"In Pyrrhonism, aporia is intentionally induced as a means of producing ataraxia".
"In Pyrrhonism, ataraxia is the intended result of epoché (i.e., suspension of judgment) regarding all matters of dogma (i.e., non-evident belief), which represents the central aim of Pyrrhonist practice,[3] that is necessary to bring about eudaimonia''.
''This essay assumes that the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.1 Hence, to kill or to allow to live constitute the limits of sovereignty, its fundamental attributes. To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power. One could summarize in the above terms what Michel Foucault meant by biopower: that domain of life over which power has taken control.2 But under what practical conditions is the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death exercised? Who is the subject of this right? What does the implementation of such a right tell us about the person who is thus put to death and about the relation of enmity that sets that person against his or her murderer? Is the notion of biopower sufficient to account for the contemporary ways in which the political, under the guise of war, of resistance, or of the fight against terror, makes the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective? War, after all, is as much a means of achieving sovereignty as a way of exercising the right to kill. Imagining politics as a form of war, we must ask: What place is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power?''
Agamben describes this as both an “anthropological machine”
and a “biopolitical apparatus.” As anthropological machine, it has generated our characteristic
ways of thinking, speaking, and enacting the human. It has created the clearing between
animality and humanity in which our form of life has appeared. As a biopolitical apparatus, it has
produced the catastrophes of the twentieth century. It has constructed the aporia between the
human being and the human person into which countless millions have disappeared. Through
these our animality has developed into rationality, sociality, and spirituality. Yet through these
same we have devolved again and again into barbarity. Because of this, Agamben chillingly
concludes that machine and apparatus are inseparable. Our humanism is not the antithesis of our
inhumanity. It is instead its genesis. We cannot repent of the latter unless we recant the former.
Agamben’s topography of the political thus leads us into a no man’s land. The
sites of the city and the camp are not two distinct topographies, two separate spatiopolitical
forms. The city and the camp are a single topology, one spatiopolitical form whose function is
continuous through its inversion.1 We are caught, then, in the threshold, the caesura, the aporia,
the antinomy between the anthropological machine and the biopolitical apparatus.
The issue, argues Agamben, is not that human rights came to be perplexed extrinsically by a form of power possible only in the cultural, social, and
technological conditions of modernity. Rather, law and order are always and already vexed
intrinsically by a political rationality that first divided man from animal in antiquity. The
prerogative of national sovereignty exercised in the interwar Minority Treaties and established as
the exceptional power of police order and internment camps did not, as Arendt writes,
“transform the state from an institution of the law into an institution of the nation.”2 The state
always has been an instrument of the nation, as has the law itself. Natality and nationality are
inseparable. Given the underlying biopolitical rationality of the law, the state of exception is both
an ineliminable stateform and an inexorable situation. The Shoah is its inescapable conclusion,
its all but inevitable culmination. Auschwitz always was, and always will be latent in the
juridical rationality of Western liberalism. Following Benjamin, on whom he relies in order to
correct and complete the work of Arendt, Schmitt, and Foucault, Agamben insists, “[T]he
emergency situation has everywhere become the rule.”3 All of us, each person and every citizen
is a Muselmann, potentially if not yet actually. It is only a matter of time.4
Woodard-Lehman
"The juridical constitution of our laws by itself is an incomplete politics of intending. To this we must add a politics of tending; the moral and political constitution of our selves. This is what we may hope. Not that a billion Bartlebys find lines of flight, but that nine schoolchildren forge lines at which to fight. Blessed not are the inert. Blessed are the organized''.
Woodard-Lehman
"Atmosphere is also key within literature on the psychosocial dynamics of welfare, which are situated within, and yet move beyond, focus on the discursive production of welfare subjectivities to better grasp the affective and embodied experiences of welfare (Stenner et al., 2008) – how welfare practices, and indeed austerity, come to be inscribed on bodies. This literature places ‘emotional life at the heart of social policy and welfare practice whilst retaining a critical perspective on issues of power’ (Frost and Hoggett, 2008: 438). There are links here to work within cultural studies on economies and politics of affect (Berlant, 2007; Puar, 2011), austerity as atmosphere (Hitchen, 2016) and questions around how capitalism feels (Cvetkovitch, 2012). Particularly relevant is Berlant’s ‘slow death’ as an analytical strategy to describe ‘the physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people’ (2007: 754) under contemporary global/national regimes of capitalist subordination, and the ‘destruction of bodies by capitalism in spaces of production and in the rest of life’ (2007: 764). Puar (2011) draws upon Berlant’s work to ask (in reference to deaths categorised as ‘gay youth suicides’) ‘what kinds of “slow deaths” have been ongoing that a suicide might represent an escape from?’ (2011: 152). Povinelli (2011) in examining modes of making (Mills 307) and letting die in late liberalism takes this further by asking who can be seen as accountable for such slow deaths (Povinelli, 2011: 134), and in relation to this article, for austerity suicides?''
Mills
"Psychopolitics enables a dual analysis of not only how austerity kills but also the mechanisms through which economic crisis comes to be rearticulated and reconfigured as individual crisis, including its psychologisation as ‘mental illness’, enabling ‘political crises to be cast as conditions of specific bodies’ (Berlant, 2007: 765) and diverting public discussion of government culpability to individual-level psychological factors. This constitutes, according to Clarke and Newman (2012), the alchemy of austerity – the intense ideological work of reconfiguring profound economic inequalities into individualised problems of ‘welfare dependence’ and ‘cutlures of entitlment’, which mirrors the reconfiguration of economic problems as individual ‘illness’ through psychotherapeutic vocabularies. Reading what the psy-disciplines frame as ‘symptoms’ psychopolitically has long been a strategy of the psychiatric survivor movement (Burstow et al., 2014). This approach frames ‘symptoms’ as personally and politically meaningful in that they may constitute ‘rational and resistant reactions to maladaptive environments’ (Goodley, 2001: 215), including maladaptive socio-economic politics of austerity''.
"The psychic life of austerity A psychopolitical analysis is also concerned with subject-making and with psychic life. Conceptualisation of ‘psychic life’ has occurred broadly within psychosocial theory where individual psyches are understood as always already social and the social is ‘imbued with the “psychic” life of individuals’ (Froggett, 2012: 179). Much of this work merges Foucauldian thinking (particularly on subjectivity) with concepts from psychoanalytic theories, exemplified in Judith Butler’s (1997) ‘psychic life of power’. A recent example is Fortier’s (2017) work on the ‘psychic life of policy’, which attends to the psychosocial dynamics of UK citizenship policy and the psychic reproduction of hierarchies of belonging through both desire and anxiety. Pre-dating Butler’s work is Nandy’s writing on ‘the psychological contours of colonialism’ and colonial selfhood (1983: 2), as well as more recent postcolonial work on the ‘psychic life of colonial power’ (Riggs and Augoustinos, 2005; Hook, 2012). This literature references not only the use of the psychological to explore workings of power, but also hints at how the colonial shapes and makes possible psychic life. It emphasises colonial psychic life as dehumanising and objectifying because the colonised are cast as instruments of production, or as non-persons that need to be erased (Loomba, 2009[1998]). This raises important questions about whether the psychic framing of colonialism and racism transfer to thinking about the psychic life of austerity, especially given the racialised dynamics of austerity that ‘subject certain populations to exploitation, oppression, displacement, and dispossession while conforming to the colorblind optics of official anti-racism’ (Thomsen, 2016: 1). Useful here is the link traced by Stevenson (2012: 597) in thinking welfare colonialism alongside ‘the psychic life of biopolitics’ in relation to the contemporary suicide epidemic among Inuit youth in the Canadian Artic. Stevenson seeks to ‘understand state-sanctioned death and genocide within a political formation that seems to privilege the promotion of life’ (2012: 597). Eugenic logic provides a crucial link here between distinct and yet related colonial regimes and rationales for austerity. Eugenics is closely linked to biopolitical discourses of ‘fitness’ (in terms of economic productivity and reproduction) and tied to racism, ableism and sanism, and the multiple ways these are linked to poverty (for example through old yet still present conceptions of degeneracy). The implications of these logics can be seen in the systematic eradication, compulsory sterilisation, impoverishment and institutionalisation of non-normatively ‘productive’ bodies, disabled and mad people, and indigenous, racialised and colonised peoples. Dependency is central here – in both the creation of economic dependency of colonised states on the metropole (and the disavowal of the dependency of the colonisers on the colonised), and the stigmatisation of dependency on the state, for example of those in receipt of disability or unemployment benefits. Eugenic logic is evident in the devaluation of certain forms of life (indigenous, disabled, mad and poor) and the production of lives that cannot or will not be improved or self-govern (Razack, 2015) as a ‘surplus humanity that is superfluous to a regime of capitalist value’ (Gidwani and Reddy, 2011: 1653). This article argues that the psychological impact of coming to understand oneself as an economic burden can be seen through austerity suicides, and further that these deaths are a logical outcome of eugenic and market logic''.
China Mills
"Psilocybin therapy shows antidepressant potential, but its therapeutic actions are not well understood. We assessed the subacute impact of psilocybin on brain function in two clinical trials of depression. The first was an open-label trial of orally administered psilocybin (10 mg and 25 mg, 7 d apart) in patients with treatment-resistant depression. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was recorded at baseline and 1 d after the 25-mg dose. Beck’s depression inventory was the primary outcome measure (MR/J00460X/1). The second trial was a double-blind phase II randomized controlled trial comparing psilocybin therapy with escitalopram. Patients with major depressive disorder received either 2 × 25 mg oral psilocybin, 3 weeks apart, plus 6 weeks of daily placebo (‘psilocybin arm’) or 2 × 1 mg oral psilocybin, 3 weeks apart, plus 6 weeks of daily escitalopram (10–20 mg) (‘escitalopram arm’). fMRI was recorded at baseline and 3 weeks after the second psilocybin dose (NCT03429075). In both trials, the antidepressant response to psilocybin was rapid, sustained and correlated with decreases in fMRI brain network modularity, implying that psilocybin’s antidepressant action may depend on a global increase in brain network integration. Network cartography analyses indicated that 5-HT2A receptor-rich higher-order functional networks became more functionally interconnected and flexible after psilocybin treatment. The antidepressant response to escitalopram was milder and no changes in brain network organization were observed. Consistent efficacy-related brain changes, correlating with robust antidepressant effects across two studies, suggest an antidepressant mechanism for psilocybin therapy: global increases in brain network integration''.
"The anxiety of unfinalizability contributes to the judicialization of politics in the post–Cold War period (Comaroff and Comaroff 2007). For increasingly global activist movements and ideologies of transnational human rights, legal architecture creates a shared way to recognize signs of justice being done—however unsatisfyingly (Clarke 2009; Tate 2013; Merry 2016). Ideological investments in the fixity of legal documents are sites where the desire for finalizability is played out (Riles 2007; Hetherington 2011; Hull 2012). Because legal logics are fundamentally shot through with time, judicialized justice can be mapped along a linear trajectory: the possibility of a deferred and future moment of justice stretches endlessly into a mappable and knowable future (Valverde 2015; Greenberg 2017). The messiness of multidimensional action is scaled and squeezed to fit the chronotopic imaginaries of late liberalism. In this way, the temporalities of justice and law go hand in hand with the violence of abandonment (Povinelli 2011)''.
Georgia van Toorn https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6660-8479 g.vantoorn@unsw.edu.au and Karen Soldatić
"Focusing here on worry and anxiety enables a move beyond solely a discursive analysis to explore how austerity is inscribed on bodies - embodied and lived. The inscription of worry9 onto bodies is evident in the death of Elaine Christian, who was ‘found dead in a drain [and] had been worried about attending a medical appointment to assess disability benefits’ (Hull Daily Mail). The inquest heard that Elaine, who died from drowning and whose wrists were covered in self-inflicted cuts, ‘had been worrying about a meeting she was due to have to discuss her entitlement to disability benefits’ (Hull Daily Mail). From a psychopolitical frame of analysis, Elaine’s worry is made flesh as the toxicity of austerity gets under, and is marked upon, her skin. For Fanon, this is a process of epidermalisation, where anxiety and inferiority, as a product of hierarchies, is made flesh and lived through the body (Fanon, 1967:11). Elaine’s death then seems marked by worry linked to ‘entitlement’ to benefits, which is itself structured by hierarchies and moral economies of ‘worthiness’ that come to be internalized – what might be understood as the epidermalisation of...stigmatization...''
"This article develops and utilises an analytic framework of psychopolitical autopsy to trace suicide as one of the symptoms of austerity and welfare reform. This brings together analytical tools rarely used alongside each other – research into the politics and economies of affect, post and anti-colonial psychopolitics and critical suicidology (one notable exception to this is Hunter 2015). This enables a timely analysis that takes seriously the psychic life of austerity (internalisation, shame, anxiety), embeds ‘psychic distress in a context of social dis-ease’ (Orr, 2006: 29), avoids understanding suicide solely through a psychocentric register (Rimke and Brock, 2012), and ultimately aims to attempt to better understand how austerity ‘kills’. The significance of this approach lies in its ability to widen analytic framing of suicide from a solely individual focus, to illuminate culpability of government reforms while still retaining the complexity of suicide – how welfare ‘practices’ can kill and can come to feel like murder (Stevenson).
"Three key findings emerge from this work: (a) that newspaper coverage tends to report individual cases of suicide without making links to the wider pattern of such deaths; (b) that the mobilisation of mental health problems in much newspaper coverage works to configure suicide as a response to mental illness (even where mental illness is acknowledged to be linked to austerity); and (c) wider stigmatisation of welfare claimants (and ‘dependency’ more broadly) is a key element of the psychic life of austerity. In doing this the article first foregrounds analytical concepts of psychopolitics and autopsy. It moves on to trace newspaper portrayals of trajectories of causality for austerity suicides, and compares psychocentric mobilisations of mental health with austerity’s ‘nervous conditions’ and the internalisation of eugenic and market logic. Finally, the article turns to examine what a psychopolitical analysis means for understanding government culpability and activism''.
"This article draws upon and is situated within the field of Critical Suicidology, which aims to conceptualise acts of self-killing beyond narrow medical and psychological approaches that frame suicide as an outcome of individual pathology (White et al., 2016). This problematises ‘taken-for-granted ideas that any death named suicide happens in apolitical contexts’ (Reynolds, 2016: 169). This is particularly evident in what Marsh calls the ‘compulsory ontology of [the] pathology’ of suicide – the dominance of an ‘individualized, “internalized”, pathologised, depoliticized, and ultimately tragic form of suicide [that] has come to be produced, with alternative interpretations of acts of self-accomplished death marginalised or foreclosed’ (2010: 43 and 219). The dominant conception of suicide as an outcome of ‘mental illness’ that has become normatively monolithic in the global North, means that suicide prevention based on treatment of ‘mental illness’ has become common-sense (Battin, 2005). This means that alternative framings of suicide as contextualised, as historically and culturally contingent, or as a method of resistance, are subjugated and silenced (Marsh, 2010). Even the act of naming certain kinds of death as ‘suicide’ is seen to mask ‘daily conditions of suffering and immiserisation’ and to normalise ‘social contexts marked by stigma, exclusion and hate’, preventing us from understanding how indifference and hate ‘kills’ (Reynolds).''
China Mills
"It is in light of this disconnect that I have come to see how justice and injustice are not opposites. Rather, these concepts are configured around fundamentally different temporalities, ethics, and affects. More often than not, injustice has a finalizable quality. Formulations of injustice are perfective actions: people suffer, are tortured, humiliated, wrongly convicted, dispossessed. It is true that our popular and analytic vocabulary has grown more sophisticated for capturing the particularly heinous qualities of structural injustice and the ongoing and repeated nature of wrongs. Nonetheless, the status of injustice as completed (if repeatable) remains nameable. Shared signs of injustice allow us to orient toward each other by way of a common object. In the process, we create an affectively charged experience of mutual recognition. We learn to recognize acts of injustice and we recognize other people recognizing them as well''.
To better understand how austerity kills, this paper draws upon the psychopolitical work of anti-colonial revolutionary and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. Fanon’s work is important here in two main ways: his insistence on situating ‘symptoms’ of distress within the psychopathology of colonialism itself – the ways colonialism gets under people’s skin (epidermalisation) (Fanon, 1967); and his ‘psychopolitics’ – a denouncement of the colonial practice of using psy-expertise to focus on the brains of the ‘natives’, overlooking the structural conditions of colonialism (Fanon, 1961). Adams says of Fanon (1970:811): ‘the poor are plagued by poverty....Jews by persecution, blacks by exploitation ... Fanon rallied against a “psychologism” that dealt with all of these estranging afflictions as if they were...mere states of mind’. Therefore, not only does Fanon provide us with a language for tracing the psychological impact of colonialism but also for tracing how the psy-disciplines reconfigure this impact as being the result of individual pathologies – what Rimke and Brock (2012) call ‘psychocentrism’. This is not a relic of the past. Razack (2015) powerfully illustrates the individualization, medicalization and pathologisation of oppression evident in the way categories such as alcoholism and ‘mental illness’ are used to obscure colonial and 4 governmental culpability and violence in deaths (including suicides) of indigenous peoples in current-day Canada. Psychopolitics enables a dual analysis of both how austerity kills but also the mechanisms through which economic crisis comes to be rearticulated and reconfigured as individual crisis, including its psychologisation as ‘mental illness’, enabling ‘political crises to be cast as conditions of specific bodies’ (Berlant, 2007:765) and diverting public discussion of Government culpability to individual level psychological factors. This constitutes, according to Clarke and Newman (2012), the alchemy of austerity – the intense ideological work of reconfiguring profound economic inequalities into individualised problems of ‘welfare dependence’ and ‘cutlures of entitlment’, which mirrors the reconfiguration of economic problems as individual ‘illness’ through psychotherapeutic vocabularies. Reading what the psy-disciplines frame as ‘symptoms’ psychopolitically has long been a strategy of the psychiatric survivor movement (Burstow, LeFrançois, and Diamond, 2014). This approach frames ‘symptoms’ as personally and politically meaningful in that they may constitute ‘rational and resistant reactions to maladaptive environments’ (Goodley, 2001:215), including maladaptive socio-economic politics of austerity. In Fanon’s account colonialism has a violent atmosphere, which ‘here and there bursts out’, a violence ‘which is just under the skin’ (Fanon, 1961:70-71). This is similar to Goodley and Runswick-Cole’s (2011) use of Zizek (2008:1) to analyse the violence of disablism through stepping back from overt violence to ‘perceive the contours of the background which generates such outbursts’. Similarly, this paper seeks to illuminate the environment from which ‘welfare reform suicides’ represent an escape, addressing the need ‘to structure into our analysis of a person’s death the context of social injustice in which they lived’ (Reynolds, 2016:170). Atmosphere is also key within literature on the psychosocial dynamics of welfare, which are situated within, and yet move beyond, focus on the discursive production of welfare subjectivities to better grasp the affective and embodied experiences of welfare (Stenner, Barnes, and Taylor, 2008) – how welfare practices, and indeed austerity, come to be inscribed on bodies. This literature places ‘emotional life at the heart of social policy and welfare practice whilst retaining a critical perspective on issues of power’ (Frost and Hoggett, 2008:438). There are links here to work within cultural studies on economies and politics of affect (Berlant, 2007; Puar, 2011), austerity as atmosphere (Hitchen, 2016), and questions around how capitalism feels (Cvetkovitch, 2012). Particularly relevant is Berlant’s (2007) ‘slow death’ as an analytical strategy to describe ‘the physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people’ (p. 754) under contemporary global/national regimes of capitalist subordination, and the ‘destruction of bodies by capitalism in spaces of production and in the rest of life (p. 764). Puar (2011) draws upon Berlant’s work to ask (in reference to deaths categorized as ‘gay youth suicides’) ‘what kinds of “slow deaths” have been ongoing that a suicide might represent an escape from?’ (2011: 152). Povinelli (2011) in examining modes of making and letting die in late liberalism takes this further by asking who can be 5 seen as accountable for such slow deaths (Povinelli, 2011: 134), and in relation to this paper, for austerity suicides? The psychic life of austerity A psychopolitical analysis is also concerned with subject-making and with psychic life. Conceptualization of ‘psychic life’ has occurred broadly within psychosocial theory where individual psyches are understood as always already social and the social is ‘imbued with the “psychic” life of individuals’ (Froggett, 2012: 179). Much of this work merges Foucauldian thinking (particularly on subjectivity) with concepts from psychoanalytic theories, exemplified in Judith Butler’s (1997) ‘psychic life of power’. A recent example is Fortier’s (2017) work on the ‘psychic life of policy’, which attends to the psychosocial dynamics of UK citizenship policy and the psychic reproduction of hierarchies of belonging through both desire and anxiety. Pre-dating Butler’s work is Nandy’s writing on ‘the psychological contours of colonialism’ and colonial selfhood (1983:2), as well as more recent postcolonial work on the ‘psychic life of colonial power’ (Riggs and Augoustinos, 2005; Hook, 2012). This literature references both the use of the psychological to explore workings of power, but also hints at how the colonial shapes and makes possible psychic life. It emphasizes colonial psychic life as dehumanizing and objectifying because the colonized are cast as instruments of production, or as non-persons that need to be erased (Loomba, 1998/2009). This raises important questions about whether the psychic framing of colonialism and racism transfer to thinking about the psychic life of austerity, especially given the racialized dynamics of austerity that ‘subject certain populations to exploitation, oppression, displacement, and dispossession while conforming to the colorblind optics of official antiracism’ (Thomsen, 2016:1). Useful here is the link traced by Stevenson (2012:597) in thinking welfare colonialism alongside ‘the psychic life of biopolitics’ in relation to the contemporary suicide epidemic among Inuit youth in the Canadian Artic. Stevenson seeks to ‘understand state-sanctioned death and genocide within a political formation that seems to privilege the promotion of life’ (p. 597). Eugenic logic provides a crucial link here between distinct and yet related colonial regimes and rationales for austerity. Eugenics is closely linked to biopolitical discourses of ‘fitness’ (in terms of economic productivity and reproduction) and tied to racism, ableism and sanism, and the multiple ways these are linked to poverty (for example through old yet still present conceptions of degeneracy). The implications of these logics can be seen in the systematic eradication, compulsory sterilization, impoverishment and institutionalization of non-normatively ‘productive’ bodies, disabled and mad people, and indigenous, racialised and colonized peoples. Dependency is central here – in both the creation of economic dependency of colonized states on the metropole (and the disavowal of the dependency of the colonizers on the colonized), and the stigmatization of dependency on the state, for example of those in receipt of disability or unemployment benefits. Eugenic logic is evident in the devaluation of certain forms of life (indigenous, disabled, mad, and poor) and the production of lives that cannot or will not be improved or self-govern (Razack, 2015) as a ‘surplus humanity that is superfluous to a regime of capitalist value’ (Gidwani and Reddy, 2011:1653). This paper argues that the 6 psychological impact of coming to understand oneself as an economic burden can be seen through austerity suicides, and further that these deaths are a logical outcome of eugenic and market logic.
China Mills
"What is never really undertaken in these summaries is Hegel's reconceptualizing philosophy's attitude towards *mediation*, even though this is what he spends much of the Preface and Introduction of the Phenomenology doing. It's critically important to have this be the first thing presented in any review of Hegel, because the whole of Hegel's system relies on overturning the traditional attitude. His reworking of mediation is what enables him to posit history as a progressive unfolding of self-consciousness. It's what enables the sensibility of determinate negation in his conception of dialectics. It's quite simply his first premise, and if one were to demonstrate an error in Hegel's attitude towards mediation, the whole edifice would fall.
Hegel's critique, to be brief, is simply that mediation--i.e., thinking, perceiving, sensing---is unjustifiably posited by philosophers since Plato to be a distortion of the Truth, or the "Absolute" in Hegel's vocabulary. He's also directly responding to Kant's implicit skepticism of course. In the traditional view, Truth, the Absolute, God as such, Kant's thing-in-itself, is taken to be the ultimate unmediated *actual thing*, the philosophical simple, the uncaused cause (not to say these concepts are all identical, but they are all certainly related as part of what Hegel critiques in terms of how we conceive of them as unmediated simples). Accordingly, our senses manipulate the *actual thing*, the thing-in-itself and transform it by means of mediation into a *perceived thing*, the thing-for-us; there is my subjective representation of X and the "real and simple" X, and the two are separated by the unbridgeable gulf of mediation. It is precisely this epistemic attitude, namely that truth lies at the pure undistilled beginning and that our representation of it could only ever be an improving imperfection, that is at issue, since by virtue of this attitude, we enter into a host of unavoidable skepticisms---a condition that Hegel takes to not merely be a problem for philosophical knowledge but for cultural and political life itself. Hegel's revision of this attitude then is simply to reverse the polarities. Whereas the traditional view places the Absolute in the beginning and treats it as an external*, for it is seen as the source from which all things spring and thus that externality towards which all our knowledge must ideally correspond, Hegel proposes that we conceive of it as an *end (or the whole process of its unfolding towards that end) and treat mediation as an internal project of the Absolute itself. This is how for Hegel moments of falsehood, contradiction, or negativity, are themselves part and parcel of the truth, for mediation is considered as the Truth becoming itself by becoming other than itself. The key passages here, for anyone curious, are 20 and 21 of the Phenomenology of Spirit---and for anyone interested in learning some Hegel, read these two passages over and over. In my reading of Hegel, this temporal restructuring of the Absolute and this optimism towards the role of mediation is absolutely critical in understanding how Hegel lends himself to progressive politics in a way that the right wing will never successfully claim. For the right, the Absolute remains the beginning pure and simple; all history is a deviation, a fall from paradise, everything is always getting worse, and the purpose of politics is to return to the simple. "Every day we stray further from God's light" is quite literally the essence of the right-wing attitude: difference from its normative ideal is conceived of as mutation, external threats, even as pathogens. But for Hegel (or what Hegel should've ascribed to if his politics were consistent with his system), the normative ideal generates its own difference, internally, and to conceptualize that unfolding as distortion or even degeneration would be in error. In a quite plain example, gender queerness is seen by the right as an external enemy: a degeneration of normalcy brought in by the absolute Other (the cultural Marxist---the Jew). But in the Hegelian perspective, gender queerness could only ever be the logical result of the actualized expression of gender normativity---it is the self-generated negative internal to itself, and in truth, represents its development in the process of self-becoming. It wasn't a malicious Other that brought in gender queerness, it was rather that gender normativity itself sublated itself via its own internal movement---and it is this movement that Hegel grasps in terms of dialectics''."Foucault focuses on the way that physiocratic modes of governance dealt with the concept of scarcity. No longer will grain scarcity be treated as an isolated crisis around which all decisions must be made and then eventually an action be taken to prevent it. Instead, scarcity will now be treated as a something that “must not disappear” (Foucault 2007, 42). The crisis is now the expanse across which the state, as a constant practice and not simply an entity charged with sovereign intervention, will manage the population. The crisis has shifted away from being confined to the space of the body under the medical gaze, now the doctor must be practitioner, judge, and social manager. This lingers today in the DSM-V’s definition of abnormality: “maladaptive behavior, personal distress, statistical rarity, and violation of social norms.” As Julian Heron notes, “the threat presented by discordant bodies organizes the very fiction of a unified society.”
So why do I open with this insufficient account of crisis? My answer is rather simple, if crisis is the reigning object of contemporary economic analysis, liberal or Marxist, we have to understand that it is not a set of emergencies that arrive at a specific maturation of contradictions but is, in fact, a mode of governing that has been with us since the eighteenth century.
Next, Neoliberalism needs Ableism for the crisis to be maintained:
In his 1979 lectures, The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault talks about, well, the birth of biopolitics. He believes that, in order to do this, in order to give this history, he has to give an account of post-physiocratic liberalism and neoliberalism. So what is unique about neoliberalism, Foucault asks? The answer is a kind of strange one. The shift from liberalism to neoliberalism can be understood in this way. Economics is no longer an analysis of a process (think commodity production), but of an activity. It is no longer a logic of processes but instead a “strategic programming of individuals’ activity.” Foucault summarizes American neoliberalism this way: “American neoliberals say this: It is strange that classical political economy has always solemnly declared that the production of goods depends on three factors—land, capital, and labor—while leaving the third unexplored.”
This new analysis is one that focuses not on the deployment of labor potentiality, but an incision into the laborer, their value, and their—importantly—abilities. This is the theory of human capital, a term we often hear but rarely actually discuss the content or strategic function of.
Gary Becker, a neoliberal economist whose foundational 1964 text Human Capital came to define a new mode of investment, set out initially to “estimate the money rate of return to college and high school educations.” What Gary Becker attests is that this new approach to capital, the investment not just in labor, but the laborer, would “fill a gap in formal economic theory: it offers a unified explanation of a wide range of empirical phenomena.” But what’s fascinating about this account, is that it relies on a concept of human investment entirely predicated on what Becker calls “ability.” Human capital is a mode of investment that seeks to identify, facilitate, and foster ability. No longer is the laborer simply the harbinger of labor potentiality that is abstracted as a broader processes of production. Instead, the human being becomes a new kind of Homo Oeconomicus. The laborer’s assets comprise a capital that is an “ability, a skill: as they say” Foucault says, clearly turning the knife on Deleuze and Guattari, “it is a machine.” And this machine is what must be invested in. However, on the other end, it is also meant to recognize risk, or “lesser ability.” In his analysis of the variation in rates of return, Becker lays out the three important measures of “ability” in his study—rank in class, IQ, and father’s occupation. All of this is meant to allow economists to gain a new perspective on capital, one that is found as an asset to the laborer. Becker writes “adult human capital and expected earnings are determined by endowments inherited from parents and by parental (x) and public expenditures (s) on his or her development”. With this framework of investment comes, of course, risk. And it is this risk that Foucault wants to focus on in a rather shocking way. Foucault qualifies his statement saying that he is engaging in a “bit of science fiction”. He attests, clearly pulling from Becker:
“one of the current interests in the application of genetics to human populations is to make it possible to recognize individuals at risk and the type of risk individuals incur throughout their life […] Putting it in clear terms, this will mean that given my own genetic make-up, if I wish to have a child whose genetic make-up will be at least as good as mine, or as far as possible better than mine, then I will have to find someone who also has a good genetic make-up. And if you want a child whose human capital, understood simply in terms of innate and hereditary elements, is high, you can see that you will have to make an investment, that is to say, you will have to have worked enough, to have sufficient income, and to have a social status such that it will enable you to take for a spouse or co-producer of this future human capital, someone who has significant human capital themselves. I am not saying this as a joke; it is simply a form of thought or a form of problematic that is currently being elaborated.”
So, this constant wave of risk interacting with the demand to optimize the population, becomes the new mode through which crisis functions. It is a crisis of optimization. This new field of problems to be managed is only intelligible with this new grid of ability. Human investment comes with human risk. The population, and its optimization, is always at stake. Disability as an apparatus becomes the mechanism through which we come to understand this human terrain of capital. The physician takes on another role, no longer simply now the doctor must be practitioner, judge, and social manager… they are now an economist. This may seem hyperbolic, but this is the air we breathe. Everything from actuary reports to the use DALYs and QALYs (which are now employed by the UN World Health organization).
In a lecture on Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Deleuze notes a micropolitical refinement of technologies of power in the development of Bonapartism. In Deleuze’s reading, Napoleon sits as the intermediate of the passage from sovereignty to disciplinary power. It finds its refinement to the infinitesimal as the punitive society takes shape. The disciplinary society is precisely when discipline is no longer vulgar, but almost unnoticeable as an organizing principle of the formation of knowledge and power relations.
One must say the same about the eugenic. The vulgarity of its finally uttered arrival in the work of Francis Galton. The eugenic lurks in our grids of intelligibility, in our mode of revealing humans as economic entities. It is precisely when the eugenic slips into a mode of governmentality that it becomes the most prevalent.
Ecology and Posthumanism as the metaphysics of eugenic modernity:
Finally, I would like to take a complete detour. I hope I at least began to lay out a possible project on the thought of crisis. But I would like to show another field of problems intrinsic to our philosophical moment. I want to just show how disability operates as an apparatus to respond to the urgent need to uphold normalizing power within philosophy and the naturalization of the body and the operativity of the human being.
There is a lot of polemical discourse about deep ecology, new materialism, OOO, whatever it is formalized as. From Harman to Latour to Bennett, they are all criticized and in fact often mocked (most recently by Andreas Malm in a Verso interview) for attributing agency to beings that are not human (inanimate or otherwise). I would caution against this criticism.
We should take Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (as it tends to be the most criticized) as our example. In her account of democracy, Bennett seeks a way to articulate what a political act could look like within this new framework of complex vibrant agents. In order to begin to lay out her politics in a world where material itself is viewed as lively, she begins with a description of Darwin’s study of worms, in order to establish what she calls small agencies. Through the lens of these small agencies, a swarm of “’talented’ vibrant materialities” comes into frame. This necessary connection, this world-producing entity, can now be shown as efficacious and productive. She turns to Jacques Rancière and his own concept of “repartitioning the political” where deliberative competence is proven through mimetic gestures. A politics predicated on perpetually establishing a “deliberative competence”, in the name of revealing “isomorphisms” through mimetic gestures, is entirely congruous with the political logic of the eugenicist.
What these political deep ecologies are actually doing is raising the discursive criteria of productivity, efficacy, and agency to the organizing principle of the entirety of the planetary fabric.
The same must be said of the post-humanist approach to nature, claiming to be on the path of discovering some core mutability of the human being keeps in place the naturalization of what is to be enhanced. Of course, the very logic of enhancement folds directly into our contemporary order which it claims to think against.
In order to function internally, as doctrines of philosophical political thought, both of these disciplines must maintain a certain zone of exception. In order to “give up the futile attempt to disentangle the human from the non-human,” Bennett would like to retain the very thing that produces, throughout the history of philosophy, the human being as a zone of exception: agentic capacity and operativity. These are precisely what must be subject to a genealogical insurrection. Bennett herself admits that “her conatus” will not let her “horizontalize the world completely.” It will just now be horizontalized along the lines of capacity. We are all ability machines in the ecological frame. In the post-human it is by the harnessing of those capacities that we can “transcend” the human.
These are modes of rendering the world intelligible that are only possible if an ableist framework is taken up. Disability is the apparatus that responds to this crisis. In this world of the dividual, it is precisely the disabled subject that must be a failed subject so as maintain the order of things that claims to have dissolved them. Philosophy will always serve power if it is seeking some constitutive point upon which it can ground a system of intelligibility and manipulability''.
Will Conway
''So long as community always attests to a constituent body, it attests to the carnage that keeps it firmly intelligible. As Benjamin wrote in his misunderstood theses, there are no documents of civilization which are not also promissory notes of interminable butchery.
There can be no common if there is still the sacred and the profane, still the sovereign subject of reason and the terrorizing madman beside him. The conditions that render the human “capable” of politics are the same conditions that render the human always in the midst of a lurking incapacity. The Multitude gives abnormality its name and position of exception again, and again. Under this condition there is only a proliferation of the stockades of humanity and disciplines that testify to their supposed necessity''.
Will Conway
All you have to do is to say that your group is pure and good, eligible for a full life and for some kind of eternal meaning. But others like Jews or Gypsies are the real animals, are spoiling everything for you, contaminating your purity and bringing disease and weakness into your vitality. Then you have a mandate to launch a political plague, a campaign to make the world pure. It is all in Hitler’s Mein Kampf
Ernest Becker
"The Schutz Stafel: Introducing ―Blutkitt‖
Another organization of violence that employed this idea, that complying with a request to engage in a morally-difficult act produces strong social bonds, was the infamous Schutz Stafel (SS) of Nazi Germany. In fact, in the ranks of the SS, a term was even coined for it, Blutkitt: blood-cement, and it was rumored to have been an explicit feature of Adolf Hitler‘s personal approach to leadership (Alexander, 1948). Robert J. Lifton (1986) theorizes that among the SS doctors serving at Auschwitz, who engaged in terrible killings and experiments, such mutual blooding served to bond the group together tightly, committing the person to their fellow doctors and to the further atrocities entailed in continued service in the camp. In order to conduct their experiments and select people to be killed, the Nazi doctors were required to comply with orders and violate a plethora of norms about what constituted decent conduct. These were no doubt strong internalized social and professional norms that spoke in favor of compassion, against inflicting needless suffering and harm and against following authorities that promote these things. This was Blutkitt, ―direct participation in the group‘s practice of killing‖ (Lifton, 1986, p 432). For low-level recruits, the SS‘s policy of requiring their soldiers to initially serve in the concentration camps was usually sufficient to bloody their consciences enough to bond them to the organization and render them compliant enough to be trusted to commit further atrocities outside the camps (Alexander, 1948) Staff officers of the feared Einsatzgruppen were also rumored to use this technique in bonding soldiers to their units. The Einsatzgruppen were a paramilitary force associated with the SS. Their work was tragic, bloody and extremely personal and they were responsible for the deaths of some 1.5 million men, women and children; the large majority of these being shot face to-face with machine-guns and hand-held firearms (Lifton, 1986). As with the initiation practices of Militias in Africa, one staff officer in particular is quoted as stating that he, ―insisted on principle that all officers and non-commissioned officers‖ that served beneath him ―participate in the executions‖ so that they might ―overcome‖ themselves as he had done (Hennicke, quoted in Hillberg, 1961, p215). Clearly, the Einsatzgruppen were engaged in morally-difficult activities, the resulting internal conflict, the guilt of which was being actively shared as a matter of principle: blood was being used as a social binder. Through these (and again many other) examples, it can be surmised that, in the context of Nazi Germany as with street-gangs and militias, that the perpetration of a morally-difficult act at the command of an authority-figure may be useful in bonding soldiers to their units and commanders and extracting compliance from them. This theorizing is consistent with the thinking of Ernest Becker (1973), who argues that Blutkitt is exploited by leaders to bond others to themselves''.
Michael Richardson
Definitions of depression strongly influence the policy decisions that in turn affect the sufferers. If depression is a “simple organic disease,” then it must be treated as we treat other simple organic diseases—insurance companies must provide coverage for severe depression as they provide coverage for cancer treatment. If depression is rooted in character, then it is the fault of those who suffer from it and receives no more protection than does stupidity. If it can afflict anyone at any time, then prevention needs to be taken into consideration; if it is something that will hit only poor, uneducated, or politically underrepresented people, the emphasis on prevention is, in our inequable society, much lower. If depressed people injure others, their condition must be controlled for the good of society; if they simply stay home or disappear, their invisibility makes them easy to ignore.
U.S. government policy on depression has changed in the last decade and continues to do so; substantial shifts have occurred in many other countries as well. Four principal factors influence the perception of depression—and thus implementation of policy relating to it—at the governmental level. The first is medicalization. It is deeply ingrained in the American psyche that we need not treat an illness that someone has brought on himself or has developed through weakness of character, though cirrhosis and lung cancer at least are covered by insurance. A general public perception persists that visiting a psychiatrist is a self-indulgence, that it’s more like visiting a hairdresser than like visiting an oncologist. Treating a mood disorder as a medical Treating a mood disorder as a medical illness contravenes this folly, takes away responsibility from the person who has that illness, and makes it easier to “justify” treatment. The second factor to shape perception is vast oversimplification (curiously out of keeping with twenty-five hundred years of not much clarity about what depression is). In particular, the popular supposition that depression is the result of low serotonin the same way that diabetes is the result of low insulin—an idea that has been substantially reinforced by both the pharmaceutical industry and the FDA. The third factor is imaging. If you show a picture of a depressed brain (colorized to indicate rate of metabolism) next to a picture of a normal brain (similarly colorized), the effect is striking: depressed people have grey brains and happy people have Technicolor brains. The difference is both heartrending and scientific-looking, and though it is utterly artificial (the colors reflect imaging techniques rather than actual tints and hues), such a picture is worth ten thousand words and tends to convince people of the need for immediate treatment.
The fourth factor is the weak mental health lobby. “Depressed people don’t nag enough,” Representative Lynn Rivers (Democrat, Michigan) says. Attention for particular illnesses is usually the result of the concerted efforts of lobbying groups to raise awareness of those illnesses: the terrific response to HIV/AIDS was spurred by the dramatic tactics of the population that had the illness or was at risk for it. Unfortunately, depressed people tend to find everyday life overwhelming, and they are therefore incompetent lobbyists. Moreover, many of those who have been depressed, even if they are doing better, don’t want to talk about it: depression is a dirty secret, and it’s hard to lobby about your dirty secrets without revealing them. “We get blown away when people come to their representatives to proclaim the severity of a particular illness,” says Representative John Porter (Republican, Illinois), who, as the chair of the Labor, Health and Human Services Appropriations Subcommittee, dominates House discussions of budgets for mental illness. “I have to fight off amendments brought to the floor to reflect someone’s excitement about a story he’s been told, earmarking a particular disease for a particular sum. Members of Congress often try to do that—but seldom for mental illness.” However, several mental health lobbying groups in the United States do champion the cause of the depressed, the most noteworthy being the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) and the National Depressive and Manic-Depressive Association (NDMDA).
The greatest block to progress is still probably social stigma, which clings to depression as it clings to no other disease, and which Steven Hyman, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, has described as a “public health disaster.” Many of the people with whom I spoke while I was writing this book asked me not to use their names, not to reveal their identities. I asked them what exactly they thought would happen if people found out that they’d been depressed. “People would know I am weak,” said one man whose record of fantastic career success despite terrible illness seemed to me to be an indication of terrific strength. People who had “come out of the closet” and spoken publicly about being gay, being alcoholics, being victims of sexually transmitted diseases, in one instance being a child abuser, were still too embarrassed to talk on record about being depressed. It took considerable effort to find the people whose stories feature in this book—not because depression is rare, but because those who will be frank about it with themselves and the outside world are exceptional.
I’d recommend coming out about depression. Having secrets is burdensome and exhausting, and deciding exactly when to convey the information you’ve kept in check is really troublesome.
It is also astonishing but true that no matter what you say about your depression, people don’t really believe you unless you seem acutely depressed as they look at and talk to you. I am good at masking my mood states; as a psychiatrist once said to me, I am “painfully over-socialized.” Nonetheless, I was startled when a social acquaintance of mine called me to say that he was going through AA and wanted to make restitution to me for his sometime coldness, which was, he said, the consequence not of snobbery but of a deep jealously of my “perfect-seeming” life. I did not go into my life’s innumerable imperfections, but I did ask him how he could say he envied me my New Yorker article, express interest in the progress of this book, and still think my life seemed perfect. “I know you were depressed at one point,” he said, “but it doesn’t seem to have had any effect on you.” I proposed that it had in fact changed and determined the whole rest of my life, but I could tell my words were not getting through. He had never seen me cowering in bed and he couldn’t make any sense of the image. My privacy was bewilderingly inviolate. An editor from the New Yorker recently told me that I’d never really been depressed. I protested that people who have never been depressed don’t tend to pretend about it, but he was not to be persuaded. “C’mon,” he said. “What the hell do you have to be depressed about?” I was swallowed up by my recovery. My history and my ongoing intermittent episodes seemed quite irrelevant; and that I had publicly stated that I was on antidepressants seemed not to faze him. This is the strange flip side of stigma. “I don’t buy into this whole depression business,” he said to me. It was as though I and the people I wrote about were conspiring to wrest more than our share of sympathy from the world. I’ve run into this paranoia again and again, and it still astonishes me. No one ever told my grandmother that she didn’t really have heart disease. No one says that increasing rates of skin cancer are in the public imagination. But depression is so scary and unpleasant that many people would just as soon deny the disease and repudiate its sufferers.
Still, there is a fine line between being open and being tiresome. It’s a downer to talk about depression, and nothing is more boring than a person who talks about his own suffering all the time. When you are depressed, you sort of can’t control yourself and your depression is all that’s happening to you; but that doesn’t mean that depression has to be your primary topic of conversation for the rest of your life.
Prejudice, rooted largely in insecurity, still exists. Driving with some acquaintances recently, I passed a well-known hospital. “Oh, look,” said one of them. “That’s where Isabel got herself electrocuted.” And he moved his left index finger around his ear in a sign for crazy. All my activist impulses rising toward the surface, I asked what exactly had happened to Isabel and found, as I’d anticipated, that she had received ECT at the hospital in question. “She must have had a hard time,” I said, attempting to defend the poor girl without being too earnest. “Think how shocking having shock must be.” He burst out laughing. “I nearly gave myself electroshock treatments the other day when I was trying to fix my wife’s hair dryer,” he said. I am a great believer in a sense of humor and I was not really offended, but I did try—and fail—to imagine our going past a hospital at which Isabel might have had chemotherapy and making similar jokes.
Andrew Solomon
The object before us, to begin with, material production.
Individuals producing in society – hence socially determined individual production – is, of course, the point of departure. The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades, [1] which in no way express merely a reaction against over-sophistication and a return to a misunderstood natural life, as cultural historians imagine. As little as Rousseau’s contrat social, which brings naturally independent, autonomous subjects into relation and connection by contract, rests on such naturalism. This is the semblance, the merely aesthetic semblance, of the Robinsonades, great and small. It is, rather, the anticipation of ‘civil society’, in preparation since the sixteenth century and making giant strides towards maturity in the eighteenth. In this society of free competition, the individual appears detached from the natural bonds etc. which in earlier historical periods make him the accessory of a definite and limited human conglomerate. Smith and Ricardo still stand with both feet on the shoulders of the eighteenth-century prophets, in whose imaginations this eighteenth-century individual – the product on one side of the dissolution of the feudal forms of society, on the other side of the new forces of production developed since the sixteenth century – appears as an ideal, whose existence they project into the past. Not as a historic result but as history’s point of departure. As the Natural Individual appropriate to their notion of human nature, not arising historically, but posited by nature. This illusion has been common to each new epoch to this day. Steuart [2] avoided this simple-mindedness because as an aristocrat and in antithesis to the eighteenth century, he had in some respects a more historical footing.
The more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole: in a still quite natural way in the family and in the family expanded into the clan [Stamm]; then later in the various forms of communal society arising out of the antitheses and fusions of the clan. Only in the eighteenth century, in ‘civil society’, do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations. The human being is in the most literal sense a ζῶον πολιτιχόν, [3] not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society. Production by an isolated individual outside society – a rare exception which may well occur when a civilized person in whom the social forces are already dynamically present is cast by accident into the wilderness – is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other. There is no point in dwelling on this any longer. The point could go entirely unmentioned if this twaddle, which had sense and reason for the eighteenth-century characters, had not been earnestly pulled back into the centre of the most modern economics by Bastiat, [4] Carey, [5] Proudhon etc. Of course it is a convenience for Proudhon et al. to be able to give a historico-philosophic account of the source of an economic relation, of whose historic origins he is ignorant, by inventing the myth that Adam or Prometheus stumbled on the idea ready-made, and then it was adopted, etc. Nothing is more dry and boring than the fantasies of a locus communis. [6]
Whenever we speak of production, then, what is meant is always production at a definite stage of social development – production by social individuals. It might seem, therefore, that in order to talk about production at all we must either pursue the process of historic development through its different phases, or declare beforehand that we are dealing with a specific historic epoch such as e.g. modern bourgeois production, which is indeed our particular theme. However, all epochs of production have certain common traits, common characteristics. Production in general is an abstraction, but a rational abstraction in so far as it really brings out and fixes the common element and thus saves us repetition. Still, this general category, this common element sifted out by comparison, is itself segmented many times over and splits into different determinations. Some determinations belong to all epochs, others only to a few. [Some] determinations will be shared by the most modern epoch and the most ancient. No production will be thinkable without them; however even though the most developed languages have laws and characteristics in common with the least developed, nevertheless, just those things which determine their development, i.e. the elements which are not general and common, must be separated out from the determinations valid for production as such, so that in their unity – which arises already from the identity of the subject, humanity, and of the object, nature – their essential difference is not forgotten. The whole profundity of those modern economists who demonstrate the eternity and harmoniousness of the existing social relations lies in this forgetting. For example. No production possible without an instrument of production, even if this instrument is only the hand.
Karl Marx
