China, the Oceanic, and the Compromised
Three modes for relation
Hentyle Yapp
The logic of immunity has long shaped how nations perceive and pursue their own security, yet its efficacy is shifting. Despite this shift, most states continue to govern within this established framework. Within an immunity paradigm, China and the U.S. imagine each other as an external threat to their respective security. For the U.S., a nation is either a liberal friend or communist foe, part of the inside order or outside—a relic of the Cold War as reinforced through the logic of immunity. A key component of this paradigm is the notion that one must maintain a national body that is presumed normatively able, secure, and free from contagion; the goal then is for immunity to keep the national body untainted.
However, ecological devastation, along with the COVID-19 pandemic, has furthered the need to think beyond this dominant immunity paradigm. Nation-states increasingly cannot protect the communal body from an external threat through walls, borders, and bans. Climate change has forced nation-states to rethink many of the established approaches they have historically deployed to counter perceived threats. Pollution through air and water, alongside viral particulate matter, permeate literal and metaphorical walls. The structure of immunity that relies on an inside versus outside, self versus other, and subject versus object cannot fully stand. Yet, as illustrated during the global management of COVID-19, the U.S. and other nations responded by reinforcing political borders through travel bans; China sought to block the entrance of the virus by tracking frozen foods from abroad, among other means, to keep the virus out of the nation during lockdown. Further, nation-states and private companies fund projects that attempt to block solar rays or trap carbon, as if these are enemies to be deflected or captured. These attempts, however, throw off the ecological balance and avoid the larger issue of changing how we live beyond rampant growth and consumerism. The reliance on immunity governance predominates so that we maintain our imbalanced ways of living, even as ubiquitous threats are changing the very notion of security. Some nation-states initially succeeded in using immunity governance to thwart the entrance of the COVID-19 virus, since their location as island nations (notably, Taiwan and New Zealand) provided the means to limit entrance—the ocean became their walled border. Some of these technological advances to manage the environment will provide some, although momentary, relief. Nonetheless, as the demands for capitalist global circulation and constant growth press on, we see that immunity governance has its limits with regard to viruses and ecological devastation. Immunity certainly continues to assist in understanding the operations of our world. However, new modes of insecurity are emerging in the contemporary that require states to reconsider how and whether they can effectively respond through established means.
Contemporary insecurity, or challenges to a state’s sense of national security, shift how governing structures respond to crisis. As threats evolve from state-based competition to more ubiquitous and shared concerns like viruses and environmental damage, there’s a networked and shared spread in the tense of the present or the present tense. Is an untainted or uncompromised national body even possible today? What happens when we all seem to be insecure, and how might this change the idea of security itself?
Of course, insecurity is unevenly distributed, and the results of climate change can be predominantly traced to first world capitalist extraction and production. Nonetheless, the spread and ubiquity of insecurity permeate beyond national borders, where the U.S. conceptualizes China not only as a competitor but also as one of many partners in feeling the effects of today. This shift toward contemporary insecurity brings nation-states closer in relation to one another—a relationality whereby threat, albeit unevenly distributed along lines of social difference and the international division of labor, nonetheless come to be shared across boundaries. However, this form of relation is not one that is positive or akin to a sort of solidarity; instead, this relation points to the fractures and difficulties with being together—the negativity of relationality. To put it differently, how do we imagine being in relation as insecurity saturates and permeates beyond the established structures and logics of the nation-state?
Despite the fact that security has primarily been structured by and limited to the confines of the state, we must also grapple with the inherent negativity of relationality in this collective world. This negativity is further amplified by shifts away from immunity governance and its limited presumptions around existing as fully protected, uncompromised, and untainted from the outside. I think with three entangled modes to help illustrate what it means to exist within this relational negativity: China, the oceanic, and the compromised. Each of these notions deserves its own respective unpacking, but I bring them together in order to highlight the need to think alongside immunity in ways that attend to changes in insecurity. Having people feel secure isn’t inherently a bad thing. However, the sense of security that we have experienced (however uneven, depending on axes of difference and global divisions) is greatly shifting. Further, national security as an apparatus often upholds an unstated yet established Cold War order. Focusing on this order and how threat is perceived is critical in reimagining a different way to do things (a perhaps new, if you believe in that idea, or amended way). My main goal, however, in pursuing this line of inquiry is to think with the descriptive in terms of what this type of relation in negativity, or in insecurity, is. Ultimately, by doing so, we can begin the longer prescriptive work of producing different ways of existing and governing ourselves, as our understanding of the negative and the oceanic shift our ways of living and senses of being.
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The immunity paradigm, with its reliance on an outside threat, is far from neutral. Its logics benefit an older Western-dominated order of Pax Britannica and Pax Americana, as exemplified by the tenets and presumptions of a field like International Relations. Jacques Derrida emphasizes the upholding of this order amid the insecurity following September 11, 2001. He unpacks the very concept of rogue states as benefitting a Western-oriented order, whereby the states acting the most roguish (i.e. enacting crimes against humanity and ignoring the rights of sovereign nations and people) were and usually are those like the U.S. and Israel which rely on the framing of the non-West, particularly Orientalized Arab nations, as rogue:
Leaving aside whatever questions this might raise, we must recognize that this incalculable dignity, which Kant sometimes called “sublime,” remains the indispensable axiomatic, in the so-called globalization [mondialisation] that is under way, of the discourses and international institutions concerning human rights and other modern juridical performatives. Consider, for example, the concept of a crime against humanity, or else the project of the International Criminal Court that this concept inspired, a project that is still opposed by the interests of so many sovereign nation-states (from the United States to Israel, and sometimes even France), who, by reason of these interests, are intent on holding on to their sovereignty.
Immunity logics have historically upheld a capitalist first world order, whereby its participating states and their attendant international organizations (IMF, WTO, etc.) that enable a presumed global world, funnel the majority of benefits to themselves. This International Relations immunity paradigm follows changes in the meaning of security itself.
“When the order of things that benefits the West and its proxy nations becomes off-kilter, the idea of security expands to accommodate our ideas of the state.”
Security’s original meaning involves being free from care or anxiety. This archaic mid-fifteenth-century notion has shifted to its current definition as the state of being free from danger or threat or a negative affect. The stakes around security increased during the latter half of the twentieth century. The etymology of security shifts in meaning beginning in 1941 to consider the safety of a state or person, and by 1965, during the height of anticolonial movements across the world, the term begins to take on a more state-based definition. It is of no coincidence that the close association of the nation-state with security arises during the Second World War and amidst global decolonization efforts. Security consolidates around a state-based meaning during the time when the colonial and imperial projects belonging to Pax Britannica and Pax Americana come to be challenged. When the order of things that benefits the West and its proxy nations becomes off-kilter, the idea of security expands to accommodate our ideas of the state. These changes in security thus coincide with the Cold War and a world increasingly defined by an inside of capitalism and an outside of communism. And for much of the past century, China has had a shifting and complex place within this cartographic dance. China has become central to this world in ways that provide a key example for understanding when those who are considered outside an immunity order can become integral participants within it. In other words, China demonstrates the need not only to continue thinking with the concept of immunity but also to push beyond it.
In this new order, known as the Beijing Consensus (a term established in the early 2000s and further developed by Petrus Liu), the previous world order does not simply expand to include new nations like China. China reforms the operations of the immunity paradigm. From within the immunity paradigm, China produces a new dominant order, as it builds relations with those nation-states, oft-considered “rogue,” that have been left out of the previous Western order. BRICS is an intergovernmental organization, composed of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Iran, and other nations, that has facilitated not only trade but also a geopolitical bloc. This organization is meant to counter and challenge the dominance of NATO and those tasked to manage global affairs. Although China has been understood by some to be entering Empire (part of a supranational network), this framework continues to understand China primarily within a Western order rather than fully grappling with the effects of this shifting notion of inside and out. Despite its entrance into global organizations like the WTO and IMF, China, alongside Russia and other nations, are rearranging what comes to be considered the inside and outside. Although China and others continue to further the ongoing Cold War logic of another axis (another immunity side that is comprised of the Rest versus the West, to use Stuart Hall’s astute taxonomy), they are simultaneously rearranging the terms of this order, particularly with their experiments with state capitalism and privatization. Further, with changes in the location of capital accumulation centered in China and other parts of Asia, a certain order of capital production is upheld but its operations are moving beyond the workings of a single supranational frame. This distinct orientation certainly upholds globalization, but it also reconfigures the distribution of in/security.
As such, it is important to think beyond immunity and its attendant structures. China helps us to engage a more relational idea that works beyond a framing of inside versus outside, particularly with regard to insecurity. In particular, China evokes a sense of living relationally through its oceanic presence. China induces what Sigmund Freud describes through the oceanic as “a feeling, then, of being indissolubly bound up with and belonging to the whole of the world outside oneself.” Freud’s definition of the oceanic in Civilization and Its Discontents attempts to describe a metaphysical religious affect. Although the oceanic is usually understood as part of a subject’s psychic development and relationship to an outside source like religion,[1] I use it here to think about the negativity of relationality, particularly with regard to geographic space. The oceanic indexes the spread of threat that operates beyond the terms of immunity. By naming the ubiquity of threat through shared global challenges, along with the need to move beyond China within an immunity framework, I direct us to think about China within the world as something relational. Relationality, however, has often been understood within a more positivist framing that focuses on shared allegiances and collaboration that seek to produce a coalition- and alliance-based world. Although this positive side of relationality is certainly crucial to consider, we often focus on the positive at the expense of the negative. The negativity of relationality is the difficulty of what it means to be subject to a shared ubiquitous threat. And in turn, the negativity of relationality also explores how we accept, engage, and live in a shared world that is compromised. As many of our own familial relations demonstrate, the relational often becomes fractured with difficulty, anger, resentment, and a whole host of negative affects. What might happen if we think more with the negativity of relationality, particularly as it helps us move beyond an immunity paradigm? After all, what do we consider a threat to the inside or what happens to the idea of an outside, when we have a crisis in common? What happens to the idea of threat or an outside within the oceanic, where we are all implicated and compromised (albeit, of course, in different ways and to differing degrees)?
In addition to the oceanic, Freud, in the same text, connects psychic experience with physical space. He provides a lurid thought experiment: “Now, let us make the fantastic assumption that Rome is not a place where people live, but a psychical entity with a similarly long rich past, in which nothing that ever took shape has passed away, and in which all previous phases of development exist beside the most recent.” If we replace Rome with China, we obtain a sense of how a physical space like China becomes a psychical presence. If anything, China has continually existed as a flattened space and time for the West, as an oceanic psychical entity.[2] China’s oceanic contours induce the West to exist outside itself; China is the West’s constitutive outside. Most theorists building off of Freud, from Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan, focus on the negative of the oceanic through notions of lack and melancholy. Although Jackie Wang provides a helpful reorientation of the oceanic toward positive modes of relation, I seek to return to this negative genealogy in a way that helps us more fully theorize relation as a concept. If we are all under differential yet proliferated modes of threat and thus related through negativity, what happens to our sense of who is considered inside or out that has undergirded the immunity paradigm? China helps us track the idea of the oceanic, as being bound up with and belonging to all others, where we shift from the immunity paradigm of inside and outside toward a negative relationality. China as oceanic and our world as relational deflate the idea of an absolute outside. What happens, then, to the idea of threat when the outside recedes?
Many have helped us rethink the immunity paradigm through relational politics and affect. Ed Cohen traces how immunity emerges as a legal concept and becomes one that links science and medicine to the law. Mel Chen’s work on animacy rewrites immunity in ways that reconsider how the human and the nonhuman animate one another beyond a simple subject and object differentiation. Cohen and Chen both remind us to historicize immunity and other paradigms in terms of scale, time, and place. They also emphasize the need to reformulate immunity in ways that shift subject and object relations. To put it within the terms of this essay, the oceanic and relational allow us to reconsider how we differentiate subject from object, inside from outside, and self from other: the structural terms for immunity. The oceanic and the relational thus renegotiate the immunity paradigm itself. However, the oceanic does not simply flatten these central terms (subject, object, inside, and outside) to be equivalent. We must deflate the very singularity placed upon these ideas, rather than simply flatten them. I resist the urge to fully equate subject with object in order to work against a theorization of relation that simply means we’re all in this together—a flat ontology turned simplistic relationality. There are material and historic differences across the inside and outside; US and China; West and the Rest; and subject and object. If we instead hold onto difference while simultaneously finding relation, we can obtain a more thorough model to track and understand contemporary insecurity as negative and ubiquitous. Upholding our current idea of security requires an immunity paradigm that reinforces overly strict distinctions between outside and inside, subject and object.
“China as oceanic and our world as relational deflate the idea of an absolute outside. What happens, then, to the idea of threat when the outside recedes?”
However, threat and insecurity have become distributed to a point where the boundaries around protected inside and threatening outside are receding. What is a threat when the legibility of immunity’s outside is reduced or rendered translucent (not obscured per se)? The material differences with China and the other cannot be flattened and rendered equivalent to the subjectivities that have been repeatedly granted to the West. Flat ontologies cannot be sustained, especially when we consider history and the continual and expanding uneven distribution of life. Instead, if we render the boundaries of these entities to be less solidified (not fully dissipated), then our sense of security shifts toward the relational. Through the oceanic, we come to understand ourselves as always relationally insecure, albeit differentially. And importantly, these differential relations, or what we might call facts of history, are crucial to maintain and remember, as they can guide how we work toward the prescriptions that will change our ways of living, existing, and governing.
By considering China as oceanic, alongside the changes in the diffuseness of insecurity, we are given the opportunity to rethink how we conceptualize the world beyond inside and outside and self and other without simply rendering them equivalent (a relationality that makes us all equal or simply one shared humanity). This relationality isn’t premised on the idea that we are all in this together and that we just need more collaboration to fix the problem. Rather, this oceanic relation points to the fact that we are perhaps all doomed in this together. We are relational from within the negative. The ubiquity of negativity points to a condition, where threat is not the exception but the norm—a threat ordinary of sorts, to riff off Lauren Berlant’s idea of the crisis ordinary. When threat becomes ordinary to a bodily form, corporeal or national, we might think of this condition akin to the compromised. It is of no coincidence that thinkers like Cohen and Chen help us reimagine bodily and nation-state immunity forms through concerns around disability and illness. From this vantage point, to be compromised or immunocompromised directs us to the permeation, saturation, and ubiquity of threat. This is what we seem to share in common.
Within immunity, a threat is something to be managed; and responses seek to be rid of the outside threat. Within the negative oceanic, a threat becomes part of everyday life, and responses must then operate in more complex ways that work beyond borders and bans. Within the oceanic, individual and social bodies are always compromised and threats are thus part of everyday existence (rather than exceptions to it). To be compromised means to be always in a negativity that cannot be simply transcended into a more positive state (“it gets better” does not seem to be a mantra worth pursuing). Rather, one must linger in the conditions of difficulty inherent to being in relation, to being in the oceanic. The state of being compromised illustrates an unevenly distributed but nonetheless ubiquitous way of living with insecurity. When one is compromised, threats are not simply something from the outside to be managed but rather always part of living. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we witnessed a shift for those compromised in terms of how risk comes to be managed and allocated: from the individual to the state. For a moment, some states took responsibility to assist in the management of the compromised through the closure of public spaces, a briefly nationalized and subsidized healthcare system, and other means. Although the initial public awareness around immunocompromised populations has dwindled and the state’s capacity for substantive public health responses has been decimated, the general public awareness around those compromised offers a glimmer (admittedly, a very small one) of hope for understanding life beyond the immunity paradigm. We have now fully returned to an individualized, privatized risk management model for the compromised. However, I turn us to the oceanic and the state of being compromised to remind us of what else might or ought to be: the prescriptive. Society has divested from state-based forms of risk management. However, the COVID-19 pandemic offered a real glimpse of what it might mean to understand us as collectively compromised, albeit of course differentially.
We exist in relation through the oceanic, whereby negative affects are part of the everyday. As such, we readjust and linger and work from within the oceanic. Rather than creating a paradigm that avoids negativity, we might then instead acquiesce to it. Acquiescence does not simply ward off negativity but understands it as a way of life. Being (immuno)compromised offers a model of acquiescence that is not simply about submitting and accepting. Instead, the state of being compromised signals the ability to work through a process and to delve further in. Acquiescence involves acceptance without opposition only after going through and feeling discontent. In other words, acquiescence involves getting into the muck of negativity. The acquiescence of the compromised is not passive or nihilistic; it does not flatten a desire for change, political or otherwise. Rather, the acquiescence of the (immuno)compromised attends to negativity through a process that works beyond a simple acceptance or rejection; resistance or submission. Instead, through negativity in relation, we enter a process that grapples with the realities at hand and forces a reconfiguration of how we structure everyday life.
The compromised and the oceanic offer a view of the world that is not structured around an older model of immunity, whereby there is an outside threat from an untainted inside. Instead, they allow us to see that we are all ultimately compromised, albeit differentially. We might attempt to distance ourselves from this reality, and indeed, we certainly see nation-states doing so through greenwashing, the furtherance of ableist policies, and pure denial, amongst other means. However, the state of being compromised is one that many populations have been experiencing for some time, particularly those existing within classed forms of social difference and across many transnational locations outside the West. This compromised condition continues to expand as insecurity becomes more and more ubiquitous and relational. China as oceanic allows us to track these changes toward a negative relationality that highlights the condition of being compromised. Together, these modes index how risk, negativity, and insecurity are central rather than exceptions to living. Living in negativity and with ubiquitous threat binds you with others. These modes of relation will not necessarily unite nation-states to work against a common cause through some utopic pipe dream of rallying against climate change or some larger entity. Negative relation will not unify humanity to act as a single cohesive polity. Instead, negative relation highlights both the historic disparities across populations and the furtherance of these uneven ways of living. And these disparities are now being felt in places and populations where they have historically been delayed through the structures of capital, immunity, and security. But now, we are experiencing the fact that there is no exit, no way out. Instead, there is only further in. To go further in requires that we view things for what they are and from where and when they came—from histories of dispossession and the ever-expanding reproduction of the compromised.
[1] Jackie Wang provides a helpful overview of this longer genealogy around the oceanic and subject. Jackie Wang, “Oceanic Feeling & Communist Affect,” Giulia Tofana the Apothecary December 2016: loneberry.tumblr.com/post/153995404787/oceanic-feeling-and-communist-affect
[2] For an understanding of China as oceanic, there is additional language to help theorize the negativity of relationality. Networks, clouds, rhizomes, and constellations are key terms that provide much-needed direction to track bounded forms of negativity. For purposes of this short essay, I will not develop these ideas here. For direction, see Ting-Hui Hu, A Prehistory of the Cloud (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016).