I’ve been asked/I volunteered to present a short ‘piece’ (as it were) at some graduate student event put on by the department of sociology and anthropology at Carleton University, to take place two Fridays hence. The presentation will by my first on what I’ve come to call “counter-sovereignty”, a concept I hope to development more coherently in the coming weeks and which I expect to form the core of my dissertation. We’ll see, of course! The format of the event (conference?) is such that I don’t get much time to speak because the organizers wish to emphasize conversation — (un)fortunately, I’m not quite as verbose in person as I am in writing. (Some also suggest I’m unduly intimidating, but I don’t know why they say that.) Consequently, the concept is suggestive, tentative, and mostly incoherent. Notes can be found here.
The name of the concept itself is rather confusing: I don’t think sovereignty (as such) is something that you can be for or against; I think that it is a universal and trans-historical feature of all societies. It’d be more accurate to say “counter-sovereign” with the intention that the reference is to the form that sovereignty takes; for instance, the sovereign subject and the subject of sovereignty. But, I find the locution “counter-sovereign” somewhat clumsly and the potentially more accurately “counter-sovereign forms” too wordy. At the risk of sounding like a dated Marxist… how about “a sovereign formation”? We’ll see.
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The link is registering a 404 with the message “Apache Server at: d1003329.dotsterhost.com”. I would like to see the notes if you could tell me how to access them alternately.
Huh. Your recent comments isn’t updating.
Moizza: thanks for bringing this to my atttention. The path on the URL was incorrect. It works now.
Mandow: it is because of the way comment moderation was set up. You changed your email address and, so, WordPress decided to let me approve your comments. They’re all there!
Yeah, I’m not doing it from my own computer so I guess I should expect these problems.
I’ve turned the feature off. I’ve never had occasion to use it. Without testing my luck… I’m happy to say that I’ve been troll free since switching to WordPress.
I’d like to hear more about this grad student event. Will you post about the other presentations? Can you put me in touch with the organizers?
Hi Craig,
Sorry for taking so long to respond to this. Here’s my take…
Re: pre- and post-sovereignty, I agree that post-sovereign in one respect sounds fishy, as surely sovereignty continues to exist. I can’t say either way whether sovereignty and human society began simultaneously, so I don’t know about the pre-.
On the other hand, the pre- and post- might not have to refer to historically instantiated things, social relations, but modes of thought: modes of thinking about politics and society prior to the centrality of sovereignty (if such a thing existed, that’s one for intellectual historians) or which try to move away from such a centrality today (cutting off the head of the king in political theory).
I have to admit that I’m not entirely sure what you mean by the term ‘sovereignty.’ In Schmitt’s terms, as I understand it, the sovereign is the entity with the power to suspend normal operations of law in the declaration of an exceptio and I guess then sovereignty would be the condition where there is such an entity. In that sense I don’t think it makes sense to say that this has always existed. I’m not sure, but people I respect and believe have commented that there are societies that have existed with states and without laws, such that this definition of sovereign and exception don’t seem to obtain. Again, I’m not sure on this or what hangs on the ‘no prior society has ever…’ argument, either for or against. I think there might be more questions as to whether or not
When you say soveriegnty is ‘the set of collective representations’ in/constitutive of society, do you mean this in the sense of political representation or in terms of symbolic representation? Or both?
On Foucault, sovereignty being replaced by biopolitics/biopower, I don’t know enough about any of this, but Mark maintains (I think, last he and I talked about this) that the latter does not replace the former, rather that the two co-exist after biopower arises.
Your take on the language/position of the king in theory and its origin is really interesting, and I like your disitinction of form vs historical instantiation quite a bit. One more question – is the development of forms of sovereignty one of progress (and if so, universally or judged from some specific position) or just one of change?
Them’s my thoughts.
Best,
Nate
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