Postgraduate

By Patrick Manning| Originally published in the Vol. 6 no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2012) issue.

In 2010, Arizona’s[1] legislature passed a bill that increased the state’s ability to enforce immigration law.[2] In addition to the oft-cited increase in policing – an amendment that surely suggests, even as it rebukes, the use of racial profiling[3] – the bill also highlights the growing concern over the labour force of immigrants, particularly illegal immigrants. In section 5-C of the revision, the amendment makes it illegal “for a person who is unlawfully present in the United States and who is an unauthorized alien to knowingly apply for work, solicit work in a public place or perform work as an employee or independent contractor in this state.”[4] The passage of this legislation underscores a rising current of xenophobia in the United States, further exemplified in the more recent decision by Arizona’s Tucson Unified School District to end all ethnic studies programs in secondary classrooms.[5] The present xenophobia is vehement in its denunciation of illegal immigrants and it goes beyond simply assigning immigrants as a scapegoat for domestic insecurities. Instead, Arizona’s law – and the sentiment it exemplifies – seeks to annihilate the perceived threat of a working class capable of moving between borders. However, this is not the threat of interpersonal violence or the violent immigrant attacking the citizen, as the law’s proponents might suggest. Illegal immigration threatens the very sovereignty of the nation-state, a threat that subverts the assumed roles of authority and subjugation. An unsanctioned border crossing disrupts the role and the rule of the United States, challenging its primary position within the workings of a globalized form of Empire.

Arizona’s law falls at one end of the spectrum; calls for amnesty[6] fall at the other. Despite the obvious differences, each maintains an element of power and authority. Both approaches attempt to reclaim the centrality of Empire by controlling the bodies within the sovereign’s borders: that is to say, the laws governing immigration interpellate the immigrant within the structure of the nation-state, a structure which the immigrant is inherently hostile toward. In order to investigate these phenomena, I draw on Jacques Derrida’s discussion of hospitality; I argue that the current immigration laws operate as laws of hospitality, interpreting the guest within the rule of the host. However, the immigrant subject – through a violation of these rules – disrupts the laws of Empire and insists upon an unconditional hospitality. From Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s theories on Empire and the multitude, I examine the way in which the immigrant unveils Empire’s vulnerability, forcing Empire to respond violently. The possibility of the multitude opens up the possibility of an unconditional hospitality, an immigration without conditions. The immigrant’s ironic exodus – an exodus of arrival – suggests an opportunity to disrupt the violence of Empire and to work toward democracy.

The United States’ immigration policies – with Arizona’s recent law as the extreme – impose conditions upon obtaining citizenship[7] and admittance into the country. These conditions are analogous to the conditions of hospitality because they both impose the host’s laws onto the guest. Jacques Derrida posits two inter-connected modes of hospitality: conditional and unconditional. Unconditional hospitality can be understood as the Law of hospitality, a universal and absolute code requiring unconditioned acceptance of the other. According to Derrida, “[unconditional] hospitality requires that I open up my home and that I give…to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other.”[8] Such an absolute law is “without imperative, without order and without duty. A law without law.”[9] This ideal serves as the unattainable standard of hospitality in general; in practice, however, hospitality is saddled with conditions imposed by the host. By implementing laws to establish rules, rights and duties, any unconditional acceptance of the other becomes impossible. Conditional hospitality is precisely the imposition of these laws. In distinction from the absolute law, conditional hospitality is “a plurality that is not only dispersal (laws in the plural), but a structured multiplicity, determined by a process of division and differentiation.”[10] Instead of the singular Law – the ideal understanding of welcoming – conditional hospitality establishes multiple laws to define the other as different, which simultaneously defines the self as normative. Immigration rights and laws are precisely these types of codes. They prescribe markers of identity to establish the norm for the nation-state (i.e., white, Anglophone, heterosexual, etc.), thus defining markers of exclusion.[11]

However, it is not only through legislation that these conditions are introduced. The ethos of American exceptionalism also emphasizes the conditions by which an immigrant can be excluded/included within the “American” identity. This type of interpellation is apparent in U.S. President Barack Obama’s first State of the Union address in January 2010. His speech included the following brief reference to immigration:

we should continue the work of fixing our broken immigration system, to secure our borders, and enforce our laws, and ensure that everyone who plays by the rules can contribute to our economy and enrich our nation. In the end, it’s our ideals, our values that built America, values that allowed us to forge a nation made up of immigrants from every corner of the globe, values that drive our citizens still.[12]

Even in its brevity, Obama’s message emphasized a distinction between “true” Americans and immigrants. It is “us” versus “them” – “our borders…our laws…our economy…our ideals, [and] our values” against those who do not “play[…] by the rules” (emphasis added). Obama articulates a necessary obedience to the laws, laws that define who can be included within the national fabric, within the “our” he repeats. Even when such laws offer an opportunity of inclusivity, including those who can “contribute” and “enrich” the national economy, they simultaneously act as a mechanism of exclusion: only those capable of enriching, of contributing, of producing are permitted entrance – there are no more huddled masses granted refuge. These established conditions of admittance are intrinsically violent and hostile.

Conditional hospitality’s violence derives from the host’s control over space and the subsequent exclusion of those who do not conform to the established laws. The host’s “sovereignty can only be exercised by filtering, choosing, and thus by excluding and doing violence.”[13] By imposing certain conditions, the host enacts two inter-related hostilities: first, the host assumes and enforces an authority not only over the space but also over the subjects within that space; and second, the host denies authority – even over the construction of the self – to any other subject within her sovereign space. Insofar as the guest exists within the host’s space, the guest’s identity becomes dependent upon and defined by the host. The United States government – in tandem with public sentiment – similarly asserts sovereignty over land and demonstrates the violence of conditional hospitality by selecting, filtering and choosing those who are permitted entrance.[14] What immigration, both legal and illegal, reveals – and thus its most potent threat – is that the United States’ sovereignty over space is in fact fragile and frail; the border, despite violent patrolling, remains permeable.

When regarded positively, this permeability gestures toward unconditional hospitality. In Derrida’s understanding, unconditional hospitality remains impossible: the moment it is set into motion, laws and questions are introduced that condition the welcome.[15] Derrida argues that unconditional hospitality “command[s] that we transgress all the laws (in the plural) of hospitality, namely, the conditions, the norms, the rights and the duties that are imposed…on the men or women who give a welcome as well as the men or women who receive it.”[16] The illegal immigrant transgresses these very laws through the emphasis on a fluid, penetrable border. Faced with a mutable border, the state authority – in this case, the United States – must acknowledge the immigrant’s assertion of her singular subjectivity, independent of the state’s rule. A border fence or increased patrols seek to negate and ignore this possibility. However, the transgression of the border – in all its violent reality – continually asserts unconditional hospitality’s possibility, which is ultimately the possibility of democracy.

The path to democracy, ironically, begins with the construction of a global Empire. The concept of Empire has been thoroughly explicated by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their text Empire. They provide a succinct definition of the term as “a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers.”[17] Today, Empire takes on a different form of sovereignty than the imperial powers of the modern, colonial world; instead, Empire is “a single power” with global authority.[18] The global authority of Empire not only changes the construction of power, but it also changes the construction of the ruled, or the multitude: “[t]he deterritorializing power of the multitude is the productive force that sustains Empire and at the same time the force that calls for and makes necessary its destruction.”[19] Because Empire’s global reach creates the very conditions for a networked communication, the multitude is both antagonistic to and constitutive of Empire; likewise, Empire requires the multitude, but because the multitude challenges its sovereignty, Empire must also deny its plurality. In other words, Empire “seeks directly to rule over human nature” in order to create a homogenous, dominated group.[20] The immigrant challenges this construct of sameness and becomes central to the formation of a politicized multitude.

Because illegal immigration denies the conditions of citizenship, it destroys the state’s fiction of sameness. The rejection of sameness becomes integral to the formulation of the multitude. As Hardt and Negri define it, the multitude can be understood as a “network in which all differences can be expressed freely and equally.”[21] These differences, unlike the multicultural metaphors of the mosaic or the melting pot, “can never be reduced to a unity or a single identity.”[22] Such an affirmation undermines the modern concept of the individual. An individual identity is based upon the performance of roles that are part of a larger, monologic collective, like the nation. Instead, each member of the multitude is irreducibly different from every other. The multitude is “an open network of singularities that links together on the basis of the common they share and the common they produce.”[23] Each singularity is accepted and accepts unconditionally – there are no conditions of identity that dictate membership in the multitude. Therefore, the multitude – and the network structure it depends on – requires the realization of unconditional hospitality. As discussed earlier, unconditional hospitality eradicates sovereignty. Because of this suspension of sovereignty, the networked multitude challenges the assumption that all political organization depends upon the establishment of a singular sovereign identity.

Hardt and Negri trace the historical primacy of sovereignty as foundational for all modern political constructs. The tradition of political theory asserts that “[o]nly one can be sovereign…and there can be no politics without sovereignty.”[24] Hardt and Negri reference Thomas Hobbes’s metaphorical illustration depicting the king ruling over his subjects, where the subjects constitute the king’s body. The analogy suggests that “[t]here is only one head, and the various limbs…must obey its decisions.”[25] Although the monarch serves as the prime example, other political structures function similarly, even if couched in different terminology. Liberal democracies, for example, position “the people” as the sovereign, but “the people” still express a unified identity, a “single subject.”[26] Even in this construction, there remains a single, rational and monologic head that all subjects must obey.

This dependence on sovereignty illustrates that conditional hospitality is in fact constitutive of the present political system. The power to define and control the other is a necessary and violent component of political power. As mentioned earlier, conditional hospitality requires the assertion of sovereignty. When the host extends hospitality and thus asserts control, she necessarily introduces the conditions of an exclusionary hostility. At the same time, however, her sovereignty is dependent upon the guest and the possibility of rejecting that guest. This is the central paradox of conditional hospitality: that it requires exclusivity to function, but nothing can be fully excluded because the guest remains foundational to hospitality itself. Likewise, the sovereign state must always have an other – an immigrant – to define the national self against.

Like the host’s dependence upon the guest, the multitude is similarly necessary in the present global Empire. It is precisely this necessity that disrupts sovereignty’s power and violence. Hardt and Negri identify that “the entire global population tends to become necessary to sovereign power.”[27] Although any sovereign authority always requires the “consent of the ruled,”[28] Hardt and Negri argue that the present circumstances of globalization fundamentally change the relationship of dependency. The multitude’s networked, in-common communication tipped “the balance of this relationship [between the ruler and the ruled]…to the side of the ruled.”[29] Although necessary to global authority, the multitude is not a liberated entity. As Hardt and Negri remind us, “[t]hose over whom Empire rules can be exploited…and for this very reason they cannot be excluded.”[30] The multitude’s indispensability interrupts and undermines the central position of sovereignty.

Within the multitude, difference among the singularities is never reduced to sameness and each singularity remains inalterably different from every other. Similarly, unconditional hospitality does not occupy, annul or define the other. Instead, the Law of unconditional hospitality requires that the host welcome the guest without reserve and accept the vulnerable position of her own at-homeness. In effect, such an offer of hospitality disrupts the very space of the home itself and challenges any claim to sovereignty. In a powerful reversal, the guest now enters the home and demands an unconditional acceptance: by violating the sacred border of the home, the guest demonstrates that the conditions of hospitality are unnecessary. This assertion makes the host vulnerable because the walls of the home no longer afford the host supremacy. In the same way, the illegal immigrant asserts her subjectivity outside the defining mechanism of the state’s sovereignty. The pursuit of true democracy by the multitude mirrors the undoing of sovereignty. Hardt and Negri demonstrate that “the multitude banishes sovereignty from politics.”[31] These two positions – that of unconditional hospitality and the multitude – intersect in the expression of the radical possibility of a true democracy.

In many ways, it is precisely the immigrant subject that enables the expression of democracy’s possibility. Arjun Appardurai coins the term ethnoscape to define the movement of people throughout the globe. The migration of people challenges the stability of any single identity group and “affect[s] the politics of (and between) nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree.”[32] He concludes that cultural forms are overlapping, fractal and unstable. The constant influx of people, for Appadurai, metaphorically suggests chaos theory – “images of flow and uncertainty.”[33] What he identifies as chaotic may similarly – and productively – be identified as the multitude and its network system. What comes across as disorganization is in fact the rejection of hegemonic, hierarchical forms of organization. Immigration and migration help create a networked system of communication across the globe. However, this should not be read as an idealization of immigration as a type of radical politics in and of itself. Instead, migration and immigration are closely related to the formation and subsequent politicalization of the multitude.

Immigration challenges the naturalized assumptions of sovereign identity within a nation-state. The recent laws in Arizona – both the anti-immigrant law and the TUSD’s dissolving of ethnic studies – re-assert the “natural” identity of an American citizen. Such an assertion itself suggests the very instability of that identity. This is the irony of the process of naturalization: the immigrant must become what is natural to the nation-state, a “natural” and ideal American. The immigrant, however, can refuse to participate in this fiction and undermine the normalized space of what is American; due to such a challenge, the immigrant is necessarily disobedient to the state’s rule. As Hardt and Negri identify, “[t]he constitution of the multitude is based on the constant legitimate possibility of disobedience.”[34] Through disobedience, illegal immigration inherently threatens Empire’s monopoly on social production.

Hardt and Negri identify the need for sovereignty to “not only rule over death but also produce social life.”[35] However, the power over biopolitical production has shifted. Biopolitical production – which “creates social relationships and forms through collaborative labor”[36] – was formerly the purview of the nation-state and modern imperial authorities. However, with the expansive power of Empire and the multitude it enables, “the ruled now tend to be the exclusive producers of social organization.”[37] The ability to produce social relationships and communicative networks is foundational to the construction and mobilization of the multitude. By rejecting the conditions of hospitality, immigrant labour and migration produce these networks. Illegal immigrants’ labour power challenges Empire’s control and domination precisely because it denies hegemonic authority. In traversing borders, “migrants demonstrate (and help construct) the general commonality of the multitude.”[38] The immigrant, in refusing to be defined by the state apparatus, emphasizes the globalized, networked structure of the multitude. From Empire’s perspective, such labour power must be prevented, which is precisely one aspect of Arizona’s immigration law; that is, without the immigrant being officially recognized by the state – and therefore translated and defined by the state –the law seeks to prevent the labouring (or, biopolitical production) of illegal immigrants. To be sure, I do not mean to idealize illegal immigrants’ labour or to deny the abuse of power and capital to which so many migrant workers are subjected. Instead, the radical possibility of the immigrant functions within the globalized commerce of Empire but simultaneously, and more importantly, has the potential to challenge that very system.

The prevalent xenophobia in American political discourse underscores the radical possibility invested in the immigrant. Arizona’s law is an attempt to deny the possibility of democracy in the age of Empire. In a modern understanding of the nation-state, it may have been possible to simply exclude the immigrant from political reality – to deport or imprison the immigrant and clearly define the proper “national” identity. However, in today’s age of Empire, such an exclusion becomes increasingly difficult because there can be no outside of Empire, no place to section off the unwanted non-citizen. Arizona’s law is another instance in the rise of American fundamentalism in the wake of the transition to Empire.[39] In essence, this is the threat of the immigrant: a complete rejection of the conditions of hospitality – the rules, laws and social codes that maintain standards of citizenship and national identity. Instead, the immigrant approaches unconditional hospitality, because, paradoxically, she destroys borders at the same moment she unveils that they have been superseded by Empire. Because the immigrant cannot be deported outside Empire, her entrance necessarily demands acceptance without condition, to move freely in the networked structure of the multitude.

This free movement takes the form of an ironic exodus. For Hardt and Negri, “exodus” describes the tactics necessary to resist Empire’s global power. They demonstrate that “[d]emocracy today takes the form of a subtraction, a flight, an exodus from sovereignty.”[40] Such a subtraction is not completely pacific. Hardt and Negri remind us that “[e]very exodus requires an active resistance.”[41] The power of the exodus is a retreat from sovereignty, a rejection of the authority of Empire to dominate and define the singularity or the multitude. In the present context, such a retreat becomes ironic: the immigrant’s departure from sovereignty depends upon an arrival, a border-crossing. Any exodus is necessarily an arrival; the movement out has an equal movement in. This exodus moves away from sovereignty by confronting it and transgressing its boundaries. Clearly, it is not a battle easily won. Empire imposes conditions and asserts its authority, but despite these attempts the shift in power has already commenced. The exodus of arrival rejects the conditions that bind the power of Empire and demands unconditional acceptance. The immigrant’s biopolitical threat challenges the homogenizing force of Empire and creates the right conditions to realize the multitude’s political power, the realization of an unconditional democracy. The gesture toward the impossible makes real its possibility. Unconditional hospitality, even if only approached, can make true democracy possible.

Notes

• [1]. In the immigration debate, the U.S. state of Arizona has emerged as a leader in the conservative movement to severely restrict and penalize illegal immigration. Not only does its position as a border state speak to its centrality in this discussion, but the Arizona law has also served as a model for similar laws in other states across the country such as Alabama, Indiana and Utah. In addition, at the time of writing the Arizona law was being challenged by the federal government in the Supreme Court, with a ruling expected in June 2012. See Adam Liptak, “Justices Seem Sympathetic to Central Part of Arizona Law.” New York Times Online April 25 2012, accessed May 30 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/26/us/considering-arizona-immigration-law....
• [2]. State of Arizona, United States. Senate. 49th Legislature, 2nd Session. SB 1070, Enforcement of Immigration Laws [signed by Governor Brewer 23 April 2010]. Web Access <http://www.azleg.gov/legtext/49leg /2r/bills/sb1070s.pdf>.
• [3]. Section 2-B of the Arizona law states that “a law enforcement official… where reasonable suspicion exists” can attempt “to determine the immigration status of [any] person” (ibid, 2). Despite public assurances to the contrary, the potential for racial profiling is obvious.
• [4]. State of Arizona, 6.
• [5]. Jeffrey Biggers, “Who’s Afraid of The Tempest,” Salon, January 13 2012, accessed January 15 2012, http://www.salon.com/2012/01/13/whos_afraid_of_the_tempest/singleton.
• [6]. For an example of the recent public debate about amnesty, see Elise Foley. “Dream Act: David Rivera Is First Republican To Propose Immigration Amnesty.” Huffington Post, May 31 2012, accessed June 1 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/31/dream-act-david-rivera-republic....
• [7]. According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website, naturalized citizens “must demonstrate an ability to read, write, and speak words in ordinary usage in the English language, and have a knowledge and understanding of U.S. history and government” (“Applicant Performance on Naturalization Test”). These legal stipulations, however, are just the beginning of social and cultural conditions imposed onto immigrant subjects.
• [8]. Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle. Of Hospitality (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000), 25.
• [9]. Ibid., 83.
• [10] Ibid., 79.
• [11]. Elsewhere and in a different context, I offer a similar explication of Derrida’s understanding of hospitality, see Patrick Manning. “‘To Become a Nomad’: Exploring Minor Literature through Hospitality and the Uncanny in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” M/MLA 43.2 (forthcoming).
• [12]. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President in State of the Union Address,” The Capitol, Washington D.C., January 27 2010, www.whitehouse.gov, accessed February 1 2010, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-state-union....
• [13]. Derrida, Of Hospitality, 55.
• [14]. The question of sovereignty is pivotal to the current Supreme Court case challenging Arizona’s law. The federal government has not challenged the law because of the potential for racial profile or for its gross abuse of police power. Instead, the law is being challenged on the grounds that Arizona has usurped the right to regulate immigration from the federal government. See Liptak, “Justices Seem Sympathetic to Central Part of Arizona Law.” 
• [15]. The idea of language takes on particular significance for Derrida when presented with the possibility of unconditional hospitality. He suggests that hospitality begins with the question of whether we must “ask the foreigner to understand us, to speak our language…to be able to welcome him into our country? If he was already speaking our language, with all that that implies…would the foreigner still be a foreigner and could we speak of asylum or hospitality in regard to him?” (17). The moment of articulation always introduces the conditions of hospitality; to translate the foreigner into the codes of the host annihilates the foreigner’s alterity, thus eradicating the possibility of unconditional hospitality.
• [16]. Derrida, Of Hospitality, 75-7.
• [17]. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Empire (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000), xii.
• [18]. Ibid., 9
• [19]. Ibid., 61
• [20]. Ibid., xv.
• [21]. Ibid., xiv.
• [22]. Ibid.
• [23]. Ibid., 129
• [24]. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2005) 329.
• [25]. Ibid., 330.
• [26]. Ibid., 329.
• [27]. Ibid., 335.
• [28]. Ibid., 332.
• [29]. Ibid., 340.
• [30]. Ibid., 336.
• [31]. Ibid., 340.
• [32]. Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” in Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader, ed. Jana Evans Braziel et al. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 32.
• [33]. Ibid., 45.
• [34]. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 340.
• [35]. Ibid., 334.
• [36]. Ibid., 94-5.
• [37]. Ibid., 336.
• [38]. Ibid., 134. 
• [39]. A variety of fundamentalist movements are presently active within American culture: Christian fundamentalism, Tea Party groups, anti-Islamic activists. Hardt and Negri, in some ways, see fundamentalism as the death banes of our modern world; “fundamentalism [is] not…the re-creation of a premodern world, but rather…a powerful refusal of the contemporary historical passage in course,” mainly the movement into a global Empire (Empire 146-7).
• [40]. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 341.
• [41]. Ibid., 342.

Bibliography

Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” In Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader, edited by Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur, 25-48. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003.

“Applicant Performance on the Naturalization Test.” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. U.S. Government. 10 August 2010. < http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem. eb1d4c2a3e5b9ac89243c6a7543f6d1a/?vgnextoid=6c40ec90d8668210VgnVCM100000082ca60aRCRD&vgnextchannel=6c40ec90d8668210VgnVCM100000082ca60aRCRD>.

Biggers, Jeffrey. “Who’s Afraid of The Tempest.” Salon. January 13 2012. Accessed January 15 2012. <http://www.salon.com/2012/01/13/whos_afraid_of_the_tempest/singleton/>.

Derrida, Jacques and Anne Dufourmantelle. Of Hospitality. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.

Foley, Elise. “Dream Act: David Rivera Is First Republican To Propose Immigration Amnesty.” Huffington Post. May 31 2012. Accessed June 1 2012. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/31/dream-act-david-rivera-republican-_n_1561004.html>.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.

Adam Liptak, “Justices Seem Sympathetic to Central Part of Arizona Law.” The New York Times Online. April 25 2012. Accessed May 30 2012. <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/26/us/considering-arizona-immigration-law-justices-are-again-in-political-storm.html?pagewanted=all>.

- - -. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Books, 2005. Manning, Patrick. “‘To Become a Nomad’: Exploring Minor Literature through Hospitality and the Uncanny in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” M/MLA 43.2 (forthcoming).

Obama, Barack. “Remarks by the President in State of the Union Address.” The Capitol, Washington D.C. 27 January 2010. Whitehouse.gov. Web. 1 February 2010. <http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-state-union-address>.

State of Arizona, United States. Senate. 49th Legislature, 2nd Session. SB 1070, Enforcement of Immigration Laws [signed by Governor Brewer 23 April 2010]. Web Access <http://www.azleg.gov/legtext/49leg/2r/bills/sb1070s.pdf>.