Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on ""They Don't Want White Men Having a Voice". Why The Tories Must Lose Badly at the Next Election." video.

  1. On the question of territory, sovereignty and power I had a paper linked to me by Academia'edu algorithms by Stuart Elden concerning the lack of academic work for many years to discuss in any "real" terms the fact of sovereign territory, against a broad intellectual paradigm that sees it as perhaps historically arbitrary and lacking any real justification and "legitimacy" and so is a mere temporary contingency and maybe anachronistic from the point of view of international human rights and legal institutions. If i may say, projects of a "meta" political ideology of a rules based post "place" world that is constructed in a process of progress to dissolve away bit by bit the idea of sovereignty and a "privileged" territory for a post nation rules and laws based internal order. It seems the paradigm for these projects from the left is the kind of historical genealogy method of Foucault that re constructs the events of the past still present to us as historical a priori creations that turn out to be highly contextualised political judgements at the time, judgements that could have gone in many different ways and so were actually are radically contingent actions from within "possibilities". If I am correct in a very general account of the lefts use of Foucault, the contingency of past legal and rule event constructions robs them of their claim to absolute legitimacy, the past is a assembly of mere facts not an origin and trace back to de jure judgements but partiality power and random stuff going on beneath and in the margins the what is evidenced in the "archive". So the first move is to make what appears as autharitive positive rules and institutions now from tradition, look as descendents merely of the positioning of powers within possibility, within the rules, back then. The next move then is to take this idea of past events as really radically contingent, and think the present, the contemporary as also more open to radical possibility of rule change than positivisms disclose. The project is no so different from what happens with global capitalism. New formations are made that are policy process and productions, that appear outside the conceptual framework of political philosophy's concepts of sovereignty territory law right and legitimacy. But given time they can beginning to erode the primary political concepts. A good example of this is given by Ben Habib's discussion of the Northern Ireland protocol. To the layman these appear to be some un intended side effect or contingent accident, but to business people and left praxis this double effect playing is politics 101. Now, I have not yet read Stuart Elden’s book “The Birth of Territory” but from based on some essays of his and reviews of the book, although his work is genealogical after Foucault he disagrees with Foucault on the notion of territory. Going by reviews he might indeed have a similar view to me of a methodological error that in seeing the many possibilities that were open in Westphalia for example, does not mean those possibility can be reopen or reversed now as if they are still carried forward with the tradition and remain open now. I rather pretentiously perhaps draw on Einstein and say those possiblities for difference then have fallen outside the “event horizon” for us, and become the “absolute elsewhere” of policy possibility. The capitalist and the left then with the rules of human rights and so on create a kind of image of absolute freedom of policy possibility now if it was possible at some time in the abstract past. It suffers from a kind of policy idealism, and as such starts to look like a coherence theory of legal legitimacy, which in practice means endless legal conflict with no basis of common agreement only legal force and policy possibility though power. A chapter by chapter account of “The Birth of Territory” (Chicago London 2013) can be found on academia’edu by Daniel Saric. Other reviews recommend reading it with his earlier book “Terror and Terratory”(2010). Stuart Elden received many awards for both books.
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