°Rush and panic
Rosalind C. Morris’ “Rush/Panic/Rush: Speculations on the Value of Life and Death in South Africa’s Age of AIDS” (Public Culture, 20:2):
[…] if we want to understand AIDS, we need to understand the apparent simultaneity of two discourses, one of panic and the other of accommodation through investment. I also suggest that an analysis of the representational economy of AIDS requires that we reconceive the relationship between panic and rush.
The rush is the affect of a speculative economy, and it has a lengthy history in mining communities (and in metropolitan centers from which investment in natural resources is drawn), and especially those oriented around highly industrialized, deep-level mining where the joint stock form of finance capital has been so historically central. However, as I shall try to demonstrate, this speculative economy has a new object in South Africa, namely, insurance. Without wanting to evade provocation, I suggest that the adaptation to dying that is being solicited from so many (South) Africans today, while not the conscious aim of capitalists, is nonetheless required by capital at the present juncture, and that what we might call speculation on and investment in death is occurring — in complex and highly mediated ways — through new forms and domains of risk management. This management takes place within the insurance sector, where it enacts the value-producing dimension of risk while seemingly offering the techniques with which to contain it. And it is achieved through a vast set of temporalizations, which distribute risk without eliminating it, and which cultivate a new oppositional structure between the HIV-positive and HIV-negative persons in the stead of older racial structures even as it recalls and in some ways reinstalls the latter.
A tentative, and inevitably reduced, formula describes the historical trajectory of this relationship between rush and panic in South African history. The first rush is that of the gold economy. It generates the conditions within which panic is a constant threat, either because of the likelihood of accident and illness or, more recently, because of the epidemic that its labor organization so cruelly enabled (these factors are independent of such economic threats as the depletion of ores, the loss of investment, the collapse of currencies, etc.). This panic can itself be converted into value if it can be made the basis of a calculus that estimates risk and differentiates exposure to it, without eliminating danger altogether. Such a transformation of danger into value occurs in and through the category of risk. It would not be entirely wrong to say that it is the work of the insurance industry to transform panic into a rush for capital, but it would be incomplete as a description. Nor would it would be entirely wrong to say that in the era of AIDS the insurance industry demands that some people, those who can no longer sell their labor, or for whom there are no opportunities for such sale, are reduced to producing value by dying. This does not mean that they sell their death, or that death has become a kind of labor, even in an economy that traffics in services and in futures, and that makes speculation itself a source of value through such instruments as hedges and derivatives. But this economy is not entirely reducible to something like disposability, though it is perhaps related to that concept, either. […]
Thanks for this…
I hope this isn’t too tangential, but I have noticed an exponential increase in the number of life insurance ads on TV, featuring either white guys talking about how they worry about the wife being able to pay the mortgage if they were hit by a bus, or otherwise people talking about the three main reasons for taking out life insurance - and guess what, the kids top the list. Children also seem to be the main reason to come home from work safely, according to a series of worksafe ads running in victoria - I would have thought they were the main reason to get out of the house myself…
Anyway - I have been curious about what this all means. the oddest thing about the ads I have seen for life insurance - now playing frequently during SBS news - is the prominent disclaimer about suicide not being paid out for either 13 weeks or 13 months. Anticipating the financial crash, and the loss of yr high-paying white collar job? Feeling inadequate cos you can no longer be the bread winner, or pay the mortgage on the Mcmansion? Take out life insurance, plan ahead…. very creepy. Maybe the other side of the insurance panic to the HIV insurance stuff discussed here…
Speaking of worksafe and panic, I’m assuming only people in Victoria have the seen the new worksafe ads pitched at young workers, featuring kids shooting themselves in the face with nail guns. You can see them here.
http://www.worksafe.vic.gov.au/wps/wcm/connect/WorkSafe/SiteTools/About+WorkSafe/Campaigns/
It makes me wonder what relationship there is to the panic generated by Workchoices in the union movement, the real degneration of OH&S standards particularly on building sites, since the Building Industry Commission started policing union activity, and of course, the desperation of the financial sector to get some cash flowing in to prop up their prior silliness. I suppose the climate of crisis and the actual degeneration of workplace rights is a perfect one in which to profit from people’s fear of death and personal disaster…
I remember a few years ago, maybe even as late as last year, lots of ads promoting private income protection schemes, similar in some respect I suppose to those that operate in the building industry to support people during lay-offs.
Anyway - I must read the rest of this piece. Thanks!
Liz [December 5, 2008 @ 12:39 pm]