Sarah Green’s (2005) account of the Balkans that describes external discourse that insists “the region is fluidity and indeterminacy personified, right on the surface, a completely explicit fog, as it were” (2005: 12). It challenges modernist accounts of statist drives to clarity, but are also partly reproduced locally, and, as Green suggests, partly constitute lived experience. Both Green’s book and Matei Candea’s (2010) on Corsican identity, which also works through external and internal insistence on indeterminacy and partiality, are themselves presented as provisional, open-ended, and fragmentary.
6. Thus despite the fact that capitalism and state socialism have been ideologically portrayed as opposites, Susan Buck-Morss emphasized how, in the twentieth century, these two forms of organization were profoundly entwined, sharing eighteenth-century philosophical roots and a passionate belief in the emancipatory potential of industrial production for creating mass utopia (2000). Earlier, Keith Hart flagged the ideological projection of difference between capitalism and socialism during the Cold War while they had never been closer in practice (1992).
7. Note also Andrew Sanchez and Christian Strümpell (2014) for a different setting of prescriptive Marxist thought.
8. Although Bataille uses both surplus and excess in The Accursed Share (1991), there is a sense that it is the latter, as superabundance, which forces expenditure, or wasting-as-luxury (or sacrifice and war). Excess is the accursed share.
9. See Charles Taylor’s 1992 account of contemporary political demands for recognition on the grounds that recognition and identity are fundamentally linked.
10. Or highlight alternative classificatory systems and discursive formations historically (Foucault 1994) and through ethnographic comparison.
11. Article 1 of The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees defines a refugee as someone who has fled his or her country “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion” and sets out the legal obligations of governments toward such people.
12. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous paradox for rule-following encapsulates some of the experiences explored in our chapters of attempts to engage with the state and its representatives: “This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. The answer was: if everything can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here” (2001 [1953]: 69). We are grateful to Diana Vonnak for this observation.
13. Thus one might see David Harvey’s concept of capitalism’s spatial fix (1981) as having a second movement. If the first is to acquire more space, more territory to fuel the constant expansion inherent to capitalism, then the irrecoverable wasting of land from unsustainable resource extraction also drives the “need” to acquire more resource-rich land (see also Gidwani 2013).
14. This is taken further in Tsing’s analysis of the potent imaginary of “the entrepreneur” in supply chain capitalism where sweatshop workers may hopefully imagine themselves as potentially rich entrepreneurs (2013: 159) and, in recruiting family members, further blur the fuzzy line between self- and superexploitation (2013: 167n28).
15. This, of course, as Joshua Reno points out (pers. comm.), is the fetishized ideal type of neoliberal ideology whereas (see Birch 2015), arguably, the monopoly capitalist who undergirds global capitalism is concerned with determinacy, predictability, and limiting risk where possible.
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