Activism, academia, and new technologies the complicities of theorised and mobilised resistances in the globalising discourses of speed

Chapter One Complicities of resistance: activisms in terms of material and discursive production 1.1 The stakes and paradoxes of alter-globalist resistance 1 1.2 Complicating activisms

BETWEEN ACTIVISM AND ACADEMIA: THE COMPLICITIES

OF ALTER-GLOBALIST RESISTANCES IN SPEED

INGRID MARIA HOOFD (M A WOMENS STUDIES AND FILM STUDIES (HONS.), UTRECHT UNIVERSITY, THE NETHERLANDS)

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE

2006

Acknowledgements

This dissertation is the culmination of many fruitful and instructive years spent in various activist and academic settings I want to thank the Department of English Language and Literature and the University Scholars Project at the National University of Singapore for providing me with the excellent resources to do my research and complete this

dissertation I also want to thank the Women’s Studies Department at Utrecht University for giving me the necessary background and enthusiasm to further pursue my research interest abroad I also want to thank the various activist projects and groups I participate and have participated in over the years for all the dialogue, friendships, materials and insights

I extend my warmest thanks to Ryan Bishop for all his patience, suggestions, comments, humour, and inspiration throughout the last few years The assistance of George Landow, Irina Aristarkhova and John William Phillips has also been invaluable I am also grateful for all the loving support and encouragement my friends in Europe and Singapore, as well as my family in the Netherlands, have given me from nearby and from afar Without them, this dissertation would not have found its completion And last but not least, thanks

to Sandra Khor Manickam for being my companion throughout the journey

Chapter One

Complicities of resistance: activisms in terms of material and discursive production

1.1 The stakes and paradoxes of alter-globalist resistance 1

1.2 Complicating activisms: folding back what has been projected as ‘outside’ 9

1.3 Naturalising humanism: the productive foundation of activism 16

1.4 Romanticising the margins and forging alliances 26 1.5 The technological prosthesis and the increasing reproduction of inequalities 31

1.7 The aporetic productivity of the practice-theory dichotomy 46

1.8 Outlining alter-globalist activist strategies that are complicit in speed 54

Chapter Two

Fantasies and tools of the speed-elite: radical new media theory and activism

2.1 Repetitions of acceleration: frantic hope, hidden despair 58

2.2 Radical new media thinkers: tactical media, autonomous zones and digital

2.4 Repeating the dream of speed: academia and Indymedia activism 97

2.5 Continuing deconstruction: from technology to mobility 101

Chapter Three

Italian thought and the obsession with the migrant: the speed-elite’s daydream of radical alterity

3.1 The rise of a metaphor: radical thought and the migrant 106

3.2 Hypermodernism, the speed elite, and its narrative of redemption 115

3.3 Complicities of radical Italian thought: imagining an ‘ally par excellence’ 123

3.4 Empire and the self-serving rhetoric of the ‘subversive’ poor migrant 133

3.5 No-border theories, Italian thought, and new media activist rhetorics 141

3.6 Radical Italian thought and European and Australian no-border activism 148

3.7 Productive migrations across the borders of nation and of other institutions 154

Chapter Four

Dichotomies and spaces of the speed-elite: activism, academia, and the carrying forward

of justice

4.1 The plot thickens: the quest for justice and its complicities in speed 159

4.2 The cry for activism: the etymology of a concept 166

4.3 The dispersed university: academia’s contingent borders 173

4.4 Concepts and borderlands, or how to loyally betray one’s productive

4.5 Being on the border: the cry for activism within activist-research 186

4.6 Caught in the productive action-thought aporia 200

4.7 The necessity and complicity of justice and thought 208

Chapter Five

The speed elite and beyond: empowering ourselves to death? 213

Summary

This dissertation examines the ways in which several alter-globalist activist groups and thinkers, as well as left-wing academic theorists, mobilise discourses and divisions in an attempt to overcome gendered, raced and classed oppressions worldwide In particular, this dissertation will draw out how these mobilisations and theorisations, despite (or because of) their liberatory claims, are actually implicated in the intensification of global hierarchies by repeatedly invoking narratives of transcendence, connection, progress and speed Drawing from the quests for justice and truth that inspire current new media

activism, radical Italian thought, and the concept of academia, this dissertation will argue that the humanist aporia that underlies all these practices, is what paradoxically also triggers the increasing disenfranchisement along lines of gender, class and race

worldwide Moreover, validating itself through the productive borderlines of academia and activism, this dissertation acknowledges that it is itself similarly implicated in these discourses and its concurrent reproduction of speed

Chapter One will outline the relevant theories of technologies (of the subject) and their entanglements with the contemporary globalisation of neo-liberalism and humanism The chapter will propose to analyse connection of technologies and discourses of

liberation and empowerment with neo-liberal capitalism through the notion of complicity,

as well as through the idea of the aporia underlying the humanist utopia of liberation Following this argument, the chapter will argue that these complicities facilitate foremost the emergence of a new global elite – the ‘speed-elite’ Next, Chapter Two will analyse the complicities of new media activism in the discourses and tools that underpin

technocratic globalisation and this new ‘speed-elite’ In particular, the chapter will look at how the contradictions that underpin new media activism paradoxically lead to an

increasingly problematic call for empowerment through virtualisation Chapter Three will follow up on this analysis by critically examining the appearance of the migrant metaphor

in radical Italian thought and activism The chapter will point out that the rise of this metaphor is an effect of the desires of the ‘speed-elite’ to universalise humanism, cross borders and attain transcendence The fantasy that such desires would be liberatory for

‘the oppressed’ erases the urgent analysis of the conditions of possibility that facilitate the ‘speed-elite’ Subsequently, Chapter Four will take the previous analyses to another plane by pointing out that the production of this dissertation itself is complicit in the very same discourses of speed This is because it seeks to productively cross the borders of activism and academia as well as thought and action, arguing problematically that such a hybrid position is a location that speaks justice and truth However, as with the analyses

of activism, the play of the thought-action binary will be shown to be precisely the

fundamental aporia that underlies the quest for speed as well as justice Finally, Chapter Five will draw together the conclusions of the previous chapters and set out to question

Chapter One: Complicities of resistance: activisms in terms of material and

“The general ideology of global development is racist paternalism;

its general economics capital-intensive investment; its broad politics the subaltern as the rhetoric of their protest.”

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (373, 1999)

1.1 The stakes and paradoxes of alter-globalist resistance

Let me, in order to plunge headlong into the complexity of the issues at stake, start this dissertation at one of those memorable protests against globalisation my feminist and anarchist friends and I participated in, which took place in Brussels on December 14,

2001 The targets of these D14 protests, which were attended by as many as 70000

people that day, were the latest decisions of the European Union and its capitulation to

the demands of global capital The European Union’s increasingly neo-liberal capitalist policies were condemned by the protesters for aggravating the gender, race and class gaps both within Europe and worldwide We argued that these new policies would lead to an increasing feminisation of poverty and to the exclusion of ever more people from access

to education, transport and (new) technologies We understood policymaking within the European Union itself as an elitist practice, equal to those of corporate finance policies of exploitation, and only in favour of those people who were already rich, male, white and comfortable Since we felt that the corporate media were not to be trusted for very much the same reasons, an ad-hoc Independent Media Centre and website were set up in an old deserted cinema building in the centre of Brussels, in order to enable the protesters to make public the ‘truth’ about the alter-globalist and liberatory ideas and intentions of the D14 Furthermore, word of the protests was supposed to spread this way, creating and enforcing alliances around the globe between us protesters and all oppressed peoples under the spread of neo-liberal capitalist globalisation

A few months later, in February 2002, some of my feminist colleagues and I were attending a European Union meeting on education and new technologies I attended in the capacity of my post as a New Media Project Coordinator at a Women’s Studies

department of a Dutch university, which had hired me partly because of my knowledge of and ties to new media and feminist activist groups ‘outside’ the university The questions addressed at the particular meeting were varied: how to bridge the gender, race, and class disparities within Europe; how to create access to education and new technologies

through, for instance, online learning programmes for those who are disabled or who have no money to travel abroad to get a degree, and how to enable and increase physical

student mobility and lifelong learning so that people get more opportunities to empower themselves through knowledge-gathering Most of the organisers of the meeting were women, and large sums of money were allocated during the meeting to tackle the issues discussed – all off which hopefully would create equal wealth and opportunity for all within Europe, as well as in the long run for all worldwide

The logic of this fight between protesters and policy makers was repeated several months later in a public debate organised by a student activist group in my home

university The student protesters accused the Dutch university rectors and heads of having fallen for the evils of neo-liberal capitalism by signing the European Union

Bologna convention – a convention set up to facilitate inter-university travel, third-party sponsoring and international conversion of diplomas and grades Students empowered themselves by putting themselves discursively in the position of the imagined ‘moral voice of the people of Europe’, by asserting that what the university originally stood for,

it should continue to stand for: the pursuit of ‘untainted’ knowledge, truth and reason as a moral obligation to liberate and empower people This was an obligation that should be carried out objectively, and which should be disconnected from ‘dirty’ politics, such as corporate economics Of course, the rectors replied in desperation that the upholding and saving of the university’s main function in society as a moral place in which the quest for knowledge and reason can continue was exactly what made them sign the Bologna Treaty and introduce third-party funding

The broad similarities between the discourses of truth and empowerment

employed by both on the surface seemingly oppositional groups – the anti-EU- and student-protesters and the university- and EU-policymakers – may strike the reader as

extraordinary Both groups clearly operated with the good intentions of a democratising and empowering politics But the point of my recollecting these personal memories is not

to claim that the alter-globalist activists are completely deluded in their resistance against and critique of the European Union, nor that these European Union and university

policies and decisions are totally benevolent Instead, it is to introduce the reader to the likelihood that these similarities on the level of rhetoric may not be accidental, and that determining whose claims are repressive and whose are actually helping the oppressed, may not be as easily made as it seems at first glace More particularly, the similarities suggest that every activist claim to be on ‘the oppressed’ side, to ‘really do’ something about injustices, as well as every subsequent demonisation of certain institutions as the

‘evil oppressor’ or as merely privileged or elitist, whether this be academia or the

European Union, marks exactly activism’s complicity in such reproductions of inequality

This is because such activism accuses those institutions of doing what activism itself also

does Perhaps then, in the cases of the above D14 and student protests examples, the very same forces that constitute the European Union make possible the very protests against

the European Union, and the counter-voices put up by students and protesters in effect reproduce the founding myths of the institutions they are protesting against

I must warn readers here that the aim of mapping out such complicities is not eventually to claim that a certain type of politics or activism is possible that may

transcend such complicities and become ‘liberating for all’ Such a claim would itself reproduce those myths that underlie the discourse of truth and liberation it inevitably seeks to critique Instead, I suggest that complete non-complicity is essentially an

impossibility, whether it is on the level of alter-globalist protests or on the level of this

individual dissertation and its entanglements with certain institutions that facilitate capitalist production This impossibility marks the continuing desire to identify with and uphold a narrative of emancipatory progress – both within activisms and within academia This may draw our attention to what are perhaps the stakes of such tainted struggles: no less than the survival of certain groups and their linguistic arrangements into the next century, as these groups and arrangements suffer gradual erasure in a world of increasing military intensification and casualty The standpoint claim to be ‘on the oppressed side’ is therefore no mean feat or frivolity, and it is not my aim to denounce such a politics at all:

late-it is serious business wlate-ith very serious consequences My suggestion is that perhaps such

a politics may end up biting itself in the tail when it is not aware of its reproduction of those hierarchies that facilitated its own self-image as ‘truly resistant and subversive’ in the first place

This investigation into complicities is therefore of great interest to many globalist and new media activists who have, since the start of such ‘global protests’, felt unhappy or uncomfortable about having to identify with certain groups within alter-

alter-globalism whose visions they conventionally assumed as completely disparate For

instance, numerous left-wing factions have great trouble walking side by side with certain extreme nationalist right-wing groups; certain eco-activists are disturbed by the many wasteful high-technological branches of the alter-globalist movement; certain feminist factions have problems with a number of Marxist groups for their continuing misogyny; global peace activists are anxious over the incessant participation of small numbers of protesters who use physical violence to show their disagreement with specific policies or

to get media attention I use the term ‘alter-globalist’1 therefore not only to indicate that most of the groups under this heading are not simply ‘against globalisation’ as such (the common denominator would rather be that they are against a specific Western-centred neo-liberal capitalist globalisation), but also to point out that ‘the movement’ consists internally of highly contradictory and oppositional strands This internal incoherence however, within which certain groups perceive other groups as completely counter to their own norms and values, gives rise to the suspicion that such groups are actually not

as totally opposed as they seem at first

Rather than invoking the term ‘alter-globalism’, I will overall use the broader term ‘activism’ throughout this dissertation as a shorthand to describe a heterogeneous grouping of anti-sexist and anti-racist class-conscious political praxis within the 20th and

21st century that generally goes under the heading of ‘left-wing activism’ These various groups and individuals, which do not include those who go by the names of ‘right-wing activism’ or ‘non-governmental organisations’, and that come together at the World Social Forums are a good example of such activism At times though, I will also use the term ‘activism’ more ambiguously and extend it to certain supposedly ‘theoretical’ practices within, for instance, academia, where individuals and groups exercise types of politicised activity using similar ‘left-wing’ or ‘anti-globalist’ ideas and utopias As for these ideas and utopias, it may be obvious that the term ‘activism’ relates somehow to the term ‘activity’ I will go deeper into the discourses of activism, its dialectic affiliation

1 I should make clear here that the term ‘alter-globalist’ is by no means my own invention, but a term that has circulated already for many years among some of the groups and individuals in Europe who identify

with the anti-globalisation movement but who want to point out that they are not against globalisation tout

court I intend however to give the term here an even more self-reflexive spin, by claiming that completely

with ‘theory’, and its close ties with the current neo-liberal economic arrangement in Chapter Four

It is my hope that readers will come to understand that the fact that I want to explicitly declare my indebtedness in the following chapters to these activisms, as much

as to the theories in this dissertation, suggests that my critiques of those activisms are by

no means attempts to destroy or completely oppose (if such an opposition were possible

at all) such alter-globalist endeavours My sympathies remain thoroughly situated with these various activisms, whose problematic underpinnings I nonetheless feel compelled

to address in this dissertation The reader should therefore be aware that my critical

analyses emphatically do not mean to identify with the traditional ‘opposite camp’ of

left-wing activism (for instance, right-left-wing activism) On the contrary, I hope that my critique can fuel further discussion and attempts to a more just global society, by working through what Jacques Derrida often calls the simultaneous ‘double affirmation’ that is

deconstruction In The Ear of the Other, Derrida likewise explains that his critical

readings of, for instance, Kant and Heidegger stem from a strong ‘love’ of and

identification with those texts One needs to be able to identify with a text in order to plunge into it, or, as Derrida notes:

[M]y relation to these texts is characterised by loving jealousy and not at all by

nihilistic fury (one can’t read anything in the latter condition) (87, italics mine)

Peggy Kamuf also explains the importance of the trope of double affirmation to

deconstruction in “Deconstruction and Love.” She points out that deconstruction can

never simply mean destruction, because it is at base critically affirmative This “loving” double affirmation means that deconstruction complicates the opposition between

preservation and destruction: before one can either love or question, one must affirm, and such an affirmation can never be neutral Kamuf sums this up by saying that

[T]he affirmative declaration remains in excess of the descriptive value or rather let us say that the affirmative voice of the declaration is what conditions the description (154)

Similarly, my ‘descriptive’ critique seeks to work alongside and develop the critical impulse and demands for justice that those activisms implicitly call forward and, more importantly, wants to be an invitation for ongoing critical involvement in issues of global (and local) justice It is then also the uncovering of the limitations of my double

affirmation, and the impossibility of discerning to what degree such an affirmation is done out of self-love or out of love for the other, that hopefully opens my critique up for loving appropriations beyond my control

While I thus by no means seek to efface the definite differences and

incompatibilities between, for instance, what is traditionally called left-wing and wing ideas, I would like to point out that the relationship of such seemingly oppositional groups is far more complicated than the classical or modernist idea of pure opposition might lead us to believe That is, if it is apparently possible for both left-wing and right-wing groups to protest together under the banner of today’s quintessential left-wing

right-“movement of movements” that the alter-globalisation protest is said to be by many2, then these left-wing activists may want to look at what are the oppressive tendencies at play in their alter-globalist efforts that facilitate identification by right-wing protesters In other words, I would like to make such conventional oppositions productive in a more

unsettling and hopefully more loving and just way because it is this quest for justice that

stands at the basis of my own personal activist and academic endeavours, commitments and responsibilities The interesting ‘accident’ of the growth within the alter-globalist movement of these reciprocal annoyances and fights which each other, is then that the event of the coming together of such historically oppositional groups can perhaps give rise to a deeper understanding of the stakes that are at play within (alter-)globalisation Also, this ‘accident’ can espouse, one hopes, a more intricate comprehension of the complicities and productivities that are inherent in the continuous unfolding of

globalisation and its networks of resistance

1.2 Complicating activisms: folding back what has been projected as ‘outside’

In Chapters Two to Four, I will look at the histories and contexts of several alter-globalist activist projects, in particular those that make extensive use of new technologies, as well

as how these activisms position themselves vis-à-vis the problems that they seek to solve

or the institutions that they seek to contest While such a positioning and the pragmatic acting on desires to change certain local and global injustices for the better on the surface appear to be extremely useful or even absolutely necessary, I will suggest that this

2 The term “movement of movements” appeared first in Italy and is commonly used to describe the globalisation movement

alter-progression towards justice for all through these alter-globalist activisms may not be so straightforward and self-evident as it seems to many academics and activists at first glance I do this in order to imply that there exists, both in activist and academic circles concerned with social justice, a significant lack of awareness of the concept of ‘activism’ and its close ties to historically and geographically specific gendered, classed and raced ideas of humanism, liberation, economics and technologies, which have historically been particularly dominant in the Western context Furthermore, this lack of awareness is also present in the complete disregard of the position that a lot of this alter-globalist activism

occupies in terms of production I conceive of the term ‘production’ here as the

precarious reproduction of hegemonies and their material underpinnings, which relies on

a discursive perpetuation of extremely gendered, classed and raced notions of what is valuable and ‘good’

In brief then, I will show how many aspects, both discursive and material or technological, of the aforementioned activisms are essentially complicit in the

reproduction of grave inequalities that globalisation engenders I suggest that

alter-globalist activisms are rather exemplary of what drives this ever increasing reproduction

of inequalities, their image of being on the forefront of combating such inequalities

notwithstanding This essential ambivalence or impurity of activism and activist thought

may come as a surprise for anyone who is convinced of the univocal virtue of any intended activism, or to anyone who believes it is better not to consider such

well-ambivalences as it will only hamper ‘true action’ However, such grounding ideas of well-meant intention and of the prioritisation of action over doubt or thinking so typical

of activisms (and of certain academic work), rest precisely at the foundation of the

essentially complicit violence of such praxes Furthermore, these grounding ideas of activism reproduce a specific set of discourses, primarily in the sense that these activisms revolve around a repetition of the fantasy of the autonomous agent, which ties them closely to technologies of transcendence and speed This is a fantasy, I must add, not merely specific to ‘the West’ I will claim that this repetition that nonetheless favours discursively and materially what is historically perceived as ‘whiteness’ and

‘masculinity’, foregrounds itself most when claims are made that marginalised groups inhabit an ‘oppositional’ subjectivity, or when the desires that foster change are

represented as authentic or transparent These assumptions of transparency tend to

translate themselves into visions of technologies as neutral tools at any activist’s disposal

In order to support such an argument, I will discuss in this chapter several theoretical positions that successfully displace the self-evidence of action, intention and justice

As can be noted from the above, this dissertation will take the concept of

complicity as the main structuring notion of its argument A quick etymological

explanation of this concept may illuminate why this notion appears to be so

fundamentally useful here The Latin word ‘complicare’ means essentially ‘folding together’, and its past perfect ‘complicatus’ means ‘entangled’ or ‘intricate’ The word has close ties with notions like ‘accomplice’ and ‘complex’ (meaning literally in Latin

‘with-weaved’); in fact, the accusative of the Latin complex (‘complicem’) can also indicate a ‘partner in crime’ Complicities then point towards the interwovenness of, or

‘being partners in crime’ with, certain point of views, histories or activities The Latin

root word of complicity would be ‘plicare’, which means ‘to fold’ Jacques Derrida, whose theories will comprise the main frame for this dissertation, refers in Dissemination

to ‘le pli’ (the fold) to indicate those folds that have been removed from the surface of a text Therefore, an analysis of the ‘plis’ that are woven together within an activism means

to let resurface those folds in the discourses of activism that it has posited itself against,

as if they were outside of its realm, when in fact these folds essentially constitute the

activism’s appeal to its ‘truth’ or universality Elizabeth Grosz in “Ontology and

Equivocation: Derrida’s Politics of Sexual Difference” makes the same observation, though in more psychoanalytical terms, about how the appeal to truth of a text needs to project onto something or someone else what in essence resides as a tension within that text:

A self-righteous tone is usually an index of the degree to which one has projected outward … the very points of uneasiness one feels in one’s own position (80)

We will see later on that such a ‘self-righteous tone’ is always somehow required for any activism to function and be productive, and that it is here (in the double sense of the

adverb), at this moment of enunciation, that it’s fundamental complicities arise As such,

a drawing out of complicities will trace back, or fold back into the surface of an action or standpoint, the contingencies of those founding ideas that had been made ‘hidden’ or

‘othered’ in the process of enunciation of that very standpoint Interestingly also, the English ‘complicity’ translates into Dutch (which is my mother-tongue) as

‘medeplichtigheid’, where ‘mede-‘ means ‘with’, and the root word ‘plicht’ translates as

‘duty’ or ‘responsibility’ The rendering explicit of an activism’s complicities therefore also shows which kind of responsibilities an activism carries forth, indeed, as if it were its

duty to do so This dissertation will then look at the discursive mechanisms at work in the aforementioned activist projects that repeatedly efface their folds, an effacement that exhibits itself through a moral call for responsible action Noteworthy for the cause of

alter-globalist activism, Derrida suggests on several occasions in Monolingualism of the Other or the Prosthesis of Origin, that it is regularly under the usually well-intended

banner of “openness to the other” (40) or “under alibis of ‘universal’ humanism” (39) that the colonialist spread of such an effacing homo-hegemony establishes itself

Wanting to pick up and elaborate on these and on other assertions of Derrida’s, I

am claiming that there are a number of issues around alter-globalist activism and

intellectual writing at play which, despite (or maybe because of) all the good intentions and claims of creating supposedly ‘open’ spaces and positive changes, in fact seriously play into the technologically enhanced repetition and consolidation of current global hegemonies around class, race and gender Furthermore, the growing inequalities around class as well as the possibilities for resistance will appear more and more to be

intrinsically connected to the faculties of the communication and transportation

technologies Despite the widespread activist belief to the contrary that tends to perceive resistances and power structures as arch opposites, the spread of a violent and oppressive technocratic neo-liberalism and the partially liberating (left-wing or feminist) humanist appropriation of these technologies actually go hand in hand, in an ever faster and more powerful way I thus understand ‘humanism’ here as an exponent of the particularly anthropocentric strain of the European Enlightenment that hubristically validates the self-evidence of human intention and communication3 Humanism, while by no means a static

entity, in this dissertation therefore denotes the cluster of thought that beliefs in the

3 See also Cultural Theory: The Key Concepts, 2002

human agent as rational and autonomous, and as capable of liberating itself from its language and history

In the course of this dissertation, I will argue that humanism currently expresses itself as a quest for speed and transcendence through the new technologies, due to the mythical repetition of humanism’s supposed ‘truly emancipatory’ Enlightenment origins This repetition is especially problematic since this particular conception of the human subject as ‘in control’ of his own destiny in itself already gives rise to discursive and potentially judicial and physical violence So I will claim that the alter-globalisation activisms and their philosophies are highly complicit in the ongoing global fortification

of what Paul Virilio and John Armitage, whom I will discuss shortly, call the ‘global kinetic elite’, and of this elite’s subsequent global hegemonic spread through certain pervasive dominant discourses around technologies Therefore, this spread of alter-globalist activism, both inside the geographical region perceived as ‘the West’ as well as

‘outside’ the West, is not so straightforwardly liberatory and a cause for celebration for all so-called ‘marginalised’ groups as often claimed or thought of on the face of it Similarly, although poststructuralists like Derrida effectively question the idea of the autonomous agent and transparent communication, poststructuralism nonetheless owes some of its own critical abilities to humanist thought

In an attempt to tie activisms’ complicities to the discourses of humanism and its technologies, this dissertation would henceforth suggest that this widening reach of alter-

globalisation activism occurs in a very particular way This fundamentally violent

particularity lies in what Derrida calls ‘the disappearance of idioms’ through

‘mondialisation’ In anticipation of this discussion, ‘mondialisation’ results in a

stratification of individuals under an increasingly singular mode of subjugation, that is, if such individuals manage to keep up with globalisation at all4 Many writings of this supposedly ‘radical’ alter-globalism, through a metaphorisation of the ‘truly oppressed’, effectively reproduce the limited fantasy of the Enlightenment subject as the ultimate centre for social change, just as much as the institutions, companies and policies that alter-globalist activism imagines itself as being outside of or against do So despite – or

rather, as will become clear later on, because of – the seemingly altruistic and resistant

intentions of the incorporation of ‘a truly oppressed’ within activism and activist thought, this imagination and its incorporation of certain groups as ‘the oppressed’ is seriously problematic The fruitful notion of ‘the oppressed’ functions as a metaphor in these

activisms and is utilised primarily as a tool to make possible the claim for some sort of hegemonic ‘unification of struggles’ in ‘the new world order’ by these alter-globalist thinkers and activists They will be shown to do so through a doubly romanticising move, leading to both the reproduction of the oppressed as a heroic figure, as well as to a

continuing desire for communal self-identification of these alter-globalists with the

margins as the embodiment of the transcendental notion of total subsumption of

boundaries The latter desire consequently results in, and at the same time is the result of, various implicit highly problematic unification discourses around what constitutes

oppression

4 Derrida actually never uses the word ‘globalisation’, but instead refers to the process of ‘mondialisation’

in several of his texts The French ‘le monde’ means not only the globe, but also ‘the people’ This play suggests that mondialisation is especially concerned with scaling down the number of possible idioms and subjugations under the stratifying humanist and anthropocentric notion of ‘one people’ (compare also the 19 th century European fascist discourse of unification of the world through the invocation of ‘ein Volk’)

word-In an answer to Martin Shaw on the concept of globalisation in “A question to Jacques Derrida,” Derrida says that globalisation as a term has been too much contaminated by neo-liberal and cyber-happy

appropriations

Although my central argument, namely that we, as alter-globalist activists and academics either rallying or writing for emancipatory change and justice, are all working along with the violence of globalising neo-liberalism and its quest for speed, perhaps sounds a bit charged, I nonetheless invite the reader to consider one’s own academic and activist endeavours on this level of discursive and material production Such a

consideration paradoxically shows that much contemporary activism and left-wing

theoretical practice will continuously appropriate and repeat precisely those technological imaginations that underpin neo-liberalist globalisation An obvious example of this would

in fact be this dissertation: the useful productivity of the notion of complicity here points directly to the dissertation’s complicity in global terms of production At the same time, this means just as much that my dissertation as well as these activisms will not repeat power structures in any knowable or straightforward way, and that there will also be some inevitable shifts of hegemonies5 As we will see later by discussing several of the typical contemporary examples of activist and academic practice, like new media- and no-border-activism, and ‘activist-research’, as well as by looking at some of the writings

by activist-deconstructionists like Spivak and Derrida, such power shifts will be

necessarily partial as well as incalculable

1.3 Naturalising humanism: the productive foundation of activism

I am insinuating that the complicities of activism primarily revolve around the modernist and humanist fantasies of the autonomous agent Therefore, in order to arrive at the complicities of alter-globalist activism, we must necessarily start at what is the

‘productive problem’ underlying current fantasies and desires of liberation, justice and freedom: humanism Derrida describes in several of his texts how the reproductive force

of any ideology resides in the continuous suppression of its own internal irresolvable contradictions, the identification of which he calls ‘aporia’ This suppression comes about through implicit or explicit declarations of ‘faith’ or ‘truth’ towards a certain belief system, which in effect universalises such a belief system in order for the subject to ‘self-actualise’ itself time and again Derrida clarifies how the declaration of humanism is particular through the notion of ‘professing’ He points out that the idea of ‘profession’,

and hence the fact that we, as activists and radical theorists, cannot help but to commit

whenever we act or speak for ‘justice and equality for mankind’, re-constitutes as well as re-appropriates the humanist beliefs that ground academic and activist practice In his remarkably brilliant and ironic (and simultaneously deadly sincere) “The Future of the Profession or the University without Condition,” Derrida professes his allegiance to the academic humanities for being the one location founded on the ‘liberating’ notion of an

“unconditional freedom to question and assert.” (24) His act of professing to the

humanities, through asserting prime value in the ‘questioning’ practice, then

simultaneously opens up the possibility of questioning the humanities’ unconditionality (of questioning) This is because both the questioning and its supposed unconditionality are founded on the structuring humanist Enlightenment ideal, which in turn necessarily shapes its format and institutional practices

The productivity of the idea of unconditional questioning must therefore

necessarily be the result of a highly conditional situation It is Derrida’s performance of

his humanist belief of ‘progress through unconditional questioning and critiquing’ in

“The Future of the Profession or the University without Condition” that shows that this performance relies on the discursive and institutional constraints of this conditional situation He demonstrates that it is exactly in the professing that deconstruction resides The fundamental aporia (or irresolvable contradiction) within the humanities, humanism, and within the humanist subject as such, is that it claims to be able to express the truth ever better and make mankind eventually ‘free’, versus the claim that it can relentlessly offer space for critique of any appearance or teleological narrative of truth The ideas of freedom and liberation from constraints (like those of the state or of capitalism) are fantasies that reproduce those very constraints In other words, freedom exists as a

consequence of constraints The power and the potential violence of the academic

institution as well as of other praxes – like alter-globalist activism – that base themselves

on humanist ideals, then lies in the repeated suppression of this fundamental internal

contradiction of humanism, as well as of the historical, material and discursive

oppressions that such universalisations entail This suppression is also the one condition that drives these praxes and institutions forward The activisms under scrutiny in the following chapters perpetuate the problematic universalisation of humanism both by their professing claims for utopias of liberation, as well as through exacerbating the ‘doing’ versus ‘thinking’ binary typical of metaphysical viewpoints Since both idealistic

academics and inspired activists, pressing for liberatory social change, are caught up in this unfinishable call for equality and freedom for all, we can effectively conclude that this humanist aporia constitutes both these seemingly opposed conditions of reproduction

of activism and academia As Derrida would have it, every time we take ‘ownership’ of this discursive legacy by fighting for freedom, liberation and equality, we are responsibly

incorporating the subjugating moral call of Enlightenment humanism So the completion

of the project of humanism in which alter-globalist activism as well as academic quests for improvement take part in, remains a priori an impossibility The result is that

humanism and its politics are thoroughly unfinishable; for it to keep operating, it

envisions a utopian end that stands a priori in contradiction to its own specific

constructedness It is this specificity of humanism that instead constantly needs to be posed as natural and universal to keep the dream of liberation for the emancipating

subject alive

In Monolingualism, Derrida depicts how the violence of effacement and

encapsulation of ‘the hyphen’ is tied up with discourses of liberation ‘The hyphen’ does this through connections based on the false assumption of an exact equality of the terms

on either side of the hyphen The example Derrida gives of such a hyphen is Maghrebian’ Derrida shows the violence of the hyphen by discussing how a language is never truly one’s own It is the desire of the subject that wants to own it – who wants to claim a language and a history as belonging entirely to itself as well as to that subject of enunciation – that must involve a “politico-phantasmatic construction” (23) of ownership The fantasy of the existence of one’s own language, history and identity, must entail a naturalisation that erases from memory the historically and culturally specific usurpation that is “always essentially colonial.” The subject needs to “make others share it [this belief], through the use of force or cunning through rhetoric, the school, or the army,” (23) in order to uphold her or his sense of self Derrida calls this a ‘first trick’ of

‘Franco-subjectivity that needs to be played The ‘second trick’ then consists of a naturalisation of the fantasy of possible “liberation, emancipation, and revolution.” (24) The desire for

mastery and for a transparent self of the subject must evoke the belief that subsumption

of, or ‘freedom from’, this necessary and limiting heritage of language is in fact possible But the belief of breaking with a heritage, the belief in emancipation, then confirms its humanist heritage by internalising it, says Derrida

In “The Future of the Profession,” Derrida performs at length what we, whether being activists or theorists professing to a mode of humanist truth, are in fact repeatedly

choosing without the memory of this aporia’s trace It is this gap, and the discursive and eventually material violence it performs, that should be remembered For, Derrida says

“while many say that performativity creates the event, one should rather say that through performativity ‘nothing worthy of the name ‘event’ can really ever take place’.” (54) And although this performance is indeed highly productive, and although it is increasingly the only mode of action or thought we can entertain when we consciously want to ‘change’

or liberate’, it is nonetheless highly exclusionary and therefore potentially violent

Colonialist, classist and sexist violence is therefore a structurally indispensable

component of Enlightenment humanism, and not an accident that resides outside of it and that it can consequently ‘fix’ Derrida in various other writings sought to address the inherent gender- and race-dimensions of this violence through his notion of

phallogocentrism, which is a term hinting explicitly at the close relationship of this humanist violence to the construction of aggressive masculinity and conquering

whiteness

Elizabeth Grosz provides another example of how this declaration or ‘professing’

to humanism propagates it as universally true, but nonetheless renders it internally

contradictory She also point out how righteous acting (or thought) in such a scheme

becomes privileged over ambivalence or doubt She discusses in “Ontology and

Equivocation: Derrida’s Politics of Sexual Difference,” how activism relies on the claim that it resides in ‘the real’ Such a realm of ‘the real’, which in essence exists primarily within the imagination of this claim, gets problematically opposed to or situated outside

of the supposedly limiting and distorting notion of ‘the text’ This ‘real’ versus ‘text’ is a false opposition that directly relates to Derrida’s analyses of the false binary of speech (as immediate and present) and writing (as delayed and absent) Grosz takes feminism, which continuously bases itself on the problematic notion of ‘real women’, as an example While certain strands of feminism imagine themselves as being emancipatory through positing the notion of ‘real women’ as somehow outside of or prior to languages,

institutions and technologies, the discursive move that essentialises ‘women’ and any empowering action derived from it can nonetheless only be made possible by implicating itself in languages and institutions (that conceptualise ‘women’) Therefore, feminist politics is always a ‘dirty’ politics, says Grosz: it needs to affirm phallogocentrism in order to be able to exist and appropriate its tools For the feminist politics that is carried within the institution of, for instance, academia, this complicity or ‘dirty politics’ seems quite obvious But in fact, any feminist politics, she says, is necessarily implied in what it seeks to contest: the fantasy of overcoming patriarchy is derived from the patriarchal fantasy of overcoming Grosz calls this a ‘double affirmation’: feminism must say ‘yes’

to patriarchy in order to affirm its utopian vision of overcoming patriarchy Grosz

concludes correctly from Derrida’s deconstruction that in essence “[e]very ‘revolution’ [is implicated in] what it revolts against.” (77) Discourses that claim the possibility of de-centering the subject, or of insurrecting or speaking from the position of a marginalised

subject, successfully and silently reinstall the (centred) subject Now this reinstallation is not in itself a problem, but the trouble resides in how such a politics then becomes blind

to what it reproduces, and which sets of potentially violent exclusions these activisms and their discourses consequently resurrect

Any activist or theoretical response to hegemonies that conceives of itself as a total denunciation of those ‘old’ power structures, therefore, will always problematically repeat the very same power structures it seeks to abolish or put in ‘the past’ The

humanist idea of resistance, which mystifies resistance as ‘authentic’ in its force and thus being outside power structures, forgets that resistance is in fact always using and is always inscribed in power relations It is this ultimately misleading notion of resistance that implicitly returns in all these new media activisms, due to an often explicit allegiance

to postmodernism, which gets strategically but mistakenly posed in terms of a clean break with modernism This false break with modernism also figures in the supposed newness

of the latest communication technologies, in which the superficial affirmation of

differences, for instance through putting ‘each individual’s desires at the centre of

technological experiences’, is materially reconnected under the sign of the same6

Derrida demonstrates that there is no position possible that inhabits ‘ultimate liberation for all’, and that pretending that there is would always mean a universalising trick But, as Derrida teaches us, it is this problematic ‘trick’ – a declaration to a belief system – that we need in order to empower ourselves as subjects So when such humanist subject positions through technologically endowed spaces are increasingly what

6 Even though ‘new media activism’ can potentially incorporate those activist endeavours that critique (the use of) new media, I will use the term ‘new media activism’ throughout this dissertation to refer to those

activisms recreate, then this field of deconstruction is exactly the one of empowerment

As an important side note, such empowerment cannot mean exactly the same, or apply to the same people every time A good illustration provides the ambivalence within the repetition of Eurocentrism in Jacques Derrida’s “The Laws of Reflection,” written in response to Nelson Mandela’s vow (or profession) to make South Africa a democratic country Derrida speaks here of Mandela’s proclaimed admiration for the Western

concept of democracy, but, says Derrida, does that make Mandela a straightforward inheritor of this Western model? Derrida’s answer is both yes and no: on the one hand, Mandela does repeat the Western democratic belief system, but his respect for the

historically specific internal logic of democracy, notes Derrida, also obtains the quality of

a reflection, an ironic mirror held up in front of the West that makes the specificity and historicity of the idea of democracy apparent This “unheard-of act of a reflection” says Derrida, can then “give birth to what had never seen the light of day.” Reflection respects the logic to such an extent that it can be used against “those who claim to be its guardians.” (17) Derrida’s deconstruction of the aporia of humanism should therefore not

be thought of as debilitating for activisms, but as affirming the ways empowerment functions so that the demographics of power may gradually shift

Through his analysis of Mandela holding up a ‘mirror’ to ‘those who claim to be democracy’s owners’, Derrida thus also tells us that such an unconscious internalisation that confirms a heritage through its superficial subsumption, can again never be an

identical copy or an absolute appropriation The desire for appropriation is therefore a continuous act of jealousy, an “appropriative madness” (24) that is the essence of

language Peggy Kamuf’s “Deconstruction and Feminism: A Repetition” identifies this

foundational jealousy of the subject as lying equally at the heart of a feminist politics that seeks to carve out a female or feminist subject This is because this feminist subject is theorised or fantasised as having effectively overcome the (penis) envy typical of

patriarchal notions of the feminine, where instead (penis) envy is what drives that subject But, says Kamuf importantly, to regard jealousy or the impossibility of subsumption and total appropriation as merely negative, would mean simply to repeat the belief that

mastery is best Instead, an affirmation of the non-viability of total control, and an

awareness of the dangers and violence that a belief in control evokes, may open it up to

“the chance of difference” (122) which remains by necessity unpredictable

It must be understood therefore that, although the mark of complicity resides within the problematics of the subject, this does not mean that we can or should discard the subject In fact, what Derrida and Kamuf claim here is that we cannot do away with

or subsume the subject at all, because it is through the subject that empowerment and appropriation is possible in the first place So again, Derrida’s deconstruction of modes of empowerment through subjugation, as he spelled out in the ideas of the ‘first and second tricks’, is just as much an affirmation of how empowerment and appropriation can be achieved These modes of empowerment must therefore result in the recreation of meta-narratives and of identity politics The critique of complicities I will explore here should therefore not be regarded as a denunciation or a disowning on my part of these activisms Such a conclusion or such an attempt would inevitably draw on the modernist idea of a critique, and I have just argued that such an overcoming is an impossibility, or at best a rhetorical ploy Instead, I would like to point out that the analyses focus primarily on the grounds that make activism possible in the first place, and on how such grounds must

inherently involve a silencing Or, as Barbara Johnson recalls in her “Introduction” to

Derrida’s Dissemination:

[T]he deconstructive reading does not point out the flaws or weaknesses or

stupidities of an author [of an activism, text or theory], but the necessity with which what he does see is systematically related to what he does not see (xv)

Therefore, I will show that the ideological and moral moments on which activisms are founded are historically and geographically specific constructions It is this

constructedness that needs to be covered up as universal through the activist’s declaration

of the absolute ‘justice’ of the humanist belief system Universalised moral notions of activism are thus often blind to that which produce themselves, as well as to the

genealogies of what they reproduce By the same token, the possibility of my writing this dissertation by means of strategically toggling between critique and deconstruction is a sign of my continuation of and responsibility towards these activisms and the grounding notions they require I am therefore greatly indebted to these activisms, in particular to the tensions that result from the aporia of humanism and that get propped up time and again between theories, praxes, their institutions, and the available internally

contradictory positions these allow This again illustrates how this dissertation is itself also entangled in the ‘dirty politics’ of these activisms through the productive notion of complicity

To acknowledge any such complicity would mean that there is something to be lost as well as to be gained for any activism, whether the latter is done through (academic)

writing or other types of praxis It would entail a necessary giving up of the fantasy of agency or of subjectivity as somehow purely liberatory in themselves, as well as of the fantasy that one can inhabit a universal position of liberation for all It would also entail

an increased awareness of the limits and complexities of liberatory struggles, which can hopefully result in a gesture towards radical otherness On another level, the

acknowledgement of such complicities, and the exponential increase in their collision with ‘mondialisation’, may also point towards the urgent need to address the sheer force

of current technocratic neo-liberal structures, as well as the growing potential for

destructive accidents and structural violence that such a structure allows The breeding of awareness and gesturing towards otherness is therefore also important in the face of the new technologies instilling an erasure of how that which one (as activist or as an

academic) enjoys or feels empowered in doing affects others and eventually affects oneself

1.4 Romanticising the margins and forging alliances

According to Derrida, the ‘double affirmation’ or ‘first and second tricks’ that activisms are engaged in, result in one particularly pervasive discursive strategy that in the light of recent alter-globalist activism deserves further attention This strategy consists of the conception of an ‘ideal other’ that is in essence a projection of the self In “Marginality in the Teaching Machine,” Gayatri Spivak discusses how the revalidation of the West and the fantasy of the autonomous agent as the proper centre for evolution and action

(whether capitalist or liberatory), relies upon the constant precarious ‘reproduction of

marginality’ For instance, Spivak, in the interview with Elizabeth Grosz entitled

“Criticism, Feminism, and The Institution,” interestingly talks about the turn of the West towards the West in terms of a “command.” (8) By this she implies that, while the taking up of the position of a feminist and Marxist intellectual speaking from ‘the non-West’ has provided her and others a means of empowerment and an income, this

non-subjugation nonetheless was and continues to be exercised as a severe material,

discursive and technological form of violence from the West onto the non-West, or really onto anyone who is not constitutively addressed by this form of subjugation Any claim

to authentic marginality – whether from those in ‘the centre’ or in ‘the margins’ – is then

paradoxically a historically and culturally specific commitment to this imperialist

subjugation; the ‘marginalised’ become the agents of neo-liberal globalisation The claim

to be from ‘the margins’ is therefore a claim from ‘the centre’ Both activisms and

theories that rely on the idea of the ‘objective reality’ that ‘the margins’ provide, and on

‘liberatory progress’ for their empowerments and truth claims because they are ‘from the margins’, always profess to the dominant belief system that assigns their marginality This may have possible detrimental effects when the ideological particularity of this

‘professing’ is not acknowledged

Therefore, as Spivak notes in “Marginality in the Teaching Machine”: “the

well-placed … [activist or] academic can afford to find [a situation] deplorable.” (54, italics

mine) Being able to critique, resist or act up against something, shows complicit

empowerment The ones who can empower themselves through this claim for marginality then have the paradoxical effect of becoming the agents of what Spivak calls

‘Eurocentrism’, since they are a “group susceptible to upward mobility” that function by

posing as “authentic inhabitants of the margin.” (59) As such, they seemingly prove and extend the universal applicability of the humanist subject and its technologies The identification of ‘the’ (voice from the) margin, like ‘the oppressed’ or ‘the Third world’, then taps into the Enlightenment aspiration to extend its own humanist belief system This is not to say that ‘naming the margin’ cannot be empowering or productive – on the

contrary, it is highly productive and empowering, but in a very specific way and within a

very specific frame of thought and subject production This specificity of empowerment and production in turn unintentionally re-enforces structural global inequalities and globalises ideologies of neo-liberalism democracy, humanism, technophilia and

‘freedom’, rooting out the many other diverse ways of being in the world

Spivak takes this analysis further when she identifies within this need of the emancipating subject to ‘identify the margins’ also a desire for an (inherently uneven) alliance with those ‘margins’ as a means for transcendence This transcendence comes about through falsely imagining that one ultimately shares the same struggles and goals The supposedly ‘authentic’ subversive struggles from those margins become the

paradigmatic fantasy of liberatory struggles for alter-globalist activist thought Asks Spivak, while discussing how in academic literary circles such an identification (in her case, with ‘Third World writers’) works: “How is the claim to marginality being

negotiated here? The radicals of the industrial nations want to be the Third World.” (57)

We will see later on how this double neo-colonialist romantisation reproduces itself discursively not only through obviously homogenising phrases such as ‘the people’ and

‘our desires’, but especially through postmodern terms like ‘the multitude’ in much activist thought Such terms are really a discursive fortification of the fantasy of the

autonomous agent, through implicitly attesting to liberation in a completely singular way

In “Revolutions That As Yet Have No Model,” Gayatri Spivak recognises in such a rhetorical manoeuvre made by alter-globalist thought an “individualism more or less disguised as pluralism.” (101)

The desire to understand or incorporate a voice from ‘the’ margins in new media activism tends to materialise through claiming or affirming open spaces or channels for dialogue and collective action Such an affirmation however can only again be highly problematic and complicit in power structures at hand In “Subjects of Sex, Gender, Desire,” Judith Butler takes up a Foucauldian perspective on power and subjugation, and claims how any form of identity politics can never be truly subversive, because it

reinstalls gender performances and cancels out internal contradictions within such a category The idea of coalition and alliance that takes as a starting point a certain

‘common goal’ between participants is therefore, “despite its democratising impulse that motivates coalition politics,” (352) very tricky This is because it always presupposes certain implicit agreements about how dialogue is to be conducted and structured, as well

as some kind of unitary vision of what the outcome of the alliance will be The premises

of alliance thus exclude identities that are not implicated in the alliance’s structures and

visions Any space then, is never a value-free space, and any dialogue or alliance,

however strategic or ‘counter-hegemonic’, is never without the imposition of certain grounds on which the dialogue or alliance is about to take place There is no such thing as equality in dialogue, and to pretend there is, is to mask the very discursive, historical and technological conditions of power that make dialogue or alliance possible Any claim to

be an ‘open space of joint forces’ therefore refuses to acknowledge the highly

empowered embodied situatedness through texts and technologies of the activists

involved in such a space To dodge this responsibility for one’s situatedness, as well as to the specific history, folds and modes of empowerment opened up by a technology, is what Donna Haraway already so lucidly called ‘the god-trick’ in “Situated Knowledges,”

a denial of the fact that one’s perspective is always already necessarily limited

We can notice here the dangers, as pointed out by Butler, of perceiving the

forging of alliances as a univocally positive process, and as one that will cancel out power differences Instead, the forging of alliances can always be considered as an

essentially colonising move, not only within the alliance itself, but also through the

exclusion of other identifications that such alliances necessarily must invoke, and through the preclusions that the technologically enhanced spaces for alliance already inhabit Derrida illustrates the dangers of the pretences of ‘equality in alliance’, that falsely

imagines a common goal and a shared history of fighting against oppression amongst allied groups, in a brief paragraph that focuses on the hyphen between ‘Franco-

Maghrebian’ “The silence of that hyphen,” says Derrida, “does not appease anything, not

a single torment.” (11) The problem is that the hyphen suggests an ‘and’, which in turn suggests problematically a sort of historical homogeneous France and a similar Maghreb,

as well as the promise or claim of a current connection or common goal between them But such a common goal was never really there, says Derrida, and to pretend there was or

is erases the historical violence that lies at the basis of the possibility of creating that hyphen So the rhetorical connection created through the hyphen is a productive as well

as potentially a physically violent one

Ryan Bishop and John Phillips call the appropriation of the ‘native informant’ in

“Diasporic Communities and Identity Politics” lucidly ‘the hallucination of radical

alterity’ (170), which functions in service of the ‘new global speed elite’ They argue that this results in a material strengthening of neo-liberal hegemony through the exponential use of technologies of mobility, connection, and border-crossing desired by this elite, eventually enforcing and spreading humanist and modernist myths such as ‘freedom’ and

‘transcendence from constraints.’ The dominant discourses of technologies, and in

particular the fantasy of ‘freedom from constraints’ that the new technologies inhabit, however, coincide with the ‘violent spread of humanism’ By contesting the

commonplace idea in new media activisms that technologies are neutral tools, ready to be appropriated in the same way by all, critiques about these assumptions can emerge

1.5 The technological prosthesis and the increasing reproduction of inequalities

One could effectively argue that Derrida’s work is precisely about nothing but

technologies: those of writing, communication and language If one subsequently

considers the subject as constituted in language, which provides the subject with an idiom,

it may come as no surprise that Derrida regards the subject as equally constituted in other technologies as well This then means not only that technologies inhabit particular world-views, but even more seriously that ‘the subject’ is a technological prosthesis itself,

providing for a narrative of origin and fantasy of authenticity and control In

Monolingualism of the Other or The Prosthesis of Origin, Derrida speaks quite clearly of

the sort of complicities of activism I am suggesting and the entanglement with

technologies these complicities involve, through bringing up the concept and the

technique of memory and archiving In the first chapters of Monolingualism, Derrida

explains at length that the idea of a language that is one’s own, a language that is

transparently tied up to one’s identity, is a fantasy of the subject’s desire for mastery By the same token then, there exist an uncountable number of languages, “but the fact that languages appear strictly uncountable,” says Derrida, “does not prevent them all from disappearing.” (30) On the contrary, under current globalising circumstances, Derrida acknowledges that “they are sinking each day by the hundreds.” Derrida here makes an interesting politicised move – a move that does away with any accusation of relativism that the claim that ‘there are an uncountable number of languages’ might invoke This move connects with an identity politics, because the number of languages that ‘sink’ each day is limited and thus can be (ac)counted (for) Derrida argues that the tragedy of these disappearances of various idioms calls forward a truly activist-scientific desire to prevent this from happening by using the immense possibilities of present-day archiving

technologies

However, he cautions that this scientific quest to rescue through archiving

languages and cultures from going extinct due to ongoing globalisation processes, once more presupposes that languages (or cultures) are pre-given static entities, or clear

identities, that can then be simply ‘stored’ Moreover, it falsely presupposes that

archiving technologies are neutral tools, as well as that the ideology behind this archiving desire is a universal one But since the very technicity of archiving is one that is already entangled with the same dominant culture that archives, the necessary translation or recognition of materials fit for archiving, will have as its logical parameters this dominant

culture This kind of quest for salvation, as much as the quest for understanding the other (or rather, the claim that one does understand the other), is therefore actually a violent and possessive sort of encapsulation Similarly the well-intended ‘activist’ search to

‘salvage otherness’ from the tragedy of disappearance under globalisation then in fact

works completely in accordance with that very tragedy One could compare this

well-intended encapsulation for instance with the anthropological display of artefacts of

certain cultures in Western museums It may be far more important to save actual humans than to salvage and store their perceived culture or language, and Derrida warns that the choice for one often does not imply a choice for the other Therefore, there is more at stake in this disappearance of idioms Derrida claims that

Today certain people must yield to the homo-hegemony of dominant languages They must learn the language of the masters, of capital and machines; they must

lose their idiom in order to survive or live better (30, italics mine)

This means again, as we have noted already with Spivak, that the margins must become

the agents of globalisation if they want to ‘survive or live better’ While the privileged

can fantasise that some authentic kind of resistance against or culture outside

globalisation lies with those ‘truly oppressed’, Derrida shows that ‘the oppressed’ must insert their survival and their activism within the dominant language and through the dominant technologies, simply in order to stay alive or become empowered The

disappearance of their idiom becomes the possibility of their survival Indeed, this fantasy that the margins would provide an ideological recipe outside this ‘homo-hegemony’, and

the subsequent creation of coalitions or rescue operations under the banner of this

privileged desire, is then precisely coexistent with the subjugations under globalisation Furthermore, the agencies of those whose idioms disappear must necessarily appeal to the limited subjugation available under the immensely powerful technocratic globalisation A

truly “tragic economy,” as Derrida calls it in Monolingualism (30)

Returning to the question concerning complicities and new technologies, the

notion of the archive Derrida refers to in Monolingualism has been elaborated more extensively by him in Archive Fever As he already claims in Monolingualism, he asserts

in Archive Fever that “the technical structure of the archiving archive [or, the archive in

the process of archiving], also determines the structure of the archivable content.” (17) The archive consequently produces and calls into existence, rather than simply records

“Archivable meaning is codetermined by the structure that archives,” (18) and an

inextricable part of that structure is also the set of discourses that believe in archiving Martin Heidegger’s ideas on what constitutes the ‘essence’ of technology illuminate how such belief-systems are folded into technology in order to make such a technology

productive at all Heidegger interestingly argues in “The Question Concerning

Technology” that it is a dangerous misconception to uphold a simplistic utilitarian view

of technologies, as if technologies are neutral tools at man’s disposal Rather, Heidegger claims, one should look at the never-neutral essence of technology and how human activity and thought is organised within the technological realm The essence of

technology for Heidegger lies in ‘enframing’, which brings forth a kind of ‘revealing’ that hence speaks a certain kind of truth So just as much as instrumentality is an idea that

is essentially a part of the productiveness of technology, technology enframes being into

the concept of instrumentality Technologies in this sense ‘manufacture truth(s)’: they alter and stratify the way we perceive the world Such a critique opens up an analysis of technologies as to how they partly (re)produce hegemonic power relations within society Furthermore, it points at how the embodied human subject is materially embedded in technologies and technological discourses, while the discourse of instrumentality

perpetuates and enhances the illusion that it is the subject who is in control Heidegger’s

idea of enframing as the essence of technology then relates quite well to Derrida’s

analysis of the disappearance of idioms under globalisation: “Where this ordering holds sway, it drives out every other possibility of revealing,” says Heidegger (332)

For this reason, Derrida notes that the set of concepts and assumptions that

constitute and are constituted by, for instance, psychoanalysis, would have been different

if during Freud’s time email (instead of regular mail, on which technology the archiving that built psychoanalysis heavily depended) would have existed As already implicated in

the idea of techne, each technology inevitably comes with a set of assumptions and particularities In Latin, the word ars, which in modern English usually gets translated as

‘art’, actually has meanings like ‘skill’, ‘technique’ or ‘quality’ Such a set of translations

overlaps almost exactly with the Greek word techne, which means likewise ‘craft’ or

‘skill’, and from which the modern English ‘technology’ is derived Moreover, the Latin

word techna means a ‘trick’ or ‘artifact’, which corresponds to the ‘tricks’ of the subject Derrida refers to in Monolingualism This means that the art of discourse has a direct or completely entangled relationship with technology – in other words, the art of rhetoric is

a technology More particularly, the art of discourse is a technology of the subject,

because it is through the prosthesis of language that the self can designate itself as an ‘I’