Part One: Coloniality of the Body (Marina Gržinić)
The shift from biopolitics to necropolitics indicated in the title of Part I of this volume initially requires that we clarify what this shift consists of. We argue that the shift from biopolitics to necropolitics is central for understanding the relation between the body and performativity in the time of neoliberal global (necro)capitalism. In order to conceptualize this shift in depth and to fully develop all its consequences for the present status of the body in capitalism, as well as for its performed variants in contemporary performance, theater and dance, we will analyze two exemplary cases.
- 1.The performance “Host” (2015) by Filipino choreographer and dancer Eisa Jocson, who explores the presentation of female bodies and sexuality in the case of female and transgender hostesses in Japanese night clubs.
- 2.The performance “All Eyes on Me” (2015), announced as “Purrr!_Femme!-ance!: Queer Femininities in Action,” a collaborative project conceived by Julischka Stengele (Austria) that brings together different fem, queer and trans positions in order to stage, provoke and question the subjectivities that stand for the reclaiming of marginalized bodies and their political stands. The analysis of each of these two performances, which derive from different historical and political locations, poses a similar set of questions, primarily regarding the situated location of a threshold between sovereign power, governmentality and life, citizens and non-citizens, as well as biopower and necropower. However, the answer varies! Why? Because we stumble upon a threshold that radically defines the difference between biopolitics and necropolitics. This threshold is the racial/colonial divide, which cuts through the present neoliberal global capitalism.
Julischka Stengele’s performance gravitates towards the biopolitical, although she exposes and performs her own position by self-defining as “white trash singularity in neoliberal global capitalism,” while Eisa Jocson explores the necropolitical—a direct management of colonial, migrant and refugee bodies, hyper-exploited in different geopolitical spaces.
Necropolitics, Bare Life and Racialized Assemblages
Necropolitics is a term coined by Achille Mbembe1 in his seminal text of the same name, published in 2003. It denotes a system of governmentality present in neoliberal global capitalism, which is not at all an exaltation of death, such as in the old relation between Eros and Thanatos, but an intensification of measures of governing that not only inflicts death, but makes profit from capitalizing on it. It is characterized by necropower: the technology of control through which life is strategically subjugated to the power of death, by which a new form of sovereignty develops in neoliberal global capitalism. It operates with new forms of technologies of discipline and control, as well as with the authoritarian politics that are presented through a normalization of racist attitudes and an economy that is seen as completely detached from any production efforts, but is used instead as a purely political tool for further suppression. Mbembe says that necropower is the enactment of sovereignty in cases where “the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations,”2 rather than autonomy, is the central project of power. We live in a time of serial terrorist attacks that have brought about the control of public spaces in the EU and the protection of EU borders that radically shut down the human rights politics of the Western world, which once claimed readiness to accept and help all those under threat, famine and utmost danger. In such a situation death becomes central for the field of power which, in global neoliberal necropolitics, takes the form of necropower rather than biopower. As Mbembe wrote in 2003, this type of power confers life by taking it at will.
The logic of necropower, where death becomes central for the field of power, is linked to Agamben’s concept of bare life. Therefore, in order to understand precisely what necropower is, we need to connect the two categories. The idea of bare life was articulated in 1995, when Giorgio Agamben published his Homo Sacer. Il potere sovrano e la vita nuda (translated as Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 1998).3 Homo sacer is the Latin term for a type of sacred, perishable life which was historically present in ancient Roman law, referenced by Agamben. Today, we have a number of figures that can be assigned to this category, most importantly refugees, though earlier this was also the status of those imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. From these two examples it is clear that these people are situated between life and death: they possess just, as Agamben says, bare life. This kind of existence is produced in the space between sovereign power and something we can call a surplus or leftover of human life: bare life. On the other hand, bare life is always constructed on top of a system of invisible, secret, hidden procedures. It is also invested with the performativity of power and therefore affects terminally the (in/human) body. This also leads to a very clear procedure which, in order to produce bare life as a leftover or surplus inside a certain structure of the social, economic, judicial or political, has to have recourse to the state of exception.
In order to be able to kill without punishment, to abandon to death groups of civilians or whole nations (as in the case of Syria), there has to exist a system of politics, law and economic and social relations that presents itself as extra-judicial, exceptional, as an emergence. In such a frame it becomes clear that when we speak of sovereign power this is no longer the old monarchical power but, on the contrary, a contemporary state with an institution or an autocratic president that can deliberately decide on the life and death of citizens, as well on the status of second-grade citizens and non-citizens.
Furthermore, the sovereign, as described by Agamben, is an exception that in itself later decides on the state of exception. As defined by Agamben and loosely retold here, the sovereign legal right is the effective prorogation of the law itself, while a “state of exception” is the mix-up of the two—and the one who decides on that exception (the confusion of law and fact) is the sovereign. Another characteristic of global capitalism is its pure circularity which has been evident more than ever in the last years through an administrative power that is subjectless and yet decides as if it was a subject.
Similarly to the sovereign, all the effects of administrative power are reassembled also in the figure of bare life, which is seen as a threshold figure, produced by an act of the sovereign, i.e. either of the state or of a supranational union, such as the EU (for example when the EU made an agreement with Turkey—perhaps followed, in the future, by North African states—to produce the figure of bare life). Moreover, in reference to Agamben, it is important to see that homo sacer cannot be sacrificed, as the act of sacrifice is only representable within the legal context of the city, nation or, in this case, the EU . Bare life is therefore a figure between the citizen and non-citizen, between the citizen and the refugee, and so on. It is also important to understand how the state of exception changed historically: at its beginnings the state of exception denoted an extra measure during the state of war, then, with the absence of traditional war in Europe, the Cold War emerged in the 1960–1970s, while today the radical change of attitude toward refugees is made possible under the frame of the “war on terror.”
When we speak of necropower we refer to a radicalization of bare life. Unlike the situation of bare life of the homo sacer, which can be killed, but not sacrificed, necropower presents a direct link with death. The outcome is a fundamental difference, as the figure of bare life is still attached to the nation-state and to a certain degree of life, while necropower means a decisive suspension of life. In such a situation the once-protected citizens can be easily transformed into denizens, denigrated citizens.4
Alexander G. Weheliye also pointed out this radicalization. In his book Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human,5 he develops the concept of “racializing assemblages” in order to, firstly, expose the difference between the body and the flesh. Why is this important? The citizen today operates with a body, a biopolitical category, yet he or she does that within the violent necropolitical process of racial differentiation inside the state or the city, directed against refugees that have only flesh at their disposal. This is why, when Weheliye insists on the concept of racializing assemblages, he is not insisting on the notion of habeas corpus (body), but of “habeas viscus” (flesh). Habeas corpus, meaning literally “you may have the body,” is a recourse in law whereby a person can report an unlawful detention or imprisonment before a court, usually through a prison official. It is addressed to the custodian (a prison official for example) and demands that a prisoner be taken before the court, and that the custodian present proof of authority, allowing the court to determine whether the custodian has lawful authority to detain the prisoner. If the custodian is acting beyond his or her authority, then the prisoner must be released. Habeas viscus presents the complete opposite of this and is valid inside the racializing apparatus of necrocapitalism, as through this category Weheliye argues for a distinction between those who are seen as fully human—the white, occidental wo/men—and their nonwhite, less-than-human “complements.” We see clearly that mobility and immobility are categories that are, from their inception, racialized, gendered and sexualized and, furthermore, constitute the division between citizens’ bodies and refugees’ flesh. If we make a reference to Hortense Spillers’ “hieroglyphics of the flesh,” we may say that not only Weheliye clearly presents what demarcates the one who is less-than-human from the Occidental “fully” human, but also that this allows him to formulate a critique of Foucault ...