| [CHWP Titles] |
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[CHC 2005] |
CHWP C.5, publ. January 2007. © Editors of CHWP 2007.
KEYWORDS / MOTS-CLÉ:
Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy,
Citizenship,
Networks, Teletechnologies / Jacques
Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy,
Citoyenneté, Réseaux, Télétechnologies
In Echographies of Television, the
transcript of an
improvised film interview between Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler,
the discussion turns at one point to the ways in which concepts of
democracy, politics, and citizenship are all transformed by
contemporary “teletechnologies” (including
television, telephones, and other tele-communication systems implying
transmission across a spatial distance) (Derrida
2002) [2]. For as
Derrida and Stiegler note, if the concept of democracy itself has been
“governed, controlled, and limited” by the borders
of the nation-state, and so by acts of
“territorialization,” and if political discourse is
inseparable from citizenship (“acquired or
‘natural,’ by blood or by
soil”)—a concept equally defined by
“inscription in a place, within a territory or within a
nation whose body is rooted in a privileged territory” (Derrida 2002, 64-65)—then it
is precisely through contemporary teletechnologies that these
geo-political boundaries and territorial markers are subject to
possibilities of displacement and permanent dislocation. Indeed,
whether demands are made to establish or protect national borders and
state sovereignty (“given, lost, or promised,” as
Derrida nuances), or whether claims are advanced for citizenship and
democratic rights, these demands and claims all find a measure of their
historical, legal, and discursive formation inscribed in—and
simultaneously delimited by—geo-political markers and
topographical or spatial boundaries. In short, “what the
accelerated development of teletechnologies, of cyberspace, of the new
topology of ‘the virtual’ is producing,”
Derrida argues, is thus a “practical deconstruction of the
traditional and dominant concepts of the state and citizen (and thus of
‘the political’) as they are linked to the
actuality of a territory” (Derrida
2002, 36).
To be sure, there is
nothing speculative or merely abstract about Derrida and
Stiegler’s argument. For these geo-political limits and the
juridical frameworks they presuppose are continually put in play by the
most mundane and increasingly pervasive uses of telecommunications. As
Derrida notes, when and wherever a television is switched on, when and
wherever a phone-call is made, when and wherever an Internet connection
is established, the question of “critical culture, of
democracy, of the political, of deterritorialization erupts” (Derrida 2002, 65). In this sense, the
“tele-” that informs contemporary communications
technology not only implies transmission across distance but
“displaces places,” provoking an eruption of space
while transforming the specific delimitation of spaces and places into
a more general problematic of “spacing”
(espacement).
Two mutually related
consequences then ensue. On the one hand, this sense of displacement
and dislocation gives way to a reactive and often militant desire to
re-affirm state sovereignty, securitize territorial borders, and
reinforce given identities (even if, paradoxically, it is the state
sanctioned deregulation of telecommunications that creates and
reproduces the deterritorialization of the state’s own
sovereignty). But such a reaction nowhere stems a highly differential,
uneven, and conflictual display of geo-political displacements and
spatial insurgence provoked by teletechnologies, and to such a degree
that it becomes difficult to discern with much certainty the
“when” and “wherever” of a
telecommunication, or even the “who” and the
“what” they presuppose, at least not without also
implying their incessant reinvention in and through this same
technology.
If the argument
concerning the effects of teletechnology corresponds to transformations
in the sovereignty of the nation-state, then the displacement of
borders and territorial limits also corresponds to some of the most
pressing issues facing our present world. These include the flows,
exchanges, and assemblages said to define globalization (peoples,
cultures, viruses, capital, etc.); new rhythms of migration, belonging
and exclusion; new global figures (the refugee, the multitude, the
global citizen, the asylum seeker); new institutional bodies (NGOs,
Médecins Sans Frontières, etc.); new modalities
of power and resistance; new forms of colonization, post-colonialism
and neo-imperialism; new discourses of cosmopolitanism, and so
on—all of which, in different ways, presuppose a
transformation in spatial boundaries and territorial borders. In
response, widespread demands are voiced for laws, rights, and systems
of justice adequate to global or trans- or supra-national—and
not simply inter- or multi-national—contexts and situations.
All this is well known. But if the multiple issues raised by the
deterritorialization of state sovereignty are now well known and widely
debated, the responses and solutions proposed in the wake of these
transformations are invariably schematic, contingent and, of necessity,
largely experimental. More difficultly, responses and solutions to acts
of deterritorialization are proposed in the continuous absence of
foundational discourses, normative criteria, transcendental schemas,
forms of legitimation, and even stable definitions of humanity or the
“human” itself. The opening protocol to the 2005
Congress describes this situation in terms of the
“paradoxes” of citizenship (Paradoxes)
[3]. One might assume that locating
or even creating a concept of citizenship in light of these paradoxes,
absences, difficulties, and even aporias constitutes one of the urgent
tasks defining not just the 2005 Congress and its focus on citizenship
but also (if the term still makes sense) the future of our shared
humanity.
Following Derrida and
Stiegler’s interview, the limit question I want to pose today
is whether the teletechnologies that displace territorial borders are
merely one aspect of a larger display of issues defining our political
present—in which case, our meeting here would be merely one
discussion amongst many at the Congress, in which citizenship is
discussed from a multiplicity of potential angles and disciplinary
perspectives—or whether this political present (including the
juridical concept of the state’s sovereignty) has a
relation—an “essential relation” as
Derrida insists—to this very technology. In other words, as
Derrida and Stiegler both argue, when delimited by territorial and
spatial boundaries, democracy and the politics informing citizenship do
not simply stand in a “relation of exteriority” to
the teletechnologies “one would want to be able to critique
in their name” (Derrida 2002, 65).
The concepts of democracy, politics and citizenship do not constitute a
“secure ground” from which one might designate this
technology apart and assess its (political) implications, for these
concepts are themselves subject to the very process of critique and
deconstruction imposed by this technology in the first place. Indeed,
if the very concept of the political is determined spatially or
territorially, then teletechnologies suggest how the very
“link” that binds the political and the
local—what Derrida calls the
“topolitical”—is not just displaced in
spatial terms but itself subject to incessant rearticulation.
Phrased in these
terms, it is thus important to acknowledge from the outset that it is
not then solely a question of politicizing technology, of putting
technology in a political, social, or global context, and then
determining its political, social, or global effects. For it is this
same technology that transforms the very concept of the political
(including the concept of citizenship) by means of those acts of
territorialization and deterritorialization through which the political
and citizenship constitute and de-constitute themselves in the first
place. Moreover, the constitutive rapport between technology and the
concept of the political is not reducible to contemporary technology.
For as Derrida and Stiegler both discuss, there has always been a
“technical character” to citizenship (Derrida 2002, 53) [4].
Beginning in ancient Greece, for example, the technique of alphabetic
writing and the widely shared practice it made possible created the
“condition of the constitution of citizenship,” a
practice that implies that a reader of texts is always potentially a
writer or producer of texts. However, if citizenship has always been
tied to some form of technical competence, the techniques mobilized by
film, television, computers, and other tele-communications now suggest
that the potential addressees of these technologies do not necessarily
have any technical competence with respect to the production of what is
received. In other words, addressees remain largely ignorant of the
conditions of production informing the images and texts that now
circulate beyond territorially inscribed borders, circulating in ways
which also involve a permanent translation (another means of
displacement and dislocation) between languages and idioms. In
consequence, one of the historical conditions and traditions in which
citizenship is enacted, performed and reproduced through basic forms of
primary education becomes open to question. As Derrida notes in his own
way, “most people who drive a car, who use a telephone,
e-mail, or a fax machine, and a fortiori people who watch television,
don’t know how it works. They use these things in a position
of relative incompetence” (Derrida
2002, 57). [5]
Two consequences ensue from this argument. On the one hand, this situation demands a radical reconceptualization of citizenship, or its reinvention, coinciding with renewed attention to the relation between citizenship, language, telecommunications, and programs in education and training. On the other hand, as Derrida also warns, “this relative incompetence and its incommensurable increase as compared with the incompetence of the past, along with the decline in state sovereignty,” becomes “one of the keys to most of the unprecedented phenomena that people are trying to assimilate to old monsters in order to conjure them away (the ‘return of the religious,’ ‘nationalist’ archaisms’)”(Derrida 2002, 57) [6]. In light of the geopolitical configurations defining our contemporary world, the effects produced by teletechnologies thus offer “at once a threat and a chance,” demanding both critique and deconstruction. More pertinent for our meeting here, Derrida suggests throughout his interview that “education” becomes the (permanently displaced or virtual) site in which the very rapport between teletechnologies, citizenship and the political is (still) played out. In short, the development of teletechnologies delimits an obscure if necessary “imperative”—not just of rethinking democracy “beyond these ‘borders’ of the political” but of thinking “the political beyond the political” or “the democratic beyond democracy” (Derrida 2002, 65), what Derrida terms a “democracy to come.” [7]
I
want to ask briefly
how the concept of networks responds to this larger argument, for
networks (as is by now well known) not only offer a practical
dislocation or derritorialization of the territorial. The question is
also how networks contribute to this thought of the
“political beyond the political” or a
“democracy to come.” [8]
In his interview with
Stiegler, Derrida proposes to rearticulate the dislocation provoked by
teletechnolgies precisely in terms of networks. Responding to
Stiegler’s proposal that this dislocation would itself create
a “’political
community”—“something like the thinking
of a community of networks, or a technological community” (Derrida 2002, 65)—Derrida
first pries apart the concept of networks from concepts of community to
which it is often attached. For if the concept of community invariably
presupposes for Derrida a “unity of languages, of cultural,
ethnic, or religious horizons,” then this concept of
community tends to reinforce and reproduce the various schemas of
identity and belonging intrinsic to the political constitution of a
nation or the territorial boundaries of a sovereign state. On the other
hand, so long as networks are posited “without unity or
homogeneity, without coherence,” then they create and make
possible a “new distribution” or
“partage,” including a
“partage” of images and information no longer
governed by a “territorially delimited, national or regional
community” (Derrida 2002, 65-66).
Networks, in short, displace the very concept of the
“horizon” and the points of spatial (and thus
subject) orientation they set in place.
Drawn from the
writings of Jean-Luc Nancy, the “partage” Derrida
evokes in French translates at one and the same time as both
“sharing” and “division,” and
thus a “sharing (out).”[9]
In this sense, a “partage” in the context
of networks takes into account what it is possible to have
“in common,” what is
shared—“the fact that several people or groups can,
in places, cities or non-cities . . . have access to the same
programs” (Derrida 2002, 66).
But it also takes into account a “partage” as
division, including “dissociations, singularities,
diffractions.” In other words, if networks create what is
“common,” that commonality is also constitutively
inscribed by dissociation, de-liaison, distance, and detachment. Or
rather, there is no thought of association without the constitutively
inscribed possibility of dissociation, no liaison without de-liaison,
no proximity without distance, no attachment without detachment, and it
is precisely this (supplemental) “logic” for
Derrida that is effaced in appeals to “community.”
The “partage” created by networks is thus the
permanently displaced site of “disidentification,
singularity, rupture with the solidity of identity,
de-liaison” (Derrida, 2002, 67)—terms
that imply “a coinscription of
space”—“or with a view to
space”—that no longer corresponds to the same
“models” of democracy, politics, and citizenship
based on territorial inscriptions and spatial assumptions.
The
reference to networks proposed by Derrida is clearly not reducible to
networks of communication, computers, or information technology. Nor
are we dealing here with the concept of “netizens.”
But in what sense does this partage open toward rethinking
“the political beyond the political” or a
“democracy to come”?
Addressing the
“political necessities of today” in The Sense of
the World, Jean-Luc Nancy delimits the different traditions proposing a
politics of “self-sufficiency” while foregrounding
a politics of the “tie” [lien]. It is this
“knotting of the tie” [nouage du lien] that opens
toward a re-articulation of the political [le politique] in terms of
“dependence or interdependence, of heteronomy or
heterology” (Nancy 1997, 111)
[10]. Implying a politics without
theatrical model, this politics opens “an entire ontology of
being as tying,” demanding that we touch that
“extremity” where “all ontology, as such,
gets tied up with something else” (Nancy
1997, 112). As long as we do not touch this extremity, Nancy
argues, we will never displace the “theological
sphere” governing the various schemas of political
self-sufficiency.
If Nancy’s
re-articulation of the political in terms of the ontological is part of
a wider attempt to discern the political necessities of today, then the
question remains how to articulate this rethinking or
“retrait” (retreating/withdrawal) of the political
when, for “two-thirds of the planet, it is the very
possibility of a tie of whatever sort that has been undone. And if the
havoc continues,” Nancy suggests, “it is the tie of
all that will be in question—indeed, it already is”
(Nancy 1997, 116): “at
this very moment, when political subjectivity is doubtless to a great
degree coming undone, and when substantial sovereignty is splitting up,
are we not in the process of learning,” Nancy asks,
“that the virtual advent, or in any case the almost
universally desired advent, of a world citizenship (beginning with that
of Europe) nonetheless risks corresponding to the triumph (itself
without sharing (out) [partage]) of what has been called 'market
democracy’”? (Nancy
1997, 108). [11]
In other words, the question remains how the hollowing out of
democracy creates a void filled by capitalism as a “global
figure,” and so whether it is the forces of market democracy
that work to efface the politics of the tie to which Nancy is drawing
us. This effacement also participates within a wider postponement of
thinking the “mondialisation” of the world,
translated less by “globalization” than the
becoming worldly of the world as the enabling condition in which to
articulate the very concept of the global. As The Sense of the World
argues, and as Nancy’s more recent writings have forcefully
suggested, the turn to the discourse of globalization refuses (in all
senses) the very “partage”—the
simultaneous “sharing” and
“division”—that articulates this politics
of the tie in the first place (Nancy 2002).
In proposing
“another approach” to the political, Nancy thus
argues that a politics of self-sufficiency always amounts to failing to
tie the tie because “one has always supposed it to be already
tied, given” (Nancy 1997, 103).
In other words, the question remains how to think political ties as
always “still to be tied,” and so refuse all
nostalgia for the desired reintegration of a fragmented society or
divided nation, a split subject or a humanity in shreds, a (re)fusion
of the (or a) community in which political and social ties either
eventually disappear (in order to (re)create a cohesive identity) or
devolve into further atomization. As Nancy writes, “in the
different figures of self-sufficiency, sometimes it is the social tie
itself that is self-sufficient, sometimes it is the terms or units
between which the social tie passes. In both cases, in the end the tie
no longer makes up the tie, it comes undone, sometimes by fusion,
sometimes by atomization. All of our politics,” he concludes,
“are politics of undoing [dénouement] into
self-sufficiency” (Nancy 1997,
111). Thinking through the political necessities of today
thus demands for Nancy that we practice a politics whose rhythm is
composed less by the tie that “binds” than the tie
that “reties,” less the tie that
“encloses” than “the tie that makes up a
network” (Nancy 1997, 114).
Two implications
follow from Nancy’s argument. First, Nancy is clearly
refusing to posit networks as a means of communication, a channel
through which individuals or groups communicate or connect with one
another. Such a claim would only ever efface the question of the
political at stake here, including its ontological scansion.
Secondly—and
returning us to the question of space and territorialization with which
we started—if the “logic” of political
ties is inseparable from networks, then the composition of political
ties is also described by Nancy as having a quite specific space. For
Nancy remarks that this politics of the tie constitutes a
“knot” that has “neither interiority nor
exteriority but which, in being tied, ceaselessly makes the inside pass
outside, each into (or by way of) the other, the outside inside,
turning back on itself without returning to itself” (Nancy 1997, 111). Nancy’s
presentation of political ties in these terms echoes his refusal of a
politics of self-sufficiency while bringing his description close to
questions of topology informing much of the literature on networks. If
there is a single text that might help rethink Nancy’s
description of networks and the opening of a chiasmatic space, one
might usefully turn to the preface of Claude
Lévi-Strauss’s The View from Afar. Returning to
his earlier work on kinship and social exchange,
Lévi-Strauss writes that “if one wishes to
understand the nature of social ties, one should not first take a few
objects and try immediately to establish connections between them.
Reversing the traditional approach, one should first perceive the
relations as terms and, then, the terms themselves as relations. In
other words, in the network of social bonds, the knots have logical
priority over the lines, even though, empirically, the lines form knots
by crisscrossing one another” (Lévi-Strauss,
xii).
We’ve
obviously come a long way from the opening discussion of
teletechnologies (and the concept of citizenship to which it is
attached) to the “space” in which Nancy rethinks
Lévi-Strauss’s appeal to the “network of
social bonds” as a rearticulation of political
ties—though I hope not that far. Let me finish with an
observation and two questions.
The chiasmatic
topology of networks outlined here clearly corresponds to the
problematization of space we discussed at the beginning of our
discussion in terms of the deterritorialization of limits and
boundaries through teletechnologies. What imports in this argument is
not just the way in which it is the concept of the political as such
that is at stake, including the constitution of “social
ties” and the “network of social bonds.”
For as Nancy also argues, the fundamental political question facing us
is “how to induce the ensemble comprised of indeterminate
ties—ties that have come untied or are not yet
tied—to configure itself as a space of sense that would not
be reabsorbed into its own truth.” “This sort of
configuration of space,” he continues, “would not
be the equivalent of a political figuration (fiction, myth). It would
trace the form of being-toward in being-together without identifying
the traits of the toward-what or toward-whom, without identifying or
verifying the ‘to what end’ of the sense of
being-in-common” (Nancy 1997, 90).
Nancy’s phrasing here echoes the play of simultaneous sharing
and division that constitutes the partage to which Derrida also refers
in his discussion of networks, an argument in which the refusal to
identify and verify the “’to what end’ of
the sense of being-in-common” is the enabling condition in
which to think a “democracy to come” (as both
threat and promise). To conclude, two questions begin to formulate
themselves in light of this argument. First, in what ways has the
association between networks, telecommunications, and reconfigured
concepts of community (widely accepted in the literature on
“virtual communities” for example) lent itself to a
political figuration or myth, rather than to the necessity of parsing
out the “grammar” in which to rethink our political
ties (a grammar in which “all ontology, as such, gets tied up
with something else”), even when that argument has repeatedly
presented itself as a transformation of contemporary politics through
information technology and systems of communication? Secondly, is there
a concept of citizenship that answers to our “being-toward in
being-together,” a concept of citizenship that forecloses in
advance any possibility of “identifying the traits of the
toward-what or toward-whom, without identifying or verifying the
‘to what end’ of the sense of
being-in-common”?
1. The following paper was first read as part of a panel on “The Politics of Networked Citizenship” at the annual meeting of COCH-COSH (Consortium for Computers in the Humanities/Consortium pour Ordinateurs en Sciences Humaines), held as part of the 2005 Congress of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences at The University of Western Ontario. My thanks in particular to Patrick Finn and Alan Galey for inviting me to participate, and to the participants at the conference for their questions and comments. A longer and extensively revised version is forthcoming in TEXT Technologies (issue on “The Networked Citizen”).
2. The text is a transcription of the interview, filmed in 1993 by Jean-Christophe Rosé under the auspices of the Institut National de l”Audiovisuel (INA) in France.
3. The opening protocol merits citing in its entirety: “Citizenship is itself a paradoxical concept. Underlying its apparent meaning of belonging are the conflicting notions we attach to it—rights versus duties, freedom versus responsibility, local allegiance versus global affiliation—and the tensions that arise from these notions. Not constrained by political or geographical boundaries, the concept of citizenship extends to communities of interest, sexual orientation, disability, gender, ethnicity, and a host of variously defined identities. The paradox of citizenship is further reflected in the differences in citizenship over time—from the historical experience of citizenship as something bestowed upon individuals and reflective of imperialism and colonialism to present perceptions of citizenship as self-defined, self-appointed and democratic.
The way we define citizenship, and our sense of belonging (or exclusion) are influenced by the social, economical, cultural and physical environments we inhabit, while artistic and literary creation often serves to express, examine or resolve the inherent paradoxes we perceive. The multiplicity of definitions is a reality that lends itself to exploration from a multi-disciplinary angle.
The sub-themes Environments, Exclusions and Equity provide further points of reference for academic investigation. As a collective citizenry, we share the responsibility for our natural and social environments. Environmental sustainability has become an increasingly pressing concern for governments at all levels, and individual citizens of all countries. What constitutes the paradox of citizenship is that it is at once inclusive and exclusive—intentional, explicit, covert or unintended, individual and groups’ exclusion from the citizenry carries clear implications for the society at large. Finally, questions of equity remain at the centre of most debates surrounding social issues.”
4. A more extensive genealogy of citizenship in these terms can be found in Isin 2002. Isin refers extensively to “technologies of citizenship” throughout his text, though in terms that are more Foucauldian than deconstructive.
5. In discussions raised by many of the papers presented at the 2005 COCH-COSH meeting, a number of related questions were raised—that we learn to become programmers and not merely users of computer technology; that we learn to teach the production of computer knowledge rather than its passive consumption; that open source software would create potential acts of political self-determination, etc. The question asked here is how these various demands both intrinsically and structurally relate to concepts of citizenship or rearticulations of the political.
6. Derrida explores this question further in Derrida 1996.
7. Derrida’s argument here is extended further in Derrida 1994
8. It would be important to acknowledge at this point that the relation between networks and “deterritorialization” is also a central focus of the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, even if we are not pursuing here the wider political implications of these writings.
9. Nancy’s reference to a “partage” as both sharing and division was first explored in Nancy 1982. Since then, it has become a widely discussed motif in relation to Nancy’s writings. In their recent translation of Derrida’s Voyous, in which Derrida returns to Nancy’s writings, Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas suggest that “le partage is both a ‘sharing in’ and a ‘sharing out,’ both a ‘partaking in’ and a ‘partitioning out.’ The English share or to share also carries both connotations, even if the latter is less audible. Le partage might thus be translated as the ‘sharing (out).’” See Jacques Derrida 2005, 165.
10. On the distinction between le politique and la politique, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy 1997. The following discussion is a highly abbreviated version of a forthcoming essay on Nancy’s writings.
11. Nancy’s writings enter into dialogue here with the work of Étienne Balibar (cited often in The Sense of the World), in particular the essays now gathered in Balibar 2004.
Balibar, Étienne (2004). We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. James Swenson. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1994). Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf. London and New York: Routledge.
Derrida, Jacques (1996). “Foi et savoir: Les deux sources de la ‘religion’ aux limites de la simple raison” in eds. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, La religion. Paris: Seuil.
Derrida, Jacques (2002). Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, trans. Jennifer Bajorek. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press and Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers.
Derrida, Jacques (2005). Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Isin, Engin F. (2002). Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002)
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe & Jean-Luc Nancy (1997). Retreating the Political, ed. Simon Sparks. London and New York: Routledge.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1985). The View from Afar, trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hess. New York: Basic Books.
Nancy, Jean-Luc (1982). La partage des voix. Paris: Galilée.
Nancy, Jean-Luc (1997). The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc (2002). La création du monde ou la mondialisation. Paris: Galilée.
Paradoxes (2005). “Paradoxes of Citizenship: Environments, Exclusions, Equity,” opening statement for 2005 Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Western Ontario (http://www.fedcan.ca/congress2005/theme.htm).