round the main gallery of eight new works: a series of “micro-videos”, titled NE_MV_01-08 (2019). The exhibition architecture and layout ensure that the viewer will encounter these after having first processed through the temple-like environment of the experience-suite, through which Kulendran Thomas’s voiceover pervades.

The snack-sized works (running from 56-107 seconds in length) that are so displayed assemble a readily digestible case for why the tenor of our times might compel New Eelamites to manifest their sovereign citizenship. Their mission is to characterize the 21^st century in terms of a series of exception-al transformations: something like what Klaus Schwab, prophet of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, calls “megatrends” (Schwab 2016). New Eelam supplies eight broadly conceived reasons why normal nation-state citizenship should be suspended. Approaching the eight micro-videos in sequence these are: the fourth industrial revolution; the proliferation of organizations run as fuzzy sets; the claim that distributed ledger technologies are outperforming the profit-generating of targeted advertising; the contention that blockchain technologies enable co-operative corporate ownership and governance; the reorientation of social groupings towards geodesic, rather than geographic networks; the condensation of the cloud—in physical form; a putative new ease of movement; and the global power of software.

The micro-video form was born out of advertising’s desire to better infiltrate and indoctrinate, without generating any friction for the passive scrollers who must not be irritated out of breaking—even momentarily—their connection to the ‘feed’ that drips them billable ads. In 2016, the New York Times reported Mark Zuckerberg’s prophesy of an audio-visual future: “where video is first, with video at the heart of all of our apps and services” (Isaac 2016). Video is where the social and the commercial sides of Facebook’s inextricably entangled “offering” coalesce: preferred medium for “sharing” footage of first steps and promotions on no-sag yoga pants alike. Micro-video is the material Moebius strip of the interaction between the two ends of the Facebook business model, and not without reason. For, as Mike Isaac puts it in the same article, “The more acclimated users are to seeing video content on Facebook, the thinking goes, the less disruptive it will be for people to view video ads alongside them” (Isaac 2016). It is the apparent lack of any discernible edge marking where the “social” stops and the “commercial” begins that gives the functionally split but aesthetically unified micro-video its potently smooth form.

At New Eelam: Bristol, the micro-videos were presented on eight perfectly square (1:1) screens: mimetically recalling the square and vertical video  [>1:1] formats that have in recent years colonized the majority of social media channels (including TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Periscope). The vertical/square aspect ratio revolution came about because these formats reduce the need for scrolling viewers to reorient phones or heads in order to take in the whole of the frame. They sand away the rough edges that might otherwise cause friction between infinite units of media content as they rub up against and flow into each other. By minimizing visual snagging, they ensure smooth and uninterrupted “feed” of visually congruent “content” to the user-viewer-customer-data provider (Facebook for Business 2016). In scrolling, the user takes in commercial and social content in an unbroken flow, the space between two blinks. What makes this possible is the presumption of autoplay, which Facebook introduced as “an easier way to watch videos on Facebook” in 2013 (Mayes 2013).

In February 2016, Facebook introduced an auto-captioning tool for advertisers.[6] So when, in May 2018, Google Chrome announced a new Autoplay Policy, enabling autoplay only where “The content is muted, or does include any audio (video only),”[7] advertisers knew what to do. As a result,  we have entered a new age of the intertitle—or something very like it. But whereas the intertitles of the early 20^th century were interspersed (respectfully) between image frames, in the era of Steyerl’s “poor image” (Steyerl 2009) no one is too worried about overlaying text over disposable image, making this standard practice both for digital marketers and, accordingly, setting the terms for the New Eelam micro-videos. While it would be nice to think the intertitle’s second coming was prompted by a desire to enhance access for Deaf/deaf consumers, captioning increases billable view time and makes it easier to tag videos with searchable SEO metadata. Tracking the conversations about this development, it’s clear that advertisers first panicked about the muting of the voiceovers that had served them so long and so profitably. However, they quickly realised that the transposition of voice into moving text had the capacity to free the content being conveyed from the last, peskily specific, mortal and subjective remnants of grain or materiality that even the acousmatic voice could never quite cast off. The digital marketing blogosphere is abuzz with dramatic claims about increased brand recognition, advert recall, message association,[8] intended to soothe advertisers panicked by reporting on the proportion of these videos that are being watched on mute.[9] Now, columns designed to help advertisers “[Make] Video Ads That Work on Facebook’s Silent Screen” abound.[10] In a strange transfiguring of video’s audio-visual functioning, the burden of information transfer has shifted from the advertising voiceover to the caption stream, and sound has receded to become a nice but nonessential optional extra. This is exactly what we see in NE_MV_01-08: short, captioned, square videos with negligibly significant sound provided on the single-user headphone set that connects to each separate screen.

Sensorial Sovereignty

The music piped into each set of headphones is an unremarkably bland sort of ambient techno: a sonic signalling of nothing more than the era of its manufacture and the technology involved. Its function is much less musical than it is structural. The presence of the headphones produces a viewing regime that is necessarily “singular and solitary” (Young 2016: 10). They lock us into place, and into separate “pods” at each of eight viewing stations, from which we are addressed by the nonvoice of each micro-video. Precisely because gallery audiences have become so accustomed to significant semantic content being delivered via headphones, hearing viewers will almost automatically apply them. They cue us to listen, to tune in, if only to an inner reading voice. Thus installed as reader-viewers, we are clamped by the ear—not in any sonically meaningful way, as we might otherwise have been by a voiceover—but physically: leashed by the short cable running between each screen and its own (though interchangeable) set of headphones. Much as white noise works to screen from distraction, the audio tracks by Dan Bodan and Tony Quiroga block out the sounds of the gallery that might otherwise distract us from attending entirely to what is playing out, in evanescent text, on the screen. A fully smooth and enclosing experience is ensured. Via a mix of real and spectral sensory inputs, the intermittently captive audience is liberated from collective hearing into individual viewing, and made newly permeable to the liquid, legible flow.

Brian Kane (2014: 222) has persuasively demonstrated the overlooking of “technè” in Mladen Dolar’s influential account of the acousmatic. Pettman describes the mutation of the acousmatic voice in the digital age as a two-stage process, comprising first, “the umbilical break from the image” and secondly, the dematerialization of the voice “to a second degree, so that even its medium of capture is no longer graspable […] its portability, its mutability, its absolute liberation from the image, and its saturating ubiquity” (Pettman 2017: 41). I want to suggest that the transition we are witnessing from voice to fluid, fluent text—in New Eelam, as in its advertising context, and more widely—represents the next phase in this process as Cavarero’s (2005: 1) “sonorous materiality” is sloughed off and the voice comes to operate in this still more dematerialized way. The minimally material acousmatic voice is replaced by the fully frictionless immateriality of the textual nonvoice that has no sonic presence and is only ever briefly, partially visible: gone before it can be subjected to scrutiny. In becoming nonvoiced, the micro-video text acquires elements of both Labelle’s (2014: 87-89) unvoice that is inner, preparatory, and Norie Neumark’s (2017: 125) that plays performatively between presence and absence. In the micro-videos, New Eelam’s liquid voice evolves into a liquid nonvoice. In the process, it attains the character of a sort of hyper-acousmatic. I want to propose that the textual nonvoice we’re seeing in the gallery can be identified as a further evolution in a progressive dematerialization of vocality: a second-order mutation along a line that could be mapped from synchronized voice to voiceoff, to voiceover, now to be extended through into the nonvoice’s final, full abstraction as temporally apprehended text.

In documentary, as Pooja Rangan observes, the “voice of god” is attributed “to the body of the film text itself” (2017: 284). In 1980, Mary Ann Doane (Doane 1980: 46) was already warning of the bad faith principles underlying efforts to correct the documentary voiceover’s tendencies towards authority and aggressivity, observing that, by doing away with the central narrator, new documentary formats promoted “the illusion that reality speaks and is not spoken, that the film is not a constructed discourse”. When the overtly authoritative Voice of God cedes to the liquid nonvoice, a similar phenomenon arises. Since the advent of sound in cinema inaugurated the demise of the intertitle as quasi-literary form, writing that appears onscreen has come to be seen (and, increasingly, produced) as an automatic emanation of the film text itself. Whereas intertitles had been recognised as writing, the more recent mainstream cinema has grown used to apprehending all such text as equivalent to the subtitles and closed captions that are broadly considered as purely functional and so, necessarily objective and authorless.[11] As Mark Andrejevic (Andrejevic 2018: 259) describes, the aspiration after framelessness—the fetishizing of “the view from nowhere/everywhere”—epitomizes the logic of big data. Just as the vectoralist megacorps insist on being identified as platforms rather than publishers, so the trachea-circumventing micro-video not only “conceals its own work and posits itself as a voice without a subject” (Doane 1980: 46); it posits itself surreptitiously as a voice without (even) a voice as such, without a position, a perspective, even a source. If the acousmatic voiceover aspires to project the anonymity of its speaker, then the micro-video pretends never to have had a writer at all.

In the replacement of the Voice of God with captions, the extra-intently vanishing mediator that was the acousmatic voice becomes inaudible and doubly vanished, as its each exclamation disappears to be succeeded by the next. The reader never apprehends the whole thing all at once. Instead, morsels of easily digestible writing are meted out at a pace determined by the artist.

The text of NE_MV_07 reads:

You can change your government by voting.

Or you can choose a new government by moving somewhere new.

The world’s wealthiest people already choose where they are legally resident because they can.

And some of the world’s poorest people leave their countries because they have to.

But now moving to somewhere is becoming easier for everyone in the middle too.

So what will happen to nation states when everyone has the power to leave?

The audacity of syllogistic illogic on display here is, in itself, fascinating. Can one really “choose a new government by moving somewhere new”? And in what dimension is “moving somewhere […] becoming easier for everyone in the middle too”? What mythical middle is this, that is not witnessing the dwindling of their roaming rights? That “too” is particularly intriguing. Whereas the third and fourth propositions are initially set up to demonstrate the gap between those that leave “because they can” and those that must “because they have to”, the adverb, “too” retroactively makes of this comparison a litany of like claims. We are left with the astonishing implication that migration is getting easier for everyone: rich, poor and middling, too. This is not the only such sleight of hand. But it is one much more readily accepted—when, as in the case in the installation, the text appears piecemeal across the screen, with the last statement vanishing before the next one takes its place. Chion (irrepressible neologophane) posits the term entrelire, for “glimpsing or seeing briefly or indistinctly” words on the cinema screen: cautioning that the half, brief, or indistinct reading resulting “was not aleatory and fortuitous but a structuring element of the film”, and proposes that we consider such snatched sightings as “Fleeting Impression[s] on First Viewing” (Chion 2017: 125-126). Within the viewing dispositif of the gallery, with the playback controls available to curatorial digits only, writing turns temporal, rather than spatial. In becoming, like the voice, temporally unfolding, the written word approaches what Cavarero (2005: 82) privileges as “the dynamic flux of the vocal”. Putting text in motion enables it to share in Bonnet’s (2016: 7) “irreducible fugacity” of sound. In the case of the New Eelam micro-videos, the rapid replacement of each statement with its successor thwarts any attempts we might make to weigh the syllogistic logic at play. Cognitive dissonance rings out more resoundingly when we are not simultaneously being swept along by a rapidly changing image track and, particularly, when we have the means to stop, slow down, double back across and between pages.

If, as Pettman (2017: 82) argues, voice is really in the ear of the beholder, then my contention is that the inner ear, that is, in Riley’s terms “designed to pick up this voice which owns nothing by way of articulation” (2004: 58), can be the arbiter of its vocality. With the transubstantiation of voice into this scrolling text, the external (though invasive) documentary voice is replaced by an athorybal internal voice that arises in the body of the reader-viewer: the inner voice of the silent reader. There is much, beyond raw grain, that allows us to recognize familiar voices—much as we can recognise the prose style or stylistic “voice” of a particular text. Patterns of flow and pause, lexicon, syntax, punctuation, grammatical idiosyncrasies: all of this conspires, in the micro-video’s streaming text, to produce the impression that we are in the presence of a coherent, if self-effacing, non-sonorous voice. The micro-video dictates to us, its reader-listeners, much as would any canny rhetorician: delivering information in manageable chunks, on a rhythm keyed to maximise auditory comprehension and memory. Punctuated exactly as much as is needed to score (the internal voice’s) non/vocal delivery, it uses italics for emphasis, and question marks in abundance: affectively activating typographical marks that reach towards the reader, making us feel involved, soliciting our continued attention. What the inner ear hears of the inner voice is not pure internality but something inherently infused with and inflected by, what has been taken in from outside (Riley 2004: 73). Because we read the New Eelam nonvoice in the immediate context of the New Eelam voiceover, and because of the non-sonorous features (not to mention the ideologies) they share, we experience our inner voicing of these words as a kind of internal takeover or possession. We read Kulendran Thomas’ words in an internally projected imitation of his voice that we experience as our own. Our inner and his external voices become not just mixed but inseparably intertwined. In encountering his logic, we experience no friction, because the voice speaking is already on the inside. In this sealed in, separated off moment, there can be little more than an infrathin difference between internal and external, self-generated belief and insidiously imposed ideology.

Peter Middleton cites Jesper Svenbro account of how, for the Ancient Greeks, “reading felt invasive to because they imagined that to read was to lend one’s voice and become ‘the instrument necessary for the text to be realized’ (Svenbro 46) in what they sometimes understood as an almost sexual penetration of the self” (Middleton 2005: 83). We can presume that for most modern readers, the experience of silent reading is less threatening of psychic disaggregation. However, this notion of reading as colonization or bodily takeover—an intrusive, even penetrative wresting of the body’s sensorial autonomy—can help to elucidate what happens when, a) as in New Eelam: Spike Island, the athorybal text is presented in an environment that is already awash with the audible acousmatic voice, b) the writing style (aka the “voice”) of the text we read is identical with that of the text we hear, and c) we are shut off from other sensory distractions, rooted in place and set up to pay attention. Escaping earshot of the documentary voice, we experience the shift from hearing to reading as a reclamation of our sensorial autonomy. Wooed by the talk of sharing and community, and becalmed by the aural absence of an authority (or even an author to the text we read) we are primed to imagine that no-one is in charge: to imagine ourselves momentarily sovereign, if only of our private viewing-reading experience. And yet, the artist’s voice can still be heard as a trickle of soundbleed, as we move between the screens installed along this enwrapping corridor, each with their own set of headphones. Catena-like, the distanced tones of his voicebleed thread the listening stations together. As a result, we are freed from the ambit of his sonorous voice only each time we apply the headphones, and turn towards a screen to take in his nonvoice that rehearses—grammatically, syntactically, lexically—the idiolectically and rhythmically distinct character of what we are hearing, what is being carried in the soundbleed from the main exhibition space into the spaces between the works in this surrounding vestibule.[12]

The New Eeelam micro-videos trap us in an unfurling text that pulls us along at the speed and in a rhythm of its own design. As is the case with the audible voiceover, the audience is marshalled to apprehend written text in the manner ordained by an author that refuses to die. In the piecemeal unspooling of the micro-video text, the spatiotemporal axis of regular reading is suspended. Text turns temporal, rather than spatial. In flow rather than fixed. For Bonnet (2016: 211), what makes the ear “the organ of the ‘unproven’; the unverifiable” is because “[w]hat is heard is already no longer there. […] Listening is doomed to form certainties on the basis of evanescent phenomena.” The same applies when what is heard was only ever voiced internally, and heard by the inner ear, in the act of inaudible (though never really silent) phrase-by-phrase reading. Writing on screen necessarily vexes the temporality of the moving image (Chion 2017: 170). But what is certain is that when writing moves across the spatiotemporal axis: from spatial to temporal, from Lessing’s Nebeneinander to Nacheinander, the reader’s critical agency is undermined. Rather than becoming redundant, at the point of the text’s coming into written being, the author of the micro-video persists—hanging around to determine and delimit the conditions under which we engage with its text. The move from encompassing, inescapable voice to mutely ubiquitous nonvoice seems like a shift in direction, but it is in fact a ramping up.

Friction-free

Langdon Winner categorized as “inherently political technologies” those “man-made systems that appear to require or be strongly compatible with particular kinds of political relationships” (Winner 1986: 22). While Pythagoras reportedly installed his magic curtain so that his students could apprehend his words without distraction, the micro-video’s nonvoice is expressly engineered to run in the margins of everything else going on. As one marketer puts it: “Rather than compete for a viewer’s undivided attention, silent video allows your brand to smoothly join in their ongoing media experience. People are much more likely to accept your brand’s messaging when they can watch it without going through the additional steps of pausing their Spotify stream or muting their latest Netflix binge” (Breaux 2018). Counselling fellow marketers dismayed by the muting of their autoplay videos, the same advertizing guru compares its technique to that of a speaker who “[moves] closer to the intended recipient” in order to “[whisper] [….] ideas in their ear?” (Breaux 2018).[13] If radio could be indicted by Adorno (2002: 94-96) for projecting an illusion of “disinterested, impartial authority” while funnelling a smoothed-out stream of hate-politics and product-endorsement directly into the defenceless ears/homes of the masses, then what of the operation of a constantly rolling “feed” whose political messaging and advertising have both been designed to “speak” surreptitiously and yet specifically, to your interests, credit rating and prejudices? From sidebars and abandoned windows, the liquid voice of inaudibly voiced video trickles into our consciousness, via our fractally distracted peripheral vision. Chatting away as soon as a hovering cursor activates its kinetic autoplay stream, it addresses us in our most intimate settings: our beds, our breakfast tables, our pockets. And yet while there undoubtedly is a two-way informational flow afoot here (our details, purchases, pauses, our keystrokes, our eye-movements are being logged), the flow of speech is singularly (Schmitt would say dictatorially) unidirectional.

The supersmooth voiceover to 60 Million Americans deploys all of the locationless, sourceless, minimally material acousmatic’s coercive power. The micro-video’s nonvoice completes and extends this process. Hypostatizing the acousmatic effect, it removes all trace of sonorous materiality, specific embodiment and the relationality it implies. The voiceover attenuates the listener’s interpretive agency; the micro-video’s unvoice forecloses it altogether. Critical autonomy is diminished. Even, arguably, “readerly sovereignty”. Thus voided of the capacity to critically analyze the rhetoric we are fed, irradiated by pseudo-celestial light and comfortably ensconced in an always-already familiar and aspirational grotto to globalized hipsterdom, we may be bamboozled into buying in to a nebulous, noxious concept of liquid citizenship. But hopefully—in the instant of our exit from the immersive, seductive, New Eelam installation and before we have subscribed to sovereign citizenship—we are given cause to pause. New Eelam’s multi-modal liquid voice is the channel by which this cross-sensory bewitching is achieved. It is the means by which its fantasy of individual sovereignty and smooth exit is made to seem real, unmotivated, familiar and benign. We quit the space of the construct and the spell lifts—leaving us, hopefully, more alert to the manipulations of voice and nonvoice elsewhere, everywhere in our midst.

 

Sarah Hayden is associate professor of literature and visual culture at the University of Southampton and leads the AHRC Leadership Fellowship project “Voices in the Gallery.” She is author of Curious Disciplines: Mina Loy and Avant-Garde Artisthood (2018) and coauthor (with Paul Hegarty) of Peter Roehr — Field Pulsations (2018).

 

References

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— (2020) Public Facebook Post, 14.55 on June 5.

[1] Kulendran Thomas works with curator, Annika Kuhlmann, who is Creative Director of New Eelam.

[2] For a detailed treatment of the New Eelam “experience-suite” environments, see the author’s “When Attitudes become Platitudes, Live in the Cloud: dematerialization in the work of Christopher Kulendran Thomas”. Cultural Politics 16:2 (forthcoming July 2020).

[3] Nor does it anticipate the further complication, congestion and outlawing of border-crossings that could result during a global pandemic. Both the New Eelam project and this essay pre-date the advent of the SARS 2/Covid 19 pandemic: a period within which even the most customarily mobile were suddenly required to “shelter in place”. It remains to be seen how New Eelam (and the world) will adapt.

[4] In the summer of 2020, significant public attention was again drawn to Zuckerberg’s “vocal” position on free speech. On 25^th May, George Floyd was killed by a policeman kneeling on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. When this atrocity gave rise to widespread protests against police violence, Facebook chose to publish a statement from Trump that was “widely interpreted as a threat and potential incitement to violence” (Wong 2020). Notwithstanding the threat implied and the specific, historically racist resonances of the language used, the president’s inflammatory statement was determined by Zuckerberg not to constitute a breach of the company’s Community Standards on Violence and Incitement. Opposition to this decision was expressed by many within the company (who expressed outrage publicly, staged walkouts and resigned), among civil rights leaders (including Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and Color of Change) and more broadly in the press, on the streets and on social media platforms (Hern and Waterson 2020). In a statement on June 5^th, Zuckerberg continued to express his commitment to “free expression” in terms of a notably malleable concept of “voice”, writing that “we will continue to stand for giving everyone a voice”, promising that a review of the platform’s decision-making processes would “take into account many voices” and vowing “to review whether we need to change anything structurally to make sure the right groups and voices are at the table” (Zuckerberg 2020). Reporting on the company’s behaviour in this affair many, including the New York Times (Isaac, Kang and Frenkel 2020) cited the platform’s recent exploitation as a tool to incite genocide in Myanmar (Mozur 2018). Subseqent to the company’s consequent adoption of new policies in that region, Facebook released a statement on February 5^th 2019 assuring users that “We don’t want anyone to use Facebook to incite or promote violence, no matter who they are” (Facebook Newsroom 2019). As of early June 2020, Trump appears to have exceptional status in this regard.

[5] In The Listening Reader, Sam Belinfante successfully tracks this tired-out trope all the way back to Rabelais in Gargantua and Pantagruel.

[6] See https://www.facebook.com/business/news/updated-features-for-video-ads.

[7] See https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/audio-video/autoplay.

[8] See Facebook for Business (2016a and 2016b), and Breaux 2018.

[9] A September 2016 New York Times piece by Sapna Maheshwari and Katie Bennier cited various conflicting reports putting that figure at 50% (Facebook themselves), 94% (Margin Agency) and 82% (Omnicom’s BBDO). See Maheswari and Benner 2016 and Patel 2016.

[10] See, for example, Forbes 2018.

[11] Out of this context, contemporary artists such as Christine Sun Kim and Liza Sylvestre are demonstrating just how far the closed caption can be pushed past this utilitarian deployment into infinitely more creative functions. See Watlington 2019.

[12] Rangan (2017: 284) contends that the documentary voiceover always has about it “a visualist, object-centred philosophy, that “keeps at bay the impermanence, instability, and unboundedness implied by the phenomenality of sound”. Perhaps this quirk of the minimally material Voice of God helps to smooth the transition (which feels not at all jarring) when it mutates from sonorous output/input to scrolling text.

[13] This framing of the silent micro-video’s textual nonvoice as a whisper is an apt one, and not alone because of its overt associations with intimacy, subterfuge and subtle insinuation. Whispering involves no vibration of the vocal cords. As such, it is in phonological terms, unvoiced, and sonically erases its source. Xinghua Li (2011: 21) cites a Carnegie Mellon study suggesting that, while the voiced voice might well supply a unique identifiable, voiceprint pace Cavarero, whispering dramatically reduces the registration of identifiable features as “Voiced fricatives and stops lose their voicing. Nasals become faint. Regular tonalities of the speech mostly disappear”. Li writes of the “gesture of self-erasure of whispering” (Li 2011: 31), and Labelle (2014: 149) of the whisper as a “‘meta-voice.’”

 

by Ryan Bishop

The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 codified a modern notion of the nation-state that neatly aligned sovereignty with territorial claims and integrity, generating the “common sense” or a priori configuration of rights, land and governance.[1] Although essentially a colonial model of state formation exported globally from Europe, this common sense understanding of sovereignty remains necessary for states and governments to enter into agreements with each other and in international organizations despite the ideal correspondence upon which it depends having been rarely achieved in practice. It has become the fiction of sovereignty upon which geopolitics trades and operates. Notwithstanding its fractured and inconsistent application, fragile formations, and incessant reliance on violence and arbitrary implementation, it is the keystone for international order and supposedly “civilized” geopolitics. Operating as a social contract or agreement between states, the concept of sovereignty provisionally prevents interference from other states while conferring the legitimation of laws within the nation-state, providing international recognition of statehood and offering the only political formation capable of legitimately enacting violence. Sovereignty as a political technology emergent from and reliant on a complex nexus of relations–including political, spatial, temporal, economic, strategic, legal, technological (in multiple senses)–has resulted in an uneven jumble through which states seek to enact or assert control over borders, financial systems, military action, violence, land (as well as seas and sea beds), the movement of money/people/data, and upon occasion human or environmental rights. Nonetheless, the assertion of sovereign right, as both a conceit and a fact, might be the only quality–though tautological–that designates sovereignty as such.

This introduction to the special issue “Frictionless Sovereignty” explores some frames and prompts for the special issue’s titular concept, which emerges from the empirical conditions listed above related to planetary computation and a reading of these systems through works on sovereignty by Giorgio Agamben, Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, Benjamin Bratton, Jacques Derrida, Stuart Elden, Michel Foucault, Catherine Malabou, Achille Mbembe, Fred Moten, Carl Schmitt, Sylvia Wynter, and others such as Arne De Boever (2016) and Dimitris Vardoulakis (2013) (both included in this special issue). The special issue seeks to consider the implications of their arguments for the scales at which frictionless sovereignty might seem to be in operation. The papers included in this special issue develop, challenge and modify the concept in light of technology, urbanism, artworks, aesthetics, bodies and mobilities/borders, blackness, imaginaries of empty spaces and over-determined geopolitical territorialization. At the same time, the papers broach the question of whether or not sovereignty is necessarily the best conceptual apparatus for examining the issues operative within the frictionless domains of systems and computations. Clearly sovereignty as a conceit operates within and justifies geopolitical claims, economic regimes, migration, data flows and planetary computation, but might it just be a placeholder for, or distraction from, other forces in action? Might sovereignty be the rationale for enacting the desires embodied in and realized through both the frictionless and the chokepoints of friction, such that we could swap adjective and noun to make it “the sovereign frictionless”?

To be clear, frictionless sovereignty is essentially a dream, a desire, an ideal, an aspiration, a phantasm, a goal for different entities heady with the power of neoliberal markets, urban human teleologies, nature as standing reserve, anthropocentric history, transitive grammar, and tele-control in which a subject (either individual, state, military, corporation, multi-agent entity) can dictate and manipulate an object without reversibility of that dynamic. An important tenet for frictionless sovereignty can be found in the following formulation: maximum benefit with minimum responsibility. Although immaterial in its essence, this imaginary is undergirded by, generated by and accelerated through complexly multiplying materialities that link in strategic and fundamentally contradictory ways with the desires to which they give rise. The role of finance and the leveraging of inequity, as well as its effects from certain public discursive domains in the sites that most benefit from this frictionless and rapid flow of money, as AbdouMaliq Simone reminds us, is key: “Here, the logics and mechanisms of financialization, for example, are adept at suturing value generating relationships among discrepant raw materials, manufacturing sites, consumption markets, and cultural backgrounds situated in wildly divergent locations and without regard to historical distinctions” (2019).

If all sovereignty is a phantasm, or “a delusion,” a self-referential term with more imaginary than ontological purchase, then frictionless sovereignty is but one of the more recent versions of that phantasm. And it is so for a few specific, interrelated reasons and qualities: teletechnologies that rapidly conflate time duration and spatial distance, the continuation of Cold War geopolitical claims on the planet as globe coupled with claims for state rights on entities and actions in discontiguous territory, the near complete domination of economics by neoliberal capitalist markets, the elevation of the ideal of the individual as agent (in spite of a lack of agency at every turn) replicated in discursive domains and governmental policies, total surveillance of populations, ease of movement of certain kinds of bodies, imaginaries dominated by domination, the intensification of bourgeois comfort into unproblematic existence, human culture positioning itself as supposed master of nature as extractive resource for exploitation and greed, the rapid deterritorialization and reterritorialization of state and individual interests, selective adherence to international norms and laws by nation-states and corporate actors, corporations acting with the rights of individuals: rights that are denied abstract actors such as nature and indeed most citizens/individuals (except in the legalistic formulations) and many others. Writing of the full control over global capital upon which so much of frictionless sovereignty depends, Achille Mbembe argues “Now that everything is a potential source for capitalization, capital has made a world of itself: a hallucinatory phenomenon of planetary dimensions that produces on a grand scale, subjects who are simultaneously calculating, fictional and delirious” (2019). The intimate co-dependence of actors on differing scales operates within and through the mutually reinforcing hallucinatory properties of capital and sovereignty, of gain and triumph, of code and control, of mastery and subservience.

The shift from an epoch of domination (slavery, obedience, alienation) to a more distributed system of hegemony, “in which everyone becomes both a hostage and accomplice of global power” (Baudrillard 7) finds analogy in the shift from the sovereign power of the monarch to that of the people, of the epochal mode of biopolitics, as articulated by Foucault and Agamben. The latter epoch occurs with the dissolution, distribution and perhaps dilution of sovereignty to the citizens in democratic regimes. Dimitris Papadopoulos and Vassilis Tsianos ask the pertinent question “How to do sovereignty without people?” in the title of their 2007 boundary 2 piece. The “subjectless condition of postliberal power” is exactly the domain of Baudrillard’s hegemony. This hegemony, which is also the neoliberal order of globalism, has been infinitely accelerated by planetary computation and the increased operation of multi- and polyscalar autonomous remote sensing systems working together by design and accident on planetary scales and beyond (see Bishop and Bratton). Emergent from military technologies that freed centralized command from a specific corporeal presence and thus allowing it to be everyone at once, tightly controlling the chain of command remotely, these current teletechnologies provide data gathering, oversight and remote control of those materials and personnel deemed worthy of attention and direction. The accidental exo-planetary mega-structure of planetary computational platforms and the rapidly expanding ring of satellites surveilling the planet and transmitting wireless data about it, further entrenches the hegemony of the epoch that Baudrillard labels as our own.

Another way of thinking about the end game or overarching purpose of these global computational systems might lead us to pick up a strand of questioning objects/systems along the lines of “What does a brick want?” (Louis Kahn), or “What do images want?” (W.J.T. Mitchell), or “What do simulations want?” (Sherry Turkle). So we can ask “What does sovereignty want?” And in the current moment, the question might be answered, even if somewhat glibly: to be frictionless. How and when this specific ease of engagement is enacted, however, becomes precisely what is up for grabs. The frictionless, too, might simply be or mean impunity, selective responsibility, unilateral benefit, strategic historical memory, willed amnesia and a full-scale discursive and material agenda to become “an id on a tricycle”, to quote Ishmael Reed about Reagan-era America.

The Frictionless

Frictionless sovereignty is either an oxymoron or a redundancy. Perhaps it is both. It is oxymoronical because sovereignty requires some sort of resistance–some force or other, some state or territorial challenge, some excess or breach–which would serve as a challenge to legitimize the authority and necessity of that sovereignty while thus proving its authority through its triumph over resistance. The formulation of frictionless sovereignty is redundant because the notion of the sovereign is that which operates self-evidently within its domain, that which can enact its will with impunity (God on earth, or at least God in the marketplace, or the market as god or unquestionable transcendental). More importantly frictionless sovereignty is an imaginary, a goal, born out of inherited notions of the sovereign subject operating in representational democratic governments, codified and fuelled by transitive grammar and semantics, and manifested by tele-technologies that allow for the manipulation of the material world at a distance. In its role as desirable ideal, it shares qualities, aspirations and technics of the supposed teleology of the urban human form as the highest achievement in the history of humanity, an achievement that operates on the frictionless absorption of nature and the rural by the urban to furnish human existence within it.

However, “this imaginary of the frictionless is set within a world of highly differentiated possibilities of friction,” as AbdouMaliq Simone notes. “In some parts of the Global South, particularly, it is not clear who is in charge, who can deploy the signs of overarching authority, and where multiple sovereignties come and go across the same territories of operation, always in intensive operations of friction—where friction itself is the object to be managed more than population or territory” (2019). The frictions and fissures that result from and impinge upon this current mode of mobile, transnational imaginaries about sovereignty are as much the focus of this special issue as the unimpeded operations are. This imaginary exemplifies the “delusion” of sovereignty, as articulated by Joan Cocks, with the difference that the delusion of control central to sovereignty is delimited in her account to physical space (2014). The extensiveness of frictionless sovereignty’s delusion eludes such spatial constraints and as such contains echoes of metaphysical freedoms that harken back to pre-Enlightenment politico-theocratic regimes, thus releasing nostalgia coupled with a false sense of historical continuity.

As such Fred Moten’s description of “the illusory coherence in/and spatio-temporal constitution of sovereignty” points toward the extensiveness and insubstantiality of frictionless sovereignty (2017). As a delusional concept that operates nonetheless with great purchase and resonance, (frictionless) sovereignty traffics in the geopolitical apophenia Moten points to: a coherence between disparate entities and patterns/relations hallucinated by a shared set of “common sense” assumptions about individuals, states, territory, governance and control (cp. Hansen and Stepputat 2005). Frictionless sovereignty leverages these assumptions while simultaneously deploying critiques of them to strategically create sceptical engagement even in the act of embrace: a strategy deployed often by far-right nationalist agendas. The first step that extracts the spatio-constitution of sovereignty from any justification for claims of sovereign rights (and acts taken in the name of said sovereignty) is liberatory; however, it is also reconstitutive of the cynical support systems perpetuating the frictionless, as sovereignty moves from state-centric formulations as its primary site and source. Vardoulakis (in his contribution to this special issue) succinctly bundles these paradoxical and strategically selective foci of frictionless sovereignty into an evocation of Kant’s rhetorical and analytic readings of antinomy. The anti-nomos, against a nomos, resident in the term’s etymology proves useful for frictionless claims to sovereignty that are against the law of the nomos upon which its claims depend while also generative of a substitute, as-if nomos. The antinomy, crucially without a medial term, functioning in frictionless sovereignty as it pertains to a (potential) waning of authority in the face of authoritarianism (cp. Vardoulakis), is thesis and anti-thesis (as Kant laid them out in the Critique) but without dialectic resolution in any kind of transcendental. Nonetheless, the self-contradictory nature of sovereign claims under these conditions asserts resolution by claimant needs, goals, desires, evanescent memory and a general inability on the part of those who suffer from said claims to respond in a sustained and effective manner.

The quality of the “frictionless” is one desired and fostered by decades of neoliberal economics and social values–free flow of goods, images, ideas, information, capital, natural resources, raw materials, and people (at least some). The facilitation or impeding of movement characterizes much of sovereign claim and legitimacy from the establishment of borders and trade routes and sea rights from early modernity to the present and is pivotal for an understanding of “frictionless sovereignty” as the organizing topos of this special issue. The desire for sovereign entities to govern and regulate or steer (as in the Greek term kybernetic) flows of people, finance, goods, images and information in the name of its own benefit helps legitimate the sovereignty of the sovereign agent operative within planetary systems and other global operations. Despite exceptional efforts, all kinds of phenomena evade this sovereign desire, not the least dauntingly prevalent and corrosive to sovereignty itself being pollution and epidemics. Nonetheless, sovereign claims as dictation of movement telescopes our inherited understanding of the term to something far more amorphous, porous and ephemeral than public discursive use would suggest. Friction overtakes the frictionless at the border, as we seem to witness more and more every day. Friction is the main quality Brexit, for example, would impose on the European Union’s administrative and bureaucratic say in the UK’s affairs, policies and laws, especially on citizen movement. It is thus mobilized by populist claims to nation rights when engaging alterity or international governing bodies. Similarly but in an altogether different register, the public good or social/collective good becomes the friction in the frictionless sovereignty of the mobile sovereign subject who places individual well being and gain over all else, which is the essence of neoliberal economic rationale. At yet another register, artistic works proffer modes of friction while deploying the tools of the frictionless against itself, with aesthetics drawing attention to the unavoidable politics of its operation.

We can look for frictionless sovereignty and its attempted operation at differing but interrelated scales: the individual as sovereign subject (especially with citizenship options available through online platforms and libertarian ideals); the state and thus the Truman Doctrine enacted seamlessly (or so it seems) at a distance made possible by teletechnologies resultant in the flow of information, goods, money and military action (Grossräume or “spheres of influence” with state sovereignty detached in selective ways from land or territory); at the corporate level and at the level of other organizational actors such as those autonomous remote sensing systems for surveillance, profit, military action or soft power influence, including planetary computations loosely tethered to national governments. These scales do not operate in isolation nor are they hermetically sealed. Each one replicates, reiterates and affirms the others through their operations and the desires that drive them.

Unsettling Grossräume

“Poor Schmitt: The Nazis said blood and soil. He understood soil. The Nazis meant blood.”—Hannah Arendt (marginalia 211, cited in Jurkevics)

Frictionless sovereignty passes through political institutions and bodies, territorial state claims and territorial integrity like neutrinos through human corporeal integrity. Neutrinos treat humans as the ghost realm, translucent and transparent. The same holds for frictionless sovereignty in relation to proclamations of inviolable statehood, territorial integrity and meaningful borders.

Territory, Stuart Elden claims, is a political technology (2013). Schmitt argued that the British, from 1815, brought this technology to the sea, providing a sense of abstract space to waterways and claims of international law to that which had no spatial ordering principle. But many historians of maritime law and sea routes argue such juridical ordering occurred much earlier. Charles I, for example, extended “the Sea of England” to the coasts of the Continent and laid claim to “absolute sovereignty” for the Crown of all the waters in between (Fulton 5-11). In his decidedly unsentimental and thorough The Sovereignty of the Sea, Thomas Wemyss Fulton details English claims to oceanic sovereignty as necessary for national defence, but also for plunder, dual justification operative in ever expansive decrees beginning as early as early as the first half of the 17^th century. The arguments made for spatial control of the ocean and its byways in abstracted form offered positions similar to that taken later by US in the Truman Doctrine. Similarly, the abstract sense of space migrated from the groundless ground of the sea to that of air space and from air space back to territory through precision targeting of the earth from the sky, creating as Cornelia Vismann notes, the deterritorialized no man’s land bereft of order operational during World War I, dubbing it “the primordial scene of the nomos” (62).

Clearly planetary computation, as well as polyscalar autonomous remote sensing systems, function in the same way because many of those targeting and surveillance systems are in fact the same. Trying to sort through the juridical jumble of the post World War II geopolitical sphere, Schmitt distinguished between space-powers (nomos tethered to land and not abstracted necessarily into cartographic territory) and air-powers, which described the Cold War emergence of the US global regime. His desire was to reterritorialize sovereignty, much as we witness today in the nationalist resurgence of a specific stripe of sovereignty. The fetishization of land and land rights as foundational for sovereignty finds one important culmination in Schmitt’s nomos, which is itself undermined by Heine’s pithy description of the Torah as “the portable Fatherland” of the Jews, thus permanently delinking sovereignty from land and anchoring it in language, community, religion, culture, practices. As a result, according to Sloterdijk, the “space-between-us” and the medial relations that allow us to think ourselves as “us” predates the land in which we live or how we imagine that space (2017: 125-127).

The firm yet remarkably malleable relationship between private ownership and sovereignty narrates state concepts differentiating land from territory. Individuals can own land, but states control territory (see Elden 2013) and territory is comprised of individual property holders of individual land tracts conjoined to become state territory, with individuals and state having differing rights in relation to the same piece of geographic land. Rousseau, in his “Discourse on Inequality,” notes that in the 18^th century rulers no longer refer to themselves as being King of peoples but of land, of a state. Thus to dwell in the territory is to be subject to sovereignty and to acknowledge explicitly (or not) the subservience to larger bureaucratic and institutional powers often predicated on transcendental ideological claims that can result in fealty or resentment.

The emergence of Cold War blocs and the Truman Doctrine, which essentially stated that anything on the globe held potential security concerns for the US, prompted Schmitt to further his theories about the Grossräume, deterritorialized “spheres of influence” rather than direct territorial annexation. Related to and developed out of sea trade, mercantilism and rationalizations for colonial control, the Grossraum has links with “soft power” and other modes of tele-control over space, populations, infrastructure, activities and more importantly their noetic possibilities to imagine shaping the world in the nation-state’s sovereign image. The Westphalian state, indispensably rooted in territory and borders, was from the outset a fiction of transgression, with transgression being the means by which it articulated sovereignty and control. It constituted a secular version of the earlier political theology substituting internal organizations (from the people) for divine authority. This vision of the state is undermined by international trade alliances, pacts and organizations, but also by planetary computation and total real-time global surveillance. Moreover, it was accompanied by a re-emergence of the retrograde political theology that wishes to reconstitute pre-modern geo-jurisdictional domains, or the hallucinations thereof (Bratton 380). The post-Cold War moment, according to Elden, is characterized by an assertion in the United Nations charter that “territorial integrity” proves essential to thinking international norms of sovereignty while simultaneously being challenged. The UN charter puts it thus: “territorial preservation seen as non-negotiable; territorial sovereignty as entirely contingent” (2010). The seemingly paradoxical division of land, territory and sovereignty contained within this summary of the charter indicates an elasticity within the constitution of sovereign claims beneficial to the phantasm of frictionless sovereignty.

The historical role of colonies in articulations of sovereignty and in relation to Grossräume is long, complex and ineluctable. On the one hand the colony undermines the sovereign state through discontiguous land claims (the failure of territorial preservation and integrity from within and through the state) while, on the other hand, the colony reifies state sovereignty through its tele-control of lands and peoples for the purposes of state exploitation and the extraction of value. The 19^th century saw claims of occupation by state entities that had once been the province of private colonial societies two centuries earlier (Schmitt 215) and were precursors to full occupation in name and deed, especially on the African continent. The legal muddles emergent from such claims were further confused by the US and Asian countries entering the fray, leading to an international set of treaties intended to convert the Age of Discovery into the Age of Civilization (with all of the hubris these phrases announced in universalist upper case abstractions). The Congo Conference of 1884-5 that seemingly settled the matter ended with the infamous words of King Leopold of Belgium, sounding eerily like Marlow’s Company in Conrad’s novel: “Civilization opens up the only part of the globe it has not yet reached, piercing the darkness, enveloping the entire population. That is, I wager to say, a crusade worthy of this century of progress” (qtd. in Schmitt 21). We do not need to belabour the horror of these tropes of discovery or civilization or progress, but their self-proclaimed justification cuts an historical path through to the Truman Doctrine, Cold War pacts and contemporary frictionless sovereignty regimes: the teletechnological reach of military and finance to interfere with and intervene in the world at a whim with the sole purposes of institutional control, value extraction and power display.

Contra Schmittian terra-based biases for sovereignty claims based upon its supposedly obdurate solidity, a number of theorists (e.g. Ross Exo Adams, John Agnew, Joe Painter and Paul Virilio) have argued that territory and networks, beginning as early as the 16^th century, could be understood as being one and the same. All forms of political organization or polity, claims Agnew, “from hunter-gatherer tribes to nomadic kinship structures to city-states, territorial states, spheres of influence, alliances, trade pacts, seaborne empires” occupy some form of space and thus space-spanning networks exercise non-territorially determined sovereignty, in both hierarchical and distributed organizational patterns (2005: 441). Networks in this instance are multiple and include trading routes on land and water, to air in the recent past and present, to communications, to colonial connections, to labor agreements to digital media. These too can be de facto territory in the manner of distributed Grossräume, decoupling territory from bounded state land. When networks count as territory for state actors, frictionless sovereignty cannot be far behind.

China’s massive “One Belt, One Road” initiative (RBI) begun in 2013 offers such a networked, distributed, tentacular set of infrastructural and noetic sovereign claims. The “Silk Road Economic Belt” provides an overland set of linkages and the “Maritime Silk Road” offers the same over-water. The belt links mainland PRC to South Asia, the Middle East, and forking off to Africa and Europe. The road connects the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean toward the same large geographical areas using coastal portals, all with the grand plan of continuing the PRC’s soft power stance as champion of the developing world as established by Mao in 1949. The RAND Corporation’s 2018 analysis of the project interprets the entire endeavour as driven by China’s concerns about security, an attempt to bolster continued economic growth, increased global influence, intensified international investment along with PRC citizens living abroad, and challenges to US and European influence in areas residing in Western geopolitical grey zones of minimal interest (2018: xiii-xvi).

The simple, “common-sense,” equation of land to territory and thus to sovereignty is further complicated by the dynamic and processual nature of the earth itself, of the ground on which the claims are grounded. Not only do the atmosphere and bodies of water, along with their complex interactions as well as the mountains of data generated about their interactions, create challenges for sovereign claims due to their volumetric dimensions and strategic operations within them from air space control to ocean petroleum or metals or even DNA/biological extraction, but also in the polymorphic forms of deserts that move and reconstitute boundaries. Ice masses, for example, contain the geochemical content of water coupled with the phenomenological and experiential qualities of land (Bruun and Steinberg 158). Hydrothermal activities are constantly reshaping the seabed and depositing chemicals of potential value ripe for exploitation. Similarly, the constitution of the land itself is not simply the crust of the geo- in geopolitical assumptions, but a heaving and vital combination of biomass, phytomass, geological strata compiled over aeons of tectonic alterations and mobility. These elements of our planet that strike our senses as solid and stable, of course, ebb and flow in constant processes of metamorphoses, as Empedocles, Hesiod, Lucretius and Ovid philosophically and poetically evoked. The deep time effects of these processes have left numerous chemical geographies that further challenge sovereignty claims when they become the source of extractive industries and large scale terra-forming and terra-altering economies and projects. Selectively choosing state or non-state interactions and claims of control on such a roiling, entangled set of geological, biological, chemical interactive processes and trajectories constitutes the willed lacunae of frictionless sovereignty. Some of terra-altering’s others are the formations one finds at the polar caps, or in ice islands, or the littorals, or volcanic areas… areas that are the sprinters on the geological scales compared to the imputed stolidity and stability of terra firma. Their protean nature is infinitely faster, and therefore more easily legible to humans, than the landmasses that yield “terraforming” imaginaries, planetary design and default claims of territorial integrity and sovereignty.

Epochal Shifts on the Way to Frictionless Sovereignty

In his 1576 “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude,” Etienne de la Boétie raises several questions about differing epochs of sovereign control. Michel de Montaigne’s friend wonders about both those who wish to exact domination on others as well as about the masses that willingly submit to such conditions. He writes:

I should like merely to understand how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him; who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him.

But if a hundred, if a thousand endure the caprice of a single man, should we not rather say that they lack not the courage but the desire to rise against him, and that such an attitude indicates indifference rather than cowardice? When not a hundred, not a thousand men, but a hundred provinces, a thousand cities, a million men, refuse to assail a single man from whom the kindest treatment received is the infliction of serfdom and slavery, what shall we call that? (de la Boétie 7-8)

De la Boétie answers these questions with the observation that people serve a tyrant because that is what they want: they do it of their own volition. This is the departure point for, and embrace of, domination. The thrust of his argument is not to encourage rebellion or revolution, necessarily, but to remind subjects “that any domination is illegitimate” and wholly given through acquiescence. He held no respect for sovereignty or sovereigns, and perhaps less so for those who voluntarily acquiesced to these regimes (Lotringer 28).

Using this apt text in his introduction to Baudrillard’s posthumous essay “From Domination to Hegemony,” Sylvère Lotringer contextualizes Baudrillard’s epochal argument for regimes of sovereign control and claims. “In order to grasp how globalization and global antagonism works,” Baudrillard writes, “we should distinguish carefully between domination and hegemony” (33). The master/slave relationship is the quintessential domination model, replete with alienation and force along with a “violent history of oppression and liberation” (33). The symbolic relationship of domination and dominated disappears with the liberation of the slave: “the emancipation of the slave” also included “the internalization of the master by the emancipated slave” which sets the stage for hegemony. The shift marks a move from direct to indirect, distributed and abstract control. With hegemony, realized through networks of virtual technologies and movement, total exchange at a horizontal (frictionless?) plane allows distinctions between domination and dominated to dissipate into the systems that deliver everyone into their operation. It returns us, Baudrillard says, to cybernetics in its original form: kubernetikè, which is the art of governing. The two paradigms are almost antithetical: “the paradigms of revolution, transgression, subversion (domination) and the paradigm of inversion, reversion, auto-liquidation (hegemony)” (34). Domination has an outside from which it can be overthrown. Hegemony can only be altered–“inverted or reversed”–from within it (38).

Baudrillard’s hegemony maps fairly neatly onto, and reveals the multiple self-serving operations, of frictionless sovereignty, down to the constitution of the human as sovereign species steering a course to the Anthropocene. He writes that “we could even say that the hegemony of global power [in geopolitics] resembles the absolute privilege of the human species over all others” (47). This very sense of self-proclaimed privilege enacts frictionless sovereignty and guarantees its furtherance and perpetuation. As the human stands in smug privilege to other species in the epoch of hegemony and frictionless sovereignty, so stands the subject in relation to the demands of the munus–that is, a position of defiant immunity from said demands. The immune position of the sovereign proclaims to be both above the law and the law itself: a position constituted by the law but which does not pertain to the sovereign.

Although the epochal conversion of domination to hegemony as outlined by Baudrillard is clear enough, especially in its realization of the frictionless imagination, we should not ignore the desire for friction, for antagonism, even in the shape of something that might be feared, envied, desired and repulsed all at the same time in a stabilizing/destabilizing ambivalence. As mentioned, multiple examples exist: pollution, disease, disparate access to frictionless systems and benefits resulting in economic inequity, revanchant nationalism, religious fundamentalism, terrorism, migration/refugees, pestilence, specific aesthetic projects (art, literature, music, theatre, dance) and other phenomena that would seem to render ambiguous the neat boundaries between domination and hegemony. Just as bodies become consistent sites and objects of value extraction, with their attendant intimacies and creative possibilities for change and innovation, they also require both free rein and intricate controls. Frictionless sovereignty often factors individuals and their bodies as control objects or sites of profit, elements of the smooth running systems flowing in uniform directions, rather than the disruptive tricksters they clearly can be and often are.

Some Contexts

The primary context that the individual papers address is the large body of critical theoretical work on sovereignty (e.g. Agamben, Arendt, Bataille, Baudrillard, Derrida, Elden, Foucault, Malabou, Mbembe, Moten, Schmitt, Wynter, to name a few). Although sustained close readings of these varied theoretical positions–pivotal and essential in the current moment–is beyond the scope of the special issue, the frames nonetheless are integral to the arguments and analyses operative throughout. All of the pieces emerged from and in dialogue with these important writings and specific sustained engagements feature in each article. Literature from a number of relevant fields also play an integral in contextualizing this special issue, including from political science, literary studies, cultural geography, legal studies, maritime law, visual culture and migration studies.

A secondary context can be found in the study of polyscalar autonomous remote sensing systems and their effects on some elements of political philosophical thought relevant to understandings of sovereignty: autos (self), nomos (law) and munus (gift and burden, obligation to others in a community) (Beck and Bishop, Bishop, Bratton, and Gabrys). These inquiries led directly to thinking sovereignty in relation to friction and the frictionless. Although encoded and constructed for different functions and to operate in separate domains, the tele-technological operations of these systems occur through the same combination of software platforms, sensing devices, machine-to-machine interfaces, autonomous monitoring and acting capacities, real-time tele-technologies, automated detection and responsive action components, and widely-distributed sensory data used by a range of agents. Remote sensing systems like the Planetary Skin Institute, Central Nervous System for the Earth (using Smart Dust), and many others work with and feed into the new geopolitical formations operative through planetary computation and platforms. These have reconfigured the autos, nomos and munus in ways still inchoate, emergent and contradictory, providing a deterritorialization and reterritorialization of hybrid governmentalities. As noted earlier, the processes of relating land, territory and de-/re-territorialization to sovereignty are complex and consistently being reshaped from the early part of the 20^th century (especially in military terms with the emergence of War Zones and No Man’s Land) to the present (see Elden, Vismann, Virilio, Bratton, Bishop and others). These systems replicate, intensify and accelerate these complicated relations upon which claims of sovereignty reside. For all the supposed efficacies of remote sensing, planetary computation and computational infrastructures tracking and generating various state and corporate interests, the persistent transgression of many traditional territorial claims for statehood and sovereignty become placed in question through the enactment of this contemporary form of sovereignty. At the same time, the reification of borders in specific sites confronts the proliferation of fuzzy borders, places of incessant contestations and ambiguity that result in sites partially authorized, represented and knowable.

A tertiary context is that of the realm of aesthetic production as a site capable of evoking conditions of friction and the frictionless within the operation of sovereignty. As addressed in several papers in this issue (Bishop and Roy, De Boever, Hayden, Hegarty, and Owen), the production of aesthetic subjectivities and works of so-motivated art is not without its contradictions and capacity for reinforcing the very concerns the works purport to critique. As with any challenge to the nomos, as Umberto Eco reminds us with the genre of parody, they can often simply rearticulate and reinscribe the power of the dominant ideological narrative and infrastructures of hegemony they attempt to resist, challenge, question or elude. This quandary resides as an integral component of the works addressed in this special issue and bespeaks its import as well at a level of self-reflexivity that might inadvertently participate in or perpetuate the sovereign phantasm in the operation of critique. The formation of aesthetic subjectivities as a putatively non-coercive form of control–as the power to release life from the hold of frictionless sovereignty–say, for heuristic purposes here, in neo-Romantic registers of Bildung, or, in the vector of the postcolonial with the recuperation of effaced civilizational symbolics–might also be viewed as a constitutive element of the sovereign phantasm. However, we might not but be able to play that game.

With the possibility of frictionless systems of planetary computation possibly being the source for this expression of sovereignty–as in a drone as smart weapon taking a life not at the direction of a human controller but by software determination that allows the smart weapon to choose a given target–then we return in the current moment to a kind of politico-theological formulation of sovereignty: one predicated on the death penalty and the capacity to take life. The strike need not be the result of a smart weapon but also a remotely controlled one, as exemplified by the 2020 assassination by the Trump administration of the Iranian General and government official Qassem Soleimani; or the accidental deaths of hundreds from the Obama administration’s escalation of tactical drone warfare. Whether the weapon acts on its own predetermined software analytics, or hits the intended “legitimate” target or others as “collateral damage,” frictionless sovereignty puts the “tele-” (at a distance) into the politico-theological potentiality of sovereign action and justification. It becomes the horizontal reach across verified territorial control and rights into the vertical enactment of sovereign control from afar. This is but an extension of the Cold War erasure of sovereignty claims caused by ICBM’s that so shook International Relations scholars and policy-makers (not to mention their polities) in the middle part of the 20^th century. The difference in the present is that such actions concurrently produce the retrograde pre-modern geo-jurisdictional domains that accompany planetary computation in a reclamation of national sovereignty predicated on the earlier “right to let live, right to kill” biopolitics outlined by Foucault. If the guillotine marks the move from politico-theological sovereignty to collective state-based sovereignty in an epochal shift, the technologies that make frictionless sovereignty possible mark the movement to new geopolitical formations as yet inchoate but fully operational, as yet indeterminate but robustly imagined, as yet obscure but uncomfortably realized.

The papers that comprise this special issue address various theoretical implications of frictionless sovereignty through three overlapping and interrelated frames: visualizing sovereignty, technology and urbanism, and sovereignty at the scale of aesthetics. Some papers address the frictionless formally–the pursuit thereof or its undoing via artistic processes that enact friction (Bishop and Roy, Hayden, and Owen), the artistic and geopolitical examination of territories that exist, at least in the popular imaginary, as empty or unmarked by lines of sovereignty or clearly articulated through national and transnational juridical regimes (Bishop and Roy, Brebenel, and Hegarty), as well as of city and rural spaces in which such lines multiply overlap, albeit across differently dimensioned strata (Bishop and Simone, and Brebenel). Others engage with bio-ontological positioning via blackness and the strategic mobilization of sovereignty claims as integral to a proper politicization of sovereignty in its contemporary guises and for imaginary futures (Brebenel, De Boever, Bishop and Simone), or through antinomies of sovereignty played out in the tensions resultant from the weakening of political authority in the face of rising authoritarianism (Vardoulakis). In so doing, the papers in different and complementary ways invite reflection on the possibilities and preconditions of artistic and other interrogations of the biophysical imperative of sovereignty to transform life, its limited capacities to do so, and a seemingly growing indifference toward that imperative, serving as it does other aims and interests: those of the frictionless.

 

Ryan Bishop is Professor of Global Art and Politics at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. His most recent book is Technocrats of the Imagination: Art, Technology and the Military-Industrial Avant-garde (co-authored with John Beck, 2020), and he is co-editor of Cultural Politics (Duke UP) and its book series “A Cultural Politics Book” (Duke UP).

 

References

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Bishop, Ryan (2018) “Felo de se: The Munus of Remote Sensing.” boundary 2 45:4, 41–63.

Bratton, Benjamin (2015) The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press.

Bruun, Johanne and Philip Steinberg (2018) “Placing Territory on Ice: Militarisation, Measurement and Murder in the High Arctic” in Kimberley Peter, Philip Steinberg and Elaine Stratford (eds.) Territory Beyond Terra. London: Rowan and Littlefield, pp. 147-164.

Cocks, Joan (2014) On Sovereignty and Other Political Delusions. London: Bloomsbury.

De Boever, Arne (2016) Plastic Sovereignties: Agamben and the Politics of Aesthetics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

de la Boétie, Etienne (1942) Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, trans. Harry Kurz. NY: Columbia University Press.

Derrida, Jacques. (2009) The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. I, trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Elden, Stuart (2010) “Reading Schmitt Geopolitically: Nomos, Territory, Grossraum” Political Philosophy May/June  https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/reading-schmitt-geopolitically.

Elden, Stuart. (2013) The Birth of Territory. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Fulton, T.W. (1911) The Sovereignty of the Sea. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons.

Gabrys, Jennifer (2016) Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Hansen, Thomas Blom and Finn Stepputat (eds.) (2005) Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in the Postcolonial World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Jurkevics, Anna (2017) “Hannah Arendt Reads Carl Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth: A dialog on Law and Geopolitics from the Margins.” European Journal of Political Theory 16:3, 345-366.

Lotringer, Sylvère (2010) “Introduction” in The Agony of Power, trans. by Ames Hodges, intro by Sylvère Lotringer. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), pp. 1-33.

Moten, Fred (2017) Black and Blur: (consent not to be a single being). Durham: Duke University Press.

Papadopoulos, Dimitris and Vassilis Tsianos (2007) “How to Do Sovereignty without People? The Subjectless Condition of Postliberal Power.” boundary 2 34:1, 135-172.

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Redfield, Marc “Aesthetics, Sovereignty, Biopower: From Schiller’s Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen to Goethe’s Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten” Romantic Circles (website), 2018. http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/biopolitics/html/praxis.2012.redfield.html#back7.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1984) A Discourse on Inequality, trans. by Maurice Cranston. London: Penguin Classics.

Schmitt, Carl (2006) The Nomos of the Earth, trans. by G.L. Ulmen. New York: Telos Press.

Simone, AbdouMaliq (2019) Personal correspondence.

Sloterdijk, Peter (2017) Not Saved: Essays after Heidegger, trans. Ian Alexander Moore and Chris Turner. Cambridge: Polity.

Vardoulakis, Dimitris (2013). Sovereignty and Its Other: Toward the Dejustification of Violence. New York: Fordham University Press.

Vismann, Cornelia (2010) “Starting from Scratch: Concepts of Order in No Man’s Land,” in Bernd-Rudiger Hüppauf (ed.) War, Violence and the Modern Condition.

Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 46-64.

[1] I am grateful to all the contributors to this issue for comments on and contributions to this introduction to it, as well as for their collaboration at all stages and for their individual contributions. The editorial group at boundary 2 and b2o have helped steer the special issue in ways that have benefited the whole immensely. Jussi Parikka is owed special thanks for his input on drafts of the introduction. Any and all problems or mistakes in the piece, though, remain my own.