Outside in the Nation Machine: The Case of Kuwait

Abstract

The title of my chapter alludes to Gayatri C. Spivak’s collection of essays called Outside in the Teaching Machine. Spivak’s paradoxical title refers speciŽcally to the position occupied by the “postcolonial” critic or teacher in Western academic institutions, a position simultaneously inside and outside the teaching apparatus. For Spivak, marking the strange doubleness of this position—its status within hegemonic cultural institutions as a perpetual outside— demonstrates a commitment to “persistent critique” not only of the “postcolonial” critic’s own position but also of the discipline more generally (Spivak 1993, p. 61). Her choice of the word “machine” as a metonym for “apparatus” or “institution” immediately brings to mind the usage of the term by French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, though Spivak herself does not establish this connection. When Deleuze and Guattari use the term “machine,” they do not necessarily imply a mechanical or technological object or construction. A “machine” can be understood as a network of relations or an assemblage of forces (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). There are many different kinds of machines that constitute a variety of different effects, which Deleuze and Guattari talk about in terms of territoriality. For example, the state apparatus, as one of the most rigid and predominant forms of political organization in the modern world, is linked to an “overcoding” or “reterritorializing” machine (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, pp. 448–460). It limits potential connections and alternative forms from taking shape within a given space because it is constantly coding people, places, and institutions in ways that are aligned with the worldwide machine of global capitalism. However, a “war machine,” in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense, is understood as a “deterritorializing” machine that betrays the state apparatus in one way or another. It does not refer to a literal state of war or to a war-making machine in the sense of a military–industrial complex; though certainly, as I will argue in this chapter, wars may be assembled with war machines (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). To return to Spivak’s notion of the “outside,” a war machine is that which is exterior to the state but which simultaneously reveals the contingency of the state’s interiority. I would like to demonstrate the applicability of Deleuze and Guattari’s model of the war machine to the Gulf State of Kuwait. First, I will analyze the various ways in which Kuwait as a nation-state organizes its sense of citizenship and national identity in terms of interiority. Second, I will explore how the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990 deterritorialized the nation-state in more ways than one, as well as what effects this deterritorialization has had on the