Sovereignty as new beginnings: Action beyond the liberal subject,among undercover police investigators in Europe,for example

Inaugurating new beginnings: sovereignty, relationality, and being political

A group of seven undercover police investigators in a southern European Union (EU) member state sit in a café on a July Friday night. None are happy to be there. Six are preparing for holidays with their family. The seventh had to conduct an unexpected surveillance operation of a Chinese business owner suspected of trafficking Chinese women for prostitution. The operation required at least three of his colleagues, but all agreed to help. If one has a problem, they all do. The surveillance led to what appeared as a brothel catering primarily to Chinese clients. To gather sufficient evidence, however, they needed to enter it, a move that would bring them trouble as the law prohibits them from procuring evidence by soliciting illegal services. ¹ Instead, they gave a Chinese man 300 Euros to do so. The man delivered the confirmation they sought (plus 50 Euros change), which subsequently led them to a 50-year-old woman. The woman convinced them that she was a prostitute (not a “madam”) in the establishment and that she greatly missed her daughter in China who was vulnerable to sexual harassment back home. Moved by her story, the team embellished it with falsified details of her daughter's exploitation to convince a superior officer to grant her a visa in exchange for the woman's information. This small event, to which we will return later, yields two important issues. First, the investigative team broke the law by hiring the Chinese man as their proxy to commit an illegal act and by lying to their boss about the Chinese woman's situation. Second, the team members sensed an ethical commitment both to their colleague, who had to work alone on Friday night, and to the Chinese woman, with whom they sympathized.

In acting in this way, I argue that the team constituted a modest sovereign space that radically differed from the state's sovereign space in which they normally operate. The difference lies in the type of political subjectivity premising it. State sovereignty assumes the familiar bounded, internally coherent, and pre-given subject of liberal modernity. In contrast, the team—consciously or not—conducted themselves as open-ended, relational subjects. This perspective opens up a new vista that shows how sovereign action, when undertaken as a horizontal endeavor, enables people to both renew themselves as ethical beings and renew the space between them. Our political subjectivity, our appearance as irreplaceable (i.e. particular) persons, and the shared space that we constitute are all inextricably linked. These linked phenomena merit the term “sovereignty” because they inaugurate new beginnings in our political lives as we respond in new ways to circumstances that habitual practice, law, and custom cannot satisfactorily address.

More fully, to understand how sovereign action serves a mode of renewal and empowerment for persons as particular entities (rather than abstract types), we must recognize that the subject of action is both an open-ended entity inseparable from the global field of relations through which it emerges as a worldly actor and distinct from that field because it lives a life that no one else ever has, ever can, or ever will (see Arendt 1998: 7–8, 177–178; 2006a: 150–151, 168–169, 216–222; and 2006b: 17). ² The subject's internal openness, its lack of pre-given definition, and its inherent relatedness to others makes new beginnings possible. This unusual sovereign experience brings us to life, to phrase it colloquially. Graeber (2002) well captures the point when writing that “it is difficult to find anyone who has fully participated in such an action whose sense of human possibilities has not been profoundly transformed as a result. It's one thing to say, ‘Another world is possible’. It's another to experience it, however momentarily.” Granted, Graeber does not invoke the word “sovereignty” to describe this experience of newness and originality incumbent to action. However, in defining “direct action” as acting “as if the state does not exist,” he achieves precisely that (Graeber, 2009: 203). ³

So, what is sovereignty? If the term “sovereignty” has meant anything throughout its history, which long pre-dates the usual reference points of Bodin and Hobbes, then it is the human capacity to (re)constitute shared space independently of precedents in law, policy, or accepted morality (Elshtain, 2008; see also Feldman, 2019: 10–17). ⁴ This capacity provides no guarantee against horrific results, but only promises of new beginnings. Today, we work with a more delimited notion of sovereignty. Whether in support or in critique, we still tend to rely on Carl Schmitt's argument that the state reveals its sovereign power by declaring the “exception,” suspending the constitution, and acting with impunity against a designated threat (Schmitt, 1985 [1922]; and in critique Agamben, 1998; on this point, see Jennings, 2011: 52). As an extraordinary measure, the “exception” ushers in a new beginning by jettisoning all legal precedents that regulate ordinary life in response to unforeseen circumstances threatening the state's integrity. While this state of exception operates through the vertical imposition of state authority on categorized “others,” horizontal sovereign action (also transpiring exceptionally) seeks to secure the ethical integrity of the particular persons undertaking it. By “ethical beings,” I mean nothing more than people who can live with themselves privately based on how they engage others publicly (see also Feldman 2015: 7; 2016: 496; Zigon 2018: 1–2). To show the limits of the Schmittian perspective, but without denying its veracity, this article argues that sovereignty expresses (1) a human capacity to inaugurate new beginnings in shared space; and (2) that this capacity enables the individual actors involved to reconstitute themselves as ethical beings when conducted horizontally among equal but different persons rather than through vertical imposition.

Schmitt himself inspires of view of sovereignty as new beginnings, even though his reasoning leads to hierarchy and the violence of depoliticization (Feldman, 2019: 19–22). Like many activists, he sought to reclaim the political for ordinary people alienated from a stultifying state. The modern state, he wrote, “seems to have become what Max Weber envisioned: a huge industrial plant. Political ideas are generally recognized only when groups can be identified that have a plausible economic interest in turning them to their advantage” (Schmitt, 1985 [1922]: 65, see also 27–28). The state's formalism—i.e., its commitment to legislative process, judicial review, and executive enforcement all in deference to capital accumulation—vacates the word “political” of real meaning (see Strong 2005: xvii–xviii). Schmitt thus designated the “exception” as the liberatory space where actors could act without restraint upon events unforeseen by “normal order,” constituted as it was in different historical circumstances with different risks and threats in mind. Expressed in exceptional circumstances, sovereignty is the power “to make something from that which is not something and thus is not subject to laid-down laws” (ibid.: xxvii). For Schmitt, our human-ness is fulfilled in the political realm through this miracle of sovereign action: the capacity to inaugurate new and unforeseen beginnings (Schmitt, 1985 [1922]: 36–37).

The stark limit of Schmitt's view of sovereign action is its identification of the “people” in abstract terms and, subsequently, on the friend/enemy distinction as the basis of politics (Schmitt 2007 [1932]: 26–30). He sees the world composed of discrete, mutually exclusive objects, that is, persons as collectivized national citizens rather than persons as unique and irreplaceable entities. The political world is not a shared universe composed of a plurality of persons, but rather a “pluriverse” composed of mutually exclusive national universes, each represented by the only entity capable of doing politics, namely a nation-state (ibid.: 53). ⁵ Schmitt, thus, retains a typically modernist understanding of bounded, self-contained individuals representing abstract nations that are predisposed to the violence of competition. This logic leads to the awkward conclusion that the “enemy in the political sense need not be hated personally” (Strong, 1996: 29). We thus might be compelled to kill people with whom we feel a genuine bond based on our particular experiences with them. ⁶ This ironic situation signifies a crucial difference between state-based vertical sovereignty and horizontal sovereign action; the former compels us to act on abstract logics designed to (re)establish nation-state order possibly against our own conscience, whereas the latter must issue directly from the consciences of the actors involved. The latter instantiates us as political beings, while the former is prone to destroy our political selves.

To be sure, Schmittian states of exception do not necessarily cause harm, even if premised upon categorical types rather than particular persons. Yet, they result in depolitization by rendering those persons as faceless objects to be managed rather than irreplaceable subjects to be engaged as equals. This arrangement's horrific potential has been actualized many times over in modern history, but so has its benevolent potential through, for example, humanitarian intervention (Fassin and Pandolfi, 2010; Ticktin, 2014: 278–279) or well-intended public policy (Gupta, 2012). Yet, in all cases, it demands peoples' passivity and nullifies their political voice. Žižek (2002: 94) best expressed the ambivalence of Schmittian states of exception when noting that that “perhaps the ultimate image of the treatment of the ‘local population’ as Homo sacer is that of the American war plane flying above Afghanistan—one is never sure what it will drop, bombs or food parcels.” Whether damning, saving, or neglecting human beings through vertically imposed states of exception, Schmittian sovereignty reduces an otherwise plurality of people to a generic, undifferentiated, biological mass. Confronting such sterile prospects, Kabamba (2015: 26, 38) rightly insists that we avoid reducing sovereignty to inflexible practices of asserting order (potestas) and also recognize it as an inalienable human quality that realizes our creative possibilities of being (potentia).

We must also avoid attributing sovereignty only to easily accessible examples of large-scale resistance movements, grand revolutionary action, or the founding of new states. These few examples obscure countless smaller political acts circumstantially precluded from notice or “interrupted” from fruition (Li 2019). Momentous examples necessarily begin on small scales that reveal the banality of sovereign potential: the extraordinary is an ordinary prospect. Or as Li (ibid.: 33–34) puts it, drawing on Gramsci, politics begins with a sense of distinction and independence that always lurks in what might appear as a stable state-based order. In the investigative team's case, they harbor no ambitions of overturning state authority, but only of carving out an independent space, premised on their own ethical judgment, where they can live in agreement with themselves based on how they engage others in their investigations. These moments signify unprecedented events because state-based operating procedures do not necessarily prepare them to engage these events in ways that satisfied their consciences. The “unprecedented” does not refer to the “entirely unimaginable,” but rather to events that standard operating procedures, so to speak, did not foresee as problems requiring a fundamental re-organization of the polity, however big, small, fleeting, or durable that polity might be. Likewise, to constitute anew does not mean that sovereign action fully creates something out of nothing (ex nihilo) or that other influences are not involved (see Zigon 2018: 9). Rather, it refers to the capacity for people to reorganize the ethical premises of their relational space as new circumstances push them to re-evaluate habitual practice. No conditions or influences are fully determinative, thus constituting the new in shared space is always a distinct possibility. That human capacity needs a name, sovereignty.

So, what isn’t sovereignty? The short answer is that which centers around social-cum-biological reproduction, which can be explained temporally. The effort to secure stable living conditions does not guarantee our political beings endowed with the capacity to re-constitute shared space. More commonly, the surest path to that security is to mute our basic disagreements and seek inclusion in the system that marginalizes us. As a conceptual matter, then, activity that maintains the processes of social reproduction create an experience of time as circular and repetitive, just as the maintenance of the body as a strictly biological entity corresponds to the cyclical, metabolic demands it places upon us such eating, sleeping, and cleaning (Arendt, 1998: 96–101). Tending to our sheer biological lives does not require our appearances as irreplaceable political actors, but only as generic workers, administrators, or laborers (manual, intellectual, or affective) skilled at fulfilling production quotas, meeting deadlines, and efficiently organizing people and resources to achieve the same. In contrast, sovereign action moves time in a new direction precisely because the people undertaking it reconstitute themselves and the relational space between them along new ethical principles. A blurry line might distinguish joint efforts to secure peoples’ livelihoods from those that would reconstitute the principles of our shared space. However, to collapse these phenomena into each other would obscure, rather than explain, the radically different temporal experiences that each entails.

Two issues still require attention. First, sovereign action should not be mistaken for rogue action (e.g. the “dirty Harry” syndrome of cop movies or the singular heroic actor who bends history to their will). The rogue and the hero are loners whose actions will certainly affect others, but they do not establish new space with others as co-constituent actors. They dismiss all people they encounter and destroys the space they might otherwise have shared. However, horizontal sovereign action is necessarily joint action among open-ended political beings who transform each other during the action itself. The newness it offers is an effect of that mutual transformation, which cannot occur if the others involved are silenced and their distinct perspectives erased. Likewise, such transformation cannot occur for the rogue or the hero precisely because they deny their relationality to those whom they silence. Second, after the new polity is established—regardless of how grand or miniscule, or how long it lasts—it also must tend to its social reproduction; the new direction in time will thus become tied to the circularity of its maintenance. People need safety and predictability. However, the compulsion to tend to social reproduction only threatens our being as sovereign actors if it also somehow denies us the possibility of (re)constituting the polity on our own agreed upon terms whenever it is deemed necessary.

The article pursues horizontal sovereign action through ethnographic research among a seven-member undercover police team based in the interior ministry of a southern EU member state. ⁷ This team investigates human trafficking and smuggling rings that operate through their country, linking the EU to places as far away as West Africa, South America, South Asia, and China. The first section clarifies the difference between sovereign agents and sovereign actors, the former obeys vertical command while the latter horizontally constitutes shared space based on their own judgments. It also describes the legal ambiguities that enable the team to take sovereign action independent of the state, however modestly. It provides three examples showing how their ethical uncertainties internally divide each of them, prompting reflections that lead to actions unprecedented by law or policy. Such actions both reconstitute themselves as singular actors and the space they share with those involved in their investigations. The second section theoretically breaks down sovereign action in terms of the subject's internal ambiguity, inherent relationality to others, and original judgments about how to engage those others so that actors can become new and enhanced persons. The third section shows how “honor” keeps the investigative team within agreed ethical parameters during sovereign action lest they dehumanize others per Schmitt's state of exception. Though traditionally associated with feudalism and rigid social order, honor, according to Appiah’s (2010) interpretation, explains how relational subjects act so they do not become implicated in the maintenance of hierarchy and instead seek the equal inclusion of difference.

From sovereign agents to sovereign actors: three situations outside of constitutional order

Located in the Immigration Service, this undercover police team's mandate is to conduct street-level investigations of transborder crime, the majority of which involve human smuggling, human trafficking, and burglary rings. While they are officers of the law, that authority itself does not render them sovereign actors capable of constituting sovereign space on their own terms. It renders them, instead, as sovereign agents, or, people in whom sovereign authority is invested and from whom it can be revoked. In that regard, police as such are state fonctionnaires, or bureaucrats with guns in Graeber's formulation (2009: 446, 518–519). However, the team becomes sovereign actors when they move outside of legal purview and away from bureaucratic oversight to reconstitute the space they share with others according to their own ethical judgments. ⁸ The crucial aspect of those judgments is not only that they are taken independently of bureaucratic expectation, but they are based on a relational understanding of how their actions implicate themselves before each other and before the people affected by them. Such judgment and action makes their work enjoyable and fulfilling. This section demonstrates that sovereign action is far more common, even if fleeting and momentary, than we might realize. That point holds for police or any group of people horizontally acting outside of state order.

Rather than rogue operators or heroic actors, the team are primarily work-a-day investigators who mostly “feed the machine,” as Brian explains, the most charismatic among them. Cases start with state prosecutors who work with a team of desk investigators that examine databases, paper trails, and suspects’ legal statuses to determine if preliminary evidence warrants a full investigation. The desk investigators then liaison with the street investigative team—both teams’ offices are on the same floor—who collect evidence primarily through surveillance, phone taps, and informants. Most of the team's work consists of hours-long surveillance operations, which involve little more than watching a front door while waiting for someone to change locations to discover whom they meet (see also Fassin 2013: 68). These observations guide them in mapping out social networks, making sense of tapped phone conversations, and deciding whose cars, residences, and hotel rooms to search. Informants help them fill gaps in the picture. The law formally governs these investigations, and a generic operational plan guides them: place key individuals under surveillance; map social networks; obtain evidence; and arrest suspects upon the state prosecutor's order.

Nevertheless, street investigations routinely present situations that fall outside legal, policy, and even mainstream ethical parameters. For example, if searching a hotel room without a warrant is illegal, then what about searching a guest's suitcase left with the reception? If a warrant to tap a phone cannot be obtained quickly enough to hear a crucial conversation, then should the team tap it without one? If an indicted suspect threatens a witness, should the team act illegally against the suspect to protect the witness? Quandaries like these are the rule not the exception. The team's most difficult challenge is not deciding when, or how fully, to apply the law, thus wielding what Butler calls “petty sovereignty” (2004: 56–65; see also Abarca and Coutin, 2018; Hull 2012; Martin, 2018: 140; Shindo, 2018). Rather, it is how to act independently in situations when law or policy do not satisfactorily apply. Unlike petty sovereign agents, who might affect how the law gets implemented, these situations call for their own ethical judgments resulting in the constitution of a sovereign space designed independently of law. They invoke—consciously or not—an entirely different subjectivity in these moments.

When gauging the risk of action outside the law, the team considers both the investigation's external circumstances in the field and the case's internal bureaucratic dynamics (Martin, 2018: 141–142; see also Manning, 1997). The team's superior officers well know that investigations often require illegal, or at least quasi-legal, activity but are sensitive to the political fallout should the transgressions become known. Frank, the team's chief, gauges their support through their oblique comments and their visionary statements about Immigration Service's new priorities. Rarely do they ask for, or receive permission to, break the law. Instead, superior officers usually turn a blind eye because, as he puts it, “They want results. We produce results.” Yet, what transpires is not merely the team evading the law for the state's sake. Rather, in evading the law, the team is reconstituting sovereign space on their own judgments relative to each other's standpoints and to those implicated by their choice of action. The technocratic “state” must accept the result. They risk getting caught for want of that horizontal sovereign experience, not from pressure from superior officers.

Clever report writing helps them cover their tracks (Feldman, 2018). Reports usually get subpoenaed as court evidence with defense attorneys scrutinizing them for errors in the investigative process. The team relies on a fine legal distinction between “evidence” and “intelligence” to protect themselves. Intelligence is any information used to investigate suspected criminal activity. It does not appear in court. Evidence is information directly tying a suspect to a crime that must appear in court. The team would never present intelligence in court lest the methods of retrieval be exposed. As David puts it, “If you don’t follow the rules, then it is not [officially] part of the investigation.” Evidence, therefore, will appear in a surveillance report while the team will find a legal way to present intelligence as evidence if necessary. If a judge asked about the source of intelligence, then the team would reply that it must remain confidential as a security matter. Judges typically accept this reply and so validate the team's right to invoke a (modest) state of exception. Again, rather than do the bidding of judges and senior bureaucrats, the team manipulates them so that they (the team) may reconstitute the sovereign field per their own actions.

However, risking the uncertainty of action outside of law is also a question of personal ethics and thus one's particular relations to others. Brian explains that “you go into the ‘gray area’ when you realize that the ‘white area’ [the team's view of moral order not the ‘state's’] does not let you do what you need to do to protect it.” The team members’ reflections on ethical dilemmas illustrate how internally divided subjects resolve themselves to action in light of the others whom it implicates. This ordinary experience is precisely what renders an individual as an open-ended entity who comes into being relationally, that is, through actions tying it to others. Hence, his colleague Max explains, “I have values, but I’m no saint. I’ve done a lot of things I thought I wouldn’t do. I try to go to bed every night with a clear conscience. So far, I’ve been able to do that.” Ethical dilemmas reveal the inherent relationality between people. Here, they tie the team to others whom their investigations affect. Absent law, the governors of their conduct are both their own individual consciences and the judgments each would make about the other's actions. Max continues, and the team concur, that “Any decision I make about the going into the gray area must be agreed upon with my colleagues.” Thus, for Brian and Max, the thrill of law-breaking for its own sake is no motivation, but rather re-uniting their ethically divided selves by acting in the world in such a way that they can live peacefully with themselves. The result reconstitutes each of them as new persons relative to how they engage others along the space they share in between.

How does horizontal sovereign action, which evokes a different kind of new beginning than a Schmittian state of exception, actually play out? Though each increasing in intensity, the following three examples portray neither revolutionary grandeur nor sustained threats to this EU state's formal authority. ⁹ They do not need to. Instead, to answer the question, they only need to capture how subjects undertake action that we can call sovereign regardless of how long it lasts or the number of people involved. Again, what characterizes those subjects are (1) each's internal divisions, which preclude regarding them as discrete, whole entities; (2) those divided subjects’ relations to others expressed through ethical reflection; and (3) their phenomenal experiences of wholeness ultimately achieved through joint action itself. That action creates new space among them in which they appear as new persons each recognizing the reality of the other. To remind, that newness is not ex nihilo, but rather it refers to a reconstitution based on currents situations that routine practices cannot address in a satisfying way.

Sovereignty: action, space, and the reconstitution of relational subjects

Butler's view on “popular sovereignty” points to the political implications in this nexus of human subjectivity. She describes the “I” as an entity whose individuation always transpires through its relations to others (Butler, 2015: 110). Speaking from the I's standpoint, she explains that “‘I’ am the complexity that I am, and this means that I am related to others in ways that are essential to any invocation of this ‘I’” (ibid.: 68). For Butler, this complexity becomes sovereign once it, along with others, issues a public demand for collective self-determination against the state. The “people,” then, are not known in advance, but only in their joint action leading toward a new and unknown future (ibid.: 169–172). Again, the appearance of the political actor as a singular entity—the relational “I”—is only an effect joint action. Though not against the state, but rather despite it, that the investigative team revealed their relationality as they contemplated the effects of their actions on others (not Others) tied to their investigations: Latin American prostitutes, the Chinese woman, and the Romanian girl.

While Butler relates the subject's interior to others’ exterior appearances in popular sovereign action, Hannah Arendt provides a fuller conceptualization of this phenomenon through two particular aspects of her work: (1) on joint action as that which manifests a space of appearance through the mutual recognition of the actors involved; and (2) on thinking as that which manifests an internal two-in-one dialogue. First, she draws on the ancient Greek notion of the daimōn, which is roughly comparable to a soul, to convey the phenomenality of action. The daimōn remains behind the actor's shoulder (not inside the person per the Christian view), visible to others but not to the actor itself (Arendt, 1998: 192–194). Thus, our soul-like essence – who we are – is not fixed, pregiven, and publicly revealed in liberal fashion, but rather publicly inscribed through ongoing negotiations about the significance of our speech and action. It is an effect of our worldly appearance. This process of mutual recognition constitutes a relational space through which each actor becomes a distinct political being in the presence of others. Without it, no one can be such an entity because they would be confined to either private life, to rogue individualism, or to the facelessness of participation in social reproduction. These three options—which remain important parts of life—deny our sovereign capacity because they deprive us of the recognition as particular beings by others. Arendt (1998: 192–201; 1992: 41–58; see also Shindo 2012) calls the relational space emerging between these mutually constituting actors a “space of appearance.”

Second, while that space testifies to external appearances of relational actors, Arendt, furthermore, explains their internal divisions that necessarily relate them to others through the capacity for thinking. Arendt regards thinking not as mental operations in abstract logic (e.g. induction and deduction), but rather as the inner dialogue that the subject has with itself as it contemplates its ethical ties to the wider world. The thinking subject splits into two voices, specifically “me” and “myself,” which talk to each other about how they can live in harmony based upon how they live in the world with others. While thinking, the subject attempts to see shared issues from the other's standpoint (Arendt, 1978: pt. 1, 184–193; pt. 2, 265–270). Again, not only is the subject fragmented, but this fragmentation reveals its inherent relationship to other subjects. Our worldly encounters with those others activate the subject's internal two-in-one thought dialogue when they prompt us to re-examine how we ourselves participate in them. Its being depends upon the other's being. Hence, Arendt (1992: 189) writes, “I first talk with others before I talk with myself, examining whatever the joint talk may have been about, and then discover that I can conduct a dialogue not only with others but with myself as well.” What appears as oneness to the others in the space of appearance, however, already has difference (and so division) built into it (ibid.: 183).

Nevertheless, the subject cannot forever remain divided, incoherent, and trapped in the inner, thought dialogue. It needs the company of others to save it from the equivocation of endless thought and to “restore the identity which makes [it] speak with a single voice of one unexchangeable person” (Arendt, 1968: 476, italics added). The thinking subject will render a judgment about the unprecedented dilemma and try to persuade others of a course of action to reconstitute space so that they may live together publicly in such a way that they can each live with themselves privately. In effect, our appearance as singular political subjects, our joint action with others, and the sovereign space of appearance that emerges between us are isomorphic and dynamic. Furthermore, the difference between the actor's singular appearance before others and its internal ambiguity and openness prior to action is precisely what makes newness—of both the space of appearance and the constituent actors themselves—the quintessence of horizontal sovereign action. This possibility of new beginnings always remains because new dilemmas will inevitably arise that cannot be addressed through what will become habitual practice.

To varying degrees of conceptualization, scholars of political action are now engaging its phenomenality as the vehicle through which people become, that is, come into their own as distinct subjects. Through the example of Slovenia's Occupy movement, Razsa and Kurnik (2012: 250; see also Razsa 2015) describe this experience (though not with sovereignty in mind) as a “self-conscious processes of becoming-other-than-it-now-is.” ¹² The creative experiences of these sovereign actors contrast decisively against those of sovereign agents. The practices of vertical state sovereignty eliminate political subject-hood, making those agents replaceable bodies, even though these practices facilitate the routine maintenance of social reproduction (e.g. going to work, keeping healthy, maintaining community infrastructure, voting in elections, training the next generation, enforcing order, etc.). Indeed, the investigative team's greatest professional fear was not getting caught in illegal action but getting reassigned to bureaucratic positions that would deaden them with predictable administrative activity. David explained the drudgery of a temporarily assignment to border control—a highly ritualized site of state sovereign authority—where an eight hour shift offers nothing but repetitive motion: “There's gotta be some point to what you’re doing. If I stamp thirty passports, there are no consequences whether I do it or not. The job itself was the most mind-numbing thing to do.”

Honor: horizontality and others in sovereign space

States of exception—the space of sovereign action—do not compel people to depoliticize others, but merely provide the opportunity. The question is how people acting independently of traditional controls—such as constitutional law, customs, and established moral codes—can be trusted to regard each other and those affected by their actions as persons who unique standpoint is worthy of genuine inspection. The team themselves describe the necessary limit in terms of honor. We can easily misread honor as a feudal era throwback with stereotypical images of knights rescuing damsels in distress; indeed, the ethnographic examples here could be misinterpreted as the team doing just that. In the feudal context, honor preserved a caste system and locked people into tightly defined and stratified social roles. Yet, Appiah, in reworking honor for contemporary times, sees it as an ethical expression between subjects willing to reassess hierarchies precisely because people benefiting from them realize that it reflects poorly on their own sense of self and on the ways that others come to judge them. Thus, for Appiah, honorable action begins from a personal moral sentiment that the status quo cannot be maintained as an exclusive, static code of conduct (2010: 178, 182). It therefore enlarges peoples’ ethical worldview, because the resulting action purges honor's historical dependence on illegitimate hierarchies (ibid.: 187). ¹³ In this rendition, honor expresses a reinvented ethical code among horizontally arranged actors who are open to personal transformation based on new relationships with others.

To get at this issue, I asked the team during a holiday dinner what keeps them in line when they act outside the scope of law. Before answering that question, they established that they must prioritize their horizontal relationship to each other rather than the vertical obligation to the Immigration Service's bureaucracy. Former team member Edward answered, “I don’t want to jeopardize my relations with the guys…not the institution but the guys.” Frank shields the team from the service's oversight through his skilled dealings with superior officers and adjacent departments (Feldman, 2019: 47–48). Among themselves, he allows the team to operate according to their own deliberations rather than lead them by command. While this may seem like a trivial modification, it profoundly influences their experience with each other. All seven members become equal but different people who negotiate the ethics of the situations they confront and agree upon a course of action accordingly.

For that horizontality to succeed, the team prefers “reasonable guys” when selecting new members and when working with affiliated police units. David explains that “‘Reasonable’ means that you don’t exceed yourself in the line of duty. You won’t hit someone unless you have to. And you won’t hit harder than necessary if they do have to hit.” Reasonability appears as one's ability to act according to what the team collectively regards as honorable conduct. Brian explains:

Sometimes our work is dirty but we don’t harm anyone we don’t need to. There is an honor among what we do: [as another example] don’t forge surveillance reports. Can you imagine how easy it would be to put someone in jail? Easy, but we would never do it for fun. The photos we take of people are deceitful. It's what we say about those photos is what counts and we take that seriously.

Frank continues: “We always have to imagine the line between good and bad. We are always crossing the line, but we have to try to do the right thing…to make difficult decisions.” Brian explains how they monitor each other by noting that “If someone crosses a line, maybe steals money. We would talk to that person. If we would steal money, it would be a shame for our profession.” (Opportunities to steal money regularly occur when collecting evidence from suspects’ residences, vehicles, hotel rooms, etc.)

Brian's concern epitomizes Appiah’s (2010: 205) point that honor has us feeling “implicated by the acts of others.” Conversely, honor mutually confirms the dignity of people in spaces of appearance through the ethical checks that each keeps on the other about how they treat those whom their actions affect (recall that the team's actions described above were motivated by a sense that wrong had been done to others.). Honor thus simultaneously accords respect to others and self-respect (Appiah, 2010: xv). When Max claims, as quoted earlier, that “you can’t be the judge of yourself,” he implies that honor can only be bestowed by others and without it self-respect is difficult to attain. Therefore, freed from its feudal context, honor reveals both the division within the subject itself and its inherent relationality to others. It enables horizontal sovereignty precisely because it opens the political actor to be transformed by others who occupy more marginal positions and, likewise, it transforms the relational space between them.

Mainstreaming the idea (and practice) of horizontal sovereignty

Horizontal sovereign action, premised upon open-ended relational actors, guarantees those actors’ political subjecthood as they mutually recognize each other through the action itself. Insofar as those actors are reconstituting themselves, in response to situations that standard practices cannot satisfactorily address, sovereign action likewise reconstitutes their shared space so that it actualizes new beginnings both in personal and political life. The appearance of irreplaceable subjects as sovereign actors is thus simultaneously a spatial and relational phenomenon. Through horizontally arranged sovereign action, we become particular, irreplaceable, and honorable persons who remain open still to future transformation. A subject acting as a bounded, internally coherent liberal actor can neither achieve such a personal transformation nor contribute to public transformation because they fail to engage the plurality of people they encounter even if they affect those peoples’ lives.

The possibility of such sovereign action is hardly restricted to undercover police investigators. It is available to any group of people that organize horizontally to undertake it. Such issues as the length of time the action lasts, the number of people involved, and the actors’ relationship to the “state” are secondary to the point that such sovereign action instantiates our political being as long as we somehow participate in it (Arendt, 1998). Again, Graeber's (2009: 203) description of “direct action” well describes sovereign action: “the insistence, when faced with structures of unjust authority, on acting as if one is already free. One does not solicit the state. One does not even necessarily make a grand gesture of defiance. Insofar as one is capable, one proceeds as if the state does not exist.” Thus, breaking the law is not the prerequisite of sovereign action, but only jointly acting independently of it, that is, people conducting themselves as actors rather than agents. Moreover, opportunities might be more common than we think given the state's lack of a consistent and totalizing presence in daily life, even in the most repressive situations.

We must abandon liberalism's limited conception of the political subject as a bounded, internally coherent entity in order to see past Schmitt's limited, but not wrong, conception of sovereignty as a depoliticizing state-based phenomenon. Sovereignty, in either case, inaugurates new beginnings. Yet, sovereign space organized horizontally allows the divided political subject can reconstitute itself relative to other such subjects in the course of the action that materialized that space. These subjects’ mutual constitution opens up countless of possibilities for being/becoming. We are thus drawn to sovereign action precisely because it grants us the opportunity to unify our erstwhile divided selves in new ways as we jointly constitute spaces of appearance with others. In this mode, sovereignty realizes our political capacity for new beginnings. Tied to the Schmittian perspective, even in critique, we will fail to fully grasp what draws people to action. Despite the risks, horizontal sovereignty is the vehicle through which we become distinct and unique persons. Academics must explain this phenomenon, which occurs on its own accord, in order to make it central to a mainstream understanding of political life.