Meditations on the Human Condition in an Imperial Age

by Irina V. Boca

Overview

The concept of empire contains features that are both irreducibly spectral and terrifyingly real. With much of both aspects prevailing at subliminal levels, it is nearly impossible for the casual observer to think through the maze of contradictions and constitutive forces inherent in the imperial system. In her latest work of nonfiction, Meditations on the Human Condition in an Imperial Age, author and political philosopher Irina V. Boca uses her expertise and research to help readers analyze the presence of empire as an indelible contemporary political force. This intricate work unravels the Gordian knot of imperial politics and allows the reader to consider overlapping concepts from multiple perspectives, finally making it possible for the general audience to get all the facts.

From post-Hegelian philosophy to political science and popular culture, the author has identified the intricately woven forces of imperial politics and invites readers to reconsider any easy location of power and any clear-cut path to resistance or liberation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781475954043
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	10/12/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	378
File size:	515 KB

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Meditations on the Human Condition in an Imperial Age

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By Irina V. Boca

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2012 Irina V. Boca
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4759-5406-7

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Chapter One

The Imperial Spectacle

Power itself has for a long time produced nothing but the signs of its semblance. J. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

There is a distinction between politics as a spectator sport and political activity as utilized by organized groups to get quite tangible benefits for themselves. For most men most of the time politics is a series of pictures in the mind, placed there by television news, magazines, and discussions. The pictures create a moving panorama taking place in a world the public never quite touches. M. Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle

To a more or less clear extent it goes without saying that support for imperial power rests on the perpetual production and reproduction of an imperial spectacle. The equally productive condition of such a possibility, nonetheless, rests on the assumption that the allegedly smooth continuity of the imperial realm cannot be entrusted to the arbitrariness and indecisiveness of public opinion, becoming necessary for the government to influence and ultimately persuade the public in political matters. In our time, the end-result is the s(t)imulation of the political as the arbitrary and often times captivating syncope of a thoroughly arbitrary and entertaining imperial reality. Its political spectacle involves, then, a radical lack of events, digitally and visually mediated eventualities, or what D. Boorstin has termed as pseudo-events. In each case, the "spectacle of power" brings before our eyes a subversive arrangement of facts and a correspondingly fictitious stage upon which the representation and the unfolding of real events might or might not take place.

Conversely, it is perhaps equally subversive, or equally fictitious, that the global spectacle of today should summon the global power(s) to imitate and eventually move or produce the real while canvassing the inertia of compliance and resistance into an involuntary memory of political existence. Herewith, M. Edelman's assessment that such a virtual subversion always flits by the public, never to be turned into a curios fable or an endearing gossip, might not be as thorough as it seems. Also, contrary to J. Baudrillard's account of a power that constantly voids its practical and discursive set-ups in the spectacular dimension of politics, in the political dimension of the spectacle it is always the same scene that (re)captures the public, reproducing its endearing curiosity in ever more convincing and stubborn versions of impossible erasure. Curiously or perhaps daringly enough (in case such categories still apply to politics), the political scientist may be dealing with an erasure of erasure, or, as J.L. Nancy would suggest, with the trace of a trace that constantly summons and veils itself aesthetically.

Moreover, since it is always in the presence of an audience that the spectacle of power (or the power of the spectacle) is believed to unfold by tracing its possible erasures and erasing its possible traces, politics amounts, simply and squarely, to a strange collapse of the power-spectacle into what might be called an a(n)esthetic event. To put it somewhat differently, whether power sets itself up, eradicates, or resuscitates itself through the spectacle of its own eventfulness turns out to be just as eventful and entertaining as the fact that such an (anesthetic) event can take the generic and performative form of a collapsing possibility.

It is, nonetheless, through this failing possibility of the spectacle that power claims to be everywhere and nowhere, spilling out of the news-industry into the friendly eyes and ears of a sophisticated audience whose blindness and deaf-muteness entertains, as if by dint of an incalculable accident, the unequivocal event of power. It is the paradoxical condition of the public, then, that accidentally confers to individuals the power or the fantasy of strolling freely from one political corner to the next, or from the boundary to the bridge that appears to span between the Real and the Virtual as well as between the so-called glass-menageries of the first world and the mud huts of the third, or between genuine political enterprising and its politically correctable factory-lines. According to this generic type of logic, the spectacle of power tends to become strikingly recursive, turning politics into a more or less narcissistic phenomenon of sheer human curiosity or shame. The familiar label for this strange recurrence is, no doubt, "celebrity" – a word by virtue of which the name or the status of a person is publicly celebrated, advertised, commemorated, or invoked. A celebrity is immediately a mass media phenomenon, and mass media, as D. Carter tells us, serve as the virtual "fourth branch of government." For J. Barbero, on the contrary, it is precisely this immediately virtual status that turns mass media into the heavy industry that produces and interrupts the production of publicly enjoyable or consumable "specters": the beautiful, the dead, the accidental victims, the happy winners smiling on the papers and screens of big cities. In the last analysis, however, it is not only immediately and virtually but also on the largest scale that mass-media succeeds in bringing forth a multiplicity of realities relative to themselves, a fuzzy bundle of reflected worlds, or, simply, an endless celebration of accidental or distorted perspectives.

As Z. Bauman seems to suggest in "Each Time Unique," such an endless and surreal political phenomenon can only mark the point of "no return," the "once and for all" of all human possibilities, or of all recorded phenomena that vanish, henceforth, by virtue of sheer repetition and reversal. In the old Heideggerian terminology, by contrast, it is precisely this evental throw back from the moment of "no-return" to its (re)actualization, from the moment of repetition to the anxiety of reversal as a certain kind of disappearance, that deprives Dasein of the very ground of its existence toward death. What seems to trouble Z. Bauman in this repetitive event of disappearance, however, is precisely the spectacle of an endless tragedy, or crisis, which he uncovers in the world of news and politics, and which seems to him to supply and subtract from reality the mere shock of Dasein being thrown back to the very moment of a necessarily political and therefore mediated actualization.

According to A. Negri and M. Hardt such a politically mediat(iz)ed actuality, which is characteristic of modern spaces, is immediately engaged in and founded on a "dialectical play with their outsides." In their view, the spectacle of space unfolds smoothly and homogeneously, somewhat closer to a fairy tale than to the tragic shock of more developed narratives: "In this smooth space of Empire there is no place for power. Empire is utopia, or really a non-place." Since Empire is immediately the non-place of power, power, too, seems to embody the absence of Empire, that is, the virtual, utopian façade of an imperial spectacle impossible to resist, but also impossible to locate or sabotage. Perhaps this is why in an era of subversive imperial domination the fundamental notion of resistance cloaks itself in the equally subversive language of desertion: "this desertion does not have a place, it is the evacuation of the places of power ..." It seems only reasonable that the evacuation of the spectacle of power, or of its (inter)mediating politicality, should call forth the equally problematic question of betrayal: how are the places of power to be deserted if they do not exist, if they are from the start non-places?

The popular explanation is fairly simple: in the (inter)mediated order of the spectacle every non-place counts as a real space by imitation or by imaging the series of successive and accidental spatial occurrences. While the relation with the real is partially suspended, the spectacle nonetheless appears realistic, at least in the sense of being widely audienced and enjoyable enough to constitute itself as the accountable locus of the real. Reality attests itself, it continues to have an extravagant role in the imperial spectacle, but only in so far as it gives up its relation to the modern space of dialectics. At least in principle, the realist-utopian formality gives way to a synthetic spatiality that necessarily counts itself as the essentially missing link between people and political space. By contrast, the dislocating occurrence of human spatiality and not of any concrete, particular place gives way to the realistico-utopian spectacle of empire. A classical example of such a thoroughly synthetic displacement of the political spectacle is S. Waltz's portrayal of the imaginary as the double of imperialism:

Imagine, for a moment, that you are the president of France. You regard US policy as often naive and overweening, and your ideal world order is one in which no single state is dominant. So what do you do about the United States? Now picture yourself as the president of Russia. The only remnants of your country's former superpower status are an aging nuclear arsenal and membership in the UN Security Council. How do you improve Russia's situation in a world dominated by US Power? Or perhaps you are the prime minister of India. You face serious regional challenges ...

In G. Deleuze's and F. Guattari's treatise on Nomadology, this kind of imaginative and simultaneous reversal of human perceptions allows the utopia of empire to take root in the already striated space of modern states. In their approach, it is not so much the utopian project of empire that is at stake, but space as such – the historical, territorial space confronted by the immediate reality of imperial presence. In their view, as soon as the sovereign figure is influenced in respect to political collaboration, space is doomed to failure due to inevitable enmity and conflict (or vice-versa). It follows that sovereignty and territoriality stand in opposition and necessarily complement one another not only by virtue of their historical composition, but also by virtue of their political dissolution. It is therefore in the guise of a nomadological project that the problematic of empire seems to confront the presence of political space, while as a global project it necessarily relates to an essentially conflicting question: what is the geo-political composition of empire?

To the extent to which the space of empire is treated as a purely utopian invention, as in A. Negri's and M. Hardt's account, its political embodiment seems to derive its sovereign force from the very absence and non-eventfulness of 'real' sovereign power. Conversely, in so far as imperial presence remains plugged to real, concrete places, as in G. Deleuze's and F. Guattari's treatise, its geo-political composition comes down to the mediated coexistence of (at least) two sovereign bodies. When, by contrast, the space of empire blurs or abandons the borders of the nation-state, as in P. Virilio's account of an inevitable imperial speed-up, its geo-political composition comes down to "the aristocracy, the military class, the bourgeois, each one fighting over its own proletariat." In each case, however, the architecture of empire seems to delineate its ideological polarities and methodological fashions as highly complex openings and closures of sheer geo-political landscaping.

When J. Baudrillard reminds us, for example, that "power floats like money, like language, like theory," he invites us to trace the threefold pulse of markets, discourses, and theories, across the hyperreal desert of the real, right through the artificial arteries of power or, in any case, around its marketable, discursive, or theoretical heart-beats. In a similar vein, A. Negri and M. Hardt shift and turn the panoptical diagram of modern power to suit, or at least to make apparent, the ergonomic ego and the deserted ruins of imperial utopianism. It was, nonetheless, in G. Bataille's relentless and accommodating account of such an ergonomic share (or infinite burdening?) that the accursed compass of modern growth suddenly flipped and regressed into an accursed compass of luxury discharge. By small degrees of separation, the economy of the commodity translated into the economy of the human body (or the other way around?), unreservedly changing or challenging the remainder. If only by dint of chance, we now stroll leisurely and sometimes righteously, as M. Ignatieff reminds us, from a revolution to a new market, from a conference room to holding, at the next street corner, the authentic banner of rights. In a mundane style, our imperial knowledges and rights appear to preserve, as if against the nostalgia of a "lost treasure," the flipping compass of formerly shared visions and spaces. Now and then, we simply notice the sudden and inexplicable tremor of the compass' arrow.

In Foucauldian terms, one could reasonably say that every regime of powerproducesitstruth-compass,its'politicalsketch'or'generaltopology' of eminent truth by virtue of which the overarching relationship between power and right is organized according to a "multiple and differentiated reality." Realistically and truth(ful)ly, there are immediate techniques of subjugation and domination, forming, as M. Foucault suggests, the 'external visage' of power, the more or less recognizable make-up of its subversive and tectonic esprit des corps, but also of its marginal and terminal effects. Accordingly, the multiplicity of forms of domination and subjugation appears organized along, across, or around an external and visible societal compass that simultaneously points towards and away from its knowledge techniques. As M. Foucault puts it, once these techniques can be analyzed in terms of "region, domain, implantation, displacement, transposition," the process by which knowledge functions as a form of power that disseminates its effects, can be finally captured.

In the process of capture, however, bargaining revolves around the distribution and redistribution of more tangible and immediate resources, which nonetheless remain hidden from view. We live in an apparently democratic age, so this 'immediately capturing' form of politics occurs behind close doors, in lobbies and corridors, in think tanks and corporate boardrooms. The other (not so immediate) form of politics revolves around a public that is left out of the bargaining venues, but which nonetheless receives continual symbolic reassurances that its interests are well looked, while military personnel operating in foreign imperial resource wars fights for peace and democracy, values and principles, freedom, justice, and equality for all.

According to A. Giddens, such an ambivalent presence of authority is "closely bound up with a further dimension of modernity: control of the means of violence." Modern power and modern knowledge appear thus to have given rise to a particular economy of violence, more precisely, to a differential economy substituting covert violence with authority, human reality with the world market, and accumulation of wealth with capitalist power. In short, they appear to have given way to an economy of violent substitution – to a spectacle of the spectacle (of power). In M. Foucault's view, by contrast, it was precisely as spectacle that power was able to thwart – in one stroke – not only the meaning of authority and justice, but also the legitimate relation between them: "in these executions, which ought to show only the terrorizing power of the prince, there was a whole aspect of the carnival, in which rules were inverted, authority mocked and criminals turned into heroes."

To be sure, as an immediately punishing and rewarding spectacle, "the public execution did not re-establish justice, it reactivated Power." In the wake of urbanism, while mockery and entertainment succeeded in turning the shocking effect of power into the very spectacle of its reactivation, the laughable and enjoyable (re)activity of power took the form of public execution. The psychological success of public executions consisted therefore in bringing the victim and the executioner so close together that they could no longer be told apart. This exhilarating and bitter enjoining gave way, as G. Bataille argues, to a series of intimacies immediately related to the conditions that made them possible: "wars and the assumed risk of death." In M. Foucault's studies on discipline and punishment, this embittered conviviality of "war and sacrifice" is nonetheless set aside in favor of an archeology of power, of an excruciating topology of punishment and liberation, or, in any case, of an archeological sketch that culminates with the birth of the prison as the quintessential embodiment of modern power.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Meditations on the Human Condition in an Imperial Age by Irina V. Boca Copyright © 2012 by Irina V. Boca. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

pre(Face)....................vii
The Imperial Spectacle....................1
The Empire-concept....................23
The question of Negativity....................55
Storing and Fabricating the Real....................91
the fold....................117
the double....................133
De-Doubling, De-Structuring, De-Composing the Real....................149
The Knowledge of Practice (or the sameness of the same)....................181
The Practice of Thinking (or the chicken and the egg)....................217
The Narrative of Power (or the power of narration)....................237
The Idea of the One (or The Riddle of Empty Space)....................277
Naked and Formless: puppeteering vs dwarfing....................317
Bibliography....................347