-Bruno Gullì (2012)
[Paper read at Left Forum 2012; Panel: Forms of Sovereignty, Instances of Violence]
In my book Earthly Plenitudes: A
Study on Sovereignty and Labor (2010), I introduce and stress the notion of
‘dignity of individuation.’ I say that this dignity of individuation is the
same as the concept of singularity, admittedly a difficult concept. The dignity
of individuation is a hybrid concept. It relates to the principle of
individuation, one of the most important concepts in philosophy. For instance,
we find it in John Duns Scotus’s great notion of haecceitas (thisness),
that is, what makes something the something that it is; we also find in
Leibniz’s concept of the notion of an individual substance (and Leibniz himself
relates his concept to Duns Scotus’s haecceitas; but we also find it in
Aristotle’s tode ti (this something or some this). From
principle of individuation I cross out, as it should be done and as others have
done, the word (and concept) ‘principle’; we are then left with individuation,
the idea of what it is to be something, anything, whatever. This, without a
‘principle,’ which might re-inscribe everything into a hierarchical order, left
to itself…, individuation as such, is horizontal, and it is the seed of
democratic thinking. Not just the seed; it is democratic thinking and practice
in its unstoppable unfolding.
In Earthly Plenitudes, I
combine ‘individuation’ with ‘dignity.’ This latter concept, dignity, I say,
relates to at least two great traditions: on the one hand, it is a Kantian
concept. Immanuel Kant famously distinguishes between ‘dignity’ and ‘price.’ In
the kingdom of ends, he says, where everyone is a legislator and thus
sovereign, there is dignity and there is price. Whatever has a price (later, we
know, that will be a commodity) can be replaced (by whatever has the same
price; or as Marx will say, exchange value, for value and price are different).
But what has dignity is irreplaceable. Dignity itself cannot be replaced. It is
a ‘such this,’ ‘this this,’ which ‘that this,’ another this, will not be
able to replace. On the other hand, dignity
is an important concept in the great Zapatista tradition, as well as in
many other revolutionary discourses and situations. The struggle is for
dignity, against the dubious dignity of dignitaries, the political class for
instance, which must go.
However, after writing Earthly
Plenitudes, and certainly in the wake of the Arab Spring and then here the
Occupy Movement, I realized that all talk of dignity alone may simply be
misused, abused, and also belittled, or looked at in a condescending way. I
realized, in other words, that dignity is too precious to be given away,
wasted, in contexts that are by their very nature undignified and undignifying:
just like poetry is. What dignity can you talk about with an Anthony Bologna
pepper-spraying women who are already in police custody, with a John Pike
pepper-spraying students who are peacefully demonstrating? And of course the
list goes on to infinity. Dignity will come, that’s for sure, but it will have
the force of a political and cultural tsunami, an upheaval; it will come at the
end of this sudden movement. In itself, dignity is not the ‘such this’ of the
movement, its current and manifest form of individuation; it is instead its
mystery, which must remain hidden, concealed, as its own secret power, its
subterranean potency. What then must (and will) manifest itself, as dignity
remains concealed, is precisely this power, this potency. Thus, before we can
even speak of the dignity of individuation, we must be able and willing to speak of the power of individuation, the
potency of individuation. It is this power, horizontal and democratic, the
power of any such this, which will be able (if any power can be) to destroy and
overcome all forms of sovereignty, neutralize all instances of violence; being
that revolutionary, pure and divine violence of which Walter Benjamin speaks,
and which he still calls “sovereign violence,” but which is really neither
sovereign nor is it violence. It is instead something that belongs to a new
order altogether; and order that can so far only be perceived as disorder; as
Hobbes says in his Leviathan, the disorder of the disunited multitude.
This power, this new power, which
is grounded in dignity and aims at the destruction of what blocks dignity from
fully actualizing itself, is similar, I believe to the new nonsovereign
power sought by Michel Foucault. In “Society Must Be Defended”, his
1975-1976 Lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault says that “we should look
for a new right that is both antidisciplinary and emancipated from the
principle of sovereignty” (p.40). I believe that this new right is the dignity
of individuation, as well as the power of individuation (a sort of anti-power,
or counter-power, or what Hardt and Negri call biopolitics in their
recent book, Commonwealth). Without the power of individuation, any talk
of dignity may simply change nothing. To be sure, Foucault’s new and
nonsovereign power is not necessarily, certainly not immediately, a
counter-power and the power of individuation. In fact, this new power is
disciplinary power, which at one point (in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, he holds) replaces or complements sovereign power (which Foucault
sees as a more traditional form of power). Foucault is not very consistent in
his views of whether there is a substitution of one form of power with another
(disciplinary power taking the place of sovereign power) or whether the two
forms coexist, but the latter view seems stronger, and indeed applicable even
in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The shift from one form of power
to the other is also a shift from sovereignty to domination, many forms of
domination. Personally, I don’t think that they are mutually exclusive. True,
there is always domination in sovereignty, though there can be domination
without sovereignty. However, every instance of domination, every instance of
violence, brings with itself a residue of the paradigm of sovereignty, which
always includes a structure of separation. Formally, there may not be
sovereignty, but only sheer domination and raw violence, as is the case with
episodes of police brutality. Indeed, there are situations in which the classic
formula of transcendence and separation which gives sovereignty its name is
simply not there. However, in order to legitimate sheer domination and raw
violence one always goes back to the logic of sovereignty; one uses sovereignty
to justify the event of domination and violence. And of course this ‘one’ is
mainly and most notably the State. Yet, the State is not the only one. We find
the same situation in the family, for instance, in the workplace, and even in
interpersonal relations that are (or may be) beyond the family or the
workplace.
We can then say that, one way or
the other, sovereignty is always part of the picture. When there is ground for
legitimizing the exerted violence, the sign of sovereignty is explicit. When on
the other hand there is no way of legitimizing violence, the sign of sovereignty
is there perhaps only implicitly. I will give an example for each case, though
there is sadly an immense quantity of possible situations that could be used to
exemplify this. For the former case let’s think of when in September of 2011
many faculty members of the City University of New York gathered in front of
Baruch College (where the CUNY Board of Trustees meets) to protest the
elimination of health insurance for a large number of adjuncts. This was around
the same time that the Occupy Wall Street movement began. We were met with a
disproportionate and unbelievable display of force by the NYPD. Plastic
handcuffs hanging from the trousers of so many police officers that one
wondered what was going on in their minds, as well as of course in the police
commissioner’s and in the mayor’s minds. Were they ready to arrest those who
educate New York City New
York Oakland
An example of the latter case (in
which the sign of sovereignty is only implicitly there, but in which it is
harder to make a case for legitimacy) would be any clear episode of police
brutality. Here one will immediately recognize the abuse of power in the
violence of the police: there is no legitimacy, yet the sign of sovereignty
(the separation typical of it) is still there. Of course, this is also the
structure one finds in those situations of violence that are considered, in a
straightforward manner, criminal acts. Here, too, whether is it a random act of
violence or a more deliberate and intentional one, we can detect the sign
(however temporary and fleeting, thus perhaps the shadow of a sign) of
sovereignty. What I am trying to do here is highlight the separation of
sovereignty (whether it’s really existing or simply illusory: a delusion in
someone’s mind) as the relation of a superior to an inferior, and thus
inherently racist. Sovereignty is a racist concept, and if it is not
sovereignty that creates violence but perhaps the other way around, violence
creates sovereignty, yet sovereignty gives violence a basis, a firm support, an
illusory affirmation of itself as somehow necessary, or an outright sense of
legitimacy and rightfulness.
Foucault speaks of racism, and
State racism (p.239), in terms of biopolitics, a “new nondisciplinary
power…applied not to man-as-body but to the living man, to man-as-living-being;
… to man-as-species” (p.242). This means, to a multiplicity of human beings.
These human beings are now not simply “disciplined, but regularized” (p.247).
It is the power of regularization, the norm, the power of normalization,
although the norm of discipline and the norm of regularization intersect
(p.253). For Foucault, racism is the modality whereby sovereignty survives in
the regime of normalization: “If the power of normalization wished to exercise
the old sovereign right to kill, it must become racist. And if, conversely, a
power of sovereignty, or in other words, a power that has the right of life and
death, wishes to work with the instruments, mechanisms, and technology of
normalization, it too must become racist” (p.256). Basically, “[o]nce the State
functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function
of the State” (ibid.). And here Foucault means “also every form of
indirect murder,” and not “simply murder as such” (ibid.).
State racism becomes common,
informing and supporting not simply the strongest instances of institutional
violence: war, capital punishment, the prison, the police; but also those
instances that still take place within yet perhaps at the margins of the
institutions: atrocities in war, abuses in the prison system, and cases of
police brutality – not speak about the generalization of violence (racist
violence) in society as a whole.
It is important to ask the question
of what power can alter this racism that, as Foucault says, “first develops
with colonization, ..., with colonizing genocide” (p.257). The power of
individuation, pointing to its source (or motor) and end, the dignity of
individuation, is an altering power of this type. The power of the 99%, to use
the language of the Occupy Movement, of those who have “nothing to sell except
their own skins,” to use the Marx of “The Secret of Primitive Accumulation”
(chapter 26 of Capital, Vol. I), when he ironically retells the fairy-tale of
how it came to pass that we have a world of property and propertylessness,
wealth and poverty, rights and mere, bare skin: a racist world of sovereign
violence. In fact, Marx continues, “[i]n actual history, it is a notorious fact
that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force [violence], [played
and] play the greatest part” (p.295).
Works cited
Benjamin, Walter. 1978. “Critique
of Violence.” In Reflections. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New
York
Foucault, Michel. 2003. “Society Must Be Defended”. Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-1976. Trans. David Macey.
Gullì, Bruno. 2010. Earthly
Plenitudes: A Study on Sovereignty and Labor. Philadelphia
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2009.
Commonwealth
Univ
Press.
Marx, Karl. 1977. Capital, Vol. I, trans. Ben Fowkes. New
York
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