"The delight in the herd is more ancient than the delight in the ego; and as long as the good conscience is identified with the herd, only the bad conscience says: I".

Nietzsche

DE LA DURANTAYE

In glossing the suspension of the divisions that separate men (such as Jew/Gentile, circumcised/uncircumcised, married/single, and so forth) which is to characterize the messianic kingdom invoked by Saint Paul, Agamben directs his readerʼs attention to a curious passage in Benjaminʼs unfi nished final work. Therein, Benjamin employs a singular metaphor for the division between what came before and what came after a given historical event. He describes it as being “like a line divided by the Apollonian incision [wie eine Strecke, die nach dem apoll(i)nishcen Schnitt geteilt wird]” [Benjamin, 5: 588; 7a1]. Agamben 4. For a brief summary of Agambenʼs views on gesture, cf. de la Durantaye [5n8]. 8 points out that this comparison, as it stands in the German critical edition of Benjaminʼs works, makes no sense. Nowhere in Greek thought is there to be found such a reference to an “Apollonian incision.” Benjaminʼs handwriting was notoriously difficult to decipher. After examining the manuscript, Agamben suggests that while the illegible “i” is in fact an illegible “i,” the half-legible “o” is a half-legible “e.” Benjamin is not referring to the god Apollo, Agamben notes, but to the painter Apelles. Agamben recalls Plinyʼs account of Apellesʼs visit to fellow painter Protogenes when he, displaying the height of his painterly art, divided in two an incredibly fi ne line drawn by Protogenes.5 Agamben takes Benjaminʼs hitherto misunderstood metaphor as a metaphor for the Paulinian division and suspension of earlier divisions (Jew/Gentile, circumcised/ uncircumcised, married/single, etc.). “Wherein lies the interest of this ʻdivision of a divisionʼ?” asks Agamben. His reply is: “Above all in that it obliges us to think the question of the relation of universal to particular in a completely new fashion, not only in the realm of logic, but in that of ontology and of politics [Inanzi tutto perché obbliga a pensare in modo completamente nuovo la questione della lʼuniversale et del particolare, non soltanto nella logica, ma anche nellʼontologia e nella politica]” [Il tempo che resta 53–54]. Further glossing this division of a division, Agamben says that it is, “an operation that divides these nomistic divisions and renders them inoperative, without forasmuch leading them to an ultimate stage [unʼoperazione che divide le stesse divisioni nomistiche e le rende inoperanti, senza però mai raggiungere un suolo ultimo]” [54-55; my emphasis]. This division of division which Agamben finds in Benjamin and Paul, this characteristic gesture, does not pretend simply to efface the divisions which isolate and alienate communities, but, without effacing them, renders them no longer of great importance, renders them, as instruments of political division, “inoperative.”6

LELAND DE LA DURANTAYE

For Heidegger, “the open” is something literally fundamental which lay at the heart of his thought. “The open” is the space revealed to us in the moment when the world we live in, which because of our many tasks and travails we tend to take no distance from (like animals with their stimuli), opens out onto something larger. This moment of distancing ourselves from our everyday concern with means and ends, with stimuli and response, is what gives us not just an environment, but a “world.” “The open” is what we find ourselves in when the bustle and haste of our environment recedes and we see that environment in all its strangeness and immensity—as a “world,” greater and less graspable than our restricted and finite representations. This experience of “the open” is, for Heidegger, what makes us human, and what separates us from the animals. And this open moment lies at the origin of philosophy: the humbling—and potentially frightening—moment of wonder that spurred speculation into the finer and deeper reason for things. As was his wont, Heidegger introduces a special phrase to describe this experience of acceding to the open, “the world worlds,” “die Welt weltet” and in the very next sentence states that “the rock has no world. Plants and animals also have no world” [Holzwege 31].1 When the world, strangely enough, worlds, we find that world open before us; we are standing, to adopt Heideggerʼs terms, in a “clearing,” a step away from both trees and forest. The world is no longer too much with us, and we suddenly see trees, forest, and ourselves in an uneasy and changing relation to one another. “The open” is a term amongst many in Heideggerʼs technical vocabulary—ultimately one that found little place in his later philosophy. It nevertheless played a crucial role in the development of that philosophy. This is most clearly visible, as Agamben points out, in Heideggerʼs lectures in Freiburg in the fall semester 1942–43. In the midst of the most bitter and brutal combat, Heidegger was lecturing on Parmenides. The course was dedicated in large part to the translation of a single word—but a crucial one—aletheia, “truth.” Heidegger suggested a number of ways of translating the term, but the fourth and final way was as “das Offene und das Freie der Lichtung des Seins”—literally, “The open and the free in the clearing of being”—or, more simply, as “the open” [Parmenides 195]. In his woodland terminology, Lichtung, a clearing (as in a forest), is etymologically a “light-ing,” an opening and an illumination. The “open” then corresponds to originary truth: it is the open space in which truth in its original (Greek) meaning took place. It stands thus, for Heidegger, at the heart of philosophy: at the heart of its history and its essence. In these lectures, first published in 1993,2 it seems that Heidegger arrived at his translation by sounding the concealed depths not only of ancient Greek, but also of modern German. This modern German was a poetic one—that of Rilke. As he introduces his translation of Parmenidesʼs term for truth, Heidegger is well aware that the unusual expression “the open” will lead his listeners to think of Rilkeʼs celebrated Duino Elegies (1923) and, in particular, to Rilkeʼs repeated use of the curious term 1. One might compare the curious phrase “the world worlds,” with an equally curious one which Heidegger coined for the opposite movement: “the de-worlding of the world [Entweltlichung der Welt]” [65]. 2. These lecture notes were published as volume 54 of Heideggerʼs complete works. The Italian edition wrongly lists this volume as the forty-fourth (“XLIV”) in the series. Attellʼs translation repeats this error, reproducing the bibliographical material from the Italian edition while simply translating the Roman numeral (“44”). diacritics / summer 2003 5 in the eighth elegy (though neither Heidegger nor Agamben notes this, the term had a longer poetic history and had in fact been used by Hölderlin in one of his most famous poems, “Bread and Wine”: “So komm! dass wir das Offene schauen . . .”). Rilkeʼs elegy begins: “With all its eyes the creature sees / the open” (“Mit allen Augen sieht die Kreatur / das Offene”) [Rilke 2.224]. In his poem, we (mankind) are excluded from this glimpse of the open granted to all other creatures. Years earlier, on a visit to Parisʼs Jardin des Plantes, Rilkeʼs sensitive eye had been captured by a panther. For Rilkeʼs panther, captivity was the central fact of his existence. “It seems to him,” wrote Rilke of his great cat, that, “there are / a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world” [Rilke 1.469]. What interested Rilke was how impenetrable, how full of incommunicable will, strength, and silence the animal was; what awakened his poetic sensibilities was how closed off that animalʼs world was. The worldlessness of the animal proves in the later poem to be the fruit not of his nature but of his confinement. In the eighth elegy, the unnamed animal (“die Kreatur”) is accorded a different glimpse of the world: it sees that world in all its openness. It sees what fear of death and fear of life prevent humans, the smartest and saddest of creatures, from seeing: the world in all its intense and interconnected immediacy. Heidegger is quick to distance himself from this immediacy. Though, as he notes, he and Rilke are employing the same term, the same “wording” (Heidegger repeatedly uses the term Wortlaut instead of the simpler Wort), “what is being named,” says Heidegger of his use of the term “the open,” “is so different that no opposition could hope to convey it,” as “oppositions—even the most extreme—demand that those things which are to be opposed to one another can be placed in the same realm” [Parmenides 226]. “The open” that Rilke praises and sees reflected in the eyes of animals is, for Heidegger, mere blindness. This is a blindness of a particular sort: historical blindness. Rilkeʼs problem, his misapprehension of the deep meaning of the term “the open” and his consequent inconsequent use of it, following Heidegger, stems from his unthinking adoption of a traditional view of the relation of man to animal typical of a fundamentally unreflective modernity [cf. Heidegger, Parmenides 231, 235]. “The open,” Heideggerʼs translation of Greek truth, is a different one than that which Rilke famously invoked. It is deeper, richer—and it is that which distinguishes us from the animals. It is not the animals who see “the open”—they are open to nothing but stimuli. According to Heidegger, we alone see “the open.” This is the point at which Agamben takes his title and enters the discussion. Agamben neither laments Rilkeʼs historico-ontological naiveté, nor accuses Heidegger of insensitivity toward poetry or animals. His interest is fixed upon another point—the open place where he feels that the two irreconcilable positions meet—the point at which the animalʼs unhindered openness, or receptivity, to stimuli in its environment and man's openness to the world in all its ungraspable immensity converge. One might ask whether these two types of openness, these two types of receptivity have anything in common, whether they bear the weight of comparison. For Heidegger, they clearly do not. Agambenʼs assumptions that they do leads him to conceive of another type of openness than either Rilke or Heidegger had conceived of, an openness of inactivity, of disengagement from oneʼs environment and, perhaps, oneʼs world.3

LELAND DE LA DURANTAYE

Solomon

"You are in touch with the real terribleness of your life. You can accept rationally that later, after the medication sets in, you will be better able to deal with the terribleness, but you will not be free of it. When you are depressed, the past and future are absorbed entirely by the present moment, as in the world of a three-year-old. You cannot remember a time when you felt better, at least not clearly; and you certainly cannot imagine a future time when you will feel better. Being upset, even profoundly upset, is a temporal experience, while depression is atemporal. Breakdowns leave you with no point of view.

There’s a lot going on during a depressive episode. There are changes in neurotransmitter function; changes in synaptic function; increased or decreased excitability between neurons; alterations of gene expression; hypometabolism in the frontal cortex (usually) or hypermetabolism in the same area; raised levels of thyroid releasing hormone (TRH); disruption of function in the amygdala and possibly the hypothalamus (areas within the brain); altered levels of melatonin (a hormone that the pineal gland makes from serotonin); increased prolactin (increased lactate in anxiety-prone individuals will bring on panic attacks); flattening of twenty-four-hour body temperature; distortion of twenty-four-hour cortisol secretion; disruption of the circuit that links the thalamus, basal ganglia, and frontal lobes (again, centers in the brain); increased blood flow to the frontal lobe of the dominant hemisphere; decreased blood flow to the occipital lobe (which controls vision); lowering of gastric secretions. It is difficult to know what to make of all of these phenomena. Which are causes of depression; which are symptoms; which are merely coincidental? You might think that the raised levels of TRH mean that TRH causes bad feelings, but in fact administering high doses of TRH may be a temporarily useful treatment of depression. As it turns out, the body begins producing TRH during depression for its antidepressant capacities. And TRH, which is not generally an antidepressant, can be utilized as an antidepressant immediately after a major depressive episode because the brain, though it is having a lot of problems in a depression, also becomes supersensitive to the things that can help to solve those problems. Brain cells change their functions readily, and during an episode, the ratio between the pathological changes (which cause depression) and the adaptive ones (which fight it) determines whether you stay sick or get better".

Andrew Solomon

Modes of fallenness like 'idle talk' don't disclose the primordial nature of being and they silence the call of conscience, this disclosure and this calling depend on states arrived at through angst: namely on care for seeing and on being in but not of the world so to speak. A wrong relationship to, and being tangled up and trapped in, idle talk (and a wrong relationship to tékhnē) hand waves away and explains away both the reality of ourselves and of the world that we are in.

"The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects." Merleau-Ponty

Excerpt

"Much of Mr. Habermas's analysis turns on an exploration of two accounts of democracy, which he labels ''liberal'' and ''civic republican.'' Under the liberal account, rooted in the work of Thomas Hobbes, politics is a process of bargaining, a matter of aggregating private interests. Liberals define citizens as holders of negative rights against the state. In the liberal view, politics is a struggle among interest groups for position and power.

The civic republican account, rooted in Aristotle and Rousseau, is very different: politics is not a mere matter of protecting our selfish interests but instead an effort to choose and implement our shared ideals. Civic republicans see rights not as negative constraints on government, but as promoting participation in political practices through which citizens become authors of their own community. Consider the right to free speech and the right to vote. For civic republicans, politics is a matter of discussion and self-legislation, in which people participate not in bargaining and compromise but in forms of reflection and talk.

The organizing theme of the book is Habermas's rejection of both views and his effort to defend instead what he calls ''deliberative politics'' or deliberative democracy.'' This is emphatically a procedural ideal. It is intended to give form to the notion of an ideal speech situation. Like civic republicans, deliberative democrats place a high premium on reason-giving in the public domain. But like liberals, they favor a firm boundary between the state and the society, and they insist on a robust set of constraints on what the government can do. Mr. Habermas sees majority rule not as a mere statistical affair, an effort to tally up votes, but instead as a large social process by which people discuss matters, understand one another, try to persuade each other and modify their views to meet counterarguments. In this way we form our beliefs and even our desires.

The deliberative conception of democracy anchors Mr. Habermas's theory of political legitimacy. For him, democracy does not exist to secure rights with which we have been endowed by our Creator; nor is it simply a way to allow us to throw the rascals out; nor is it a mechanism for processes of accommodation, compromise and the exercise of power. Democracy, ideally conceived, is a process by which people do not implement their preferences but consult and deliberate about what values and what options are best''.

Cass R. Sunstein

"I think academics don’t like being reminded (or maybe being told for the first time) that they are generally, at best, politically irrelevant. At worst, they are actively providing (diversity) cover and training on behalf of an occupying, extractive force—that is, the college and university—that’s a skip and a sneeze away from the actual machinery of violent global racial capitalism and empire. Academics get in their feelings when people suggest they are operating as apologists and, at times, disempowered operatives for an institutional/state liberalism that is central to the antiblack colonial empire war machine.

A peculiar combination of insecurity and political flimsiness is hard-wired into the professional identity of the academic, which often means they are a liability—if not an activated danger—to collective projects that confront the oppressive violence and deadly cynicism of institutions like 21st century universities and colleges. Academics tend to be a menace to most efforts to minimally reform these places, not to mention radically disrupt or dismantle them''.

Dylan Rodriguez

"Some of the most self-serving and institutionally reactionary academics—those who pose a real danger to collectives and communities engaged in radical forms of movement—are the ones who publish books and articles about radicalism and revolution as well as convincing critiques of policing, racism, antiblackness, gendered colonial violence, sexual violence, prisons, and so on. I bet the organizers you’re referencing in your question are understating the case, too: at least the corporate executives, mainstream media elites, cops, and state officials tend to be far more honest with themselves and others about who and what they are—there’s no pretense or mushiness about their institutional and political loyalties. By contrast, some academics who fuck around with radical, progressive reform, and other social justice and “social change” focused organizations and movements are delusional or dishonest about their intentions, commitments, and loyalties.

Something i’ve learned over the last three decades is that people in my profession have earned default suspicion from serious radicals and revolutionaries, especially when those academics don’t actively participate in collective projects that attempt to move toward radical or revolutionary horizons. I recently participated in a conversation convened by AAPI Women Lead, a feminist abolitionist and pro-sex worker organization based in the Bay Area, in which we emphasized the importance of thinking about “community” as a verb rather than a taken-for-granted noun. In the context of trying to build radical and revolutionary projects, the work and experimentation of community is especially precious and vulnerable.

These communities-in-the-making are everywhere: in the U.S. context alone, there are variously scaled movements to confront and abolish antiblack and colonial state power, including sustained struggles for police abolition in Portland, Minneapolis, and Stop Cop City in Atlanta, Indigenous water and land defense at Standing Rock and Mauna Kea, the everyday work of organizations like Ujimaa Medics and Dissenters, strikes in U.S. prisons and detention sites, and militant labor organizing all over the place. These examples show how the term “social movement” is sometimes inadequate or inaccurate when identifying what people are actually creating through radical, autonomous, liberationist, and revolutionary forms of community—again, i’m thinking of “community” as an activity, not a static or predetermined constituency. These community projects—which can also be framed as collective experiments in radical and revolutionary power, sociality, and insurgent becoming—are likely to confront overt state repression as well as liberal counterinsurgency and extra-state opposition from business and corporate interests, conservative religious and cultural groups, and reformist social justice and nonprofit organizations.

Academics can pose special security risks to these projects, experiments, and movements. They generally don’t have the training or practical preparation, much less the militancy of commitment to enter these communities without creating additional vulnerabilities for other people (and sometimes themselves). Sometimes academics’ sensibilities are deformed by liberalism and pacifism—many academics, for example, have a knee-jerk aversion to guns and firearms, which raises concerns about how they might respond to community projects that are prepared to militantly defend against reactionary attack and militarized state repression. There is also a long record of academics exploiting organizations, movements, and communities by playing the role of curious opportunists who don’t make themselves available to the collective in ways that aren’t self-serving.

These are lessons as much as they are criticisms. I think it’s both possible and necessary for the academic to be sacrificed and figuratively immolated for the sake of enlivening and emboldening the radical scholar or “guerilla intellectual,” a notion that Kalonji Changa, Joy James, Jared Ball, and others at Black Power Media have thankfully revived in recent times. (I constantly think about the late Dr. James Turner, who sat me down in 1995 and explained the charge of becoming an “intellectual guerilla fighter.”) 

I’ve learned from collaborators and fellow scholars, people like Michele Welsing and Yusef Omowale at Southern California Library, that it is necessary for university employed scholars and teachers like me to present ourselves to committed radical, liberation focused collectives and communities with full transparency. A condition of shared responsibility is the understanding that suspicion of “the academic” is a historically informed, principled political position rather than a petty personal attack; there’s no room for the thin-skinned academic here. It’s not about you".

Dylan Rodriguez

"There...a long record of academics exploiting organizations, movements, and communities by playing the role of curious opportunists who don’t make themselves available to the collective in ways that aren’t self-serving".

Dylan Rodriguez

 "There is harmony. The harmony of overwhelming and collective murder".

Herzog

jasbir k. puar

"The Right to Maim situates disability as a register of biopolitical population control, one that modulates which bodies are hailed by institutions to represent the professed progress made by liberal rights–bearing subjects...this book is largely about what happens after certain liberal rights are bestowed, certain thresholds or parameters of success are claimed to have been reached: What happens when “we” get what “we” want?...But my argument also makes a critical intervention into the literatures of and scholarship on biopolitics, which have been less likely to take up issues of disability and debility. Michel Foucault’s foundational formulation hinges on all the population measures that enable some forms of living and inhibit others: birthrates, fertility, longevity, disease, impairment, toxicity, productivity. In other words, these irreducible metrics of biopolitics are also metrics of debility and capacity. Biopolitics deployed through its neoliberal guises is a capacitation machine; biopolitics seeks capacitation for some as a liberal rationale (in some cases) or foil for the debilitation of many others. It is, in sum, an ableist mechanism that debilitates. Biopolitics as a conceptual paradigm can thus be read as a theory of debility and capacity. Addressing disability directly forces a new, discrete component into the living/dying pendulum that forms most discussions of biopolitics: the living dead, death worlds, necropolitics, slow death, life itself. These frames presume death to be the ultimate assault, transgression, or goal, and the biopolitical end point or opposite of life. I am arguing that debilitation and the production of disability are in fact biopolitical ends unto themselves, with moving neither toward life nor toward death as the aim. This is what I call “the right to maim”: a right expressive of sovereign power that is linked to, but not the same as, “the right to kill.” Maiming is a source of value extraction from populations that would otherwise be disposable. The right to maim exemplifies the most intensive practice of the biopolitics of debilitation, where maiming is a sanctioned tactic...justified in protectionist terms and soliciting disability rights solutions that, while absolutely crucial to aiding some individuals, unfortunately lead to further perpetuation of debilitation".

jasbir k. puar

SARI EDELSTEIN (On The Zone of Interest)

The film indulges in decadent close-up shots of blossoming flowers, dwelling on their almost surreal vividness. Such shots invoke the eugenic obsession at the heart of the Nazi program, foregrounding the role of the family in the colonization of resources and in the production of superior types. But there are no close-ups of human faces, just human screams barely audible in the background. With such close-ups, Glazer is revealing something about what the family does to scale and focus; the outsized images of flowers suggest the disproportionate attention lavished on domestic endeavors even while human beings next door are subjected to gruesome acts of brutality. Glazer asks us to see the private family as a moral vacuum that trains attention inward, directs resources toward itself, and refuses to look beyond its own walls.

SARI EDELSTEIN  

ADLER-BOLTON and VIERKANT

Health, disability, and debility are largely absent from early discourses around the surplus populations that Marx and Engels responded to, except in cases of characteristic pathologizing of the poor. (Malthus again: “The labouring poor . . .seem always to live from hand to mouth. Their present wants employ their whole attention, and they seldom think of the future.”) Engels and Marx do, however, share concerns for the public health of the surplus population and the disablement wrought by industrial production. Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England can be regarded as an early work of “social” epidemiology, locating capital’s impact on the social determinants of health just as the idea of public health was at its formation. Marx notes of the relationship between health, private sector industrialization, and the state, that

health officers, the industrial inquiry commissioners, the factory inspectors, all repeat, over and over again, that it is both necessary for [factory] workers to have these 500 cubic feet [of space per person], and impossible to impose this rule on capital. They are, in reality, declaring that consumption and the other pulmonary diseases of the workers are conditions necessary to the existence of capital.

A contemporary understanding of what it is to be “surplus” is necessarily more expansive. Major societal shifts in the late modern period, discussed at length in our chapter LABOR, solidified the worker/surplus binary in public consciousness in part by incorporating a conception of workers’ health or disability as a central facet in their certification as surplus.

The surplus, or surplus populations, can therefore be defined as a collective of those who fall outside of the normative principles for which state policies are designed, as well as those who are excluded from the attendant entitlements of capital. It is a fluid and uncertifiable population who in fact should not be rigidly defined, for reasons we discuss below. Crucially, this definition also elides traditional left conceptions of the working class or the “worker.”...the idea that the worker is not a part of the surplus populations, yet faces constant threat of becoming certified as surplus, is one of the central social constructions wielded in support of capitalist hegemony. Similarly, the methods the state employs to certify delineations between surplus populations constitute effective tactics in maintaining this hegemony. An understanding of the intersectional demands of those subjected or excluded by capital constitutes the potential for building solidarity, which is definitionally a threat to capital. An understanding that the marking and biocertification of bodies as non-normative or surplus constitutes a false, socially constructed imposition of negative value is also a threat to capital. An understanding that illness, disability, and debility are driven by the social determinants of health, with capital as the central social determinant, itself constitutes such a threat. We argue therefore that in order to truly mount a challenge to capitalism it is necessary that our political projects have and maintain the surplus at their center.

While the surplus population does contain those who are disabled, impaired, sick, mad, or chronically ill, the characteristic vulnerability of the surplus is not inherent to their existence—that is, it is not any illness, disability, or pathologized characteristic that itself makes the surplus vulnerable. Their vulnerability is instead constructed by the operations of the capitalist state. The precarity of the surplus population is made through what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “organized abandonment,” the deliberate manipulation and disproportionate dispossession of resources from Black, Brown, Indigenous, disabled, and poor communities, rendering them more vulnerable to adverse health.

Understanding the shifting social constructions of surplus under capitalism, and the organization of this “organized abandonment,” is uniquely illustrative of the imbrication of health and capital. At the time of its initial formulation, surplus populations are largely discussed in the sense of surplus constituting “superfluous” (another term wielded synonymously for this population at the time) or otherwise irrelevance, waste. We can see this literalized in early American labor benefits: the few national unions that offered a permanent disability benefit paid a sum equal to the meager benefit a worker’s family would receive on the worker’s death. A worker becoming disabled thus not only constitutively passed the boundary from “worker” to “surplus”—their social value following disablement was, effectively, as good as dead.

This categorization and certification of surplus has become a focal struggle in the history of capitalism, socially reproducing a collective imaginary of who is a worker, who is property, and who is surplus—and to what degree of personhood each category is “entitled” under the scope of law. Those who are deemed to be surplus are rendered excess by the systems of capitalist production and have been consequently framed as a drain or a burden on society. But the surplus population has become an essential component of capitalist society, with many industries built on the maintenance, supervision, surveillance, policing, data extraction, confinement, study, cure, measurement, treatment, extermination, housing, transportation, and care of the surplus. In this way, those discarded as non-valuable life are maintained as a source of extraction and profit for capital.

This rather hypocritical stance—the surplus are at once nothing and everything to capitalism—is an essential contradiction Liat Ben-Moshe identifies this characteristic through the intersection of disability and incarceration: “Surplus populations are spun into gold. Disability is commodified through [a] matrix of incarceration”. Jasbir Puar, in The Right to Maim, writes: “Debilitation and the production of disability are in fact biopolitical ends unto themselves . . . Maiming is a source of value extraction from populations that would otherwise be disposable”.

BEATRICE ADLER-BOLTON and ARTIE VIERKANT

"Maiming is a source of value extraction from populations that would otherwise be disposable".

 Jasbir Puar: The Right to Maim

 

What is Popular Education?

“Popular education is an educational approach that collectively and critically examines everyday experiences and raises consciousness for organizing and movement building, acting on injustices with a political vision in the interests of the most marginalized.”

– Paulo Freire

Popular and community-based education methods arise from community organizing and empowerment practices, particularly with marginalized groups. They support reflection and action in order to transform the world. They break down the rigid separation between teacher and learner – all are learners and can help facilitate learning for others.

These methods are derived from the work of Paolo Freire and have a long history of use in social movements.

In Popular Education:

• The starting point is the concrete experience of the learner.
• Everyone teaches; everyone learns.
• Involves a high level of participation.
• Leads to action for change.
• Is a collective effort – focusing on group rather than individual solutions to problems.
• Stresses the creation of new knowledge, rather than the passing on of existing knowledge.
• The process is ongoing – any time, place or age.
• And it’s fun!

– Adapted from R. Arnold and B. Burke, A Popular Education Handbook p. 9

‘It is all too easy to define aesthesis according to the misplaced concreteness, so prevalent among modern philosophers of both the empiricist and rationalist schools, which has it that our primary form of sensory experience is of bare patches of qualia free of all relations. Whitehead called this mode of aesthesis ‘presentational immediacy’ or ‘sense-perception,’ and contrasted it with the more primordial mode of ‘causal efficacy’ or ‘sense-reception’ (Whitehead 1979: 113-114). The latter mode of aesthesis, as its name suggests, directly links to and reiterates in our present experience the experiences of past actualities in our causal lineage. That present occasions of human experience are linked to past actualities via such causal lineages contradicts both the Humean dismissal of necessary connection and the Kantian transcendental paradigm, wherein aesthesis is ‘mere appearance’ and so ontologically epiphenomenal. According to Whitehead, modern philosophers have explained experience in a ‘topsy-turvy fashion, the wrong end first’: because presentational immediacy (i.e., a derivative appearance projected by the subject) provides us with clear and distinct ideas that are accessible to conceptualization by the understanding, it has been given genetic priority, when in fact, causal efficacy (i.e., the primordial inheritance of superjective feelings) deserves this honor (Whitehead 1979: 162.). ‘The philosophy of organism is the inversion of Kant’s philosophy,’ according to Whitehead, in that while Kant endeavors to construe experience as a process whereby ‘subjective data pass into the appearance of an objective world,’ Whitehead’s philosophy of organism describes experience as a process whereby the order of the objectively felt data of the world pass into and provide intensity for the realization of a subject (Whitehead 1979: 88). In short, in Kant’s philosophy ‘the world emerges from the subject,’ while ‘for the philosophy of organism, the subject emerges from the world’

Matthew Segall

Tore Persson

 Study circles

The study circle is the most common form of all adult education in Sweden. Every year almost 300.000 study circles are organized, with almost two million participants. Since many people participate in more than one study circle per year the real number of individual participants is about 800 000 a year – of a total population of 9 million.

The Swedish study circle is a small group, normally with five to twelve participants. The constructive-minded discussions and dialogues between the participants is the essence of the study circle method. In study circles the participants are expected to take part in discussions with an open mind, being prepared to listen and to learn from others and to change themselves. And each participant is expected to contribute with his or her knowledge, experiences and ideas.

For study circle leaders, learning and knowledge building is process-based, a continuous ongoing questioning, an everlasting testing of thoughts and ideas in a social and cultural context. The meeting and the discussions between the participants is the most characteristic quality of the study circle.

Another fundamental value behind the idea of study circles is that every individual has the ability to be wise. People just need, as Confucius declared, guidance. Unfortunately, that is not always something that characterizes the school systems, where many of the students instead ”learn” to look upon themselves as more or less stupid. That is a devastating side effect of immature school systems, which creates huge problems not only for a lot of citizens but also for the nation. Many adults therefore have to free themselves of such prejudices before they can start learning again; often the study circle functions well as a correction against such self-images.

The ideals…

The ideal features of the study circle are:

• Participation is voluntary. No one may be forced to take part and no one may be excluded.

• They are small group studies with normally 5-10 participants; the size shall allow every single participant to be an active participant.

• Most study circles meet once a week for two to three hours and continue during one, two or three months. Usually the study circles meet in the evenings, when most people can join.

• Most study circle leaders are ”experts” in one way or other; for example, he or she might be a teacher in Chinese or an experienced ornithologist. The leader could also be one in the group who has no special qualification but volunteer to take a special responsibility to keep the group focused on their target etc.

• The work during the study circle meetings is based more on dialogues than on lectures.  

• The participants are equal, with the leader as one in the group (that is the reason we call it a ”study circle” because you are supposed to sit in a circle where each participant can see all others).

• The individual participants’ own knowledge, experience and ideas are of outmost importance for the end result. You always try to apply what you read and discuss to the participants’ everyday situation.

• The group decides together the goal for the studies, the content of the studies, which books to read, how to co-operate in the group etc. The whole group is responsible for the outcome of the studies.

• No grades or exams are given in study circles, but for some participants the study circle become the first step on their way to further formal education.  

• There are certain topics that are popular and common, but there are no formal limits and any subject could be studied in study circles.

The reality…

Ideals do not always meet reality and a number of study circles are less than ideal when it comes to the features mentioned. There are for example study circles where there are more lectures by the expert leader than discussions among all participants.

The participants volunteer to join a special study circle, but in most cases the topic is already decided and the leader already chosen when the participants arrive for the first session.

Non-Governmental organizations

In Sweden study circles are organized by study associations, which are deeply rooted in a number of non-governmental organizations (NGO) and which get government subsidies. For more than a hundred years, Swedes have had a strong tradition of forming such popular organizations. Sometimes Sweden has been called ”an organization democracy”. It has also been called ”a study circle democracy”, for example by our former prime minister Olof Palme.

There are thousands of local organizations in Sweden. Sometimes the same kind of  local organizations are established in many places around the country and then they often unite in one national organization (federation or association) with local branches.

There are hundreds of different national organizations and around 250 of them are member organizations in one of the study associations. Many other organizations have a close cooperation with study associations at the local level.

Tore Persson

 

Time Compressed and Dilated

"According to the Marxist geographer David Harvey, “the condition of postmodernity” as we experience it today involves a particularly intense degree of “time-space compression” (Harvey 1989). This is not wrong, but perhaps it is incomplete. Time in the neoliberal era is certainly “out of joint,” in the phrase from Hamlet that Deleuze loves to cite in this regard (Deleuze 1989; Deleuze 1994). But today, this works in the form of a sort of temporal schizophrenia: our experience of time is, all at once, both compressed and dilated.

On the side of compression, the world economy is geared towards just-in-time production, which endeavors to reduce, and ideally to eliminate, the glitches due either to shortages or to excess inventory (Harvey 1989). We only become aware of these lapses in production when supply chains are disrupted... Meanwhile, computerized financial transactions are squeezed as close to instantaneity as possible. The success or failure of algorithmically-controlled high frequency trading on financial markets is a matter of milliseconds, or even shorter intervals. Michael Lewis describes in great detail the ways in which financial traders strive to gain competitive advantage by increasing the speed of their transactions — something that is ultimately limited by the speed of light. However, even if you cannot make the buy and sell orders flow any faster, you can still gain precious microseconds by locating your server farm physically closer to the actual stock exchange (Lewis 2014).

In computational devices, sensing and action happen in real time, which is to say in micro-intervals, far beneath the threshold of human perception. They literally happen too fast for us to follow them. In consequence, these events have no phenomenology. As Shane Denson puts it, the processes at the heart of computation today “are themselves discorrelated from human subjectivity — no longer tuned to the frequencies of human sensory access and thus no longer essentially bound to appear at all” (Denson 2020). We are increasingly affected by transformations that we are unable to intuit or to experience as they happen. By the time we become aware of their effects — if we ever do — it is too late to respond: they have already receded into the past. In the words of Mark B. N. Hansen,

today’s media industries have honed methods for mining data about our behavior that feature as their key element the complete bypassing of consciousness, the direct targeting of what I shall call the “operational present” of sensibility. (Hansen 2015)

That is to say, the newer digital technologies — what Hansen calls “twenty-first century media” — shrink the present moment by reducing it to an “operational present” that is irreducibly and “categorically distinct from the present of consciousness” (Hansen 2015).

Contemporary capitalism also dilates time, however, in the sense that algorithmic operations capture both the past and the future, absorbing then into an ever-more-extended specious present. This is itself a result of the relentless monetization of temporal displacements. Remnants of the past take the form of monetary debts, and anticipations of the future take the form of exotic financial instruments such as derivatives. Both claims upon the past and claims upon the future are priced — and thereby bought and sold — in the extended present. Everything is drawn into the actions of buying and selling. Tokens of the past, and guarantees for the future, are alike subsumed within the frenzied and heightened now of the financial markets.

The financial mechanisms that dominate our lives today are best understood as “machines that crystallize time”: in saying this, I am hijacking, and inverting the meaning of, a phrase that I take from Maurizio Lazzerato (Lazzarato 2019). For Lazzarato, this phrase describes the production of video art — to which he attributes a utopian, oppositional role in his account of contemporary social processes. But the phrase “machines that crystallize time” is arguably even more apropos to describe the dystopian actualities of debt and financialization. Modern financial instruments work — or at least, they are supposed to work — to capture the future, by making it commensurable with the present. Derivatives and other arcane financial instruments — which, tellingly, used to be known as “futures contracts” — are ways of calculating and pricing future contingencies. Each potential development, to the extent that it can be anticipated at all, must be priced according to its likelihood as well as its promise of profitability. “Hedge funds,” which buy and sell derivatives, are so called because their ostensible function is to allow economic actors to “hedge” their bets. This ultimately means that wealthy investors come out ahead no matter what happens in the markets, leaving everyone else to absorb the losses. In short, derivatives are machines for capturing and accumulating flows of money — which is eqaully to say, for stockpiling flows of time.

But financial speculation by corporations and the rich is only one side of the way that time is managed in our globalized, neoliberal economy. The other side is consumer and household debt, which is equally an object of speculation. The economy would collapse, were it not for the purchases we all make on credit, living perpetually beyond our means. The debts we accumulate, just in the course of living our lives and reproducing our conditions of existence, are never actually paid off. They are just recycled and endlessly deferred.

The result is that my wages, as well as my savings and assets (if I am part of the minority lucky enough to have any savings and assets) continually “need to be leveraged and put to work in the speculative logic of the asset economy” (Adkins et al. 2020). I am continually compelled to manage, control, and carefully invest my own so-called “human capital,” making sure that I do not waste my potential in unproductive activity. I must subordinate all my future hopes to the need for keeping up with a pressing schedule of monthly payments and repayments. I cannot project or anticipate a future free from debt, but only an indefinite extension of the present, in which I continue to accumulate new debts at least as rapidly as I pay off the old ones. Lazzarato sees this situation as one in which we have no more time: the debt economy “has deprived [most of the population] of the future, that is, of time, time as decision-making, choice, and possibility” (Lazzarato 2011). But Lisa Adkins argues, to the contrary, that the new economy actually burdens us with “too much time” (Adkins 2018). We must scramble to service our debts indefinitely, in an extended future that stretches endlessly, but without ever offering us any sort of qualitative difference from the present.

Where Walter Benjamin worried about the past, “firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious” (Benjamin 2003), today we may well worry instead about the future. We experience futurity as devouring and empty of potentiality. The not-yet-born are already subjected to it, and even death itself offers us no escape from it. One the one side, the American right wing is focused upon the existence of the “unborn” (Cooper 2006); billionaires like Elon Musk are obsessed, against all evidence, with an alleged “underpopulation crisis” (Levin 2022). On the other side, as we approach the end of the life process, we are subjected to ever-greater indignities. K. W. Jeter’s great cyberpunk novel Noir offers us a scenario in which the dead are brought back from the grave as zombies, and compelled to work in order to pay off the debts that they incurred in life. But this is an interminable process. Since interest charges accumulate faster than wages do, the more the zombies work, the more they fall behind, accumulating ever greater debt (Jeter 1998; see my discussion in Shaviro 2003). This is scarcely even an extrapolation from actually existing conditions".

Pinocchio Theory

Brown

"Health Communism’s definition of surplus...“elides traditional left conceptions of the working class or the ‘worker.’... the idea that the worker is not a part of the surplus populations, yet faces constant threat of becoming certified as surplus, is one of the central constructions wielded in support of capitalist hegemony.” (4) Surplus is not so much a state to which a given population belongs a priori as it is a status bestowed upon populations by the state in the interest of capital, a fraught and ever-shifting designation mediated by a host of administrative processes of biocertification which seek to either recoup as productive those bodies it deems capable or to mark for extraction the bodies it does not. This brings us to the idea of “extractive abandonment,” an extension of Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s notion of “organized abandonment” and Marta Russell’s money model of disability, which describes the ways in which capitalist society maintains “those discarded as non-valuable life… as a source of extraction and profit for capital” via a host of “industries built on the maintenance, supervision, surveillance, policing, data extraction, confinement, study, cure, measurement, treatment, extermination, housing, transportation, and care of the surplus.” (5)

Lewis Brown

 

1. "There is a line to be drawn there between the barbarian and the foreigner. For the Greeks, the barbarians were those who didn't speak their language, and therefore inferior. Such a mark of difference and hierarchy is to be found throughout history. The Slavic name for Germans, still in use in some languages, is 'nemets', 'nemtsy', which means 'mute' - those that cannot speak Slavic. The foreigner is a threshold between human and animal because they can't speak properly, they can't communicate. Since Agamben explicitly marks this as the pre-modern anthropological machine, they are not just dumb animals with human form:

Up until the eighteenth century, language—which would become man’s identifying characteristic par excellence—jumps across orders and classes, for it is suspected that even birds can talk. With such a view of language, it is easy to see how an Other who can articulate, but not speak properly, is both animal and human".

"The idea of hegemony is that we are approving of it, we're agreeing to it, it's not that they're doing this to us. It's as if we're rushing like the souls in hell - we're rushing to it. It's important to see that this is the way the mechanism works, it's an important nuance to to add: we are co-conspirators in this normalizing process".

"The only way in which one can think that the Platonists are otherworldly is if you think that the world of appearances is the true world, 

It is our truest nature to be engaged in intellectual contemplation of the cause of this world, because as Proclus tells us the Forms are Causes. This intellectual contemplation is not opposed to the senses, because it is the senses superior and hence they cannot be opposed, it is opposed to attachment to falsity...To ascend to the higher levels for a human requires perfection at the lower levels, hence the hierarchies of virtues. The higher encompasses the lower, it does not exclude it. The realm of forms is not opposed to the realm of becoming, it encompasses it. Becoming alone is false, untrue, and opposed to Truth, but subordinate to the Truth it is good and beautiful. 

This finite world for the Platonists is the shine of the diamond that is the Form of Good, it is the ripples upon the infinite sea of beauty, we are those ripples we are that shine, and we are good. But only when taken to be reflective of this higher perfection, and not perfect through ourselves. This is how we achieve liberation for the Platonists, through understanding that this world is only perfect through another, we can embrace change, hope and possibility''.

"Levi Bryant has a new post up (responding to Jeremy Trombley) on the difficulties of being both pluralist and realist:

We need a pluralistic– a pluralism that also recognizes different animal worlds as phenomenologically described by Uexkull –to cultivate compassion and proper ethical regard for others; a big part of which involves recognizing the limitations of ones own conceptual schemes, attempting to understand others, or at least recognize that they might inhabit worlds of meaning (in Heidegger’s sense) that differ substantially from our own. However, we need a realism because there are facts of the matter pertaining to what causes psychic maladies, climate change, how economy functions, etc., and when we get these things wrong we generate horrific practices. How, then, can these things be thought together? I don’t know. It seems I’m continuously trying to square circles.

(Well, let me try to circle that square! ... sorry.)

Ontologically and metaphysically the idea of realist pluralism is no longer an issue. There are (appropriately) numerous variants but the basic idea that reality is itself pluralistic is well established. The question is political-discursive. It's what Stengers and Latour are getting at with their concepts of diplomacy and cosmopolitics.

They grant, first, that all entities exist and, second, that to say that someone's cherished idol (or whatever disputed entity they hold dear) is non-existent is a 'declaration of war' - 'this means war,' as Stengers often says. They thus shunt onto-political discourse off of the terrain of knowledge/belief in the sense of existence/non-existence. Their basic claim seems to be that 'respect for otherness,' i.e. political pluralism, can only come from granting the entities that others hold dear an ontology, even if you don't 'believe' in them. You are thus permitted to say 'I do not follow that god, he has no hold over me' but you are not permitted to say 'your god is an inane, infantile, non-existent fantasy, grow up.' And it's not just a question of politeness (although there's that too). The point is to grant others' idols and deities an existence - one needn't agree over what that existence entails, over what capacities that entity has or what obligations it impresses upon you as someone in its partial presence but to deny it existence entirely is to 'declare war' - to deny the possibility of civil discourse, of pluralistic co-existence.

I think it's important to add that they do not deny the possibility of legitimate 'war talk' - perhaps there are circumstances where that is entirely justified, in fact it's inevitable - but the properly political question should be 'how can we live together?' That is not a utopian political programme but a pragmatic one. And that's also the root of the notion of the composition of a common world through diplomacy.

I found (and still find) this a difficult notion to get my head around. The notion of 'speaking your mind,' of 'saying what you really mean' is so engrained in many ways that to temper that seems dishonest. But we do it all the time, in practice. That's 'political correctness' (which, contrary to reputation, has not actually 'gone mad')''.

Circling Squares

"Bryant believes that the social constructionist turn of the 90s was politically valuable in that it improved the social standing of many oppressed minorities. But he rejects what he perceives to be the extension of such constructionism beyond politics into ontology. Bryant writes:

“In arguing that everything is a social construction, the pluralist undermines the possibility of public deliberation about truth. Everything becomes an optional narrative or story about the world, an optional picture of reality, where we are free to choose among the various options that most suit our taste...”

I’m not sure if Bryant intends to include cosmopolitical thinkers like Latour and Stengers in his punching bag category “social constructionist.” I don’t understand how he could. If he does insist on labeling them as such (which seems to me to just obscure their true positions–but if he insists…), then, building on Whitehead’s categoreal scheme, I’d retort that “society” for these cosmopolitical thinkers has to be understood in the most general sense as an ontological category, not simply a human “construct.” The human organism is already a society of cells, each of which is itself a society of organelles, each of which is a society of molecules, each of which is a society of atoms, each of which is a society of protons, neutrons, and electrons, and so on… Realities are decomposed and recomposed by associations between and among actual occasions–occasions which are never simple unities but are always multiple and so always “in the making.” Which brings me to the concept of “construction”: if we are working within a process ontology, construction also needs to be ontologized. Biological evolution is a gradual process of construction wherein what begins as psychological desire later becomes physiological reality (to take the example of evolution by sexual selection). The physical world is itself continually constructed by what physicists are now calling “geometrogenesis.” This is not to say that the physical world is a human construct, mind you. The picture that is beginning to become clear as a result of contemporary physical cosmology is that space and time are the co-emergent products of the real activity of pure energy, something both non-human and pre-physical/pre-extended (Whitehead called it Creativity; physicists call it the quantum vacuum). If the physical world (as described by contemporary physics) is a network of relations always “in the making,” and not some collection of pre-given particles obeying eternal laws, then a “true” understanding of it must also always remain open-ended. There is no Science or Universal Reason that might once and for all pronounce upon the nature of the Real. There are many sciences, many methods, many rationalities. Science as it is actually practiced now and in the past has always already been a pluralistic enterprise. As Latour showed in Science in Action, what ends up being called “Nature” is always a consequence of some more or less temporary settlement of controversies. Every new generation of scientists stirs up new controversies about what the aging generation thought was settled.

The cosmopolitical perspective that I’d want to defend certainly does not “undermine the possibility of public deliberation about truth”–it is (once we accept an enactivist account of truth) the condition of its possibility! It is Bryant’s position that rules out such public deliberation by insisting on declaring war on all those human societies that reject materialism. Latour has plenty to say about the vacuity of the notion of “matter,” which I’ve discussed elsewhere and won’t get into here.  Accepting a cosmopolitical form of ontological pluralism doesn’t at all require that we think of all beliefs and belief-systems as created equal. Nor does it imply that social groups “freely choose” their beliefs simply as a matter of “taste.” The ontological commitments of any given society typically emerge out of long multi-generational processes of historical development. They aren’t just made-up on a whim by individual members. Further, the world view of a social group is as integral to their their livelihood and well-being as their food, shelter, and water, not simply an optional aesthetic veneer. As Trombley suggested, belief-systems enact ways of being and are not just representations.

Ontological pluralism is a commitment to multiple realities, many of which overlap, but some of which remain (at least for now) irreconcilable. It is not a commitment to tolerance of multiple perspectives on a single reality. This latter option, as Bryant points out, would be a rather trivial form of pluralism. It is also a rather colonialist and scientistic take on the Real. Anyone trying to argue that contemporary science has somehow provided us with a unified account of an objective reality that holds true for all people in all places and times has their work cut out for them. Several hundred years of “modern” science has only succeeded in making the world stranger, more dangerous, and more multifarious than it was for ancient and medieval peoples.

Am I saying that a ayahuasca shaman’s encounter with the spirit of the jaguar is just as real as the particle physicist’s encounter with the Higgs boson? Yes, most definitely. In fact, the shaman’s encounter is way more concrete and direct than the physicist’s, since the latter has to wait for a world-wide network of supercomputers to process the information for him, which only after many repeated trials, journal publications, and so on becomes what most (but not every!) physicist will agree is something like a Higgs boson. Even after all this painstakingly detailed mediation (“science in the making”), the Higgs boson remains now and forever a theoretical construct. The ayahuasqueros’ encounter with the jaguar spirit is anything but. Sure, a cognitive neuroscientist might claim to be able to explain the shaman’s experience as a “brain malfunction” brought on by the ingestion of a psychedelic plant brew. But this remains a reductive etic description and not a complete explanation. The neuroscientist should participate in an ayahuasca ceremony for himself before he goes declaring war on the shaman. At least, this is what a pluralist ethics would entail. Such shamanic practices have functioned quite well in their own tribal context for thousands of years. Instead of assuming from the get go that anyone who doesn’t describe the world in your favored language is deluded, try to get to know them, to understand not only what their world is like, but how their world is brought forth. Follow the injunctions through which they enact their world. Then, once you’ve explored it from the inside, by all means judge their enactment, contest it, translate its features into other terms to show why it is unethical, dangerous, or misguided.

I’ll leave you with an excerpt from an essay of mine on the ethical implications of enactivism and the need for a pluralistic planetary mythos (Logos of a Living Earth):

One consequence of the enactive approach is that the Cartesian quest for epistemological certainty becomes but the expression of a particular cognitive domain made possible by the abstract languages of mathematics, precise measurements of machine technologies, and controlled laboratory environment. If the nervous system is operationally closed, its function cannot be to modestly mirror an external, objective reality, even if the modest witnesses are highly trained scientists allied with powerful instruments that extend their sensory reach. The operational closure of the nervous system forestalls a representational account of its activity, as its role is maintaining coherence, rather than correspondence, between organism and environment. New techniques may open up previously hidden worlds, as when Galileo first turned a telescope to the sky and revealed the moons of Jupiter in 1610, or Hooke first recognized cells through a microscope in 1665, but one cannot speak of finally discovering the real as if it existed independently of our bodily and inter-bodily experience of its meaning.

As Haraway has suggested (p. 199, 1997), “…objectivity is less about realism than about intersubjectivity.” She yearns for us to come to see objectivity as a way of “forming ties across wide distances” (ibid.), instead of as the privileged and modest perspective of self-invisible European men who remain somehow unpolluted by their ambiguously situated bodies (p. 23-32, ibid.). If science can claim relative epistemological privilege, it is not the result of transcending culture, but of the ever-accelerating, ever-expanding mobility and combinability of the traces scientists and their cyborg surrogates have constructed within their networks. Outside of these special networks of labs, machines, shared languages, and centrally controlled policy initiatives, scientific facts have little relevance. As Latour put it, “we might compare scientific facts to frozen fish: the cold chain that keeps them fresh must not be interrupted, however briefly".

Segall 

''Thinking only at a responsibility level makes the world, when you think about it, a terrible place because we are completely okay with the fact that some people are treated way better than average for reasons they had nothing to do with, that they weren't responsible for. While some people are treated way worse than average and we decide that this is okay and it's not okay''.

Robert Sapolsky

In fact, we may well be witnessing the almost definitive triumph of artefacts over...speech. We are about to outsource to information machines and technologies of calculation the bulk of the faculties human reason was initially supposed to embody. This is happening as all kinds of killing projects are tried out on the most vulnerable classes of the world’s population...The accumulation of inhumane brutalities meted by state and non-state apparatuses do not fail to include all countries, in particular those that are still committed to one form or another of techno-colonial occupation. As a geomorphic force, sovereignty today tends to reproduce itself through acts of fracturing and fissuring. In turn, fracturing and fissuring targets bodies, nerves, blood and brains, just as it does the entrails of the Earth itself. The coming together of these two forms of destruction (the destruction of the human body and the destruction of the body of the Earth) is what gives the concept of necropolitics its catastrophic weight.

Achille Mbembe

Sarwar Tusher

While in a biopolitical state, human ‘life’ becomes the central subject of sovereign politics, in a necropolitical state administering ‘death’ becomes the main functionality of sovereign power. The necropolitical state subjugates the lives of most people to the power of death. In this context the condition of sovereign power does not depend on moulding life positively and creating ‘bare life’; rather, it is a political, cultural and economic arrangement of structural death: necropolitical power proceeds by a sort of inversion between life and death as if life was merely death’s medium. It ever seeks to abolish the distinction between means and ends. (Mbembe)

Producing large scale death becomes an inevitable part of such a total polity...Such a political settlement can be identified by the phrase ‘secret life, public death’, a large population where life becomes the waiting room for boarding a train called ‘death’. In such a political reality, death is the ‘rule’; life is the ‘exception’. To live here means to escape death as long as you can. As Achille Mbembe noted, necropolitics also refers to a death-world, a form of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead. (Mbembe).

Some signature features of such a political regime are: unprecedented state horror, a society of violence where the state does not hold the monopoly of violence, rather, state violence is reproduced throughout the society, the commodification of war or warlike situations, predation and dispossession of natural resources and communities in the name of ‘development’, different modes of killing, concentration camps, ghettos, enclaves, creating less than human humans (consider, for example, the plight of and systematic racism against the Rohingya in Bangladesh). To sum up, as per Antonio Pele, necropolitics implies a closed entrenchment of political, economic and military devices, oriented towards the elimination of human populations. But, along with this aspect, necropolitics is also deployed through “small doses” of death that structure the everyday life of individuals.

Sarwar Tusher