Death visible and invisible

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affect, death, disciplinary power, Foucault, image, Roland Barthes

In his last lecture of Society Must Be Defended Foucault points to the late 18^th century disappearance of what he calls “the great public ritualization of death,” a disappearance he claims is still ongoing today. He writes, “Death—which has ceased to be one of those spectacular ceremonies in which individuals, the family, the group, and practically the whole of society took part—has become, in contrast, something to be hidden away.” (17 March) Foucault makes this comment as part of his larger set of assertions about the growth of “biopower” (or “regulatory power”) on top of and amid disciplinary power during the 19^th century. Disciplinary power attends to the body directly; it individuates. To be subject to disciplinary power is to be formed as an individual subject. But biopower “absolutely” does not relate to the individual body, Foucault asserts; rather, it concerns the population or even the entire species of humanity. Biopower attends to the generalizable dimensions of an event or problem, to “endemic” situations, such as how to design housing for the poor, provide clean water to rural towns, or handle city garbage. “Death,” he writes, “was no longer something that suddenly swooped down on life—as in an epidemic. Death was now something permanent, something that slips into life, perpetually gnaws at it, diminishes it and weakens it.”

Death in the 19^th century became permanent, deindividualizing, and invisible: absorbed by biopower.

Foucault’s comments brought to mind Roland Barthes’ comments about death in Camera Lucida (section 38). If death disappears from public view in the second half of the 19^th century, Barthes insists, “Death must be somewhere in a society; if it is no longer (or less intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere.” Photography, he suggests, is that place. “Photography may correspond to the intrusion, in our modern society, of an asymbolic Death, outside of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death. Life/Death: the paradigm is reduced to a simple click, the one separating the initial pose from the final print.”

Death in the 19^th century became prevalent, individualizing, and visible: absorbed by photography.

These two perspectives seem oddly to come together in our early 21^st century: the invisible deaths of active warzones and medical crises, on the one hand, and the singular images that bubble up and slice through the fields of impersonal death, on the other. The borders and contours of these warzones and medical crises are constantly being managed and discussed. We hear national leaders manage problems—how to get arms to the right people in Syria, how to control the movements of citizens into warzones, what counts as being ‘at war,’ and whether flights from Liberia should be banned. We hear public officials discuss protocols—how to establish rapid and reliable hospital screenings, who gets protective gear, how can staff be trained efficiently, who needs quarantine. We see desert beheadings, funerals in Gaza, soldiers in Ukraine who may or may not be Russians, the exterior of the Dallas hospital, headshots of the Americans who’ve contracted the virus, the funeral for Thomas Duncan.

As Foucault makes agonizingly clear, the managing of invisible death has everything to do with race. Black African bodies and Palestinian bodies “browned” by the very power dynamics they contest flood the greyed-out periphery of our points of view. The singular images that do leak into our visual frame transmit the ‘affective economies’ of their situations and by means of their very circulation they constitute a hovering and temporary public sphere. Images and affect mediate discourse—not the other way around.

Peirce, habit, and Cvetkovich’s Depression

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affect theory, Ann Cvetkovich, C. S. Peirce, habit

That grouchy and brilliant American philosopher, Charles S. Peirce, theorized life in terms of habit.  On every scale, he said, from galaxy to atom, being consists in the endurance of some relation, and that endurance simply is habit. What has no habit, he wrote, evaporates “thunderless and unremembered.” As patterned repetition, as endurance, Peirce correlates habit with law and concept; but it may be less obvious how or why he linked habit to feeling. And yet feeling is also a complex patterning, the repetition and accretion (Peirce claimed) of possibility and quality. Feeling is the experience of a relation of some duration (however brief), a repetition repeating long enough to be registered up and down our bodies, in our guts, and in our minds (“Huh.” “Ah.” “Oh.” “Ouch.” “Mm.”) Alongside the cosmic and quotidian habit of habit-taking emerges also the cosmic and quotidian tendency toward “some slight aberrancy.” Every law, habit, and concept sustains itself only by rupture or failure. The repetition is never exact, never full. A rock that drops to the ground, Peirce wrote, does not incarnate the Law of Gravity, but only evokes it or indicates it. As Gilles Deleuze would say: it is always repetition with a difference (Deleuze was one of the few French theorists to read and use Peirce in his own work). Deleuze staked everything on that modicum of difference, while Peirce spent his life overwhelmed with the task of understanding the constitutive power of repetition. Space and time are habits. Bodies are habits. Personality and society and rainbows and rivers: all are habits. Ann Cvetkovich’s recent book, Depression: A Public Feeling (Duke UP 2012) draws on habit to counter habit. In it, Cvetkovich seeks a curative tactic against what she terms the “linkage between depression and political failure,” evidenced, for example, in “the murkier dimensions of everyday racial experience for which identity politics is not always an adequate container” (7). She proffers the reparative power of “performative writing” (15) and “the utopia of ordinary habit” (154) as technologies of the self that counter the death-dealing of society. Like Deleuze, then, Cvetkovich banks on the slender frisson of lived difference to crack the social-structural reifications of habit. She attends to “the felt sensations of the lived environment” (11), to the public dimensions of “feeling dead inside” (18), to the particular acedia bred by the habitual practices of the academy. She offers, in response, what Laurent Berlant terms a “juxtapolitical” (166) focus on domesticity, crafting, and small creative rituals—spoonfuls of meaning fed to a body cast upon the vast ocean of meaninglessness (“Now in calm weather,” writes Melville, “to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?” –Moby Dick, ch. 92). What I call the “anti-maternality” of the academy presents its own fold to this twisted tale of habit and habit-taking, its own textured linkage between depression and political failure. Space and time may themselves be constructed habits, but life pulses perpetually at the rigid limits they impose when the non-negotiability of children’s needs slam up against the rigid habits of semester temporality and the presumptions of colleagues, not to mention the larger social habits that foreclose good and affordable childcare options. The depression that stems from enduring and resisting everyday gendered experience is compounded by a lack of support among childless academic feminists, by the perpetual requirement not to offload the aches of contradiction onto one’s children, and by the daily registered consciousness that we are—bodies and minds simply are—the accumulation of how we spend our time (habit). In the face of this, the “slight aberrancy” of the law and feeling of habit can shut down rather than open up lines of escape, and Cvetkovich’s turn to domesticity and crafting does not alleviate depression. Quite the contrary.

Butler and the Affective Landscape of Grievability

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affect, grievability, Judith Butler

Last week, Judith Butler gave the 2014 Edward Said Memorial Lecture at the Palestine Center of The Jerusalem Fund. It was titled “What is the value of Palestinian lives,” and it was streamed live so that you, too, can listen to it while making dinner for your family.

Butler’s topic of grievability is not new; in fact, it has become her regular schtick in recent  years, so much so, that listening to her lectures or reading her book Parting Ways is akin to a kind of academic political brand(ing). Brands are effective and comfortable in part because they short-circuit thought and plug immediately into familiar affective landscapes (reliability, for example, or hipness, or the panache of a certain class). While academic celebrities cannot avoid the “sticky affect” (Sara Ahmed) of this kind of branding, or (worse) the reactionary discursive tyrannies that sometimes devolve from it (i.e., if you want to talk about “X” and you don’t mention person “Y” and keyword “Z” then you are not one of us and we can’t hear you because you’re not political enough), the reception of this kind of celebrity can generate just enough slipperiness between “speaking the truth to power” (justice) and what Wendy Brown has recently termed “the politics of the camp” (dogmatism, show trials) to keep me skeptical.

But I am compelled by Butler’s schtick; I agree with it. I have since Precarious Life. To borrow an aesthetic category from Sianne Ngai, I find her arguments interesting. Butler’s arguments do not set out, for me, the passion of the on-the-ground situation in Palestine or Israel, because I have never been there and have no bodily connection to the place. Instead, the questions by which she frames her analyses generate the odd combination of indeterminate conceptual content and weak affective connection that Ngai posits as the basis of the interesting, and which keeps me returning to the object (her analysis) over and over and over again. Because I am a complete outsider to the situations of the Middle East–except for the rather pertinent imbrications of my tax dollars and my life on this shared earth–the connections that I make with her words are comparatively abstract or meta- (philosophical and ethical), anguished at times, but not on a lived or phenomenological level (because they can’t be), and this removal from proximity probably abets untroubled agreement with her political and philosophical claims. Overwhelmed as I am by what Adrianna Caverero might term the “horrorism” of the bombings in Gaza last summer, and yet knowing that I cannot hope ever to do anything at all to alleviate the black holes of pain, yearning, suffering, mourning, and trauma that striate the relationships of Israel and Palestine, I perhaps too easily escape into the calm though obscure regions of philosophy, of Butler’s philosophy.

In this lecture from last week, I found myself reflecting (again) on her turn from a humanist appeal to human rights to an ontological claim about the normativity of certain affective states (as in dispositions). Each one of us, she says, should be grievable. It’s a brilliant turn from a political stance (human rights) to a position that is at once ethical, political, and non-identitarian. We do not possess grievability, it is not a thing or quality to be owned and deployed; it is a relation, something Foucault would call a “play of forces” between bodies. To be is to be vulnerable, to be undone by the other, to be one-who-will-be-grieved by those who outlive us.

In this lecture, Butler (un)cannily plays on the universality of this ontological grievability in two ways. The first way is by highlighting the wrangling in the discourse about the  killing of “women and children,” those, as Butler quietly puts it, who are assumed to be innocent and yet who must be (re)positioned as somehow not innocent or as somehow deserving of their deaths. The ache, the gut-punch elicited by a dead child underscores her claim to ontological universality: how can any child, anywhere, not be grievable? It is an argument of sheer assertion; without spelling it out, it hovers, lurks, in the interstices of her words. The second way is by “associating” the situation in Israel-Palestine with other situations of human tragedy wrought by severe asymmetries of power. Edward Said (she reminds us) denominated the task of the intellectual as that of universalizing any particular situation, not by equalizing it to some other situation, but by “associating” it, by pulling out the specific filaments that resonate and animate other situations. Foucault once positioned himself as the specific intellectual over against the universal intellectuals who claim a mastery of truth and justice. But quite harmonious with Foucault’s historical ontology of the present, Said’s universalizing task of the intellectual shows the discontinuity of the particular through the patterned repetition of structural oppression.

Reitman’s, “Men, Women and Children”

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Foucault, Tiziana Terranova

Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la prison, 1975) accounts for the modern ‘individual’ through low-level but accumulating changes in penal justice. From the 1600s to the 1800s penal tactics gradually shifted from direct corporeality to what Foucault calls “moral orthopaedics” (10). Instead of the spectacle of public torture and execution, or strategies of publicly marking and humiliating the body, “the apparatus of penal justice must now [by the mid-19^th century] bite into this bodiless reality” of the soul (17). The vampire of penal technology does not feed on blood, however, but affect. The courts assess the crime committed, of course, but also the suspect’s “passions, instincts, anomalies, infirmities, maladjustments, …aggressivity, …perversions, …drives and desires” (17). Affect is elicited, devoured, and then regurgitated and reformed (re-formed) as the soul of the prisoner.

The attraction of this bodiless reality to the circulations of social power spreads beyond the prison. Like Weber’s iron cage (but without a Protestant ethic to blame) the normalizing processes of disciplinary power apply also to schools, families, factories, and barracks, and “by means of a general visibility” (170) pin us to power precisely in our ‘individuality.’

Jason Reitman’s new release, Men, Women and Children showcases a very different world, even if the film could easily borrow Foucault’s French title, “To Keep under Surveillance and to Punish.” The film is saturated with relations of gaze: we see characters seeing almost more than we hear them speaking, and even when characters do dialogue, a good chunk of their words concerns surveillance and control (of an other or a situation) rather than meaning. Tiziana Terranova has pointed out in Network Culture: Politics for an Information Age that in Internet society “there is no meaning…outside of an informational milieu that exceeds and undermines the domain of meaning on all sides” (9). When bodies talk to each other, their meaning is a reflection or refraction of their online encounters, engagements, or personas.

Visually, the film conveys this difference between meaning and information by contrasting the smooth, gyrating course of the Voyager space probe—carrying the ‘meaning’ of human culture through sounds preserved on a golden record that was constructed, so the film’s narrator (Emma Thompson) tells us, to last a billion years—with the cluttered, fragmented palimpsests of smart phone information—texts, images, Youtube videos, Facebook pages—that splay across the screen when humans are traversing hallways or malls. The singular and meaningful purpose of Voyager is contrasted with the infinite and meaningless purposes of text culture. Carl Sagan’s “pale blue dot” forms the film’s aural counterpoint to the Voyager, and its central ‘melody’ (if not thematic): there is no meaning, and that is the ground of all meaning.

Society’s “general visibility” has intensified, but not in a manner that crystallizes an interior soul. Affect is not elicited from and then re-formed inside a body, but pulses through and between digital circulations. Chris Truby’s addiction to pornography; his parents’ use of online escort and casual sex services; Hannah’s “acting” webite that promotes her 2-dimensionally as erotic skin; Allison’s starving body that screams for nourishment through her texts to Brandon; Brandy’s Tumblr account; her mother’s paranoid surveillance of her online activity; and (finally) Tim’s thousand-hour investment in an online game, his constant ‘swipes’ to ignore hate-filled texts from peers angry that he quit football, and his ability to track on Facebook his mother’s abandonment of his dad and him—all of these gazes and clicks show the substantiation of self, if we can call it that, through the circulation of affect embedded in often meaningless information. (see the IMDB.com webpage for this film to connect these characters to the actors who play them)

One last word: The film is set in Texas, and has no reference to religion. None. The patriotism of 9/11 pops up, but nothing Christian. I find this almost unbelievable for a Texan, white, middle class suburban school district.

Affective Administration

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graduate students

This space needs no metanarrative. It’s form and function will emerge at a distance, like pointillism.

Today was given over to administrivia. Mostly it was boring, even (maybe especially) when the stakes are transparently clear and high. Meeting 1: What are the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your graduate program? What other programs, exactly, are competition for your program? Meeting 2: Is a professor of practice (“expert” but non-PhD) considered a “regular” member of the faculty? When? What about a spousal hire or a research assistant in physics? What about someone who holds no or limited voting rights in your department but does have a PhD? Meeting 3: What is the obligation of humanities programs to the surplus doctoral students in our programs who will never receive tenure track positions?

Ok, granted, this last meeting was not boring.

All three meetings traced the porous filaments of an institution that wants clear borders and signature programs. That is, the ‘threats’ to program, faculty, and graduate students are precisely the relationships endemic to the constitution of program, faculty, and graduate student identity: the presence of other thriving graduate programs in religion; faculty who teach and mentor but have not endured the tenure track gauntlet that “we” have survived; students whose entire being trembles on the precarity of their future.

The last meeting centered around a discussion with Prof. Russell Berman of Stanford, one of the writers of the MLA task force report on doctoral study in modern languages and literatures. The discussion tacked along the axis of accommodation: doctoral programs seek professorial excellence, but do we not need to train students for jobs other than the academy? Graduate education is expensive, so is it not narcissistic for faculty simply to duplicate themselves in haughty disdain (or ignorance) of job market realities? Berman’s presentation was accused of ignoring the federal and state slashing of education budgets and the value of politically left culture housed (safe-housed?) in many if not most academies. He was asked if the privilege of the 1%, a privilege exponentially expanded through channeling profits back to elite Ivy League institutions, can ever model anything other than the chase for the golden ring of prestige.

Nowhere was the question of negotiating potential with pragmatism. Not even the Marxists presented the situation as one of a process instead of a set of bodies and positions staked out in death-dealing opposition. No one stated the obvious fact that tussles over things like responsibility (should advisors contact advisees, or are the advisees adults who need to check in regularly with their advisors?) and skill sets (do graduate seminars really need to point out the fact that ‘today we are working on oral presentation’?) are affective dodges. They attempt to pin down a situation that cannot be pinned down. They attempt to frame a situation in way that allows someone (some body) to be framed. Litigation, not education.

No one laughed when I said that, as DGS, I see my job less as responding to the possible realities of the job market than as responding to the actual realities of my graduate students’ anxieties. But that’s the truth. Don’t dodge the affect. Start where you are, attend to the person before you and to the fear or crisis or worry s/he relates. Build programming that addresses and navigates those concerns, even if they can’t be eradicated. Doing this enables older faculty to plug in to the leading edge of the wave that will be the next generation—whether in or out of the academy. And no, starting with affect and building cognitive programming around is not crazy; it is the hallmark of 21st century rationality.