> Maureen Therese Anderson wrote:
>
> > >Can anyone name this author?
> >
> >That would be Saskia Sassen.
>
> Bingo. It's from the paper she's giving to the panel I'm on at the
> anthro meeting in SF in two weeks.
>
> >Still, my impression is that Sassen is on your page, Doug.
>
> Dunno if I'd say that, but gawd what prose! As far as I can tell, the
> 25 pages I read after posting that early paragraph boil down to:
> "Global? National? Local? Kinda hard to tell. But there's some heavy
> shit going down here that we really have to figure out."
>
Yes, the prose is overly complex (I remember noticing on a 'intro to
contemporary thought' book that my wife edited, that the author's prose
took on the style of the person she was writing about. Her prose in the
Marx section sounded like Marx's, in the post-modern section tended
towards some of the (lighter weight) posties. If I read too much LBO-talk,
I end up spouting a confusing mishmash - probably the same process is at
work with these academic bods who seldom get to take a break and explain
this to a non-academic.).
But what is said here is, I think, important - particularly when, in the debate around globalisation, the concepts of global and local are generally used as if they are two opposite poles. If the debate is to get beyond some kind of soc-dem dream about getting the Keynesian state back, or its American cousin, nostalgic dreams about Pure American Democracy, the question of the nation, the state, the global and resistance needs to be put quite differently.
A number of the theorists whose names came up in this guessing game seem to have something to say on this. Here's Michael Hardt (a close colleague of Toni Negri's) on this:
It is quite clear that
in the various processes of globalization the locus of sovereignty
has shifted away from the nation-state, at least in part, but it is
not so easy to identity its new locus, if indeed it can be located
at all. Furthermore, and this is the much more interesting
question, perhaps the nature itself of sovereignty has changed in
this passage. We claim that indeed there has been a shift from
the modern form of sovereignty, theorized by authors from
Bodin and Hobbes to Schmitt, to what we call an imperial
sovereignty. The form of modern sovereignty can be
characterized schematically by the dialectic of inside and
outside. (Think of Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction as its
basic unit if you like.) Imperial sovereignty, in contrast,
operates on a network model and functions through hybrid
identities and differences of degree.
Our perspective, of course, is against sovereignty in all its
forms: imperial sovereignty, the nation-state, even the
"popular" forms of sovereignty that arose in modernity.
Absolute democracy is incompatible with sovereignty. But in
order to challenge sovereignty and pose an alternative to it, one
must understand first its contemporary form. Resistances to old,
outdated forms of rule often tend not only to be ineffective
against the present form but contribute to its functioning.
LBO-talk acts as an interesting vantage point over some of these processes - the case of a large US corporation (was it Ford? I can't remember) coming to the defence of affirmative action, as happened recently, is one more fact to note, and the conclusion that some of these theorists (influenced by the French, and in N&H's case, probably others, by Ol' Whiskers) come to is that, in contrast to the old forms of rule, which were hinged on maintaining a rigid distinction between in and out, now "there is no outside". This could be interpreted pessimistically - rather like interpreting Foucault as meaning that the game is over, and we'll remain slaves forever - but that's not the only possibility.
Time for another Hardt quote:
MH: First of all, nation is the wrong concept to use to name
cultural heritage, identity, and community in this case. There
may exist nations without states, but every nation contains
within itself the dream of a state. I sometimes think that
Benedict Anderson's motto should be reversed: the nation
sometimes seems to be the only form in which we can imagine
community. And that is only testament to our poverty of
imagination. Nation, of course, is a specific form of community,
one that is inevitably characterized by exclusion of others,
internal hierarchy, and ultimately sovereign authority.
23. More important for our argument in Empire, however, is the
question of hybridity. Homi Bhabha's work is rich and complex,
but many readers come away from it with the impression that
hybridity itself is liberatory because it defies the binaries
through which power functions: white/black, male/female, and
so forth. We claim, however, that imperial sovereignty is not
threatened in the least by hybrid subjectivities. In fact, Empire
rules precisely through a kind of politics of difference,
managing hybrid identities in flexible hierarchies. From this
perspective, then, a politics of hybridity may have been effective
against the now defunct modern form of sovereignty but it is
powerless against the current imperial form.
When Hardt talks about the powerlessness of hybridity, I think he is talking about the limitations of understanding rigid oppositions and hierarchies as necessary for modern capitalism. A quick survey of tactics of rule suggests that he is right - when the state steps forward as the defender of diversity - when it puts on a 'progressive' air, as in the case of Blair in Britain, that's an example of what Hardt is talking about. Another example is from the book 'Renegades of the Empire', which cronicles the adventures of three prominent Microsoft programmers - the team who created the DirectX architecture. At one point, late in the book, one of them sets a list of tasks for a collaborator - register a set of domain names. The Microsoft guy knows that the collaborator is a Christian, and intentionally includes 'god.com' in the list of domains. When the collaborator refuses to register the domain, the Microsoft guy knows that this collaborator isn't really up to being a player...
The recent debate on LBO-talk about the 'resistance' or lack thereof of geek codes of practice to capitalism is relevant here. Again, in 'Renegades of the Empire', one is presented with a model of industrial relations - within Microsoft, all teams, all individuals fight to gain access to company resources. The hierarchy exists - very clearly within Microsoft, rather more fluidly within Open Source - buts its intentions are hidden behind a set of Rules of the Game. For example, the Open Source rule that whoever commits the code wins the argument is interpreted by Open Source advocates as a sign of the inherent producer-democracy of the movement. Yet, at the same time, that rule serves to hide the way in which programming resembles nothing so much as total dedication of time to work (through identification of the hobby and the job - my colleagues here recently all argued for working at home, because it would allow them to do 12-hour, uninterrupted coding marathons).
Understanding how control and resistance work in these circumstances is no longer only about taking the side of the excluded - whether that be the factory worker, a figure assumed to not be (or be less of) a consumer of the products of the factory, or any other figure of exclusion. While the 'modern sovereignty' still exists and provides many targets for action, I think these theorists with their tangled words are asking us to think ahead.
Think of the mythical 'factory replacement' - the office where everyone (except the office cleaner) is white collar, everyone is wired, there is a mix of black and white, men and women, all sorts of nationalities. The problems of management are things like how to manage people across different time zones, and the company can fit into the way people in 3 continents do their work (and the company is willing to give lots of things away for free to achieve this), etc. In fact, amidst a sea of South African poverty, that's pretty much what my office looks like. I've got no idea how to talk to my colleagues about the kind of concepts LBO-talkers throw around - I've got less than a clue about where the new fault lines which might assist me in splitting my fellow workers from the grasp of capital are - its not that there is no resistane in this office, its just that the language in which it operates is quite unlike the languages of resistance with which I am familiar.
As Doug quotes Bourdeau in one of his essay - there are two mistakes, one to imagine that everything is different. The other to imagine that everything stays the same.
Peter P.S. I'm waiting to see how this turns set of movies turn out: http://www.badcop.de/badcop.html -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844