Paper Presented at the "Alternative Modernities"
Conference
Seoul, September, 2000
Forthcoming in Traces: a multilingual journal of cultural
theory, Vol. 3
All rights reserved
The way a problem in political philosophy is framed is not
independent of the way in which solutions are derived. Bartelson
(1995) shows that the concept of sovereignty exemplifies the
importance of framing, and suggests that it be treated as a
concept contingent upon, rather than fundamental to, political
science and its history.1 From a normative perspective, Taiwan,
the Republic of China, might be simply proceeding, with more or
less difficulty, along a heroic path against many odds that
repeats the processes culminating in the constitution of a
modern nation-state, linking territory to language, people, and
market in a struggle for popular sovereignty, or, as one recent
work in English, part of a series dedicated to "Taiwan in
the modern world," blithely proposes, "national
identity and democratization."2
Instead of this typical modernization scheme that creates
different temporalities for different regions, (preserving the
equation of "West" with "modern" and
"East" with "pre-modern"), we propose a
synchronous view of change that places Taiwan's democratization
process in the context of a global phenomenon, namely, the
"irreparable rupture of the old nomos as well as a
dislocation of populations and human lives according to entirely
new lines of flight."3
The initial evidence for the viability of this alternate
framework would be, of course, the profound delocalization of
locality occurring in Taiwan since (at least) the massive influx
of exiles from a nation-State, "China"-itself in long
term crisis around the formation of sovereignty-following the
success of Communist armies in 1949.4 Recent inclusions in this
category would be the increasing number of Taiwanese who live
with dual citizenship or permanent residency abroad (largely
U.S.), the increasing number of business people living in
mainland China; the influx of temporary foreign laborers into
Taiwan and the codification of their status exclusively within
the needs of Capital; the enduring problematic status of
aborigines (e.g., the reduction of Lanyu Island to an off-shore
nuclear waste site, initially established under the guise of
military transport bringing barrels of waste to a seriously
under-constructed site where aborginal laborers were hired for
work in a so-called "canning factory," affecting the
health of the aboriginal inhabitants, resulting in an increase
in birth defects, and reducing the politics of Lanyu's
aboriginal inhabitants to the biopolitics of survival); the
codes which stipulate that HIV-positive non-nationals,
regardless of residency status and position in the labor force,
face immediate expulsion to "home" countries where
they, no longer part of a productive labor force, may not enjoy
any medical coverage; the mainland Chinese living in camps (as
illegal aliens) or in restricted compounds (for laborers); the
various sorts of "silent biological killers" such as
the illegal dumping of toxic waste around the island and the
increasing levels of heavy metal contamination in the food
chain, mad cow disease, and buildings constructed out of
radioactive materials; not to mention the unabated process of
urbanization, rural exodus, and transient labor that have kept
Taiwanese labor in a state of dislocation for several decades.
This partial list is not simply a catalogue of social ills;
instead, we must recognize in it the emergence of a new
category, biopolitics, which according to Agamben, materializes
a state of exception and creates a space of naked life that can
be killed, but not sacrificed. As this list shows, the major
concerns of biopolitical critique will focus on populations
living wholly or partially outside the discourse of sovereignty
and citizenship, exposed to emergency situations that blend
biology and economy in the place of politics.
Curiously, the relation between the new, ostensibly
democratic form of popular sovereignty, behind which often lurks
the interests of local capital allied to global production, and
the previous forms of sovereign power under martial law is
invariably subsumed by a vague, progressive teleology which
posits the neo-liberal state-a kind of fictive representation
metonymically equivalent to the media presentation of the United
States-as the ultimate direction of democratic development. This
teleological faith prevents us from analyzing the ways in which
democratic reform has actually served, not simply as a pretext
for salacious private interest (which could be remedied by a
return to public reason and a strengthening of the institutions
that codify reason), but as an ideological interpellation of new
subject positions that blend the biopolitics of sovereign power
established during martial law to new forces of production and
immaterial labor in the current conjuncture of unprecendented
globalization.
The society of control established by the world's longest
rule of martial law (1949 - 1987) in Taiwan was largely based
upon five key elements: the identification of State interests
with Party capital; the division of sexual labor that on the one
hand required a total mobilization of the male population and on
the other hand perpetuated a colonial distribution of women into
social immobility through categories of
either-prostitute-or-mother; the restriction of national space
by controlling access to the mountainous outback, the open sea,
and the air space above Taiwan; the discipline of "national
language" as a cover for instituting the privilege of a
minority population; and finally the reduction of
"citizens" to mere populations and the system of
ethnic identification cards that maintained a distinction
between "Taiwanese" and "Mainlanders"
(exiles from Mainland China who account for some 15% of the
actual population) while maintaining aborigines (5% of the
actual population) in remote spaces of restricted access.
Although democratization has reinstated the formal exercise
of citizenship, the essential ingredients that formerly reduced
citizenship to population remain in place: the sexual division
of labor and juridical codes that favor patriarchal prerogative
continue, language politics remain in a state of exception, and
the system of citizenship laws and aboriginal population control
remains fully in effect. Ethnicity, no longer marked on
identification cards (except for aborigines), nevertheless
remains on file in government archives.
In the meantime, democratization has not fundamentally
improved the former identification of the Party-State with
Capital. As Wang (1996) shows, democratic reform has changed the
composition of the Party-State to reflect the movement of
capital from State to private interests. In other words, the
former Party-State has merely renegotiated a new alliance with
Capital (or perhaps we should say that Capital has negotiated a
new alliance redefining the Party-State), based not upon a
minority exile population with a monopoly on State power, but
upon an ethnically-mixed minority population of local private
interests who appropriate the State apparatus for Private-Party
ends.5 This anti-democratic movement, which we can call the
"Private-Party State," was accomplished by a parallel
movement that increased Taiwan's incorporation into the global
economy. Indeed, at several key junctures in the democratic
reform, the United States exerted critical economic pressure
upon Taiwan's monetary policy by calling for the
"internationalization of the New Taiwan Dollar,"
creating pressure that seriously affected the development of
domestic political reform.6 Significantly, the same American
scholar who lauds "by any measure" the democratic
development of Taiwan cannot articulate the emergence of
"ubiquitous Pizza Hut outlets" after the end of
martial law with the "severe and Spartan militarism [that]
pervaded daily life in Taiwan" during martial law.7
Our thesis is that the powers of private interest and global
hegemony that informed-even commanded-the democratic reforms
since the end of martial law continue to maintain an effective
link with the status of permanent exception previously
instituted by martial law, maintaining sovereign power in a
radically altered field of population, governmentality and
biopolitics. If Taiwan can be considered democratic "by any
measure," we believe it necessary to specify the result of
this faith in unquestionable quantifiability: a culture of the
minimum threshold and a politics of the permanent exception.
In order to gain a cogent understanding of Taiwan's current
situation that does not rely upon a narrative of historical
repetition (establishing a 19th century nation-State) and that
leaves behind those who cannot articulate the appearance of
"Pizza Huts" to any power configuration whatsoever, it
will be necessary not only to consider the filiation of power
within Taiwan, but also to consider Taiwan's position within the
nexus of sovereign power in the Pacific (if not around the
globe). In other words, we can no longer appeal to notions such
as, "the current stage, at which the sovereign nation-state
system still forms the mainstream of history," and to
"the [present] conditions under which the national polity
forms the unique context of political institutions,"8
without running the risk of masking new political and economic
relations that cannot be construed through the normative model
of State, and even popular, sovereignty.
It is necessary, hence, for thought to make visible again the
exceptional status of sovereign power in Taiwan, as well as to
uncover the biopolitical aspects of the crisis of sovereignty.
We will return to this topic in a moment when we discuss the
biopolitics of English education and the "amplification of
English" into a one-way means of "communication"
mimicking TV. However, it is first absolutely essential to see
the horizontal power of U.S. Imperial Sovereignty. From this
perspective, we admit for consideration that the unilateral
exercise of power by the U.S. since the end of World War Two has
kept sovereignty across the Pacific, and particularly in Taiwan
(as well as China), in a virtually permanent state of exception.9 The proposition is worth repeating: Since the WWII
defeat of Japan, America rehearses the entire Western Pacific
region as a Theater of Operations in which it is the only
sovereign nation-in truth, a sovereign lawmaker and law
enforcer, the Judge-Police of the Pacific. This history is as
well-documented as it is disavowed, although its justifications
are simple: criminalize the enemy and reduce peoples in the
region to populations subjected to forms of power and productive
relations that actually cannot be understood through the model
of sovereign politics, yet which maintain political aspirations
immobilized in the desire-(of)-sovereignty.
A "theater of operations" comprises: logistics,
communications, optical representation, and the capability to
concentrate levels of disciplined force. As Virilio (1984)
persuasively argues, twentieth century history shows that it is
impossible at the limit to distinguish between advances in image
reproduction technology and military weapons systems. We can use
the term "theater of operations" to depict, rather
than delineate, the space and speed of power in an age when
territorial sovereignty breeds only insecurity. Since WWII, the
United States of America treats the entire Pacific as a theater
of operations in which it is the only true sovereign power. The
U.S. is the sovereign police for the Asian theater of
operations, and this fact more or less determines the meaning of
sovereignty, and the desire for sovereignty, of Asians and
knowledge about Asia. We will denominate this complex by a
single term, "Asian(ist)s" that marks a constructive
technology interpellating knowledgeable bodies. Except for a
limited, elite sphere of effective citizenship (effective
disposal of Capital) and political participation, Asian(ist)s
largely enter the political not as citizens but as populations
existing at the level of bare life-more as denizens operating
between, or outside, economy and law, than as citizens partaking
in State mediation of the public sphere. Yet at the level of
public desire, which is, we understand, experienced at a
personal, corporeal level, the desire for sovereignty in the
Pacific is a contradictory desire for both independence and
incorporation. In a word, it is a desire formed within the
infinity of Empire, as opposed to the finity of nations forming
a world, and this infinity oscillates, like capital, between
"local" and "global."
Taiwan sovereignty needs to be seen as something that is
included, virtually in domestic terms, within the theater of
operations open to the sovereign police-U.S., or otherwise. In
the case of Taiwan, the terms "theater" and
"act" must be rigorously taken at face value: this
will help us remove the various productions of optical
representation and dissemination (such as film) out of the
obfuscating category of so-called "cultural
imperialism" and begin to theorize them in terms of
violence and logistics. This sort of genealogical perspective
has the advantage of obviating culturalist assumptions which
obfuscate the crucial articulation between sovereignty and
subjective technology during the transition from Colonialism to
Cold War.
I will cite one pertinent example of America's unilateral
approach to sovereignty in the Pacific: according to wartime
accords, the powers at war against Japan should have all been
involved in drafting a peace treaty. However, the emergence by
1947 of the Cold War, the Chinese Revolution in 1949, and the
Korean War in 1950, changed U.S. security considerations and the
way in which the U.S. occupation of Japan was conducted into a
virtually unilateral affair. Especially after the outbreak of
war in Korea, Taiwan was now included in the defense perimeter
of U.S. containment policy. Arrangements for the peace treaty
with Japan, begun in 1947, followed a similar course. China and
Russia, whose armies had diverted the bulk of Japanese land
forces throughout the Pacific War, were excluded from drafting
the treaty. The final treaty, concluded in San Francisco in
1951, was a United States production. China did not attend the
treaty conference. Contrasted against this regime, the impunity,
or again the status of exception, enjoyed by the East Asian
nationalist State and its U.S. competitor/ally is particularly
evident. Faced with what must strike any impartial observer
("impartial" means, minimally, that we do not
criminalize our enemies, and furthermore, we recognize that our
enemies do not constitute our politics as much as those whom we
simply banish or exclude) as obvious, flagrant disregard for
sovereignty and international protocol, let me voice what I
believe to be common knowledge: given the military weapons
systems in deployment since the end of World War Two, it is
axiomatic that control of Taiwan would allow a third power
effective ability to interdict the shipping lanes to and from
Japan. Hence the description, "Taiwan, the unsinkable
aircraft carrier," points us not only to China but to
Japan, as well. If, we may suppose, Taiwan were to come under
Chinese sovereignty, would not the whole strategic balance of
U.S.-Japan production be seriously, perhaps fatally, threatened?
With Taiwan under Chinese control, Japan would perhaps have to
consider much more seriously the prospect of a Sino-Japanese
alliance, rather than a U.S.-Japan security arrangement. Hence,
the entire United States strategy in the Western Pacific must
hinge upon maintaining a balance of power between China and
Japan. One name for that "hinge" is Taiwan-an area
whose sovereignty, arranged by the United States in collusion
with occupied Japan, was unilaterally declared
"unresolved" by the United States as the Cold War
crept into its post-War Pacific protectorate. Other names are
possible: obviously, Korea comes to mind; beyond any specific
example, however, it is important to observe that although the
four tigers (Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan) emerging out
of economic expansion in the 1980s were called
"countries," within a Cold War logic they might as
well have been named "front-line States," that is,
States without a nation whose entire population is subject
(hostage) to the needs of Capital.
The international relations around Taiwan combine sovereign
police and subjective technologies of national translation in a
single theater of operations. Although this is true for any
State in the region, Taiwan is especially interesting because it
is essentially a State without sovereignty and, in a way that is
still very difficult to accept, a State without a people. Within
this imperial, rather than imperialist, configuration of
sovereignty (an hegemony which combines sovereign police,
knowledgeable bodies, and the law of national translation in a
juridico-religious empire operated by police and engineers), the
"unresolved" question of Taiwanese sovereignty under a
"peace" maintained by repeated U.S. military
intervention serves to maintain sovereignty in China and Taiwan
in particular, as well as the Western Pacific in general, in a
state of virtually permanent exception.
It is becoming well known that outside a normative framework,
sovereignty can only be understood in reference to what it
excludes. In most accounts of Taiwan sovereignty, this excluded
yet intrusive other is unquestionably known to be the People's
Republic of China. However, to the extent that we accept
sovereignty as a normative juridico-institutional discourse, it
is difficult to understand why the United States, or even Japan,
is not treated in the same way.
Largely determined by juridical, economic, and security
considerations, Taiwan's relation to the United States requires
certain caution on the part of those who would set a critique in
motion, lest it be misconstrued for a kind of simple
neo-colonialist argument. Of course, there are important,
perhaps even determining facets of this relationship, such as
the incorporation of important productive sectors in Taiwan, now
one of the world's largest regions in the production of
semi-conductors, in the formidable U.S. military-industrial
complex, or again, the new kinds of diplomatic initiatives
pairing the State with NGOs in development projects in Africa
and Central America, which ought to be taken into account.
Hence, it weighs heavily upon my mind to inform the reader that
this paper simply cannot substitute for what I consider
absolutely necessary but am unable to provide: a definitive,
penetrating account of the relations between violence, the
frontier, technology and production in the Pacific. However,
Taiwan, the Republic of China, is such an exceptional place, it
ought to provide an excellent nodal point for understanding the
complex relations between sovereign power, law, and technology
in our world.
Taiwan exists in an exceptional space. When we say
"exceptional," we do not mean just different or
superlative. We speak instead of the status of the exception,
the inclusive exclusion, which is at the heart of sovereign
power (more central to the construction of the political than
the distinction between friend and enemy10). A cursory glance at
the modern history of "Taiwan"11 reveals an enduring
crisis of sovereignty. Colonial baton-passes between Dutch,
Portuguese, Spanish, and Japanese Colonial States, interrupted
by Ming rebels-turned-pirate kings and Qing Imperial negligence,
culminates in a 'perfect' higher synthesis of domestic-foreign
State negativity: mercenary remnants of a fascist State (the KMT
Nationalist Party) are transported into puppet sovereignty by a
United States government that is deeply preoccupied at the end
of the Pacific War by its strategic agenda: to subsume Japanese
sovereignty (ending Pan-Asianism) and establish a
juridical-police framework in the Pacific (indeed, the entire
globe) which accords the United States exceptional status (Noam
Chomsky will call it an "outlaw superpower"12) while
criminalizing China on account of its Communist aspiration
(terminating the Communist alternative to Pan-Asianism).
Long before Communism, however, Chinese sovereignty had been
developing, informed by European and Japanese colonial
expansion, into a state of exception for quite some time. Here,
it is worth mentioning once again the need for an ongoing
project to show that Chinese sovereignty was not inherited
directly from the Imperium in a contiguous line, but was rather
formulated in the exteriority of colonial power.
Extraterritoriality, rather than the Imperium, ought to be
placed at the center, not the encroaching margin, of our
understanding of what sovereignty is for modern China. For this
reason, the typical historical periodization of a
"semi-feudal, semi-colonial" status should be seen as
a crisis of conceptual categories that calls for complete
reformulation. We propose instead that Chinese sovereignty was
maintained in the status of exception through the protocols of
extraterritoriality, and that exception has almost always been
managed by the State policing its territory and population (not
"defending the rights of citizens").
Taiwan, as a colony acquired by Japan from the crumbling Qing
Empire, largely escaped the modern Chinese experience of
sovereignty until 1945, when the KMT invested Taiwan with
American transport. Significantly, the KMT governor's first act
is to address the issue of sovereignty at the same time he
grants validity to the previous colonial codes. Following this
reintroduction of the permanent exception-a truly Chinese
experience of modern sovereignty-there is a long period
beginning with the Korean War in which the international status
of Taiwan is declared-by Washington, acting as a
police-judge-"unresolved", while Taiwan itself is
ruled under the world's longest period of martial law. Once
again, we are dealing with the exception made permanent-right
back in the modern Chinese experience of sovereignty: a status
of permanent exception. However, with the end of martial law in
1987, and the first election by popular suffrage of Taiwan's
head-of-state in 1996, the discourse of sovereignty has
apparently erased this history. The difficulties encountered by
President Chen Shui-bien, the first non-KMT head-of-state,
elected almost by accident in 2000, could well serve as evidence
of the profound resistance of the Private Party-State to
democratization, and the continuing collapse of the political
into economic categories. Equally important, and certainly even
less well understood, however, remains the problem of Taiwan's
incorporation within the U.S.-led global Empire.
It is well-known that the Taiwan Relations Act (1979) which
currently governs Taiwan-U.S. relations was the product of
intense political lobbying and negotiation between the Executive
and the Legislative branches of the U.S. government following
President Jimmy Carter's decision to establish full diplomatic
ties with the People's Republic of China. Even before it was
passed into law, the TRA invited vociferous partisan debate
within the United States, as well as in the P.R.C. and the R.O.C..
Curiously, what interests participants in this debate are
matters of principle and interest (if not simply
"principal" and interest-but the record of that
investment is beyond this essay). It is impossible to find
writers who seriously consider what the TRA means. For all
writers, it seems, the TRA is simply an expedient means, a way
for the United States of America to give de facto recognition to
a front-line anti-Communist State from which it severed ties for
considerations of realpolitik. In fact, the entire posture of
realpolitik serves to produce a representation of Taiwanese
people as victims, and unofficial diplomatic relations as
humanitarian aid or service. This discursive structure
(undeclared national emergency), of course, prepares in advance
the ground for ultimate military intervention. Indeed, security
is the main concern of the document, which
"authorizes" various relationships in order "To
help maintain peace, security, and stability in the Western
Pacific."
What is particularly remarkable about the TRA is that it
excludes the government of Taiwan (the Republic of China) from
diplomatic relations, yet extends full validity to all
agreements with "Taiwan" in effect before the end of
diplomatic relations. Bypassing the State, the object of the TRA
is either "Taiwan" or the "people on
Taiwan." Significantly, the preposition on stands in sharp
contrast to the phrasing that precedes it: "the people of
the United States of America." Internal State Department
briefings about the island reportedly refer sometimes to the
"Taiwans"-a neologism that reflects with unprecedented
clarity the confusion between population and territory that is
at the heart biopolitical power's new configuration of
sovereignty within the discipline of crisis management and
police power. Significantly, the TRA does not recognize a
Taiwanese nation (which comprises 60% of the ethnic mix on the
island), nor does it recognize identity based on the classic
postulate of possession and property. But it does recognize
"life" on the island. This minimal recognition reminds
us once again of Arendt's formula that links the decline of the
nation-state to the end of the rights of man.
Before we consider the biopolitical implications of this
formulation, let us observe that the TRA's management of State
identity reminds us of the relation between the Federal
Government and local States within the U.S.. States may not
conduct independent diplomatic relations with other foreign
governments, but may carry on all manner of commercial,
cultural, and representative links. Given Taiwan's current
diplomatic isolation, its position vis-á-vis the U.S. Federal
Government is very much analogous to that of a local State. This
analogous inclusion of Taiwan within the Federal constitution of
the United States is further confirmed by Section 4, Article 6,
which states that for the purposes of the Immigration and
Nationality Act, Taiwan will effectively be treated as an
independent nation. In other words, documents
("passports") issued by the authorities in Taiwan can
be officially recognized by United States government agencies as
de facto national documents. Although we might be tempted to
construe these documents as "travel documents," the
recent experience of Mei-chin Hsiao shows otherwise. Hsiao's
case became public in Fall, 2000: working as an advisor for Chen
Shui-bien's minority (non-KMT) government, Hsiao was threatened
with legal action against illegal alien labor because she did
not have R.O.C. citizenship. A U.S. citizen, born of a mixed
Taiwanese (naturalized U.S.) European American couple, Hsiao
held an X-series (overseas) R.O.C. passport. In a public
statement, Hsiao reported that when she consulted with the
American Institute in Taiwan (AIT, the exceptional
"non-official" American Embassy established in Taiwan
by the Taiwan Relations Act) about using her X-series passport
to enter the United States (in case she would renounce U.S.
citizenship), officials at AIT indicated that they could not
issue a U.S. visa to holders of an X-series passport who did not
bear documents showing permanent residency status and/or
citizenship in another country. AIT could only treat the
X-series passport as a "travel document" rather than a
truly national passport; holding such a passport, Hsiao would be
treated by the U.S. government as a stateless person.13 This
interpretation of Hsiao's passport raises questions about the
status of R.O.C. passports in general: How can the U.S. view
regular (non-X series) R.O.C. passports as anything other then
"travel documents"? i.e, as national passports, since
they are issued by a State which the United States does not
recognize? The bearers of R.O.C. passports enjoy rights and
obligations according to U.S. law and the protocols of U.S.-R.O.C.
relations in place before the end of diplomatic relations.
However, the documents themselves do not refer to any State
recognized by the U.S. In this context, it is extremely
difficult to understand why Hsiao's X-series passport would
leave her to be considered by a government which does not
recognize any R.O.C. state to begin with as anymore
"stateless" than any of her compatriots. Behind the
apparent contradictions, we must seek a new conceptual category
which fully accounts for the exception rather than attempt to
paper over the exception by reasserting our faith in the
normalcy of the rule. Hence, we propose that for the U.S.
government, R.O.C. passports-which are admittedly not
"travel documents," and yet refer to a State which the
U.S. does not recognize-are primarily ethnic identification
papers for an alien population with a government and no state-i.e.,
a fully biopolitical labor force-entering the discipline of
naturalization. In this sense, we detect an important discursive
continuity between the ethnic identification codes of Martial
Law and the TRA. Hence, the TRA should be seen as an exceptional
measure that maintains Taiwan in the space of the exceptional
state of undeclared emergency, prolonging Taiwan's
From these two aspects of the TRA, we can see that the TRA
effectively legislates treatment of individuals from Taiwan
according to a domestic U.S. law process that essentially
substitutes ethnicity for nationality, population for
citizenship, and governmentality for sovereignty. In the event
that the life of an individual bearing Taiwan travel documents
residing in the United States were threatened by the U.S.
government agencies or other non-governmental vigilante forces
(such as White Supremacist militia), that individual could not
expect to receive the kind of support accorded to individuals of
sovereign powers such as U.S. citizens abroad regularly receive.
Under the TRA, Taiwan forms an undemocratic security border
within which an ethnic population without citizenship is poised
to acquire, given sufficient resources, U.S. residency. The real
scandal, however, is that relations with Taiwan are handled
under the protocols of U.S. domestic law. Our findings
essentially confer with Micheal Hardt and Toni Negri, who write:
"the immanent concept of sovereignty [i.e., that of global
Empire as opposed to territorial nation-States] is inclusive,
not exclusive. In other words, when it expands, this new
sovereignty does not annex or destroy the other powers it faces
but on the contrary opens itself to them, including them in the
network...its space is always open."14
The recognition of a "people on Taiwan" given by
the TRA establishes a classic biopolitical category: live
population, which Arendt and then Agamben show, by looking at
stateless people, refugees, and camps, tends to reveal the
emergence of a new political category, that of "life"
itself, life stripped of every determinate identity. This
reduction to bare life helps us understand why Lee Teng-hui,
first Taiwanese president elected by popular suffrage (1996),
appealed to a concept of "New Taiwanese" identity by
recognizing community in the life on Taiwan. Hence, Lee's
formula, that Taiwan is a "community of life" (shengming
gongtongti), is in fact a politically acute assessment of
Taiwan's current position, although it is not something, as Lee
thinks, that still awaits construction. The accuracy of Lee's
assessment requires an equally critical thought be applied to
the contextual account of sovereignty.
One may ask why "people on Taiwan," whose lives, if
not interests, are directly concerned, have not protested
against this meaning of the TRA? Silence, especially in a
non-coercive context, is often symptomatic of a certain desire
which structures the formation of knowledge and action. Which is
to say: one can maintain a dual, if conflictual, desire to
acquire sovereignty at the same time one can desire to be
incorporated into the constituent power of U.S.-centered Empire.
This desire, it is no surprise, is born out of the insecurity of
territory. It is important to note, additionally, that the TRA
itself was passed at a time when the rule of law in Taiwan was
still suspended by Martial Law. The meaning of "domestic
law" in this situation was understandably of secondary
importance. Finally, I would observe in passing, that during the
entire period of martial law in Taiwan, one finds a highly
institutionalized, broadly accepted discourse throughout society
about the criminal status of mainland China (labeled
"Communist bandits"). Nominally under R.O.C.
jurisdiction, the Chinese mainland is regularly criminalized in
legal documents of the period. Not just books and propaganda,
but all products in general from the mainland are subject to
control. Bizarrely, commercial relations with the mainland
(officially non-existent, except through the mediation of Hong
Kong and other third territories, but juridically codified,
nonetheless) are referred to in terms of
"importation."15 No doubt, this usage itself was
historically constructed through the long series of challenges
to central authority that form modern Chinese history from the
Taiping Rebellion up to the Communist Revolution. Once again,
the language of sovereignty is completely insufficient to
describe anything but-and this is no small feature-the desire of
political movement in China. In any case, the meaning of law in
the Republic of China is deeply implicated in an international
politics of sovereignty and subversion in which the nationalist
State itself is not the true sovereign power, but a police force
maintaining productive discipline.
Peng Ming-min's seminal account of Taiwanese sovereignty,
The
Legal Status of Taiwan (1976), provides extensive historical
discussion of the crisis of sovereignty in Taiwan. As a defense
of Taiwanese sovereignty, the book marshals textual and
documentary evidence to refute the claims of the other sovereign
power: the People's Republic of China. The book does not
consider the possibility of claims by other sovereign powers
(such as Japan or the United States), nor does it consider the
possibility that the historical praxis and concept of
sovereignty has changed and is still changing.
It is certainly not incidental to the meaning of this work
that it was produced by an outstanding Taiwanese student seeking
accreditation from the Faculty of Law at Tokyo University. Of
course, since the beginning of the 1960s, Japan was a more or
less congenial place for Taiwanese thinkers to prepare the
theoretical groundwork of an independence movement. When we
think of Japan at the start of the 1960s, we would have to think
of the political and intellectual struggles around the strategic
alliance with the United States. Certainly, by the 1970s,
however, the U.S.-Japan alliance has stabilized and opposition
has been pushed into the discredited realm of radical terrorism.
Within this milieu, we could be certain that the production
within institutional sites as closely linked to government as
the Faculty of Law at Tokyo University of elements for a
discourse of Taiwanese independence cannot be easily dissociated
from the general strategic interest of the U.S.-Japan security
arrangement: to prevent the emergence of a Chinese sovereignty
(if not a Japanese sovereignty, for that matter) capable of
parity with the United States.
The greatest clue bequeathed by the Taiwan Relations Act has
been studiously ignored by thinkers of Taiwan's predicament. As
the name of that truly performative "act" so readily
implies, in order to think Taiwan, it is necessary to think
sovereignty not in terms of autonomy, but in terms of relation.
In fact, one might characterize much of the new thinking in
post-Marxism and post-Coloniality as a turn from the thinking of
a politics of the self-sufficient subject and sovereignty to a
thinking of an ontology of relationship, of the proletariat as
precisely that which is not a subject, and of the sovereign as
that which is based on a permanent exception. As Hardt and Negri
sum up, the concepts of modern national community, however,
"make the relation of sovereignty into a thing (often by
naturalizing it) and thus weed out every residue of social
antagonism."16
The authors of Taiwan's Legal Status are indeed aware of the
non-normative implications of sovereignty. Because Taiwan has
never been constituted as a stable sovereign power, the authors
must admit that an exclusively international framework, that is,
a framework based exclusively on the normativity of an
international community of sovereign States, is insufficient to
explain Taiwanese history.17 But there is no attempt to use this
platform to seek a Taiwanese independence that would challenge
the construction of precisely that normativity which has denied
Taiwanese their own independence. As the Chinese title of the
work, Taiwan's position within international law, suggests, the
book is primarily an attempt to fix the boundaries of the local
and constructions of sovereign power exclusively within a
juridical discourse of supranational right. The discourse
represses historical difference. We never ask why sovereignty
has become such an obsessive question around Chinese history and
East Asia in general any more than we pose questions to the
ponderous construction of international law's "surplus of
normativity and efficacy."18 In place of these radically
transformative questions, there is endless debate within the
framework of cultural difference and cofiguration: did Chinese
possess a conception of sovereignty? and/or what was the
difference with a "European" concept/practice?.
Whereas an earlier school of American sinologists, represented
by John Fairbank, assert that sovereignty was an alien concept
brought to China with the "Western Impact," a later
generation of scholars, typified by James Hevia, asserts that,
yes, China knew of sovereignty, but with a difference. To know
whether China is the same or different is the obsession of a
culturalism that never examines the desire motivating such
massive institutional production of knowledge. Surely, it is
because of a specific kind of power within history that we feel
we must come up with an answer to the questions of identity and
difference posed by the desire-(of)-sovereignty. Yet when we
look at the history of sovereignty's desire as one of failure,
we think it is precisely these answers to which questions must
be addressed if we are to avoid reproducing the normative desire
of sovereignty itself.
Considering just how explicit Taiwan's Legal Status is with a
litany of rapacious, unethical maneuvers by various colonial
powers around Taiwan, it is equally remarkable that the authors
do not deploy historical knowledge to challenge the politics of
knowledge and the political construction of sovereignty. What is
it, then, that drives the authors, from the very outset, to
subsume the political nature of the historical problem
surrounding Taiwan to a court of international reason? If there
is, as Taiwanese independence-oriented thinkers like Peng
Ming-min believe, a lesson to be drawn from Taiwan's history, it
is clear that no sovereignty takes Taiwan itself as a central,
core region of power. Rather, off-island-centered sovereignties
lay claim to Taiwan, for various different reasons and
histories, but always as part of a strategic gambit which itself
forms the de facto framework of sovereignty during an age
("modernity") of intense international competition
compressed by capital-imperialist global expansion. The standard
position of Taiwanese independence would thus find the
resolution to a painful history of external subjugation in the
assertion of a sovereignty whose core is located in territorial
Taiwan. Although vociferous opponents of Taiwanese independence
disagree, the appeal to territorial sovereignty as a final
resolution of Taiwanese history is equally shared.
Our analysis of the hidden continuities between the TRA and
Martial Law might suggest that settling the question of
Taiwanese sovereignty would end the enduring violence that
affects Taiwanese society due to the permanent state of
exception into which Taiwan, from Martial Law to the TRA, has
been thrown. Certainly this analysis cannot be refuted, and at
this level, we must agree that maintenance of the status quo in
China-Taiwan relations is the biggest obstacle to democratic
development in Taiwan. The challenge to this position, however,
comes when we see Giorgio Agamben's thesis about the nature of
sovereign power today, which, he argues quite persuasively, has
been thrown into a permanent state of exception around the
world. Although resolution of Taiwanese sovereignty would grant
some relative stability vis-a-vis the current situation, it
would not resolve the predicament into which all sovereignty has
fallen since the 20th century. Or, to follow Agamben's thesis
more faithfully, we should say that the history of the 20th
century has been a process of revealing the essence of
sovereignty, which is based not on the distinction between
friend and enemy, but on the decision on the exception.
"Sovereignty," writes Agamben, "is the guardian
who prevents the undecidable threshold between violence and
right, nature and language, from coming to light." The
"breakdown" in sovereignty everywhere evident at the
end of the 20th century has brought to light what we were, under
the regime of sovereignty, "not supposed to see, namely
what is apparent to everybody: that the state of exception is
the rule, that naked life is immediately the carrier of the
sovereign nexus, and that, as such, it is today abandoned to a
kind of violence that is all the more effective for being
anonymous and quotidian."19 From this perspective, we must
question whether even the regularization of Taiwan's sovereignty
would remove Taiwan from its long sojourn in the state of
permanent exception since Martial Law. Certainly the posing of
this question means that the issue of Taiwanese sovereignty
would have to be linked to the crisis of sovereignty around the
world, including particularly, the problematic status of
sovereign power in China, and the emergence of biopolitics.
While Taiwan today moves closer to the reality of achieving a
locally-centered political sovereignty, the status of sovereign
power itself in the world is undergoing profound changes whose
extent is cogently argued by Hardt and Negri. This change is
also the primary index, they suggest, for understanding the
meaning of "theory"-by which we generally mean,
"with much fanfare and controversy," as Chow points
out, "poststructuralism"20-produced by the last
generation. Hardt and Negri clarify the often-overlooked
historical dimension of this theory when they write:
"postmodern theory [i]s a challenge neither to the
Enlightenment nor to modernity in toto but specifically to the
tradition of modern sovereignty."21
The change in construction of sovereignty is one of the most
common themes articulated by the defenders of "Taiwan,
" who unimaginatively assert that the kind of
ethno-territorial sovereignty claimed by the Chinese government
is anachronistic. Needless to say, the enunciation of this
position requires a certain disavowal of history. Anyone
familiar with the 19th century history of the European-Japanese
Imperialist penetration of the Qing Empire will immediately
recognize a familiar motif in which impetuous Chinese
sovereignty is always already anachronistic compared to the
progressive, rationally-legislated sovereignty (in fact, the
only real sovereignty) of the Powers. While subsequent
generations of Chinese undertake enormous sacrifices to respond,
sovereignty today is being restructured into a new kind of
subjective technology, what Hardt and Negri call immaterial
labor. And, just like material labor, outdated means of
production incur greater moral opprobrium.
The normative technology of sovereignty is not only the
default position for all accounts (regardless of language and
politics) of Taiwan history, it is the only position. This
exclusion is not evidence of a limit or an impossibility so much
as it is an indication of just how persuasive and widespread the
juridico-ethico Empire of sovereign technology has become.
Sovereignty is, as Foucault argued, an ideology that masks the
power deployed through subjective technologies of the self. This
perspective does not call for us to simply abandon sovereignty
(ostensibly in favor of "difference") in either our
politics or in our conceptual understanding. Rather, it calls
for us to engage the claims of sovereignty with a thought and a
praxis capable of producing new categories that articulate the
problems of biopolitics and globalization. The utter uniformity
with which all writers concerned with Taiwan-if not the entire
Pacific Theater-simply accept the normative framework of
international relations and the urgency to think the
humanitarian, which is intrinsically connected to the discursive
apparatus of military investment and intervention, is itself the
trademark of an old metaphysics of ethics. Without a doubt, the
greatest change since the end of the Cold War in the status of
sovereignty is the emergence of human rights and humanitarian
intervention as a non-political arena. On the level of practice,
the "true" bearer of sovereignty lies more and more
with the category of "naked life," almost exclusively
construed through an ethico-techno-logical discourse of rights,
which are constantly being "expanded" or
"upgraded," and total possession, which is constantly
being honed down to new, intrusive definitions of the personal
body.22
Ethico-techno-logy, as Laruelle points out, invariably raises
three related questions: "1. What can I know? 2. What must
I do? 3. What am I permitted to hope?"23 All of these
questions weigh heavily upon writers concerned with Taiwan, but
who will challenge the discourse of sovereignty that determines
the current legislation of hope? The ethico-techno-logical
discourse of sovereignty-which must always rely upon secularized
faith structured in a discourse of teleological progress-is so
massive that the rupture of this disavowal could be recognized
as a political task itself, proper and appropriate to
knowledgeable bodies invested in the production and consumption
of subjective formation.
The best vision writers like Peng and Huang can provide is an
appeal to international human rights, with which the authors end
their argument for Taiwanese independence. But as the Taiwan
Relations Act implicitly makes clear, "human rights"
in this context is ultimately indistinguishable from the
rhetoric of military intervention.24
We know that at the back and at the core of Taiwan's status
is an ethical question about the relation between human rights
and sovereignty. We can follow a persuasive line of argument
developed by Arendt (1951), Balibar (1994), and Agamben (1998)25
that shows how the concept of human rights is integrally part of
the logic of sovereignty, and hence cannot be simply relied upon
to counter or mitigate its effects. Agamben perceptively
observes: "It is almost as if, starting from a certain
point, every decisive political event were double-sided: the
spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals in
their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously
prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individuals'
lives within the state order, thus offering a new and more
dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from which they
wanted to liberate themselves."26 After reading Agamben, we
are neither surprised that the seminal work of Taiwanese
Independence seamlessly articulates human rights to a discourse
of national sovereignty, nor can we unproblematically accept the
equation of the two. Our task is to go beyond these 19th century
formulations (which 20th century history pushed towards
unprecedented levels of biopolitical violence) and find new ways
to theorize biopolitics and the community-to-come.
This theoretical urgency can also be understood in relation
to a specific regime of linguistic technology-a regime of
translation-which governs the rules of immaterial labor power in
Taiwan. The status of English as commodity (it is an economic
desire) is matched by the status of English as means of
high-speed data transfer whose function is tilted towards
optimal efficiency. In practice, translation is undertaken as a
practice of unilateral relation that is hierarchically organized
around a principal of optimal efficiency.
Certainly one of the best places to observe the deployment of
English as a means of biopolitical discipline is the school,
particularly the private cram schools that are a ubiquitous (and
highly profitable) supplement, in the political economy of
Taiwan's insertion into the global information
industry-particularly its growing role as mediation or buffer
zone between global Capital and Chinese capital. The cram school
is particularly interesting because it is not formally part of
the school as "State apparatus" described by Althusser.
The ubiquity of the schools, however, is practically on a par
with state-run public schools, and they are completely geared
towards helping students perform better according to the
criteria established by the state schools. As a space where the
state apparatus is privatized and bodies are disciplined, it is
an exemplary site of biopolitics. A promotional brochure
advertising the Dalson School, an expensive cram school for
children, deserves attention not for its uniqueness, but rather
for the coherency of its vision, all the elements of which are
more or less explicitly shared by all English cram schools for
young children. The Dalson brochure relates English education to
the school's emphasis on personal hygiene and technological
advance. What makes this different from 19th century
colonialist/missionary discourse, however, is the recognition of
a new, globalized relation of production. English, states the
brochure, is a language spoken by "85% of the world's
population." Taken to virtually mythic proportions, English
is also, we are told, the "semiotic tool of the
Internet."
When the Dalson brochure announces: "English. Culture.
Network-to be the Master of the Globe," we must take this
formulation at face value as a strong statement, an ideological
program that connects power and language to technology. The
goal, says the brochure, is to produce the "Masters"
of tomorrow's global information age. The combination of
discipline, technology, and ethics within a figure of
sovereignty is a common interstitial trope found in institutions
of social discipline and production throughout Taiwan. Like
Liberal thought that rejects the Romantic ideology equating
language and national identity by displacing identity onto the
subject of individual sovereignty, this trope unmistakably
places us within the realm of subjective technology and
biopolitics. In other words, it is both intellectual and
corporeal, and it concerns, above all, how subjects will live
and their very mode of expression. Learning English is a
corporeal-intellectual discipline of bio-quality control: the
products are knowledgeable bodies whose productive force is
based on an "ethical" principal of normativity and
exclusion. In addition to information about the school's ongoing
curricular development, the Dalson School's newspaper (destined
for parent-consumers) supplies dietary suggestions for infants.
Biopolitics, as Foucault understood, concerns above all the
production of life. Learning English is not a way of accessing
alterity, but a way of strengthening the myth of total
possession linked to a certain kind of body. The body, in this
instance, has been released from the limits of sovereignty and
placed into the care of a biopolitical regime that blurs
distinctions between public and private to the point where the
Althusserian formulation of school as a State apparatus no
longer proves adequate.
This zone of indistinction between public and private can be
seen most clearly in the implicit substitution of English for
Mandarin occurring in the linguistically-represented space of
"central" power. As we approach this zone, we cannot
forget that this "central" space was created,
minimally, by the violence of linguistic discipline instituted
under Martial Law. Under that regime, Taiwanese
"dialect" was forbidden in school. Punishment applied
to (young) offenders was corporeal. Martial Law succinctly
established language as the first line of biopolitical
production. This biopolitical production of a national language
in a virtually permanent state of emergency served to legitimate
the privilege of a minority exile population
("mainlanders") and place other Taiwanese languages in
a subaltern position. Given the state of exception in which
sovereignty languished, we therefore think it is improper to
call Mandarin a "national" language during this time,
simply because there was no nation. It would be more appropriate
to call Mandarin a "central" language, referring both
to the Party Central (dang zhongyang) and to the Central
Government (zhongyang zhengfu). Following the "Taiwanization"
of R.O.C. sovereignty in the period of democratic reform, the
public schools have initiated a humanistic project in
"mother tongue" education that ostensibly allows
children to be educated in Taiwanese Hokkien, Hakka, or
Aboriginal languages in addition to the "national
language," Mandarin-while at the same time instituting
English as the ubiquitous, and in fact, exclusive supra-national
language of Taiwan. Of course, Mandarin itself is an
international language, but within the complex configuration of
Taiwanese language politics, no policy adequate to this
formulation exists. While the new legislation of nativity and
language ostensibly prepares for the eventual recognition of a
new national language (in fact it would not be simply new, it
would be the first) to replace Mandarin based upon a new
articulation of birth to nation, it is interesting to see what
actually intercedes into the exceptional transitional space
created by the evacuation of Mandarin from the central position
violently appropriated by Martial Law. As Mandarin effectively
loses its position, acquired under Martial Law, as the central
language of the Party-State (dang zhongyang/zhongyang zhengfu),
the only Taiwanese language that can truly lay claim, in the
current conjuncture joining the Private-Party State to global
Capital in a new (ostensibly sovereign yet still exceptional)
central power, is English. While it will seem controversial at
first to call English a "Taiwanese" language, we
suggest that English, as a language whose obligatory
reproduction is disciplined by both State and private interests,
is as much a part of the linguistic identity and politics of
Taiwan as Mandarin. No other Taiwanese language (except
Mandarin) occupies a similar position, not even Japanese, which,
although widely studied and disseminated in Taiwan, has no claim
to globalism the way English does.
In this biopolitical context, ethics cannot be seen as an
antidote or a mitigating limit upon technology, since the two
share alternately interchangeable positions. English is the
point of suture that reveals how problematic such formulations
are. The claim enjoyed by English to the position of centrality
we have described is based upon a logic of capital articulated
to biopolitics. English, as a Taiwanese language, does represent
not an existential obligation to community nor even a tool, but
a spectacular faith in commodity.27 English costs more and
delivers greater returns than Chinese. As such, this commodity
stands for advance-but what is so remarkable is the ease with
which "advancement" is understood in a sense not
merely technological but ethical as well. It is not simply that
learning English is associated with the hi-tech industry in some
external fashion and that hi-tech is associated with the modern
imagination of progress, but rather that learning English itself
is a technology that co-generates technology. This technological
status is articulated to an implicit ethics: The ethical status
of English is partially accomplished by its cofigured relation
to the "mother tongue," where the "mother
tongue" stands for a prison- (or for some a fortress-) like
interiority and English stands for the unlimited space of global
Empire. It is further completed by the mediatized notion that
English is the language necessary to acquire subjective
identification in an international "civil society"
based solely upon the market. English thus forms a point of
suture between contradictory desires for sovereignty and
incorporation, technology and ethics. The challenge to theory is
thus not to explain how these categories have been corrupted
(and thus how to restore them) but rather to invent a new
category that shows the essential relation between the terms.
By way of conclusion, I would like to end this discussion of
Taiwan's place within the global Empire of sovereign police with
a reflection upon the Age of the Globe. For us (an
"us" that recognizes the difficulty of exteriority and
the painful politics this has created around "the
West"), the historical meaning of deconstruction is an
essential point of departure.
"Deconstruction" names the experience of a very
specific kind of failure, the failure of the
philosophical-political discourse of modern community. One of
the leading figures of this school, Jean-Luc Nancy, explains:
"This work of thought was imposed by a fearsome motif,
which the history of our century (because it is ours) never
stops holding out to us, to the point that its recollection is
just as wearisome as it is inevitable: in the name of community,
humanity-but first of all in Europe-revealed an unsuspected
capacity to destroy itself. It gave proof of this capacity
simultaneously in the order of quantity-but to a degree in which
the terms 'extermination' or 'mass destruction' convert numbers
into absolutes or infinities-and in the order of concept or
value-because it tore apart the fragile nervure of 'man' itself,
so recent after all, and the price of which was also linked to
fragility."28
Partaking of an historical sensitivity like that of
Aimé Césaire, for whom the Holocaust was a belated repetition of what
Europeans had long practiced in the colonies, we doubt that this
failure occurred "first" in Europe, or that when we
think of it as "ours" we should think of it as simply
"European." But the European experience, precisely
because of the ease with which it enables us to link order
(State identity) with locality (national territory) offers us a
very significant opportunity for a transformative understanding
not just of the putative unity of the West, but also of the
East, precisely in the sense that capitalist colonial expansion
created the notion of a unitary world inhabited by unitary
subjects seeking or competing for sovereignty. The lessons from
the failure of this world, however, seem to be endlessly
deferred by the subjective technologies that produce gregarious
confusion between world and knowledge.
If, as Jean-Luc Nancy's The Sense of the World has pointed
out in most rigorous fashion, we have come to the end of
"world," to speak of the world means only to speak of
the limits of sense, this realization does not mean that our
desire for world and worldly sovereignty has ended, nor does it
mean that struggle and domination no longer have worldly
meaning. For this reason, Empire, the latest tour de force from
Toni Negri and Micheal Hardt, deserves particular scrutiny as
the first work which theorizes the end of modern sovereignty in
terms of a new formation of sovereign power which the authors
rigorously define as imperial, distinguished from imperialist.
Strangely enough, although this work on the new empire was
not produced as a global theorization of an Asian historical
experience, we have seen that it can describe in powerful terms
a construction of sovereignty that is highly applicable to East
Asia. Hence, we could take seriously the task of posing these
two interrelated question: What does it mean that we,
Asian(ist)s, could not produce this kind of work? and, What does
this work, because it was not formulated in an Asian(ist) site
of production, overlook? In the first question, we see a
challenge to overcome the institutional opposition between
Cultural Studies and Philosophy. In the second, we see a
challenge to the regime of translation which allows us to
oscillate between global and local, strategy and tactics, and
technological and ethical simulations.
The biopolitics of English, or what we might call the
"amplification of English," is one of the most
important lacunas in Hardt and Negri's work, hence I would like
to dwell on its importance. Hardt and Negri reject theories of
biopower that are purely intellectual because they overlook the
corporeal aspects of social production. In a disciplinary
process of language-learning, however, we see a subjective
technology that defeats the difference between body and
intellect, per se. Hardt and Negri recognize that one of the
important problems of today's political struggles are their
inability to articulate beyond immediate local concern (except
by immediately jumping to a global plane). "There is,"
they write, "no common language of struggles that could
'translate' the particular language of each into a cosmopolitan
language...This points toward an important political task: to
construct a new common language...Perhaps this needs to be a new
type of communication that functions not on the basis of
resemblances but on the basis of differences."29 Although
communication needs to be rethought on the basis of difference,
"control over linguistic sense and meaning and the networks
of communication becomes an ever more central issue for
political struggle."30
Unfortunately, what we see in the relation between English
and the languages of Taiwan (mandarin, Taiwanese, Hakka,
aboriginal, etc...) is a relation of unilateral translation. Of
course, languages are 'freely' translated into each other,
although it hardly requires a statistical analysis to know that
the overwhelming direction of translation is structured by a
market that promotes flows of data from Chinese into English and
flows of comprehensive technology from English into Chinese. The
sense of these flows produce very different kinds of
subjectivities. The subjectivities produced in English remain
virtually autonomous of what is said in Chinese, while English
becomes not just a means of social production, but also the only
means of social recognition for Chinese in global Empire. Hence
the matrix of difference and control needs to be transformed.
Just as Negri and Hardt say, this means "Knowledge has to
become linguistic action and philosophy has to become a real
reappropriation of knowledge."31 This reappropriation,
however, cannot simply be thought along the lines of difference,
which in the current conjuncture would fall prey to the regime
of unilateral translation.
Minimally, this would mean that one has to change the notion
of address implicitly codified into disciplinary divisions of
knowledge within the human sciences. The fact that Hardt and
Negri's work appears in English is not, to borrow their terms,
"superstructural, external to production." Since the
end of the Second World War, English serves as a model of
complete translatability. This notion of translatability
ultimately depends not upon a theory of identity, but a theory
of difference. However, disciplines that specialize in
theoretical production about global issues-we know these
disciplines occur in English-do not take responsibility for the
way this kind of intervention is disseminated into other
languages. Ultimately the unilateral privilege enjoyed by
English can only be maintained by institutional discipline that
overlooks the need both to engage in the dialogic process of
translation, refraction, and retranslation and to not confuse
this dialogic process with the construction of a world.
Is it necessary, as Hardt and Negri think, to create a new
"common language" based on the singularity of
translation as a mode of social production? If the answer is
undoubtedly yes, does this mean that we can dismiss the need
also to resituate the site of unilaterality away from theories
of difference, and, perhaps even singularity? Otherwise, how can
we ever distinguish between "common language" and
doctrine? This project minimally means that English cannot be
relied upon as a site of commonality and the gap between
philosophy and cultural studies must be reworked.
Perhaps something ec-centric, social, and sometimes useless
like theory could fulfill that task.32 Here is where Francois
Laruelle's project of non-philosophy and non-ethics is
potentially very interesting for a theory of translation as
subjective technology because it provides a way to think of
translation without reference to sovereignty. Although there is
not enough time at the end of this essay to go into the details
of Laruelle's work, our look at Taiwan makes it clear that if
"knowledge has to become linguistic action and philosophy
has to become a real appropriation of knowledge," it will
be necessary to locate this action in a theory of aliens beyond
sovereignty. This alien community of non-sovereignty obviously
could not rely upon English as a universal medium of
communication any more than it could rely upon the intrinsically
hierarchical speed of communication itself to produce democracy.
As we reflect upon the failure of sovereignty, it could be
helpful to consider what "sovereignty" has meant and
why it persists. Today, just as in the past,
"sovereignty" minimally means freedom from domination.
But who would doubt after looking at Taiwan, if not several of
the other front-line States-that-are-not-nations in the region,
that the intermittent peace of sovereignty in this theater of
operations is also a dialectic of survival and desertion.
Citizens from front-line States-that-are-not-nations such as
Taiwan pour into the United States to desert the failure of
local national sovereignty, redoubled in their dual desire for
incorporation and autonomy that finds temporary appeasement in
the ideology of cultural difference. Although this movement is
one of desertion, it works in favor of the unilateral technology
of translation, producing knowledgeable bodies readily available
for the discipline of sovereign police and maintaining the
optical illusion of sovereign desire.
It is important to note that besides freedom, sovereignty
also meant a desire for unity and control such that a unitary
world could be imagined. This world, an amphibological mixture
of thought and world, technology and ethics, power and life, was
known as a multiplicity of finite problems, upon which could
operate an imaginary totalization that related these problems to
Being.
Now that world has failed and been replaced by the flat
surfaces of our infinite cybernetic globe, we might ask what has
become of our imagination? This is probably the most significant
part of Hardt and Negri's Empire: the way it attempts to provide
a narrative of global imagination. Although the narrative they
present is necessary, we might ask, is it sufficient? In a
global infinity governed by a regime of unilateral translation
that preserves the optical illusion of a finite world
constructed by sovereignty, it is easy to imagine that Empire's
appearance in English will be simply attributed to and amplified
through the knowledgeable bodies and talking heads which already
populate English. In other words, the narrative may just simply
feed into the tireless oscillation between global and local that
structures our world-less planet.
If imagination rests in the prison-house of English, what has
become of Being? Perhaps it is the merit of Hardt and Negri's
work that they leave aside this question completely.
Undoubtedly, the development of biotechnology, combined with
virtual reality in the midst of declining biodiversity, presents
us with a radically new challenge to the thought of Being. Will
the philosophies of difference and singularity that underpin so
much of the alternative and radical currents in political
thought be sufficient to understand what is at stake in a
globe-without-world inhabited by clones and virtual selves
ironically disciplined by the failed ideologies of humanism and
sovereignty? This question could well be why we will need to
locate the clone after the alien (which only determines the
identity of the clone in the last instance), rather than rely
solely upon the tropes of the Otherness, trace, and difference
which have enabled us to conceptualize the failure of
sovereignty.
At the end of this paper, without further ado, I would like
to suggest for consideration the notion that Taiwan today
inhabits the position of the clone. It is not just a question of
mimetic desire vis-á-vis the United States or Japan or the
People's Republic of China. The position also concerns a radical
break in the constitution of Being, such that a unitary world
cannot be imagined, yet subjective technologies (of translation,
of knowledgeable bodies...) remain in place, multiply and
accelerate without stop. The scandal of cloning makes sense only
to a notion of Being that possesses world and origin. But if our
only substitute for the failure of this ontology is a philosophy
of difference that defers and displaces technology and ethics,
it is hard to see how we can ever attain the discipline of
undistracted non-concentration, and the ability to selectively
refuse and decelerate without relying upon nostalgic narratives
of return to a supposedly "lost" world.
