hosted by the graduate students in the Department of Comparative Literature at
UC Irvine
REMOTE CONTROL
Respondant: John Smith, Comparative Literature and German
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Moderator: Tim Wong
"Remaking Sovereignty: States of Desire and Security in Kosovo"
Fatmir Haskaj, CUNY
Genocide, mass rape and ethnic cleansing have entered common parlance as the era of the liberal ‘global village’ has succumbed to the neo-liberal credo of ‘creative destruction.’ The Former Yugoslav Province of Kosovo, the site of contested histories, religions, languages, sentiments, myths and NATO intervention, is a microcosm of the bleeding between the borders of local peripheral desires, resistances and sentiments and global political and economic ‘states’ of security and economic liberalization. While the attempted Serbian ethno-nationalist remaking of Kosovo focused upon the erasure of Albanian bodies to ensure the ‘survival’ of ethnic Serbia, the NATO lead democratization project invests in the restructuring of the economies of affect and sentiment to produce stable and secure ‘states.’ The democratization and state building project of Kosovo presumes a network of global circulation, commodification and stabilization that posits security as paramount and dependent upon an individual humanism.
While the nation-state in the developed world has waxed and not waned in the face of global capital and the ‘war on terror,’ in the periphery, states have become fractious exclusivist zones of inter-ethnic conflict that are politically and economically subsumed through security and human rights discourses. The subsumption of the state form in the periphery to the security concerns of the center, remake sovereignty as a contingent phenomenon subject to the centers criteria of viability and stability.
Considering the recent mobilization of political capitol by the Bush administration upon the event of 9/11, the symbolic value of actual and potential catastrophic events as forces of affect and sentiment have been internalized and internationalized as both a cause and effect of increased control, surveillance and centralization of power. Domestically, the production and circulation of catastrophe negates resistance. Globally, catastrophe opens formally closed economic and political systems to revaluations. Regime change, state dismemberment and formation are technical solutions to the claimed internalized pathologies of failed states that are presented as a priori catalysts of catastrophe.
In line with the neo-liberal credo of ‘creative destruction,’ Kosovo epitomizes the confluence of local resistances, inter-ethnic conflict and widespread catastrophic devaluation harnessed to the forces of globalization and neo-imperialism. The Kosovo war of 1998-99 saw the destruction of public infrastructure (commons), private property (housing) and symbolic property (ethno-religious monuments) by all actors in the conflict. This political, material and symbolic erasure provided both the rational and potential for a comprehensive revaluation. The inscribed sentiment of loss and revenge are sutured to the discourse of democratic liberalization and stability as a means of disengagement. Memory and the (re)cycled repertoire of ideology, ethnicity, nation and sovereignty are weaved into a broad spectrum of instrumental economic policy concerns that subsume resistances, insurgencies and affective determinations under the umbrella of security.
"Biological Threat Construction: Fear, Security, and Surveillance in the U.S."
Gwen D’Arcangelis, UCLA
Threat construction has proven, particularly in recent times, important in the constitution of national, international, and transnational relations. Threats can be said to be constituted not only by material and “tangible” dangers, but also by fear, security, and other affective states. These affective states cannot be separated from the material, and are no less “real”; they are part and productive of what constitutes a threat, and to whom. Threat construction in the U.S. since 2001 has set the stage for new and continuing modes of surveillance, particularly through the state. Much of the discussion of this surveillance has focused on the sites of public life in relation to abrogation of civil liberties, citizenship rights, and in the worst cases, life itself. There has been less discussion of less obviously public arenas—I refer to the biological and health realms in particular. The lack of work examining the biological threat-surveillance relationship, and the role that affective states such as fear and security play in their construction, is what my talk will seek to address.
The dual threats of “bioterrorism” and “emerging infectious disease” have been heavily constitutive of surveillance both at the sites of biology and health, and through these two sites but with effects in other social and political realms. The increased surveillance of biological material transport has affected research practice within biological spaces, but also in the general public realm through the withholding of information on the location of biological materials classified as dangerous; in both spheres feelings of security and fear are exploited as well as generated. Increased surveillance of disease data similarly affects both the sites of health care (hospitals, clinics) and in the general public realm (border and immigration control, access to citizenship), and also in co-constitution with states of fear and security. It is the particulars of these two sites in the production of threat discourse, and the concomitant employment as well as production of sentiments such as fear and security (fears of new genetic and biological technologies, fears of terrorists and foreigners, standards and definitions of security, and perceptions of state ability to secure populations from harm), in relation to U.S. modes of surveillance since 2001 that my talk for this conference will address.
"Debt"
Morgan Adamson, University of Minnesota
“Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.”
- Gilles DeleuzeIn what might loosely be defined as the regime of Post-Fordist capitalism which we now find ourselves, the character of money has dramatically shifted in the financialization and real subsumption of life itself within the logic of money’s form. Alongside this shift, however, money’s dubious and contingent counterpart, debt, has also been altered. Debt has become, more and more, a commodity with great worth that is traded among nations, international financial institutions, and sectors of private industry. In addition to the pillage wrecked upon many parts of the third world by regulative policies imposed by IMF and World Bank, evidenced most extremely in Argentina’s debt crisis of 2001-2002, the individual consumer of the first world has on average more debt than ever. Debt’s parasitical nature seems to be infecting life itself at a limitless rate. This explosion of debt, I will argue following Deleuze’s cryptic passage cited above from the “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” marks a turn in which debt itself has emerged and is emerging as one of the most insidious mechanisms of control societies. Debt is, most basically, a social relationship that has been reified and mediated, like money, to a form of control which captures not only the body, but the actual labor potential of the multitude.
This discourse around the ubiquitous nature of debt, however, seems to take little into account of the affective social modes that the economy of debt both structures and circulates. The global economy of debt is one that must be understood to be both a material and affective “state.” My paper intends to begin to supplement a more “marxist” understanding of the circulation of debt in “societies of control” with psychoanalytic readings of debt. Specifically, I am interested in Lacan’s reading of Freud’s “Rat Man” case that highlights the affective contingencies of monetary exchange and takes the form of relation that debt implies to be one that structures subjectivity itself. My critique of Lacan, however, is that he does not take debt and money to be more than useful metaphors for psychic operations. For this reason, it seems to me that neither the psychoanalytic nor marxist renderings of debt are sufficient in isolation, but rather that they need to be considered as mutually-conditioning terms through which the economy of debt can be understood.