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INTERSTITIAL SUBJECTIVATIONS
Respondant: Dina Al-Kassim , Comparative Literature link to faculty profile
Moderator: Anna Cavness

"The Theory of Guilt: A Supplement to the Theory of Sovereignty"
Marc Lombardo, European Graduate School

Unquestionably, the reappraisal of the theory of sovereignty inspired by Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer has proven to be a seductive framework for contemplating the present historical moment. The reasons for this are plain enough: in recent years, many of the official ideologues who surround the locus of sovereign power have themselves advocated explicitly transparent descriptions of sovereign authority such as the theory of the unitary executive; somewhat removed from the internal workings of the sovereign decision, it is quite understandable that as scholars we would attempt to understand those workings in the terms offered to us by the very exercise of sovereignty itself. However, I would argue that this development in our understanding of politics is incomplete precisely because it has sought to disclose the limit situations (the sovereign on one hand and homo sacer on the other) at the expense of the more garden-variety cases of political experience. Consequently, the next step required if this body of inquiry is to have a significant bearing upon our political reality is the attempt to show how the extreme situations of the exercise of sovereignty are continuous with the most banal facets of political existence.

Upon closer examination neither homo sacer nor the sovereign is a case which has actually been experienced as such. As a matter of fact, these extremes are necessarily abstracted from the particularity of experience and this is after all their worth. In isolating factors responsible for the everyday exercise of sovereignty, that exercise is made perceivable to those who experience it. Nevertheless, life (bios surely as much as zoē) takes place in experience and the extent to which we can render this taking place as expressible in experience as it is experienced is the extent to which our theory has done justice to the facts at hand. In this interest, I propose a theory wholly responsible for detailing the particularities of political experience: this I name the theory of guilt.

In advancing this theory, I shall first turn to the challenge of doing justice to those cases of individuals, institutions, or biopolitical bodies in whatever adjudication which are neither sovereign nor sacred, neither capable of absolute decision nor wholly decided upon: in short, any being actually susceptible to experience. As a fundamental assumption of our inquiry, we shall posit that a political being shall be operationally defined as any being which is neither wholly powerful in its exercise of will nor wholly consigned by the will of another but for whom experience is constituted in the perpetual confusion of ability with inability and vice versa. Precisely because one’s actual functional abilities in a given situation may never be definitively known, political beings are defined by the necessity to act without this knowledge. The distasteful joke present in the nature of experience is that political beings will always overestimate their own responsibility for situations of which their actual functional ability may be very small (and these will most often be situations viewed as having produced negative outcomes) and will also underestimate their responsibility in cases where their functional ability is actually quite great (and these will most often be situations capable of producing outcomes which would be viewed as positive). In other words, guilt is the precondition for all political experience.

"Transnationalizing the National Family: Narrativizations by Transnational Adoptees and the Decentering of the 'Salvation Narrative'"
Rose Jones, University of California, Irvine

For many within and outside the transnational adoption world, the emotional intensity of articulations by and for transnational adoptees on the internet, such as “Transracial Abductees1,” remains largely misunderstood. This paper hopes to demonstrate that that intensity reflects years of being (mis)inscribed by a narrative practice that has effectively silenced them, deafened would-be listeners, and neutralized their attempts to signify losses and challenges that attend the radical dislocation that the transnational adoption incurred on them. Their articulations are attempts, as my title suggests, to decenter the hegemonic grip of the dominant “salvation narrative” that has prevailed, and continues to prevail, in transnational adoption practice, and thereby expose the narrative’s optimistic claim to effacing racial difference, while reproducing in practice the same racializing ordering of individual bodies within the private sphere of the family according to the same racializing ordering of national bodies on the global stage. While the national identities (of the West and of the Rest) the “salvation narrative” imbues its subscribers may correspond to the white adoptive parents’ perceived and experienced subjectivity, the transnational identity of the non-White adopted child’s, which often feels like a simultaneous belonging and “not belonging” to two nations, two families, two cultures, etc., is not accounted for and is essentially erased. In their various attempts to narrativize the perspectival limitations of the “salvation narrative” to accurately represent the actual adoption event as it is experienced by the adoptee and the subsequent experience of living as an adopted non-Western body in a Western family in a Western nation, transnational adoptees have met fierce resistance and often condemnation.  This paper examines the identities propped up by the “salvation narrative” and the psychic investments in those identities, which may explain the intensely defensive stances by those who are invested in the integrity of the “salvation narrative,” the disintegration of which may in turn feel like a threat of psychic disintegration. Further, this paper wants to demonstrate how the defense mechanisms to ensure narrative (and hence, psychic) integrity have silenced the transnational adoptee, who could not signify, and subsequently mourn, the losses incurred on them by the adoption event, which has left them melancholically situated in a differend, Jean-Francois Lyotard’s term to describe a situation in which “the ‘regulation’ of the conflict that opposes [the parties] is done in the idiom of one of the parties[,] while the wrong suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom” (9, §12). My thesis is that these attempts by the First Generation2 of transnational adoptees break through the silence and the silencing mechanisms of the “salvation narrative,” dislodging it from its hegemonic position and thereby opening up instead a narrative space, in which the losses experienced by truly global citizens may be narrativized into existence, and, through signification, may finally be mourned. Simultaneously, by exposing the violence of the “salvation narrative,” the hope is that further investments in it by prospect adoptive parents may be discouraged, preventing further iterations of violence in transnational adoption practice and in global kinship formations.

"ID Cover"
Ayhan Aytes, University of California, San Diego

On the streets of Istanbul one could hardly walk two blocks without seeing the garish, makeshift, noisy mobile carts marked in orange with the letters PVC, designating the acronym of the plastic used to protect and seal the personal identity documents that have become important to the subjects of Turkey. These carts appear in the busiest quarters, near train stations and around clogged ferry turnstiles. They come out from hiding after the working hours of the city officers who are determined to banish all unlicensed street vendors from the streets. The sealers may not have credentials; they may not even have personal identity papers themselves. But this is how they earn their money: sealing identity cards, drivers’ licenses, vendor licenses with shiny transparent PVC covers.
Throughout the years of terror during the 1990s in the southeastern part of Turkey the Kurdish locals intensified the immigration flow to the metropolitan cities. Istanbul has been the most favored destination among the metropolitan regions due to its unregulated informal economy in which newcomers might within a few days cobble together both a job and a makeshift gecekondu (built-overnight) home.

Street vending is one of those jobs that require less initial capital and skilled labor but more stamina than a regular job. Stamina and patience are needed for pushing the wheeled carts while running away from city officers all through the day. Fortunately there are always informal networks of undocumented workers that operate on the principle of countryman solidarity. This informal market network enables newcomers to diffuse fluidly into the inner workings of the city.

ID sealers are constitutive of a new sort of subject, produced through their products/services. Although the appearance of the subject constituted might look like an improvisational bricolage, it indeed aims at the identity construction within their imagined community. Since the conception of the future plays a great role in imagination of communities, the political, social and economical transformation process of Turkey during its “accession” to European Union with its promise of a better life has been one of the formative factors in the reconstitution of the subjectivities of individuals in relation to their expectations from that future.

In one of the remote edges of the flux of transforming scapes that follows the global currents created by the tensions and alliances of the European Union, ID sealers appear as the voluntary performers of improvised subjectivities that embody the mode of existence that is apprehended between today and the future, current nation state and promised future state of Europe. While the current performance of identity sealers legitimizes the power of the state through their enactment of state bureaucracy, that performance also helps this domain of state power to be extended to “cover” themselves too in return of the emergence of their subjectivity within their imagined community of the future. This economy based interaction when combined with ID selaers’ utilization of various media also causes slight modifications or distortions in the portrayal of the state from a feudal patriarch into a merchant matriarch.