There’s a great post and discussion on the theme of emergence and emergency over at the Archive which provoked me to put down notes on how some other friends and I have been trying to think through this stuff. I realize there are limits to word origins as theoretical resource, but I’ve found it useful as a means to begin reflection.
Emergencia is the Spanish word for ‘emergence’ and ‘emergency’. The term, and its English translations, has roots in the Latin ‘emergentia’, from ‘emergere’ - to rise up as if from a fluid. ‘Emergentia’ or the current analogs in romance languages, demonstrates a lexical contiguity parallel to the political contiguity in the practices/events of emergence and emergency. In other words, to restate a version of what has been called ‘the autonomist hypothesis’, emergencies (as in ’states of emergency’ or ’states of exception’) are responses to emergences. Not to assimilate the matter to an entirely textual point, but, this can be seen in Agamben’s work, though he is not as explicit as he could be about this.
Agamben lays out two categories, exception and example. The exception logically defines the concept of sovereignty (the sovereign has the right to decide upon whether and when exception shall be) and historically defines sovereigns. Agamben follows Schmitt in saying that law requires a regular social order to which to apply. When the social order departs from the order to which law applies (the order which law requires in order to apply), there must be an action to return the social order to a condition to which law can apply (if law is to continue to exist). Exception is an act of intervention upon the social order through force. It is an act of and capacity for force which underlies law.
The example is much less clear in Agamben, but can be taken to mean non-state or non-sovereign forms of life. The relation between example and exception is not as clear as could be in Agamben, but I understand the two as follows:
The exception lacks a specific juridical content (it is a space in which, legally speaking, anything can happen), but is at the same time an exercise of the force underlying any specific juridical content. The exception is juridically empty but saturated with sovereign power. The example, on the other hand, is (tendentially) nonjuridical, a non-state way of being. From the perspective of sovereignty, this is a problem. The nonjuridical problematizes the regular social order which law requires in order to apply. Exceptions are declared in response to potential examples. In Agamben’s terms, the sovereign decides on the exception. But this is not a capricious decision. The conditions in which the sovereign faces the decision whether or not to except are conditions composed by example(s). Or, emergencies are declared in response to emergencies.
This is an important point, but only a starting point. There are many emergencies and many emergences, what of it? How shall modes of the latter act in/against modes of the former? Do emergences of a certain type automatically produce emergencies? What is the process by which emergencies are declared? If one takes emergence as the constitutive or ontologically prior moment, then that might be a fruitful starting point for further consideration. What are different ways to understand ‘emergence’?
‘Emergere’ means to rise up, as if from a fluid. For now, let’s consider ‘rise up’ to mean ‘compose itself’ and ‘become visible’. That is, ‘emergere’ in the sense of ‘emergence’ means the construction of a body and, in the same process, that body’s becoming visible as a body. This is how I believe Negri conceives of similar matters, the construction of subjectivity and so forth, and is a paradigmatic view of what political action is among certain sectors (for example, NGOs). The equation of composition and visibility is highly problematic, and is not simply a straw person set up for the sake of argument here. A version of this is the prevailing mode of operation, to give one example, in the official US labor movement. That is, to build an organization is to enter into a play of visibility, guaranteed by the state (as guarantor/terrain of visibility), in which political action and power are defined by contractual and legal relations.
There are, of course, modes of visibility. A Levinasian ethical model, the face of the other etc, implies a mode of visibiltiy: the visibility of one to another. Visibility can mean circulation within a certain set of circuits, for example in a workplace organizing campaign members of a shop committee which is not yet visible to the boss may well be visible to each other. (Or one can think of codes and double entendres by which various minority groups have been able to navigate a line between assimilation and continued existence as minority.) Visibility can also mean visibility to the sovereign and capital. This last has two modes, intentional and unintentional, though the two are often intertwined.
Intentional visibility is public activity, in the sense of activity which happens in the eyes of the sovereign (or the boss), activity which wants that attention. Think of petitions, lobbying, contract negotiations, calls for rights, etc, as well as acts of terrorism and violence followed by claims of responsibility for (self-visibilization, marking oneself as cause of) those acts.
Unintentional visibility is activity which happens in the eyes of the sovereign (or the boss) where that attention is not desired. Think of state surveillance against terrorists, the processes by which undococumented migrants are rendered visible in an undesired fashion, the boss finding out about a workplace organizing drive, police shutting down convergence spaces, raids and lawsuits against file sharers and drug users. In these instances, the passage into visibility is linked to punishment. Knowledge of one’s self and one’s activities is used against one, either to keep one from entering into visibility in a way which the current sovereign (or boss) does not wish (ie, breaking a union drive before it gets to the point of invoking its rights to/rights under visibility, preventing a terrorist attack from happening) or to prevent activity from happening which does not wish visibility at all (filesharing, drugs, other activity which is not predicated on nor aim visibility to the sovereign, I am admittedly fuzzy on this but emergences which do not - or do not wish to - emerge into visibility to the sovereign would of course fall into this category).
Emergency happens when a body becomes visible to the sovereign which the sovereign takes to be threatening. For activities which may emerge to themselves or at some register of visibility other than that of visibility to (representation for and guaranteed by the sovereign), there is nothing desirable about the visibility linked to emergency. From the little I know about the noborder network, the majority of which I’ve learned from Angela, some of the activities of that group are aimed at preventing the processes by which undocumented migrants are rendered unwillingly visible as undocumented, and at identifying and disrupting the sanctions which follow from this unwanted visibility.
This has two moments: attempted prevention of declaration of emergency, and work against the forces that act in conditions of emergency. Both are generally quite important strategic considerations, though the former, it must be repeated, is not meant to be any kind of quietism but rather consideration of what and how exactly one is doing and accomplishing. Of course, all of this must be concretized in respect to particular situations, but, generally speaking, visibility - especially to the state - should be tactical, rather than strategic. Should the view that emergency is a reaction to emergence be meant to indicate that the existence or production of emergency is necessarily a positive index of the strength or value of a tactic or emergence. There is no a priori value to emergence as visibility, nor is provoking an emergency necessarily laudable or desirable.
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What follows are notes from a discussion with my friend Tzuchien a while back, repeats much of the above, I paste it here as a note to self for future revision.
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What I like about the idea is in large part that it is a restatement
of ‘the autonomist hypothesis’, or what Deleuze calls ‘the last word
on power’, that is: the primacy of resistance, of labor. That is,
emergencies (states of exception, in Agamben’s terms) are reactive,
responses to emergences (examples). Emergencies are contiguous with
emergences, changes in the dispositifs and operations of power are in
response to pressures ‘from the bottom up’. I’m also interested in
nonrepresentational modes of politics and political thought.
‘Emergentia’ seems to relate to this issue in complex ways. My
preferred way to read the term ‘emergence’ is in terms of
‘composition’ or ‘construction of subjectivity and organization’. But
this is vague, and ‘emergence’ is not necessarily linked to
nonrepresentation. On the contrary, to emerge means to rise up, as if
from a fluid. One mode of understanding ‘rise up’ is to become
visible. Emergence as a process of becoming seen, entering into the
representational field, producing (or ceding oneself to authorized)
representations. This understanding is, to my mind, highly problematic
and would fail to accomplish part of what I am interested in about a
thought and politics of emergentia.
There are, of course, modalities of visibility as well: visibility to
‘the movement(s)’, to other people - visibility as encounter,
communication, expression. There is also visibility in the media or
spectacle. This visibility is not wholly negative but rather is itself
a terrain of (constituted by) struggles: mediatized appearance can
still have a useful tactical function (as a mode of encounter, for
instance), but it this tactical utility can cut both ways (as a mode
of otherization or a moment of securitization, for instance).Then
there is visibility to the state. This visibility takes at least two
forms. One form is self-presentation before the state (lobbying,
political parties) - or before another power but in a fashion
predicated upon visibility under the state’s auspices (union
contracts, excerising of rights against employers, landlords,
companies, etc, various activities undertaken by campaign groups) -
oftentimes through a representative to whom one’s right/potential to
be visible is delegated (lawyer, negotiator, elected leader, etc).
Another mode of visiblity is surveillance by the state (thus,
clandestine groups have at times been more visible to security forces
than to the rest of the movement[s]).
To say that emergence provokes emergency strikes me as not precise
enough. Rather, it strikes me that emergence as visibilization is what
provokes emergency. That is, becoming visible to the state provokes a
response from the state. Or rather, emergency is precisely a project
of intervening upon the social so that collectivies only occur under a
logic of visibility-to-the-state. Emergency is an operation which
reinforces emergence-as-visibility to the state. Not every mode of
being or becoming visible provokes an emergency response, of course.
Rather, emergences that threaten the order of representation and of
capital are what provoke the emergency.
Emergencies are also emergences, after a fashion: they can be sites of
experimentation on new techniques for producing and enforcing
visibility. Emergencies as contests over the modality of visibility or
invisibility which will manifest.
A few possible avenues for further inquiry open up from here:
-further exploration of different modalities of visibility, attendant
techniques and operations of visibilization, and the relations and
passages between these different modalities:
–modalities of visibility to the state
—deliberate/selfproduced (some of which provoke
emergency and some of which do not)
—accidental or imposed
–nonstate modalities of visibility
—deliberate/selfproduced (press releases, culture
jamming and subvertising, calls to action and
convergence, the production and circulation of ideas and struggles,
which may be in part production of modes of visibilization
themselves, that is, narratives and ideas which shape what movements
see and do not see, how they see themselves, each other,
the state, etc)
—accidental or imposed
-modalities of nonvisibility
–not yet (fully) emerged, where ‘emergence’ is taken to mean
visibilization
–different modalities of emergence which do not take the term
to mean (only, always) visibilization [Sergio Bologna’s termites,
Marx’s mole]
—modalities of knowledge of/in nonvisibility: nonvisibility
that does not aim to become visible (or if it does, does so only
tactically) implies a change in the role of intellectual practices.
The ‘universal intellectual’ was a figure bound up with processes
of visibilization to the state - processes of producing visibility and
movements as visible, and producing the nonvisible as visible
in the mode of being inert. Nonvisibility that seeks to be active,
rather than inert has other traits, and other intellectual
practices are needed. (There may be tactical resort to visibilization,
in which case perhaps there is a tactical resort to the
practices of the universal intellectual.) What would modes of
knowledge/knowledge production with regard to movements be, if not
aimed at/predicated upon visibility to the state?
–state vs nonstate nonvisibility (ie, exclusion:
inclusion-as-exclusion, visibility as excluded, also the disappeared
detained, erased in Argentina and elsewhere: the state disappeared
people, tried to render them invisible politically [not proper
subjects, without rights, politically inert or nonexistent] and
invisible socially [to erase their memory - hence the struggles
of the Madres and HIJOS to produce a social visibility to the
disappeared, to keep alive the disappeared at least in memory,
as well as the radical goals of those genocided])
-strategies and tactics bearing on these different prospects (for
instance, a strategy of nonvisibility may have resort to visibiliation
tactically, and vice versa [actually, I think visibility politics are
always predicated on a nonvisible - shopfloor power undergirds union
contracts, for instance], how to prepare emergence in order to escape
or survive emergency yet without becoming trapped into imposed logics
of visibilization), and how all of these play out as fields cut across
by lines of force and are deployable in different modalities for
different purposes.