For those of you who don’t know, my dissertation in Ethnic Studies
dealt with sovereignty, most specifically Guam’s role in producing
America’s sovereignty, or what role its invisibility or nothingness
plays in producing America as sovereign. This may sound confusing, but
what makes it difficult for most to wrap their heads around, is the
simple fact of saying that something which has been for hundreds of
years produced discursively as being “small” or “faraway” or “faint” or
“owned by the US” as somehow creating something as great and grand and
mighty as the United States of America.
One frustrating aspect of writing my dissertation was the preparing
of a literature review, which is a sometimes helpful, sometimes useless
review of what others have written about your topic of choice and how
you will either use and build on them or defy them. If you are familiar
with the bulk of work on sovereignty it all basically says the same
thing nowadays, drawing mildly different conclusions around assertions
that no one can really contest. In historical terms, meaning the
development of sovereignty over the past 500 years for example, the
ideas of the late US Senator Alan Cranston are not so different then the
conceptions of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. (they draw the same
basic genealogy and end up in the present day with a similar crisis, but
naturally use different languages (can you imagine Alan Cranston
talking about transcendence vs. immanence?) and promote different
political projects for those today seeking to reconcile the shifts
taking place today). There are some Native scholars who have more
interesting versions or definitions of sovereignty, but these are not
the conceptions which underpin Guam’s colonization and so I did not
address them as much in my dissertation.
For those unfamiliar with sovereignty, I’ll provide a short history.
Sovereignty begins largely in religious terms with political effects. It
is a theory of rights and relations between those who govern and those
who are governed. The explanation for the right to rule, the existence
of a sovereign power who was considered to be unchallengeable within
their domain, derived from a divine source. The source of sovereignty,
is therefore outside of the earthly world, and whatever political or
physical body that sovereign power is collected in within this world is
not to be constrained by any limits other than what is defined from the
source of said sovereignty.
Given this framework, power is theoretically absolute and the
sovereign is not accountable to those who he governs, but rather the
source of his sovereignty, namely God. On earth this transmission of
sovereignty and power rarely runs so smoothly. In the Middle Ages for
example, the powers of both the Church and the King were articulated to
share the same source, yet each had different functions and intentions
in the world around them.
We find an important shift in the source of sovereignty in the 17th
and 18th century with the work of philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and
Jacques Jean Rosseau who attribute in different ways to an earthly
source, namely the people of a nation or a society. This shift takes
place and is codified for a number of different reasons, such as
development of different technologies which allowed people across great
distances to nonetheless imagine themselves as being the same, the shift
from the way populaces are governed and power is located (art of
government to governmentality), and also the work by men such as the
Brothers Grimm who would assist in the “invention” of peoples and
traditions through the collection of “folk” tales which would become the
“history” of nations.
What follows though the above mentioned diffusion of power in society
is also the diffusion of sovereignty. One could almost say that it
disappears from the equation, just as the brutal violence of the
sovereign’s law becomes displaced by the banal control of norms.
The issue in all of these articulations is where the source of
sovereignty lies, in the divine? The social? In Reason? But what happens
with the rise and formalization of European nations, starting with the
1648 Treaty of Westphalia and later the clear rise of modern nations and
articulations of modern international law in the 19th century, is the
shifting of discussions of sovereignty to a formal level whereby
external recognition becomes a defining characteristic. The source of
sovereignty in most texts becomes externalized within the family of
nations, meaning the sovereignty of a nation is dependent upon its
matching particular requirements “nations” collectively share and also
the recognition of sanctity the borders that said nation claims.
Before continuing, it is important to note that although the way a
thing called “sovereignty” is formalized and accepted and becomes part
of a general framework which is supposed to govern the conduct between
nations. Texts which deal with sovereignty do not necessarily address
the production of a nation’s sovereignty, or what networks of power,
meaning, force and material accumulation have to go into authorizing the
right or naturalness/acceptability of a particular political act,
program or relationship. (So to connect this to my project, how is it
that the United States, besides a simple citation of treaties, appears
to hold a natural, expected right to Guam, which lies beyond any simple
questioning or problemtization?)
Instead most texts deal with a basic thing called sovereignty, which
is never produced, but merely changes over time, and is today in crisis
by extranational organizations, Imperial ambitions of First World
Nations and Rhizomic terrorist cells.
For me, the assumption of a concrete and formal form of sovereignty
is useless for thinking about Guam and its position today. Why? Because
if we assume that sovereignty is a zero-sum equation (you have it or you
don’t have it) or at its most extreme, force/pressure against a legal
right (neocolonial influence), then the issue is merely to include Guam
within the current global framework for nation-state belonging. Or in
other words, get sovereignty for Guam.
In some ways, this is precisely what I along with a small but
significant number of people on Guam want: political independence for
Guam, and the opportunity to join the rest of the world as some sort of
equal partner. But does the receiving of sovereignty in this formal way
really mean receiving either of these things? If we look at the nations
that have decolonized over the past 50 years, they are hardly equal with
their former colonizers, since the world that awaited their freshly
forged national souls and cultures, was one defined by itchy and greedy
neo-colonial figures, trapping them in the same structurally inequitable
relationship, although now with less odor from colonialism. For more
evidence of the meaningless of formal sovereignty for small, developing
and newly decolonized nations, we need only look at the islands in the
Micronesia that surround Guam.
Islands such as Palau have formal sovereignty, but if we look closely
at the history of their negotiations with the United States and even
the way their government and economy is situated today, the political
existence of Palau demands that we redefine sovereignty so that it can mean something, since if the formal sovereignty that Palau has is supposed to be sovereignty, then sovereignty means nothing.
Only the worse American apologist would argue that Guam has
sovereignty right now. And only a foolish and idealistic person would
argue that Guam is currently on some natural and self-correcting road to
getting meaningful sovereignty. The history of sovereignty’s changes
and development, instead of reconciling the colonial relationships that
places such as Guam, Okinawa, Puerto Rico, Hawai’i and indigenous
peoples represent, instead develop quaint footnotes or states of
exception where these places reside politically. Nowadays, these states
of exception are not insane, chaotic places, but ones which take on very
formal appearances. They can be invoked, they can be detailed, they can
be studied and visited, without those making these gestures of study or
reference seeing the need for any sort of resolution of the conflict,
the contradiction, the hypocrisy that those states of exception
represent.
Take for instance an October 29, 1971 Pacific Daily News editorial titled “U.S. Colonialism.” In it the editor discusses and marginally decries US colonialism in the Micronesia region, without making any reference to the US colonialism going on in Guam! Guam
is invoked in the editorial, but only in order to provide reference for
the approximate size of British colonies in the Pacific, not because of
the need to discuss American colonial sins or guilt there. For this
editor, the ambiguous political existence was not sufficient enough or
tangible enough to support even the mere mention of Guam as a US colony,
instead it simply faded into the background and become the natural
ground beneath his articulation.
In the world today, colonialism is not supposed to exist, or is
supposed to be eradicated by the year 2020. (The UN is now in its Third
Decade of attempting to eradicate colonialism from the world. It
recognizes 17 remaining colonies (including Guam) in need of
decolonization). Therefore, the way to analyze and view Guam and its
relationship to the United States and the rest of the world is not
through the formal rules of governance, but through the informal, obscene world of political meanings.
We can find this point in a hilariously depressing way in the following clip, which is a statement by then President George W. Bush, during the 2004 campaign, on tribal sovereignty.
Question: What do you think tribal
sovereignty means in the 21st century, and how do we resolve conflicts
between tribes and the federal and the state governments?
President Bush: Tribal sovereignty means
that; it’s sovereign. You’re a — you’ve been given sovereignty, and
you’re viewed as a sovereign entity. And, therefore, the relationship
between the federal government and tribes is one between sovereign
entities.
A number of things achieve an almost banal and confusing clarity in
the stumbling of Bush. First, Bush makes the mistake of breaking from
sickly common sense by stating that sovereignty is “given,” a point
which is completely true (for every nation state, sovereignty is
dependent upon it being given in the sense that it is not questioned,
critiqued or worked actively to be undermined), but reveals the clear
condescending gaze of the US against Native Americans. Second, in his
constant reiteration of “sovereignty meaning sovereign” we get past the
chauvinistic tautology of “my decision is my decision,” and get into the
meaningless repetition as the cover for an obscene meaning which cannot
be adequately covered over by any formal terms.
Of course Bush doesn’t believe it, probably doesn’t even understand
what he’s talking about or what is happening. But above board, meaning
formally, he is right, right? There has been an elaborate legal maze
that has been developed around this issue whereby the formal alludes to a
civilized, legal, adult, productive relationship between the US and
tribes, where there is no colonization, but only mutually recognized
sovereignty entities.
Within the world of the obscene however, which sadly more closely
resembles the world around us, colonialism is not just alive and well,
but necessary and accompanied with all manner of infantilized,
racialized, primitivized mythology to back it up. The formal only goes
so far and once its cover of you ends, you tend to wallow in
unintelligibility along its margins, since there is not supposed to be
any calculus to measure the breadth of the obscene.
To continue with Micronesian examples, let’s start with The Solomon Report. For
those of you who don’t know what this is, it was a report commissioned
in the early 1960’s by President Kennedy, which is basically an outline
for ensuring a dependent and intimate relationship between the United
States and what was at that time the Trust Territory and is now, the
Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands, The Federated States of
Micronesia, Republic of the Marshall Islands and Palau. Here is a line
from the report which stresses the importance of these islands, “Micronesia is said to be essential to the U.S. for security reasons. We cannot give the area up…”
Formally what took place during the 1960’s – 1990’s in the rest of the islands in Micronesia (fuera di Guahan) were processes of decolonization, which by virtue of even this limp facade attested to the strategic value of these islands. In The Solomon Report, because
of its clandestine character, the need of the United States is
expressed and laid bare. In order to create a buffer in the Pacific, and
to effectively control a huge portion of the entire globe, we must have
these islands. But naturally, this cannot be spoken of, cannot be laid
on the table, it cannot truly enter into the formal world of
negotiations which created all these new exciting island governments and
states. Instead this need stays obscene, beneath the proceedings,
drawing from racist and infantilized notions to reverse and make invisible the
needs of the United States, by fabricating from notions of islands
being backwards, economically unsustainable, culturally lazy and so on,
that it is truly these islands that need the United States. But
this isn’t some isolated instance of dependent reversal. This is a
gesture which produces sovereignty, it projects the needs of the subject
of sovereignty to the object of sovereignty, thereby creating the
subject as one distinguished by a lack of such mediated concerns.
In Hobbes for example, those governed, beneath the watchful eye and
hovering boot of sovereign power are mediated by appetites and
aversions, that constantly infiltrate them and turn them into petty,
pitiful creatures of limited vision. Their appetites constantly push
them into more and more precarious positions of risk, danger and near
death, but because aversion and fear governs them as well, they
constantly pull back in loyalty to the ultimate human moment of fearful
oblivion, the aversion to death. Therefore, in an articulation of
sovereignty surprisingly close to Bataille’s, the realm of the sovereign
is not just to decide the conditions of life and death, but that it is
also to be beyond such concerns.
Thus formally, this dependent relationship is codified, but this
formal surface tells us nothing about the obscene web of meaning which
both forced these neocolonial relationships and structured the state of
exception that these islands exist in.
Throughout my dissertation I made my commitment to exploring the
“obscene” dimensions of sovereignty, using evidence, such as the George
W. Bush quote that some might find ridiculous in terms of articulating a
sound theoretical foundation. As Guam is a colony, the formal rules
exist to pin it down, to neutralize it, to take away its claims to
existence. This is why exploring the realms of the banal and the obscene
was necessary. As Slavoj Zizek writes in Welcome to the Desert of the
Real, If you cannot change the explicit, formal rules, then you must
work to change the underlying, unwritten obscene rules.
The history of sovereignty means little for explaining Guam’s current
geo-political existence, meaning its banal and exceptional status. Such
histories persistently focus on the way sovereignty as a concept has
changed over time, the unifying notion of a historical continuity or
development leading them to put aside the fact that sovereignty is
something which must be produced and reproduced at every moment, and
what means and methods must always be deployed in order to maintain a
regime beyond mere material/violent assertions of authority.
Sovereignty as it is dominantly understood relies upon a communal
recognition, that sovereignty is not so much produced as brought into
existence by a recognition of a nation’s right. This means nothing for
Guam, as sovereignty the way I understand the relationship between the
US and Guam relies on clear misrecognition. Whereas the traditional
notion of sovereignty requires a shared understanding, a conscious
clarity, to understand the relationship between Guam and the US, we must
interrogate clear ambiguity, invisibility, banality.
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