Week 2: Notes on a Postnational Geography

Arjun Appadurai’s essay “Sovereignty without Territoriality: Notes on a Postnational Geography,” offers a close examination of territoriality, a central problem facing the modern nation-state.  If the basis of the nation-state has historically been territorial sovereignty, defined as a capacity for jurisdictional governance or state control of civil society, then territory, as defined by Appadurai, is in a state of crisis as the globalized construction of locality signals a disruption in the relationship between the nation and the state. The globalized construction of locality with weak or nonexistent ties to the nation-state is being produced through global flows of capital, labor, information and people. Although disjunctive, these flows produce ties to communities not rooted in the nation-state. Using the term translocalities, for the multiple identifications that these communities possess and perhaps even thrive off, the disjunctures that these global and local phenomena produce pose a significant threat to the territoriality of the nation-state and its claims to sovereignty. This is the framework that Appadurai sets up as he begins to map the disjunctures between space, place, citizenship, and nationhood, proposing a new kind of cartography that thinks beyond the nation-state and instead a global economy or geography based on difference. 

            In this project of mapping difference and disjuncture, Appadurai marks two kinds of translocalities: one that is produced through the marginalization or abandonment of communities by the nation-state such as border-sites and conflict zones and the plural community or cities produced by something like cosmopolitanism. These two translocalities, however seem to have very different relations to the nation-state. More importantly, what is the relationship between these two translocalities? Is the translocality of the pluralist cosmopolitan city reliant on the translocality of those marginalized from the nation-state in terms of their exploitative positions? What is the role of cosmopolitan geopolitical discourses and how do they affect these disjunctive spaces?

Week 1: Introduction (part 1 of 2)

In Politics and the Other Scene, Etienne Balibar looks at the universalims that structure ideas of the nation and the rights that are greanted under citizenship. In the first chapter, “Three Concepts of Politics,” Balibar  discusses the “autonomy of politics” in that it exists “only to the extent that subjects are the source and ultimate reference of emancipation for each other” (Politics and the Other Scene, 4).

Tracing the thought that Balibar refers to as “the autonomy of politics” is that first, individuals are given Natural Right. However, as Balibar immediately points out, the Natural Rights that are allotted to people (or more specifically citizens), although Natural, become a set of rights that must be “won” or “gained”. Put differently, the maintenance of one’s own rights falls upon the individual and is their own responsibility. In addition, since these rights are not merely God-given or unconditional, but must be “won”, the Individual Rights of Man are only possible through a collective struggle or if won collectively. This line of thought, Balibar continues provides the framework for the nation and its constructions of citizenship.  The Natural Rights given to individuals become the same right that must be collectively won or gain, so that both the “natural” and the “earned” rights are both one and the same. The natural rights given to Man or Humanity are also the same rights that must be earned or won as a collective of citizens.  Balibar writes, “In this way, we move from the self-determination of the people to the autonomy of politics itself” (4). 

Put differently, “it is always-already time to demand emancipation for oneself and for others,” yet at the same time, it must always be something that, through systems and institutions that guarantee these rights to its citizens, it must also be protected and gained for every human equally. Being a citizen is equal to being human. Balibar writes, “To be a citizen, it is sufficient simply to be a human being, ohne Eigenschaften” (4). The space in-between the “natural” and “earned” rights that the construction of the nation seem to provide individuals with is precisely the area that Balibar confronts. The “other scene” of politics, then, becomes a space that lies outside of the scene of politics that is most apparent or that are structured by the discourse surrounding the construction of these universalisms, but the “other scene” also seems to function as the scene of the other.

What is the status for those who reside outside of citizenship? More important for my own interest, what is at stake in the in-between space of human and citizen? What is at stake in construction of identity of those who live in such spaces? This text is important for my research in that it poses similar questions. This idea that rights need to be won or gained, if carried out further, expand to an evolutionary or Darwinian idea of the struggle for existence as a universal truth. The implications of such universalisms on individual rights become particularly important if carried out to this degree. What is at stake in speaking of such a universal where life, basic life, is always already a universal struggle for existence?