Conway

"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