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Carolyn Tyjewski, Hybrid Matters: The Mixing of John Stolle-McAllister, Grounding Theory: Cultural Richard Day, Citizen, Nomad, Smith: Political Spac By politics | Published: August 17, 2010 From edition 2003 Issue 3 By Richard Day Before I proceed with the main argument of this paper, I want position it with respect to my current research in the area of radical social movements. In this work I am focusing on the displacement of liberal and marxist modes of social change, which are oriented to counter-hegemonic practices, by a logic of affinity that challenges hegemony as such. I see this logic operating, not solely or purely of course, but operating nonetheless, in practices being developed by global movements for social justice, indigenous peoples all over the world, queer theorists, non-identitarian feminists, post-anarchists . a disparate network of new struggles is emerging . The link to my previous work on Canadian multiculturalism is that I am interested not only in the integration of racial and ethnic `others, but in the attempt to integrate all subjects on all

axes of domination and exploitation within what Michael Hardt and Toni Negri call Empire (Hardt and Negri 2000). I argue that understanding Empire requires multi-dimensional analyses of how the effects of mutually reinforcing systems of domination and exploitation are discernible in specific contexts; while working against Empire means developing new strategies and tactics for resistance and the construction of alternatives within and against these contexts. This paper relates to my broader project by focusing on the role played by dominant conceptions of political spaces and their inhabitants in constraining or enabling radical social change. As I have already mentioned, a critique of the logic of hegemony is central to what I have to say here. Many writers from various cultural studies traditions have worked hard to show that the hegemony of any existing order is never total, that resistance is always possible, even in situations that appear to involve mere deterministic reproduction watching network television, for instance. I think this has been a valuable contribution to western critical theory, but I want to push things a little further. While acknowledging that resistance is always possible, and perhaps always actual, I want to look a little more closely at what kinds of results can be expect from various modes of resistance, using some concepts derived from Deleuze and Guattaris Treatise on Nomadologyfrom A Thousand Plateaus. I am also interested in the styles of subjectivity and conceptions of political space that are associated with these modes of action. In this paper I will work with three different, but related, articulations of subjects, spaces, and practices: the striated space of the productive citizen, oriented to the reformation of an existing hegemonic order; the smooth space of the destructive nomad, oriented to the replacement of an existing hegemony with a new one; and the holey space of the itinerant smith, oriented to circumventing hegemony as such. The argument I want to advance is that many of the `newest social movements can be best understood as practices of what Deleuze and Guattari call smiths, rather than as those of citizens or nomads. The first step in making this argument is to say exactly what is meant by all of these terms, and how they relate to each other; and this is what I will now set out to do, beginning with the symbiotic relationship between citizens and nomads. Citizens and Nomads According to classical liberalism, the citizen is a contradictory entity, existing in a `civil society as well as being a member of a `political state which takes on tasks of governance. This situation establishes a foundational tension between the citizen as a free-wheeling `private individual seeking to optimize his or her own self-interest, and as a member of a `public community that must somehow maintain its coherence and be representable as a whole. One stream of current liberal theory, which follows Kant in prioritizing individual autonomy, views the state as a necessary evil and argues that it should be reduced to enforcing a minimal set of procedural rules that are not supposed to privilege any particular conception of `the good life (Rawls). For others, generally grouped together as `communitarians, citizen and state are seen as two necessary and mutually conditioning poles of a neo-Hegelian or neo-Aristotelian identification with a substantive notion of a common good (e.g. Sandel 1982; Taylor 1991). Various feminist writers have weighed in on this debate, arguing that both liberals and communitarians operate with a malestream conception of citizenship that maintains an illusion of public universality by forcing all particularity into the private sphere (e.g. Young 1989). Postcolonial critics, for their part, have pointed out a first-world, Eurocentric bias in liberal pluralism, as well as a tendency to naturalize, objectify, and dehistoricize cultural identities (Bhabha 1994; Parekh 1995). Drawing from these critiques, and pushing them further, Chantal Mouffe has

advocated a form of citizenship based only upon identification with the political principles of modern pluralist democracy, that is, the assertion of liberty and equality for all (1993:83). Well aware of the slippery nature of signifiers like `liberty and `equality, and of the impossibility of ever establishing who is and is not one of us all, Mouffe notes that there can be as many forms of citizenship as there are interpretations of those principles (84). Her conception thus explodes the liberal vs. communitarian dichotomy by describing an emergent, multiple, and ever-changing definition of citizenship. Here we can see signs of a form of subjectivity that would be difficult to accommodate within Empire. Indeed, Mouffe argues that new identities need to be created in order to facilitate new egalitarian social relations, practices, and institutions (86). One such identity is that of that of the nomad. In an article entitled For a politics of nomadic identity, Mouffe argues, following Derrida, that the existence of a constitutive outside implies that identity cannot belong to one person alone, and no one belongs to a single identity (1994:110). Rather, every identity comprise[s] a multiplicity of elements (111). This process is also described by Deleuze and Guattari, who give it the name of schizophrenization (TP:113) and who, like Mouffe, identify it with a nomadic mode of subjectivity. This is not to claim, of course, that Mouffes conception is identical to, or even intentionally related to, Deleuze and Guattaris. However, I do think it could be productive to follow out some of the entailments of nomadic subjectivity for radical social change, by way of an examination of the place of the nomad in social and political thought in general, and Deleuze and Guattaris work in particular. Within the Western tradition, nomads appear as the negation of all of the qualities attributed to the citizen, as Barbarians who sow not, nor have any tillage; [are] without habitation, having no dwellings but caves and hollow trees (DAvity, cited in Hodgen 1964:201). In an archetypal nightmare of European civilization, the nomadic war machine gallops in off the steppes, sweeping away everything that matters: fields, walls, houses, castles. That the East has fared no better is suggested by that monument to State insecurity, the Great Wall of China. What is it about nomads that makes them so frightening to sedentaries? Deleuze and Guattari provide us with a whole series of dichotomies between these two styles of subjectivity, but the most important for my purposes here is the difference between the kinds of space that they occupy. Citizens are at home in the striated space of the state form, while nomads occupy the smooth spaces of non-state relationships. As with all of the concepts deployed by Deleuze and Guattari, no stable definitions or oppositions can be sustained with respect to these two spaces yet it is clear that they are not of the same nature (ATP: 474). On the plane of technology, striated space is associated with fabric, while felt is considered smooth; using a maritime model, the ocean prior to the invention of latitude and longitude was extremely smooth, that is, one navigated according to wind and noise, the colours and sounds of the seas (479); finally we can think literally in terms of territory, and distinguish between the smooth space of the open prairie prior to European colonization, and the striated spaces of its division into a firm grid-like structure, fenced off against errant flows of flora, fauna, and indigenous peoples. With regard to the relation of striation to identity formation, an extremely helpful pair of images can be gathered from multiculturalism policy documents produced by the Canadian state. First, we have the `full container image, which represents the `problem of Canadian diversity. OVERHEAD: FULL CONTAINER

You will note the uncontrolled, amorphous diversity of person-types, which fills the entire space claimed by the Canadian nation I never knew Baffin Island was so densely populated! One can imagine non-linear flows of all sorts at work here, hybridization, miscegenation, and so on. Thus the field of uncontrolled diversity is a smooth space, a nomadic space. OVERHEAD: NATIONAL JEWEL Then we have what I call the National Jewel, which illustrates the `solution offered by multicultural recognition and integration of these problematic person-types. As you can see, it is wonderfully and perfectly striated. In the past I have used this image to talk about Canadian identities. But it works even better when we realize that Canadians are being called not only to be good multicultural citizens of their own country, but to become docile subjects of a global Empire as well. The identically shaped triangles represent the constraints of the emerging neoliberal-capitalist society of control, while the colours represent the `differences between subjects that are allowed within it;, that is, the differences that can be captured and put to use in the construction of national, global, consumer, and other identities. The form of the pact is that in `agreeing to become a citizen of a particular state / Empire, one agrees to limit ones difference so as not to exceed the boundaries of the triangle to which one has been assigned. That is, one agrees to respect the regularities and disciplines associated with capitalism, racism, heterosexism, the domination of nature, and so on. So as to avoid giving the impression that we are dealing here with an absolute dichotomy, I want to emphasize that the positions of the citizen and the nomad are deeply inter-related, to the point of reversibility. The inside and outside of any social space are interdependent, each potentially giving rise to the other, each warding off the other, in an ongoing play of relations of co-operative and competitive power. Thus Deleuze and Guattari argue that it is not in terms of independence, but of coexistence and competition in a perpetual field of interaction, that we must conceive of exteriority and interiority (TP:360-1). The citizen and the nomad in fact share a space of contested de- and re-territorialization, each attempting to instantiate and perpetuate the conditions of possibility of its own style of life. For example, the USSR appeared to the USA as a horde of communist barbarians poised at the gates of civilized capitalism, while at the same time the Soviets feared the immense deterritorializing power of capital. The same thing is happening now between USA and Islam, or really, if one looks closely at the arrangement of friends and enemies, with USA and all that is not yet sufficiently USA. The beauty of this formulation is that friends can be turned into enemies and vice versa as need be, for example in the demonization of Canada and the glorification of Poland as a result of the exigiencies of the US/UK invasion of Iraq. And, as the world is progressively Americanized, the criteria for acceptance as properly pro-American become ever tighter. One can already imagine a situation in which most Americans will be excluded, but one can also imagine that this will hardly matter, for by then America and Empire will be indistinguishable. There will be no more outside . or will there? Smiths The question of the total conquest of the outside leads us to consider how the smith exists in a complex relation to both the citizen and the nomad, in one aspect as their complement: There are no nomadic or sedentary smiths, Deleuze and Guattari argue. The smith is ambulant, itinerant: his space is neither the striated space of the sedentary, nor the smooth space of the nomad (TP:413,

emphasis added). In another aspect, the smith takes up a contradictory position: [I]t is by virtue of his itineracy, by virtue of his inventing a holey space, that he necessarily communicates with the sedentaries and with the nomads (and with others besides). He is in himself a double: a hybrid, an alloy, a twin formation (415, emphasis in original). OVERHEAD: HOLEY SPACE Where the practice of the citizen is oriented to `staying on the road, as it were, the smith is guided by an alchemical, metallurgical will to the involuntary invention (403) of new strategies and tactics. Evidence of this kind of activity can be found throughout the world, in communities of resistance addressing a wide range of issues. I cannot possibly discuss all of them here, and I cannot do justice to those I do discuss. But I think that in order to support the point I am trying to make, it is necessary to mention a few concrete instances of what Im talking about. In the case of certain elements of `the anti-globalization movement, for example, the goal is not to create a counter-power around a new hegemonic centre, but to challenge, disrupt, and disorient the processes of global hegemony, to refuse, rather than rearticulate those forces that are tending towards the further establishment of Empire. As David Graeber has pointed out in a recent article in New Left Review, many of todays activists have rejected a politics which appeals to governments to modify their behaviour, in favour of physical intervention against state power in a form that itself prefigures an alternative (2002: 62). John Jordan of Reclaim the Streets [RTS] notes that: RTS does not see Direct Action as a last resort, but a preferred way of doing things. a way for individuals to take control of their own lives and environments.. If global capitalism does not manage to destroy the ecosphere and human civilization. and a new culture of social and ecological justice is developed, RTS would hope that direct action would not stop but continue to be a central part of a direct It should be noted that the sense that this term of the Atlantic. Rather, democratic system (Jordan 1997). I am not claiming that RTS is a `social movement in is given within the relevant literature on either side I see RTS as a non-branded tactic that is being used by

various groups and communities to achieve various ends. There are other tactics which not only prefigure non-hegemonic alternatives to state and corporate forms, but create them here and now. The burgeoning network of Independent Media Centres (IMCs) is an excellent example of this kind of `productive direct action. IMC aims to combat corporate concentration in media ownership through the creation of alternative sources of information, and in so doing to participate directly in the negation and reconstruction of mass-mediated realities. Like RTS, IMC shows the possibilities of reconstructive community in action, and deploys a model which can, and has, been adapted to other institutions where corporate and state control are endemic. Other examples of non-branded tactics which prefigure or create autonomous alternatives include social centre, Food Not Bombs, and countless long-standing and newly emerging co-operative social and economic experiments. What is important about all of these approaches to social change is that they take us beyond both reform and revolution, that is, beyond the oppositional stalemate between citizens and nomads.

It is also important to note that the use of productive direct action to prefigure and create autonomous alternatives is not limited to privileged subjects of the global North. The Zapatistas have been particularly adept in this regard, most famously by making use of (relatively) autonomous means of mass communication such as the internet to advance awareness of their cause both within mainstream Mexican society and around the world (Cleaver 1998; Ronfeldt et. al. 1998 ). Indigenous decolonization movements in Canada and Australia/New Zealand are also interesting on this point. To supplement mainstream strategies, some communities are pursuing forms of self-determination that run counter to the dominant paradigm of integration within the system of states. These identities often shun both capitalism and socialism, and their difference poses difficult problems for Western theory, problems that have so far not been adequately addressed (Day 2001). The key point I want to make here, though, is that the activities of smiths show us that no matter how totalizing a system might be, it will never achieve its ambition of totality it is impossible to create a system with no outside, even a system that appears to cover an entire planet. For there will always be holes, even when there are no longer any margins. And out of these holes will spring all manner of subjects. Conclusion In closing, it should be noted that I am not denying the utility of citizenship for achieving certain sorts of change within ostensibly `liberal societies. Nor am I willing to suggest that armed revolutionary struggle is inappropriate in situations where not even the rudiments of a `liberal political order exist. I am suggesting, through an both . and logic, that alternative subjects and paths to radical progressive social change can, and should, be explored as well. I am suggesting that an exclusive focus on social change within or via the State form prevents us from imagining and implementing modes of social organization that are not only possible and desirable, but are becoming ever more necessary as Empire consolidates its hold on our bodies, minds, lands . on our very ability to produce ourselves and the contexts in which we encounter others. Richard J.F. Day Assistant Professor Department of Sociology Queens University, K7L 3N6 Canada Email: dayr@post.queensu.ca Share this: Email Print

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