1NC Michigan

Debating and researching government policy does not

entrench a universal standard of normative subjecthood,
but refusal on those grounds ironically does
Zanotti, 13 [Laura, associate professor of Political Science at Virginia
Tech., Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2008 and joined the Purdue
University faculty in 2009. Governmentality, Ontology, Methodology: Rethinking Political Agency in the Global World, originally published online 30
December 2013, DOI: 10.1177/0304375413512098, P. Sage Publications]

Unlike positions that adopt governmentality as a descriptive tool and end up embracing the liberal substantialist
ontological assumptions and epistemological framework they criticize, positions that embrace an intra-agential (or

everything is made within specific

practices. Governmentality as a research program that explores the
present as multiply constituted, polytemporal . . . and recombinatory . . . and not just the
expression of a singular logic or the resultant of a linear process61 has an important role to
play as a methodology of inquiry that brings to the foreground the
techniques through which power is practically enacted, the ambiguity
embedded in its practices, and the various tactics for unsettling it that become possible
in the context of multifarious political encounters. Because political power scripts do not
relational) ontology, maintain that nothing is but

stand as substances that preexist the practices of their making and the specific relations that construct them, the
application of a relational ontology and of an archival methodology opens the way for nonidealist, engrained in praxis,

the space for politics is

rooted on ambiguity and performativity, that is on the making and remaking of
meaning, subjects, power, and political spaces in the context of agonic relations. What Does This All
analyses of politics and conceptualizations of political agency. In this framework,

Matter for Political Agency? I will now turn to elaborating more specifically on the relevance of scholarly positions that,
while not necessarily relying mainly on governmentality as a research program, have imagined both power and subjects in
non-substantialist ways and embraced situatedness and ambiguity as the very constitutive space for politics for
conceiving political agency beyond liberal straightjackets. For Richard Ashley and R. B. J. Walker, far from being issues to
be resolved or feared in the name of a sovereign universal truth and the definition of what ones identity is,

ambiguity and uncertainty are indeed political resources to be deployed in sites

of struggles where the differences between inside and outside are uncertain.62 Here political action
is not predicated on asserting the life and freedom or some sovereign
identity, some community of truth that is victimized and repressed by
power.63 Instead, resistance is very much about questioning practices of
power that attempt to impose and fix ways of knowing and doing that shall
be recognized as natural and necessary to autonomous being .64 For Ashley and
Walker, in other words, political action is about questioning assumptions about the
unity of identity, the mighty homogeneity of power, and the stability of categories of thought. Downplaying
ambiguity is indeed itself a technique of power. In taking issue with descriptive governmentality theories, Jacqueline
Best argued representing social events as totally calculable is itself a governmental strategy, part of governments very
attempts to depoliticize them.65 For Best, such representations undermine the analysis of what exceeds efforts to
govern through risk.66 Therefore, one should not be seduced by contemporary governmental strategies own promise of
infallibility. For Best, ambiguity brings to the foreground the limits of knowledge and should be included in current
analyses of governmental tactics. Ambiguity is a fundamental trajectory of power, rooted in the nontransparency of
language that always calls for hermeneutics and opens the possibility for political interpretation and manipulation even in
the presence of governmental strategies of regulation. Indeed, pace liberal institutionalism that looks at norms as
entities and explanatory variables for institutional behavior, regulations are only a shell and norms are always in
context, negotiated and renegotiated in the contingent spaces within which they are interpreted. Postcolonial literature
has also offered interesting insights of how political agency may be exerted in the face of powers self representation as a
powerful and mighty script. Homi Bhabha has argued that colonial powers self-representation as unity is a colonial
strategy of domination and explored the subversive potential of the mimicry and mockery of the colonized.67 For Bhabha,

The display of hybridityits peculiar replicationterrorizes authority with the ruse of recognition, its mimicry, its
mockery. Such a reading of colonial authority profoundly unsettles the demand that figures at the centre of the originary
myth of colonialist power. It is the demand that the space it occupies be unbounded, its reality coincident with the
emergence of an imperialist narrative and history, its discourse nondialogic, its enunciation unitary, unmarked by the
trace of difference-a demand that is recognizable in a range of justificatory Western civil discourses. 68 Bhabha sees

Political agency is a process of hybridization

through transformation of meaning. Thus, Colonial hybridity is not a problem of genealogy or
subjection and resistance as intimately related.

identity between two different cultures which can then be resolved as an issue of cultural relativism. Hybridity is a
problematic of colonial representation and individuation that reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so that other
denied knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authorityits rules of
recognition.69 Political agency is not portrayed as the free subjects total rejection of a unified totalizing assemblage of
power. While (the colonizers) power attempts to reproduce its script by creating the mimic men, that is, the docile
colonial subjects who are almost the same, but not quite,70 it also creates an ambivalence, a contradiction between
same and not quite that can be appropriated by the subaltern. Mimicry is easily camouflaged as mockery, with the
colonial subject consequently subverting or refusing to simply repeat the masters lessons. Instead of producing a
controlled imitation or a managed response from the native, the civilizing mission elicits an answer back, a menacing look,
a distorted and disturbing echo.71 Agency is exerted through moves that are imbricated with discourses of power but also
recognize and question them. In this way, universal claims are unsettled and powers purported unity menaced. Bhabha
sends a note of caution to those whose response to subjection is direct opposition, a warning that overcoming
domination, far from getting rid of it, often occasions its mere reversal.72 Thus, Ilan Kapoor suggests that the agent
must play with the cards s/he is dealt, and the hegemon, despite the appearance of absolute strength, needs or desires
the subaltern.73 Purity of identity may not ever have been a possibility, even less when the very ideas of what accounts
for identity and alterity are being rapidly reworked. In relying on Foucaults understanding of power and on feminist
elaborations of Identity,74 Roland Bleiker has embraced a non- substantialist standpoint and the acceptance of ambiguity
as central for conceptualizing human agency and for exploring its actual transformative possibilities. Bleiker questions
positions that see agency as a reflection of externally imposed circumstances as well as traditions that bestow the
human subject . . . with a relatively large sense of autonomy.75 Assumptions of fundamental autonomy (or freedom)
would freeze a specific image of human agency to the detriment of all others.76 As Bleiker puts it: A conceptualization
of human agency cannot be based on a parsimonious proposition, a one-sentence statement that captures something like

There is no essence to human agency, no core that

can be brought down to a lowest common denominator, that will crystallize
one day in a long sought after magic formula. A search for such an elusive
centre would freeze a specific image of human agency to the
detriment of all others.77 For Bleiker, universals are indeed tainted with an
imperial flavor. This includes the imperialism of ideas of identity based on
liberty and freedom (rather than imbrication, situatedness, and relationality) as the ontological
horizon for understanding human nature and assessing political agency. Nonan authentic nature of human agency.

substantialist positions do not assume the existence of monolithic power scripts or ontologically autonomous subjects; do
not establish linear links between intentions and outcomes, and do not assume that every form of agency needs an
identifiable agent. Instead, they call for careful attention to contexts. In this disposition, Bleiker advocates a modest
conceptualization of agency, one that relies upon Michel de Certeaus operational schemes, Judith Butlers contingent
foundations, or Gilles Deleuzes rhizomes.78 In a similar vein, in a refreshing reading of realism, Brent Steele has
highlighted the problematic aspects of assessing political agency based upon actors intention and focused on contexts as

as actors practice their agency within

the space of a public sphere, intentionalityat bestbecomes dynamic as
new spaces in that sphere open up. Intentions, even if they are genuine,
become largely irrelevant in such a dynamic, violent, and vibrant realm of
human interaction.80 In shifting attention from intention to the context
that made some actions possible, Steele sees agency as a redescription
of existing conditions, rather than the total rejection of or
opposition to a totalizing script. As a consequence, Steele advocates
pragmatist humility for politicians and scholars as well.81 In summary, in non-substantialist
the yardstick for assessing political actions.79 For Steele,

frameworks, agency is conceptualized as modest and multifarious agonic interactions, localized tactics, hybridized
engagement and redescriptions, a series of uncertain and situated responses to ambiguous discourses and practices of
power aimed at the construction of new openings, possibilities and different distributive processes, the outcomes of which

Political agency here is not imagined as a quest for

individual authenticity in opposition to a unitary nefarious oppressive
Leviathan aimed at the creation of a better totality where subjects can
float freed of oppression, or a multitude made into a unified subject will
reverse the might of Empire and bring about a condition of immanent social
are always to an extent unpredictable.

justice. By not reifying power as a script and subject as monads endowed

with freedom non-substantialist positions open the way for conceptualizing
political agency as an engagement imbricated in praxis. The ethical virtue
that is called for is pragmatist humility, that is the patience of playing with
the cards that are dealt to us, enacting redescriptions and devising tactics for
tinkering82 with what exists in specific contexts. Conclusion In this article, I have
argued that, notwithstanding their critical stance, scholars who use governmentality as a descriptive tool remain
rooted in substantialist ontologies that see power and subjects as standing in a relation of externality. They also downplay
processes of coconstitution and the importance of indeterminacy and ambiguity as the very space where political agency
can thrive. In this way, they drastically limit the possibility for imagining political agency outside the liberal straightjacket.

They represent international liberal biopolitical and governmental power as a

homogenous and totalizing formation whose scripts effectively oppress
subjects, that are in turn imagined as free by nature. Transformations of
power modalities through multifarious tactics of hybridization and redescriptions are not
considered as options. The complexity of politics is reduced to
homogenizing and/or romanticizing narratives and political engagements are
reduced to total heroic rejections or to revolutionary moments. By questioning
substantialist representations of power and subjects, inquiries on the possibilities of political agency are reframed in a way
that focuses on power and subjects relational character and the contingent processes of their (trans)formation in the

Options for resistance to governmental scripts are not

limited to rejection, revolution, or dispossession to regain a pristine
freedom from all constraints or an immanent ideal social order. It is found
instead in multifarious and contingent struggles that are constituted within
the scripts of governmental rationalities and at the same time
exceed and transform them. This approach questions
oversimplifications of the complexities of liberal political rationalities and of
their interactions with non-liberal political players and nurtures a radical
skepticism about identifying universally good or bad actors or abstract
solutions to political problems. International power interacts in complex ways
with diverse political spaces and within these spaces it is appropriated,
hybridized, redescribed, hijacked, and tinkered with. Governmentality as a heuristic
focuses on performing complex diagnostics of events. It invites historically
situated explorations and careful differentiations rather than overarching
demonizations of power, romanticizations of the rebel or the the local.
context of agonic relations.

More broadly, theoretical formulations that conceive the subject in non-substantialist terms and focus on processes of
subjectification, on the ambiguity of power discourses, and on hybridization as the terrain for political transformation,

These alternative
formulations also foster an ethics of political engagement, to be continuously
taken up through plural and uncertain practices, that demand continuous
attention to what happens instead of fixations on what ought to be. 83
Such ethics of engagement would not await the revolution to come or hope
for a pristine freedom to be regained . Instead, it would constantly attempt
to twist the working of power by playing with whatever cards are available
and would require intense processes of reflexivity on the
consequences of political choices. To conclude with a famous phrase by Michel Foucault my
open ways for reconsidering political agency beyond the dichotomy of oppression/rebellion.

point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is
dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to hyper- and pessimistic
activism.84

1AC/2AC MSU
Were State-as-heuristic, not State-as-descriptor.
That distinction matters for Framework and Links. If
fiats fake, heuristics still mean well learn contingent
toolkit items AND avoid pitfalls of foundational
descriptor frameworks. Those reify critiques of
liberalism and teach processes that fail.
Zanotti 14 Dr. Laura Zanotti is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia
Tech. Her research and teaching include critical political theory as well as international
organizations, UN peacekeeping, democratization and the role of NGOs in post-conflict
governance.Governmentality, Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the
Global World Alternatives: Global, Local, Political vol 38(4):p. 288-304,. A little unclear if
this is late 2013 or early 2014 The Stated Version of Record is Feb 20, 2014, but was
originally published online on December 30th, 2013. Obtained via Sage Database.
While there are important variations in the way international relations scholars use governmentality theory, for the purpose of my argument I

One body of scholarship uses governmentality as a

heuristic tool to explore modalities of local and international government and to assess
their effects in the contexts where they are deployed ; the other adopts this
notion as a descriptive tool to theorize the globally oppressive features of international liberalism. Scholars
who use governmentality as a heuristic tool tend to conduct inquiries
based upon analyses of practices of government and resistance. These scholars rely on ethnographic inquiries, emphasizes
the multifarious ways government works in practice (to include its
oppressive trajectories) and the ways uneven interactions of governmental
strategies and resistance are contingently enacted. As examples, Didier Bigo, building upon Pierre
identify two broad trajectories.2

Bourdieu, has encouraged a research methodology that privileges a relational approach and focuses on practice;3 William Walters has
advocated considering governmentality as a research program rather than as a depiction of discrete systems of power;4 and Michael
Merlingen has criticized the downplaying of resistance and the use of governmentality as interchangeable with liberalism.5 Many other
scholars have engaged in contextualized analyses of governmental tactics and resistance. Oded Lowenheim has shown how
responsibilization has become an instrument for governing individual travelers through travel warnings as well as for developing states
through performance indicators;6 Wendy Larner and William Walters have questioned accounts of globalization as an ontological dimension of
the present and advocated less substantialized accounts that focus on studying the discourses, processes and practices through which
globalization is made as a space and a political economy;7 Ronnie D. Lipschutz and James K. Rowe have looked at how localized practices of
resistance may engage and transform power relations;8 and in my own work, I have studied the deployment of disciplinary and governmental
tools for reforming governments in peacekeeping operations and how these practices were hijacked and resisted and by their targets.

Scholars who use governmentality as a descriptive tool focus instead

on one particular trajectory of global liberalism, that is on the convergence of knowledge and
scrutiny of life processes (or biopolitics) and violence and theorize global liberalism as a n extremely effective formation, a
coherent and powerful Leviathan, where biopolitical tools and violence come
together to serve dominant classes or states political agendas. As I will show, Giorgio Agamben,

The distinction
as a heuristic and

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and Sergei Prozorov tend to embrace this position.10

between government
government

ality

ality

as a descriptive tool is central

for debating political agency

I argue that, notwithstanding their

scholars who use government ality as a descriptive tool rely

on the same ontological assumptions as the liberal order they
criticize and do move away from Foucaults focus on historical practices in order to privilege abstract
critique of liberalism,

theorizations. By using government ality as a description of liberalism or

capitalism instead of as a methodology of inquiry on powers contingent modalities and technologies, these scholars
tend to reify a substantialist ontology that ultimately reinforces a liberal conceptualization of subjects and power as standing in a
relation of externality and stifles the possibility of reimagining political agency on different grounds. Descriptive
governmentality constructs a critique of the liberal international order based upon an
ontological framework that presupposes that power and subjects are
entities possessing qualities that preexist relations. Power is imagined as a mighty totality, and subjects as
monads endowed with potentia. As a result, the problematique of political agency is portrayed as a quest for the liberation of a subject
ontologically gifted with a freedom that power inevitably oppresses. In this way, the conceptualization of political agency remains confined
within the liberal struggle of freedom and oppression. Even researchers who adopt a Foucauldian vocabulary end up falling into what Bigo
has identified as traps of political science and international relations theorizing, specifically essentialization and ahistoricism.

I argue

that

here
in order to reimagine political agency an ontological and epistemological turn is necessary, one that relies upon a relational
ontology. Relational ontological positions question adopting abstract stable entities, such as structures, power, or subjects, as
explanations for what happens. Instead, they explore how these pillar concepts of the Western political thought came to being, what kind of
practices they facilitate, consolidate and result from, what ambiguities and aporias they contain, and how they are transformed.12 Relational

modest conceptualizations of political agency and also

question the overwhelming stability of mighty totalities, such as for instance the international liberal order or the
state. In this framework , political action has more to do with playing
with the cards that are dealt to us to produce practical effects in specific
contexts than with building idealized new totalities where perfect conditions
might exist. The political ethics that results from non-substantialist ontological positions is one
that privileges modest engagements and weights political choices with regard to the
consequences and distributive effects they may produce in the context where they are made
rather than based upon their universal normative aspirations.13
ontologies nurture

2AC Northwestern
Reject their deterministic view of an all-encompassing
liberalism which crushes agency----focus on the
contingent outcome produced by the plan, not the
totalizing threat that its subsumed by their critique
Laura Zanotti 15, Associate Professor of Department of Political Science at
Virginia Tech, Re-Conceptualizing Political Agency beyond Universal
Normativity,
www.aspect.vt.edu/documents/workingpapers_zanottispring2015.pdf
Both in its individualistic version (i.e. a positions that focus on the parts attributes) and in its structuralist versions (i.e. positions that focus
on detecting the organizing principles of the whole) substantialism has underpinned the position of scholars belonging to very different
traditions, such as neorealist, neoliberals, post- Marxists as well as some post-modernists. Substantialist structuralism explains the whole in
terms of a few overarching principles that determine the parts behavior, and posits the parts as having given attributes before their
contextual interactions. Scholars such as Hardt and Negri (2000) and Giorgio Agamben (1998) borrow Michel Foucaults terminology but not
his methodology and embrace substantialist assumptions (Zanotti, 2013). While favoring divergent political aspirations, substantialist-

structuralist positions share an ontology that represents agents as monads endowed with fundamental
characteristics and qualities and that explains social phenomena and political dynamics through a few,
ahistorical overarching principles. Regardless of what the organizing principle of choice is (i.e. anarchy for Waltz,
Empire for Hardt and Negri, or the liberal biopolitical order for Agamben), it is reified as an
inescapable deterministic factor that shapes the behavior of actors and
structures the outcomes of their deeds. In a structural-substantialist
framework the structure always tends to reproduce itself, thus re-directing
and re-orienting actors political engagements towards preserving the status
quo. The ways out of the determinism of this script are few. Short of
changing the organizing principle of the system (as a conservative substantaliststructuralist like Waltz
would have it), totally withdrawing from the script of power (as Prozorov (2007), who embraces
Agamben suggested) or constituting th multitude as one to fight the mighty Empire (as Hardt and Negri would like it),
agents can do very little to change what is. In summary regardless of their
stated political preferences, these positions are politically conservative
because they stifle political imagination and straightjacket options
for action.
Chris Browns has recently called for a critical problem-solving theory, that is, theory that relates directly to real-world
problems but approaches them from the perspective of the underdog (Brown, 2013, 483). A change of perspective in the
direction Browns suggests demands in my view a reflection on the ethical and political implications of IR ontologies and
methodologies. In this paper I embrace Michel Foucaults methodology and political intent as my starting point for
exploring these connections. In Questions of Method, from which the excerpts above are taken, Michel Foucault (1991)
established a relation between the problem of truth and the political. In taking issues with some of the most dogmatic
streams of Marxism, Foucault defended an intellectual and political project centered on deconstructing what is taken for
granted instead of devising an overarching principle for explaining all that happens in society or for establishing a more
desirable social order. Foucault did not aspire to guaranteeing an appropriate outcome. Instead, he aimed at displacing
certainties and at participating in the difficult displacement of forms of sensibility.
I make my case on the connections between ontologies, epistemology and ethics by arching back to a debate that has become a classic in IR,
i.e. the one between the most famous proponent of neorealism, Kenneth Waltz and his critics. I continue by assessing critical realisms
contribution to a non-substantialist understanding of ontology, epistemology and ethics. I focus on the work of IR scholar Heikki Patomki
(2002) to argue that while maintaining an attachment to some overarching explanatory structural features, critical realism rejects
substantialism and adopts a relational ontology. In particular the notion of emergence challenges structuralist determinism. I continue by
addressing the more radical non-substantialist ontology proposed by the feminist realist philosopher of science Karen Barad (2007) and by

critical realism and, to a greater extent, Karen

Barads version of scientific realism open an ontological space where conceptualizations of
political agency and ethics rooted upon praxis and contingent
configurations (instead of universal normative abstractions) are possible. In
this vein, instead of relying upon abstract theorizations of what is right across time and places, ethical decisions
exploring the relevance of her notion of intra-agential agency for ethics. Both

must include practical assessments of what is possible under

specific circumstances, as well as gauge political consequences and
distributional effects. This position leads to a reconfiguration of political
agency that moves away from universal prescriptions rooted upon universal
normativity, and sees ethics as a method or an attitude that embraces
uncertainty and mutable contingent conditions rather than static recipes for
action.

2NC/2NC Baudrillard
Why speak to someone when you can just communicate?
Their attempt to bracket content and form is a lure of
control and re-produces social conformity. Their lust for
transparent communication eviscerates the seductive joy
of language while it vacates the possibility of political
confrontation at the same time.
Baudrillard 09. Jean Baudrillard, The Vanishing Point of Communication
in Jean Baudrillard: Fatal Theories, Edited by David B. Clarke, Marcus A. Doel,
William Merrin and Richard G. SmithThis text is based on a transcript of a
lecture delivered in English by Jean Baudrillard to the Department of Social
Sciences, Loughborough University, UK, New York:Routledge, pg. 15-23

Everything about communication seems to have been said, but actually

nothing has been. Almost nothing except the stereotypes or the technological
fantasies of the experts in the matter. Something really theoretical is lacking.
Let us refer to what happened in the theoretical field of production: whereas
the classical economists spoke of a natural philosophy of wealth and
exchange, Marx came along and spoke of production, of productivity and
mode of production it was a theoretical revolution. The same later with the
theory of consumption: whereas the ideologists of consumption spoke of
human needs and pure commodities, we began to speak of consumption as a
structural and differential logic of signs. This was something radically
different, and initiated a totally new analysis. And now with the sphere of
communication: we only hear about information, message, interaction and so
on. But what is the real meaning, the real finality of all that? At this moment
we dont have the key. We didnt get the equivalent of the theoretical leap
forward in the field of production and consumption, the radical viewpoint
which would change the very terms of the problem, allowing us to speak of
communication and information in terms other than those of evidence and
apologia. If it is so difficult to abstract the logic of communication from its
apologia, then this is because communication and information are first of all
involved in their own operation, invested in their own effects, immersed in
their own spectacle. So it is difficult to extract their reality from their
simulation. The whole complex has succeeded today as a dominant system of
values, and as a collective operational network at the same time. But the
point is: are we really communicating or isnt it rather the problem of our
whole society expanding, transcending, exhausting itself in the fiction of
communication? Other generations grew up with the myth of production.
Saint-Simonian and proto-capitalistic utopias marked out a radiant future for
the human race according to this prospective conception. And a sort of
political and economical mysticism continues to push us towards maximal
production with the prospect [la perspective] of maximal wealth and social

comfort however cruelly smashed by the world crisis of 1929 and the latent
crisis in all industrial countries ever since. Now we know that an excess of
production may be obnoxious and fatal. Even consumption may reverse its
finality. Ever-growing consumption of therapies and healthcare for example
may turn out to be a catastrophe for social security and for our health itself.2
The consumption of cultural goods, or of sexual pleasure, or of any
commodity considered as a quantitative function, reveals itself to be an
absurdity. The same paradoxical consequence is true for communication and
information. We are at the critical limit where all effects can be reversed and
communication vanishes into an excess of communication. All functions of
transparency and fluidity in social relations end in a useless
complexity and a collective suffocation. This vanishing point is not a
prediction, it is a pure presumption, but a logical one, or rather a tautological
one describing communication and information as a great tautological
operation, as a great self-fulfilling prophecy. First of all: it isnt true that men
have always communicated since they first spoke to each other and lived in
society. It is not even true that there have been messages and information
ever since men were connected by language. This anthropological
extrapolation, which tends to extend the principle of communication back
through the ages and to give it an aboriginal status, is entirely misleading. It
occults the very moment when communication began, in the technical sense
of the word (communication is a technology), when we began to be involved
and engaged in a collective need for communication. It occults the specificity
of communication as a modern invention, as a new mode of production and
circulation of speech, connected to the media and the technology of media.
Conversely: just as it has not always existed, perhaps also communication will
not exist forever; neither is information an extra-temporal notion maybe
both will last as long as the words to speak of them. The terminological point
is crucial. Things exist only when there is a determination of them, a sign
which testifies, a warrant of their meaning and credibility. Whoever had the
idea of communicating in ancient societies, in tribes, in villages, in families?
Neither the word nor the concept existed, the question doesnt make any
sense. People dont need to communicate, because they just speak to one
another. Why communicate when it is so easy to speak to each other? So, my
presupposition is: just as the failure [dfaillance] of the real is the basis for
the reality principle, so the failure of speech and symbolic exchange is the
basis for the principle of communication. So the basic status, the basic
definition of communication is negative. It is just like what Apollinaire says of
time: if you are talking about it, it is because it doesnt exist any more
When we speak of communication, it is because there is no communication
any more. The social body is no longer conductive, relations are no longer
regulated by informal consensus, the communion of meaning [le sens] is lost.
That is why we must produce a formal apparatus, a collective artefact, a huge
network of information that assumes the circulation of meaning. A new
specific function is born, reflected in a code, in numerous institutions, and
then all at once emerge the techniques of communication, and then the
sciences of communication, all the sophistries, all the casuistries, all the

social and political complexity of communication. The simplest exchanges

must transit through multiple codes and feedback, which change their sense.
Everything becomes a message (according to McLuhan,3 this pompous and
ridiculous term sounds like massage, like manipulation ). With the message,
language becomes a pure medium of communication , according to the
structuralist and functionalist analysis. Emitter, receiver, code, context,
contact, message: language is altered in its substance by this system of
formalization, it is reduced to a one-dimensional function , according to the
one-dimensional process of life. What was an act has become an operation.
Speech was an act, communication is an operation, and along with it goes the
operation of social life. Language is a form, but communication is a
performance. Then it becomes more and more efficient [performant], easier
and easier, faster and faster, but at the same time the system becomes
heavier and heavier, more and more institutionalized, less and less
conductive. (The very term communication has a bureaucratic heaviness, it
has all the beauty of a prosthetic mechanism.) We must never forget this
when confronting the structure of communication: its very essence is noncommunication. Its horizon is negative, and this has consequences for the
future of all human relations. Communication became this strange structure
where things (and beings) do not touch each other, but exchange their
kinetic, caloric, erotic and informational energy through contiguity, just like
molecules. Through contiguity, but without contact, always being at a
distance from each other. Take highway cloverleaves. Nothing is more
beautiful than two roads crossing each other, but it is dangerous as an
accident risk so is the crossing of glances or the exchange of words, human
words, as a seduction risk. So we invented traffic infrastructures where cars
can move without crossing each other, we invented structures of relations
where humans can communicate without passing each other, without
touching each other, without looking at each other. We are all commuters,
and the condition for the fluidity of information, for the fluidity of transit, will
be the abduction of all senses, of looking, of touching, of smelling, of all the
potential violence of exchange. It is the same with our mediatized and
computerized human relations. We interact without touching each other,
interlocute without speaking to each other, interface without seeing each
other. Here is something really bizarre. The strangeness of a blank attraction,
of a blank interaction, the inseparability of particles at distances of lightyears. They talk about this a lot in physics. It seems that our social structure
too is oriented towards this model, in a form of electronic solidarity. Just by
chance we are discovering this in physics at the very moment when we are
having the same experience in everyday life. Permeability to all images, to all
messages, to all networks submission to the virality of signs, to the
epidemics of value, to the multiplicity of codes tactility, digitality, contact,
contiguity, contagion, irradiation and chain reaction: what gets lost in this
new ritual of transparency and interaction is both the singularity of the self,
and the singularity of the other. That is, the irreducibility of the subject, and
the irreducibility of the object. Interaction, communication describe the
vanishing point of the subject, of its secret, of its desire, of its Unheimlichkeit

(strangeness to itself). But it is the vanishing point of the other as well, of

transfer and challenge; of strangeness and seduction all the fascination of
alterity, of the external quality of the other, all dual and dialectical forms of
relationship get lost, for all these forms presuppose distance, contradiction,
tension or intensity, quite the contrary of the superficial fluidity of the
electronic screen of communication. Another point is the question of time, of
the suspension of time as well as the suspending of words, or of activity. In an
interactive field there is no place for silence, for idleness, for absence. There
is no stasis, no vacation, no rest only metastasis along the networks,
ramifications of time and space. No dead time, no distraction, no dreamtime:
time is no longer your enemy, nor your luxury (you cannot spend it
uselessly). It is not your master or your slave: it is your partner, and it
resolves itself without past or future, in exhausting instantaneity. For it must
be instantaneous in order to work. And images and messages must follow
one another, without discontinuity. No break, no syncope, no silence. A text
may be silent, it may absorb or produce silence in its words images, at least
media-images, cannot. Silence on television is a scandal. That is why these
lapses or silences on the screen are so significant, significant of nothing
maybe, except the rupture of communication, but precisely this suspense is
delightful, inasmuch as it makes obvious that all these non-stop images, this
intensive information, is nothing but an artificial scenario, a pure fiction that
protects us from the void the void of the screen, of course, but also the void
of our mental screen. The scene of a man sitting and staring at his empty
television screen, on a strike day, will be one of the most beautiful and
impressive anthropological images of the end of the twentieth century. In the
interactive social life, it is prohibited to disconnect yourself; prohibited even
on your deathbed to disconnect the tubes and wires. The scandal is not so
much the offence against life (nobody cares) as the attack on the network, on
medicine and the technological apparatus of survival, which must first take
care of its own survival. The principle of communication implies the absolute
moral obligation not so much to be involved as to remain connected. This
constitutes of course a possibility of being alienated by the whole system of
interconnection, of being controlled even in your private lif e. But much more
alienating, much more destabilizing is the reciprocal control given to you over
the external world. The first danger is well known as the Big Brother story
the common fear of total control. But the second is more sophisticated and
perverse. By using all the available screens and videos and telematic
possibilities (including sex [lamour] by telephone), it makes the external
world superfluous, it makes all human presence, physical or linguistic,
superfluous. All-out communication accentuates the involution into a microuniverse, with no reason to escape any more . A carceral niche with video
walls. The fact that someone knew everything about you was frightening. But
today, the best way of neutralizing, of cancellating someone is not to know
everything about him, it is to give him the means of knowing everything
about everything and especially about himself. You no longer neutralize him
by repression and control, you neutralize him through information and
communication. You paralyse him much better by excess than by deprivation

of information, since you enchain him to the pure obligation of being more
and more connected to himself, more and more closely connected to the
screen, in restless circularity and autoreferentiality, as an integrated network.
At this point, the question of liberty doesnt make sense any more. Our
sovereignty is diffracted along the technical and mental lines of parasitic
ramifications. For this process happens not only externally, in the operational
network of institutions and programmes, but also internally, in the labyrinth
of our brain and our body. To put it another way: the exoteric complex of
communication, this huge apparatus deployed on the surface of our societies,
goes along with an esoteric complex that rules the intimacy of each
individual. Through this complex, through all techniques of introspection,
through psychology, biology and medicine, man has learned to communicate
with himself, to deal with himself as a partner, to interface with himself. He
passed from the stage of passion and destiny to the stage of calculating and
negotiating his own life, dealing with all the information about it, just like the
way a computer operates. The sexual discourse itself is an operational one.
Sexual pleasure becomes an act of communication (you receive me, I receive
you), we exchange it as an interactive performance. To enjoy without
communication, without reciprocal feedback, is a scandal. Maybe
communications machines feel pleasure [jouissent] too we dont know, and
well probably never know. But if we imagine pleasure-machines, they can
only act, or interact, as computing networks. In fact, these machines exist
right now: they are our own bodies, induced to feel pleasure [jouir] again by
all the most subtle cosmetic and exultative techniques. Exactly as, sitting in
front of his computer or word-processor, he affords himself the spectacle of
his brain and his intelligence, man affords himself the spectacle of his sexual
fantasies as he sits in front of his Minitel rose (this term refers to a computer
network, connected with the telephone system, and freely available to every
home rose refers to the type of messages, sweet ones). He exorcises
sexual fantasies or intelligence in the interface with the machine. The other,
the sexual or cognitive interlocutor, is never really face-to-face. Only the
screen, which is the point of interface, is invested, and this interactive screen
transforms the process of communication into a process of commutation that
is in a process of reversibility between two identical things. Within the screen
there is no transcendence as there is for the mirror (you cannot get beyond
the screen as you can pass through the mirror), and then the Other is
virtually the same Otherness is virtually squatted by the machine. And so
the archetype of modern communication would be this one of the Minitel
rose: people make contact via the screen, then pass to talking on the
telephone, then face-to-face, and then what? They return to the telephone
Well call each other and then go back to the Minitel exchange so much
more erotic, because esoteric and transparent, a pure form of
communication, with the abstract presence of the screen and its electronic
text, as a new Platonic cave, where one can watch the shadows of carnal
pleasure passing by. Why speak to each other when it is so easy to
communicate? We used to live in the fantasy of the mirror, of the divided self

and alienation. We now live in the fantasy of the screen, of the interface, of
contiguity and networks.

The proliferation of meaning and consciousness raising

rely on a fantasy of communication which implodes under
its own weight. More knowledge does not change reality.
Baudrillard 2000. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, available
online: /http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/simulacra-andsimulations-viii-the-implosion-of-meaning-in-the-media/
We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and
less meaning. Consider three hypotheses.
Either information produces meaning (a negentropic factor), but cannot make
up for the brutal loss of signification in every domain. Despite efforts to
reinject message and content, meaning is lost and devoured faster
than it can be reinjected. In this case, one must appeal to a base
productivity to replace failing media. This is the whole ideology of free
speech, of media broken down into innumerable individual cells of
transmission, that is, into "antimedia" (pirate radio, etc.).
Or information has nothing to do with signification. It is something else, an
operational model of another order, outside meaning and of the circulation of
meaning strictly speaking. This is Shannon's hypothesis: a sphere of
information that is purely functional, a technical medium that does not imply
any finality of meaning, and thus should also not be implicated in a value
judgment. A kind of code, like the genetic code: it is what it is, it functions as
it does, meaning is something else that in a sense comes after the fact, as it
does for Monod in Chance and Necessity. In this case, there would simply be
no significant relation between the inflation of information and the deflation
of meaning. Or, very much on the contrary, there is a rigorous and necessary
correlation between the two, to the extent that information is directly
destructive of meaning and signification, or that it neutralizes them. The loss
of meaning is directly linked to the dissolving, dissuasive action of
information, the media, and the mass media.
The third hypothesis is the most interesting but flies in the face of every
commonly held opinion. Everywhere socialization is measured by the
exposure to media messages. Whoever is underexposed to the
media is desocialized or virtually asocial. Everywhere information is
thought to produce an accelerated circulation of meaning, a plus
value of meaning homologous to the economic one that results from
the accelerated rotation of capital. Information is thought to create
communication, and even if the waste is enormous, a general consensus
would have it that nevertheless, as a whole, there be an excess of meaning,
which is redistributed in all the interstices of the social - just as consensus
would have it that material production, despite its dysfunctions and
irrationalities, opens onto an excess of wealth and social purpose. We are all
complicitous in this myth. It is the alpha and omega of our

modernity, without which the credibility of our social organization

would collapse. Well, the fact is that it is collapsing, and for this very
reason: because where we think that information produces meaning,
the opposite occurs.
Information devours its own content. It devours communication and
the social. And for two reasons.
1. Rather than creating communication, it exhausts itself in the act
of staging communication. Rather than producing meaning, it
exhausts itself in the staging of meaning. A gigantic process of
simulation that is very familiar. The nondirective interview, speech,
listeners who call in, participation at every level, blackmail through
speech: "You are concerned, you are the event, etc." More and more
information is invaded by this kind of phantom content, this
homeopathic grafting, this awakening dream of communication. A
circular arrangement through which one stages the desire of the
audience, the antitheater of communication, which, as one knows, is
never anything but the recycling in the negative of the traditional
institution, the integrated circuit of the negative. Immense energies
are deployed to hold this simulacrum at bay, to avoid the brutal
desimulation that would confront us in the face of the obvious
reality of a radical loss of meaning.
It is useless to ask if it is the loss of communication that produces this
escalation in the simulacrum, or whether it is the simulacrum that is there
first for dissuasive ends, to short-circuit in advance any possibility of
communication (precession of the model that calls an end to the real).
Useless to ask which is the first term, there is none, it is a circular process
- that of simulation, that of the hyperreal. The hyperreality of
communication and of meaning. More real than the real, that is how
the real is abolished. Thus not only communication but the social
functions in a closed circuit, as a lure - to which the force of myth is
attached. Belief, faith in information attach themselves to this
tautological proof that the system gives of itself by doubling the
signs of an unlocatable reality.
But one can believe that this belief is as ambiguous as that which was
attached to myths in ancient societies. One both believes and doesn't. One
does not ask oneself, "I know very well, but still." A sort of inverse simulation
in the masses, in each one of us, corresponds to this simulation of meaning
and of communication in which this system encloses us. To this tautology of
the system the masses respond with ambivalence, to deterrence they
respond with disaffection, or with an always enigmatic belief. Myth exists, but
one must guard against thinking that people believe in it: this is the trap of
critical thinking that can only be exercised if it presupposes the naivete and
stupidity of the masses.
2. Behind this exacerbated mise-en-scne of communication, the mass
media, the pressure of information pursues an irresistible
destructuration of the social. Thus information dissolves meaning
and dissolves the social, in a sort of nebulous state dedicated not to
a surplus of innovation, but, on the contrary, to total entropy.*1 Thus
the media are producers not of socialization, but of exactly the opposite, of
the implosion of the social in the masses. And this is only the macroscopic

extension of the implosion of meaning at the microscopic level of the sign.

This implosion should be analyzed according to McLuhan's formula, the
medium is the message, the consequences of which have yet to be
exhausted.
That means that all contents of meaning are absorbed in the only
dominant form of the medium. Only the medium can make an event whatever the contents, whether they are conformist or subversive. A
serious problem for all counterinformation, pirate radios, antimedia,
etc. But there is something even more serious, which McLuhan himself did
not see. Because beyond this neutralization of all content, one could still
expect to manipulate the medium in its form and to transform the real by
using the impact of the medium as form. If all the content is wiped out, there
is perhaps still a subversive, revolutionary use value of the medium as such.
That is - and this is where McLuhan's formula leads, pushed to its limit - there
is not only an implosion of the message in the medium, there is, in the same
movement, the implosion of the medium itself in the real, the implosion of
the medium and of the real in a sort of hyperreal nebula, in which even the
definition and distinct action of the medium can no longer be determined.
Even the "traditional" status of the media themselves, characteristic of
modernity, is put in question. McLuhan's formula, the medium is the
message, which is the key formula of the era of simulation (the medium is the
message - the sender is the receiver - the circularity of all poles - the end of
panoptic and perspectival space - such is the alpha and omega of our
modernity), this very formula must be imagined at its limit where, after all the
contents and messages have been volatilized in the medium, it is the
medium itself that is volatilized as such. Fundamentally, it is still the message
that lends credibility to the medium, that gives the medium its determined,
distinct status as the intermediary of communication. Without a message, the
medium also falls into the indefinite state characteristic of all our great
systems of judgment and value. A single model, whose efficacy is immediate,
simultaneously generates the message, the medium, and the "real." Finally,
the medium is the message not only signifies the end of the
message, but also the end of the medium. There are no more media
in the literal sense of the word (I'm speaking particularly of electronic
mass media) - that is, of a mediating power between one reality and another,
between one state of the real and another. Neither in content, nor in form.
Strictly, this is what implosion signifies. The absorption of one pole into
another, the short-circuiting between poles of every differential system of
meaning, the erasure of distinct terms and oppositions, including that of the
medium and of the real - thus the impossibility of any mediation, of any
dialectical intervention between the two or from one to the other. Circularity
of all media effects. Hence the impossibility of meaning in the literal sense of
a unilateral vector that goes from one pole to another. One must envisage
this critical but original situation at its very limit: it is the only one left us. It
is useless to dream of revolution through content, useless to dream
of a revelation through form, because the medium and the real are
now in a single nebula whose truth is indecipherable.
The fact of this implosion of contents, of the absorption of meaning, of the
evanescence of the medium itself, of the reabsorption of every dialectic of
communication in a total circularity of the model, of the implosion of the

social in the masses, may seem catastrophic and desperate. But this is only
the case in light of the idealism that dominates our whole view of
information. We all live by a passionate idealism of meaning and of
communication, by an idealism of communication through meaning,
and, from this perspective, it is truly the catastrophe of meaning
that lies in wait for us. But one must realize that "catastrophe" has this
"catastrophic" meaning of end and annihilation only in relation to a linear
vision of accumulation, of productive finality, imposed on us by the system.
Etymologically, the term itself only signifies the curvature, the winding down
to the bottom of a cycle that leads to what one could call the "horizon of the
event," to an impassable horizon of meaning: beyond that nothing takes
place that has meaning for us - but it suffices to get out of this ultimatum of
meaning in order for the catastrophe itself to no longer seem like a final and
nihilistic day of reckoning, such as it functions in our contemporary imaginary.
Beyond meaning, there is the fascination that results from the neutralization
and the implosion of meaning. Beyond the horizon of the social, there are the
masses, which result from the neutralization and the implosion of the social.
What is essential today is to evaluate this double challenge the challenge of
the masses to meaning and their silence (which is not at all a passive
resistance) - the challenge to meaning that comes from the media and its
fascination. All the marginal, alternative efforts to revive meaning are
secondary in relation to that challenge.
Evidently, there is a paradox in this inextricable conjunction of the masses
and the media: do the media neutralize meaning and produce unformed
[informe] or informed [informe] masses, or is it the masses who victoriously
resist the media by directing or absorbing all the messages that the media
produce without responding to them? Sometime ago, in "Requiem for the
Media," I analyzed and condemned the media as the institution of an
irreversible model of communication without a response. But today? This
absence of a response can no longer be understood at all as a strategy of
power, but as a counterstrategy of the masses themselves when they
encounter power. What then? Are the mass media on the side of power in the
manipulation of the masses, or are they on the side of the masses in the
liquidation of meaning, in the violence perpetrated on meaning, and in
fascination? Is it the media that induce fascination in the masses, or is it the
masses who direct the media into the spectacle? Mogadishu-Stammheim: the
media make themselves into the vehicle of the moral condemnation of
terrorism and of the exploitation of fear for political ends, but simultaneously,
in the most complete ambiguity, they propagate the brutal charm of the
terrorist act, they are themselves terrorists, insofar as they themselves march
to the tune of seduction (cf. Umberto Eco on this eternal moral dilemma: how
can one not speak of terrorism, how can one find a good use of the media there is none). The media carry meaning and countermeaning, they
manipulate in all directions at once, nothing can control this
process, they are the vehicle for the simulation internal to the system and
the simulation that destroys the system, according to an absolutely Mobian
and circular logic - and it is exactly like this. There is no alternative to this, no
logical resolution. Only a logical exacerbation and a catastrophic resolution.
With one caution. We are face to face with this system in a double situation
and insoluble double bind - exactly like children faced with the demands of

the adult world. Children are simultaneously required to constitute

themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to
constitute themselves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects. The
child resists on all levels, and to a contradictory demand he responds with a
double strategy. To the demand of being an object, he opposes all the
practices of disobedience, of revolt, of emancipation; in short, a total claim to
subjecthood. To the demand of being a subject he opposes, just as
obstinately and efficaciously, an object's resistance, that is to say, exactly the
opposite: childishness, hyperconformism, total dependence, passivity, idiocy.
Neither strategy has more objective value than the other. The subjectresistance is today unilaterally valorized and viewed as positive - just as in
the political sphere only the practices of freedom, emancipation,
expression, and the constitution of a political subject are seen as
valuable and subversive. But this is to ignore the equal, and without
a doubt superior, impact of all the object practices, of the
renunciation of the subject position and of meaning - precisely the
practices of the masses - that we bury under the derisory terms of
alienation and passivity. The liberating practices respond to one of
the aspects of the system, to the constant ultimatum we are given
to constitute ourselves as pure objects, but they do not respond at
all to the other demand, that of constituting ourselves as subjects,
of liberating ourselves, expressing ourselves at whatever cost, of
voting, producing, deciding, speaking, participating, playing the
game - a form of blackmail and ultimatum just as serious as the
other, even more serious today. To a system whose argument is
oppression and repression, the strategic resistance is the liberating
claim of subjecthood. But this strategy is more reflective of the
earlier phase of the system, and even if we are still confronted with
it, it is no longer the strategic terrain: the current argument of the
system is to maximize speech, the maximum production of meaning.
Thus the strategic resistance is that of the refusal of meaning and of
the spoken word - or of the hyperconformist simulation of the very
mechanisms of the system, which is a form of refusal and of non-reception. It
is the strategy of the masses: it is equivalent to returning to the system its
own logic by doubling it, to reflecting meaning, like a mirror, without
absorbing it. This strategy (if one can still speak of strategy) prevails today,
because it was ushered in by that phase of the system which prevails.
To choose the wrong strategy is a serious matter. All the movements that
only play on liberation, emancipation, on the resurrection of a
subject of history, of the group, of the word based on "consciousness
raising," indeed a "raising of the unconscious" of subjects and of the
masses, do not see that they are going in the direction of the
system, whose imperative today is precisely the overproduction and
regeneration of meaning and of speech.

2AC/2NC Necropolitics
Their accession to liberal activism inculcates the
perfection of the necropolitical state capable of total
lawfarethe 1AC fails to understand that the space
created for the discussion rights of biopolitical society in
the West are a simulacra of civil society to sustain
massive death on a global scale in the necropolitical east
Comaroff and Comaroff 07. John Comaroff, Professor of African and
African American Studies and of Anthropology, Oppenheimer Fellow in African
Studies at at Harvard, and Jean Comaroff, Professor of African and African
American Studies and of Anthropology, Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies
also at Harvard, Law and disorder in the postcolony, Social
Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2007) 15, pg. 144

Nor is it just the politics of the present that are being judicialised. As we said
earlier, the past, too, is being fought out in the courts. Britain, for example, is
currently being sued for acts of atrocity in its African empire (Anderson 2005;
Elkins 2005): for having killed local leaders, unlawfully alienated territory
from one African people to another, and so on.33 By these means is
colonialism itself rendered criminal. Hauled before a judge, history is made to
submit to the scales of justice at the behest of those who suffered it. And to
be reduced to a cash equivalent, payable as the official tender of damage,
dispossession, loss, trauma. What imperialism is being indicted for, above all,
is its commission of lawfare: the use of its own penal codes, its
administrative procedures, its states of emergency, its charters and
mandates and warrants, to discipline its subjects by means of violence made
legible and legal by its own sovereign word. Also, to commit its own ever-socivilised forms of kleptocracy.
Lawfare the resort to legal instruments, to the violence inherent in the law,
to commit acts of political coercion, even erasure (Comaroff 2001) is equally
marked in postcolonies. As a species of political displacement, it becomes
most visible when those who serve the state conjure with legalities to act
against its citizens. Most infamous recently is Zimbabwe, where the Mugabe
regime has consistently passed laws to justify the coercive silencing of its
critics. Operation Murambatsvina, Drive Out Trash, which has forced political
opponents out of urban areas under the banner of slum clearance has
recently taken this practice to unprecedented depths. Murambatsvina, says
the government, is merely an application of the law of the land to raze
dangerous illegal structures.
Lawfare34 may be limited or it may reduce people to bare life; in Zimbabwe,
it has mutated into a necropolitics with a rising body count. But it
always seeks to launder visceral power in a wash of legitimacy as it is

deployed to strengthen the sinews of state or enlarge the capillaries of

capital. Hence Benjamins (1978) thesis that the law originates in violence
and lives by violent means; that the legal and the lethal animate one
another. Of course, in 1919 Benjamin could not have envisaged the
possibility that lawfare might also be a weapon of the weak, turning authority
back on itself by commissioning courts to make claims for resources,
recognition, voice, integrity, sovereignty.
But this still does not lay to rest the key questions: Why the fetishism of
legalities? What are its implications for the play of Law and Dis/order in the
postcolony? And are postcolonies different in this respect from other nationstates?

The turn to law

would seem to arise directly out of growing
anxieties about lawlessness. But this does not
explain the displacement of the political into the
legal or the turn to the courts to resolve an ever
greater range of wrongs. The fetishism, in short, runs deeper than
The answer to the first question looks obvious.

purely a concern with crime. It has to do with the very constitution of the
postcolonial polity. Late modernist nationhood, it appears, is undergoing an
epochal move away from the ideal of cultural homogeneity: a nervous, often
xenophobic shift toward heterogeneity (Anderson 1983). The rise of
neoliberalism with its impact on population flows, on the dispersion of
cultural practices, on geographies of production and accumulation has
heightened this, especially in former colonies, which were erected from the
first on difference. And difference begets more law. Why? Because, with
growing heterodoxy, legal instruments appear to offer a means of
commensuration (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000): a repertoire of
standardised terms and practices that permit the negotiation of values,
beliefs, ideals and interests across otherwise intransitive lines of cleavage.
Hence the flight into a constitutionalism that explicitly embraces
heterogeneity in highly individualistic, universalistic Bills of Rights, even
where states are paying less and less of the bills. Hence the effort to make
human rights into an ever more global, ever more authoritative discourse.
But there is something else at work too. A well-recognised corollary of the
neoliberal turn, recall, has been the outsourcing by states of many of the
conventional operations of governance, including those, like health services,
policing and the conduct of war, integral to the management of life itself.
Bureaucracies do retain some of their old functions, of course. But most 21st
century governments have reduced their administrative reach, entrusting
ever more to the market and delegating ever more responsibility to citizens
as individuals, as volunteers, as classes of actor, social or legal. Under these
conditions, especially where the threat of disorder seems immanent, civil law
presents itself as a more or less effective weapon of the weak, the strong and

everyone in between. Which, in turn, exacerbates the resort to lawfare.

The court has become a utopic site to which human agency may turn for
a medium in which to pursue its ends. This, once again, is particularly so
in postcolonies, where bureaucracies and bourgeoisies were not elaborate to
begin with; and in which heterogeneity had to be negotiated from the start.
Put all this together and the fetishism of the law seems over-determined.
Not only is public life becoming more legalistic, but so, in regulating their own
affairs and in dealing with others, are communities within the nation-state:
cultural communities, religious communities, corporate communities,
residential communities, communities of interest, even outlaw communities.
Everything, it seems, exists here in the shadow of the law. Which also
makes it unsurprising that a culture of legality should saturate not just civil
order but also its criminal undersides. Take another example from South
Africa, where organised crime appropriates, re-commissions and counterfeits
the means and ends of both the state and the market. The gangs on the Cape
Flats in Cape Town mimic the business world, having become a lumpen standin for those excluded from the national economy (Standing 2003). For their
tax-paying clients, those gangs take on the positive functions of government,
not least security provision. Illicit corporations of this sort across the
postcolonial world often have shadow judicial personnel and convene courts
to try offenders against the persons, property and social order over which
they exert sovereignty. They also provide the policing that the state either
has stopped supplying or has outsourced to the private sector. Some have
constitutions. A few are even structured as franchises and, significantly, are
said to offer alternative citizenship to their members.35 Charles Tilly (1985)
once suggested, famously, that modern states operate much like organised
crime. These days, organised crime is operating ever more like states.
Self-evidently, the counterfeiting of a culture of legality by the criminal
underworld feeds the dialectic of law and disorder. After all, once government
outsources its policing services and franchises force, and once outlaw
organisations shadow the state by providing protection and dispensing
justice, social order itself becomes like a hall of mirrors. What is more,
this dialectic has its own geography. A geography of discontinuous,
overlapping sovereignties.
We said a moment ago that communities of all kinds have become ever more
legalistic in regulating their affairs; it is often in the process of so doing, in
fact, that they become communities at all, the act of judicialisation being also
an act of objectification. Herein lies their will to sovereignty, which we take to
connote the exercise of autonomous control over the lives, deaths and
conditions of existence of those who fall within its purview and the
extension over them of the jurisdiction of some kind of law.
Lawmaking, to cite Benjamin (1978: 295) yet again, is power making.
But power is the principal of all lawmaking. In sum, to transform itself into
sovereign authority, power demands an architecture of legalities. Or
their simulacra.