From borders to margins: A deleuzian ontology for identities in the postinternational environment

Alternatives

Volumn 34, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 17-39

  Parker, Noel ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN   (Denmark)

Author keywords

Borders; Deleuze; Identity; Margins; Ontology; Postinternational politics

Indexed keywords

EID: 68749104469     PISSN: 03043754     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030437540903400102     Document Type: Article

References (131)

1. James N. Rosenau and Mary Durfee. Thinking Theory Thoroughly: Coherent Approaches to an Incoherent World (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000), pp. 46-75;
2. James Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and Continuity (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990);
3. James N. Rosenau, "DisaggregatedOrder and Disorder in Globalized Space," in Birthe Hansen and Bertel Heurlin, eds., The New World Order: Contrasting Theories (Basingstoke, UK: Mac-millan, 2000), pp. 18-45.
4. Yale H. Ferguson and Richard Mansbach, Polities: Authority, Identities, and Change (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996).
5. Yale H. Ferguson and Richard Mansbach, A World of Polities: Essays on Global Politics (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 225.
6. Have deliberately replaced "politics" with " environment" here so as to highlight the openness of the field in which entities appear.
7. James N. Rosenau, Along the Domestic-Foreign Frontier. Exploring Governanceina Turbulent World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 5.
8. Malcolm Anderson and Eberhart Bort, The Frontiers of the European Union (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2001);
9. Étienne Balibar, We the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, 2001, translated by James Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004);
10. Fredrik Barth, "Boundaries and Connections," in Anthony P. Cohen, ed., Signifying Identities (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 17-36;
11. Neil Brenner, et al., State/Space: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002);
12. Didier Bigo and R. B.J. Walker, "Political Sociology and the Problem of the International," Millennium: Journal of International Studies 35, no.3 (Sept. 2007): 725-739;
13. Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift, eds., Thinking Space (London: Routlege, 2000);
14. David Delaney, Territory: A Short Introduction to Geography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005);
15. ChristerJonsson, Sven Tagil, and Gunnar Tornqvist, Organizing European Space (London: Sage, 2000);
16. David Newman, ed., Boundaries, Territory and Postmodernity (London: Frank Cass, 1999);
17. Gearöid Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space (London: Roudedge, 1996);
18. L. O'Dowd and Thomas M. Wilson, eds., Borders, Nations and States: Frontiers of Sovereignty in the New Europe (Aldershot, UK: Avebury, 1996);
19. David Storey, Territory: The Claiming of Space (New York: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2001);
20. Nick Vaughan-Williams, Border Politics: The Limits of Sovereign Power (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009).
21. Lucien Fèbvre, "Civilisation: Evolution of a Word and a Group of Ideas," in Peter Burke, ed., A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Lucien Fèbvre (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 218-257.
22. Friedrich Kratochwil, "Of Systems, Boundaries, and Territoriality: An Inquiry Into the Formation of the State System," World Politics 39, no.1 (1986): 27-52.
23. Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
24. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
25. Manuel Castells, End of Millenium (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1998);
26. Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1997).
27. Ulf Han-nerz, Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (London: Routledge, 1996);
28. Saskia Sassen, Cities in a World Economy (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2006).
29. Peter J. Taylor, World City Network: A Global Urban Analysis (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 55-100.
30. Matthias Albert, David Jacobsen, and Yosef Lapid, eds., Identities, Borders, Orders: Rethinking International Relations Theory (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2001).
31. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (Cambridge: Polity, 2006).
32. William E. Connolly, Identity /différence: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp. 158-181;
33. Anthony Giddens, Beyond Right and left: The Future of Radical Politics (Cam bridge: Polity, 1994), chap. 3.
34. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globaliza tion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996);
35. Anthony P. Cohen,Signifying Identities (London: Routledge, 2000).
36. Jonathan Friedman, Cultural Identity and Global Process (London: Sage, 1994);
37. Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Glob alization and Culture-Global Mélange (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield,
38. Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman, Modernity and Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
39. Bauman, note 12.
40. Yale H. Ferguson and Richard Mansbach, "PostInternationalism and IR Theory," Millennium: Journal of International Studies 35, no.3 (Sept. 2007): 548549.
41. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), pp. 8182.
42. He uses this ontologicalontic distinction to criticize Cartesian ontology, which, according to Heidegger, failed like modern philosophy as a whole, to observe that distinction. In taking a feature of some beings (namely, extension) as a feature of being in itself, Descartes had aimed at the ontologi cal, but reached only the ontic: the condition of existence of some entities. See Heidegger, note 17, pp. 125127.
43. Gilles Deleuze, différence et Répétition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), p. 1.
44. Ibid pp.12.
45. Where text is cited from a French source, the translation is my own. In cases where there may be issues of translation, an endnote also gives original French wording.
46. Deleuze himself usually refers to "singularities" in preference to entities. This is to capture his position that entities in themselves are without specifics, but acquire them (or appear to do so) in relation to other entities alongside diem. The inspiration lies in Leibniz's calculus, where a "singularity" is a zero point for a given function from which every other point in the neigh-borhood of the singularity can nonetheless be derived. See Charles J. Stivale, ed., Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts (Stocksfield, UK: Acumen, 2005), p. 52 n.5.
47. Natural blockages, for example, "give us only a nominal définition and a negative account of Répétition . . . But the natural blockage needs a supraconceptual power to explain it, and by the same token to explain repetition." Deleuze, différence et Répétition, note 19, p. 26.
48. Ibid., p. 40.
49. Hence the pejorative view, from Plato to Hegel and modern dialectics, that what differentiates one entity from another opposes an overarching unity that has to be (re) discovered at a higher level. That which is not iden-tical with the original appears in a negative light: a "negation" of the original. Deleuze holds that we can now understand that limitation in our inherited system of représentation, and dispense with the priority of the original over the repeat; see Deleuze, différence et Répétition, note 19, p. 1.
50. Ibid., p. 41.
51. "Singulière." Hence my neologism "entityness" trying to convey the quality of what Deleuze calls a singularité. See note 21 above.
52. Deleuze, différence et Répétition, note 19, p. 41.
53. Ibid., p. 80.
54. Ibid., p. 96168.
55. Deleuze was drawn earlier to study him by Hume's radical willingness to open both the human mind and humans' identity to shifting content. His Humaine Selon Hume (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953).
56. which has a plainly Heideggerian feel to it, is to point out that Hume-style passive reflection presupposes a reflecting presence alongside the phenomenal events (Hume's "impressions"). Deleuze holds that the same limitation applied to Hume's philosophical psychology and to Bergson's ontology of an elan vital present in all of reality. See Deleuze, différence et Répétition, pp. 96-100.
57. Deleuze, différence et Répétition, note 19, p. 154.
58. La différence soil au different.
59. Deleuze here uses one of two distinct spellings: " differentiation" and "differenriation." The latter refers precisely to différence arising from within that which is different, as against that laid out in top-down categories.
60. Deleuze, différence et Répétition, note 19, p. 154.
61. Ibid., p. 155.
62. Ibid., pp. 154-155.
63. Rendre compte de.
64. Deleuze, différence et Répétition, note 19, p. 157 (emphasis added).
65. Ibid., pp. 165-168.
66. Sensible.
67. "Chaos chaotizes (chaotise), and dissolves (défait) all knowledge [back] into infinity." Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Qu'est-Ce Que la Philosophies (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1991), p. 45.
68. Ibid., pp. 189-206.
69. Deleuze, différence et Répétition, note 19, pp. 221-228.
70. These match Deleuze's two spellings: "differentiation"/ "differenciaUon." See note 33 above. Here, the first spelling belongs to the a priori mathematical formula and the second the a posteriori, biological inquiry. The limits reappear in his sum-ming up, even though, according to Deleuze, their presumption and inade-quacy leaves dramatization with a greater role in understanding the world; see Deleuze, différence et Répétition, note 19, pp. 284-285.
71. Deleuze, différence et Répétition, pp. 345-349.
72. Fonder.
73. Deleuze, différence et Répétition, note 19, p. 351.
74. La représentation, surtout quand elle s'élève à 1'infini, est parcourue de pressentiment du sans-fond.Mais parce qu'elle s'est rendu infinite pour prendre sur soi la différence, elle représente le sans fond comme un abîme tout à fait indifférent, un universel sans différence, un néant noir indifférent.
75. The different social orders as set out by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et Schizophrenie: L'Anti-Oedipe (Paris: Minuit, 1980).
76. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Capitalisme et Schizophrenie 2: Mille Plateaux (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980).
77. focus human desire, a la Nietzsche, the better to constrain it: directing attention upon one or other determinate body- a piece of territory itself, the body of the ruler, fetishized capital. For, as Paul Patton puts it, "Social relations require the stabilisation and fixation of cer-tain forms of interaction." See Paul Patton, Deleuze and The Political (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 104.
78. These different orders, or "abstract machines," converting and directing human energies, are said to "reterritorialize" the objects of desire that are thus conjured up. Each reterritorialization is a kind of psychic perversion corresponding to the acdon of a type of social order: territorial, despotic, civilized capitalist; see Deleuze and Guattari, Capitalisme et Schizophrenie: L'Anti-Oedipe, pp. 335-336.
79. Originally published in Revue de synthese, reprinted in Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Phibsophie Pratique (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2003), pp. 164-175.
80. Une Nature qui est Ellemême un individu variant d'une infinite de façons." (Deleuze, Spinoza, p. 164.).
81. Ibid p.164.
82. Ibid., p. 165.
83. Se définit par des agencements de mouvements et d'affects dans lesquels elle entre.
84. Deleuze, Spinoza, note 49, pp. 166-168.
85. Ibid., p. 172.
86. Ibid., pp. 171-173.
87. Deleuze and Guattari, Capitalisme et Schizophrenic: L'Anti-Oedipe, note 48, pp. 9-37.
88. The plateaus of the book's title can be understood in this way: as levels in the overall growth where upward or downward extension eases off, in the same way as the rhizome thickens.
89. The term "margin" was given currency in Derrida's 1972 Marges de la phibsophie.
90. which extrapolates from Heidegger and from contemporary linguistics to lend a new priority to that which lies on the margin of the semantic field; see Jacques Derrida, Positions (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972).
91. The whole deconstructive endeavor could thus be said to be built upon the notion of the margin as an indeterminable edge of sense. But one exception has been the work of Geoffrey Bennington, Derrida's onetime student, who has long pursued a deconstructive reflection on boundaries; see Geoffrey Ben-nington, Frontières Kantiennes (Paris: Galilee, 2000).
92. Hence, this article arrives at a concept of "the margin" from an ontology, in Deleuze, rather than from a semantics, in Derrida. Specifically Derridean treatment of territorial and other boundaries is rarer, but see Vaughan-Williams, note 6.
93. Geoffrey Bennington, Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruclion (London: Verso, 1995), p. 186.
94. Deleuze, différence et Répétition, note 19, p. 80.
95. A further investigation, which does not belong here, would qualify that assumption, by specifying the potential that the weaker "marginal" entity nonetheless has vis-à-vis the center. See Noel Parker, "A Theoretical Intro-duction: Space, Centers, and Margins," in Noel Parker, ed., The Geopolitics of Europe's Identity: Centers, Boundaries and Margins (New York: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 3-23.
96. Such as William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1995).
97. Jacques Derrida, Adieu À Emmanuel Lévinas (Paris: Gallilee, 19970).
98. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
99. Jenny Edkins, Post-Structuralism and International Relations: Bringing the Political Back In (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1999), pp. 65-86.
100. Many of these points are shared between Foucault and Deleuze (Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, translated by Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon, edited by Donald Bouchard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), pp. 205-217.
101. Foucault's account of the tension between raison d'état and the identification of the subject population reflects the same issue; see Michel Foucault, Securilé, Territoire, Population: Cours de Collége de France, 1977-1978 (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), chap. 10.
102. These conflict-sustaining processes have been subjected to investigation in, e.g., Susanne Buckley-Zistel, "In-Between War and Peace: Identities, Boundaries and Change After Violent Conflict," Millennium: Journal of International Studies 35, no.1 (2006): 3-21.
103. This idea is very fully explored at the level of the human person and the sociopolitical group in Paul Ricoeur's analyses of the interactions between self- and other-identities; see Paul Ricoeur, Soi-Mȩme comme un Autre(Paris: Seuil, 1990).
104. For a discussion of the same idea's application to the International, see Xavier Guillaume, "Unveiling the 'International': Process, Identity and Alterity," Millennium: Journal of International Studies 35, no.3 (September 2007): 741-758.
105. These insights are presumed in a battery of constructivist positions on international politics: Stefano Guzzini, From (Alleged) Unipolarity to the Decline of Multilateralism? A Power-Theoretical Critique, DIIS Working Papers, vol.2005:25.
106. (Copenhagen: Danish Institute for International Studies, 2005);
107. Stefano Guzzini and Dietrich Jung, eds., Contemporary Security Analysis and Copenhagen Peace Research (London: Routledge, 2004);
108. Erik Ringmar, Identity, Interest and Action: A Cultural Explanation of Sweden's Intervention in the Thirty Years War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
109. Bo Stråth, "Multiple Europes: Integration, Identity and Demarcation to the Other," in Bo Stråth, ed., Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2000), pp. 385-420.
110. Alexander Wendt, "Anarchy is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics," International Organization 46, no.2 (Spring 1992): 391-421;
111. Alexander Wendt, "Collective Identity Formation and the International State," American Political Science Review 88, no.2 (1994): 384-396;
112. Ole Waever, Concepts of Security. (Copenhagen: Copenhagen University Institute of Political Science, 1997). Here they appear in an ontology.
113. This mirrors Deleuze's strictures, discussed above, regarding the distinction between interior and exterior according to Spinoza's ontology.
114. Frederik Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969), p. 10.
115. Chantal Mouffe, ed., The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 1999).
116. Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), pp. 47-65;
117. Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000).
118. I avoid saying that it is non-"spatial" because "space" has a nonterri-torial meaning as the relations of entities and parts of entities.
119. Parker, ed., The Geopolitics of Europe's Identity, note 42.
120. See Olivier Roy, "Al-Qaida Brand Name Ready for Franchise," le Monde Diplomatique, Sept. 2004, pp. 1-3.
121. Philip Bobbitt, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Knopf, 2008), chap.l.
122. Balibar, We the People of Europe?note 6, p. 109.
123. Lucien Fèbvre, "Frontières: The Word and the Concept," in Peter Burke, ed., A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Lucien Fèbvre (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 210-218;
124. Michel Foucault, Sécurité, Territoire, Population: Cours de CollégedeFrance, 1977-1978 (Paris: Gallimard, 2004);
125. Stein Rokkan, State Formation, Nation-Building, and Mass Politics in Europe : The Theory of Stein Rokkan Based on His Collected Works, edited by Peter Flora, Stein Kuhnle, and Derek Urwin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
126. Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980);
127. Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (London: Routledge, 1996);
128. Chris Smaje, Natural Hierarchies: The Historical Sociology of Race and Caste (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
129. Barth, note 6, pp. 17-36; Henri LeFèbvre, The Production of Space, translated by D. Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991);
130. Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989).
131. Ferguson and Mansbach, Polities: Authority, Identities, and Change, note 2.