Moving Grammars of the Political, Affirm Different Verbs in Its Wake

Moving Grammars ofthe Political: Beyond Sovereign Thought and Action A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN POLITICAL SCIENCE DECEMBER 2004 By Geoffrey Alexander Wallace Whitehall Dissertation Committee: Michael J. Shapiro, Chairperson Kathy Ferguson Jon Goldberg-Hiller Jon Goss Sankaran Krishna Nevzat Soguk ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my entire committee for the generosity ofoffering their time to this project. iii ABSTRACT This dissertation challenges the failure of the contemporary political imagination. Effectively to do politics today is to say I oppose. With this failure in mind, the dissertation explores what it can mean to affirm new horizons of political possibility by being attentive to political grammars. I ask what it means to exceed the political grammar of sovereignty and, by moving grammars of the political, affirm different verbs in its wake. In the wake of sovereignty, I explore the following types of questions: 1) how can what exceeds accepted structures of intelligibility be appreciated. 2) How can difference be politicized without reducing it to the logic ofthe same? 3) How is it possible to think about a politics of time? How is language, grammatically and rhetorically, a set of limits that holds people to singular identities and calibrates political action to predetermined positions? With these questions in mind, the general question being asked is: how can different linguistic practices open up competing political grammars? To this end, the dissertation pushes Gilles Deleuze beyond his inherited political grammar. Specifically, I amplify Deleuze's philosophy, which celebrates creating concepts above all else, into a moving politics. The dissertation demonstrates that Deleuze's emphasis on the concept neglects the verb "to create" which is always indebted to sovereignty's intellectual patrimony. For Deleuze to become political, other verbs are needed that do not reproduce sovereignty's political grammar. To aid developing different verbs, I dedicate a chapter to re-writing the Pacific Rim as a temporal Event in order to affirm the verb to exceed. In a chapter dedicated to reading the genre of Science Fiction, the verb to encounter is affirmed. Finally, in a chapter dedicated to the problem of Music appreciation, the verb to amplify is affirmed. Such affirmations offer a contribution to political and philosophical discussions about the crisis of the political. They push celebrating movement and change towards developing linguistic practices that embody movement and change. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Moving Grammars of the Political: Beyond Sovereign Thought and Action i DISSERTATIONCOMMIITEE ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii ABSTRACT iv TABLE OFCONTENTS, v LISTOFFIGURES vii PREFACE 8 CHAPTER1 12 Movingfrom Crisis 12 The Politics ofCrisis ___________________ 20 The Crisis ofthe Political 33 Moving Politics From Crisis 46 CHAPTER 2 56 The Verbalising ofthe Political Grammar ofSovereignty 56 Concept ofSovereignty or Sovereign Concept? 63 Verbalising Sovereignty's Statements 77 Affirming MovingVerbs 93 CHAPTER 3 103 Politics after the Event: Exceeding Fluid Horizons in a Time ofTerror _____________________________103 The Event ofthe Pacific Rim Project 110 Oceans, Flows and Currents 127 Politics after the Event 138 CHAPTER 4 157 The Problem ofthe "World and Beyond": Encountering "the Other" in Science Fiction 157 Science Fiction as a Genre ofthe Beyond 162 Replicating a Grammar of Representation: Star Trek Managing the Beyond 166 Ironic Grammars: Starship Troopers Mobilises the Beyond 172 Encountering Grammars: Martian Chronicles and the Affirmation of the Beyond 183 Encountering BeyondWorld Politics 191 CHAPTER 5 195 5 Musical Movements ofPolitical Thought 195 Track 1: Thinking as a Dogmatic Image ofThought 202 Remix: Music as a Terrain ofThought 209 Cut: Music as a Distinct Terrain ofSocial Thought 217 Drop: Towards a Dissident Image ofThought 223 Redux: Towards a Dissident Sound ofThought 229 CHAPTER 6 241 Concluding in the Middle 241 BIBLIOGRAPHY 251 ENDNOTES 266 6 LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE PAGE Figure 1: APEC Logo 119 Figure 2: Rogue Wave 155 7 Everywhere (the metaphysics of language) sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things - only thereby does it first create the concept of "thing." Everywhere being is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause, the concept of being follows, and is a derivative of, the concept of ego. In the beginning there is that great calamity of an error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a capacity. Today we know that it is only a word.... I am afraid we are not yet rid of God because we still have faith in grammar. -- Fredric Nietzsche It is often forgotten that (dictionaries) are artificial repositories, put together well after the languages they define. The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature. -- Jorge Luis Borges PREFACE As the title suggests this dissertation is about shifting grammars of the political, pushing beyond sovereign thought and action, and implies celebrating the political event of thinking and acting. To say the least this is an inauspicious beginning, since, like any interesting project (another trembling statement), it is doomed to failure. It is doomed to failure because there are a number of impossible juxtapositions in the title, for instance, between thought and action and between thought and thinking and action and acting. Although they are productive, and worthy of inquiry, they are impossible because they only persist in and through the grammar that brings them into existence. Grammar is more than the way in which words are organised and how they follow from each other in an acceptable fashion. Grammar is more than what Mr. Hayes, my ninth grade English teacher, attempted to teach (me); namely: the rules and exceptions of the English language. When is it proper 8 to use a comma? When is it correct to pluralize a subject? When is it acceptable to modify a noun? In this line of questioning grammar is a morality. It is a set of rules that must be obeyed or, returning to the case of Mr. Hayes, be subject to the pain of copying out a column of the Oxford English Dictionary. As a morality, grammar is an articulation of what is possible and of what can be said at any particular time. As Nietzsche's quote starting this preface suggests, grammar is a metaphysical statement about being, "I am afraid we are not yet rid of God because we still have faith in grammar (Nietzsche 1954: 483)." Through language, through grammar, a world exists. This world is properly ordered, rhythms are well punctuated and meanings are defined. It should be no surprise that the first chapters of Hobbes' Leviathan are about grammar, since, in modernity grammar is sovereignty and, in turn, sovereignty is the expression, condition and performance of being modern. To this end, Mr Hayes played his role in making an example out of me. Ifgrammar is about the constitution of a way of being together, of the meaning and possible expression of life, then all grammar is political. The dissertation is about grammar because it politicises the conditions of possibility for politics. I want to ask how it is possible to think and act beyond the political conditions of possibility of thought and action. In this sense, I am asking with Mr. Hayes when to pluralize a word and when to modify a noun, but instead of operating in the service of a governing morality, my aim, with Machiavelli as my teacher, is to celebrate the return of politics. To ask 9 such an impossible question of thinking and acting beyond sovereign thought and action requires moving grammar by pluralizing nouns and modifying verbs. In the dissertation's title, the first meaning of the word moving, therefore, is that of the verb to move. The second meaning of the word moving however is its adjective usage. Because the etymological root of "adjective" is to throw or to place, moving grammars throws grammar into a condition of movement. This second meaning highlights, in contrast to moralising grammars, that grammar is always already in a condition of movement. Grammar's moving can be explained as a contemporary experience. It is increasingly common place to hear statements like our worlds have changed, our worlds are changing or our worlds will change. Or grammar's moving can be explained as a prior statement about life itself: "there is nothing permanent," Heraclitus of Ephesus once said, "except change." Grammar's moving can also be explained as an internal destabilising quality oflanguage itself. Language itself is always deteriorating. The roots of language, Borges reminds us, are mystical and irrational. In all these affirmations, grammars are on the move. The grammar of being together and creating meaning in the world today is itself on the move. Third, the effect of moving grammars and grammar's moving is, I think, moving. In other words, moving grammar, like poetry, is affective. It is emotional at a bodily level. Moving grammar changes the habitualized ways in which it is possible to experience, sense and appreciate being in the world. 10 Moving grammar gives access to words that are beyond the habit of comprehension, specification and quantification. "It is the silence, rather, that obliges the poet to listen, and gives the dream greater intimacy. We hardly know where to situate this silence, whether in the vast world or in the immense past. But we do know that it comes from beyond a wind that dies down or a rain that grows gentle (Bachelard 1994: 172)." Moving grammar alters the possible ways in which to become, identify, and recognise what it means to be alive today.

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