Before Method: Analytic Tactics to Decipher the Global- An Argument and Its Responses,

Part II
Author(s): Saskia Sassen
Source: The Pluralist, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Fall 2013), pp. 101-112
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the Society for the Advancement
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Before Method:
Analytic Tactics to Decipher the Global—
An Argument and Its Responses, Part II
saskia sassen
Columbia University

Professor Hickman—It is not structural.

It is functional.
Many of Hickman’s comments focus on the analytics I develop in my book on
territory, authority, and rights (Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights; cited here-
after as TAR). Thus it is this discussion that I focus on here. Hickman writes:
As I understand her work, then, Sassen is advancing a type of transh-
istorical account . . . . [F]or Sassen territory, authority and rights are
“transhistorical components present in almost all societies.” . . . Does
this amount to the invocation of a “grand historical narrative,” or is it
merely a generalization on existing cases? More specifically, how can
this transhistorical claim be operationalized for those such as educators,
engineers, scientists, financiers, and public officials, for example, who
are charged with thinking critically about our problematic present and
our common future? (Hickman, “Saskia Sassen” 91–92)
Responding to these questions, I would say that while I use the term “transh-
istorical” to characterize territory, authority, and rights, it is in a specific sense:
they are present in all complex forms of socio-political organization, from
nomadic tribes to nation-states, but they do so in highly variable shapes and
combinations. Because they are so widely present in very diverse places and
times, and further, because they have been assembled in such diverse ways,
they can serve as windows, as flashlights by which to explore different epochs.
The assumption is that their variability gives us some sort of knowledge not
only about themselves but also about a larger complex socio-political reality.
In that sense, they can be heuristic.
Hickman also writes:

the plur alist  Volume 8, Number 3 Fall 2013 : pp. 101–112 101

©2013 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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102 the pluralist  8 : 3  2013

In the discussion that followed her presentation, I asked whether her

use of the term “assemblage” is linked to that of Bruno Latour, who
famously described Paris as an “assemblage” of various numbers of
various things—kiosks, metro stops, hotels, churches, parks, bistros,
pissoirs, and so on. Sassen replied that her notion of assemblage is
instead rooted in the work of Gilles Deleuze. I hope that in her reply
to these comments, she will address that strand of influence, since the
notion of assemblage plays an important part in her project. In any
event, however, it is not so much the nation-state that is at issue for
Sassen, but its components, its capabilities, and the ways that they are
disassembled and reassembled at various times and places. It is in this
sense that she appears to be on guard against reification either of the
state or of globalization. This should receive considerable sympathy
among self-described pragmatists who are readers of this journal. (Hick-
man, “Saskia Sassen” 92)
I use the term “assemblage” as an analytic instrument that allows me
to detect an organizational format that deborders established institutional
domains—the economy, the polity, the state, society—and recover the con-
tingency of how each of these is constituted, and the fact that across time
and place, they were constituted differently. Thus it is not Latour’s assem-
blage—my assemblage has to work hard at producing meaning. Nor is it
Deleuze’s assemblage—mine is less theorized (see Sassen, TAR 5n1). My effort
is to recover the formation of arrangements that include elements of each or
several of these institutions in specific ways, depending on the period and
place. Analytically, using assemblages allows me to detect and construct for-
mations that include only elements of established institutions. In this regard,
an assemblage cannot be reduced to an institution (the state, the economy,
etc.), but rather contains elements of diverse institutions or other identifiable
entities, which cohere through specific, often situated dynamics or logics.
Territory, authority, and rights each are transhistorical in the sense that
they are basic building blocks, whether formalized and recognized, or in-
formal but recognized. In this sense the most controversial is the notion of
rights—once, formally speaking, the presumption of the divine sovereign.
But I argue that if one goes digging into specific historiographies, one can
detect a foundational awareness of something akin to what today we repre-
sent as rights. Rights, if we think about it, is a concept that takes on variable
meanings even within a given type of statehood, such as liberal democracies
or communism. Yet, in the end, there is a core meaning across this variability.
Hickman writes: “Since capabilities appear to function for Sassen as orga-
nizational media, that is, the media for organizational logics (of which more

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sassen : Before Method, Part II 103

later), it seems appropriate to ask if they follow the pattern discerned by some
media theorists that might be termed ‘containment forward’” (Hickman,
“Saskia Sassen” 94). Generically put, as per this final sentence, I would agree.
But more specifically, I find that this is a very compelling idea, one I had not
thought about (see Hickman, Philosophical Tools for Technological Culture.)
I work on digital technology, but that is a different field of knowledge, by
now, from McLuhan’s focus on media (see, e.g., Sassen, “Interactions”). So I
am inclined to posit that what Hickman sees is indeed one version of what
I posit. At the same time, I would say it is one mode but does not exhaust
all possible modes. I am thereby also leaving open emergent or not yet de-
veloped modes. As the technical increasingly not only inhabits but actually
partly constitutes all our key domains—from the material to the imagined—I
would assume that we will see new constitutive functions for the technical
in the shaping of epochs, their transitions, and their declines.
Hickman asks: “So how should we understand this constitutive element
going forward? Should we understand a tipping point as the predictable con-
junction of necessary and sufficient conditions?” (Hickman, “Saskia Sassen”
94). I do not think it should be understood as “the predictable conjunction
of necessary and sufficient conditions.” I would agree that it is a tool, and
hence we cannot read too much into it. I have found it useful as a tool to
understand what was the X that made a larger whole take on a new valence
or become a new type of vector. Its utility in my kind of research is partly
due to the profound messiness, incompleteness, and contradictory extant
accounts about some of the realities I research.
Further, as Hickman writes, “[h]indsight is not even now entirely free of
dispute regarding tipping points of changes” (Hickman, “Saskia Sassen” 93).
Yes, there is ambiguity in the concept and in its contribution to clarifying a
process. Identifying a tipping point is troublesome, and future histories and
geographies may well point to the dubious marking of many much-accepted
tipping points. One can think of the different perspectives that studies or-
ganized by the category “coloniality” (Quijano) would make in identifying
tipping points.
Hickman continues: “So I wonder how, in Sassen’s account, are we to
operationalize this notion in ways that allow us to prepare for the future?”
(Hickman, “Saskia Sassen” 94). Let me answer this question by describing
some of my own ways of doing this—and these ways belong partly to the
period, the place, and the entity in question. There is much situatedness here.
I used this tool especially to contest the notion that the rise of the transna-
tional banks in the 1970s marked the beginning of a global political economy.

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104 the pluralist  8 : 3  2013

It was not so difficult to demonstrate empirically, that what led to the current
global economy was in fact the decline and failure of those banks because that
failure made room for the rise of the financial services sector (TAR, chap. 4).
At the time the financial services sector was mostly small, as its growth had
been stunted (and that was good!) by the dominance of the transnational
banks that were really large Fordist style organizations. At a more complex
level, I also make this argument about the Breton Woods agreement, typically
assumed to be the beginning of the global era. I argue that this is a mistake
in understanding what Breton Woods was about. It was about protecting
national economies from excessive fluctuations in the international economy;
one instrument to do this was to have credit surplus countries take on some
of the collective burdens for the international system, and give indebted
countries a break. To do this, Keynes proposed Special Drawing Rights as a
form of global currency. The United States rejected all of this flatly. But, in-
terestingly, this is now returning as an increasingly attractive option in order
to avoid the dominance and distortions of having leading currencies, which
allow their governments far more leeway (one example is the enormous debt
of the United States) (TAR 149–63).
Hickman also asks: “How do we specify such conditions in advance” in
order to forestall such a terrible decline and eventual complete loss? “I am
thinking, for example, of the tragic case of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in
St. Louis, Missouri” (Hickman, “Saskia Sassen” 94). Forestalling takes a bit
of detailed knowledge. I would assume that at some point, a consequential
number of residents, and perhaps outside observers, understood something
was really wrong. But, again, to establish this takes empirical knowledge and
some interpretive capacity to decode that empirical knowledge.
I was very interested in reading Hickman’s comment on John Dewey’s
failed attempt at educational reform in China, and the consensus “that condi-
tions for a tipping point were missing” (Hickman, “Saskia Sassen” 94). This
is then also where Hickman raises a question about the connection in my
own research between tipping points and the possibility that capabilities can
jump tracks. “Jump tracks” is clearly not my most precise, elegant, or scholarly
way of designating the process I am after, but I like its directness. That larger
process has to with the possibility that the organizing logic of an assemblage
(more simply, a period in a historic process) can “reposition capabilities.”
Jumping tracks does communicate the basic potential that concerns me
here. Let me give an example that has taken mostly a destructive turn (though
it should be noted that there are domains with positive outcomes). One key
concern in Territory, Authority, Rights is that complex capabilities, for example,

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sassen : Before Method, Part II 105

“the rule of law,” can move from serving one historical organizational pro-
cess—legitimating the authority of the national state—to another, such as
forcing the state to give up much of the control it accumulated to establish
itself, for example, to open its borders. For instance, the “rule of law” came to
be used in the 1980s and 1990s to legitimate corporate economic globalization,
which both uses the existing body of laws inherited from that history of the
national liberal state and subverts its meaning to its own needs. Many of these
subvert what allowed the national state to become strong and authoritative as
it evolved: deregulate, privatize, open borders, allow outsourcing, allow mas-
sive mining operations that are toxic to vast stretches of surrounding land,
destroy small banks as a way of concentrating, for instance, 70 percent of
all consumer banking in the United States in five large banks. The language
of the law is everywhere (TAR 184–205). It is in deliberations of the World
Trade Organization (WTO), World Bank, and International Monetary Fund
(IMF) to develop authorizations that enable large Western firms to invade
the fragile markets of just about all countries in the Global South. It is in the
making of new, highly destructive financial instruments, and so on.

Professor Meagher—
“Time to destabilize one’s own categories”
I am grateful to Professor Meagher for letting me know that what I experi-
ence as an ongoing challenge in my work—the need to suspend powerful
categories, the need to question established precepts—sounds familiar to a
philosopher. “All of us work with concepts that we (at least sometimes) fail
to adequately interrogate—for example, globalization, immigration, and
citizenship (to note those that Sassen discussed in her lecture). Yet I find re-
sources in John Dewey for the analytic tactics Sassen is calling for” (Meagher,
“American Pragmatism” 84).
And then, to my great delight, Meagher invokes Dewey’s struggles with
writing, his effort to avoid dichotomies, and that Dewey, in a way, also was
concerned with destabilizing settled categories “in order to help us see new
things or see in new ways” (Meagher, “American Pragmatism” 84). She reminds
us that Dewey resisted the main dichotomy of the time: “absolute empiricism”
and “absolute idealism.” Dewey “did not believe that either philosophy or
science has a method in the hard sense,” but only in the “soft sense” (Mea-
gher, “American Pragmatism” 85). In that sense Dewey saw both philosophy
and the sciences as unfinished projects. And, in a precise understanding of
my point, she then does me the honor to assert that I argue that “we cannot

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106 the pluralist  8 : 3  2013

a­ llow interpretive concepts—however productive and useful they might have

been—to be taken as such, that we need to keep a critical distance” (Meagher,
“American Pragmatism” 85).
Meagher invoked Dewey’s “The Child and the Curriculum,” where he
pushes entrenched camps in the debates about public education. He argues
that “the curriculum is like a map; it provides us with a starting point for
exploration. And the child is like an explorer, whose investigations should
not be limited by the map/curriculum” (Meagher, “American Pragmatism”
84). I am that child. And, in fact, I do not think I ever “grew up” fully—that
is, I never fully accepted the paradigmatic—that which organizes/controls a
discipline. As professors, who are meant to be adults, we are also meant to
play by the established rules.
But I am not saying, and Meagher correctly observes this, that we should
throw out method. That is too easy—there is work to be done, methods to
be developed. My “before method” zone is one of suspension of established
rules in order to roam conceptually and understand what it is I need from
method in order to study what I have possibly just seen/discovered con-
ceptually. It does strike me, then, that the before method zone in my field
is different from that of the philosopher. Nor am I sure that my notion of
analytic tactics “might be understood in terms of Dewey’s understanding of
‘soft method’” (“American Pragmatism” 84) as Meagher writes. It might, but
I am not sure. In this regard I do much appreciate Mendieta’s concept of
epistemic outrage—to which I return later. The epistemic is in all our forms
of scholarship, though perhaps not in all forms of knowledge, and certainly
not in all information.
Both Meagher and Hickman focus on one of the key issues in my book
Territory, Authority, Rights, here referred to as TAR. It is that the global is not
the same today as it was in the past, and new epochs do not leave behind
everything of the earlier era. As I already discussed above, the capabilities
shaped in one epoch (e.g., the West’s concept of the rule of laws) can shift
to a new organizational logic, today’s global political economy; but this will
shift its meaning as it gets installed in different types of institutional settings
(from national state to IMF, WTO, etc.) and the new consequences that come
with that shift (TAR, chaps. 4 and 5). Moving from one historically situated
condition to another leaves its traces on what moves.
Meagher sees this as a Deweyan mode of interpreting, seeing in it the
rejection of a seemingly settled debate.
Dewey also pushed the disciplinary boundaries of philosophy during his
time. In particular, he resisted the two major competing philosophical

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sassen : Before Method, Part II 107

views of reality that were prominent during his time: “absolute empiri-
cism” and “absolute idealism.” He rejected the absolute empiricist view
that held that the world can only be known through direct experience.
But he also rejected the competing view of idealism that argued that we
can only know ideas that we ourselves make (Eisner ix; qtd. in Meagher,
“American Pragmatism”). Dewey did not believe that either philosophy
or science has a method in the “hard sense,” in that “there were no strict
procedures, no algorithms, no steps to be taken that could be routinely
. . . applied in order to get to a goal” (Eisner x; qtd. in Meagher, “Ameri-
can Pragmatism” 85).
I like Dewey.
Meagher, kindly, writes that my type of work might contain elements
for how and why philosophers can and should be engaged in work oriented
to public dimensions. Why? Not simply because they are nice people (my
words!), but because of the importance of concepts and interpretation—a
philosopher’s “stock-in-trade.” Meagher observes that working with multiple
communities at multiple scales and locations might open up a whole new
terrain for working with people on rethinking “interpretation so that they
can make something new and learn from those who are doing that making
(which may itself open up new conceptual ways of thinking)” (Meagher,
“American Pragmatism” 86). Meagher calls for connecting theory and empiri-
cal research “in ways that are necessary if we are to follow the Deweyan call
to philosophers to address social problems rather than problems internal to
philosophy” (Meagher, “American Pragmatism” 86).
Meagher concludes her comments with the voice of Dewey’s child: the
power of an honest question. Thus she asks whether my concept of the global
city (Sassen, Global City) should not also be destabilized? And she correctly
points out that I am doing exactly that when I argue that “the urbanizing of
the world” cannot simply be thought of as an urban event. The massive land
grabs I described in my talk, the poisoning of water and earth due to mining
and toxic manufacturing, these and other processes expel people from their
rural areas (Sassen, “Land Grabs”; Sassen, “Savage Sorting”). And where are
they to go? Mostly they go to cities. These non-urban processes become a key
part of the category of urbanization in today’s world. Thereby I destabilize
the meaning of urbanization. Urbanization is not a new condition: from their
origins, cities have received people from rural areas. But each epoch has its
distinctive vectors underlying these processes. I chose to include these in my
analysis. Most urbanists choose not to do this and so they study the city in
terms of the city’s features, including its population growth.

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108 the pluralist  8 : 3  2013

In her own research on Rwanda and the rebuilding of its capital (see
Philosophy and the City), Meagher finds a version of how the non-urban must
be part of understanding the urban. She describes the allocation of dispro-
portionate resources into “an elite project” rather than into building up the
country and its people. “There are minor, but powerful concrete examples
of this in, for example, the use of the federal social security funds” to pay
for the development of new middle-class neighborhoods in Kigali, and the
government’s spending “U.S. $50 million to link up to the global fiber optic
network in a state where more than 92% of people lack electricity and even
more lack direct access to water” (personal communication—comments in
Meagher’s discussion paper).
Given Meagher’s focus on the concept of the global city in this final part
of her comments, I should address some of the issues in this part of my work.
Unlike most users of the concept, Meagher evidently has read the book—long
and arduous as it is to read. She precisely identifies the distorted use of the
concept that now predominates, and that even critical scholars have taken
on—which makes me think that some of the critical scholars have not read
the book. She is correct when she writes:
I do worry about the way that Sassen’s concept of the global city has
become reified in ways that Sassen never intended and may no longer
help us accomplish what we want to do. For Sassen, “the global city” is
an analytic concept that helps us understand how global flows of capital
hit the ground. Sassen argues that cities therefore provide the strategic
space where we can make interventions in the neoliberal circulation of
capital. I have little doubt that the concept has been extraordinarily pow-
erful in this regard. Yet “the global city” has taken on a stable meaning
within both urban studies and global urban policy-making circles and
is often used synonymously with “world city.” Both terms have been
operationalized empirically by other social science researchers, as if we
can and should measure whether various cities have attained “global
city” status. (Meagher, “American Pragmatism” 87–88)
In many ways, The Global City is not an urbanist’s book. I was seeking to
understand emerging spaces of power and of resistance. This aim of the book
has not been understood by those who criticized me for overlooking non-
global cities—even though I alert the reader in chapter 1. I was specifically
keen on discovering whether the increasingly private, digitized, and elusive
forms of global economic power that were ascendant in the 1980s ever hit
the ground—as the narratives of the time emphasized that leading economic
sectors could move anywhere, and could certainly avoid large, messy cities. I

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sassen : Before Method, Part II 109

wanted to see whether these new powerful economic sectors actually needed a
complex territorial moment. This would then be the space where this elusive,
partly digitized economic power would become visible, would become firms
and their buildings, and would become professional men and women who
want it all. This large urban footprint would make it visible (and hopefully
accountable) to the law, to other residents, and to local firms.
This would also mean that the powerless, those displaced by this expanded
urban footprint (gentrification), would have a chance to directly engage this
increasingly privatized, elusive, and digitized power. That territorial moment,
the global city, is just that, a moment in a vast economic trajectory. But the
global city is also a space that concentrates some of the largest disadvantaged
populations of any type of city and some of the most globalized in their origins.
This is why I insisted that the global city is a space for contestation, and it is
a space of production—albeit production of highly specialized products and
forms of knowledge. But as a space of production, it needs truckers, cleaners,
manual workers of all sorts—to make, to feed, to build, to clean—which signals
yet another potential engagement between haves and have-nots, or those who
have not so much. Our large cities are spaces where the powerless can make a
history, a politics (Sassen, “Global Street”).
All of this is lost in the current flattening of the concept to a corporate
project of global positioning for advantages. And that flattening is both on
the part of uncritical researchers, the world of consultants, and the critics of
global capitalism who do not know the book but assume that if it deals with
high finance, it is conceptually contaminated. I am sure I am not the only
one who has suffered such distortions of her work. My position has been
that this is a concept out of control. But, there is a new generation of young
scholars who has understood the concept and uses it in ways that expand its
meaning. They include prominently the critics of corporate capitalism—both
as scholars and as activists. And there were and are always serious readers that
have understood it with precision, and, lucky for me, many of them write
and thereby contribute to a strong critical scholarship focused on cities.

Professor Mendieta:
That special place before method: epistemics of resistance
Mendieta begins by positing that “[e]mergent social orders . . . [require] that
we rethink our old categories, or that we try to assess their usefulness or al-
low ourselves to countenance their obsolescence.” From here, then, Mendieta
asserts the relevance to pragmatism of stepping back from method in one’s

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110 the pluralist  8 : 3  2013

inquiry given that it “has thematized so deliberately and consistently the ques-
tion of rethinking our methods and epistemic categories in light of new and
unexpected challenges” (Mendieta, “Beyond” 96). This is, again, one of those
observations that I appreciate enormously—a conceptual bridge to Dewey.
Among the emergent orders that Mendieta discusses is the interaction
between increasingly removed ordering systems and the return of the body
as one of the sites for norms. This is a subject I have been working on for
the last several years. In my work I emphasize that it emerges by default out
of the growing distance between the daily needs and aspirations of the many
and the realm of large-scale orderings (power systems, the corporatizing of all
survival infrastructures, and more). Almost by default, the body returns as a
strategic site between the cracks, not subject to those large-scale orderings. It
is one reason, I think, that the human rights regime, with all its shortcomings
(excessive individuation) and weakness of implementation, is actually a rising
regime—rising out of the cracks in power systems (TAR, chaps 7 and 8).
My analysis of defaults and cracks is clearly not “elegant” social science—it
belongs to the zone of “before method.” Mendieta’s invoking Derrida’s “Be-
fore the Law,” which in turn evokes Franz Kafka’s unsettling text, becomes
an invitation to theorize that the particularity of the space that is “the be-
fore” is its “theoretical indistinction” where “we neither know how to apply
extant law nor is there law to apply” (Mendieta, “Beyond” 96). I find that the
radicalness of such a space captures one of the key reasons for doing theory,
although a reason rarely recognized in the social sciences. It is an invitation to
theorize—not to measure and establish features. In my world it is the space
that dare not say its name, or, more practically, referred to as “gibberish” by
those who have trouble with the notion of theorization because it is not a
model that one can trot out and simply apply. This space is, precisely, the
poorly lit penumbra that has become such a key zone for my research and
interpretation practice. It is deeply reassuring to me to understand that there
might be a working, live, connection with pragmatism—a category far more
understandable than the more elusive and indeterminate space of “the before”
that Mendieta recognizes, and that I value so much.
And then comes a naming that entails detecting a second distinction. It is
not the “non-space of ‘epistemic innocence,’ or ‘epistemic non-commitment,’
or ‘epistemic vigilance’” (Mendieta, “Beyond” 97). It is the space of “epistemic
outrage” at the histories we make that so often come “at the heavy price of
new forms of social suffering” (Mendieta, “Beyond” 97). (For an elaboration
see Mendieta, Global Fragments; and Medina). In my experience this raises
an elusive issue on which it is difficult to get traction as an academic, as a

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sassen : Before Method, Part II 111

scholar. It is easy to imagine that our ethical preoccupations shape our ab-
stract thinking and theorizing. And yet, when I actually examine my mode of
working, how I do it, what gets me going at it for hours every day—I can see
there is a pleasure in the mere athletics of thinking and decoding and renam-
ing. I am not sure how I would work so hard without this type of pleasure,
often the kind of pleasure one might get from playing a good tennis game.
It is not even a spiritual pleasure but merely a mental one. But once I enter
the research zone, I am indeed driven a bit by a deep sense of outrage at the
extreme injustices in our world, and by much mainstream explanation. How
could we let things get this bad—this much suffering, poverty, illness, hu-
man rights abuses, destruction of the environment? And how can so much
be explained away? And yet, there is something about theorizing, “seeing,”
which can engender its own passions, different from outrage at injustice.
So I remain intrigued by the full meaning of Mendieta’s category of “epis-
temic outrage.” Clearly my “Before Method” space is linked to a substantive
discomfort with what our established methods and paradigms obscure, and
do so with such ease—it does not even require lying or repressing. It is time
for more “epistemic outrage”!

note
I want to thank the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy for the in-
vitation to deliver The Coss Dialogue address. It was an honor and a pleasure. The re-
spondents, Professors Hickman, Meagher, and Mendieta have contributed enormously
to this work in process. Their observations, always generous and precise, will make all
the difference in the final manuscript. A very special thank you to Professor Erin McK-
enna for working with me on a very tight deadline, and to Professor Colin Coopman
for making it all happen.

references
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