States in motion: Power and naming in the relations among Indonesia, Australia, and the United States

For centuries, the world has been plagued by a seemingly interminable war to name states. This dissertation argues that the certainty that agents of global theory and practice would hope to achieve by naming states as being sovereign fails because of the ambiguity of the rules of naming and the logic of exemplarity by which naming proceeds. The rules of naming involve a double injunction to name states as sovereign, and to name them by translation according to the available languages of global politics. Such translations are made by people who engage in exemplary conduct. By adhering to the norm of deferring to the power of the examples that they posit in support of their claims to sovereignty, these people name states as being sovereign and, at the same time, translate the sovereign name into examples that are understandable, but only in the languages of political power. Such naming therefore excludes the movement of people and ideas (the multiple modalities of human life) that are considered to be outside those languages---that are, in effect, considered to be unworthy of naming. Exemplary conduct occurs during states of emergency, such as the Indonesian Civil War of 1958, that are said to be isolated instances of a failure to adhere to the rules of naming and the norms of exemplary conduct. The Americans and Australians engaged in what has been called "subversion as foreign policy" in their intervention in the Indonesian Civil War. The effects of the Civil War and of Western intervention contributed to the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people not only in the 1950s but also in the decades to follow. The war to name Indonesia demonstrates that naming states cannot be settled, once and for all, in a performance of naming by the power of the example. By their own ambiguity, the rules of naming and the logic of exemplarity are already open to contestation and to question. This opening suggests a further opening to the question of the responsibility to name states. Naming responsibly should proceed as an ongoing critique of the all too often exclusionary practice of naming that, until now, has dominated global life. Such a critique begins in a return, such as the one offered in this dissertation, to those others of the name whose unnameable movement has been rejected in favor of the power of the example and the principle of sovereignty, but whose movement is paradoxically that which naming requires. Naming responsibly should proceed not by way of the translation of the proper (sovereign) name of states into the common nouns of exemplary conduct, but rather through translation as a transference, that is, the transformation of the languages of global political practice and the languages of the multiple modalities of human life. These languages, like states that might be named as being sovereign, are, in fact, in motion. This dissertation recommends the emergence of the languages of responsibility through an interminable critique of the seemingly interminable war of naming states.