Escape Routes

Control and Subversion in the Twenty-First Century

Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson, Vassilis Tsianos

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN:
  9780745327785
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781783716135
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Illegal migrants who evade detection, creators of value in insecure and precarious working conditions and those who refuse the constraints of sexual and biomedical classifications: these are the people who manage to subvert power and to craft unexpected sociabilities and experiences. Escape Routes shows how people can escape control and create social change by becoming imperceptible to the political system of Global North Atlantic societies. 'A profound and brilliant examination of the power of exodus to create radical interventions in perhaps the three most important and contested fields of society today: life, migration and precarious labour. It is in these fields that the present and future of multitude is at stake. Escape Routes is a toolbox in the hands of multitude.'
Antonio Negri, author of Insurgencies and co-author of Empire and Multitude

PART I

THE POLITICAL CONSTITUTION OF THE PRESENT

Section I

SOVEREIGNTY AND CONTROL RECONSIDERED

1 NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY

Spaces of the Nation

Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons), a series of capriccios issued around 1750, present fantastic imaginary interiors, visionary dungeons. Piranesi, who in most of his other works delivered a romanticised version of Roman architecture, created here an image of social space characteristic of the emerging modern form of political sovereignty.

Piranesi’s capriccio ‘The Drawbridge’ can be read as a metaphor of a highly structured political space, filled with mysterious scaffolding and different interconnected hierarchical levels (Figure 1). Each level is clearly distinct from the others; some of them are under surveillance from the internal tower. There are chasms between the levels, but also controlled possibilities for mobility. It seems that the main purpose of this structure is to make individuals and their bodies identifiable and manageable in space. The human body becomes domesticated, disciplined, productive, and individuals become subjects. This is the logic of representation which constitutes the political scene of modernity and with it a collective subject, the people, whose members are distributed in an ordered way within a certain space, occupy specific positions, perform certain activities and have rights. But space is never abstract, it is always delineated and limited: space in modernity is territory.

Formalising the Relation Between National Territory and People: the Double-R Axiom

The core principle of post-medieval modern polity is national sovereignty, which is the ideal correspondence between people and territory. Modern political theory employs distinct ideologies, models and practices in the attempt to grasp how the relation between people and territory can be configured to engender a viable form of spatio-temporal coherence and integrity of the nation (Hobsbawm, 1990; Bhabha, 1990; Benedict Anderson, 1991; Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991). One main tradition, for example, highlights the role of territory and refers back to the Schmittian (1997) concept of sovereignty according to which sovereign law is the rationalisation of Landnahme, the appropriation of land – for critical evaluations of Schmitt’s concept of sovereignty see Balibar (2004b) and Balakrishnan (2000). A second major model highlights the role of the people and refers back to Hobbes (1994). Here sovereignty is the outcome of an agreement between the people and the sovereign. In the tradition of Rousseau (1997), sovereignty can be understood as the ideal identification of the people’s will with the national constitution – Habermas (2001) attempted a continuation of this latter line of thought in the debates on world citizenship. Common to all these vastly differing accounts is the notion of national sovereignty as an attempt to systematise and describe the relation between people and territory.

1. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Carceri d’Invenzione, plate VII: The Drawbridge, c. 1750 (new edition, 1761), etching, 54.5 × 41.5 cm, Staatsgalerie, Graphische Sammlung, Stuttgart. © Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Köln. Printed with permission.

The correspondence between people and territory is instituted in two sequential moves. Firstly on the level of representation, people are separated and classified into social groups, that is, classes or social strata. Secondly, the nation state assigns rights of participation to each of the represented groups. National sovereignty is sustained by the existence of a national social compromise – a stable but changing balance of institutional power between the represented social groups, which is developed as a means of regulating the distribution of rights amongst these groups (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985; Poulantzas, 1978). Initially, the city state – and later the nation state – consisted of wealthy, property owners only (Sennett, 1994). Citizenship was available to those people who already recognised each other as participating in forging state institutions (Koschorke, 2007). The majority of the inhabitants of the territory of the state were excluded. But, in the process of the expansion and consolidation of the nation state, exclusion is not the primary concern; rather what solidifies the centrality of the state in modern sovereignty is a form of differential inclusion of certain social groups through granting rights (social, civil and political). Rights become a means of expanding the category of citizenship (citizenship is here understood as belonging to a nation state, where the belonging is both legitimate through law and codified through culture); but this move is always partial and in this sense citizenship is always imperfect (Gunsteren, 1998; Sassen, 2004). For instance, the working class can be deemed eligible for social rights such as protection from unemployment and can be granted rights such as access to education for their children on the basis that they are involved in wealth production. But as social rights are extended to some they are held beyond the reach of others – on the basis, for example, of their sex, age, mode of employment, country of birth, or length of stay in the territory of the nation state. Because the move is always partial, its outcome, the national social compromise, is continually open to being contested and transformed. Thus, the national social compromise is the legitimate order of institutional power which is achieved in each particular historical moment of each particular society as a pragmatic equilibrium between those who are represented and have rights. In other words, the national social compromise is a balance between rights and representation of ‘the people’ in a certain territory.

We call this balance between rights and representation the double-R axiom. It is only through the continuous interplay between rights and representation that the unity of people and territory is maintained. The double-R axiom is the insurmountable precondition of national sovereignty. In modern national sovereignty, constitutionalism (as in an established set of formalised rights in sovereign law) has always been the predominant mode of political government. Rights have dominated over issues of representation and have absorbed more attention than questions such as how different social groups are represented in the social and cultural imaginary and in everyday public life. The reason for this is that representation was mainly organised throughout the emergence of national interests according to the positioning of social groups in the national territory in relation to the production process. Representation in national sovereignty is mainly an affair of economically defined social classes (consider for example the absence of women, queer, cultural or generational identities). But despite this predominance of rights, representation was always a key element in the process of emergence of national sovereignty. However, as we discuss in the next chapter, the problem of representation has only recently attained an equal role as the problem of rights in the organisation of polity in Global North Atlantic nation states.

Escaping the Limits of Global North Atlantic National Sovereignty

The double-R axiom is central to national sovereignty, not only because it organises political life inside the national space, but also because of its unavailability to certain social groups in the realm of the nation state and, of course, outside of it. The double-R axiom not only binds people and territory but also designates the nation state’s relation to other states and their people. It simultaneously defines the matrix of positive rights and representation within the national territory, and the non-existence of rights and symbolic presence beyond the nation’s borders. Hence, the double-R axiom constantly refers to its exact opposite: to the absence of rights and representation. The monopolisation of state power has a double function, as Elias describes it. On the one hand state power reconciles social antagonisms inside the borders of the nation, on the other hand it creates a belligerent and hostile competition with other states beyond its borders (Elias, 1981).

The double-R axiom retains its power not only when it is active and functional in the domain of a certain territory but also when it is absent – this is its potency. Much contemporary political theory devotes considerable interest to the state of exception – that is the suspension of the double-R axiom and the withdrawal of the state from (or its inability to impose) any legal restraints which govern the execution of its power. For different reasons the state of exception is often cast as the crucial moment of modern national sovereignty (Schmitt, 1963; Agamben, 2005; Mills, 2008). However, overemphasising the role of the state of exception in the consolidation of power in the modern Global North Atlantic nation state creates a false picture. For example, Agamben’s pathetic fixation on bare life (1998) and the camp (2001), both conditions beyond the protection of polity and the public, pervades some understandings of modern political sovereignty. But explaining the genesis of modern sovereignty as simply naked violence over life is a reductionist move (Bojadzijev, Karakayali and Tsianos, 2004). Agamben acknowledges that neither rights nor representation can exist without each other and that both the absence and presence of the double-R axiom are necessary in order to maintain national sovereignty (Agamben, 2005; Mills, 2008). Yet, because he explains modern polity by prioritising the role of those who are connected to sovereignty through their exclusion, he fails to understand the agency of the excluded; he cannot grasp their involvement in immanent processes of social change. That is, the excluded are cast as another characteristic of modern sovereignty; they may pose a logical or political problem about the extension and limits of sovereignty, but – from this perspective – they do not figure as a possible constituent force which can trigger transformations on the part of sovereignty.

To say that national sovereignty is incomplete is not to say that it can improve and become potentially all-inclusive, rather it means that national sovereignty is unequal and incomplete by design. It is exactly this ultimate incompleteness of national sovereignty that creates the possibility for social change and for its potential overcoming. This book attempts to trace the formation and transformation of modes of being which exist in the spaces where sovereignty pervades without holding a totalising grasp. It traces the emergence of many immanent, imperceptible and violent acts of subversion, silent retreats, forceful refusals and unexpected insurgencies which question current forms of sovereignty, reveal its incompleteness and escape its control.

These imperceptible actions have never ceased to exist; in fact they have always accompanied the emergence of sovereignty, designating its limits and foiling the repressive machinations of modern political constitution. Modern social and political history is full of people’s attempts to refuse and to subvert modern polity. Remember these incidents: 26 March 1871, Belleville, Menilmontant (and the massacre of 30,000 citizens of Paris); the Declaration of the Rights of Woman (rights which were not granted; instead women’s bodies were sexualised and neutralised: Liberty Guiding the People/Liberty on the Barricades); the Haitian revolution (whose representatives on being sent to the French revolution were simply executed); the Räterepublik (and the Freikorps); and more …

From Imperceptible Subjectivities to Subjects of Power

The precise task facing modern political sovereignty is to respond to such acts of refusal and subversion. The uncontrollable, singular potentialities of bodies which escape its order become the matter necessary for the creation of the ‘big Leviathan’, that is the modern nation state. Modern political sovereignty digests and incorporates imperceptible subjectivities, actions, potentialities into the grand corpus of modern polity. Imperceptible subjectivities have to be subsumed under the guidance of polity. The thing is that all these escaping subjectivities cannot be simply eradicated, they must be appropriated. For control to function, anything that looks like questioning sovereign power must be translated and mediated. We consider this to be the core moment of modern polity: insurgency and subversion are repressed only if they cannot be incorporated. Modern power is cynical and indifferent to morality: it is not concerned with ideological exclusion and ethical purity but with instrumental inclusion.

Crucially, national sovereignty is not primarily organised around the oppression of singular potentialities. Its main objective is not the suppression of those social groups which attempt to escape. Rather, modern national sovereignty attempts to absorb unruly potentialities by including them in its social reproduction. Imperceptible subjectivities are marked by their intimate relation to potentialities which escape fixed forms of regulation and control (Grosz, 1993; Gatens, 1996). Modern national sovereignty does not refuse to harness these potentialities. Rather, it transforms them by domesticating, adjusting, educating, tormenting, disciplining and training imperceptible bodies – by breaking the immanent relation between bodies and potentialities. In Chapter 4 we give a fuller account of the centuries of attempts to immobilise and capture the bodies of vagabonds and how these attempts culminate, in the nineteenth century, in the effort, not to contain, but to utilise their mobility and harness bodily potentials into a capitalist system of production and accumulation.

In other words, modern national sovereignty operates by mediating the relation between subjectivity and its potentials with a series of ‘body techniques’ (Mauss, 1978) which incorporate the body into the given mechanics of polity. This is a long and painful process, a process which very much resembles the meticulous transformation of the body’s habits, so powerfully described by Elias (1994). National sovereignty works with the reflexive subject. Escaping, mobbing, refusing, revolting, subverting individuals are transformed into the main ingredient of modern polity: subjects of power.

2. Albrecht Dürer, Der Zeichner des weiblichen Models (Draughtsman Drawing a Recumbent Woman) 1525, woodcut, 8 × 22 cm, Albertina Museum, Vienna. © Albertina, Wien. Printed with permission.

Consider Albrecht Dürer’s famous painting Draughtsman Drawing a Recumbent Woman (Figure 2). The painting invokes surveillance and method, domination and order, the invasive gaze and the scopic regime of controlling space. But these are widely discussed topics (Alpers, 1982; Nead, 1992; Haraway, 1997). What is particularly important for us is the relation between the subject of study and the device which makes study possible: the grid. It is through this grid that the (male) artist’s vision of control can dominate and order the object of study.

3. Perspectival Grid. Courtesy of the authors.

This upright grid of wires is the major actor in this woodcut: it splits the picture into two, transforming the artist into a male subject, and the object of the drawing into a sexualised female subject (Figure 3). The grid transforms imperceptible bodies and subjectivities into subjects; it classifies subjects into groups, groups into a territory. Before the grid is placed between the two subjects, these subjects do not exist at all. The grid is the metonymy for the order of modern sovereignty. It produces social classes, institutional positions, social actors, it directs them to the pervasive regime of productivity and, finally, it establishes hierarchical relations between them. The hierarchical organisation of gender relations and the organisation of space along the terms of masculinised and homophobic imaginaries is an outcome of the very existence of subjects of power. The stand-alone, self sufficient, reflexive subject, with the capacity to carry out intentional acts – this is the valorised individual actor of modern national sovereignty. The subject is the extreme opposite of the imperceptible body. By becoming a subject, imperceptible subjectivity is made amenable to discipline, to work and to production, to being trained and tormented. The imperceptible body is simultaneously the building material of modern political sovereignty and the most elusive and absent element of modern polity.

Unregulated Struggles

There is nothing new about this observation about the centrality of the subject for the constitution of national sovereignty and about the subject’s role in the taming of imperceptible subjectivities. The debate between the two maitres penseurs of the crisis of the social state, Michel Foucault and Nikos Poulantzas, as well as of their common teacher Luis Althusser (1971), has completely exposed the centrality of the subject for understanding power. Foucault interrupts the classic dualism between individual freedom and repressive sovereign power, linking together discipline and freedom, sovereignty and the body. Discipline is the ‘art of the human body’, discipline attempts to make the body productive; and in becoming productive the body becomes docile. Co-option and training, subjugation and usefulness are inseparable for the operation of modern political rationalities of government (Foucault, 1991). Moreover, these microphysics of power effect how pervasive social antagonisms between different groups are transformed into technologies of the body. Social antagonisms are rarely played out as violent struggles, they are increasingly managed through disciplining the body. For Foucault, in his later lectures (2004a, 2004b), there is no external relation between the modern state and the subject, government is what connects practices of the subject and practices of domination (see also Foucault, 1987, 1990). The modern state is understood as an individualising and, simultaneously, a totalising form of power. Foucault’s genealogy of the modern state is concurrently a genealogy of the subject itself (Lemke, 1997).

Nevertheless this extraordinary attempt to link the subject with power seems to neglect one important aspect of the modern state, what Elias calls its capacity to pacify society (Elias, 1981). The modern state is more than a paramount form of government. It is not exhausted in technologies of the self and technologies of government. Rather, it deals in and relies on social antagonisms. Social antagonisms are productive; they create their own conditions for balancing and pacifying social conflicts. These conflicts are fought, resolved and contested against and out of these processes. For example, the welfare state arises in response to competing claims from different social actors (e.g. workers wanting protection from unemployment, people wanting access to healthcare, employers demanding flexibilis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• Prologue
• Part I: The Political Constitution of the Present
• Part II: A Contemporary Itinerary of Escape
• References
• Index