Assembling No: Remarks on Diaspora and Intransitivity
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[1] Diaspora, imagined in terms of a people that belong both to a place of departure and to a place of arrival, is implicitly transitive. Narrated in these terms, a diasporic people is defined by being in-between two places, by a transitive zone of indeterminacy. It is marked, at its arrival-place, by its belonging to another (departure-)place, and thus as not fully belonging to the (arrival-)place; it is marked, at its departure-place, by its belonging to another (arrival-)place, and thus as not fully belonging to the (departure-)place.1 To be in-between departure and arrival is to be in-between places of belonging. This in-between is simultaneously articulated as a belonging-too-much (belonging to more than any one given place) and a belonging-not-enough (failing to belong to any one given place)—the both/and valence of diaspora is likewise a neither/nor valence.
Such mutual implication of non-belonging and double-belonging may be approached in a variety of ways. Some might take a relatively melancholic cast by attending to the impossibilities of non-belonging, whereas others might take a more productivist cast by attending to the hybrid potentialities of double-belonging. Yet regardless of how one evaluates the mutual implication of non-belonging and double-belonging, what is left in place is the assumption of diaspora as transitive. To foreground the impossibilities of non-belonging, or to foreground the potentialities of double-belonging—and certainly to propose a dialectic between these two emphases—is to leave untouched the assumptive logic of transitivity. All of these approaches pursue means of addressing diaspora’s transitivity, but none of them pursue a logic of diaspora that would be autonomous from transitivity. An intransitive logic of diaspora is left off the map.
[2] The disambiguation of diaspora from transitivity requires more precise attention to the apparently definitive “in-between” of diaspora. One can imagine this in-between as conceptually prior to its articulation in terms of non-belonging and double-belonging: if a diasporic people does not belong, or if a diasporic people belongs to more than one place, then this is because it is a people already defined by transitivity’s passage, its in-between. It is the definitive transitivity of a diasporic people that renders it peculiar to two places. While this peculiarity comes to be articulated in [End Page 155] terms of non-belonging and/or double-belonging, such failure to properly belong is the effect of defining a logically prior “in-between.”
All this is to observe the sense in which proper belonging is defined in opposition to transitivity. If transitivity gives rise to non-belonging and double-belonging—to a failure to properly belong—then this is because proper belonging is already defined as being-without-transitivity, as being at that place without-arrival and without-departure. Such mutual exclusivity between transitivity and proper belonging would entail that those who properly belong have no transitivity, no narrative of arrival and departure. Yet there are those who do properly belong even as they are very much shaped by arrival and departure (most evidently in the “immigrant” narrative of the USA). Given this proper belonging of those with a history of transitivity, what is at stake is clearly something other than a simple fact of transitivity. The distinction between proper belonging and transitivity must then be further determined: the transitivity that defines diaspora is not transitivity as simple fact, but rather transitivity as mark of deviance. In other words, the transitivity that is determinative of diaspora is one that is made to appear transitive precisely insofar as it deviates from or fails to accord with proper belonging, or “community.”
The term “community,” while undoubtedly complex, is used here simply to indicate belonging that is a matter of being-in-common; community here names a belonging that establishes itself through determination of that which deviates from or fails to accord with being-in-common. This distinction between being-in-common and deviation or failure is what conditions the articulation of transitivity: prior to any simple fact of transitivity, there...
