SASKIA SASSEN
IN this passionate and original book, Daniel Innerarity unsettles a range of typical or familiar contrasts. In this process he repositions the familiar as part of a new interpretation. Nothing is left standing where it once stood. Key categories are evicted from their conventional anchors. But it is an eviction that entails making new meanings.
As I read through this book, there was one image that kept recurring in my mind, albeit not one used by the author—it was more my applying Innerarity’s method to some of my work. The image is that the immigrant makes new ground for her mobility, and thereby makes identity into a practice. Here are meanings that keep rolling, not one can stand on its own in isolation: the moment it is uttered, it generates another meaning, in a sequence that eventually puts the reader in a faraway place from where the sentence, the paragraph, the page, or the chapter started. It is not analytical anarchy, but rather analytic freedom—concepts take on nomadic meanings that keep mutating.
But these mutating meanings can also become frightening. Innerarity asks: “How should we conceive of and govern a world made up of common threats and borderless sovereignties? How should we protect ourselves in limitless spaces, in a world of nets, fluidity, and connections?” A beginning of an answer is that we must find “a grammar” that helps us see that there is no exclusive ownership, that what belongs to us is not necessarily exclusively so... . The privileged may think they can withdraw from dangers, but they cannot.
In a moment of practical observation, Innerarity argues that we cannot produce safety, and we should not promise it. Rather, “we can only offer cooperative solutions, projects for greater integration, and complex forms of justice for which there are barely models or precedents.” Which brings him to what is probably his core argument, call, or thesis, that “what unifies us and puts us on equal footing is none other than the community of our threats, the shared risks that make it physically impossible to escape danger on our own.” He tells us that we can illustrate these “harsh new conditions” with such conditions as the gaseous world, universal exposure, or “a world without outlying areas.” Each of these images points toward “a shared vulnerability, a similar lack of protection, impossible immunity. The flip side of interdependence is common fragility and the fear of contagion.” He posits that this is why “a reasonable cultivation of fear and the management of global risks are among the most important functions of today’s governments, constituting a new opportunity for political innovation.”
Innerarity’s answer to many of the conundrums he examines is probably well captured in the following statement: “What we could call the civilizing of globalization is nothing but the reinvention of politics on a global scale in such a way that the world stops having owners and moves toward becoming a space for the citizenry.”
Yet at the same time, in his relentlessly critical rather than romantic perspective, he also detects trajectories that might go in less attractive directions. Thus he posits that our maps of the world today no longer show a “coherent and complete collective of self-sufficient units, but an incomplete map, with areas of ambiguous sovereignty, spaces that are difficult to regulate, and hazy responsibilities.” Again, here I see Innerarity executing that language operation that recurs relentlessly, to wit, that nothing is simply what it is.
In short, the play of metaphors proposed by the author as a way of examining today’s world helps clarify a range of complexities. It throws light on emergent patterns that are easily experienced as intractable.