Some notes on sovereignty on the occasion of the exhibitions of Knowbotic Research’ s Naked Bandit, I-IV (2004-05)

It is in times of major social upheaval or crises that the dispositifs of ruling sovereignty become questionable – politically, legally, philosophically. The existing apparatus proves to be porous, and new plans have yet to be made. This applies to the present era of post-Fordist globalization, in which for some theorists the historical role of the nation-states except for the USA has become superfluous.

With ‘Il principe’ and ‘Discorsi’ in the early 16th century, Niccolò Macchiavelli in his countryside exile laid the foundations for all modern political philosophy. A republican before the term existed, he had been dismissed from all offices of state in the midst of the crisis of the Florentine republic; his discussion of the relationship among rulers, state, and people, between politics and morality, has remained highly controversial and topical until the present day.
Some four hundred years later, in the 1930s, Antonio Gramsci was jailed by the Fascists. Aware that he would not survive imprisonment, the philosopher and former leader of the Italian Communist Party was determined to create something ‘für ewig’ (for posterity), as he noted with a nod to Goethe. Although his philosophical-political work picking up the threads of Machiavelli’s ‘Prince’ was discussed only briefly when published, its impact has been all the more enduring. His ‘Prison Notebooks’ focus on the question of the failure of the model of sovereignty propagated by the Communist parties of Europe in the period, and the closely associated question of the bourgeois values deeply anchored in the ‘hearts and minds’ of humankind. Of interest today is not Gramsci’s modern ‘Prince’ (that is to say, the Party) but the conceptual tools he furnished for analyzing ‘bourgeois society’: ‘hegemony,’ ‘historical block,’ ‘war of position / war of movement,’ ‘every day common sense,’ the modernized notion of the ‘cultural battleground.’ Since the thread to Gramsci’s wide-ranging if fragmentary explorations has been torn, the need to re-read his ‘Prison Notebooks’ would appear to be pressing. Particularly his notion of the state as the hegemonial combination of società civile and società politica represents a level of knowledge urgently required in order to efficiently analyze the contemporary sovereign.

In the post-Nine/Eleven era in which the USA is so forcefully aspiring toward ‘sovereign unilateralism, that undivided sovereignty’ (Jacques Derrida), an analysis should not fall behind Gramsci’s acquired knowledge of the constitution of bourgeois society and the rhizomatically connected deliberations on sovereignty by Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, and others.

Gramsci demonstrated for instance that the notion of a homogenous state is untenable. The simple complexity of the princely state of the medieval variety has yielded to the complex differentiation of modern societies and their dispositif of sovereignty. The state which is the core of modern sovereignty is invariably a formation based on compromise, a conjuncturally and temporally determined form resulting from struggles among disparate social forces. The resultant formation is of varying duration, but never stable; it remains structurally volatile because it is constantly besieged. In other words: sovereignty is always heterogeneous, never homogeneous. Historical research has shown this to be true even of rigid military dictatorships or of National Socialism. And it is all the more true of democracies such as those established in the wake of the American and French revolutions. Since the founding of the states they serve, however, the models of sovereignty embraced by modern western societies have harbored an irresolvable contradiction: the highest sovereign is the people (which is tacitly installed as the sovereign: the American Declaration of Independence begins with the words, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident…’), but at the same time the people delegates its power, even if only for a limited period of time, to representatives. John Locke, already, stated that ‘Supreme Power (…) is a delegated Power from the people.’ As the Proclamation of Massachusetts of 1776 puts it, ‘It is a maxim that, in every Government, there must exist, somewhere, a supreme, sovereign, absolute, and uncontrollable power; but this power resides always in the body of the people.’

Secondly it is a matter of taking seriously, that is to say of neither underestimating nor overestimating, a sovereignty whose differentiation – the division of powers into legislative, executive and judicature -- increases according to the complexity of the modern state. The three separated powers are interconnected over a ‘trusteeship,’ and are therefore not sovereign in their own right. Yet the authority of state they exercise is unilaterally binding, and therefore sovereign. Thus, the system of checks and balances functions on the one hand – as demonstrated at present, for instance, by the US Supreme Court’s admission of lawsuits by Guantanamo prisoners against the ongoing activities and interests of the executive. On the other hand, the danger exists of the division of powers being undermined, as is likewise shown by the current situation in the USA, where the legislative is appointing a number of supreme judges exclusively on account of their political affiliations.

What does this tell us against the background of the findings on sovereignty made by Gramsci, Foucault, Derrrida, and others?
We must discard the last remnants of thought based on conspiracy theories and theories of manipulation increasingly discernible among some intellectuals, and particularly those in the USA, since September 11, 2001. Just as we have learned that the individual is dividual, and that the atom is not the smallest unit of mass, we must come to grasp the sovereign fundamentally as a heterogeneous formation, as an ‘articulated whole’ (to take up Louis Althusser’s notion in a different context) that is substructured and sometimes contradictory, as the product of a structurally contingent interrelation of social forces. No absolute center exists, even if efforts are being made to create such a center. If one follows Foucault in grasping the sovereign as a dispositif, as an articulation of elements, then it is a matter of altering the given ‘ruling’ dispositif as a constructed, external arrangement, of re-articulating it and at the same time introducing new elements. A social dispositif which does not, for instance, exclude slaves as non-human (as was the case with the Greek polis), Jews as inferior (as was the case with National Socialism), gays and lesbians as deviant (as was the case throughout Europe and in the USA until the1960s), or – wholly topically – migrants as alien and basically incapable of cultural integration, furnishes its members with extremely diverse options for living.

If one secondly, with reference to Ernesto Laclau‘s and Chantal Mouffe’s deliberations on radical, plural democracy, ‘takes leave of the myth of a transparent, homogeneous society,’ then it becomes obvious that this re-articulation of the sovereign must furthermore remain an interminable process: there is no Archimedean point from or to which democracy is aligned.

This interminable project of radical and plural democracy takes seriously the micro- and macro-physics of the circumstances of individual, society and control, and goes ahead with a life skill of ‘self-solicitude,’ an ‘aesthetic of existence’ (Michel Foucault) to which is inherent a concern for the others. In such a dispositif of sovereignty, whose objective is intensified social conditions as opposed to a withdrawal from society or the formation of niches, it is a radical and interminable matter of self-invention instead of self-realization, of conceptualizing oneself (Entwerfung)as opposed to subjecting (Unterwerfung), of unleashing multiple and hybrid forms of self-determined existence instead of submitting the self to existing control structures, however rebellious a form this submission may take. In short, it is about an art of life that enables and requires self-conceptions that are manifold (viel-fältig) as opposed to simple-minded (ein-fältig), and must be created by the individuals themselves. It is about sovereignty of a new kind, sovereignty at once supple, fluid and stable; about hegemony without a hegemon.

The installation Naked Bandits amounts to an imposition of artistic interference within and onto this highly explosive field of non-homogeneous sovereignty. Its own explosiveness derives from a mode of intervention which does not politicize or foreshorten but instead expands the artistic perspective.
Naked Bandits puts to the test a complex confrontation with the complex contemporary sovereign: In basically any public space – galleries, museums, gyms, city squares - any location that itself invites an expansion of its space and audience, the ‘visitors’ can partake and actively intervene in the experience of being imprisoned and excluded, of imprisoning and excluding, of being sovereign and being sovereign-determined. In the course of this acoustic, visual, and haptic process, they mentally and physically discover that they, just as in society, initiate collaborative processes over whose precise constitution and effects they have no overview. Over which they can indeed have no sovereign overview, since the result of their activities is always the unpredictable effect of many overlapping intentions: there is no standpoint from which the complete transparency of the activities would be revealed – just as there is no place from which society reveals itself as being wholly transparent. Because it is a test case, however, visitors are allowed to literally see into these processes, can learn somewhat to recognize that and how they are simultaneously part of the sovereign and object of the sovereign. That these experiences and insights co-train attitudes that are useful for independent, own-minded action in the currently crystallizing new post-Fordist social formation is the justified hope of this project.
If ‘all arts serve the greatest of all arts: the art of life’ (Bertolt Brecht), then such a project is presumably the utmost that an art project can achieve today: radical, because it goes to the roots; complex, because it is on a level with the times; contemporary, because it productively overchallenges the viewers in their social environment.

First published under the title:
Sovereignty of a new kind. Picking up the torn thread. In: Knowbotic Research: Transcoding the dilemma. Naked bandit. Zurich 2005, pp. 40-50.