posted under
Angelique Haugerud
,
biolegitimacy
,
biopower
,
Critical Inequalities
,
Didier Fassin
,
Jeremy Varon
,
Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan
,
Margaret Somers
,
Mary Romero
,
Patricia Williams
,
Siobhan Somerville
by Unit for Criticism
Written by Jenn Baldwin (Medicine/Anthropology)
Over the last two months, through the faculty/graduate seminar organized by the Unit for Criticism, we have engaged with the subject of this conference through a range of different disciplines, theoretical frameworks, and the impressive scholarship of many of our conference participants about the real world contexts they each study. And in reflecting on the scholarship and discussion from the last two days, I want to revisit the two terms that brought us all together: Critical Inequalities.
To many of us in the audience the term “critical” refers to a theoretical mode of engagement, a critique. Critique engages us in the necessary task of cultivating theoretical models and analytics that allow us to move back and forth between particular contexts and wider shared experiences, between the micro and macro manifestations of historical and global processes. But the term “critical” also references an analysis of the role of power in shaping social formations and experiences.
For example, critical medical anthropology, my own discipline, seeks to evaluate the body as a political site, with material and symbolic qualities that are produced through and made the subject of power relations. Well-recognized scholarship includes Paul Farmer’s work and interventions in medicine that demonstrate how social inequalities powerfully sculpt the distribution of infectious diseases like HIV and tuberculosis as well as health outcomes among the infected. As Farmer notes, “in a very real way, inequality itself constitutes [a] modern plague” and a “pathogenic force.” At the conference in May, Didier Fassin’s harrowing statistics told a comparable story regarding the disparate rates of chronic conditions and life expectancies experienced by individuals who occupy different racial and class positions.
Fassin’s work on biolegitimacy also makes an important intervention into the Foucauldian concept of biopower. He argues that Foucault’s biopower addresses the governmentality of life itself which is defined as le vivant, or life-as-biology following the work of Georges Canguilhem. Instead, Fassin wishes for us to analyze life as such which he defines as life that is lived (le vécu--biographical, and embedded in political choices and moral economies. Fassin argues that to talk about biolegitimacy rather than biopower is to emphasize the stakes of the game rather than the rules. Discussing biolegitimacy in his keynote address, Fassin revealed the inherent contradictions between rhetoric upholding the equality of all men and the disparate meanings, values, and treatment assigned to particular lives.
In the world of medicine, the term “critical” also references a particular bodily state. Being in a “critical condition” denotes a vulnerable status of severity, acuity, and precarity. To the medical profession, it indexes a dangerous deviation from a state of balance in which the body is no longer able to flexibly regulate and adjust to changes in its internal and external environment. It is a deviation from a state conducive with living and the future. It warns that the individual’s prognosis is not favorable to and potentially incompatible with life.
In identifying these alternative meanings of “critical,” I am restating what we already know: when we talk about “critical” inequalities, we are often talking about relationships of power that render individuals and communities vulnerable--sometimes to the point of physical or social death. On an abstract level, inequalities are the products of large-scale social forces that have disparate effects on unequally positioned individuals. The work we addressed during the Critical Inequalities conference and seminar all points to the concrete and devastating effects of such inequalities. Specific examples from the presentations and scholarship discussed includes:
* Margaret Somers’ haunting images of the victims of Hurricane Katrina, along with her analysis of the increased risk, insecurities, and burdens that are borne by the poor and increasingly the middle class as a result of market fundamentalist policies that recode as deregulation those regulative policies that redistribute wealth to the rich.
* Jeremy Varon’s presentation which recalls the social vulnerability that inspired the anger of the Occupy Wall Street movement in the wake of the recent financial crisis and its accompanying soaring rates of unemployment and housing foreclosures.
* Patricia Williams’s writing on Trayvon Martin’s death and the struggle for justice within the courts, as well as her keynote address on the re-biologization of racism (thanks in part to a new book by the science editor of the New York Times), as well as the ongoing deployment of racial stereotypes in the media, by corporations, and society-at-large. Her scholarship vividly captured how these factors framed Martin's death, as well as the changing metrics for assigning value to (or we might say, devaluing) human life within increasingly neoliberal, privatized, and corporate moral economies.
* Rob Nixon’s published work on the protracted, slow deaths among this and future generations as a result of environmental degradation and climate change which provided yet another example of how inequality works to exacerbate environmental risk. Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan’s juridical and ethnographic analyses also revealed how environmental destruction poses a threat to social rights and collective identity.
My own work on US veterans returning home with war traumas suggests yet another set of asymmetrical effects: examples include the targeted recruitment of the urban and rural poor into our professional military, the epidemic of veteran suicides and homelessness resulting from these recent wars, and even a soldier’s predisposing risk for developing PTSD when he or she has had earlier exposures to trauma and violence including childhoods marked by poverty, domestic abuse, and other forms of overt and structural violence. Looking through the glass darkly also reveals the hidden companions to these veterans’ politically acknowledged traumas and injuries. It reveals the significant burdens of psychological trauma, physical injuries, and deaths of both private contractors and Iraqi civilians that are little recognized in our society.
In all of these ways, our engagement of this topic showed again and again that the task of critically countering the mechanisms and effects of inequality of various kinds requires a diverse disciplinary tool kit and multiple methodologies. Likewise, many of the talks demonstrated the importance of evaluating inequality at different scales: whether from the precious individual to the statistical population Fassin surveyed, from the local community and village courts to the national juridical arena assessed in Sivaramakrishnan’s work, or from national policies to their linkage with international trends as Siobhan Somerville analyzed.
Somers’ and Williams’ scholarship asks us to consider how ideologies that naturalize or biologize the status quo justify prejudicial treatment and the state’s lack of obligation to serve particular groups equally.
Mary Romero and Somerville highlight the need to compare—perhaps even to queer—our analyses of how the rights and citizenship of particular populations are framed. As their scholarship individually and collectively suggests, such analyses allow us to elucidate how the use or expansion of certain categories can result in the contraction of rights and possibilities for some groups, while also shoring up normative, or otherwise exclusionary ideologies and policies.
I would like to end with some questions that emerged in reflecting on the last two days: How do we or should we represent inequality? What are the necessary aesthetics of representation? What are the cognitive, affective, and political tasks that these representations should accomplish? Do some mediations or modes of representation harm rather than help, and how so?
Fassin contrasted the image of a “precious brown haired girl” with statistical renderings that alienate the personal and lived realities from the quantitative representation of inequality. Somers presented us with three slides regarding representation. The first one stated “this is what inequality looks like” and revealed a messy, complicated graph of statistical trends. The second slide announced “this is what inequality sounds like” and cited the sickening statistic that the top 1% of Americans captured 95% of the income gains in the first two years of the economic recovery. The third slide concluded with “this is what exclusion looks like” as a caption to an image of a victim of Hurricane Katrina, dead from flood waters she was unable to escape. Angelique Haugerud’s work offers an analysis of the aesthetics of satire and its use in social and political activism as performed in the Billionaires for Bush movement. Additionally, Sivaramakrishnan’s work offers another way of thinking about representation that suggests a more celebratory and optimistic modality through his documentation of the political and legal gains being made by those whose cultural identity and heritage is under threat by environmental degradation.
Yet, in reflecting on how to represent inequality, I am also reminded of Arthur and Joan Kleinman’s concern over the effects of the commodification of images of suffering and inequality via their global circulation and consumption. The Kleinmans warn that many of the mediations of inequality and suffering that populate nightly news stories and humanitarian campaigns risk alienating the consumers of these images (largely located in the global north) from their own complicity in the production and maintenance of inequality. Further, they warn against the tendency of representations of inequality and suffering to mask local agency and obfuscate from view the significant and necessary efforts made by local communities to intervene on behalf of their own members.
While I can posit no answers to the questions I raised, it is clear from both the Kleinmans’ cautionary remarks and the exemplary scholarship of our participants in this conference that much work lies ahead which will require both our heads and our hearts as we commit ourselves to understanding and representing critical inequalities, their causal mechanisms, and the solutions necessary for their extinction.
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A Common Milieu: Italian Thought After 1968 and 1989
Written by Timothy Campbell (Cornell University)
[Guest writer Timothy Campbell was a speaker at the Unit for Criticism's Spring 2010 conference, BIOS: Life, Death, Politics. His below "manifesto" on Italian thought is written in conjunction with Cornell University's upcoming September 24-25 conference, Commonalities: Theorizing the Common in Italian Thought. It also anticipates Roberto Esposito's October 2-5 visit to the University of Illinois as the Unit's first Nicholson Distinguished Visiting Scholar.]
For the better part of a decade the position of Italian thought in the Anglo-American academy has increasingly grown in importance. From issues as far ranging as bioethics and bioengineering, to euthanasia, to globalization, to theorizing gender, to the war on terror, works originating in Italy have played a significant, perhaps even the dominant, role in setting the terms and conditions of these debates. Indeed it might well be that no contemporary thought more than Italian enjoys greater success today in the United States. If twenty years of postmodernism and poststructuralism were in large measure the result of French exports to the United States—Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault—today a number of Italian philosophical exports are giving rise to a theoretical dispositif that goes under a variety of names: post-Marxist, posthuman, or most often biopolitical. Yet the fact that Italian thought enjoys such enormous success in the United States and elsewhere begs an important question, one put to me polemically recently by a prominent Italian philosopher. Is there really such a thing as contemporary Italian thought? And if there is what in the world do its proponents have in common?
By way of responding, it might be useful to recall some details about the recent reception of Italian thought in the American academy. In the aftermath of the end of the postmodern—which a number of American observers savored as spelling the end of the use and abuse of philosophy by large numbers of literary critics—two works appeared in English within a span of three years: Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire. Stepping into the void left by the departure of what in the United States was known as "theory," these works made a number of bold theoretical claims about the relation between political power and individual life (Agamben) and globalization and collective life (Hardt and Negri), claims that uncannily—sometimes almost prophetically—addressed some of the most pressing issues in our current state of affairs. Equally a number of important works of Italian feminism appeared over roughly the same period. Works by Adriana Cavarero and Rosi Braidotti, among others, deeply influenced a whole generation of American theorists in fields like gender studies, political philosophy, and law. Looking back it's difficult to overestimate the influence of all these figures when accounting for the intellectual success of Italian thought today. Certainly it became possible for other voices to be heard, Paolo Virno, and more recently Franco Berardi, Roberto Esposito, and Maurizio Lazzarato among others.
But to take up again the question at hand: what do authors as seemingly different as Agamben and Negri, Berardi and Esposito, Braidotti and Bodei, or Cavarero and Virno have in common outside of the mere fact of writing in Italian? Beyond a common language, is there, for example, such a thing as a common Italian philosophical tradition of which they are all a part? Some, most notably, Mario Perniola, would say yes, one found in the elements of repetition, transmission, mixture, and body that together forged an Italian philosophical culture over the last 300 years. Deleuze and Guattari would have said no, arguing that Italy has historically "lacked a milieu" for philosophy. For them the reason for this lack could be found in Italy's proximity to the Holy See, which continually aborted philosophy across the peninsula, reducing Italian thought to mere rhetoric, philosophy's shadow, and allowing only for the occasional "comet" to briefly light up the philosophical sky.
Yet what if Italian thought today does in fact enjoy a milieu? What "event" or "events" in the recent past might have fashioned a milieu for the emergence of Italian thought? What would the features of that milieu look like?
Undoubtedly, the decade-long Italian 1968 would have played the decisive role. The votes on abortion, the emergence of counterculture and student and feminist movements, and changes in 
labor and production all deeply changed the space in which politics—as well as philosophy—was practiced. Indeed one of the central features of the Italian 1968 was precisely the emphasis on politics as philosophy and philosophy as a form (among others) of politics. We can see this in the place 1968 and 1977 awarded political militancy; in the increasing prominence given to questions of subjectivization; and more broadly in the birth of new forms of social and political life separated from those that had previously dominated.
Yet Italy’s long 1968 wasn't enough on its own. It was only with 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall that politics and philosophy truly begin to pass intensely into each other, to stay with the language of Deleuze and Guattari. Although it may seem less the case for those writing in Italy, when seen from the outside 1989 was experienced as trauma more in Italy than in the rest of Europe. The result forced a number of thinkers to re-examine the fundamental political and philosophical categories that had underpinned decades if not centuries of thought: what meaning would the end of a certain form of common life have for politics, for philosophy, for culture? Such a calling into question of the previous understanding of the common had the effect of reterritorializing politics and philosophy under new terms and new problematics, one of which will be “life,” broadly speaking. It is only when 1968 is considered as the motor for deterritorialization of the common in political theory and philosophy and 1989 as the turn toward its reterritorialization as newly mapped by (among other things) biopolitical theory that something like a milieu is constructed for contemporary Italian thought.
This is not to say that proponents of Italian thought share the same understanding of the common or even celebrate it. Clearly they do not. Yet the centrality of the common raises a number of questions about Italian thought and Italian public life today. What does it mean to be or have in common in 2010? What are the effects of questioning the weight of shared life and what possible futures are there for the common? How might singularities be thought together so as to create new forms of life and what kinds of co-habitations or contaminations might reinforce these new forms of life? These kinds of questions are ones Italian thought, in all its diversity, has placed at the forefront of contemporary theory, questions that in turn raise fundamental questions about the nature of relationality and of a politics that would seek to strengthen relations and to extend them in order to create yet further relationality. Such is the force of Hardt and Negri’s discussion of the capacity for love near the end of Commonwealth, though one can well imagine others, including a capacity for play, for attention, and for compassion too.
Yet the relationality implicit in these new forms of shared life doesn't only lead to greater and more positive capacities for relationality among singularities. The deterritorialization of the common as biopolitics, the posthuman or even insurrection by no means conjures away the specter of power; thus with greater capacity on the one hand comes the possibility of more intense and invasive forms of power on the other. The question then becomes: how are new forms of the common that are being forged today—shared singularities, mirror neurons, impersonality—also being reterritorialized and recontained, and by whom? Is it possible that more intense forms of relationality might signal a return to the very terms that earlier critiques of the common had attempted to uncover? On the one hand the recent success of social networking sites like facebook suggests that new forms of virtual relations involving vast numbers of "friends" are not only possible but involve ever greater exposure to others. On the other hand such exchanges continue to be premised on the notion that my body and my opinions belong to me, what the Invisible Committee unforgetably characterized as treating "our Self like a boring box office," using whatever prosthesis is at hand "to hold onto an I." In such a neo-liberal scenario, the circulation of information, of goods, of persons, of persons as goods is taken to mean a return to a common mode of being-together. It's a film we've seen countless times before: the common's reinscription in contexts less open to affect that are continually based upon a conflation of connnectivity with more open modes of relating.
These questions among others will be the foundation for a two-day conference sponsored by the journal diacritics to be held on the campus of Cornell University on September 24-25, 2010. The conference, titled "Commonalities: Theorizing the Common in Italian Thought," will bring together a number of Italian voices so as to think together not only the relation between Italy and the common but to consider emerging forms of the common and common life today as well as consider the efficacy of a term like the common for a progressive (bio)politics. Equally, the event, the first of its kind of recent memory in the United States, is an occasion to register the state of Italian thought today. When seen from the other side of the Atlantic, no other contemporary thought more than Italian seems better suited today to offer what Foucault called an ontology of the present. At a minimum, and pace my doubting Italian philosopher, the editorial and intellectual success of Italian thought merits a closer look.
Featured at the conference will be some of the leading philosophical figures from Italy today, including Franco Berardi, Remo Bodei, Cesare Casarino, Ida Dominijanni, Roberto Esposito, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri. The conference will be transmitted over the internet at http://www.commonconf.com. A number of Cornell students will be blogging the conference live over the two days.
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posted under
biopower
,
esposito
,
feminism
,
foucault
by Unit for Criticism
Written by Samantha Frost (Political Science)
In responding to Penelope Deutscher’s Monday presentation, “Biopoliticized Maternity and the Trope of Immunization,” I want to briefly outline the questions and insights that animate her main argument and then offer some questions and observations that, hopefully, may provide the basis for our broader discussion.
Deutscher considers how we might understand the operations of biopower in feminisms in which claims to women’s reproductive rights are articulated in a language or rhetoric that participates in state racism: women must have control over their reproductive lives in order to ensure the vitality of the volk, the people, the racialized nation. Deutscher is interested in tracing how such feminisms participate in the unfolding of biopower. And of course, she finds that Foucault is not much of a direct help in his writings.
Foucault, it turns out, has a blind spot. When he analyzes sexuality, sex, and the biopolitical management of populations, he develops his insightful account of how biopower constitutes subjects, of how biopower’s elaboration forms the basis for resistance that is incorporated into the elaboration of biopower itself. In other words, there is no outside to power; instead we must speak of subjects’ redeployment or redirection of power, a redirection that doesn’t undermine or detract from power but rather enables subjects to use it to their relative advantage even as they become more enmeshed in its tentacles and operations. Now, what Deutscher points out is that when Foucault is confronted with questions about feminism, particularly as feminists have made claims about reproductive rights, he chokes, theoretically. In other words, whereas he talks of resistance to imperatives about sexuality in terms of the complex operations of biopower, he seems unable to draw on that analysis of power in talking of women’s resistance to imperatives vis a vis reproduction. Instead, he reverts to the language of defiance and counter-attack--a language that positions feminists as outside of and countering biopower and not as participating in it.
Deutscher marks this as a curious blindspot in Foucault’s thinking: for all his attention to sex, sexuality, and the biopolitical management of the life of the population, he does not seem to recognize that these turn on women’s reproductive capacities and that therefore the control and management of women’s reproductive lives is necessarily at the center of the operations of biopower.
For intellectual succor, Deutscher turns to Roberto Esposito’s effort to expand the political insights available through Foucault’s account of biopower. Esposito notes that biopolitics--the management and enhancement of life--is inextricably bound up with thanatopolitics--the dispensing and management of death. Indeed, he claims that each is the obverse of the other. However, Foucault and his commentators often disregard the obverse relationship between biopolitics and thanatopolitics, instead favoring analyses that point to either the productive or the destructive elements of biopower. Esposito suggests that the notion of immunity might be helpful to highlight the points of contact between the destructive and maximizing elements of biopower. With the immunity model of power, biopower divides itself, fights against itself, in order to preserve itself.
Deutscher argues that it might be helpful to analyze feminist politics of women’s reproductive rights through the model or trope of immunity. Within this model, as women’s reproductive capacities are harnessed for the purposes of enhancing the vitality of the race/nation, feminists deploy a language of rights and autonomy that is framed in terms of the vitality of the race and nation. Accordingly, feminists’ rights rhetoric participates both in their subjection to biopolitical imperatives as well as in the thanatopolitical designation of the unwanted racial others. It is not clear to me, in Deutscher’s analysis, whether the racialized feminisms are the relevant instance of biopower’s immunitary self-negation (feminism qua protest movement takes a form that serves or protects the biopolitical imperatives of the nation), or whether the racialization of the feminisms is the relevant instance of biopower’s immunitary self-negation (racialization is feminism’s effort to preserve itself in the face of biopolitical imperatives). In other words, insofar as it serves the biopolitical imperatives of the nation, feminists may make demands for women’s reproductive autonomy. Here, the racial other is sacrificed for the sake of the survival of feminism. Or perhaps both these immunitary moments are in play. So a question I have, then, is about where Deutscher locates this immune response.
A second question concerns the close relationship Foucault and Deutscher sketch between women’s reproduction and the racial interests of the state. If women are constituted as political subjects through biopolitical interest in and management of their reproductive capacities, are political claims about reproduction necessarily steeped in forms of racism? Given the analysis Deutscher wants to develop, is it possible to articulate non-racist feminist claims about women’s reproductive rights, or will they always be a reformulation of the racialized terms through which women’s reproductive capacities vehiculate racialized biopolitical imperatives?
A final question I have--it is perhaps more an observation than a question--concerns Esposito’s intention to use the immunitary model of power to develop what he calls an affirmative biopolitics. I have to say I am not yet clear what this might be. Part of me wants to say that it might be seen in those movements in which racialized others--those who are the subjects of thanatopolitics--redeploy the rhetoric of race to make claims for the right to have families--the right to give birth, to reproduce. I am thinking here of Latinas, Native Americans, or African-American women who have been caught up in the longstanding eugenics policies of the US. And of course, since such redeployments are made precisely through the language of race, they are also a retrenchment of biopolitics: are such feminist movements instances in which an immunitary logic of biopower is at play? Would this constitute an affirmative biopolitics (it enhances life as it undermines thanatopoltics)? Or is an affirmative biopolitics, as Esposito also seems to suggest, one in which discourses of reproduction would no longer be enclosed within specific racial bodies, detached from the nation? Might one substitute the vitality of the planet for the vitality of the nation? And if we did so, what difference would that make to women’s efforts to be roughly self-determining with respect to their reproductive life cycle?
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