ABSTRACT
To claim that the most challenging political problems of our time express a need to reimagine where and what we take politics to be, even to claim that imagination has anything of consequence to do with political life at all, is to invite suspicions about the marginalization of more significant, or at least more tangible, matters. Any such claim is liable to become caught within rhetorics distinguishing the serious from the trivial, the urgent policy from the distant abstraction: liable to be construed as a callous disregard for the politics of the moment, even as an irresponsible disinterest in matters of life and death for thousands of people. Some things, we know, are important. Others are less so. How we know which
is which, and who is this “we” that is able to get away with its claim to know, are always matters of considerable dispute, again sometimes over trivialities, but sometimes over the most basic assumptions that allow for distinctions between the trivial and the serious. The slaughter of some 3000 people in New York in September 2001 was widely judged to be much more important than the killing of far greater numbers of people in many other acts of political violence elsewhere. At a considerable greater level of conceptual intensity, claims about certain kinds of freedom have come to be judged more important than claims about equality, or fraternity, at least when it has to be acknowledged that these are not always, and perhaps never, compatible values given the dynamics and contradictions of modern capitalist societies, or of the modern state. Somewhere in between the competing claims of modern liberalism and evaluations of one spectacular event, we recognize that some things have come to be framed as matters of national interest, as necessarily exempt from the usual expectations of democratic scrutiny, while others have not. Of more specific interest for the argument I seek to elaborate here, some claims about security are consigned to the military, others to the police, the intelligence agencies, the social workers, the insurance companies, the central banks, or even the courts of human rights. As I have especially sought to stress in relation to
the contradictory structures of a modern internationalized political order, and thus to the specific conditions under which we have been able to imagine the possibilities and impossibilities of liberty, equality and security within the modern world, we are all supposedly subject to competing claims to citizenship and humanity, and are sometimes forced into difficult choices between them, even while both claims are sometimes at odds with the multiple and differentiated capacities of people and peoples as either political agents or human beings. Start thinking about the way we distinguish between the serious and the
trivial, that is to say, and it is not difficult to become lost in many of the most intractable dilemmas of contemporary political life. Generalizations may be abstracted, but specificities are necessarily affirmed. Universalities may be proclaimed, but exclusions are never far away. Judgements are enacted, and subsequently contested. Some things become important, so we discriminate, privilege, forget, obey. Even to start writing about such things is to become uncomfortably sensitive to the limits of grammar, vocabulary, tense and voice, and to the close but complex relationship between authorial authority and the authorization of political possibilities and impossibilities. The ability to discriminate (and thus to categorize, to make comparisons
and evaluations on the basis of judgements about what is similar or different) is constitutive of all human endeavours, not least of the practices through which humans seek to distinguish themselves from non-humans; to distinguish themselves not least from the natural, the divine and the barbaric or primitive, even to distinguish ordinary realms of human experience from possibilities of enlightenment and transcendence in which discriminations might somehow fall away. Many discriminations have ensued before this book came to be where it is now, especially given the comparative attractions of other books, other engagements, other articulations of time, space and value. There are always other things to do. Many fairly elaborate and contestable discriminations have been made in earlier parts of this book so that I can now try to shape my analysis through comments on the authorization of discriminations, thereby diverting attention from many other possible considerations, those that might more readily entice political economists, historians, philosophers, sociologists or geographers, all of whom would no doubt have very different things to say about the problems I seek to identify here. Many discriminations have been made, over a long period and through massively contested practices, to enable claims about the capacities of modern reason to be able to discriminate universally, even neutrally and peacefully. Many discriminations have been subverted so as to permit modern forms of discrimination to claim the status of neutrality, even universality, the only possible ground for judgement. Discriminations often seem so easy, the automatic acts of everyday existence that allow us to get up, eat, talk to the neighbours, get a job, get a life, or not. Yet to examine any specific discrimination is usually enough to remind us of the multiplicities and densities of human judgement, of the peculiarity of distinctions we take for granted, and of our reliance on, but also our unease about, absolute declarations of a yes and a no.1
