This new configuration of power requires a new theoretical framework, or, at least, a revision of the models for thinking power that we already have at our disposal. The fact of extra-legal power is not new, but the mechanism by which it achieves its goals under present circumstances is singular. Indeed, it may be that this singularity consists in the way the “present circumstance” is transformed in a reality indefinitely extended into the future, controlling not only the lives of prisoners and the fate of constitutional and international law, but also the very ways in which the future may or may not be thought (92).<\/p>\n
How then finally are we to understand this extra-legal operation of power? <\/strong>(92)<\/p>\n What we have before us now is the deployment of sovereignty as a tactic, a tactic that produces its own effectivity as its aim. Sovereignty becomes that instrument of power by which law is either used tactically or suspended, populations are monitored, detained, regulated, inspected, interrogated, rendered uniform in their actions, fully ritualized and exposed to control and regulation in their daily lives. The prison presents the managerial tactics of governmentality in an extreme mode. And whereas we expect the prison to be tied to law\u2014to trial, to punishment, to the rights of prisoners\u2014 we see presently an effort to produce a secondary judicial system and a sphere of non-legal detention that effectively produces the prison itself as an extra-legal sphere (97).<\/p>\n Finally it seems important to recognize the one way of “managing” a population is to constitute them as the less than human without entitlement to rights, as the humanly unrecognizable. This is different from producing a subject who is compliant with the law; and it is different from the production of the subject who takes the norm of humanness to be its constitutive principle.<\/p>\n The subject who is no subject is neither alive nor dead, neither fully constituted as a subject nor fully deconstituted in death. “Managing” a population is thus not only a process through which regulatory power produces a set of subjects. It is also the process of their de-subjectivation, one with enormous political and legal consequences (98).<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n … I am [interested] in the place of law in the articulation of an international conception of rights and oblligations that limit and condition claims of state sovereignty<\/strong> … I am further interested in elaborating an account of power that will produce effective sites of intervention in the dehumanizing effects of the new war prison…. I think that a new internationalism must nevertheless strive for the rights of the stateless, and for forms of self-determination that do not resolve into capricious and cynical forms of state sovereignty<\/strong><\/span>. There are advantages to coneiving power in such a way that it is not centred in the nation-state, but conceived, rather, to oeprate as well through non-state institutions and discourses, since the points of intervention have proliferated, and the aim of politics is not only or merely the overthrow of the state. A broader set of tactics are opened up by the field of governmentality, including those discourses that shape and deform what we mean by “the human.”<\/p>\n I am in favor of self-determination as long as we understand that no “self,” including no national subject, exists apart from an international socius.<\/strong> A mode of self-determination for any given people, regardless of current state status, is not the same as the extra-legal exercise of sovereignty for the purposes of suspending rights at random. As a result, there can be no legitimate exercise of self-determination that is not conditioned and limited by an international conception of human rights that provides the obligatory framework for state action.<\/strong> I am, for instance, in favor of Palestinian self-determination, and even Palestinian statehood, but that process would have to take place supported by, and limited by, international human rights (Precarious: 98-99).<\/p>\n … Even the US’s call for an international coalition after those events [Sept 11] was one that presumed that the US would set the terms, lead the way, determine the criterion for membership, and lead its allies. This is a form of sovereignty that seeks to absorb and instrumentalize an international coalition, rather than submit to a self-limiting practice by virtue of its international obligations. <\/strong>Similarly, Palestinian self-determination will be secured as a right only if there is an international consensus that there are rights to be enforced in the face of a bloated and violent exercise of sovereign prerogative on the part of Israel.<\/strong> My fear is that the indefinite detainment of prisoners on Guantanamo, for whom no rights of appeal will be possible within federal courts, will become a model for the branding and management of so-called terrorists in various global sites where no rights of appeal to international rights and to international courts will be presumed. If this extension of lawless and illegitimate power takes place, we will see the resurgence of a violent and self-aggrandizing state sovereignty at the expense of any commitment to global co-operation that might suport and radically redistribute rights of recognition governing who may be treated according to standards that ought to govern the treatment of humans. We have yet to become human, it seems, and now that prospect seems even more radically imperiled, if not, for the time being, indefinitely foreclosed <\/strong>(100).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This new configuration of power requires a new theoretical framework, or, at least, a revision of the models for thinking power that we already have at our disposal. The fact of extra-legal power is not new, but the mechanism by which it achieves its goals under present circumstances is singular. Indeed, it may be that … Continue reading “precarious ch. 3 new power”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,38,89,115],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler","category-ethics","category-power","category-precarity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1886"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1889,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1886\/revisions\/1889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}