"...We are being left to burn because we do not count": Biopolitics, abandonment, and resistance

Global Society

Volumn 23, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 519-538

  Anna, Selmeczi ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK; GOVERNANCE APPROACH; POLITICAL DISCOURSE; POLITICAL RELATIONS; POLITICAL THEORY; SOCIAL EXCLUSION; THEORETICAL STUDY;

EID: 70350786887     PISSN: 13600826     EISSN: 1469798X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13600820903198933     Document Type: Article

References (109)

1. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78 (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 66.
2. Idem, "The Political Technology of Individuals", in Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton (eds.), Technologies of the Self (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press), p. 147.
3. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 6.
4. See, for example, Jenny Edkins, "Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp", Alternatives: Social Transformation & Humane Governance, Vol. 25, No. 1 (2000), pp. 3-27.
5. Jenny Edkins and Veronique Pin-Fat, "Through the Wire: Relations of Power and Relations of Violence", Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1 (2005), pp. 1-24.
6. Michel Foucault, "The Ethics of the Concern for the Self as a Practice of Freedom", in Paul Rabinow (ed.), Essential Works of Foucault, Vol. I: Ethics (London: Penguin, 2000), pp. 281-301.
7. Michel Foucault, "Subject and Power", Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 4 (1982), pp. 777-795.
8. On Foucault's distinction between relationships of power, states of domination, and government (an intermediary category understood broadly as the conduct of conduct) see Barry Hindess, Discourses of Power: From Hobbes to Foucault (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 96-136.
9. It is based on the Foucauldian conception of power as "action upon the actions of others"-or, as Hindess formulates it, as "an ubiquitous feature of human interaction"-that Laura Zanotti criticises Agambenian interpretations of liberalism. In line with what is stated above, Zanotti argues that the government of disorderly states does not "produce totalizing effects of domination". Instead, through conducting the conduct of states to be disciplined, normalisation inscribes spaces of resistance that allow for diverting and hijacking its original agendas, as in the case of the international attempts to secure order in Croatia. Cf. Laura Zanotti, "Normalizing Democracy and Human Rights: Discipline, Resistance, and Carceralization in Croatia's Euro-Atlantic Integration", Journal of International Relations and Development, Vol. 11, No. 3 (2008), pp. 222-250.
10. See Edkins and Pin-Fat, op. cit.
11. Prem Kumar Rajaram, "Disruptive Writing and a Critique of Territoriality", Review of International Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2 (2004), pp. 201-228.
12. See, for example, Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
13. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose, Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism, and Rationalities of Government (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
14. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 138; emphasis in original.
15. While I do not engage here in a detailed discussion of Agamben's notion of abandonment as the sovereign exception, it is not my intention to dismiss it completely. As mentioned below in relation to the notion of superfluity, and as the above references to analyses of power and resistance in contemporary Camps show, this concept indeed has relevance in certain situations. Nevertheless, its relevance cannot be extended to all manifestations of biopolitical abandonment, for these, I believe, are more often inscribed not into states of domination but into governmental rationalities and practices characteristic of biopolitical models of power. This is precisely what enables and at once necessitates thinking resistance to their inscription. As Didier Bigo argues, Agamben criticises Foucault's very conception of the indivisibility of power and resistance: "For him, and contrary to Foucault, the polarization between power and bare life is possible and in fact drives all the contemporary practices of power, including those of liberal states and democracies." The conception of this polarisation is made possible by Agamben's reduction of Jean-Luc Nancy's notion of the ban. This reduction, according to Bigo, implies that "by exaggerating the capacity of the actors speaking in the name of the sovereign and by essentialising sovereignty through a conception that plays against (yet with) the rule of law [...] Agamben ignores the resistance of the weak and their capacities to continue to be humane and to subvert the illusory dream of total control". Didier Bigo, "Detention of Foreigners, States of Exception, and the Social Practices of the Control of the Banopticon", in Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr (eds.), Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory's Edge (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp. 3-33.
16. For a criticism of Agamben's "political nihilism" that entails dismissing "all political options in our societies" see further Ernesto Laclau, "Bare Life or Social Indeterminacy?", in Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli (eds.), Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty & Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press), pp. 11-22.
17. See Agamben, op. cit., p. 120.
18. André Duarte, "Biopolitics and the Dissemination of Violence: The Arendtian Critique of the Present", HannahArendt.net, available: http://hannaharendt.net/research/biopolitics.html (accessed 21 June 2009).
19. See the most quoted "definition" of biopolitics: "For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being into question" (Foucault, The History of Sexuality, op. cit., p. 143).
20. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 28-29.
21. Patricia Owens, "Hannah Arendt", in Jenny Edkins and Nick Vaughn-Williams (eds.), Critical Theorists in International Relations (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 37.
22. Arendt, op. cit., p. 33.
23. Ibid., p. 44.
24. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979 (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 22.
25. Idem, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., p. 48.
26. Idem, The Birth of Biopolitics, op. cit., p. 20.
27. Ibid., p. 22.
28. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., p. 72.
29. Ibid., p. 75.
30. Foucault, History of Sexuality, op. cit., p. 138; original emphasis. It is exactly this shift that cannot be captured when accepting Agamben's claim on the ancient bond between sovereign and biopolitical models of power.
31. "Perhaps if Foucault could have seen the way African 'demography' is 'regulated' by the AIDS epidemic (and a number of other epidemics, all monitored by a 'World Health Organization'), he might have ventured to speak of 'negative bio-politics'" (Étienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene (London and New York: Verso, 2002), p. 38).
32. Arendt, op. cit., p. 40.
33. Michel Foucault, "Society Must be Defended": Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979 (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 241.
34. Idem, History of Sexuality, op. cit., p. 143.
35. Idem, "Society Must be Defended", op. cit., p. 242.
36. Arendt, op. cit., pp. 42-43.
37. Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 2.
38. Or, to borrow Hacking's term, "the avalanche of printed numbers" (ibid.).
39. Ian Hacking, "Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers", Humanities in Society, Vol. 5 (1982), p. 280; original emphasis.
40. "[N]ational and provincial censuses amazingly show that the categories into which people fall change every ten years. Social change creates new categories of people, but counting is no mere report of developments. It elaborately, often philanthropically creates new ways for people to be" (Ian Hacking, "Making up Individuals", in Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna and David E. Welbery (eds.), Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), p. 223.
41. Hacking, "Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers", op. cit., p. 280.
42. Jacques Rancière, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 6.
43. Ibid., p. 105.
44. Hacking, "Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers", op. cit., p. 281.
45. Rancière, op. cit., p. 38.
46. Idem, The Politics of Aesthetics (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 12.
47. Thus, I do not wish to suggest that there is a continuum of thought around the notions of abandonment or superfluity in the work of the authors discussed; in fact, at points, there are significant tensions between them. While some of these are mentioned below, the discussion of discontinuities is not the object of this article. My aim here is rather to place the referred authors' concepts into interaction, so that they illuminate each other and thus shed some light on aspects of the problematic of abandonment that has remained obscure in current discussions.
48. Foucault, "Society Must be Defended", op. cit., p. 241.
49. On the Arendtian aspect of Rancière's thought see Jean-Philippe Deranty, "Rancière's Political Ontology", Theory and Event, Vol. 4, No. 4 (2003).
50. Even if these laws are probabilistic and contain an element of contingency, so constituting the crux of security apparatuses. On this aspect of biopolitical governance see Michael Dillon, "Governing through Contingency: The Security of Biopolitical Governance", Political Geography, Vol. 21, No. 3 (2007), pp. 41-47.
51. Rancière, Dis-agreement, op. cit., p. 104.
52. Ibid., p. 116.
53. For a bizarrely nostalgic description of the contrasting rationalisation of exclusion in the past see Rancière, ibid.
54. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, op. cit., p. 11.
55. Rancière, Dis-agreement, op. cit., p. 113.
56. For Arendt, superfluity features primarily as the aim of totalitarian regimes, for which, as a result of their aim to speed up the progress of the (human) race towards its historical fate, the human potential for spontaneous action is unnecessary, and so-this potential being what makes it what it is-human itself becomes superfluous. In her view, this aim had only been achieved in the concentration camps where, being reduced to mere corpses, human beings were indeed lacking the capacity for action. (This sense of superfluity can be read as Agamben's homo sacer.) Beyond this notion, however, Arendt uses the term in another, more literal sense: referring to stateless people and the millions of unemployed who were excluded from the protected sphere of their nation-states because they were, for various reasons, unwanted. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976).
57. Bauman's notion of "waste" is very expressive of this state superfluity. See Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts (London: Polity Press, 2004).
58. Cf. Bernard Ogilvie, "Violence et représentation: la production de l'homme jetable", Lignes, Vol. 26 (1995), pp. 113-141.
59. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., p. 64.
60. "Freedom as inherent in action is perhaps best illustrated by Machiavelli's concept of virtù, the excellence with which man answers the opportunities the world opens up before him in the guise of fortuna" (Hannah Arendt, "What is Freedom?", in Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking Press, 1961), p. 153).
61. John McGowan, Hannah Arendt: An Introduction (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 101.
62. See Michael Dillon and Luis Lobo-Guerro, "The Biopolitics of Security in the 21st Century: An Introduction", Review of International Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2 (2008), pp. 265-292.
63. For a discussion of the limitations of governmentality theories' usage of contingency see Jacqueline Best, "Ambiguity, Uncertainty, and Risk: Rethinking Indeterminacy", International Political Sociology, Vol. 2, No. 4 (2008), pp. 355-374.
64. On the relation of racism and the power to disallow life see Foucault, "Society Must be Defended", op. cit., pp. 239-263. On the "circulatory imperative" see the next section of this paper.
65. See Foucault, History of Sexuality, op. cit.
66. idem, "Society Must be Defended", op. cit.
67. About his understanding of aesthetics that is at the core of politics see Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, op. cit., p. 13.
68. Ibid., p. 12.
69. Rancière, "The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics", Paper presented at the "Fidelity to the Disagreement: Jacques Rancière and the Political" conference, Goldsmiths College, London, 16-17 September 2003.
70. Mustafa Dikeç, Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics, and Urban Policy (Malden, MA, Oxford and Victoria: Blackwell, 2007), p. 17.
71. Rancière, "The Thinking of Dissensus", op. cit., p. 4.
72. Idem, Dis-agreement, op. cit., p. 30.
73. Ibid., p. 16.
74. See Rancière, On the Shores of Politics (London and New York: Verso, 1995), p. 6.
75. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit.
76. Ibid., p. 69.
77. Ibid., p. 34.
78. Don Mitchell, "The Annihilation of Space by Law: The Roots and Implications of Anti-homeless Laws in the United States", Antipode, Vol. 29, No. 3 (1997), p. 304; original emphasis.
79. Ibid., p. 305.
80. Ibid.
81. Consider, in particular, the passages describing the construction of beggars and other homeless people as impediments to the sufficient extent of consumption: "There is another, perhaps more important, danger posed by those sitting and lying on streets: 'many people see those sitting or lying on the sidewalk and-either because they expect to be solicited or otherwise feel apprehensive-avoid the area. This deters them from shopping at adjacent businesses, contributing to the failure of some and damaging others, costing Seattle jobs and essential tax revenue'" (ibid., p. 309).
82. Deranty draws a parallel between Rancière's and Jean-Luc Nancy's diagnoses of the phenomenon and refers to it by Nancy's term: "the juridification of the social"; see Deranty, "Rancière's Political Ontology", op. cit., p. 12.
83. Rancière, Dis-agreement, op. cit., p. 109.
84. The collision of fact and law that Rancière discusses should not be confused with their indistinction theorised by Agamben in Homo Sacer, op. cit. (e.g. p. 170). Cf. Rancière
85. ibid., p. 112.
86. idem, "Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?", South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 103, Nos. 2-3 (2004), pp. 297-310.
87. The Camp is the "biopolitical paradigm of the modern", according to Agamben in Homo Sacer, op. cit. (e.g. pp. 9, 123).
88. These are the Brazilian and Turkish words, respectively, for shantytowns. The latter phrase means "it happened at night". "For years, Turkey's squatters built at night to take advantage of an ancient legal precept that said, essentially, that if they started construction at dusk and were moved in by sunrise without being discovered by the authorities, they gained legal standing and could not be evicted without a court fight" (Robert Neuwirth, Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 8.
89. Literally: "the people who live in the shacks".
90. Beyond available texts of the movement (mostly online at www.abahlali.org), I draw on field research carried out with the movement. At the time of writing the research is still ongoing, and the conclusions, therefore, should be regarded as preliminary.
91. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., p. 65.
92. Ibid., p. 66.
93. Here again Zanotti's and Best's (op. cit.) arguments can be relevant.
94. S'bu Zikode, "Opening Remarks at the Meeting to Build Consensus in Support of Participatory Upgrades in Cities and against Forced Removals to Rural Dumping Grounds", available: http://abahlali.org/node/3627 (accessed 22 June 2009).
95. Richard Pithouse, "To Resist all Degradations and Divisions-An Interview with S'bu Zikode", Pambazuka News (30 April 2009), available: http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/55955 (accessed 22 June 2009).
96. Cf. idem, "Struggle is a School: The Rise of a Shack Dwellers' Movement in Durban, South Africa", Monthly Review, Vol.57, No.9(2005), available: http://www.monthlyreview.org/0206pithouse.htm (accessed 22 June 2009).
97. S'bu Zikode, author's notes, 6 May 2009. On the subjectifying force of anger see Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London: Verso, 2007), p. 130: "[Political] disappointment provokes an experience of injustice and the feeling of anger. I think anger is very important, and, contrary to the classical tradition, in Seneca say, I think it is the first political emotion. It is often anger that moves the subject to action.".
98. The most evident manifestation of these processes in present-day South Africa-recalling what was said above about the correlation of the prevalence of the circulative imperative and the factualisation of law-is the series of attempts to change the legislative regulation regarding shack settlements and illegal land occupation. Neutralising the pro-poor elements of earlier legislation, among them the Constitution that famously endorses a wide array of social and economic rights, it now seems that the official state policy towards shack-dwellers-regardless of a growing backlog in the number of low-cost houses built and the number of people entitled to them-is eviction. See, for example, Marie Huchezermeyer, "Comment on KwaZulu-Natal Elimination and Prevention of Reemergence of Slums Bill", in Marie Huchezermeyer and Aly Karam (eds.), Informal Settlements: A Perpetual Challenge? (Cape Town: UCT Press, 2006).
99. Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE), Business as Usual? Housing Rights and Slum Eradication in Durban, South Africa (Geneva: COHRE, 2008), available: http://www.cohre.org/store/attachments/081007%20Business%20as%20Usual_fi nal.print.pdf (accessed 22 June 2009), pp. 61, 104.
100. One of the greatest threats is fire: in lacking electricity, people use candles and paraffin stoves, which can cause huge fires in minutes, as the shacks are built mostly of flammable material-and are built very close to each other. In lacking water, too, a candle flipping over can lead to disasters. Cf. Matt Birkinshaw, A Big Devil in the Jondolos: The Politics of Shack Fires (Durban: Abahlali baseMjondolo 2008), available: http://abahlali.org/node/4013 (accessed 22 June 2009).
101. See, for example, the UN-Habitat's Participatory Slum Upgrading Programme at http://www.unhabitat.org/categories.asp?catid=592. (accessed 22 June 2009).
102. Zikode, quoted in Pithouse, "To Resist all Degradations and Divisions", op. cit.
103. See Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).
104. Kristin Ross, "Rancière and the Practice of Equality", Social Text, Vol. 29 (1991), p. 67.
105. S'bu Zikode, author's interview, 2 June 2009.
106. Rancière, "Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?", op. cit.
107. See Foucault, "Society Must be Defended", op. cit., p. 30 and Idem, "Subject and Power", op. cit., p. 780.
108. See, e.g., David Chandler, "Critiquing Liberal Cosmopolitanism? The Limits of the Biopolitical Approach", International Political Sociology, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2009), pp. 53-70.
109. and Jan Selby, "Engaging Foucault: Discourse, Liberal Governance, and the Limits of Foucau ldian IR", International Relations, Vol. 21, No. 3 (2007), pp. 324-345.