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Spectral Sovereignty, Vernacular Cosmopolitans, and Cosmopolitan Memories

HOMI K. BHABHA

In keeping with the representational style and practice of taking the genre of the photograph, the snapshot as a kind of cosmopolitan exercise, I will present a text which consists of three snapshots: the first section of my essay is called “spectral sovereignty,” the second “vernacular cosmopolitans,” and the third “cosmopolitan memories.” I do this in the spirit of one of the earliest cosmopolitical projects, the photographic archives of the Musée Albert-Kahn in Paris, that great “Archive of the Planet” for which Kahn sent photographers all across the world to take photographs (in Autochrome color) and to film. It’s a remarkable archive of the way the world looked between 1909 and 1931, and it demonstrates the cosmopolitan interconnections at that time.

Before I start, I’d like to echo a point touched on by Robert Young in “The Cosmopolitan Idea and National Sovereignty.” I have tried to answer some of Robert’s questions, not in the order he’s posed them, but as part of a narrative. It is of course true that certain cosmopolitan acts in the world can actually intensify national and ethnic relations, almost make them artificially intimate. In Dubai that is one of the issues for South Asian migrant workers. They literally live closer together than they would ever live otherwise. If you go a little bit outside cosmopolitan Dubai, you see a very different Dubai. This is something we should not forget: cosmopolitanism of various kinds produces its own artifices of ethnic identification, its own politics of identity, which of course you have to go and look for. But when you look for it, you find it. And what you find is one of the problems with the way in which a certain kind of market cosmopolitanism works transnationally.

Let me start with a few words from an article by Avishai Margalit which I’m very fond of, called “The Lesser Evil.” It’s a rather cryptic paragraph, an enigmatic set of rather deep ideas. I’ve tried in different ways to work with them, today and in other places. Margalit writes: “It is injustice, not justice, which brings us into normative politics; despotism, not freedom. Moral political theory should start with negative politics: the politics that informs us how to tackle evil before it tells us how to pursue the good.”1

Spectral Sovereignty

Robert Young’s finely crafted questions follow the dark trajectory of Margalit’s thought. How often in the past century, and in this present one, have we not found ourselves stranded on the Via Dolorosa in any number of towns, countries, and villages, saying “Never Again”; and how often has human history responded with a sly, startling echo: “Again and Again and Again”. Young invites us into the normative realm of cosmopolitanism by recalling Hannah Arendt’s passionate condemnation of “the bankruptcy of the nation state and its concept of sovereignty” after Auschwitz.2 And yet, almost half a century later, the Arendtian echo lives on in Agamben’s statement, “The refugee should be considered for what he is, that is, nothing less than a border concept that radically calls into question the principles of the nation-state and, at the same time, helps clear the field for a no-longer-delayable renewal of categories.”3 What is the nature of the crisis of the nation-state today? Or to put it another way, in what sense does cosmopolitanism clear the way for a renewal of our human rights; the representation of global justice; and the construction of a polity of “equality-in-difference” that protects and propagates the interests of minorities, individuals, collectives, and groups—what Etienne Balibar has called “equaliberty”?4

To start with the negative politics of the nation-state—to move from injustice to an idea of justice, from tyranny to tolerance and beyond—should not turn us into gleeful undertakers busily burying the remains of the nation’s tattered sovereignty. The sovereignty of the nation-state may have lost its ethical authority after Jim Crow or after Auschwitz or, more recently, after Rwanda, or after Gujarat. Its political sovereignty may have been compromised and displaced by some of the financial structures of neoliberal global markets, just as its territorial sovereignty has become permeable to nongovernmental organizations and, I must say, the generally weak enforcement of international legal regimes. These losses of sovereignty have also manifested themselves in new compromise-formations—the avatars of spectral sovereignty—that exercise a furious affective and imaginative sense of “national” belonging, often theological and political at the same time, among transnational and diasporic populations. There are those who believe that the sway of Hindutva stretches from India to New Jersey; others who see the umma as a global phenomenon capable of generating “an ethical life” commensurate with the cohesive intimacy of an Islamic national community wherever and whenever they may be living. For the Kashmiris, the Palestinians, and some First Nations peoples, the nation form is at once and ever a proleptic promise—the fulfillment of a future that knows no end in the sacrifice of lives and the loss of goods in the cause of a passionate patriotism.

Such spectral sovereignty must certainly not be understood as the national mimesis of minorities or the disposed alone. Powerful Western nations use the empowered prerogatives of “security”—Preemption, Redemption—to claim for themselves corners of a foreign field that are forever England, or France, or the United States. The ghosts of sovereignty are capable of reappearing in many garbs and speak in strange tongues. Gunboat democracy in Iraq was repeatedly justified as a cosmopolitical act that sought to go beyond “national consciousness” (which was abundant in Iraq), toward creating a model “civil society” that, as they put it, would stabilize the entire Middle East region and unify it so that the Euphrates would flow gently and docilely into the Thames, the Seine, and the Mississippi. What I am calling spectral sovereignty is not a leftover remnant of the Westphalian system that has somehow been resistant to the transformative forces of globalization or cosmopolitanism. It is a hybrid constellation of affect and political effect; a semblance of the past as it passes into the history of the present. Spectral sovereignty is produced in the asymmetrical and interstitial conditions of global disjunction and it is absolutely contemporary with attempts of globality to create market-based consumer cosmopolitanism.

Cultural theorists like ourselves—hypocrites lecteurs, mes semblables, mes frères—have rightly taken “sovereignty” to task, without sufficiently acknowledging the iterative and affective part of spectral sovereignty, whose global-cosmopolitical ambitions, adhesions, and affiliations are magnified and accelerated multiple times through new, digital technologies. It is as if an aching phantom limb (the notion of sovereignty) even though it has been severed, had found its perfectly fitting “virtual” prosthesis. When cultural theorists argue that “postmodernism” is the logic of global capital, or that “the world market establishes a real politics of difference,”5 they equate the conceptual language of cultural studies with select aspects of the global political economy—commodification, financial flows, capital transfers, outsourcing, flexible accumulation. These economic and financial processes that seem to resonate with aspects of a kind of Deleuzian deterritorialization are then mobilized for a wider political and ethical argument.

The aim of empire-assisted cosmopolitan citizenship lies, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue, in “the struggle against the slavery of belonging to a nation, an identity and a people, and thus the desertion from sovereignty and the limits it places on subjectivity—is entirely positive. Nomadism and miscegenation appear here as figures of virtue, the first ethical practices on the terrain of empire.”6 Such an emancipatory ideal—so affixed on, so fetishizing of, the flowing, borderless, global world—neglects to confront the fact that the migrants, refugees, or nomads do not merely circulate just because the signifier suggests that they should. They need to settle, claim asylum or nationality, demand housing and education, assert their economic and cultural rights, and seek the status of some form of citizenship. It is salutary, then, to turn to less “circulatory” forms of the economy, like trades and tariffs, or taxes and monetary policy—much less open to metaphoric appropriation or deconstruction—to see how they impact on the global imaginary of diasporic cultural studies. At a rough estimate, almost 90 percent of all worldwide trade policies of tariffs are still controlled by nation-states rather that interregional bodies. There are some exceptions like the EU and Mercosur, even though the figures are not spectacularly different. Positive global relations depend on the protection and enhancement of these national “territorial” resources, which should then become part of the “global” cosmopolitical economy of resource redistribution and participate in a transnational moral economy of redistributive justice. It should be seen in that way. These are complex relationships, and I think it does no good at all to follow certain notions of borderlessness for their own sake: it is very important to be able to see the tensions between what remains, because what remains fixed is not always what was fixed. There are new fixities, new borders. Just as with globalization, there are new pockets of polity. The fact that, for example, in India literacy levels have not changed dramatically cannot simply be read as part of an ongoing history. These have to recalculated, reconjugated, if I may use the verbal term, in current conditions.

Vernacular Cosmopolitanism

Pursuing the theme of “negative politics” in a more positive direction leads us into a shadowy realm just prior to the cosmopolitan claims of normative political community. This is a moment in the making of Ethical Life that Hegel describes as an unresolved contradiction, or as Jean Hyppolite puts it, a “tormented opposition between sensuousness and duty.… We must therefore postulate an indefinite life in order for the subject continually to make moral progress.”7 It is the torment of this indefinite life—which introduces indeterminacy, anxiety, and contingency into the practices of ethical life and into the idea of progress itself—that enables us to take our first steps toward an everyday vernacular cosmopolitanism. When I talk about negative politics, I’m focusing on that moment before the normative comes to be constituted, the disturbed moment before, the moment that in his work on ethical life Hegel sees as the indefinite moment of a kind of subsumption. I’m suggesting that if you bracket out that subsumption and spend a little more time with this moment of the indefinite, then you reach something that allows you to think about the cosmopolitical in a useful way.

Our nation-centered view of sovereign citizenship can only comprehend the predicament of minoritarian “belonging” as a problem of a political ontology—a question of belonging to a race, a gender, a class, a generation that becomes a kind of “second nature,” a primordial identification, and an inheritance authenticated by tradition, a naturalism and a naturalization of the problem of citizenship. The vernacular cosmopolitan view takes the position of a negative political ontology and suggests that the commitment to a “right to difference in equality” as a process of constituting emergent groups and affiliations has less to do with the affirmation or authentication of origins or “identities,” and more to do with political practices and ethical choices. Minoritarian affiliations or solidarities arise in response to the failures and limits of democratic representation, creating new modes of agency, new strategies of recognition, new forms of political and symbolic, as well as affective, representation—NGOs, antiglobalization groups, Truth and Reconciliation commissions, international courts, local agencies of transnational justice (such as the gacaca courts in rural Rwanda). Vernacular cosmopolitanism represents a political process that works toward the shared goals of a democratic rule, works toward them again from that negative moment of process, rather than simply acknowledging already constituted “marginal” political identities or entities.

The torment of the indefinite, as I am calling it, in the creation of vernacular cosmopolitanism often presents itself as an existential and ethical anxiety that is at the heart of any cosmopolitical relationality. If, as Seyla Benhabib argues—and Young agrees—the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1946 “signaled a profound transformation of the international itself whereby the rights and sovereignty of nations established through international treaties was shifted to the rights and claims of individuals,” then even this world-changing document is not free from the marks of what I have called “the indefinite,” precisely at the point at which it makes claims to be universal. The unsettled universality of the Declaration is not primarily a matter of its inability to deal with cultural pluralism, otherness, or relativism, as problems that face it from the outside, or indeed of its inability to respond to whatever “Asian values” are. There is a more fundamental structural issue—differentiation as an internal problem—that is visible even in as seemingly singular and universal a phrase as “a member of society” in Article 22: “Every person as a member of society is entitled to the realization of the economic, social, and cultural rights enumerated below.”

The “subject” of rights in the Universal Declaration is an ongoing articulation of representations and repressions—a Gordian knot of ideologies and beliefs, or a web of beliefs about culture, identity, and agency that are absorbed into the draft, into the rhetoric itself, or erased from it. This great cosmopolitical instrument must be read, as I’ve suggested, with the nation, as much for its substance as for its spectral authority. The rhetoric of the Declaration is an iterative practice of drafting and erasure, and must be grasped as a process of instantiation and incompletion (the torment of the indefinite) that is part of any serial archive. For instance, the travaux préparatoires, that give you the discursive and archival history of Article 22, attest that the innocuous, abstract-sounding phrase “as a member of society,”—who could disagree with it?—is the denomination of a “subject” of second-generation rights that is a strange composite of divergent historical strategies of that time of “subjectivity” that cast their shadows on the very drafting of the phrase. There are all sorts of controversies there, which allowed them to come to this distillation which has this universal, resounding sound but is in fact a battleground itself, a profound indeterminate place. The liberal individual subject versus the Marxist subject of collective rights; the citizen-subject articulated with the subject of international law; the (failed) attempt by Western governments to damage the cause of social rights by designating Article 22 as an “umbrella” article—these are some of the contradictory forces that created the mise-en-scène for second-generation social rights. Ideologies at odds with each other; concepts of agency conceived in the overlap, the Venn diagram, between the national and the international; the ontology of rights balanced precariously between transcendence and effective territoriality.

To reveal the indefinite structure of the modern cosmopolitical subject is to understand the uses of negative politics as the tentative, yet tenacious, stage or phase before—or indeed in anticipation of—the normative status and politics of the Declaration. And this attention to that which is not as yet concretized or instrumentalized makes possible another important move in constructing a cosmopolitical ethics. Julia Kristeva eloquently makes the case in elaborating her concept of cosmopolitan societies as paradoxical, side-by-side communities consisting of subjects who are simultaneously the same and the other:

Such an ethics should reveal, discuss, and spread a concept of human dignity, wrested from the euphoria of classic humanists and laden with alienations, dramas, and dead-ends of our condition as speaking beings. […] That being the case, as social as that strangeness might be, it can be modulated—with the policy of achieving a polytopic and supple society, neither locked into the nation and its religion nor anarchically exposed to all of its explosions.8

To propose an ethics of cosmopolitanism not based primarily on our dignity as human beings—the assumption of the Universal Declaration—but on our psychic and social alienations, moral ambivalences, and personal agonisms as speaking-subjects raises questions that go far beyond Kristeva’s own semiotic and psychoanalytic ends. What does it mean to locate the authority of recognition, or the endowment of dignity, in the very act of annunciation? In the scene-shifting, self-positioning regimes of discursive address? Does the immanent, time-worn value of universality have to be renounced in order to accommodate the alternative perspective of what Seyla Benhabib calls our necessary “democratic iterations”: “The deconstruction of the sovereign nation that confronts its authority with a process of fluid, open, and contentious public debate, the lines then separating we and you, us and them, more often than not rest on unexamined prejudices, ancient battles, historical injustices, and sheer administrative fiat.”9 The act of enunciation, which represents the ongoing processes and performances of the speaking subject—very different from the speaking subject as Kristeva announced it—is the imminent domain of discourse. Enunciation is the ongoing articulation of language that always tries to capture the present as it is passing into the future; and as such, I believe, it is intimately related to the assertorial and aspirational basis of rights, the ethics of rights which are often prior to their institutionalization and their legislative power. This a very important area, that part of negative polity before the right becomes a right, all that happens before—the solidarity, the construction of a party or a group. The symbolic and ethical power of rights, Amartya Sen argues in The Idea of Justice, lies in their rhetoricity, not their propositionality— in their acts of enunciation. It is their rhetorical and conceptual structure as ethical assertions—“not propositions about what is already guaranteed”—Sen argues, that ensures that “the public articulation of human rights (and recognition) are invitations to initiate some fresh legislations … and not just one more human interpretation of existing legal protections.”10 The “enunciative” ethics of cosmopolitanism are phrased in what I would call “quasi” or “proto” universals, not because they are abstractly true for all time, nor, like dignity, are they ends in themselves. Ethical enunciations in relation to rights and rhetorical assertions make a claim to a peculiar universal-cum-alterity, only because we repeatedly return to them, translate them ceaselessly, and extend them proleptically. This is a different way of thinking about universalism, not by saying it is a plural universalism, which actually doesn’t do the work at all because what’s the point of having that, but by saying that there is an iterative logic to universality, particularly in this area, that repetition and translation continually open universality to the problematics of alterity and difference. Universals are instrumentally efficacious not because they are incontrovertible “truths for all time”—as we know from their success or otherwise in legal challenge—but because their constant iteration and repetition is part of the revisionary temper of “negative politics” as it aspires to the truth of normative politics. Universals are not “ends.” They continually, however, send us back to the beginning to relocate, re-pose our starting questions, and to retool our originating assumptions.

Cosmopolitan Memories

It was an unsettled wet morning in late May. The rain skidded across the windscreen, blinding us for a moment and then suddenly clearing, giving us no kind of hint of what kind of day we were to expect. My host, a German professor from Munich, suddenly suggested that we make a stop in Nuremberg. “You must see Nuremburg, I must take you there.”

“Where?” I stuttered, really meaning “Why?’ and then, of course, I quickly recovered: “Yes certainly, what an excellent idea.” I vaguely remembered a film about the Nuremberg trials with Spencer Tracy and Marlene Dietrich, Judgment at Nuremberg, seen as a child in Bombay, much before I knew anything about Albert Speer or the millions of Nazis who frequently gathered in what Hitler called “The City of the Rallies.” Just these distant recollections, the heinous echolalia of Hitler’s high-pitched ravings, and a tired, overused phrase from Hannah Arendt—“the banality of evil”—trailed along in my mind as we drove off the Autobahn, and after some innocuous suburban maneuvering, arrived at the Zeppelinfeld, Hitler’s massive parade ground.

The vast stadium of soaring stone and empty, crumbling terraces was soundless. Where hundreds of thousands once stood to rapturous, roaring attention, today, in the rain, there were only a few of us—a man scraping the rust off his car, children baiting a dog—a few of us, tourists and visitors, at a loss for words, and what was far worse, without any sense of how to behave, or what really to look at, or what truism of history to utter. This sight was neither background nor foreground. It was strangely there, etched strongly in history and memory, and somehow nowhere.

How do you “dis-possess” a cultural space, a heritage site that has developed a global resonance, a cosmopolitan reference? How do you “dis-possess” a sight or subject of the past that is at once tangible and intangible—and yet preserve and protect something of the traumatic, barbaric heritage of its memory, something of that anxiety which has to be preserved, without which history is silenced and memory is made mute. Guilt, Reparation, Apology, Truth and Reconciliation—these are important moral dispositions and political strategies that strive to surmount the internecine violence of nations and states “in transition” by practicing the virtue of public confession and the balm of collective introspection. But there is nothing in the ethic of ameliorative witnessing, however sincere in its pursuit of human “fairness” and historic justice, that prepares you for the “vacuum” that such dis-possessed cultural monuments create—“the half-life of heritage,” on the other side of which lies the death of culture and the destruction of humanity. As I stood in this place of barbaric cultural transmission I was startled to hear a loud triumphant roar, a raucous chorus of celebration that rose from behind a bank of trees. I froze. Was I hallucinating? Alexander Kluge’s remarkable film Brutality in Stone, that explores the architectural tomb of the half-dead Zeppelintribune, flashed before my eyes. It brought back those voices—Hitler, Himmler, anonymous camp commandants—that Alexander Kluge had dug up from the Nazi archive to accompany his silent visuals. These “dis-possessed” moments and monuments, merely mortar and marble, are not free of the morality of human choice.

In the lengthening shadows of the Zeppelintribune I felt a gathering sense of being in the midst of many unresolved experiences and narratives. At first I shrank away from this dispossessed site of shame—Noli me tangere, What did all this have to do with me? And then I realized that there was no way out of it. The half-life of heritage was also mine to embrace. Only by identifying with this conflictual ambivalence between cultural appropriation and cultural alienation—between enunciation and erasure—could I make a moral alignment between what we know now and what we should have done then, between the cosmopolitical here and the global then and there. But who is the cosmopolitan “we”? Why me? I, who was not even there, born in another country, years after the event?

To enter the realm of cosmopolitan memory is to place oneself—and others—within the orbit of a question posed by Margalit in a discussion of The Ethics of Memory: “Is the moral witness a forward-looking creature even when his [or her] testimony is about the past?”11 The moral witness is caught in a double time frame of cosmopolitical memory, surviving the testimony of the past while striving to possess the freedoms of the future. This complex temporal layering of memory consists, one might say, of a past that refuses to die, confronted by a future that will not wait to be born. You are faced with an open, onrushing future that demands a kind of ethical confidence that only comes from looking back from the future, as if one had the advantage of retrospection and afterthought.

What makes the moral witness a “forward looking creature”—what allows her to exclaim, Never Again—is the anticipatory, proleptic nature of moral consciousness itself. In Thinking and Moral Considerations, her beautifully wrought meditation on “the banality of evil,” Hannah Arendt argues: “conscience appears as an afterthought.… What makes a man fear [it] is the anticipation of the presence of a witness who awaits him only if and when he goes home.”12 The future-looking nature of global memory—which is neither redemptive nor tragic—is both an “afterthought” (the projection of a traumatized past) and an “anticipation” (a proleptic future). Memory’s cosmopolitan reach is not merely a spatial extension of ethical attention that crosses cultures, moves beyond borders, and converges upon new maps of the global world-picture: new internationalisms, new financial sectors, new technologies. Such vanities are short-lived and shortsighted. The ethical project of cosmopolitan memory is a negative politics: the perception of public virtue and progress seen through the dark, sometimes distant glass of human survival.

NOTES

  1  Avishai Margalit, “The Lesser Evil,” Royal Institute of Philosophy, vol. 54, March 2004, 187.

  2  Hannah Arendt, “On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1972), 108.

  3  Giorgio Agamben, “We Refugees,” trans. Michael Rocke, Symposium 49:2 (1995), 117.

  4  Etienne Balibar, Equaliberty: Political Essays (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014).

  5  Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 151.

  6  Ibid., 362.

  7  Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” (Evanston, Ill.: Northwest University Press, 1979), 478.

  8  Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 154.

  9  Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 177.

10  Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 359.

11  Margalit, op. cit., 152–53.

12  Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture,” Social Research 38:3 (1971), 444.