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September 21, 2004
In his article, 'The Perverse Perseverance of Sovereignty', Anthony Burke says that sovereignty is not just a juridical figure. It is also political technology which simultaneously reached into the heart of the citizen and most obscure reaches of the social world, and enabled new forms of governmental power that underpinned and accelerated new forms of technological and economic modernity.
In explicating this he is working from Hardt and Negri's text Empire.
He says that a utilitarian strand of this discourse of sovereignty (eg., Jeremy Bentham) saw security as essential to the progressive imagination of liberal modernity. Security would safeguard an 'expectation' of the future in which economic gain can be pursued without interruption either by social disorder or socialist redistribution; a security which rested not merely on totalising deployments of police or military violence but on desire, discipline and self government – what Foucault termed "governmentality". Burke understands this in terms of 'a political machine that rules across the entire society' - a machine that is disciplinary and bio-political.
He says that:
" ....what I would emphasise is that such power, exercised through economic regulation, disciplinary apparatuses, coercion and desire, is still ultimately organised around the final authority (and emotional appeal) of the state. In the construction of national identities, all too often in fearful and repressive relation to internal and external Others, we ultimately find the link between individualising and totalising power; between the state and the citizen as linked formations of subjectivity secured by security. This closes off democratic possibility and freedom...."
Burke says that this, then, is "modern sovereignty": not simply an abstract locus of juridical authority that forms the basis for Westphalian international law and order, but a complex disciplinary and ontological machinery of enormous depth and force; one whose ultimate aim is to harness and control the possibility of freedom within capitalist modernity.
In this way Hardt and Negri's is a brilliant and suggestive analysis that resists essentialism and builds powerfully on an extended body of prior and contemporary theory.
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