excerpt (On identity fusion)

Identity fusion reflects a visceral feeling of oneness with a group that predicts extreme pro-group orientations. While the theory has been tested extensively, several questions have not been conclusively answered. Here, we present the first meta-analysis of the associations between identity fusion and pro-group orientations (k = 57, N = 36,880, 106 effects). Identity fusion had a strong positive association with extreme pro-group orientations, which was significantly stronger than between social identification and these outcomes. The observed relationships were relatively robust across various countries and, interestingly, the effects were strongest for fusion with an outgroup. The verbal scale assessing identity fusion was the most predictive, and extreme forms of collective action were most strongly correlated with fusion, followed by sacrifice and die orientations and outgroup hostility. In sum, the present meta-analysis provides evidence for identity fusion being robustly associated with extreme pro-group outcomes across contexts and settings.

Anders Hustad Varmann, Line Kruse, Kinga Bierwiaczonek, Angel Gomez, Alexandra Vázquez, Jonas R. Kunst

Hollingshead and Redlich

Both social class and mental illness may be compared with an iceberg; 90% of it is concealed below the surface. The submerged portion, though unseen, is the dangerous part. This may be illustrated by recalling what happened when an “unsinkable” trans-Atlantic luxury liner, the Titanic, rammed an iceberg on her maiden voyage in 1912. In that crisis, a passenger’s class status played a part in the determination of whether he survived or was drowned. The official casualty list showed that only 4 first class female passengers (3 voluntarily chose to stay on the ship) of a total of 143 were lost. Among the second class passengers, 15 of 93 females drowned; and among the third class, 81 of 179 female passengers went down with the ship. The third class passengers were ordered to remain below deck, some kept there at the point of a gun.

The idea that stratification in our society has any bearing on the diagnosis and treatment of disease runs counter to our cherished beliefs about equality, especially when they are applied to the care of the sick. Physicians have deeply ingrained egalitarian ideals with their fellow citizens, yet they, too, may make subtle, perhaps unconscious judgments of the differential worth of the members of our society. Physicians, among them psychiatrists, are sensitive to statements that patients may not be treated alike; in fact there is strong resistance in medical circles to the exploration of such questions. But closing our eyes to facts or denying them in anger will help patients no more than the belief that the Titanic was “unsinkable” kept the ship afloat after it collided with an iceberg. . . .

The implementation of a decision that a person should be treated by a psychiatrist for his disturbed behavior is linked to class status. There is a definite tendency to induce disturbed persons in class I [the most affluent class, highly educated, consisting of business and professional leaders] and II [generally educated beyond high school, managerial positions, living in the better neighborhoods] to see a psychiatrist in more gentle and “insightful” ways than is the practice in class IV [the working class, engaged in skilled or semi-skilled manual occupations, generally completed some high school] and especially in class V [the lowest class; semiskilled factory hands and unskilled laborers who generally have not completed elementary school, living in the worst areas of town], where direct, authoritative, compulsory, and, at times, coercively brutal methods are used. We see this difference most frequently in forensic cases of mentally ill persons who are treated often according to their class status. The goddess of justice may be blind, but she smells differences, and particularly class differences. In sum, perception of trouble, its evaluation, and decisions about how it should be regarded are variables that are influenced in highly significant ways by an individual’s class status. . . .

[A] distinct inverse relationship does exist between social class and mental illness. The linkage between class status and the distribution of patients in the population follows a characteristic pattern; class V, almost invariably, contributes many more patients than its proportion in the population warrants. Among the higher classes there is a more proportionate relationship between the number of psychiatric patients and the number of individuals in the population. . . .

Hollingshead AB, Redlich FC

Eichenberger\Reuters

"In a practice that lasted in Switzerland until 1981, tens of thousands of children and teenagers were forcibly removed from their families, who for one reason or another were deemed by the authorities to be incapable of caring for them."

"Effectively a cheap labour force, the children were sometimes beaten, malnourished, or sexually abused. For their part, unmarried teenage mothers and dropouts could be detained without trial or interned in psychiatric hospitals right up until the 1980s. The authorities sometimes even decreed that the adults should be castrated or sterilised and forced to hand their children over for adoption.

In the early 2000s, survivors’ accounts began to appear in the media, triggering questions in parliament. For a long time, the churches, cantons, communes, and government all blamed each other – some even playing down the mistreatment suffered by the children".

“It was the same elsewhere,” he explains. “There is just as little documentation as in Switzerland but the witness accounts are the same from Germany to Poland to Czechoslovakia or Norway.”

“At the time, it was normal to mistreat the children and poverty was considered a flaw to be corrected with hard work. I was invited one day to a meeting of these people and I was so completely shocked by what they said that I was speechless,” says Walter Zwahlen, president of the Association for Stolen Children".

Isabelle Eichenberger

"In an attempt to come to terms with one of the darkest chapters in Swiss history, the lower house of parliament has approved compensation for thousands of people who were separated from their families as children because the government considered their parents unfit to bring them up."

"Verdingkinder," which literally means "children for hire" in German, was a policy practised in Switzerland from the 19th century until the 1980s. Officials forcefully took away orphans, illegitimate children, children of alcoholics and boys and girls whose parents had separated or who were from socially weak families. Many villages also organized auctions, where children were sold to the highest bidder.

The juveniles were then given over to farmers or owners of small factories and forced to do physical work. They often fell victim to sexual and physical abuse.

According to historians, the "Verdingkinder" policy affected thousands of people. In the 1930s alone, 30,000 children were placed in foster families across the country".

Reuters

Bacchi (Excerpt)

As in the example of Indigenous health above, representing 'problem gamblers' as 'the problem', as pathological, has important political effects—keeping change within narrow limits, protecting specific interests, and stigmatizing those constructed as responsible for the problem. From this example it is clear that problem representations necessarily involve implications about who or what is responsible for the 'problem'. In many areas today, as in the examples above, it is common for individuals to be blamed for any ill effects in their lives. For example, Gillian Fulcher (1989) 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. In addition, problem representations that target specific individuals or groups (e.g. 'the disabled', 'problem gamblers') as the 'problem' often affect how those who are targeted feel both about themselves and about the possibility for change. For example in the Politics of Affirmative Action (1996; see also Bacchi 2004) I show how the dominant understanding of affirmative action as 'preferential treatment' of the 'disadvantaged' tends to alienate affirmative action 'targets' from the reform—no one in Western societies likes to appear a supplicant. The way in which the 'problem' is represented in dominant affirmative action discourse, therefore, produces political subjects unlikely to support the reform, reinforcing the political status quo. This example illustrates how problem representations are forms of political intervention.

Carol Bacchi

West and Citron (Excerpt)

Most legal scholarship is produced in law schools that are part of universities committed to the pursuit of knowledge, but law schools are also part of a legal profession committed to, and even defined by, the ideal of justice. Scholarship reflects the legal academy’s dual identity. Normative legal scholarship aims to influence judges, lawyers, legislators or regulators to reform, interpret, or preserve existing law to make the world more just. Doctrinal scholarship aims for interpretations that show what actions justice requires or prohibits. Reformist legal scholarship aims to render the law more just not by interpreting pre-existing law, but by arguing for proposed legal reforms. The reformist scholar emphasizes claims of injustice or at least couples them with direct appeals to the common good or to public policy writ large. Normative scholarship is not bound by the same constraints as a judge’s opinion or a brief written for a client. It can range across entire swaths of law to address questions not posed by individual cases. It seeks fundamental changes in law, often over a long time frame, but not directly through filing a lawsuit.  Its impact is felt through the force of its argument on its readership, including students who become judicial clerks, lawyers, judges, and legislators. This scholarship rests on the understanding that the work of justice is squarely within the purview, and reach, of law. It also demonstrates that the work of the citizen-lawyer requires scholarly virtues: deep engagement and rigorous thought.

Robin West and Danielle Citron

Hedva

The APA has a “topic” page on their website for “Emotional Health” that defines it like this:

Emotional health can lead to success in work, relationships and health. In the past, researchers believed that success made people happy. Newer research reveals that it’s the other way around. Happy people are more likely to work toward goals, find the resources they need and attract others with their energy and optimism—key building blocks of success.

—

 There are many nights, when I start up in bed, the fight-or-flight nut of my brain exploding ...and I feel as if the only thing that really exists is being extinguished: “me.” I also feel this sucked-out vacuum of self-extinction in line at the pharmacy, to be told that one of my medications costs $800 USD a month without insurance.

In capitalism, the primary purpose of one’s life—both ideologically and materially—is to accumulate value. This is done through one’s labour, but of course primarily relies upon the exploitation of the labour of others and various resources of all kinds. As Silvia Federici has argued, such exploitation requires an accumulation of differences, beyond Marx’s “primitive accumulation” of natural and labour resources, to justify itself: self/other, white/black, male/female, society/nature, us/them, life/death.

“The order that collects differences, the order that collects what Marx called labor still objectifying itself, is the order of governance,” write Moten and Harney. Governance was invented for that which is ungovernable—I’d like to suggest that it was invented for de-persons...

Johanna Hedva

Mbembe (Excerpt)

For Bataille, sovereignty therefore has many forms. But ultimately it is the refusal to accept the limits that the fear of death would have the subject respect. The sovereign world, Bataille argues, “is the world in which the limit of death is done away with. Death is present in it, its presence defines that world of violence, but while death is present it is always there only to be negated, never for anything but that. The sovereign,” he concludes, “is he who is, as if death were not. . . He has no more regard for the limits of identity than he does for limits of death, or rather these limits are the same; he is the transgression of all such limits.” Since the natural domain of prohibitions includes death, among others (e.g., sexuality, filth, excrement), sovereignty requires “the strength to violate the prohibition against killing, although it’s true this will be under the conditions that customs define.” And contrary to subordination that is always rooted in necessity and the alleged need to avoid death, sovereignty definitely calls for the risk of death.14 By treating sovereignty as the violation of prohibitions, Bataille reopens the question of the limits of the political. Politics, in this case, is not the forward dialectical movement of reason. Politics can only be traced as a spiral transgression, as that difference that disorients the very idea of the limit. More specifically, politics is the difference put into play by the violation of a taboo.15

Biopower and the Relation of Enmity 

Having presented a reading of politics as the work of death, I turn now to sovereignty, expressed predominantly as the right to kill. For the purpose of my argument, I relate Foucault’s notion of biopower to two other concepts: the state of exception and the state of siege.16 I examine those trajectories by which the state of exception and the relation of enmity have become the normative basis of the right to kill. In such instances, power (and not necessarily state power) continuously refers and appeals to exception, emergency, and a fictionalized notion of the enemy. It also labors to produce that same exception, emergency, and fictionalized enemy. In other words, the question is: What is the relationship between politics and death in those systems that can function only in a state of emergency? In Foucault’s formulation of it, biopower appears to function through dividing 

Public Culture 16 14. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, eds., The Bataille Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 318–19. See also Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, vol. 1, Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1988), and Erotism: Death & Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights, 1986). 15. Bataille, Accursed Share, vol. 2, The History of Eroticism; vol. 3, Sovereignty. 16. On the state of siege, see Schmitt, La dictature, chap. 6. Necropolitics 17

people into those who must live and those who must die. Operating on the basis of a split between the living and the dead, such a power defines itself in relation to a biological field—which it takes control of and vests itself in. This control presupposes the distribution of human species into groups, the subdivision of the population into subgroups, and the establishment of a biological caesura between the ones and the others. This is what Foucault labels with the (at first sight familiar) term racism.17 That race (or for that matter racism) figures so prominently in the calculus of biopower is entirely justifiable. After all, more so than class-thinking (the ideology that defines history as an economic struggle of classes), race has been the ever present shadow in Western political thought and practice, especially when it comes to imagining the inhumanity of, or rule over, foreign peoples. Referring to both this ever-presence and the phantomlike world of race in general, Arendt locates their roots in the shattering experience of otherness and suggests that the politics of race is ultimately linked to the politics of death.18 Indeed, in Foucault’s terms, racism is above all a technology aimed at permitting the exercise of biopower, “that old sovereign right of death.”19 In the economy of biopower, the function of racism is to regulate the distribution of death and to make possible the murderous functions of the state. It is, he says, “the condition for the acceptability of putting to death.”20 Foucault states clearly that the sovereign right to kill (droit de glaive) and the mechanisms of biopower are inscribed in the way all modern states function;21 indeed, they can be seen as constitutive elements of state power in modernity. According to Foucault, the Nazi state was the most complete example of a state exercising the right to kill. This state, he claims, made the management, protection, and cultivation of life coextensive with the sovereign right to kill. By biological extrapolation on the theme of the political enemy, in organizing the war against its adversaries and, at the same time, exposing its own citizens to war, the Nazi state is seen as having opened the way for a formidable consolidation of the right to kill, which culminated in the project of the “final solution.” In doing so, it became the archetype of a power formation that combined the characteristics of the racist state, the murderous state, and the suicidal state. 17. 

See Foucault, Il faut défendre la société, 57–74. 18. “Race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end . . . , not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death.” Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 157. 19. Foucault, Il faut défendre la société, 214. 20. Foucault, Il faut défendre la société, 228. 21. Foucault, Il faut défendre la société, 227–32.

It has been argued that the complete conflation of war and politics (and racism, homicide, and suicide), until they are indistinguishable from one another, is unique to the Nazi state. The perception of the existence of the Other as an attempt on my life, as a mortal threat or absolute danger whose biophysical elimination would strengthen my potential to life and security—this, I suggest, is one of the many imaginaries of sovereignty characteristic of both early and late modernity itself. Recognition of this perception to a large extent underpins most traditional critiques of modernity, whether they are dealing with nihilism and its proclamation of the will for power as the essence of the being; with reification understood as the becoming-object of the human being; or the subordination of everything to impersonal logic and to the reign of calculability and instrumental rationality.22 Indeed, from an anthropological perspective, what these critiques implicitly contest is a definition of politics as the warlike relation par excellence. They also challenge the idea that, of necessity, the calculus of life passes through the death of the Other; or that sovereignty consists of the will and the capacity to kill in order to live. Taking a historical perspective, a number of analysts have argued that the material premises of Nazi extermination are to be found in colonial imperialism on the one hand and, on the other, in the serialization of technical mechanisms for putting people to death—mechanisms developed between the Industrial Revolution and the First World War. According to Enzo Traverso, the gas chambers and the ovens were the culmination of a long process of dehumanizing and industrializing death, one of the original features of which was to integrate instrumental rationality with the productive and administrative rationality of the modern Western world (the factory, the bureaucracy, the prison, the army). Having become mechanized, serialized execution was transformed into a purely technical, impersonal, silent, and rapid procedure. This development was aided in part by racist stereotypes and the flourishing of a class-based racism that, in translating the social conflicts of the industrial world in racial terms, ended up comparing the working classes and “stateless people” of the industrial world to the “savages” of the colonial world.23

Achille Mbembe

Baudrillard

The smile of immunity, the smile of advertising: ‘This country is good. I am good. We are the best’...An autoprophetic smile, like all signs in advertising. Smile and others will smile back. Smile to show how transparent, how candid you are. Smile if you have nothing to say. Most of all, do not hide the fact you have nothing to say nor your total indifference to others. Let this emptiness, this profound indifference shine out spontaneously in your smile. Give your emptiness and indifference to others, light up your face with the zero degree of joy and pleasure, smile, smile, smile...

Jean Baudrillard 

SUNAURA TAYLOR (Excerpt)

ON JUNE 21 OF THIS YEAR, the Tucson Airport Remediation Project (TARP), a twenty-seven-year-old water treatment facility, was shut down. The area’s municipal water company, Tucson Water, was facing the reality that the system was soon to be overwhelmed by chemicals it was not designed to treat. The contaminants headed toward the facility were a family of chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), known also as “forever chemicals” because they don’t degrade or break down under natural circumstances.

The TARP system was built during the mid-1990s, a decade defined by climate denial. It was designed to treat contamination of industrial solvents discovered in the 1980s, when fossil fuel industry leadership first planted plans for that denial. The contamination itself took place between the 1940s and 1970s, during a time of mass industrial contamination, but before the atmosphere of our planet had been drastically altered—before climate change was widely known to be an existential threat. This pollution is old, nearly eighty years old, hardly a crisis that feels urgent in an era when our newsfeeds are filled with new climate catastrophes every day.

Yet, here in Tucson, deep under the record heat waves cooking the saguaros and coyotes and people, lies an aquifer existing with chronic contamination, which will require likely indefinite treatment for the original contamination that took place half a century ago. The people who live with this aquifer, a largely Mexican American community on Tucson’s south side, are also still in need of medical care and supports for the impairments and illnesses that the previously discovered contamination caused.

I have been researching this particular treatment facility and the contamination that led to it being built since 2017, and it is clear to me that the shutdown of TARP exemplifies a larger issue: the reality that treating environmental harm and its multifaceted effects on the health of humans, animals, and ecosystems is a long-term, enduring, and at times incurable process. It is a reminder that, for many ecosystems, creatures, and people on this planet, the coming decades of environmental crises will stretch not only toward death or health, but also something else—something impaired, precarious, dependent, filled with loss and struggle, requiring assistance, accommodation, and creative forms of care.

As a disabled person I recognize this as disability. Although past environmental movements in this country often focused on the protection of landscapes understood as pristine, untouched, and wild, today those fighting for the environment work with an understanding that nature has been altered and damaged in profound and serious ways. What we live with in the present and will for decades to come, even under the best-case scenarios, is mass ecological disablement of the more than human world, a disablement that is utterly entangled with the disablement of human beings. Given this, it seems vital to consider what forms of care, treatment, and assistance this age of disability will require.

 

In 1951 Tucson became the home of Hughes Missile Systems Company (now Raytheon), a major player in postwar U.S. military industries. Hughes contracted out the newly built Air Force Plant #44 on the south side of the city and within a year was manufacturing radar noses for the Northrop F-89 Scorpion fighter interceptor aircraft to be used against North Korea. In 1952, only a year after opening, the plant began disposing large amounts of industrial solvents and heavy metals, in particular trichloroethylene (TCE)—an airplane degreaser used to clean electronics and aircraft—into large open-air pits or lagoons. These lagoons were only some of the dumping grounds. Abandoned wells, desert washes, discrete fences, and the desert floor all became sites for waste, not only by Hughes, but also by the Air National Guard and a variety of now defunct defense and electronics industries.

Over the three decades during which these lagoons were used for waste disposal, the chemicals would at times overflow and leach into the surrounding landscape, stressing and eventually killing the mesquite and cottonwood trees and other plant life in their path. Wildlife drank from the open pits and became ill and died. Tohono O’odham representatives protested the disposal of wastes from Hughes, which were flowing through desert arroyos onto O’odham land, where their cattle would drink it. From the toxic lagoons more than four thousand gallons of TCE, and a large variety of other body-harming chemicals, slowly flowed downward through fewer than a hundred feet of porous earth below, entering Tucson’s regional aquifer and filtering into the groundwater. The chemicals traveled northwesterly, entering the sand, gravel, and clay that made up the region’s geologic matter— moving with gravity underground toward the north-flowing Santa Cruz River. The river was spared the contamination, only because the contaminants reached municipal and private wells first—wells from which the people of the south side bathed and drank. The “TCE plume,” as it came to be known, eventually reached out ten square miles from south to north, and a mile and a half east to west.

Although many of those living in the area had been there for generations, many more had relocated after one of the oldest and most vibrant Mexican American neighborhoods in Tucson, La Calle, had been demolished in a racist downtown revitalization plan in the 1960s. (A typical case of environmental racism and Native dispossession through contamination, the impacts of the pollution on residents went unacknowledged for nearly thirty years—even after the area became a Superfund site in 1981.) Residents began to notice their plants would die when they’d water them. Their dogs and cats became ill. Many people were diagnosed with rare illnesses: lupus, testicular cancer, brain tumors, leukemia; babies were stillborn, or were born with congenital heart impairments or other disabilities.

Regardless, communities on the south side endured years of racist and classist accusations that their conditions were their own fault. As alarm grew and suspicion fell on the lagoons, Hughes spokespeople and the Pima County Health officials stated at public meetings that, although people in the area were disproportionately becoming sick, it was not a result of pollution, but because they were “genetically disadvantaged.” They were depicted as having made poor reproductive choices, having maintained a poor diet and lifestyle. Residents were told during meetings with city officials that they were getting sick “because of the chilies and beans they ate,” and the mostly women organizers were dismissed as “hysterical Hispanic housewives.” They were, the statements suggested, just predisposed to illness.

SUNAURA TAYLOR

ASHLY (Jacobin)

Evans Mutisya sits hunched over on a chair to the side of the road in the Mukuru kwa Njenga informal settlement, or slum, in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. The fifteen-year-old’s head rests heavily in the palms of his hands. He is writhing in pain. For more than a week, he has been in the hospital where doctors have attempted to treat a bullet wound.

On December 27, as Nairobi’s residents spent time with family or traveled to the coastal region for the holidays, the impoverished residents of Mukuru kwa Njenga were gifted with live bullets by Kenyan police. Dozens of families, including Mutisya and his family, have slept in a sprawling tent settlement for more than two months, erected on top of the ruins of their homes, destroyed in a mass government demolition campaign that began in October. Bulldozers destroyed at least 13,000 homes, along with businesses and schools, and displaced some 76,000 people.

Tensions reached their breaking point on December 27 when clashes broke out between police and residents. Mutisya was inside one of the makeshift tents at the time. “They [the police] were shooting tear gas and the gas came into the tent,” Mutisya recounts, speaking in a low tone. “I ran out from the tent and toward the water tank on the street to wash my face.” At that moment, a police officer shot the teen in the lower back, the bullet exiting from the front of his stomach.

On pure adrenaline, he ran from the officer, who was charging toward him, finally collapsing when bystanders crowded around to help him. Since being released from the hospital, Mutisya has been unable to lie on his back or his front, owing to the excruciating pain from the bullet wound. Police shot and killed two others on that same day, according to the residents, while scores of others were injured.

The demolitions and evictions in Mukuru kwa Njenga have shined a bright light on the historical injustices and state corruption shaping Nairobi’s rapid urban development. While these projects have provided comfort and convenience to the city’s rich, they have unleashed extreme violence on the poor of the informal settlements, who make up the majority of Nairobi’s population.

JACLYNN ASHLY

Martin Luther King

"It is this moral lag in our thing-oriented society that blinds us to the human reality around us and encourages us in the greed and the exploitation which creates the sector of poverty in the midst of wealth. Again we have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that Capitalism grew and prospered out of the protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice. The fact is that Capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor both black and white, both here and abroad".

"We must also realize that the problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.

And we must further recognize that the ghetto is a domestic colony. Black people must develop programs that will aid in the transfer of power and wealth into the hands of residents of the ghetto so that they may in reality control their own destinies".

Foucault

‘Discipline’ may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a ‘physics’ or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology. And it may be taken over either by ‘specialized’ institutions (the penitentiaries or ‘houses of correction’ of the nineteenth century), or by institutions that use it as an essential instrument for a particular end (schools, hospitals), or by pre-existing authorities that find in it a means of reinforcing or reorganizing their internal mechanisms of power (one day we should show how intra-familial relations, essentially in the parents-children cell, have become ‘disciplined’, absorbing since the classical age external schemata, first educational and military, then medical, psychiatric, psychological, which have made the family the privileged locus of emergence for the disciplinary question of the normal and the abnormal); or by apparatuses that have made discipline their principle of internal functioning (the disciplinarization of the administrative apparatus from the Napoleonic period), or finally by state apparatuses whose major, if not exclusive, function is to assure that discipline reigns over society as a whole (the police).

…But the peculiarity of the disciplines is that they try to define in relation to the multiplicities a tactics of power that fulfils three criteria: firstly, to obtain the exercise of power at the lowest possible cost (economically, by the low expenditure it involves; politically, by its discretion, its low exteriorization, its relative invisibility, the little resistance it arouses); secondly, to bring the effects of this social power to their maximum intensity and to extend them as far as possible, without either failure or interval; thirdly, to link this ‘economic’ growth of power with the output of the apparatuses (educational, military, industrial or medical) within which it is exercised; in short, to increase both the docility and the utility of all the elements of the system.

The disciplines function increasingly as techniques for making useful individuals. Hence their emergence from a marginal position on the confines of society, and detachment from the forms of exclusion or expiation, confinement or retreat…Hence also their rooting in the most important, most central and most productive sectors of society. They become attached to some of the great essential functions: factory production, the transmission of knowledge, the diffusion of aptitudes and skills, the war-machine.

Michel Foucault

Zink

Gustafson cites a memo former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers wrote when he worked at the World Bank, in which Summers 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. The example demonstrates how when market-based thinking is dominant, the only relevant measure of utility is money and financial value. Cox agrees: “The relentless metrics of the monetary have filtered into our thinking about virtually everything.”3 These themes are addressed at length by the Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel in his book What Money Can’t Buy. While Sandel is not writing from a religious perspective, he has much in common with Cox and Gustafson. Unlike Cox or Gustafson, Sandel has a clear and consistent focus on a single time period. The last three decades have seen the intrusion of markets and market values into ever more areas of our life: “Today, the logic of buying and selling no longer applies to material goods alone but increasingly governs the whole of life.”4 He distinguishes between having a market economy— largely a good thing—and being a market society, in which markets are used to allocate goods like health, education, public safety, recreation, and procreation in a way that would have been unimaginable a generation or two earlier. While he does not explicitly pursue the claim that the market is a god, he does write of a “market faith,” which has led to the expansion of “market values into spheres of life where they don’t belong.”5 Sandel is a philosopher, not a theologian. He is comfortable talking about morality and rightly critiques the emptiness of public discourse: “The problem with our politics is not too much moral argument but too little. Our politics is overheated because it is mostly vacant, empty of moral and spiritual content. It fails to engage with big questions 3 Cox, The Market as God, 180. 4 Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 6. 5 Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy, 7. The Deified Market 323 people care about.”6 He argues that the absence of moral argument is precisely what the market wants. Markets claim not to pass judgments but merely to respond to preferences and create incentives. Yet in doing so they are implicitly engaging in acts of judgment, including judgments regarding the propriety of ceding ever-expanding areas of our lives to the market’s domain, claiming all preferences are equally worthwhile, and all incentives are morally appropriate. Indeed, one might argue that the market is exceedingly clear and consistent about its implicit judgments: the only “value” that matters is the price produced when market mechanisms are introduced. The trouble with Sandel is that his discussion of morality remains abstract. Toward the end of the book, he argues that the debate societies need to have is about the limits of markets. That question can not be answered “without deliberating about the meaning and purpose of goods, and the values that should govern them.”7 Just where this meaning and purpose and value should come from is unclear. He skirts around spirituality and religion, but that there is a role for people of faith in these deliberations seems obvious. Sandel can call for the importance of a debate about morality, but the nature and source of the values to be debated is left unclear. Two books show that these same debates are taking place in the United Kingdom. David Marquand’s Mammon’s Kingdom is a thoroughgoing demolishment of English society in the 2010s. For him, England is a “market fundamentalist” world in which a “strange, new Holy Trinity” is worshiped: Choice, Freedom, and the Individual.8 The dominance of economic relations has meant the diminishment of the public sphere and the disappearance of public goods. That is a problem: “without a robust and confident public realm to complement them, the private and market realms are likely to become nests of predators, preying on those who lack influence or market power.”

Jesse Zink

Chomsky

"If by 'intellectual' you mean people who are a special class who are in the business of imposing thoughts, and framing ideas for people in power, and telling everyone what they should believe, and so on, well, yeah, that's different. These people are called 'intellectuals' – but they're really more a kind of secular priesthood, whose task is to uphold the doctrinal truths of the society. And the population should be anti-intellectual in that respect, I think that's a healthy reaction."

Noam Chomsky

"A participatory society seeks to allow all individuals, regardless of their background or bargaining power, to participate as equals. This would require a radical restructuring of much of society, including: kinship, the economy, politics, culture and how we interact with the planet and other nations".

      International Organisation for a Participatory Society

Dictionnaire des philosophes (On Foucault)

"Foucault has now undertaken, still within the same general project, to study the constitution of the subject as an object for himself: the formation of procedures by which the subject is led to observe himself, analyse himself, interpret himself, recognize himself as a domain of possible knowledge. In short, this concerns the history of “subjectivity”, if what is meant by the term is the way in which the subject experiences himself in a game of truth where he relates to himself".

"Hence a third principle of method: address “practices” as a domain of analysis, approach the study from the angle of what “was done”. For example, what was done with madmen, delinquents, or sick people? Of course, one can try to infer the institutions in which they were placed and the treatments to which they were subjected from the ideas that people had about them, or knowledge that people believed they had about them. One can also look for the form of “true” mental illnesses and the modalities of real delinquency in a given period in order to explain what was thought about them at the time. Michel Foucault approaches things in an altogether different way. He first studies the ensemble of more or less regulated, more or less deliberate, more or less finalized ways of doing things, through which can be seen both what was constituted as real for those who sought to think it and manage it and the way in which the latter constituted themselves as subjects capable of knowing, analysing, and ultimately altering reality. These are the “practices”, understood as a way of acting and thinking at once, that provide the intelligibility key for the correlative constitution of the subject and the object".

"Now, since it is a matter of studying the different modes of objectivation of the subject that appear through these practices, one understands how important it is to analyze power relations. But it is essential to clearly define what such an analysis can be and can hope to accomplish. Obviously, it is a matter not of examining “power” with regards to its origin, its principles, or its legitimate limits, but of studying the methods and techniques used in different institutional contexts to act upon the behavior of individuals taken separately or in a group, so as to shape, direct, modify their way of conducting themselves, to impose ends on their inaction or fit it into overall strategies, these being multiple consequently, in their forms and their place of exercise; diverse, too, in the procedures and techniques they bring into play. These power relations characterize the manner in which men are “governed” by one another; and their analysis shows how, through certain forms of “government”, of madmen, sick people, criminals and so on, the mad, the sick, the delinquent subject is objectified. So an analysis of this kind implies not that the abuse of this or that power has created madmen, sick people, or criminals where there was nothing, but that the various and particular forms of “government” of individuals were determinant in the different modes of objectivation of the subject".

    Dictionnaire des philosophes

O'Donoghue (On Agamben)

"The camp cannot be said to be defined by the atrocities that take place there, but by the potential that exists that they may. This is the condition to which the bare life of homo sacer is banished. As such, the camp is realised wherever bare life, abandoned by law, is produced".

Amy O'Donoghue

O'Donoghue (On Agamben)

"Stripped of legal status and expelled from the political community, homo sacer is exposed unconditionally to the potential for killing by anyone. Homo sacer ‘is in a continuous relationship with the power that banished him precisely insofar as he is, at every instant, exposed to an unconditional threat of death".





"The separation of zoē from bios, and the production of a bare, human life as a product of sovereign power can be said to undergo a transformation in modernity as zoē, or biological life, is repositioned inside the polis, becoming the focus of the State’s organisational power. This process, rooted in classical politics and extending into the present, indicates, for Agamben, a Western politics that has constituted itself from its beginnings as a biopolitics (ibid: 181)".





"Biopower is distinguished for Foucault from sovereign power. This new technology of power, he argues, ‘has to qualify, measure, appraise, and hierarchize, rather than display itself in its murderous splendor’ (1990: 144). As such, biopolitics begins with the emergence of biopower in modernity. Agamben, however, offers a corrective to Foucault’s theory: sovereign power is itself already biopolitical, based on the constitution of bare life as the threshold of the political order. For Agamben, the emergence of the technology of biopower signifies, not a break in the history of Western politics, but the expansion of the existing biopolitical imperative of the State, as bare life moves from the periphery to the centre of the State’s concerns, entering in modernity into the political order as the exception increasingly becomes the rule (1998: 9). ‘Placing biological life at the center of its calculations, the modern State […] does nothing other than bring to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life’ (ibid: 6)".





"The historical concentration camp, such as those of the Spanish in Cuba or the British in South Africa, Agamben writes, were born ‘out of a state of exception and martial law’ (ibid: 167). Writing of the Nazi State, Agamben argues that a transition has occurred, that the concentration camp system of 20th century totalitarianism is now the product of a ‘willed’ state of exception. It is thus the structure in which the state of exception […] is realized normally. The sovereign no longer limits himself […] to deciding on the exception on the basis of recognizing a given factual situation (danger to public safety): laying bare the inner structure of the ban that characterizes his power, he now de facto produces the situation as a consequence of his decision on the exception. (ibid: 170; emphasis in original)

Under modern liberal democracy, the state of exception, once a temporary suspension of law, became a stable, generalised condition[3]: ‘the declaration of the state of exception has gradually been replaced by an unprecedented generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government’ (2005: 14). This tendency provided the totalitarianisms which emerged in the 20th century with the framework by which rule by a permanent state of emergency was possible (ibid: 2). As the site in which the state of exception is ‘given a permanent spatial arrangement’ (1998: 169), the concentration camp is, for Agamben, the paradigmatic space of this new political arrangement. It is ‘the space that is opened up when the state of exception begins to become the rule’ (ibid: 168-9)".

Amy O'Donoghue

LeVine (On Mbembe)

‘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

Cairney (Excerpt)

High profile politics and electoral competition can cause alienation:

1. Political actors compete to tell ‘stories’ to assign praise or blame to groups of people. For example, politicians describe value judgements about who should be rewarded or punished by government. They base them on stereotypes of ‘target populations’, by (a) exploiting the ways in which many people think about groups, or (b) making emotional and superficial judgements, backed up with selective use of facts.
2. These judgements have a ‘feed-forward’ effect: they are reproduced in policies, practices, and institutions. Such ‘policy designs’ can endure for years or decades. The distribution of rewards and sanctions is cumulative and difficult to overcome.
3. Policy design has an impact on citizens, who participate in politics according to how they are characterised by government. Many know they will be treated badly; their engagement will be dispiriting.

Some groups have the power to challenge the way they are described by policymakers (and the media and public), and receive benefits behind the scenes despite their poor image. However, many people feel powerless, become disenchanted with politics, and do not engage in the democratic process.

Paul Cairney

Oliver

Further, the medical profession, because of its power and dominance, has spawned a whole range of pseudo-professions in its own image; each one geared to the same aim - the restoration of normality. And each one of these pseudo-professions develops its own knowledge base and set of skills to facilitate this. Increasingly, disabled people, individually and collectively, are coming to reject the prescriptions of the 'normalising' society and the whole range of professional activities which attempt to reinforce it. Instead, we are increasingly demanding acceptance from society as we are, not as society thinks we should be. It is society that has to change not individuals and this change will come about as part of a process of political empowerment of disabled people as a group and not through social policies and programmes delivered by establishment politicians and policy makers nor through individualised treatments and interventions provided by the medical and para-medical professions. This, obviously, offers a very different and challenging view not just about the nature of the problem of disability but also about what can be done about it. Equally importantly, for today at least, it raises the question of whether medicine has a role to play in dealing with disability. In the next section I will answer this in the affirmative and attempt to suggests some ways forward. I hasten to add, however, that I will not be imposing my views on doctors, I will not be telling them what to do, nor will I be prescribing treatments for their own disabilities. Their own disabilities, in the social model sense of the term, are the disabling barriers of the doctor patient relationship, which render the experience of disability inaccessible to doctors.

Mike Oliver

Foucault

There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorising to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself. A superb formula: power exercised continuously and for what turns out to be at minimal cost.

Michel Foucault

Cresswell Riol

Within the marketplace, food has even been repackaged as a “want” as opposed to a fundamental human need, thereby disregarding human dignity further, as described by O’Boyle: Setting aside need and focusing instead on wants allows mainstream economists to side step the intellectual biases regarding the use of value-laden concepts such as need, to cast consumer behavior in a value-free analytical mold and to represent economics as an exact, value-free science.

Katharine Cresswell Riol

Hedva

He rarely asked me questions, other than the perfunctory, “And how are we today?” The vague, elusive, imagined “we” of that sentence always felt like a large void that yawned open between us. Nonetheless I tried to insert myself into the conversation. “But how much will it cost?” “But I don’t want to do that.” It was a struggle of making myself not only have a presence, of making myself be seen and heard and understood, but of persuading him that mine was an important presence, one that mattered, one that he had to consider as much as I had to consider his.

A note I wrote down in the hospital: “What am I doing here? Malingering, lingering.” Being chronically ill often feels like all I really have, which is to say all that I own, is radically temporary—a lump of painful, decaying, remembering matter whose existence is composed of different strategies for lingering.

In our last meeting, on the day I was released, he told me, “You’ve made a tremendous accomplishment.” It made me laugh. “My tremendous accomplishment is that I didn’t kill myself?” I said. Yay-Crew made a gesture then, a little bow of the head, an opening of the hands in my direction, that I’ve tried to interpret but I still can’t say exactly what it meant. It felt a bit parental, go forth now, my child, I trust that you will be okay. He told me that I could always come back.

Johanna Hedva

dpdr

 “The novelist Kingsley Amis, suffered from depersonalisation/derealization, and would never allow himself to be left on his own for that reason. It sounds terrifying. His wife used to bring his small children to him when he had an attack at night to remind him he was still connected to the rest of the world.”

depression

 

All I knew is that I became bad at the things I used to be good at, and I didn’t know why.

Edward Honaker

Arendt

"These definitions coincide with the terms which, since Greek antiquity, have been used to define the forms of government as the rule of man over man—of one or the few in monarchy and oligarchy, of the best or the many in aristocracy and democracy, to which today we ought to add the latest and perhaps most formidable form of such dominion, bureaucracy, or the rule by an intricate system of bureau in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many, can be held responsible, and which could be properly called the rule by Nobody. Indeed, if we identify tyranny as the government that is not held to give account of itself, rule by Nobody is clearly the most tyrannical of all, since there is no one left who could even be asked to answer for what is being done."

Hannah Arendt

Arendt

 ‘’Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant.”

Hanna Arendt

Butler (excerpt)

So if the question, ‘How am I to lead a good life?’, is one of the elementary questions of morality, indeed perhaps its defining question, then it would seem that morality from its inception is bound up with biopolitics. By biopolitics, I mean those powers that organize life, even the powers that differentially dispose lives to precarity as part of a broader management of populations through governmental and non-governmental means, and that establish a set of measures for the differential valuation of life itself. In asking how to lead my life, I am already negotiating such forms of power. The most individual question of morality – how do I live this life that is mine? – is bound up with biopolitical questions distilled in forms such these: Whose lives matter? Whose lives do not matter as lives, are not recognizable as living, or count only ambiguously as alive? Such questions presume that that we cannot take for granted that all living humans bear the status of a subject who is worthy of rights and protections, with freedom and a sense of political belonging; on the contrary, such a status must be secured through political means, and where it is denied that deprivation must be made manifest.

It has been my suggestion that to understand the differential way that such a status is allocated, we must ask: whose lives are grievable, and whose are not? The biopolitical management of the ungrievable proves crucial to approaching the question, how do I lead this life? And how do I live this life within the life, the conditions of living, that structure us now? At stake is the following sort of inquiry: whose lives are already considered not lives, or only partially living, or already dead and gone, prior to any explicit destruction or abandonment?

Of course, this question becomes most acute for someone, anyone, who already understands him or herself to be a dispensable sort of being, one who registers at an affective and corporeal level that his or her life is not worth safeguarding, protecting and valuing. This is someone who understands that she or he will not be grieved for if his or her life were lost, and so one for whom the conditional claim ‘I would not be grieved for’ is actively lived in the present moment. If it turns out that I have no certainty that I will have food or shelter, or that no social network or institution would catch me if I fall, then I come to belong to the ungrievable. 

Judith Butler

Herman

Jobs are jobs, whether building schools or Peacekeeper Missiles or cutting down thousand-year-old redwood trees. I was slightly nauseated during the Vietnam War era by Boeing ads soliciting workers for its helicopter plant, touting itself as an "equal opportunity employer (EOE)." Maybe the Dachau camp management was also an EOE, for jobs that needed to be done and for which there was an effective demand.

Edward S. Herman

Stanford (On Habermas)

As a theory of rationality and knowledge, his theory of knowledge-constitutive interests is both pragmatic and pluralistic: pragmatic, inasmuch as human interests constitute knowledge; pluralistic, in that different forms of inquiry and knowledge emerge from different core interests.

    Stanford 

Solomon

I went through a tribal exorcism in Senegal that involved a great deal of ram's blood and that I'm not going to detail right now, but a few years afterwards I was in Rwanda, working on a different project, and I happened to describe my experience to someone, and he said, "Well, that's West Africa, and we're in East Africa, and our rituals are in some ways very different, but we do have some rituals that have something in common with what you're describing." And he said, "But we've had a lot of trouble with Western mental health workers, especially the ones who came right after the genocide." I said, "What kind of trouble did you have?" And he said, "Well, they would do this bizarre thing. They didn't take people out in the sunshine where you begin to feel better. They didn't include drumming or music to get people's blood going. They didn't involve the whole community. They didn't externalize the depression as an invasive spirit. Instead what they did was they took people one at a time into dingy little rooms and had them talk for an hour about bad things that had happened to them." He said, "We had to ask them to leave the country.

Andrew Solomon