Or, what in the hell is a decision? Or necropolitics, for that matter? Keeping on following, although erratically, a thread from this discussion, I finally got around to reading Achille Mbembe’s essay “Necropolitics.” (Still need to finish that earlier set of Foucault notes; like those these too will be incomplete for now, just jotting so I don’t forget.)
Mbembe writes of “multiple concepts of sovereignty—and therefore of the biopolitical” which have been collapsed into just one concept. I like that point. I also like Mbembe’s insistence on the link between sovereignty and killing. The conjunction of those two basically implies a typology of ways of killing, tied to the typology of sovereignty perhaps. More on the rest of the Mbembe later. I particularly like the sovereignty/killing bit in relation to Foucault on the exposure to death bit - the sovereign’s power to end life involves two things, one is a power to execute and the other is the power to impose a risk of death. This will come up again when I take notes on Society Must Be Defended (been leafing through that again too). For now:
There are two characterizations of sovereignty related to the issues I’ve been reading on, and relating to the discussion I linked to above. One is the Schmittian definition: the sovereign has the power to decide whether or not a state of exception (suspension of law) takes place. The other is the Foucaultian/Agambenian/Mmembean definition: the sovereign has the power to impose death or the risk of death on people (I’m overlooking differences here I know). It seems to me that these overlap in important ways. The power here, at least in the latter case, is sometimes expressed as right.
What I want to know is, what counts as deciding or as exercising a right or power? The sovereign doesn’t kill or force the risk of death on people. The sovereign orders killing or the risk of death to occur. The chief exec of the US is not in Iraq firing or being fired upon. But what about military rules and law and so on? A commander who orders a solider to kill (or not to kill) a civilian or another soldier, is that commander a sovereign? Does it matter if the commander is following vs defying orders from higher ups? Likewise with the soldier given the order, is the soldier sovereign? (Does the outcome matter? Does intent matter?) In both cases, commander and soldier, the decision made can effect the life or death of another. That seems to meet the definition of sovereign in some respects. Perhaps sovereignty makes less sense if personalized - not “the sovereign,” then, but sovereignty as … what? a social relationship? form of organization? operation? But in what sense then does decision or exercise of a right count as decision/exercise of a right?
A different matter, different question - the Mbembe, Foucault, and Agamben all seem to focus on deliberate violence (there’s a passage from the Foucault which works against this interpretation, I’ll dig it up - I wish there were more of them). What about incidental violence? While it’s not clear to me where or what exactly sovereignty/the sovereign is in the situation I mentioned a moment ago - soldiers and commanders and all that - it does seem clear that somewhere in that hypothetical there’s an example of sovereignty, in soldier’s (not) killing and being exposed to the risk of death. But … let’s say the soldier is one of many using depleted uranium ammunition. This poses a health risk to civilians in the area due to exposure as well as to the soldiers. Was the decision to use the rounds part of sovereignty? A further step removed - was Union Carbide acting as the sovereign in the Bhopal disaster? If not, why not? Surely killing all of those people and injuring others is proof that Union Carbide possessed a power to kill and to expose to death (since power means potential and the actuality of some thing is proof of the potential for that thing).
Likewise with other industrial accidents. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says there were about 5700 people killed on the job in 2006. If some of these are the result of negligence, is the negligent party sovereign? What about those responsible for lack of enforcement? Of course, “sovereign or not” is not a very useful question. “Was a right exercised or not” probably isn’t either. The point to my mind is that there’s a whole other area of the exposure of life to death and the taking of life which falls outside of (or is grasped only clumsily) by these theoretical tools. Fine, not every tool is ideal for every purpose, but given that these are the matters I’m interested in right now - work and workplaces in general, and injuries and bodies used up in these place - I’d like to see to what extent these theoretical tools can and can not be made useful for those matters. I’m also curious to see to what degrees these matters suggest refinements in the tools/the use of the tools. I suspect a lot of this has as much to do with academic disciplines and what writers were paying attention to as it does the actual applicability of the ideas. (A bit all over the map tonite, me.)
Before I turn in, this I think is related to the bit I liked in the Virno quoted a few posts ago: “the capitalist seeks to buy labour power, or “labour as subjectivity”, not the living body (…) the life of the worker has no price.” This was the case for a long time in much of workplace death and injury in the US. That assignment of valuelessness (product of numerous factors) was an important part of the toll of industrialization and early industry after industrialization. (I know I have paper notes somewhere on comparisons between industry and war/battlefields, I’ll have to find those and put them here.)
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Final thought, what I’m trying to get at is that I think that workplaces get left out a bit - in the stories about changes in welfare policy, public health, prisons, sex, all that, and in the stories about war and camps and all that. Both of those types of stories seem to me to focus on political entities in a common sense definition of the term - governmental institutions, so to speak. Among what’s left out is work/workplaces (these are some of the lines which don’t change at the same speed as others such that claims made about all of society based solely on one line are overinflated - claims that all of society has changed etc). That’s not all that gets left out, of course (it’s hard to see where sexual assault and domestic violence fit in with all this, despite their lethalness as well - 1247 women killed by partners in the US in 2000 according to this). Also left out are other sorts of armed conflict or war - namely class war, which is often waged from their side on ours as in the Ludlow Massacre or the Bisbee Deportation. Pinkerton as sovereign?
I know what you mean. Given that their accounts are entirely from within the frame of discouses and laws, it’s hard to see how Foucault or Agamben could give an fully satisfying account of the examples you mention. Nevertheless, I think that Agamben’s concepts of “bare life” and homo sacer are meant as answers to the questions you raise. For him, it’s not the bullet but the sovereign ban, the state of exception, that kills–hence homo sacer is someone who anyone can kill without legal ramifications. Hence, his account of the holocaust is always keen to stress the legal precedents and processes that lead up to the camps. Not that I personally believe that laws and discourses are the most important aspects here, but I suspect a true Agambenian would reply by saying something about the workplace as a state of exception in which the rights and privileges of the citizen are suspended. Or something about how citizenship depends that other place/state of exception/bare life.
Comment by Jasper — January 14, 2008 @ 9:05 pm
hi Jasper,
Thanks for that. I find part of that that Agambenian account pretty convincing, actually, at least in terms of US labor law and workplace injury law - especially pre-1910s. At one point I had plans to write something on Agamben and strikebreaking and labor massacres and all that. I guess part of my complaint is just simply … one of object choice. There’s a somewhat abstract scheme laid out, applied to some range of objects, then big claims are made which take those objects as paradigmatic to the scheme. When really the scheme applies to other objects too. Seems to me the object choice isn’t really given by the theory, and the theory isn’t really derived from the objects - or, it is but something is found which connects with many other phenomena. Like the workplace etc….
take care,
Nate
ps- I think I may have to retract my earlier remark disagreeing with you (about the derivation from capitalism or no), based on a passage in the new Foucault lecture. I’ll put notes up soon-ish.
Comment by Nate — January 15, 2008 @ 12:45 am
hi, just a few comments as a way of introducing myself.
but first, a disclaimer: so i really don’t know this shit well enough to do more than nod my head in recognition if this were to ever come up in a conversation. thankfully, neither agamben, foucault or mbembe tend to feature prominently in the kinds of stuff i find myself chatting about. still, its something i have become interested in and i figured i should practice talking about so that when an opportunity arises to impress someone with me knowledge about ‘biopolitics’, i will be prepared.
Like you, when i read the mbembe essay - which personally i found to be a seriously difficult - i liked his discussion of the sovereign’s power to circulate the ‘risks of death’. what i don’t understand is why necropower? “necro-” seems to have the connotation of a corpse. Why not thanatopower as in agamben….since Mbembe does seem to need agamben in passage from a concept of biopolitics which is at least methodologically distinct from operation of sovereign power (ala foucault), to a concept of biopolitics as a form of sovereign power (i could be wrong but this is the impression i got). Is this just another in a series of ‘fetish words’, as virno might say? more generously i get the sense that the differences between agamben and mbembe are, in part, caught up in their respective relationships to battaile (who agamben tends to dismiss). Anyway i have marked this as thread to spend more time on
something else i like about mbembe’s work (although i am not sure if he does this in necropower) is his deployment of D&G’s concept of the ‘war machine’ to describe the ways in which sovereign power is wielded by mobile, ad-hoc institutional configurations like the strange mix that forms between private mercenary armies, private corporations and local interests, and which act as the supreme authority in parts of africa. Here again the movement is too quick for me and even if i like the idea, i remain suspicious.
the thing that worries me about mbembe - and this no doubt is at the bases of my suspiciousness of his work - is that his broader politics, at least as it relates to the south african context, tends to somewhat conservative, and seems trapped on the horizon of ideas like the ‘rule of law’.
also i tend to get the impression that agamben’s idea of sovereignty owes far more to schmidtt than you suggest here. Now, i could have completely missed the point, but for for me, in agamben sovereignty consists in the decision on bare life (this is why even the ‘making live’ type of biopolitics is implicated in sovereign power). What agamben seems to do with schmitt is to shift the emphasis to bare life (in part by clarifying the relationship between the bare life and the exception). What is key, and what he seems to take from schmitt, is the centrality of the ‘decision’ in the characterization of the sovereign. In this respect, i think we could say that the soldier in the camp is invested with sovereign power.
On non-delibrate violence; there is a bit in homo sacer where he raises some problems around the possibility that anyone knocked on a highway potentially becomes homo sacer. i don’t remember exactly how he deals with this, but i’ll dig it up if you interested. The example however is an interesting one for me. In security, territory, population, foucault shows how in assuming a biopolitical perspective, the emphasis in town planning comes to be on the circulation of goods and people. Now the relationship of this principle to emergence of capitalist forms of production should be clear. To return to the example, the potential risks to human life associated with highways is not deliberate…but it is important to see that the principle of circulation trumps whatever risk might come as a result of highways (here, the principle of circulation becomes something like an exception to principle that state should always protect the lives of its citizens). There is a context however in which the rather prosaic example takes on it full meaning. In south africa, in 2003 people from a small town blocked the a national highway adjacent to their town, in protest against the slow pace of the roll out of basic services and housing in the area. in order to clear the road, with virtually no warning the police opened fire with rubber bullets killing a 16 year old protester. When the case got to court, not only were the leaders of the protest charged with public violence (a relatively minor offense), but also with sedition (the latter charge was later dropped largely due to public pressure). While the charge is probably the product of an overzealous prosecutor’s desire to please his political bosses, it the kind of power implicated in maintaining the circulation good and people in a modern economy, where circulation is what is also implied by the idea of security.
With respect to labour, although i haven’t given it that much thought, i suspect that the modern phenomena of export processing zones lends itself biopolitical analysis ala agamben
anyway, that’s more than a few comments so i’ll stop
Comment by dionysusstoned — January 17, 2008 @ 12:39 am
the last line of the second last paragraph -
“it the kind of power implicated in maintaining the circulation good and people in a modern economy, where circulation is what is also implied by the idea of security” - should have read, “it says something about the the kind of power implicated in maintaining the circulation goods and people in a modern economy, where circulation is what is also implied by the idea of security.
Comment by dionysusstoned — January 17, 2008 @ 1:06 am
hey Dion,
Thanks for the comment. Lots to ponder here. Real quick on Agamben and Schmitt - I had Schmitt in mind here a lot and Agamben’s more Schmittian moments. I’m not sure what I think of the notion of decision as used by them. There are clearly cases where there’s a clear decision to suspend law etc as they describe. What I wonder about is where cases fit where people can act with relative impunity when doing things (committing acts of violence) that are still technically illegal - like masters and slave traders who killed slaves even though it was technically illegal to do so (and there were occasional prosecutions). Or situations where life can be consumed in work - from the work I’ve (just recently) been doing on US injury law, it seems to me that for a while anyway there was no disincentive for employers to have workplaces that would take workers’ limbs and sometimes lives, because of the legal doctrines used in court. There were lawsuits and sometimes people did win monetary compensation but not always and not often enough to change prevailing employer practices for a while. It seems to me that that is at least related to the stuff on sovereignty and bio/thanato-politics, but I don’t know that decision quite makes sense (in the sense of The Decision by The Sovereign, seems to me more like a distribution of many decisions).
Gotta run, more later.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — January 17, 2008 @ 1:00 pm