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Paper short abstract:

Utilizing the concept of dividuality to explore a Rohingya-run social enterprise that uses blockchain technology to generate quasi-legal identities for stateless subjects, the paper considers the opportunities and limitations of such experiments in enacting "post-Sovereign" spaces and lives.

Paper long abstract:

Since Mauss anthropologists have explored how subjectivity is generated by and tied up in collectivities, with Strathern elaborating ‘dividuality’ to describe the ways that persons are constituted by material objects co-produced with others. Deleuze, however, describes dividuality differently: as the outcome of ‘societies of control’ that atomize subjects beyond the individual, rendering them partible data available for reinscription (in things, in data flows). These versions have rarely been thought together; Appadurai for instance only mobilizes “socialized dividualism” (Strathernian) to preempt “predatory dividuation” (Deleuzian). In contrast, I describe a Rohingya-run social enterprise that uses blockchain technology to generate quasi-legal identities for stateless subjects, identities that seek to enable them to access bank accounts and loans. The intermediation of the Rohingya dividual by its representation on blockchain shows that only through the interpolation of the body by the thing (data) can the former achieve legal personhood; only by engaging the Deleuzian kind of dividuality, in which Rohingya are rendered into code, does the Strathernian kind get invested with the affordances that Rohingya seek: where their lives signify beyond both the Rohingya community and the realm of sovereign exclusion. By proposing an in(dividual) more recognized in its encoded form than its bodily version, such that the ‘virtual’ is the primary substrate on which body and political identity rest, the project inverts liberal presumptions of how bodies relate to the social/political (and by extension to sovereignty), suggesting that bodily intermediation through digital encoding anticipates a more generalized global political subjectivity on the horizon.