WPR etc
Suffering therefore can become a political technology, where certain groups are exposed to conditions in which they are “kept alive but in a state of injury”(Mbembe).
Thom Davies/Arshad Isakjee/Surindar DhesiSome years ago I was teaching a course on ethics and biotechnology...and we were discussing various aspects of the project of re-engineering human nature and...we invited James Watson to come to the class and he...discussed cognitive enhancement through genetic alteration and he was very much in favour of it...I asked him: “Do you consider having a low IQ a disease in need of a cure?” And he said: “Yes of course because people with low IQ’s have very difficult lives, they have trouble making a living and so on”. A student raised her hand and said: “Well, given that's the case, why don’t we reform the economy and society so that people with low IQ’s don’t lead such hard lives”. And Watson's reply was: “Oh, we’re never going to be able to change society, that's way to hard. That’s why we need to use genetic engineering to solve this problem”. And I found that a revealing but chilling answer. Not only because of its eugenics sensibility but also because it seemed to concede so readily the project of moral and political improvement, as if to say that human agency is impotent in the face of that project. Therefore better repair ourselves the better to fit the world, the social roles, that are beyond repair or reform. That, I think, represents the fundamental concession to the moral and political dis-empowerment of humanity.
Micheal Sandel
Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension, yet - and this is its horror - it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think...It is "thought-defying"...because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its “banality.”
Hannah Arendt
The following quote, referencing Gillian Fulchers work, speaks to the ways in which disabled people are represented and 'shaped' as a problem by official writing and speech - by discussion about them and through actions that flow from it, but WPR (professor emerita of politics) Carol Bacchi's all-terrain form of analysis can be applied equally to an array of subjects including those focused on here; in: ‘Women, Policy and Politics: the Construction of Policy Problems' Bacchi writes: ‘Gillian Fulcher...argues that the discourse surrounding education policy and disability construes disabled children as the ‘problem’, distracting attention from the disabling structures that surround them. She also notes that representing the disabled as the ‘problem’ allows government ‘responses’ to be seen as benevolent, generous and compassionate, reinforcing existing power relations.’ Several concepts taken from WPR will be cited or reiterated in this text, work taken from other sources will be handled similarly.
If benevolence, generosity and compassion are presupposed then ‘take it or leave it’ becomes a mantra and questions and attempts to re-frame are forestalled. Attention might be distracted away from the fact that team membership, roles, money, control of collective budgets, knowledge, curriculum vitae entries, computers etc. are in the hands of people other than those an organization is nominally for. And away from the fact that public spaces and res publica are degraded when an excessive amount of public wealth is siphoned away from them. And away from the fact that the modus operandi of many organizations '...is always to seek the most self-profiting relationship they can with their “customers” (though it is not immediately clear who is serving who).'(Segall) And away from the fact that: 'The whole city is for passing through, for window shopping. Sure, people will also stop and buy, but it’s over before they know it and then it’s on to the next thing a little lighter in the pocket and heavy in the soul.'(Segall)
In short, attention is distracted away from society. And, as Mike Oliver has it: 'Society...should be the target for professional intervention and practice'.
Bacchi studied history before branching out but her work contemporizes the work that influenced it - some of her work is influenced by philosophico-historical (archaeological or genealogical) post-structuralist thought. Though it differs from, and expands on, Foucault's project and although it emphasizes subjectification, problematization and governmentality, it would be alive, for example, to the fact that: ‘Oppressed communities have had long and complicated histories with the medical industrial complex’.(Mia Mingus) And it would readily take into account the fact that: ‘...policy designs can endure for years or decades. The distribution of rewards and sanctions is cumulative and difficult to overcome’.(Paul Cairney)
Intention and agency are, inevitably, confined or qualified and, as per a low resolution reading of Foucault, answers and ways of thinking and feeling are structured, and to a degree generated, by (interconnected social, cultural and linguistic) histories at an individual level, at an organizational level and at the level of academic (and other) disciplines. Alternatively, a more conventional (structuralist) view would be that, as per Pierre Bordeaux: 'Humans internalize social structures which they then reproduce through practice'.(Agmon, Sa’ar and Araten-Bergman) In this way, or in ways like it, agency and structure are integrated.
Genealogical inquiry, in particular, into practices, concepts, rationalities and unexamined ways of thinking also involves re-reading, re-evaluating and re-inventing the present. Such histories are more about the present than the past, histories of the present deploy '...genealogical inquiry and the uncovering of hidden conflicts and contexts as a means of re-valuing...contemporary phenomena'.(David Garland) History as a discrete academic discipline, while it has advantages, can function as an anesthetic - it can serve to reassure us that then is not now and that then is safely imprisoned in books and memory banks. Histories and power relations are linked - knowledge in general and power are linked, as in the often quoted line from Birth of the Prison: 'There is no power relation without the corelative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations'.
Epistemological breaks occur in (and are enmeshed in) periods of upheaval - crossroads at which futures are up for grabs. To stir up debate and to figure out how we got from there to here (and how there is still here and how here could have been somewhere else) it make sense to think about the traces left during these upheavals. But a more central aim is to think about identity formation, stated with more precision, the aim is '...to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects'.(Foucault) How and why do we place ourselves and others beneath microscopes - under what conditions?
To think well about the ways in which subjects are made in nation states it's necessary to think about the way that states are made and about the various kinds of meso and micro-power operating within them.
There are a multitude of heterogeneous and often discontinuous events/conflicts, of dead and loose ends and breaks, none of which are privileged such that they function as essences because knowledge regimes (including histories, 'discursive traces' and primary sources) and power relations (along with everything else that can be sensed) are also events constituted by multiple processes, are also conflicted and fueled, sometimes, by passions, hatreds, competitive tempers, sorrows and so on.
It, sometimes, makes as much sense to trace an event back to events called descriptions or sciences as it does to reverse the process and the word 'description' could, just as well, be exchanged for any number of others.
The sciences are ethico-political in as much as they bleed into, and impact, other spheres.
Events is a catch all term, and when we record we participate in them (in events) in a distinct way; as such there is no escape from participation and, therefore, from consequences, even if, as is often the case, they are faced by others. Even truth, as Foucault has it, is a thing of this world. There is no umpire seated so high that he is outside of the cosmos, there is no unmoved mover or view from nowhere though the world is certainly full of tin Gods and authoritative talismans.
'The subject of knowledge itself has a history; the relation of the subject to the object; or, more clearly, truth itself has a history'.(Foucault)
With that said Foucault's work is difficult and casual readings of it are inherently misleading, in part, because he changed tack a lot. And with that said, taken in isolation such thoughts are (unnecessarily) confusing, to me at least, and their usefulness is unclear in this context; this is one way in which Bacchi's systematic, and more consistent, politics diverges from Foucault's philosophy, though it's in keeping with his notion of a philosophical toolbox that others can make use of.
(See, for example, the Garland paper cited above: 'What is a “history of the present”? On Foucault’s genealogies and their critical preconditions' for a far more careful reading, or see Foucault's: 'The Subject and Power' which is also cited above).
Power relations might include what Achille Mbembe called: necropower: the power to decide how some may live and how others must die or, alternatively, the subjugation of life to the power of death; though I don’t think that Bacchi references necropower (and it isn't what Fulcher had in mind when she spoke of power relations) she does reference biopower and they are intertwined or ‘concatenated’ to Mbembe and, not in so many words or with the same emphasis, to Foucault. Power may be viewed as generative and as normative, we are rewarded or sanctioned, as was (in differing ways) always the case, depending on our adherence to custom but power qua killing persists, though it's less visible because it persists in 'peripheral' parts of the world and it tends to be exported: either abroad or to the margins at home. ‘Mbembe first described the role of extreme violence in the functioning of larger biopolitical orders as “necropolitics” – not merely a state’s “right” to kill and to organise people to be killed (as opposed to live), but to expose them to extreme violence and death and reduce entire segments of populations to the barest and most precarious existence. All in order to preserve...established economic and political hierarchies...’(Mark LeVine) Necropolitical killing involves the imposition of social and political death as well as physical killing.
Social, living death or death in life happens when a society does not accept us as fully human, while political or civil diminishment or death consists in a, partial or complete, loss of civil rights and of a public voice. The slave/master relation, for example, re-constituted the slave as ‘...a permanent internal enemy life form, whose relationship to power was made always reducible to one of hostility and disposability’.(Elizabeth Povinelli) In other words, s/he was continually re-constituted as socially and civilly dead, though there were, to a degree successful, attempts to counter this process. In the Holy Roman Empire, people declared civilly dead were referred to as vogelfrei which translates as: free as a bird and, like birds, they could be hunted and killed with impunity since they were outside of the law or inside of the law as vogelfrei. As Nasrullah Mambrol, following Giorgio Agamben, says: in modern states, those lacking definite legal or moral status belong to, but are never members of, the polity. Elsewhere in medieval Europe, outlaws were similarly stripped of all intrinsic moral worth and called wolves or werewolves/caput lupinum - inhuman or half-human - at a time when it was open season on wolves.
To a degree, echoing Byung Chul Han and Mbembe, Jon Stratton suggests that zombies superseded the pre-modern werewolf as the paradigmatic monster. In that the pre-modern bandit (the pre-modern skogarmaor) escaped, literally or metaphorically, into the wild, from the perspective of the state he became a threshold between nature and culture 'a threshold of indistinction and of passage between animal and man, physis and nomos, exclusion and inclusion...'(Agamben) Zombies are not half animal, rather, they are humans stripped of much of their humanity, without a wilderness, without much wild agency and without much human agency. They are the living dead - a diminished life form, an indistinction between life and death rather than between non-human animal and human. Manas Ray writes: 'Hobbes viewed the state of nature (or, premodern) not as a real epoch chronologically prior to the foundation of the City, but a principle internal to the City itself: tanquam dissoluta, “as if it were dissolved”. It can emerge anytime and therefore proper vigil is essential'. Non-civilian roles and the absence of civilian status involve the withdrawal of civic custom, rendering us killable without redress. But civilians are never fully civilized, they are always, also, mere life - the state of nature can't be removed entirely. It can be customarily masked or correctly mobilized or arranged, even so, we are on notice - if our performance isn't second nature, if the mask slips, then we may be destroyed. With reference to Agamben, Manas Ray says that, as it stands: 'The work of politics is precisely to monopolize the sphere of the living – merely living (zoē) – to reduce man to his bare existence, and more: to ceaselessly threaten with the prospect of annihilation...' Accordingly, life is now a means to an end or an extra or luxury, and that end is other than life - life's lot is a blurring of annihilation with cultivation, reason and consensus.
It might be the case that extravagant bloodletting is related to extravagance in general, and that civilizations are founded to sustain such excesses. That extravagance and wastefulness and an extravagant wasting of lives are flip-sides of the same coin - where you find one, the other isn't far away. It might be the case that potential is created when death-worlds are - if a city is bombed into the stone age and a forest clear-cut then almost anything can be created in their place. Either way or neither, necropolitics is built into those societies with which I'm familiar; capillary power and violence are not worth their salt unless exercised on and through both life and death.
As per Achille Mbembes emphasis, capillary power (the diffusion and internalization that, for example, 'panoptic' power entails) doesn't point to an absence or a withering of axial figures of sovereignty. After all, various leaders possess codes with which they can authorize a nuclear strike. The bloody code, for example, which coincided with Britain's economic rise, and which was set in motion during the early European enlightenment, has many recent parallels; necropolitical decisions both large and small, both axial and peripheral are still made.
There is also the question of governing through abandonment, the question of ‘...abandoned subjects relegated to the role of a superfluous humanity’(Mbembe) or sink or swim laissez faire necrocapitalist killing (let do might be let drown to those fallen overboard) and of necrocapitalist profit: the most obvious example of which would be military industrial complexes profiting from war and the accompanying creation of, what Mbembe calls, death-worlds. Necro and bio power/disciplines are perfectly concatenated on battlefields - the sciences, for example, are sets of disciplines necessary for military success.
As far as I can tell, Achille Mbembe and Giogio Agamben identify and unravel Foucault's parochialism, Mbembe often through a spatial (he speaks of the planetary and the plural) and Agamben often through a temporal expansion of this school of thought, to use two questionable abstractions. Bacchi, arguably, inherits this limitation from Foucault; in any case, it should be clear that analyzing how subjects are construed, what is reinforced and what attention is drawn away from when problems are defined is a non-trivial practice. Here, some of Mbembe and Agamben's thought (along with thought from other sources) is interleaved with Bacchi's without attempting to alter, or to combine it with, the latter.
As far as I can tell, Achille Mbembe and Giogio Agamben identify and unravel Foucault's parochialism, Mbembe often through a spatial (he speaks of the planetary and the plural) and Agamben often through a temporal expansion of this school of thought, to use two questionable abstractions. Bacchi, arguably, inherits this limitation from Foucault; in any case, it should be clear that analyzing how subjects are construed, what is reinforced and what attention is drawn away from when problems are defined is a non-trivial practice. Here, some of Mbembe and Agamben's thought (along with thought from other sources) is interleaved with Bacchi's without attempting to alter, or to combine it with, the latter.
WPR also expands on and complements Foucault’s project: 'It does not look for “crisis” points, places where practices change...Rather, it suggests that all policy proposals rely on problematizations which can be opened up and studied to gain access to the “implicit system in which we find ourselves”.(Bacchi)
Put very simply one of Bacchi's more basic points is, I think, that problem definitions and policy designs and, by extension, actions that follow their lead are not merely responses to facts out there in the world, they are also creative and constitutive. Is that policy plays, has played and will play a role in generating what its makers assume (if not consciously then by dint of their tacit conceptual frameworks and epistemological commitments) has merely been stumbled upon or discovered by them and which they then react to or address. When analyzed, these ostensible reactions reveal the implicit ways in which 'problems' have been interpreted - problems specified and (in a circular fashion) generated through the ways in which situations, events or phenomena (I would add problems to this list) are, and have been, addressed; she analyzes, and offers conceptual tools for the analysis of, this generative process.
Problem definitions (whether they are formed by law makers, policy analysts or anyone else) are viewed as creating meaning or as world-making more so than world-finding, just as histories both find and invent. Policy making creates problems by calling them such, once made and once stabilized or continually re-enforced by pervasive disciplinary techniques they may then become inescapably real.
Writing about Bacchi's work, Paul Cairney says that: problem representation is a political process which identifies how to define and to address the social world. And he says that a problem implies ‘...that the nature of an issue is ‘fixed and identifiable’, ‘self-evident’, well-understood, agreed, or taken for granted.’ Seen as fixed in this way: ‘Problem definitions can help close off debate. They help alienate and stigmatise some populations’. With this in mind, WPR destabilizes taken-for-granted knowledge; policy (not just specific policies) is also denaturalized, viewed as, to some degree, contingent and therefore worthy of the same destabilization and analysis.
Bacchi encourages us to notice the importance of how we, or more to the point, those with sufficient influence, represent problems; including, for example, how specific subjects are constituted and situated within given representational constellations and within organizations made in their image. As Cairney says: ‘Political actors compete to tell ‘stories’ to assign praise or blame to groups of people...These judgments have a ‘feed-forward’ effect: they are reproduced in...institutions’. He notes that, as such, the civic involvement of those preemptively blamed, stigmatized or negatively stereotyped is strongly disincentivized.
In Johanna Hedva's work, the subject of involvement comes up but here it isn't a question of incentives; Arendt illuminated the dangers of, what she called, the rise of the social and of homo-laborans such that social/market imperatives, or spheres in which necessity is imperative, take over or hollow out political and public spheres. As such, she wanted to see the firewall between the two domains shored up, but for Hedva this configuration would lead to further social and civil death for some; she writes about 'the trauma of not being seen.' And asks: 'Again – who is allowed in to the public sphere? Who is allowed to be visible?' Because public spheres are often inaccessible to people who are unwell and many others, she argues, in line with many second wave feminists, for the politicization of the personal and views dominant conceptualizations of private and public as moot.
What else might it mean to belong to what Cairney calls a blamed group? Four terms Achille Mbembe posits: enclosure, contraction, containment and selective permeability are elaborated in his work, he proposes, for example, that they consist in ‘...a matrix of rules, mostly designed for those human bodies deemed either in excess, unwanted, illegal, dispensable or superfluous’. He references Hanna Arendt's writing on superfluity - on the way in which the superfluous are ‘...treated in moments of human history when the very enigma of existence - of collective existence - is no longer taken for granted’. And he suggests that ‘...we are increasingly faced with the question of what to do with those whose very existence does not seem to be necessary for social reproduction’. Further, he says that: ‘...spatial violence, humanitarian strategies and a peculiar biopolitics of punishment all combine to produce...a peculiar carceral space in which people deemed surplus, unwanted or illegal are governed through abdication of any responsibility for their lives or their welfare’. If power and capital have no use for you or you have no use for them then your state will, likely, be close to death and you will be located close to death - in other words, to be in a blamed group is, in this instance, to be consigned to a death-world. Mbembe is discussing Palestine in the talk excerpted above but he says that what’s been happening there has been happening elsewhere, with adaptions and with varying intensities.
Bacchi encourages us to notice and track the effects that problem representations have on, and beyond, the things that they claim to represent. And to unearth and to analyze ‘deep-seated conceptual schema’ and the axioms that play a role in leading to the generation of representations and therefore to new systems of meaning. The cascading effects mentioned include ‘...symbolic and material effects: discursive effects which follow from the limits of what can be thought or said; subjectification effects which define who we are [and] how we feel about ourselves...'(Susan Goodwin) as well as numerous lived effects, such as causing or relieving emotional or material distress.
At a more prosaic level: ‘Policy designs are observable phenomena found in statutes, administrative guidelines, court decrees, programs, and...the practices and procedures of street level bureaucrats’.(Anne Larason Schneider and Helen Ingram) They generate various kinds of governing ‘background knowledge’. Or downstream instances of the hegemonic control of signs and tools which strategically direct the formation and destruction of particular subjectivities and cultures.(Acid Horizon) The aim, for Foucault, is not to unlink truth from power, as such, because it's not possible to do so, however, it can be unlinked from certain kinds of power: '...it's a matter of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates...'(Foucault)
Hand looms were considered slow and faster, less labour intensive mechanical looms were introduced; this was a factor in kick starting the industrial revolution - a minority advocating for their introduction saw slow fabric production as a problem but many did not. Despite much civil unrest, however, those in favour had a great deal more rhetorical (and other kinds of) power than most, and their discussions and their conclusions were acted upon. Once industrialization was underway, new kinds of subjects were generated who thought and felt differently about industrialization (and much else) than they would have otherwise. Stated in a more academic way, the concrete and the ‘...discursive reality produced by policy...creates the conceptual boundaries within which we - as a society - are led to think’.(Rigby etc.) Or else, we could say that the process is multidirectional or that it works in a contrary direction, see Neil Postman's: Technopoly, Marshall Mcluhan's: Understanding Media and Karl Marx's: The Poverty of Philosophy, etc. Postman, for example, wrote: 'Surrounding every technology are institutions whose organization — not to mention their reason for being — reflects the world-view promoted by the technology'.
In '1984' Orwell wrote: “The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.”
Framing which ignores the evolution of prevailing implicit rules, épistèmes or, in other words, shifting but relatively stable conditions which help determine the erasure or emergence and the organization of knowledge (and where the aim is, for example, accumulation or where the aim is improvement) feeds into presentism. As such ongoing primitive original accumulation is downplayed; though (socio)biography - read with these factors in mind - might illuminate sociohistorical determinants of health. The relationship between success and place. What Friedrich Engels termed: social murder/murder-by-omission. What Rob Nixon calls: slow violence. What Janna Thomson calls: intergenerational collective responsibility and so on. 'Evil' has no roots, Arendt said, and it uproots. See also, Henri Stiker's exemplary: 'A History of Disability', a book in which Stiker aims some of his strongest criticisms at recent history and points out, for example, that when and where Christianity held sway, suffering and stigma provided opportunities to turn individuals and organizations granting charitable help into vehicles for the salvation of the charitable. And Ehrenberg's: 'The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age.' According to which, society is now '...organized around the sovereign individual...who is responsible for her destiny and who therefore finds herself in a void, not knowing how to act, nor even why is it preferable to act'.(Gil Eyal)
In 'Invisible Cities' Calvino wrote: 'I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades’ curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past...' Homo sacer has many names, one is, I think, tabula rasa. Or the diminution of, annihilation of, or deinterlacing of, sociobiography and of all forms of mediation - a kind of disarmament or worldlessness, to borrow Arendt's term, that leads to perfect tractability and, when taken to extremes, to epistemicide, to borrow Boaventura de Sousa Santos's term. In spaces where biopolitics is taken to its limit '...power confronts nothing but pure life, without any mediation’(Agamben) People in socio-economic, technological and political mech suits confront people without, Somali pirates in rickety boats confront U.S navy warships.
Alternatively we could invoke the Lockian blank slate which, though emancipatory to a degree, aided the theft of indigenous lands.
Or we could invoke critique as a way of de-subjectifying an unbearable subjecthood and calling for a less painful kind; if subjecthood is generated by what can, at a push, be abbreviated to power relations or to a given social order then that order or those relations would be the focus of critique or counter-policing. Ordinarily we might, instead, move to where an order is less painful but this isn't always possible - critique, here, is a call for less adverse power relations minus the ability to create them or minus the ability to relocate, and it is, perhaps, an attempt to re-subjectfy as critical subjects or witnesses - as an extremely bitter consolation prize so to speak. But: 'The direction to go, we are conditioned
to believe, is up. Like birds trapped in a room'.(Hedva) And, as discussed elsewhere, subjection to necropower is often the price we pay for rejecting, or being rejected by, neoliberal (or other authoritative forms of) subjecthood.
Bacchi’s work contains both complex and simple descriptions of WPR and complex and simple illustrative examples of its application, here’s another elementary description/example: she notes that there was concern amongst policy makers about the relatively poor health of a colonized native population and that they found that semi-nomadism lead to poor integration into health systems - it follows that this might be addressed through policies encouraging a more sedentary lifestyle. Bacchi says that the conceptual underpinnings of problem representations lodge at two levels, which she identifies ‘...as what is represented to be the concern and what is represented to be the cause of the problem’.(Bacchi) The concern here is represented to be ill-health and a cause is represented to be nomadism.
Possible unstated factors and ‘silences’ in the policy makers assessment might include the notion that some people must adapt to systems and not the other way around. And that economic considerations, including the relatively low cost of leaving systems unchanged, were elided, as was evidence showing negative impacts of sedentary lifestyles on health. Who or what is considered to be a problem is given away by who or what is viewed, in any given problem representation, as in need of change; as such, the indigenous minority (or indigenous life-style) is represented as the problem - given the long-lasting mistreatment of colonized peoples, this designation might be viewed as begging several questions.
Here’s another simple illustration: she notes that the fact that more boys than girls study STEM is considered to be a problem by some in some countries and that there are policies aimed at reversing this trend. How would such policies, and how would discussion surrounding them, impact who we are and how we feel about ourselves? Would a consequence be that those with qualifications in the humanities become second rate holders of second rate qualifications? Would an implicit devaluing of the humanities feed (however minimal the impact) into a politically illiterate culture or into a devaluing of humanity itself? Would there be holders of STEM qualifications who are misplaced - who would rather be involved in the humanities? What would the ‘subjectification effects’ be if we said that there are not enough boys studying the humanities? It might be the case that this last question is seldom asked because the notion that the reverse is true is axiomatic - it goes without saying.
The following is excerpted from a text about a more serious analysis of policies on children seeking asylum - in the problematizations discussed, risk is posed by children seeking asylum and/or they are at risk: ‘It is through considerations of risk that care enters the analysis...Emphasis is placed on one-to-one caring relationships, “on micro levels, rather than on care as a macro social practice with institutional and governing implications”...Beasley and I...characterize this relationship as displaying “the residues of noblesse oblige”, effectively denying the socio-political relations that constitute this hierarchy. Rigby et al...drive home the point: “prescriptive understandings of altruism within already hierarchical societies hide alternative, more expansive conceptions of a just and interconnected community, either national or international”.(Bacchi) These more ‘expansive conceptions’ (which might involve mutual aid, democratization, co-operation, self-reflexivity, civil rights, unionization, a focus on (organizational) design, procedure, protocol, structure, infrastructure and so on) are elided and a staggering number of cans of worms are also hidden behind masks of noble obligation. Of course, I don't think that the notion that we have obligations to those who are struggling or suffering is wrong as such. I think that the extent to which such duties are right or wrong depends on how they are defined and implemented. I see value in the following thoughts: If we attempt to find purpose by solving problems for an ill-defined society or population which we are not a part of, and are not meaningfully engaged with, then we will impose solutions on people which they don't want and haven't asked for rather than co-creating a better future with them.
The universalization of hyper-individualism implicit in such policies might also ride rough-shod over other philosophies including those generated within other cultures. Desmond Tutu defines an aspect of ubuntu praxis as follows: 'We say a person is a person through other persons...I am human because I belong, I participate, and I share' Individuals can be digitized and processed - they are quantifiable and calculable, ubuntu is not. And, to paraphrase Tutu's definition, proper self-assurance comes from knowing that we belong within a greater whole and that we are diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed, or treated as if they were less than who they are.
Privately we might find ourselves in sentimental agreement with these, what we derisively call, sentiments, while we publicly (and procedurally) tear them to shreds. And say with a sigh: je sais bien mais quand même. We tend to immerse ourselves in a hyperreal (and transparently evil) public life and claim powerlessness in private. I see merit in the notion that: we support individualist ideologies that both produce mass individual suffering and enable mass healers to sell cures for states that, at least in part, they produced in the first place.(Hans-Georg Moeller) Hyper-individualism and the Individual Model help mask this circular process. Anne Boyer makes much the same point with more urgency in her book: The Undying.
We tend not to notice that we need supportive infrastructures (including emotional and cognitive infrastructures) until they are removed - until the rug is pulled from under our feet. Micro-social framing can lend itself to this same inattention, to disowning, to being inattentive to our intrinsic vulnerability and to our precarity - to our dependence on various (infra)structures. And can lend itself to ‘...the posture of control over the property that I have and that I am...’(Judith Butler) To conceiving of ourselves as seemingly sturdy and self-centered and to routinely hiding any fault-lines in ourselves that we can’t overcome.(Butler) Secure in the knowledge that the rug is firmly beneath our feet, we can say that we are not interdependent and we can foist an anti-interdependence slant on the terminally insecure but not without performative contradiction, and not without hypocrisy; even the most virulent attack on the fact of interdependence rests on its preservation.
Those without the means to be ‘liberal subjects’ are expected to be, those who can’t maintain the posture or cloak fault-lines are expected to. The imposition or superimposition of liberal subjecthood onto those who can’t perform it might give them something to aim for or counter, or render them as obscure and as socially dead as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. It never, however, meets (disability studies founder) Mike Oliver's demand for: ‘...acceptance from society as we are, not as society thinks we should be’ because putative assimilation and just membership are incompatible. Achille Mbembe speaks of the erasure of the living substance of the face 'that gives the enemy his humanity' and he speaks of: 'The task of disfigurement and erasure...' Of the task of disfiguring and erasing those banished and, therefore, executed in accordance with the logic of contemporary hatred. Mbembe equates the face with language - language is our face.
Where does this leave the non-linguistic? What if the face transcends, or is other than, language? '...to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean...lay...undiscovered before me. Where exactly do they come from?'.(Newton) Seen through the lenses of this culture, for the most part, signs are a semblance of smooth pebbles substituted for a complicated, agonistic and struggling inwardness or outwardness - this feeds into the evisceration and into the 'disfigurement' and 'erasure' of Others and to their imprisonment in dungeons of appearance, semblances of smooth pebbles or shells, or the pebbles smoothness without the pebble.
Mbembe, sometimes, tip-toes around such questions by calling for a de-monopolization of language. Language isn't the exclusive property of humans. Language alone does not separate us from them, rather it is societies refusal to acknowledge the language of human and non-human Others that contributes much to their erasure. Similarly, Anne Boyer suggested that '...pain is widely declared inarticulate for the reason that we are not supposed to share a language for how we really feel.' The non-human is also widely declared inarticulate.
See also: 'In Defense of the Poor Image' and other, related, work by Hito Steyerl, particularly that which is collected in her book: 'The Wretched of the Screen'. And Johanna Hedva's essays: 'In Defence of De-persons' (in which she argues, for example, that governance was invented to govern de-persons) and: Sick Woman Theory, from which I want to excerpt one important insight: “Sickness” as we speak of it today is perceived through its binary opposite, “wellness.” The “well” person is the person well enough to go to work. The “sick” person is the one who can’t. What is so destructive about conceiving of wellness as the default, as the standard mode of existence, is that it invents illness as temporary. When being sick is an abhorrence to the norm, it allows us to conceive of care and support in the same way. Care, in this configuration, is only required sometimes. When sickness is temporary, care is not normal'. Everyday support for everyday discomfort and everyday difficulties is continuous and taken for granted. While support for those, like Johanna Hedva, with permanent illnesses is intermittent and conspicuous and often, to use a bland term, inappropriate (she speaks in visceral terms of violence and terror) in as much as illness is, or at least should be, normal or a mere difference.
It isn't a 'mere difference' in as much as we generally go-along-to-get-along instead of challenging all forms of unjust division and binarization and, as Hedva indicates, market fundamentalism and crude economic utility as a catch-all ethic are ideological lynchpins that this violence and this terror now revolve around. 'Usefulness is virtue, incapacity — burden — is its corresponding vice'.(Conway) One way, as per Foucault, that authorities exercise control over individuals is through 'binary division and branding' - the sick/well binary described by Hedva is one example, there are many others. And, as Hedva has it: wellness now '...stands in for “life,” but life in terms of wealth, race, power, and, primarily, ability...' As such, our conception of '...wellness is soaked in ableism'.
There is also a gearing up for crisis and emergency and not for the more common, less exciting but no less agonizing, quiet desperation. By defining problems we shape solutions and so defined, we might be inclined to rush unnecessarily; provisional or stop-gap measures and short termism might be favoured and thoughtful deliberative democracy might yield quickly to, faster and simpler, managerialism. Charles Eisenstein talks about this inclination to rush in terms of an artificial scarcity of time; a notion that might, usefully, be connected to the idea that there is a limited supply of virtue: Michael Sandel cites the economist Kenneth Arrow as saying that: ‘We do not wish to use up recklessly the scarce resources of altruistic motivation.’ He says that Arrow conceived of virtues as like fossil fuels which are depleted with use. This view leads to virtue (or a facsimile of virtue) being carefully metered with a frugality appropriate for a scarce resource – as is often the case when it comes to our treatment of various forms of distress. Sandel suggests that virtues would be better analogized to muscles that get stronger the more we exercise them, as such, it would be preferable to normalize the practice of virtue. Given that we continue to construe altruism as a scarce resource and sickness as temporary, Hedva suggests a different kind of exercise: 'go to the mirror, look yourself in the face, and say out loud: “To take care of you is not normal. I can only do it temporarily.” Saying this to yourself will merely be an echo of what the world repeats all the time'.
Two tangential questions, has liberty defined as a freedom from ties and unchecked or un-complimented by solidarity, equity and specific traditions etc. allowed organized domination to proliferate and intensify? Is injustice a side-effect of a lack of liberty, or synonym for illiberal, also defined as a lack of ties?
Michel Foucault developed the notion of 'descending individualism' with reference to '...the way in which, people are more closely monitored and 'individualised' the lower in the social scale they are.'(Danaher, Schirato, Webb) By way of illustration, a focus on personalities, trivial details concerning individuals and on celebrities is more common in tabloids than in broadsheets, where ideas and analysis receive more air-time and where the tone tends to be more passive, observational and neutral. In academic work, the focus is largely on the latter; the focus is entirely on the latter where the most prestigious scholarship is concerned, namely, scientific work. Fuller humanity (transcendence even) is won through ascending social scales, Foucault, for example, tends to be synonymous with his thought - he isn't subject to much demographic classification or analysis, he isn't a digit - we tend to talk about him as if he were still alive while we treat many of the living as if they were not and subject them to a kind of systemic add hominem. Though his opponents are more inclined to individualise and, in doing so, to bring him down a rung or two, and popularisation (of his work and in general) also, often, involves individualization, more focused, as it is, on the kinds of mammalian concerns which hijack amygdalae. Foucault's aim, in this instance, isn't to judge or to hierarchize, however, but to overcome and arrive at a custom of customs whereby each custom is, so to speak, a book in an archive or a pixel on a screen.
Perhaps a comparison could be drawn between the various strata's of media and with military organization - with generals who seemingly keep a cool head, who strategize and who see the bigger picture, on the one hand, and infantrymen whose aggression or zeal is to be honed and directed. Just as infantrymen and generals are a part of the same structure so it is with the mass-media, and the ideal type would, perhaps, be a combination of infantryman and general or a general who was once an infantryman.
Its judgmental severity and hypocrisy duly noted, I'm reminded of the epigram: ‘Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.’ 'Great minds' or noble minds, in both senses of the word: i.e. high status and honourable. Earlier versions of the epigram are richer in meaning than later, pared down, iterations: 'The great temptation both to ministers and people, is to talk about persons. “Why,” said Dr. Rush to some one, “are you always talking about persons? Why do you not talk about things?” The answer is plain. It is so much easier to talk about persons than things. It is so much more gratifying to our evil natures to talk about persons, especially their faults. Any one can talk about persons.' The authors prescription, to talk about ‘things’ could be clearer and other variations are clearer, for example one encourages us ‘...to prefer dwelling on those principles, doctrines, and facts, which are always and to all classes in society, interesting and instructive...’ Though this leveling and false universalism might blind us to difference I can, nevertheless, cynically take the point.
Uneven hyper-individualization is combined with hyper-totalization, in Homo Sacer, Gorgio Agamben writes: 'In one of his last writings, Foucault argues that the modern Western state has integrated techniques of subjective individualization with procedures of objective totalization to an unprecedented degree, and he speaks of a real “political ‘double bind,’ constituted by individualization and the simultaneous totalization of structures of modern power”.
Techno-capitalism is the machine de nos jours and subjective individualization the ghost perhaps.
As per Foucault, totalization and individualization both involve a constant, or potentially constant, non-local observation which facilitates the implementation of (rewarding or punishing) classificatory regimes. Put another way, they involve pastoral power which both objectifies populations en masse and generates a collection of separated and self monitoring individualities. The machinery of modern power produces the kinds of subjectivities which build it.
For Agamben, juridico-institutional totalization and bio-political individualization intersected when life itself was first politicized through severing and therefore creating the two domains. The act of separating is the root of politics and it was through the separation of what he calls 'bare life' through its quasi-exclusion from the City or polis that the idea and the quasi-reality of natural life was created and vice versa. This exclusion is, itself, an ongoing political activity and so unqualified life is at once subject to hands-off biopolitical rule and 'continual encounters with the violence of the state'(Steven DeCaroli) and also to elemental necessity and the 'the caprice of nature’s fury' as DeCaroli puts it - it is at once excluded/quasi-natural and politicized through its exclusion and so included/biopolitical.
This intersection or ‘hidden tie’ is axial to much of Agamben's work.
In short, deep-seated cultural values inform problem representations, and methods and underlying epistemological frameworks would, likely, include positivism or the idea and the practice of careful observation and reasoning about observations. And instrumentalism: the idea that we should then use those findings to achieve something, not least to solve problems; a related and familiar ideological concept would be rational choice theory - market actors using market logic to calculate what's valuable to them etc. Understood in a technical, neutral or positivist way, the identification and definition of a (policy) problem is either accurate or inaccurate, right or wrong, depending on how well data has been collected and parsed. ‘Problems...sit outside the policy process’(Bacchi) in this view - the policy process is outside the goldfish bowl and the problem is within or vice versa. Complicity in that which is observed is seemingly minimized, as is ambiguity and with it the ability to form multiple interpretations.
'In evidence-based practice, the focus is on “what works”, assuming that the goals – the research “problems” – set for testing research interventions are legitimate and non-prejudicial'.(Bacchi) We could ask: whose evidence? But Bacchi asks another question: “evidence for what?”
The idea here is not to question empiricism, as such, but to show that policy making isn't empirical and is not 'science informed'.
These epistemological commitments have consequences for democratization because (for example) if there is no room for interpretation then there is less room for participation in reform or for the kinds of discussion on which democracy depends. However, Bacchi favours constructivist/post-structuralist over interpretative accounts because, for example: ‘An interpretive view of problematizations as competing understandings of problems, together with the conviction that the goal of the analyst is to train policy makers/workers in problematizing skills, supports a reformist agenda. By contrast, the study, in Foucault-influenced post-structural accounts, of problematizations as deep-seated conceptual schema that shape lives, offers a more thoroughgoing analysis of how we are governed, a level of analysis that prefers “unregulated questioning” to “partial answers.” With that said, elsewhere, she does make a case for democratization grounded, in part, in a critique of positivism, its uses and its misuses.
It might be the case that hermeneutics is, sometimes, ground floor 'panopticism' in that powers fingerprints are all over testimony and its interpretations - those offering and interpreting testimony were (and are being) produced by power and knowledge and they play a role in reproducing them. And the sites where testimony is offered and interpreted are positioned within complicated power relations - they are positioned within a top-down (totalizing) panoptic machinery.
To simplify, if structures are, so to speak, held together by discursive scaffolding then discursive traces directly associated with concrete organization should be a focus of analysis and critique.
WPR rests on several presuppositions, the most important of which is, I think, that: ‘The role of policy analysts is explicitly political, based on the assumption that policy benefits some groups and harms others, and taking ‘the side of those who are harmed’.(Cairney and Bacchi) Although, for the most part, WPR tells us how we may think and not what to think, this break with the neutrality of some post-structuralist thought is significant and it has wide ranging consequences.
You can't be neutral on a moving train.
Though WPR doesn’t emphasize psychology, it plays a role, according to Cairney: ‘Policymakers make quick, biased, emotional judgments, then back up their actions with selective facts to pursue their understanding of a policy problem and its solution...social constructions can also be based on conscious bias and the strategic exploitation of...’ popular stereotypes and of other people’s emotions for political gain. If you want to take the high road and to challenge biases etc. then your ability to impact policy will likely diminish and your popularity will likely fall.
Policy makers deal with populations too numerous to know and so stereotypes, stigmatization, categorization, popular biases etc. serve as short-hand. Short-hand which, at first, applies to populations and then - as it circulates and makes its way downstream - applies, also, to smaller collectivities and to individuals. Those in praised categories have little incentive to question this process and, given the strength and prevalence of the subjectification effects discussed elsewhere, those in blamed or depreciated categories tend to believe in, become or else lack the capacity to challenge categories and all that they are associated with.
From some perspectives, as Foucault said, some others are a sequestered multiplicity to be numbered and supervised.
How might these agnotological considerations factor into the segregation, does he take sugaring, stigmatization and surveillance of, for example, disabled people or people in mental distress? Or into the dividing and arranging of people into organized, over-active abled service providers on one side of the aisle and disorganized, passive individual clients on the other? Might this factor into injured people, and others who have no economic use, being liquidated by default? Or into the creation of abandoned subjects or practices that rubber-stamp abandonment? That rubber-stamp the power to make live and let die, the peremptory injunction to enjoy, to have a nice day or fuck off and die. If conceptualizing the problem as the injured or the incapacitated (who we have an obligation to help) or as the presence of risk and lack of ‘one-to-one caring relationships’ factors into these outcomes then re-conceptualization becomes imperative. We could represent the problem as a lack of co-operation, solidarity and justice for example. In order to remedy such a lack we could, as a thought experiment at least, draw lots (though other methods would have much the same results) to decide who joins which team, collective or grouping - the formal practices of these teams would be the same and the interactions between them would be mutual such that if a member of one team is, to use a questionable term, another teams ‘case’ then members of other teams would be their cases in return. This structure may provide more opportunities to contest harmful discursive formations and to broach what those formations suppress - the question of reparations or the question of (collective) accountability, for example, and may allow for a wider range of subjectivities. And because it involves the creation of non-binary mixed (in distress-not-in-distress or abled-disabled) teams interacting with other mixed teams it may go at least some way to answering Dr Lynne Friedli's question: 'What difference does it make if discomfort and difficulties are shared by everyone?'(See Friedli's paper: 'Mental health, resilience and inequalities') and it should reduce prejudice, as Gordon Allport writes: ‘Prejudice (unless deeply rooted in the character structure of the individual) may be reduced by equal status contact between minority and majority groups in the pursuit of common goals. The effect is greatly enhanced if this contact is sanctioned by institutional supports (i.e. by law, custom or local atmosphere), and if it is of a sort that leads to the perception of common interests and common humanity between members...’ See, also, Dean Spades thoughts on mutual aid.
How might these agnotological considerations factor into the segregation, does he take sugaring, stigmatization and surveillance of, for example, disabled people or people in mental distress? Or into the dividing and arranging of people into organized, over-active abled service providers on one side of the aisle and disorganized, passive individual clients on the other? Might this factor into injured people, and others who have no economic use, being liquidated by default? Or into the creation of abandoned subjects or practices that rubber-stamp abandonment? That rubber-stamp the power to make live and let die, the peremptory injunction to enjoy, to have a nice day or fuck off and die. If conceptualizing the problem as the injured or the incapacitated (who we have an obligation to help) or as the presence of risk and lack of ‘one-to-one caring relationships’ factors into these outcomes then re-conceptualization becomes imperative. We could represent the problem as a lack of co-operation, solidarity and justice for example. In order to remedy such a lack we could, as a thought experiment at least, draw lots (though other methods would have much the same results) to decide who joins which team, collective or grouping - the formal practices of these teams would be the same and the interactions between them would be mutual such that if a member of one team is, to use a questionable term, another teams ‘case’ then members of other teams would be their cases in return. This structure may provide more opportunities to contest harmful discursive formations and to broach what those formations suppress - the question of reparations or the question of (collective) accountability, for example, and may allow for a wider range of subjectivities. And because it involves the creation of non-binary mixed (in distress-not-in-distress or abled-disabled) teams interacting with other mixed teams it may go at least some way to answering Dr Lynne Friedli's question: 'What difference does it make if discomfort and difficulties are shared by everyone?'(See Friedli's paper: 'Mental health, resilience and inequalities') and it should reduce prejudice, as Gordon Allport writes: ‘Prejudice (unless deeply rooted in the character structure of the individual) may be reduced by equal status contact between minority and majority groups in the pursuit of common goals. The effect is greatly enhanced if this contact is sanctioned by institutional supports (i.e. by law, custom or local atmosphere), and if it is of a sort that leads to the perception of common interests and common humanity between members...’ See, also, Dean Spades thoughts on mutual aid.
(If memory serves, in a interview Johanna Hedva said that, when she was an infant, an adult referred to her as a little girl and she recalled being annoyed by this because, that day, she believed herself to be a dragon; Hedva then discussed shapeshifting. This speaks to the notion of allowing for a wider range of subjectivities or forms of life).
Many policy analysts have, of course, addressed (dis)ability and the comments above are only indirectly related to WPR; analyzing policy isn’t, after all, the aim of this essay.
Bacchi problematizes problem solving itself - division, passivity and depoliticization (or political disorganization) are built into certain kinds of problem solving, she writes: ‘while “problem-solving” is commonly aligned with critical thinking, to the contrary, problem-solving, as a governing knowledge, creates politically quiescent, divided and self-regulating citizens’. These self-regulating citizens are the (at once constrained and empowered) docile bodies posited by Foucault but, as stated elsewhere, biopolitics is intertwined with necropolitics for Achille Mbembe and in this view, the destructive aspects of ‘governing knowledge’ are underplayed in Bacchi’s (generativity focused and developed/pacified world centered) accounts. The injured know that there's a lot of blood in the water and they know that it's their blood and they know that there are lots of sharks in the water. Judith Butler has it that: ‘A sovereign position not only denies its own constitutive injurability but tries to relocate injurability in the other’. History shows that there is a strong tendency to use pseudo-reasoning and kettle logic to justify the communal sadism inflicted on, and to generate members of, out-groups; see the Cagots, the Burakumin, the Dalit and countless other examples. Related to this, scapegoating is also a near universal cross cultural practice - a practice which, for example, Thomas Szasz (and Jerzy Kosinski) covered well and which René Girard covered in more depth.
As such, de-constructing ubiquitous Adolph Eichmanns, so to speak, might make more sense than questioning the so called Muselmänner - the following suggestion made by Tom Shakespeare in his paper: ‘Disability, Identity and Difference’ is relevant here: “If everyone is impaired, then we should look at the ways in which a specific group in society, namely non-disabled people, ignore their experience of impairment...Perhaps the maintenance of a non-disabled identity...is a more useful problem with which to be concerned; rather than interrogating the other, let us de-construct the normality-which-is-to-be-assumed”. Alternatively, and put more bluntly, we need to study the “pathologies of non-disablement”(Hughes) Our focus should not be on Bartleby but rather on those scriveners for whom business as usual is a motto - on what they take for granted and on what they omit, on the interleaving and punctuating gesamtkunstwerk or ‘regulatory ensemble’ that generates a normality-which-is-to-be-assumed or on finding the paper pushing or hammer or sickle wielding mass-murderer latent, or not so latent, within the innocuous everyman.
It's well known that positive affirmation improves performance and other desirable attributes - an affect amplified when sanctioned by institutional supports. This might be one, minor, reason to maintain valorized mythical identities but there is also the question of 'stereotype lift' or, that process by which our abilities are enhanced when we have discernible out-groups to look down on.
Ironically there is a sense in which out-groups are in a majority: W.E.I.R.D stands for Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic; a minority masquerading as a majority sets itself up as a benchmark against which others are to be judged - there are several papers which examine this notion; at the time of writing, 85 percent of the words population are below a poverty line which is set low. See, also, Johanna Hedva's work (in particular her conceptualization of the co-constitutive relationship between monsters and humans) Adorno's Minima Moralia: Malignant Normality and the Dilemmas of Resistance and Christopher Brownings: Ordinary Men. This cursory answer to Shakespeare's important question doesn't do it justice, it is, however, a digression in this context.
One way to escape suffering, Calvino said, is to '...accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it'. Inferno's consume everything except for themselves, complete fusion with violent formations can provide protection from them, work undertaken on identity fusion is relevant here. Perhaps Tom Shakespeare's normality-which-is-to-be-assumed is an alternate way of describing this same strategy, a reassuring and lethal strategy that hand-waives critique away, rejects didacticism outright and that has it that 'there is nothing to see here' or that 'everything is as it should be'. If, as Arendt says, evil can spread like a fungus (or an inferno for that matter) over the surface of the earth then it's certainly able to and if it stems from an inability to think then we have thoughtless ability, I would say avoidably or willfully thoughtless or, to put it another way, we have the indifference and the banality of evil.
We have the 'reappearance and various metamorphoses of the Beast'.(Achille Mbembe) A far more sophisticated appraisal of which can be found in his: Critique of Black Reason.
To simplify far too much, the end of feudalism entailed the fragmentation of sovereignty and its dispersal amongst subjects; in modern states many are, potentially, defenseless and many are potentially sovereign and so can, potentially, take part in declaring others homines sacri. Once sovereignty is up for grabs, populations enter the competition and the population (i.e. the state) turns its attention towards itself - towards the population and whoever constitutes the population. If we can't maintain a mandated relation between physis and nomos, if we can’t or don’t mask our biological existence or standardize it in accordance with the logic of dominant power(Matteo Quai) then our existence is negotiable - we are homo sacer; if we are not sufficiently confident, ambitious, able to handle stress and so on, then our existence is negotiable. As per Giorgio Agamben, determining who is categorized as homo sacer and who isn’t, who is defined as a full moral subject and who is not, who merely exists or survives and who possesses a ‘...form or way of living proper to an individual or group’(Agamben) or who is at the sharp end of concentration camps are synonymous or similar judgments - they are decisions always in play, everywhere. And homo sacer is 'virtually human' or (merely) human or, at least, humans are conceived as such in specific social orders.
As Arendt noted, when all that we have is our humanity we find that our vaunted human rights are meaningless.
They are decisions always in play everywhere, including within each individual, in that we are configured as both qualified life (or, stated in an antiquated way, life qualified by its pursuit of the good/virtuous life) and unqualified life, and in that we are called on to regulate and auto-exploit the later. In that we must give ourselves to public life (and in so doing gain a share of sovereignties symbolic immortality) while unqualified life is public life's fuel. In that Frankenstein's monster was always, also, within his inventor. Nowadays we might say ‘homo-economicus’ or 'homo-laborans' instead of qualified life - labor, as Michael Hardt has it, produces social life and, in turn, all social life is put to work. And we might say that economics is functionally political - is ‘political economy’ or that politics is primarily economic: '...power belongs to an economic-administrative paradigm'.(Beltramini) Either way, Ζωή or life has, for the most part, long since been, and continues to be, annexed or enclosed and the blood, sweat and tears involved obscured. See also: Depression: A Public Feeling by Cvetkovich, The King's Two Bodies by Kantorowicz and the phenomena of 'psychological doubling' described by Lifton. As physis provides testimony it falsifies, it always stutters its testimony, so to speak, as it attempts to render that which cannot be rendered. That which remains unrendered exists, then, as an included exclusion. As such, we remain barbaroi, that is, indeterminate, or else savages, that is, physis.
‘For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who decides whether this normal situation actually exists’.(Karl Schmidt) He who decides who or what is politically irrelevant, who or what is worthless, who or what is normal. And exceptions also define that which is not omitted, banned, banished or abandoned - to define camp forms is to define and to create what is outside of them, homo sacer is the structuring principle or ‘nomos’ of modern societies. Once life itself is politicized, sovereign power must operate at the border of life and civic life in that it decides who is civilized, and to what degree, and who is mere life and so stripped of rights, expectations, connections, honour and meaning. Though Agamben offers more nuance, he says, for example, that the point at which the decision on life (i.e. biopolitics) becomes a decision on death (i.e. necro or thantopolitics) '...no longer appears...as a stable border dividing two clearly distinct zones’. In a paper titled: ‘Mental capacity and states of exception: revisiting disability law with Giorgio Agamben’ Penelope Weller addresses the remedial extension of legal capacity in international law, and argues that the current experience of people in mental distress or with disabilities might mirror that of the homo sacer described by Agamben, she writes: ‘Agemben’s analysis indicates that modern bio-political power maintains liberal order through the exclusion of bodies and minds that fail to confirm to the liberal vision...inclusion in the mainstream can only be achieved through a demonstration of the individual’s ability to function as a rational self-actualising liberal subject. In this kind of order, a benevolent response denotes exclusion from the mainstream. Moreover, as people with disabilities report, the struggle to avoid benevolence and achieve inclusion becomes the constant feature of the disability experience...For Agamben, homo sacer is a figure who is alive, and yet beyond law, inhabiting a place where all normal rights, expectations, connections, honour and meaning are suspended. Because homo sacer is a diminished life form...it becomes ‘an object of violence that exceeds the sphere both of law and of sacrifice.’ Agamben argues for the destitution of law which is to say against the interminable logic of the guillotine/the sorting of the righteous from the damned and turns to divine violence which leads to politics without law and to metaphysics but Wellers reading of Agamben is pragmatic and this makes sense because '...no matter how much we are working to change the world, we must still find ways of coping with the reality at hand.'(Hedva) Law and politics are compromised, politics is war by other means (or vice versa) but that's where we're at and denial or pretending that we're all on the same page merely intensifies conflict to the point of extermination, denial is the ultimate compromise.
In this kind of order, in the reality at hand, orders absence (those pervasive points at which the rule of law flounders or breaks down) is administered. Aporíē, confusion and absurdity are built into law and into language - they are built into order as such.
For related and more detailed discussion from a different angle see, for example: 'Violence, Power and Pleasure: A Revisionist Reading of Foucault from the Victim Perspective' by Dean and Juliet MacCannell, in particular see their discussion of administrative violence.
This kind of order animalizes those receiving help and colonizes life itself. In this kind of order, full inclusion in (political, artistic, proletariat, intellectual and so on) community depends, in large part, on the ability to speak ‘properly’ - those who cannot are positioned somewhere between animal and human. Origins for this can be found in the division, and consequent creation, of what was considered to be human and what was considered to be non-human or natural - the division between speech (or lógos) and sound (or phōnḗ) and so on, ‘...the law (language) relates to the living being by withdrawing from it, by abandoning it to its own violence and its own irrelatedness.’(Agamben) Consider the etymology of the word barbarian:
‘Early 15c., in reference to classical history, "a non-Roman or non-Greek," earlier barbar (late 14c.) "non-Roman or non-Greek person; non-Christian; person speaking a language different from one's own," from Medieval Latin barbarinus (source of Old French barbarin "Berber, pagan, Saracen, barbarian"), from Latin barbarus "strange, foreign, barbarous," from Greek barbaros "foreign, strange; ignorant," from PIE root *barbar - echoic of unintelligible speech of foreigners (compare Sanskrit barbara- "stammering," also "non-Aryan," Latin balbus "stammering," Czech blblati "to stammer").
Greek barbaroi (plural noun) meant "all that are not Greek," but especially the Medes and Persians; originally it was not entirely pejorative, but its sense became moreso after the Persian wars. The Romans (technically themselves barbaroi) took up the word and applied it to tribes or nations which had no Greek or Roman accomplishments.
Also in Middle English (c. 1400) "native of the Barbary coast;" meaning "rude, wild person" is from 1610s. Occasionally in 19c. English distinguished from savage (n.) as being a step closer to civilization’.
In theory, lucid portrayals of, for example, mood disorders can serve as qualifiers, in other words, they can serve to include us in civic life or in what Agamben calls βίος, if they are well met that is; Andrew Solomon's portrayal is a good example, symptomology, generally, can, in theory, function in this way - as a kind of biopsychosocial capital; as with every other form of capital, not everyone has much of it. This might be the result of, or it might be a form of, epistemological injustice or, more specifically, a form of hermeneutic injustice, as per Miranda Fricker.
To simplify far to much, we might say that, as per monotheism and stoicism, all words are passwords - that it's through the lógos (and by way of prosopa - masks or roles) that we enter into human organization/community, while the cries of animals/phōnaí are at once abandoned and trapped outside of the many cages or arrangements which the lógos consists in. They are surrounded by cages and we are perpetually judged on our ability to actively communicate - communicative debts or deficits are original sins; like Pocahontas mythologized by Disney, captured song-birds appear to be prized but really they are bribed, bought, sold and stolen.
There is a sense in which such arrangements are also arraignments - when we arrange we judge and we are open to judgment. And there is a sense in which Adolph Eichmann in Israel was a caged cage - perfectly comfortable with the administrative machinery (or apparatuses) which he was now on the wrong side of.
The word apparatus, in this context, seems to be, more or less, interchangeable with the phrase: 'knowledge-power regime' and with the phrase: 'regulatory ensemble', and according to Foucault, apparatuses are made up of elements which include discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions. While an apparatus itself is a system of relations that can be established between these elements. Agamben expands on this list and suggests that language might be the originary apparatus. Either way, power doesn't belong to one individual or organization or to a few. It generates individuals or subjects and wields that which wields it, so to speak.
Professor Weller's view is supported by, for example, U.S. Department of Justice data and World Health Organization data which shows that disabled people, generally, are approximately 3 to 4 times as likely to be assaulted, raped and murdered than average and that rates are significantly higher than this amongst some subgroups - among those with emotional or cognitive disorders for example. (More precise statistical breakdowns are available from, for example, the DoJ and the WHO; findings differ but they all seem to point in the same direction). And her view is supported by the following statistic: ‘...once a week, a person with a disability is murdered by a family member or caregiver’.(The Ruderman Foundation) There is also the question of statistically obscure ‘small massacres’ which Antonio Pele, following Mbembe and affirming living being, speaks of as follows: ‘The instillation of those “small doses” of death in the daily existences of many individuals...comes from “unbounded social, economic, and symbolic violence” that destroys their bodies and the value of their social existence. Daily humiliations perpetrated by public forces on certain populations, the strategy of “small massacres” inflicted one day at a time...’ And in Wellers view, violence that isn’t organized is an offshoot of that which is.
While '...the privilege of the sovereign is to exercise lawful violence, the creation of a relationship of violence, encourages others to act violently toward the figure of the homo sacer. They are emboldened because violence is made permissible’.(Weller) Weller suggests that, for the same reasons, abuse visited on ‘diminished life forms’ by diminished life forms also tends to be deprecated, ignored or otherwise seen as not counting. See, for example, Eleanor Longden’s popular TED talk for possible examples of this dynamic, these examples are, of course, the tip of an iceberg. I knew someone who was raped by ten people every day in the residential that he grew up in and I knew someone who was drugged and raped by a psychiatrist who, he found out later, had raped over one hundred people; such anecdotal evidence can be misleading, however, in as much as it's unrepresentative or in as much as the problem is systemic.
All of this would, of course, work against bringing down and rebuilding philanthropic institutions on democratic and solidalitarian foundations, and it would work against contesting, bringing down or rebuilding paternalistic institutions on more egalitarian grounds, to borrow Butler’s phrasing. Butler also shows, as many others have and as discussed earlier, that an independent 'self-actualising' liberal subject can only pretend to be so insofar as the mutual dependence and infrastructural support necessary to maintain this performance is, and has been, in place.
Byung Chul Han reminds us that relative freedom is won through the quality of our connections and lost through a lack of ties and that freedom and friendship share the same etymological root.
On the one hand, we might be so injured that we are unable to claim rights, roles or socioeconomic status. On the other, through eliminating injured or incapacitated people (and fully individualizing their incapacity) others may be freed from being categorized in terms of mere physical existence and their particularity, belonging and humanity consecrated. The outlaw is both dehumanized and valorized, in part, because there is a sense in which the civilized or respectable may become so by distinguishing themselves from what ordinary law doesn’t fully capture - from states of exception, nature/cosmos or from anomie, disorganization or chaos. ‘The statement: ‘The rule lives off the exception alone’ must...be taken to the letter. The law is made of nothing but what it manages to capture inside itself through the inclusive exclusion of the exepcio. It nourishes itself on this exception and is a dead letter without it’.(Agamben) Language is a cup formed by what fills it. Exclusion, as Penelope Weller and Jessica Whyte put it, founds sovereign power and constitutes political community; as such this valorization or sacralization is self-serving, is a kind of 'inverse exultation' and is, therefore, misleading. Homo sacer is said to be sacred and accursed but ultimately, to contemporary politics and biopolitics, for the most part, he is just diminished, just a cockroach, as free as a bird and as killable and ungrievable - in Agamben's view, the politics of separating life from qualified life occurs prior to any distinction between the sacred and the non-sacred. About the holocaust he writes: ‘The dimension in which the extermination took place is neither religion nor law, but biopolitics’. (See, for example, Robert Jay Lifton's: ‘The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide’).
In this view, the state and law have, to some degree, been captured by anomie and so attempts to locate it (anomie) entirely elsewhere also lack credibility. ‘For the sovereign, who freely consented to donning the executioner's clothes, is now finally manifesting his originary kinship with the criminal’.(Agamben) And it’s a case of, as above so below - from sovereign to criminal and every lesser-sovereign in between, and it’s a case of, as abroad so at home.
And in this view the suspension of ordinary rights, under the guise of biopolitics and biopower, constitutes a perpetual state of emergency implemented by (or using) an array of distant, and mostly unwitting, experts and deputies, and justified by security, safety, crisis, protection, necessity, care, emergency and the like. Instances of biopower might be good, bad or indifferent and justifications might stand up to scrutiny or they might not but overall, politics now ‘...secretly works towards the production of emergencies.’(Agamben) It produces states of permanent catastrophe that call for politics as policing or polizeiwissenschaft or, more broadly, as all pervasive technê. They know the lingo but they don't do da ting doe: knowledge can be used to prop up ruling and structurally violent formations successfully, just as superstition can; a more granular apprehension of biology makes a more granular implementation of biopower possible, whether in the form of the skull measuring racism described by Stephen J Gould, or a more 'benevolent' expansion of diverse techniques permeating states invested in ‘defending’ and in ensuring, sustaining, and multiplying(Foucault) the lives of populations.
Increasing the accuracy of the measurements mentioned doesn't denote a corresponding ethical improvement.
Democratic politics should, Agamben said, try to ‘...prevent the development of conditions which lead to destruction, hatred and terror.’ But, instead, politics has limited ‘...itself to attempts to control them once they occur’. And - like M.C Escher's famous drawing of a hand drawing a hand which draws the first - destruction, hatred and terror and the politics of safety depend on and, sometimes, create one-another but they also morph into one another.
About Foucault's vision of state racism, Sam Binkley writes: ‘Through state racism, the popular sovereignty of specific groups was reduced to a category of human biological variation, separated off from the normal population for specific and unique strategies of containment and correction’. As Foucault (sometimes) has it, these strategies were enmeshed in and with, for example, medical, juridical and economic practices and inscribed and re-inscribed into and generative of populations and they were, also, increasingly deployed endogenously - against ourselves. Such is the make live component of the make live and let die binary; though, in a more elemental sense, social power, of the type referenced, consists in sets of actions acting upon other actions.(Foucault) These actions or force relations form complex strategic situations.
It is, in its repressive form, a '...a total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action'.(Foucault) In its normalizing form it may consist in what we want, what we believe, what we think, our judgments and choices; all of which are determined, to a significant degree, by normalizing power and all of which can be, themselves, normalizing.
As is true of many forms of prejudice: ‘Racism, commonly understood as an interpersonal disposition or an emotional state, in fact derives from a history of medical, scientific and institutional discourses that...related that knowledge to new strategies of government, whose aim is to divide societies into populations warranting distinct forms of regulation’. And in this view, state anti-racism may be another form of biopolitical correction wedded to its apparent antitheses - the echo's of certain kinds of prejudice are generated and corrected within echo chambers. Variants of Pax Romana eliminate, hide, misname, transform and make use of their internecine 'tribal' conflicts. As such, neoliberalism's self-image is, often, that it is free of racism, misogyny, classism and ableism etc. and attempts to problematize them (made by post-colonial scholars or critical race theorists, feminists, socialists, or by disability studies scholars or, for that matter, made by fascists) are to be rejected as at odds with this image - this image of a, Francis Fukuyama like, fait accompli. But, whenever prevalent versions of liberalism are threatened doesn't fascism become an option or savior? Ludwig Von Mises wrote: 'It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aimed at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has for the moment saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history'. That said, regimes of all types, as Mbembe has it, 'are capable of incorporating criminality into their system' and, as such, there is no singular ideological demon.
And, in line with this harmonious self-image, gene environment interaction becomes: 'it's all in your genes' and being-in-the-world becomes, tacitly moralizing, individual or, at best, interpersonal psychology. As Nancy Harstsock wrote: 'In theory, when we enter the market, we arrive in an environment populated by free and equal individuals who have chosen to come together for their mutual benefit, none with power over any others'. To bridge the gap between this theory and reality and square the circle, structural prejudice/violence and the damage they cause are fully essentialized, treated as an externality, as collateral damage, as a bug and not a feature. Privileges are left un-checked, just-world and naturalistic fallacies are invoked and doxastic comfort is maintained. As per Lorraine Code, following Miranda Fricker: '...losses, not just of psychic or doxastic comfort, but of the privileges and self-certainties...prejudices confer' are avoided, cognitive dissonance is eliminated and its sources obscured.
What if we began, as Paul Cairney does, with the assumption that all policy is bad and then attempted to figure out how and why?
What if we defined precarity and vulnerability as continuous and universal rather than temporary and uncommon and, as such, re-defined selfhood itself as continuously contingent on infrastructures of support? 'The subject cannot...appear in a way that matters without the caring and creative support of others'.(Brophy) What if we re-shaped the world accordingly as Hedva and Butler suggest? Though Foucault might balk at naïve accounts of appearing subjects and, to Bacchi, care is questionable in that it transcribes hierarchy.
Or implemented universal design and the Social Model or its descendants.
What if we asked, as per Mbembe: what place is given to wounded or slain bodies ‘...how are they inscribed in the order of power?’ Or viewed the world from the perspective of the injured or slain?
Or, as next step, pursued the renewal of suspended rights, expectations, connections, honour and meaning. Or, as a horizon to work towards, toyed with policy instead of executing it and emphasized extra-legal and extra-linguistic judgment, moved by forces other than legal machinery.
Attitudes to pain and to brutality quite often tend towards or encourage solipsism, which is something that should, perhaps, be de-emphasised in favour of seeing them as something that humanity has struggled with and thought deeply about since Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden, seeing suffering globally – awarding suffering citizenship of the world instead of confining it to an island of ourselves. Or, to paraphrase, in favour of finding methods, customs, cultures or activities concerned with the practice of relating to pain; without ways of relating to suffering and its opposites in public, we might be left with private quasi-spiritual lives consisting in self-aggrandizement or justification, personal dreams and wish-fulfillment.(Segall) Suffering is difficult to incorporate; our instincts are to reject it and yet it remains resolutely at the centre of life, even when it's socially marginal – Sam Harris paints too simple picture: 'Our struggle to navigate the space of possible pains and pleasures produces most of human culture, we are ever in the process of creating and repairing a world that our minds want to be in and wherever we look we see evidence of our successes and our failures.' I think that, as Will Conway wrote, wherever we look we also see evidence of a concern for '...maximizing the extraction of raw utility from bodies within the state'. If we concede Harris's point then successes seem less likely and an alienated and alienating voyeurism seems more likely if we ignore the role that pain plays and act as though it is, or view it as, radically removed or as a spectacle. But as Anne Boyer writes: 'The common struggle gets pushed through the sieve of what forms we have to make its account, and before you know it, the wide and shared suffering of this world is narrowed...The telling is always trying to slide down into a reinforcement of the conditions that made us want to say something in the first place, rather than their exposé, as if the gravity of our shared diminishments is more powerful than any ascendant rage.' You can lace words with poison but there is little that the Moloch can't digest.
Nature contains deserts and Arctic ‘wastes’ and culture contains equally inhospitable locations; as inhospitable as they are, it would be remiss of a geographer not to include deserts in their work. Organizational design, culture, regulation, protocol and law all reflect a gross lacunae in skill and soul where pain is concerned and so what if we asked, along with Eduardo Galeano: 'What happens when we integrate rather than refuse the pain, toil, and doom of surviving?'
What is avoided, downplayed or consistently left out and what is left unproblematic in a ‘...problem representation? Where are the silences? Can the ‘problem’ be thought about differently?’(Bacchi) Both problem and meta-problem representations are understandable and mutable, and there are a variety of ways in which they can be re-conceptualized if we question them closely - if we start with the question: what is the problem represented to be? Instead of placing too much emphasis on solving problems - an emphasis that would be seen here as begging several questions. ‘The study of problematizations...directs attention to the heterogenous strategic relations – the politics – that shape lives.’(Bacchi) And, according to Bacchi, even theorists and researchers inevitably participate in these relations. Some gears are aware that they are gears nested in gears.
Reversing the rotation of a gear takes collective effort. It '...is the sufferings of men that should be shared' Adorno wrote, and isn't emancipation (which is always wider emancipation) won through accepting this burden, by walking into the Omelas and fighting-back-by-thinking-back? By rejecting burden, doesn't it land on and crush those for whom acceptance or rejection are not options?
If an asteroid were about to hit the earth and, out of the earths ten inhabitants, one was worried and nine were not then the worried one would be very worried - if the carefree nine had the skills needed to stop the asteroid in its tracks then the worried one would have yet more reason to agonize over the asteroid and to worry - without a care in the world we don't care about the world.
It's difficult for some countries to reject electronic waste and it's difficult for some populations and for some individuals to reject collective behavioral, emotional and cognitive hardship or overload. And isn't the rejection of our share of the burden the most toxic form of waste? In a memo written by Lawrence Summers while he worked at the World Bank, he '...argued that rich countries should export pollution to poorer ones on the grounds that it would do less economic damage because the economies were smaller'.(Jesse Zink) In a similarly crudely utilitarian and productionist vein, philosopher Nick Beckstead suggests that: '...saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal.' This, he reasons, is so because: '...richer countries have substantially more innovation, and their workers are much more economically productive.' We can see much the same logic in force where systemic and interpersonal emotional dumping is concerned and where panoptic strategies are concerned. We don't dump on 'praised groups'. We don't dump on individuals or groups who are considered important to the overall functioning of 'important' societies. Feminist affect theory offers a more complicated discussion (and expression) of the politics of affect, see, for example, Sara Ahmed and Cvetkovich.
How are subjects construed, what is reinforced and what is attention drawn away from?
Like cats that chase their own tails - tails which they are eternally surprised by, we are surprised by the results of our custom of using others and of our customary destruction of human bodies and populations; we can continue to kick the can down the road or pick it up, we can say: Je sais bien mais quand même or know better and do better or, at least, not worse. To a degree, echoing Agamben, Achille Mbembe writes: ‘My concern is those figures of sovereignty whose central project is not the struggle for autonomy but the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations. Such figures of sovereignty are far from a piece of prodigious insanity or an expression of a rupture between the impulses and interests of the body and those of the mind. Indeed, they, like the death camps, are what constitute the nomos of the political space in which we still live’. The politics that both shapes lives and destroys them.
There are several iterations of the following six questions which, as per WPR, are used to analyze problem representations/policies. These questions are then aimed at any problem representations that the process generates:
‘Question 1: What’s the problem represented to be in a policy or set of policies?
Question 2: What deep-seated propositions or assumptions underlie this representation? Identify binaries, key concepts and categories.
Question 3: How has this representation come about?
Question 4: What is left unproblematic in this representation? What are the silences? Can the problem be reconceptualised differently?
Question 5: What effects (discursive, subjectification, lived) are produced by this representation of the problem?
Question 6: How/where are dominant problem representations produced, disseminated and defended? How could they be contested/disrupted? Explore contradictions and discursive resources for reconceptualisation(re-problematization)'.
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