Off the Grid : Environmental Degradation and Citizenship at the Margins

We thank the Federal Ministry for Education and Research for generous funding. 1 " If it is not in the file, it does not exist. " Indian bureaucrat, quoted in Akhil Gupta, " Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence , and Poverty in India " " Squares, markets, roads, bridges, rivers: these are the critical points in the territory which police will mark out and control. " Pasquale Pasquino, " Theatrum Politicum: Genealogy of Capital – Police and the State of Prosperity " 1. Introduction A widely known anecdote of 11 th century King Canute has it that he once put up his throne at the seashore and demanded the waters to spare him. 1 Obviously, the waves would neither halt nor flow around his seat. Thus, they served as a graceful reminder of the limitations of worldly power in the world; of the irrelevance of kingly conduct when it comes to waves and tides. The conclusions drawn from the anecdote vary greatly. Assuming that the king was actually trying to command the waves, some use the anecdote to illustrate kingly vanity and its necessary failure and suggest that contemporary climate realpolitik falls into the same trap (n.a. 2014). Others read this incident as a staged performance of humility and have it that King Canute ceased, henceforth, to bear royal insignia as truly the king could only be He who creates and masters nature, i.e. God (see e.g. Raglan 1960). As a spectacle either of vanity or humility, the anecdote draws attention to a set of questions I will engage in this paper. It invokes the intricate relationship of statecraft and nature as it emerges through the persistent problem of hazardous, unruly and encroaching environments. The latest avatar of which is anthropogenic climate change. Threatening lifestyles, ecosystems or planetary life itself, it is now commonly thought as having severe repercussions for the sphere of politics itself. Against this background there is much agreement today on the need to rework economic arrangements, modes of governance or horizons of justice. These involve a reordering of political relations in their respective ways. Yet, the converse seems to be true, too. For environmental changes, including anthropogenic climate change, have to be understood as reworking the sphere of the political itself. Using the anecdote's figuration as metaphor, let me put it this way: Licking at the throne the tides enforce fraught reconfigurations of what the state …