Theory & Event

This is a timely and thought-provoking paper. I agree with much of what the paper argues. I agree, for instance, that there is a certain conditioning of the American social and political landscapes through multiple and intersecting knowledge practices. Think-tanks constitute one of many nodes through which such knowledgeable practices travel and have effects in the real. A multitude of self-conscious and loosely orchestrated regimentations ultimately serves limited interests, arguably to the detriment of democratic ideals and practices. I agree, too, that this conditioning has consequences that reaches far beyond the US; people around the world live and die in part by the effects of the policies and processes conceived and empowered around American politics.

So, the United States is no small actor — the practices in the political in the US at once traverse the world, shaping the possibilities of life in distant lands. In Giorgio Agamben’s lexicon, often these practices operate through “a logic of ban and capture” that takes hold of much of the world as it conditions the contours and contents of the political in the US. Often, too, these engagements are with tragic consequences for ordinary people who have limited, if any, effective ways of controlling what befalls them from the mysterious networks of power and hierarchy.

More tragic than the fact these relations so exist is that they are effectively obscured in the displacements they create by anchoring even the displacements in the language of freedom, progress, market, inevitability, and necessity that bespeaks a certain journey starting from the familiar horizon of states, sovereignties, borders, and nations and moving inexorably in the direction of a promising horizon of the global.

I say tragic because this logic of ban captures lives in the US as well as across the world and brings them within the instrumental ambit of power while paradoxically claiming to be progressive and libratory. It works in effect to actively distance people — all but a few political and economic elite — from the locus of effective power yet manages to articulate such a displacement as positive agency.

These are the thoughts, observations, and arguments that are either explicitly or implicitly in the paper — I sympathize with all. Yet, the most compelling point that the paper begins to make but never really pursues rigorously is that in all of this somehow we seem to have less effective agency than we have previously thought or might be tempted to think. This point, I think, is the single most important point of the paper — and I agree with it. Yet, as I said before, this point is never actively cultivated although it underlies much of the urgency in the paper.

I welcome the willingness to recognize this position of relative alterity vis a vis the prevailing set of ideas and practices that capture lives and hold them in their instrumental ambit even as it promises progress, prosperity, emancipation, authenticity and community. Still, the questions that really animate the paper never really directly get at the lament about how this alterity is produced and maintained. Rather, they express it in studying think-tanks as a effective exercise of power in producing an hegemonic regime, manifesting itself in part in the military, industrial and media complex. However, ultimately, the questions, once asked, point in their shadow to a number of other questions that highlight this alterity in relation to the prevailing mode of ban and capture that characterize much of politics in the US and beyond and call for active engagement with the political.

How then do we begin to respond effectively to the capture of hegemonic practices that produce this position of alterity? How, by way of what practices, tactics and strategies, do we mobilize practical intelligibilities that then develop real capacities to respond proficiently to the regimentations that capture and harness our collective energies in directions contrary to our normative intentions and desires? How do we resist the militarization of our citizen subjectivities that ultimately narrows the fields of citizen politics, thereby curtailing our abilities to make ourselves as autonomously and decently as possible? How...