Transdiscursive Cosmopolitanism: Foucauldian Freedom, Subjectivity, and the Power of Resistance by Joanna K. Rozpedowski A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of Government and International Affairs College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Major Professor: Michael T. Gibbons, Ph.D. Cheryl Hall, Ph.D. Mark Amen, Ph.D. Date of Approval: June 24, 2009 Keywords: Foucault, globalization, governmentality, postmodernism, self-enactment © Copyright 2009 , Joanna K. Rozpedowski Mei Parentes cosmopoliticum, Anna et Jerzy Rozpedowski, hunc thesis dedico “Quidquid agis, prudenter agas et respice finem.” ~ “Where the tree of knowledge stands, there is always Paradise” -Nietzsche ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Professor Michael Gibbons for his enduring intellectual guidance and generous research atmosphere. It was my good fortune to have benefited most agreeably from an Independent Reading on Michel Foucault’s works conducted by Professor Gibbons in the Summer 2008 term; and I am very grateful for his superb introduction and outstanding scholarly exposé of this complex politico-philosophical material. I would like to thank Professor Mark Amen for a year of exquisite academic lectures and engaging discussions on globalization. I gratefully acknowledge and thank Professor Cheryl Hall for her meticulous critical evaluation of the manuscript and her many intelligent and instructive observations, which helped to better define the final version of this study. As a student absorbed with Foucault’s literature, I must admit, following in the philosopher’s footprints, that any intellectual shortcomings on my part “are simply good intentions left undone.” TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................................... iii INTRODUCTION ..............................................................................................................1 CHAPTER I. COSMOPOLIS – A BRIEF HISTORY: FROM AGORA TO GLOBAL FORUM .......................................................................................................9 The Discourses on Cosmopolitan Universe ...........................................................12 CHAPTER II. THE POSTMODERN TURN AND A CASE FOR COSMOPOLITANISM: A FOUCAULDIAN CHALLENGE TO THE REALIST ORTHODOXY .......................................................................................... 29 Poststructuralism in International Relations .........................................................35 Injunction of Realism ............................................................................................37 Foucault’s Postmodern Paradigm: The Question of Political Sovereignty ..........44 Genealogy, Archeology, and Discourse in Politics ..............................................46 Foucault on Sovereignty .......................................................................................50 The State of Being qua Creative Becoming ..........................................................57 A Prelude: Political Significance of Space ...........................................................60 CHAPTER III. THEORIZING POLITICAL SPACE, GOVERNMENTALITY, AND SOVEREIGNTY ................................................................................................63 Postmodernism and the Rise of the Politics of Social Space ................................69 On the Art of Government .....................................................................................78 The Foucauldian Subject .......................................................................................83 The Problematic of Subjectivity, Freedom, and Resistance .................................87 CHAPTER IV. THE ROLE OF DISCOURSE IN TRANSFORMATIVE POLITICS: FOUCAULT’S PHILOSOPHY I N POLITICAL PRACTICE ..............91 Case Study I: National/State Gender Discourses and the Administration of Society .............................................................................................................94 Case Study II: Civil Liberties and the State of Exception ..................................107 Case Study III: War Crimes, Refugeeism, and the Dilemmas of Citizenship ....................................................................................................130 The Power of Resistance and the Foucauldian Ethics of Self-Creation .............140 i CHAPTER V. FOUCAULDIAN COSMOPOLITANISM: TERRA INCOGNITA? ...........................................................................................................146 The Grand Narratives and Cosmopolitan Itineraries ...........................................147 Governance and Governmentality in an Era of Globalization ............................158 Diffused Nation-States and the Challenges of Self-Enactment ..........................165 Cosmopolitan Ontology ......................................................................................171 Conclusion: The Horizons of Cosmopolitan Democracy ...................................176 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...........................................................................................................178 ii Transdiscursive Cosmopolitanism: Foucauldian Freedom, Subjectivity, and the Power of Resistance Joanna K. Rozpedowski ABSTRACT The following project will consist in the study and examination of the concepts and theories that lie in the domain of political theory. The enquiry into the dimensions and complexities of the socio-political organization and the political substance of individual human agents will be conducted with the intellectual assistance of the postmodernist turn of thought. I will interrogate and develop a specifically Foucauldian reading of international politics and the emerging global world order as well as situate Foucault’s insights and theorizing in a cosmopolitan framework, which calls for a progressive re- conceptualization of the dimensions of power and the modalities of state-citizen autonomy, and sovereignty. The thesis will proceed through five stages of analysis: (i) examination of freedom and self-creation as foundational and fundamental to the cosmopolitan citizenship; (ii) investigation of governmentality, power and the role of personal and political resistance in shaping new horizons of political order (iii) development of a structural approach to cosmopolitan democracy; enhanced by (iv) decoupling of identity iii from citizenship, and prompted by (v) an inquiry into and recalibration of the political space and sovereignty of states and political agents. I will contend for a conception of citizenship, illuminated by a postmodernist lens of analysis, set in a cosmopolitan framework and premised upon a notion of a layered and constituted dialectic, as the most adroit model for a re-articulation of the spirit of democratic qua cosmopolitan citizenship in the world of increasingly displaced loyalties, porous identities, and atrophied civic commitments. The study aims to inquire into the possibilities of meaningfully addressing the fundamental question in political theory, that of: how is the state to be organized in an era of globalization accompanied by an unprecedented compression of space and time, and re-spatialization of socio-economic and political relations. The thesis will conclude with a synthesis of proposed theoretical assumptions that are to serve as the structural basis and philosophical guidance for the institutionalization of measures conducive to the enactment and perpetuation of cosmopolitan consciousness and cosmopolitical practice. iv INTRODUCTION “The main interest in life is to become someone else that you were not at the beginning … The game is worthwhile as we don’t know what will be the end.” -Michel Foucault Globalization, it has been argued, engenders homogenization, engineers specious consensus, subsumes and absorbs individuality into an “undifferentiated being,” and induces subject’s surrender to the “collective rhythm” of the indifferent world of corporate symbolism and largely anonymous spaces dedicated to the cultivation of virtual pseudo-personal relations. Due to its ubiquitous presence, the phenomenon as a corpus of ideas, processes and interactions changes the very nature of the international realm of governance, resulting in decomposition and an organic disintegration of the connective tissue that ties social capital qua citizenship to its communitarian and democratic values. The multidimensionality of the phenomenon thus appears to make dichotomous demands upon the situated agent, as it presents both an occasion for challenging the ossified, asphyxiating, and inflexible modes of being and feeling a citizen, as well as prompts alienation from the public participatory dialectics of socio-political existence which ensue in the praxes of individual ethical ambiguity, powerlessness and inertia. Furthermore, it is argued that contemporary modes of globalization have shifted concentration of power from the states to other non-territorial and supraterritorial entities, 1 as the importance and condition of territorialization diminishes. Hence, it is possible to speak of the transition from statism – the centralized regulation and operation of territorial, bureaucratic and national governments1 - to polycentrism - a societal condition of governance in which power radiates from various dispersed nodes of supra- and sub- state parties, that is; power as “incarnated in historical social practices”2 emanating