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Colonisation

Deleuze and Guattari’s blunt assertion that ‘The state is sovereignty’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:360) points to the intimate connection between sovereignty and the stratification of global political space in a system of territorial states. Nicholas Onuf suggests that the modern concept of sovereignty has three constituent elements, namely unchallenged rule over a given territory, majesty and ‘agency’ where this means the exercise of governance over a given territory and people (Onuf 1991:426).

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From a historical point of view, these different elements of sovereignty may appear over time in relative independence of one another. From an analytic point of view, they are all components of the concept of sovereignty in its modern form. Onuf suggests that the peculiarly modern combination of majesty, uncontested rule and government in the supposed interests of those governed forms the ‘primary architecture’ of the modern state, to the extent that it is redundant to speak of ‘sovereign’ states. He writes:

The state is the land, the people, the organisation of coercion and a majestic idea, each supporting each other, so that they become indivisible. Sovereignty describes this conceptual fusion and thus the territorial organisation of early modern Europe. Simply by adding states to its margins, the early modern world irresistibly grew to its present proportions.

(Onuf 1991:437)

The historical process by which the European world added states to its margins involved the incorporation of indigenous peoples and their territories into the sovereign territory of existing states. Deleuze and Guattari offer no explicit theory of colonisation; however, their theory of the state as apparatus of capture is particularly suited to describe this process. Consider the elements of modern sovereignty identified by Onuf. Each of these elements appears in Deleuze and Guattari’s characterisation of the state. The state is sovereignty, they argue, but ‘sovereignty only reigns over what it is capable of internalizing’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:360). In other words, the state is inseparable from the exercise of ultimate authority over a given territorial domain or ‘milieu of interiority’. Second, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that sovereignty has two poles. On the one hand, it involves a form of ‘magical capture’ through which authority is irrevocably imposed. In the terms of Georges Dumézil’s analysis of Indo-European mythology, this corresponds to the action of the magician-king who casts a net and ‘captures’ the people or territory by quasi-magical means. This aspect of sovereignty corresponds to what Onuf calls ‘majesty’. In the case of modern colonialism, magical capture persists in the form of the belief that certain symbolic acts, such as the raising of flags or the reading of proclamations, are sufficient to establish sovereignty over newly ‘discovered’ territories. On the other hand, sovereignty always implies the activity of a jurist-legislator who builds a political structure by means of laws and political institutions. This aspect of sovereignty corresponds to the element of governmental agency which is characteristic of modern sovereign rule and which, in the colonial case, comes after the initial acquisition of territory.



In addition to the locus of sovereign power, Deleuze and Guattari claim, the basic constituents of a nation-state are a land and a people, where

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‘land’ is understood to mean a deterritorialised geographical area and where ‘people’ is understood as a decoded flow of free labour (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:456). In this sense, a modern nation-state is one particular solution to the problem of society in general, involving a particular configuration of fundamental economic relations, including the division of labour and the relation to the means of labour such as land. In the colonial case, the equation is complicated by the fact that the geographical surface is already occupied by indigenous peoples with their own distinctive relation to the earth. The social organisation of hunter-gatherer peoples involves a very different solution to the problem of society, one that realises an altogether different abstract machine from that expressed in the modern nation-state. In cases such as this, where the indigenous inhabitants lived an itinerant existence in accordance with the requirements of a territorial assemblage, both ‘land’ and ‘people’ were lacking. The colonial authorities had either to import other people in order to provide labour (slaves or convicts), or to transform indigenous inhabitants into subjects of labour. First, though, they had to transform the earth into land fit for appropriation and exploitation by the establishment of a system of property.


Date: 2015-01-11; view: 663


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