Course syllabus

Welcome to Plague Theory: On this page you will find

  1. BASIC ARGUMENT AND POINT OF DEPARTURE (and course plan)
  2. SCHEDULE
  3. SOME SOURCES REFERENCED


1. BASIC ARGUMENT AND POINT OF DEPARTURE

The course is made up of a very heterogeneous kind of content drawing on multiple disciplines. We are taking the license of working in the broadly contemporary art field to allow us to mix diverse materials that might otherwise not be brought so readily together: epidemiological terms, historical studies, material culture, political theory, cultural studies, art theory,  etc.  

In the current context of the global pandemic of covid19 – unfolding as waves of infection, illness and mortality around the world; driving news cycles in global mass- and social- media; and shaping/shaped-by different political discourses since January 2020 – we see a convergence of epidemic and of an epistemic crisis of legitimation. 

By an epistemic “crisis of legitimation” is meant a situation where major aspects of systems of knowledge are thrown into doubt for substantial parts of those constituencies that the knowledge system addresses: conspiracy theories on virus origin and on vaccine functions; accusations of subordination of scientific findings to over-riding political imperatives; disputes on public health data; and a range of other challenges to state approved institutions of knowledge.

The basic premiss of the intensive is that epidemics have historically had the double aspect of both throwing epistemic orders into a crisis of legitimacy, and of subsequently giving rise to new orderings of knowledge systems. 

The other aspect of this epidemic-epistemic pairing, is that certain key terms (such as ”body”) become re-valued and re-ordered in the wider process of epistemic re-ordering in response to the unfolding of epidemic processes.

In terms of the contemporary art field, we address that this current moment of epidemic and epistemic destabilisation, occurs after the widespread rehearsal of a series of critiques of “Science” and “Western epistemology” from various cultural-political projects (such as critical theory; feminism; postmodernism;postcolonial studies; the analysis of nosopolitics/biopolitics/thanatopolitics/necropolitics; ecological activism; STS; and decolonialism’s powerful analytic of modernity-coloniality) have already established certain forms of critique in terms of embodied, positional, sensory and geopolitically situated knowing; analytics of symbolic violence and epistemicide.

The purpose of the intensive is to consider the ways in which these established critiques intersect with the still unfolding processes of epidemic, through forms of genealogical analysis and case study.

Within case study we will encounter both historical examples and contemporary cultural-knowledge practices that offer different styles of thinking and ways into the questions epidemic epistemics from different moments of geopolitical ‘situatedness’.

Finally, there is a tension between a “politics of representation” approach to the study of cultural practices (which prioritises questions of meaning, interpretation, the sign, and is typically human-centric) and a “theory of affect” / “process ontology” approach (which prioritizes the relational, the agential andthe ”becomings” of (“vibrant”) matter and gives greater centrality to the “more-than-human”) .

SEE THE COURSEPLAN HERE: plague_theory.pdf 

Invited guests include:

Abhijan Toto, The Forest Curriculum http://theforestcurriculum.com/about/

Dr. Chikezie E Uzuegbunam, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Cape Town, South Africa  http://www.huma.uct.ac.za/huma/people#chikezie-uzuegbunam   

Dr. Divine Fuh, Director HUMA Institute for Humanities, University of Cape Town, South Africa http://www.huma.uct.ac.za/huma/people#divine-fuh

Dr. Ralph Borland HUMA Institute for Humanities, University of Cape Town, South Africa http://www.huma.uct.ac.za/huma/people#ralph-borland

Dr. Lisa Godson, National College of Art & Design, Ireland; https://www.ncad.ie/research-people/view/dr-lisa-godson   

Martin McCabe, Technological University Dublin; http://www.gradcam.ie/people/martin-mccabe/    

 Alhena Katsof, doctoral candidate in Performance Studies at New York University and teacher at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School. 

 

2. SCHEDULE

Mon 16 Aug

10:00-11:00 Introductions

  • Welcome 
  • Round of participants introducing themselves
  • Why “Plague Theory: Epidemic Cultures & Epistemic Praxis?”

11:30-12:30 The ‘first’ signs of the plague: WHO and COVID

13:30-14:30 Going to hospital

We will read this text together in the session 

  • 03_ Denise Ferreira da Silva (2020) ”If hospitality, then the duty is to repair and to foster” (.pdf)

15:00-16:30 Knowledges, reliable and unreliable

The way plague interacts with questions of knowledge legitimacy is introduced drawing on these two sources as well as current media coverage

 

Tues 17 Aug

10:00-11:00 Scenes from the body count

  • Thinking about the visualisations and graphic representations of covid sickness and mortality. You will be asked to suggest some examples for discussion in the session

11:30-12:30 The philosopher’s diagnosis

There will be a presentation and we will also read together short extracts form this debate that energed around Agamben’s intervention on the appearance of covid 

14:00-15:30 Reading together

We read this text together that challenges the terms used in the previous sessions

  • 08_Katherine McKittrick (2015) “Axis, Bold as Love: On Sylvia Wynter, Jimi Hendrix, and the Promise of Science”

 

Wed 18 Aug 

10:00-11:00 Guest presentation: Martin McCabe

A look at recent zombie images through cinema and TV and questions of virality and contagion, racialised and “entomised” bodies as figures of a changing biopolitical imagjnary emergent from neocolonial fantasies (e.g., USA presence in Haiti)

11:30-12:30 Guest presentation: Martin McCabe (continued)

14:00-15:30 Different ways of thinking biopolitics

  • 11_Extract from Thomas Lemke (2011) Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction

 

Thurs 19 Aug

10:00-11:00 Guest presentation: Lisa Godson

A presentation on the speculum and the 19th C. British Empire “Contagious Diseases” Acts by a material culture specialist

  • 12_ Jim Jose and Kcasey McLoughlin John (2016) “Stuart Mill and the Contagious Diseases Acts: Whose Law? Whose Liberty? Whose Greater Good?”

11:30-12:30 Guest presentation: Lisa Godson (continued)

14:00-15:30 What is a body?

Break out groups to discuss the difficulties in defining or delimiting “body” as an ontological and epistemological category. The Spillers reading will be used as a source – with particular focus on her theorisation of the contrast between “flesh” and “body”

  • 13_Hortense J. Spillers (1987) “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book”

 

Fri 20 Aug 

10:00-11:00 Review of key terms

12:00-13:30 Guest presentation: Abhijan Toto The Forest Curriculum 

14:30-16:00 What, if anything, are the dead?

you are asked to develop a description of competing conceptions of “the dead” with particular attention to our own implicit and explicit assumptions. This short text on Povinelli’s work is used as a device to open up possible differences in approach to the life-death contrastive pair.

 

Mon 23 Aug

10:00-11:00  What task do you need to do for to complete the course? 

What is epidemiology? Reading some short extracts from Alfredo Morabia (ed.) (2004) A History of Epidemiological Methods and Concepts

11:30-12:30  Reading together extracts from Suely Rolnik (2011) “Avoiding False Problems: Politics of the Fluid, Hybrid, and Flexible”
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/25/67892/avoiding-false-problems-politics-of-the-fluid-hybrid-and-flexible/

14:00-15:30  Preparatory reading time: We won’t meet at this time, but rather use the time to do a little preparatory reading on the idea of panic (fear) and epidemic.

João Rangel de Almeida “Epidemic Opportunities: Panic, Quarantines, and the 1851 International Sanitary Conference” Chapter 3 from Robert Peckham (ed.) Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties

 

Tues 24 Aug

10:00-11:00 The germ theory and the matrix of conspiracy theory: Reading together:

David Gorski (2010) “Germ theory denial: A major strain in ‘alt-med’ thought” (blog entry on a polemical site advocating “science-based medicine”) https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/germ-theory-denialism-a-major-strain-in-alt-med-thought/  We will work through this in the group meeting together.

11:30-12:30 Cure, Healing, Health, Well-being: The changing ways in which bodily being is framed.

“Biomedicine”, Chapter 1 in Sociology for Health Professionals

https://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/59005_Russell.pdf 

An introductory text that provides a very accessible entry point into the discourse on health/n well-being. We will look especially at the short section entitled: “The Social and Biopsychosocial Models of Health” on pages 15 to 17.

14:00-15:30 Reading together extracts from Donna Haraway’s "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective." 

 

Wed 25 Aug

10:00-11:00 participant presentation:  Séamus - Accumulation: Traveller culture and constructing an archive

11:30-12:30 participant presentation:  Maya – Mobile-phone produced works during pandemic

14:00-15:30 Art practice in times of pandemic: Looking at L’Internationale’s (2020) “artists  in quarantine” project:

​​https://www.art-agenda.com/features/332992/artists-in-quarantine-public-intellectuals-and-the-trouble-with-empty-heroics 

See also: https://exhibition.school/exhibitions-online-what-for/ 

 

Thurs 26 Aug

10:00-11:00 participant presentation:  Sinead - Symbiosis, mutualism, parasitism

11:30-12:30 participant presentation:  Jack- Death from above: airborne plague and asymmetrical violence 

14:00-15:30 Discussion Topic: Competing accounts of embodiment 

 

Fri 27 Aug

International guest speakers from HUMA, University of Capetown present

10:00 Welcome and introduction

10:15 Presentation followed by discussion: Dr. D. Fuh

11:15 Break

11:45 Presentation followed by discussion: Dr. C. Uzuegbunam

12:45 Break

13:15 Presentation followed by discussion: Dr. R. Borland

14:30 Break

15:00-15:30  Closing discussion 

3:00-14:15  Housekeeping to the end of the course

  • Short round of the room to see if people have any ideas yet on what they might generate for the course

No pressure to know yet what you are going to od… just an opportunity to throw up ideas if you have any now…

  • Schedule for reviewing together work generated from the course: proposed date:
  • Proposed that work is uploaded / shared before end of year break (provisionally Friday 17thDecember)
  • Proposed that we meet and spend 30 minutes each approx. (some short breaks) discussing the contributions on Wednesday 19th January 14:00-18:00
  • Short review of the two week intensive to pick up any issues that might have been overlooked.
  • Some reading resources available to you (from guests also) and some that you would like to share with the group
  • Access to recordings of material (where these exist)

14:15-14:30 Short break

14:30-15:45 Alhena Katsof: Guest presentation

“Mythological Formulations: Autochthony at the Root of the Matter”

The guest speaker has been invited to talk about aspects of her work on the figure of the garden and the plantation and the tangle of ontology-and-epistemology in different imaginaries of coming from the earth. Alhena will present us with a meditation on gardening, the human and the political imaginaries of ‘planting’. The invitation was made to Alhena because of work she had previously done on Hanna Höch’s garden and the dynamics of this cultural work in the context of the Nazi genocides. I thought particularly this would resonate in an interesting way with Abhijan’s work on “the forest curriculum.” See Alhena’s bio below.

15:45-16:00 Wrap up – any outstanding issues

 

 

3. SOME SOURCES REFERENCED

Set texts week 1

01_Covid appears in WHO communiqué: ”Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) SITUATION REPORT-1” (21 January 2020) (url)

https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200121-sitrep-1-2019-ncov.pdf?sfvrsn=20a99c10_4

02_The World Health Organization A History

03_ Denise Ferreira da Silva (2020) ”If hospitality, then the duty is to repair and to foster” (.pdf)

04_ Anjana Susarla (2021) ”Big tech has a vaccine misinformation problem” (url)

https://theconversation.com/big-tech-has-a-vaccine-misinformation-problem-heres-what-a-social-media-expert-recommends-164987

05_ Anita Salamonsen and Rolf Ahlzén (2018) ”Epistemological challenges in contemporary Western healthcare systems exemplified by people’s widespread use of complementary and alternative medicine” (.pdf)

06_EJoP (2020) ”Coronavirus and philosophers: M. Foucault, G. Agamben, S. Benvenuto” https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirus-and-philosophers/

07_Zsuzsa Baross (2020) ”Agamben, the Virus, and the Biopolitical: a Riposte”

08_Katherine McKittrick (2015) “Axis, Bold as Love: On Sylvia Wynter, Jimi Hendrix, and the Promise of Science”

09_Bruno Latour (2004) ”Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern”

10_ Srikanth Mallavarapu & Amit Prasad (2006) “A small reading task for tomorrow Facts, Fetishes, and the Parliament of Things: Is There any Space for Critique?” (.pdf)

11_Extract from Thomas Lemke (2011) Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction

12_ Jim Jose and Kcasey McLoughlin John (2016) “Stuart Mill and the Contagious Diseases Acts: Whose Law? Whose Liberty? Whose Greater Good?”

13_Hortense J. Spillers (1987) “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book”

14_McKenzie Wark (2019) “Elizabeth Povinelli: when the rocks turn their backs on us” https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4236-elizabeth-povinelli-when-the-rocks-turn-their-backs-on-us

 

 

Speculum source

https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/radical-object-fergusson-vaginal-speculum/

 

Biopolitics online audio-visual resources

Thomas Lemke “Biopolitics and Beyond: Vibrant Matter and the Political Economy of Life” (2013)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zCaku4N0SM

 

Thomas Lemke “Biopolitics: Current Issues and Future Challenges” (2012)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPTz0-cWDgs

 

Foucault 13/13: Birth of Biopolitics (1978-1979). A seminar from a series that addressed Michel Foucault’s 13 years of lectures at the Collège de France (1970-1984) which introduced new concepts and novel research avenues, and responding to the full publication of the lecture transcriptions in 2015.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3QAA_jyokA  

http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/foucault1313/

 

Zombie session references

  • Cooke, J. (2009) "Plague, Zombies and the Hypnotic Relation: Romero and After " in Legacies of Plague in Literature, Theory and Film. London: Palgrave, pp163-84
  • Canavan, G. (2010) “We Are the Walking Dead”: Race, Time, and Survival in Zombie Narrative" Extrapolation, Vol. 51, No. 3 
  • Jennifer Rutherford (2013) Zombies, Routledge.
  • Roger Luckhurst (2015) Zombies: A Cultural History
  • Richard C Brook (1929) The Magic Island  - a source for colonial fantasies about the USA’s early 20thC ’s  “neo-colony” in Haiti 
  • World War Z, here’s a short relevant article by Amir Vodka from UvA- originally published at Springerin 2015:  https://www.springerin.at/en/2015/1/zombieland/
  • In regards to the transformation of the imagined representation of ‘enemy’ as insects (and the use of swarms and nests terminology) intrinsically to the War on Terror, a more elaborate essay by Vodka, as part of our collaborative Eco Noir recent publication, focusing on interspecies relations (pg. 59-99):https://taju.uniarts.fi/handle/10024/7185Online PDF: https://taju.uniarts.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/7185/eco_noir_2021.pdf?sequence=4&isAllowed=y

Films of interest

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5700672/

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3463106/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077402/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10044182/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0289043/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4547056/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

one of the first zombie-covid movies: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12098392/

 

Body and Flesh distinctions 

(tensions between “politics of representation” and “politics of affect” analytical approaches and race nit as a “representational” category but a different order of onto-epistemological operation beyond ther terms of the economy of “representations

“Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”

(T)he socio-political order of the New World … with its human sequence written in blood, represents for its African and indigenous peoples a scene of actual mutilation, dismemberment, and exile. First of all, their New-World, diasporic plight marked a theft of the body - a willful and violent (and unimaginable from this distance) severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire. Under these conditions, we lose at least gender difference in the outcome, and the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender-specific. But this body, at least from the point of view of the captive community, focuses a private and particular space, at which point of convergence biological, sexual, social, cultural, linguistic, ritualistic, and psychological fortunes join. This profound intimacy of interlocking detail is disrupted, however, by externally imposed meanings and uses: 1) the captive body becomes the source of an irresistible, destructive sensuality; 2) at the same time - in stunning contradiction - the captive body reduces to a thing, becoming being for the captor; 3) in this absence from a subject position, the captured sex­ualities provide a physical and biological expression of "otherness"; 4) as a category of "otherness," the captive body translates into a potential for pornotroping and embodies sheer physical powerlessness that slides into a more general "powerlessness," resonating through various centers of human and social meaning. 

But I would make a distinction in this case between "body" and "flesh" and impose that distinction as the central one between captive and liberated subject-positions. In that sense, before the "body" there is the "flesh," that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography. Even though the European hegemonies stole bodies - some of them female - out of West African communities in concert with the African "middleman," we regard this human and social irreparability as high crimes against the flesh, as the person of African females and African males registered the wounding. If we think of the "flesh" as a primary narrative, then we mean its seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship's hole, fallen, or "escaped" overboard.

Extract from Hotense J. Spillers (1987) “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”

-----------------------------------

The Empire of Love: 

Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality

Talking about bodies and materialities as actual fleshy things can produce strong ambivalence among feminists, queer theorists, and progressive scholars in part because it is assumed that to mention bodies and their materialities is to forget that these are always stretching, reacting, and forming their physiology in the domain of discourse. Further, it would seem to forget that even if there were flesh on one side and discourse on the other, neither of these sides is singular, homogeneous, or reducible to a singular axis.What flesh,where and when? And which discourse, where and when?

The multiplicity of discourses wound into any one object meets the multiplicity of the object as it changes over time, is stretched by any given discourse, and winds others as it twists away from them. The aim of my emphasis on the physical matter of the body—the ways discourses leave bodies behind them in a certain condition—is neither to reach the fact of the flesh as opposed to discourse, nor to establish a discursive separation of flesh and self. Instead, I want to show how the uneven distribution of the flesh—the creation of life-worlds, death-worlds, and rotting worlds—is a key way in which autology, genealogy, and their intimacies are felt, known, and expressed.The dynamic between carnality and the discourses of the autological subject and the genealogical society is in this sensemore like a skein than a skin—like a length of yarn or thread wound loosely and coiled together, a flock of birds flying across the sky in a line, or a tangled or complex mass of material.

…

(W)hat is conceptually useful here … is attempting to sketch a system of governance in which the mutual constitution

of soma and psyche, flesh and discourse, are no longer captured by the usual mechanics of ‘‘cause and effect, origin and derivation.’’ They are instead the literal material of each other, different from each other but mutually obliged rather than caused or affected, vulnerable to rather than subject of.

(T)he point of reading … in this way is to break through a certain resistance in feminist theory to consider the physiological aspects of psychological process, not to reduce psyche to soma or soma to psyche, but to map the strange elasticity of each as it finds itself obligated by the other—a leg obligated to a psychic paralysis, psyche to the pain of a hysterical facial tic.

In seeking to resist the choice between individual freedom and social determination as the only foundation for governing love, sociality, and the body—a choice presented as natural, vital, and irreplaceable in liberal settler colonies—the aspiration of this little book is not so different from the biopolitical project that Michel Foucault outlined over a quarter of a century ago. As we know, the point of his histories of sexuality (as well as of his histories of the clinic, the prison, and madness) was not to study discourses of sexuality, for example, for the sake of knowing sexuality but for the sake of investigating power and thediscursive matrixes that underpinned it. Similarly,

the aspiration was not merely to know how power disciplined sexuality, sexual expression, or sexual identity, but to understand how all of these were the means by which power in a robust sense—power over life and death, power to cripple and rot certain worlds while over-investing others with wealth and hope—is produced, reproduced, and distributed when we seem to be doing nothing more than kissing our loversgoodbye as we leave for the day.

Extracts form Elizabeth A. Povinelli (2006) The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality

------------------------------------

Biopolitics and State Regulation of Human Life

Michael Laurence (28 April 2016)

“Biopolitics” is a term that refers to the intersection and mutual incorporation of life and politics. In literal terms, it signifies a form of politics that deals with life (Greek: bios). Yet if we begin from this basic definition, a series of questions immediately arises: What is life? What is politics? What is the precise nature of the relation between these two things? Do all forms of politics relate to life? Different answers exist to these questions. As a result, the term is employed in different ways across academic disciplines. In political science, the term “biopolitics” tends to take on two competing and irreconcilable meanings. The first meaning was developed by scholars in the United States in the 1970s and seeks to use theories and data from the life sciences to achieve a more complete understanding of political behavior. This kind of “naturalistic” research begins from biological origins and factors and works outward in an effort to explain the causes of political behavior. For these scholars, biological life is understood as a foundation of politics. The second (and more prevalent) meaning, took effect when Michel Foucault broke radically with this “naturalist” tradition by redefining the term in his writings and lectures in France in the late 1970s. For Foucault, life cannot be understood in terms of biological forces or determinants that exist outside of political processes. Instead, life must be understood as both an object and effect of political strategies and technologies. Biopolitics, he argues, refers to a historical transformation and development, beginning in the 17th century, whereby the sovereign right to seize, repress, and destroy life is complemented by a new form of power that aims to develop, optimize, order, and secure life. Foucault often uses the term biopower to denote this new form of productive power. Biopower is both individualizing and collectivizing: it intervenes through disciplinary technologies in order to control and manage individual bodies while it also intervenes at the level of the population conceived of as a social or biological corpus defined by its own characteristics and processes (i.e., birth rates, death rates, measures of health, and so on). Since Foucault’s pioneering work on biopolitics, there has been a proliferation of research inspired by him. Some have even suggested a biopolitical turn has taken place in the humanities and social sciences. The works cited here focus exclusively on the variants of research that emerged with and after Foucault. This article privileges Anglo-American and western European forms of scholarship and therefore does not represent the full range of thought on the subject.

A growing number of articles and books have been published that provide useful overviews of the different forms of research on biopolitics in the Foucauldian tradition. Lemke 2011 offers the first book-length introduction to the field. It is an important starting point for any student of biopolitics, as it makes a clear distinction between the numerous conflicting uses of the term. For a critical overview of the dominant forms of research in the field by two renowned Foucault scholars, see Rabinow and Rose 2006. Although less theoretically nuanced, Lieson and Walsh 2012 offers a useful overview of the state of research on biopolitics in political science. Campbell and Sitze 2013 has assembled a collection of the most influential texts on biopolitical governance, while Clough and Willse 2011 offers an innovative assemblage of writings concerned with the future and limits of biopolitics under neoliberalism.

https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199756223/obo-9780199756223-0170.xml

 

bare life

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's concept for life that has been exposed to what he terms the structure of exception that constitutes contemporary biopower. The term originates in Agamben's observation that the Ancient Greeks had two different words for what in contemporary European languages is simply referred to as ‘life’: bios (the form or manner in which life is lived) and zoē (the biological fact of life). His argument is that the loss of this distinction obscures the fact that in a political context, the word ‘life’ refers more or less exclusively to the biological dimension or zoē and implies no guarantees about the quality of the life lived. Bare life refers then to a conception of life in which the sheer biological fact of life is given priority over the way a life is lived, by which Agamben means its possibilities and potentialities. Suggestions made in 2008 by Scotland Yard and the Institute for Public Policy Research in Britain that children as young as five should be DNA typed and their details placed in a database if they exhibit behavioural signs indicating future criminal activity is a perfect example of what Agamben means by bare life. It reduces the prospects of the life of a particular child to their biology and takes no interest in or account of the actual circumstances of their life.

https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095446660

 

homo sacer

Translated literally as ‘sacred man’, this classical concept has attracted significant attention in contemporary critical theory because Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has devoted several books to exploring the intricacies of its multi-layered meaning. Homo sacer is a paradoxical figure: it is the one who may not be sacrificed, yet may be murdered with impunity. In this sense, the homo sacer is outside or beyond both divine and human law. Agamben's provocative thesis is that the homo sacer is evidence not merely of an original ambivalence in the notion of the sacred, as anthropology has long contended, but that the realm of the political itself is constituted by making an exception of the very people in whose name it is created. The homo sacer thus emblematizes the sovereign's power over life and death, the power to designate a life that is worth neither saving nor killing. For Agamben, the most complete realization of homo sacer is the concentration-camp inmate, particularly the hapless figures known in the colloquial language of the camps as ‘die Muselmänner’ (i.e. the ‘Muslims’) because of their apparent surrender to God or Fate. But rather than argue that homo sacer is a product of Nazism, or totalitarian politics more generally, Agamben contends that on the contrary it is the sheer possibility of so regarding human life that enabled Nazism's exterminationist politics. The very same possibility, he argues, is at the origin of democracy too, a fact that is displayed in the way politics has been constituted as a biopower focused on the population not the individual. See also bare life.

Further Reading:

  1. Agamben Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998).G. Agamben Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (1999)

 

governmentality

Introduced in the later work of Michel Foucault as a more refined way of understanding his earlier idea of power/knowledge. Government refers to a complex set of processes through which human behaviour is systematically controlled in ever wider areas of social and personal life. For Foucault, such government is not limited to the body of state ministers, or even to the state, but permeates the whole of a society and operates through dispersed mechanisms of power. It comprises both sovereign powers of command, of the kind that figure in traditional political science and political sociology, and disciplinary powers of training and self-control. Sovereign power is coercive and repressive, involving exclusion through external controls and inducements. Disciplinary power, on the other hand, concerns the formation of motives, desires, and character in individuals through techniques of the self. Disciplined individuals have acquired the habits, capacities, and skills that allow them to act in socially appropriate ways without the need for any exercise of external, coercive power. Disciplinary power developed in the modern period through such means as schools, hospitals, military barracks, and prisons, and a particularly important focus is the family itself. It is through the disciplinary agency of the family that selves and bodies are regulated at the most intimate level. Foucault traces the emergence of a whole array of ‘experts’, based in scientific ‘disciplines’ and involved in the disciplining of individuals. It is through all these means that governmentality takes place. A particularly interesting account of governmentality can be found in Political Power beyond the State by Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller (1991) and in Nikolas Rose 's Powers of Freedom (1999).

https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095901877

 

Governmentality: Notes on the Thought of Michel Foucault

Bal Sokhi-Bulley (2 Dec 2014)

The title of Foucault’s lecture series of 1977-78 Security, Territory, Population was poorly chosen; the series should, as he acknowledges, have been called ‘Governmentality’, since the concern of these lectures is with the overarching ‘problem of government’ – that is, ‘how to govern oneself, how to be governed, by whom should we accept to be governed, how to be the best possible governor?’1 He is thus interested in the how of government – both how governing happens and how it is thought. 

The 1977-78 lectures start with the theme of biopower, one of Foucault’s thought ‘fragments’2 (as opposed to cohesive theory) on the how of power. Biopower referred to a set of procedures, or relations, that manipulate the biological features (for example, birth rate, fertility) of the human species into a political strategy for governing an entire population. Whilst the theme of biopower is largely dropped, population figures heavily in the lecture series as a novel, ‘absolutely modern’ idea key to the functioning of political power. ‘Population’ in this sense refers not simply to ‘people’ but to phenomena and variables,3 such as birth rate, mortality rate and marriage statistics. It thus encompasses the whole field of ‘the social’,4 a phrase which describes the network of social relationships and the site at which political power operates. Political power thus becomes omnes et singulatum – ‘of all and of each’.

How are we to understand the problem of population, its relation to the state and to that defining feature of modern liberal society that Foucault identifies as ‘security’? This question prompts the need for a new thought fragment which problematizes population-government-security as a ‘problem of government’: governmentality.

The neologism is obviously a play on the word ‘government’;

This word [government] must be allowed the very broad meaning it had in the sixteenth century. ‘Government’ did not refer only to political structures or to the management of states; rather, it designated the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might be directed – the government of children, of souls, of communities, of the sick … To govern, in this sense, is to control the possible field of action of others.5

How can we translate the verb ‘to govern’? The French verb gouverner covers a range of different of meanings;6 it can have a material and physical meaning of ‘to direct or move forward’, or ‘to provide support for’. It can have a moral meaning of ‘to conduct someone’ in a spiritual sense or, tangentially, to ‘impose a regimen’ (on a patient, perhaps) or to be in a relationship of command and control. A focus on ‘conduct’ perhaps leads to the most concise definition of ‘governmentality’ as the ‘conduct of conducts’7 – or, in my own words, the regulation (conduct) of behaviors (conducts). Governmentality operates to produce a (governmentable) subject (hence the relation between ‘the subject and power’ and the continuation of Foucault’s broader and always central theme: ‘to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects’).

The ‘problem of government’ then, does not refer only to the government of the state (by the Prince); it is not one but many problems. The many problems concerned the government of children (through the interest in pedagogy as it emerged in the sixteenth century), the government of souls and of conduct (here Foucault draws on the problem of Catholic or Protestant pastoral doctrine which, as he explains, is where governmentality was born) and, finally, the government of oneself (he refers here to the sixteenth century return to Stoicism. The government of the self as an inevitable part of governmentality becomes the focus of Foucault’s later work as he develops the idea of self-government as a care of the self and even an ethics that manifests itself as a practice of parrhēsia, or truth-telling).

So, as a mélange of many problems concerning children, souls, communities, the sick, ‘governmentality’, Foucault elaborates, means three things: first, ‘the ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses, reflections, calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population’. Second, governmentality refers to ‘the tendency that, over a long period and throughout the West, has steadily led to the pre-eminence over all other forms (sovereignty, discipline and so on) of this type of power, which may be termed “government”’. Third, governmentality is the (result of the) process by which the state gradually ‘becomes governmentalized’. In referring to the ‘ensemble’, Foucault is talking about an art of government; the activities or practices of government, or even ‘the game of government’ – an art by which some people are taught the government of others and some let themselves be governed.

Two rules of the game are worth highlighting: one, that government relies on freedom and, two, that government can be observed by looking not at the state as an institution engaging in government but at looking at the practices of government within institutions that exist in the state (i.e. how the state becomes governmentalized). The game, or art, of government draws, furthermore, on discipline; far from disciplinary technologies of power being removed from the governmentality relation, there is now a triangle, sovereignty-discipline-government. Thus governmentality, though concerned with a macrophysics of power (which has a collective subject, the population, as its target – rather than a microphysics, which targets a singular body – such as the body of the soldier which can be made docile by being ‘subjected, used, transformed and improved’), retains from discipline a concern with a ‘multiplicity of often minor processes [which] … gradually produce the blueprint for a more general method’. The focus remains therefore on the mundane; on ‘meticulous, often minute techniques’, which control the behavior of a collective. In this governmentalized space, tactics – and not laws – are what is important to observe the relations of power that produce governor/governed identities.

Why the need for this ‘ugly word’? Why not simply call this ‘new government’ or even ‘governance’? The word ‘govern/mentality’ refers to both the processes of governing and a mentality of government – i.e. thinking about how the governing happens. It is thus both an art (a practice) and a rationality (a way of thinking about) government.16 As a way of thinking, governmentality represents an important methodological tool (not theory) within Foucault’s ‘tool-box’ that he offers to ‘users’, not ‘readers’. Arguably, the most attractive feature of governmentality is its creativity – it provides a flexible and open-ended lens through which the minor tactics of governing are magnified. So, a whole field that can be described a ‘governmentality studies’ can now be identified, where the ‘problem of government’ is tackled in, for instance, the areas of crime control (Garland; Rose), healthcare (Rose), asylum, migration and borders, (Bigo; Darling; Walters) and human rights (Sokhi-Bulley).

Interest is also becoming endemic in the other side of governmentality – that is, in ways in which to counter the form of being governed in that way and in the notion of counter-conduct. ‘Counter-conduct’ refers to Foucault’s more preferable term signifying ‘resistance’ (see Security, Territory, Population for the problem of vocabulary that Foucault faces with respect to how better to label ‘resistance’). Can we use this as a means to understand political struggle in today’s age of riot and revolt? This remains a fascinating area of study.

This continued study is the legacy of the ‘Foucault effect’. To persist to explore ‘the different ways in which an activity or art called government has been made thinkable and practicable’. ‘Why study governmentality?’ is a question Foucault asked in 1978; to tackle the problem of state and population, was his reply. But the answer goes also to the question of ‘why critique?’ – so that, by interrogating the ‘how’ of government, we might perform ‘the art of not being governed quite so much’.

Dr Bal Sokhi-Bulley, Lecturer, School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast 

https://criticallegalthinking.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/governmentality.jpg

 

Some other references:

controversy continues over origins 

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/21/who-issues-call-for-experts-to-help-with-covid-origins-probe -- 

Martha Rosler: Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained, 1974 and 1977 

https://www.macba.cat/en/art-artists/artists/rosler-martha/vital-statistics-citizen-simply-obtained

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl-8j939qdM  interview

https://vimeo.com/477716672   extracts (start at 2.22)

Sarat Mahraj  “Xenoepistemics”

http://xenopraxis.net/readings/maharaj_xenoepistemics.pdf

Tate Modern Talk: 28 April 2012 “Spaces of Transformation: Epistemologies of the South Reinventing Social Emancipation”

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/symposium/topology/spaces-transformation-epistemologies-south

Fataar & S. Subreenduth  “The Search for Ecologies of Knowledge in the Encounter with African Epistemicide in South African Education”

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321581369_The_search_for_ecologies_of_knowledge_in_the_encounter_with_African_epistemicide_in_South_African_education

“Epistemicide is used in this article as a metaphor for the epistemological marginalisation, or evisceration of African-centred intellectual traditions in formal education. Considering the complex cultural, political and social constructs of knowledge across the African continent, we have deliberately attempted to refrain from providing a static definition of African knowledge systems. For purposes of this article, we contextualise African knowledge as a reference to the embodied epistemologies of previously colonised/marginalised people on the African continent.

Epistemicide, we argue, is a product of the constant hegemonic western science model of knowledge construction, production and consumption that unproblematically circulates within education discourse and practice on the African continent as relevant, valuable and best practice. While we engage with various scholars on the issue of epistemicide, we specifically utilise Santos’s (2014) concept of ‘cognitive injustice’ to illustrate how it produces ‘epistemicide’ and upholds the status quo of abyssal epistemology (Santos 1996; 2001; 2007) and as such fails to recognise (1) different ways of knowing; (2) the relevance of such knowing within particular socio-cultural and political educational contexts; and (3) how the failure of formal education to include the different ways of knowing within school and university-based knowledge systems create epistemological inequity, imbalance and conflict within educational and societal structures.”

“The concept of cognitive justice, coined by Visvanathan (2009), is based on the recognition of the conceptual equivalence of different knowledge forms and their co-existence. Visvanathan (2009) argues that different knowledge traditions are connected with different cultures and lifestyles and should therefore be treated equally. Cognitive justice promotes the recognition of alternative knowledges by enabling dialogue between what is often regarded as incommensurable knowledges.”

“Modern western thinking is abyssal thinking. It consists of visible and invisible distinctions, the invisible ones being the foundation of the visible ones. The invisible distinctions are established through radical lines that divide social reality into two realms, the realm of ‘this side of the line’ [western epistemology] and the realm of ‘the other side of the line’ [non-Western epistemology]. The division is such that ‘the other side of the line’ vanishes as reality becomes non-existent. Non-existent means not existing in any comprehensible way of being. Whatever is produced as non-existent is radically excluded because it lies beyond the realm of what the accepted conception of inclusion considers to be its other (Santos 2014, 1).”

“As Santos explains, post-abyssal epistemology, while forging credibility for alternate knowledges, does not imply the discrediting of modern scientific knowledge. It implies its counter-hegemonic use. Such use consists of exploring the internal plurality of knowledges and sciences, in other words, the deployment of alternative knowledges and practices that have been made visible by post-colonial, black consciousness and other radical epistemologies. A plurality of knowledges or an ecology of knowledges approach demands co-presence and incompleteness, inter-subjective dialogue, thinking beyond the western canonical line, and an incorporation of the knowledges of the subjugated, the repressed, and those knowledges that have been discursively marginalised.”

 

Russian state agency developed vaccine controversy:

”Mounting evidence suggests Sputnik COVID vaccine is safe and effective”

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01813-2

”The story of the Sputnik V vaccine: Vaccine nationalism and Cold War tropes abound”

https://www.eurozine.com/the-story-of-the-sputnik-v-vaccine/