°Finitude - Geopolitics
Further to the previous post, some remarks on the eternalisation of the border, or perhaps I mean the border as a form of eternalisation. Wildly Paranthetical has some interesting takes on biopolitical health, as does Influxus on contagion. Read both.
But the aspect of this I want to turn around a little more is the relation between the border and temporality, heading off from the concluding remarks of that prior post - and some of those considerations about Kant’s “Conflict of the Faculties” from elsewhere. This latter might seem wildly tangential, or more so than Influx’s more specific reading of Kant’s discussion of the medical faculty. These are, as are most things here, notes in motion.
Not coincidentally, in At Odds With Aids, Düttmann turns to Kant to deliberate upon the border - in his words, the difference between the bound and the limit - in what is one of the more interesting analyses of HIV/AIDS. His discussion of im-pertinence is particularly useful I think (though most of his writings are), as is his rendition of the Kantian limit as that which ex-poses.
But, upon concluding his discussion of Kant in the essay “The Epidemic as a Rupture in History”, Düttman goes on to write:
The epidemic emergence of AIDS … had the effect that (finite) existence, threatened by the virus, was integrated into a recognizable history and into a history of recognition, thus transcending its finitute. … But the militant lament, the active mourning of a lost freedom, and its violent negation - negation also in the sense of a denial - resemble eachother inasmuch as they refer back to a finite existence, the history of which makes sense and which thus sheds its finitude. It can be recognized - the past or present representation of the historical can become a “historical document”. That the epidemic emergence of AIDS makes sense because it marks a historical rupture is confirmed by Susan Sontag’s observation that the outbreak of the epidemic is perceived not as a natural catastrophe, a catastrophe of nature (at least not in the West), but as an event of history, a historical event. As it spreads across the West, the virus or the syndrome called AIDS becomes a historical phenomena. Its status differs from that of the diseases that ravage the nations of the poorest continents. We know, for example, that speculative philosophy declares Africa to be a continent, a part of the world, that lacks history, a part of the world that one can leave without recollecting or remembering it later. Africa is the “undeveloped land which is still enmeshed in the natural spirit”; it remains steeped in the night of a not yet awakened self-consciousness and forms but the limit [of] the “threshold of world history” (Hegel). This example, of course, is not just an example, because speculation wants to show that world history is the “unfolding” of teh spirit in time and that this movement of the spirit is analagous to the movement in the course of which the idea “unfolds” as space in nature. “Part of the self-definition of European and neo-European countries, Susan Sontag writes, “is that … the First World … is where major calamities are history-making, transformative, while in poor, African or Asian countries they are part of a cycle, and therefore something like an aspect of nature.”
Düttmann does not, unfortunately, pursue the geo-philosophical or geopolitical aspects of this further, except in the oblique sense of following through with a critique of HIV/AIDS activism (which is interesting in itself).
But isn’t there a sense in which the temporality that is acribed to ‘Africa’ makes itself felt as the attempt to repartition the world - between, say, the space of the contract and that of the ‘permanent’ war - at a time of increasing precariousness in the former? Obviously, I’m moving back around and through some of the questions posed here, and more recently here - but sparked by the piece on Cronulla. And is there not something eternally aporetic about the Kantian understanding of the border?
And now I’m going to read Jean Comaroff’s “Beyond Bare Life” - which looks to be just the thing.
Dead right! Assuming I read and over-read you correctly. It is the curious urgency of epidemics in spaces like ‘Africa’, the irrelevant calamity milkable until ‘compassion fatigue’, that folds the nature time of African AIDS straight back into the logic of there are wars where there are not borders. Or, in this case there are cycles of epidemics where there are not contracts. So the contract retrospectively becomes the inoculation for epidemic.
I am thinking of the specific contract, the security(risk) of trust between patient and doctor, between biomedicine and citizen, And the whole language of consent, adherence, compliance. (But, of course, that already includes contracts of labour, property and socius.) The increasing precariousness of the medical contract - the shifts to consumer responsibility for demanding Evidence Based Medicine, the increasingly stringent demand that surgery candidates be already healthy, the calls for further animal testing and stricter controls on drug trials before they can be done in English speaking countries - then leads to increased offshoring of medical research and biovalue extraction, which is always justified precisely on the urgent lack of these other spaces.
Thanks for the Düttmann.
influxus [June 10, 2007 @ 1:44 am]
the contract retrospectively becomes the inoculation for epidemic.
Yes. And I like the details - of which you know more than me - about medical practices and their non/contractual spaces. One could add stuff about the organ trade, ‘medical tourism’, etc.
By the by, it’s also interesting - and here I go by conversations relating it to me - that there’s an argument in Europe (or between parts of it) as to whether to focus on (what’s called) ‘cognitive capitalism’ or the aforementioned. In many ways, the latter is more interesting; and (as I alluded in the piece on the “Conflict of the Faculties) I think there are significant problems with the former’s attachment to an analytical or political eminence of the cognitive. And, as someone pointed out to me, this argument seems like an argument between mind and body. So I guess I would argue that there’s a way to overcome that binary (if not the factional split, which interests me far less) by approaching both questions through the contract.
s0metim3s [June 10, 2007 @ 12:51 pm]
Persuaded. The problems of particular cognitive capitalism analyses are a rich way to move forward contract/border possibilities. Particularly given the whole normal/border/pathology nexus you’ve signaled.
Thinking back on the Franco Berardi piece you posted back in march, what struck me about it was not necessarily the privileging of the cognitive so much as the willingness to take up pathology as natural category. The reliance on human mind (or human body for that matter) as something that is affected by economy, as though it had an asymptomatic pre-modern economic existence, is merely the Rousseau-ian mirror, happy nature, to Hobbes. Instead it is by taking up pathology as division and tie, as the making of attention, mood, linearity (dyslexia) problems of organisation that there is the possibility of something other than the recounting of our plight.
As tangential example of the impasse, I saw Nick Broomfield’s Ghosts yesterday, which was moving, well crafted etc. but focussed so much on telling the “human story” that it didn’t seem to be doing much more than saying look at these poor illegal labourers. (Although it was a little gratifying to see the sympathy angle being worked for so called economic migrants). But then it all made sense when the end of the movie results in a web address where you can donate to help pay off the debts still owed by the families of those who died in “2004 Morecambe Bay cockling disaster”.
It seems to me that it is precisely the angle of recounting unhappiness which Berardi takes in Schizo that leads him to the deadlock closure of the final triumvirate. Pull back, technological upgrade or isolated autonomy.
influxus [June 10, 2007 @ 3:22 pm]
I’m very excited about all the commentary happening here. I’ve written about the South African AIDs crisis and Mbeki’s denialist reassertion of a kind of post-colonial superimmunity, which ends up criminalizing itinerant sex workers, the very targets of clinical trials. There is the whole problem of internal migration in a post-colonial setting, say from Zimbabwe to South Africa, which I think gets left out of a lot of analysis. But really Mbeki’s anti-’trafficking’ agenda (on migration and sex work)is very much in keeping with repeated attempts by governments elsewhere (notably australia) to securitize AIDS as a border issue. Also I think the militarization of humanitarian relief throughout the 90s has left its mark on NGO responses to AIDS. The UN is now calling AIDS a global security issue and the logisics of Bush’s Pepfar program are now contracted out to a military contractor and a Christian organization! For me, what is really recent is how the whole push behind the faith-based initiative (with its pseudo feminist Bible bashing ideas about saving women from trafficking and restoring the family)is beginning to work very closely with this transnational humanitarian-security apparatus. The Bush admin has really pushed this in terms of its foreign policy and I don’t think its getting enough attention. Particularly worrying is the way it converges with and reinforces the kinds of populist, heteronormative fundamentalisms that are springing up everywhere, not least in South Africa with its Moral Regeneration campaign.
Angela (or Sometimes?) - I saw that you’re reading the Laura Augustin books? What do you think? I feel she really opens things up - I’ve kind of been searching for this work. I almost feel that some kind of seminar should be organized around this, maybe in London somewhere.
Melinda [June 11, 2007 @ 9:08 pm]
So much to talk about and so many connections to make and unravel at the same time …
Influxus - in remarking on the analytical eminence accorded to cognitive labour, I was thinking less of Franco’s work than of, say, those which use ‘cognitive capitalism’ and ‘immaterial labour’ almost interchangeably - and perhaps, as some of that discussion occured around edu-factory.
But you’re right about a certain pre- or de-political concept of mind in working up notions of pathology (and norm). I wonder how it might be possible to exapand on that sense of pathology as division and tie (which is I think a really good way to explore this).
Melinda - good to hear from you. You’ll have to find a way to pass along the stuff you’ve been writing on Mbeki etc, yes?
Someone mentioned trafficking the other day, and even the very word makes me baulk - it connotes and generates so much about ‘victimhood’, about who has autonomy, decision, and (of course) where and what (the border of) politics is. So very gendered, indeed, sexualised. Hence the turn to Agustin, who seems to have been doing a lot of really good work on this for a long time - though not as widely read as she might/should be. And, as Influxus notes and I’m sure you already know, there’s so little concern here in what passes for the Left for so-called ‘economic migrants’ that I’ve been wondering how to more emphatically trace the connections between the internment camps and labour markets. This discourse, at least here, is still occupied by trade unions, NGOs and various neo-missionary types (as I suspect is the case most places). But I often worry about how speaking/writing about such things won’t be tied back into a kind of radical version of missionary voyeurism (enjoyment). The rescue industry that Agustin talks about.
ps. speaking of contracting, there’s also this smaller version of what you describe as a global trajectory.
pps. I’m glad we’re all egging eachother on to write, share what we’ve been writing.
s0metim3s [June 11, 2007 @ 10:41 pm]
Thanks for the link.
By the way its interesting that Bill Gates has been one of the few to publicly denounce Bush’s faith-based policies in Africa, with a pretty decent analysis of its gender and class implications. But then the whole politics of drugs as a beneficent gift of capital falling sporadically from the sky in the form of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation totally escapes critique!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1844633,00.html
That interesting tension between Clintonian, libertarian neoliberalism and neo-fundamentalist Bush neoliberalism which is so visible in a lot of biomedical politics today.
Melinda [June 13, 2007 @ 12:54 am]
On that link about Catholics being subcontracted by the AU Gov to do pregnancy ‘counseling’ (and the tension you mentioned) - it just occurred to me that it’s almost nine months between that and the recent spate of reports about women leaving babies outside hospitals, in dumpsters …
There’ve been three very recent reports - this today, this a couple of days ago. I really can’t say whether this is about media reportage or whether it suggests an actual rise in women having unwanted pregnancies - and I’d be very careful about speculating. But it’s interesting that no one has actually speculated about a possible link at all. It’s become a debate about the mothers.
Though interesting that the PM got something of a hammering for tut-tutting the mother (including by what I suppose passes for the libertarian neoliberalist rump of the Liberal Party, ie., Jeff Kennett). (Kennett’s appearance here, maybe not so accidently, turns us around again to the conversation about schizo-economy, pathology, etc … )
Still, no one has really talked about these ‘events’ in the context of changes to medical practices, access, referral services, etc that the Minister for Health (a Catholic) has overseen. It’s all completely individuated around some (dare I say) naturalised contractual relation between mother and child.
s0metim3s [June 13, 2007 @ 1:26 am]