Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
In light of Judith Butler’s 2004 reflection on the role of grieving in the establishment of the political body, the social body, and the boundaries of what any subject may be capable of conceiving as “human” (Butler p.24,29) the work of Teresa Margolles, which expose the body of Mexico City’s uncounted dead through trace evidence of their decaying bodies (Martinez, p.117), takes on additional weight. If the act of grieving, or of the acknowledgement of death through the public obituary constitutes a primary method for the delineation of the bounds of the national community, or the human community (Butler p. 36-38), Margolles work functions to undo the most primal act of the collective discursive negation of the “ungrievable” nameless dead by making visible, if not a name or obituary, at least a trace of the corpse, which attempts to access our primal sense of the relational “we” (Butler, p.20) through unsettling confrontation with the taboo of the human corpse (Martinez p.125), which is both undeniably real and undeniably dead.
Sovereign Power and Bare Life
In “Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life” by Giorgio Agamben, Agamben questions the fundamental nature of sovereignty and redefines it as the power to create the state of exception. The state of exception is the ‘new “normal” bio-political relationship between citizens and the state’, where Homo Sacer loses the right to be protected under juridical, social or religious law meaning ‘the life… may be killed without the commission of homicide’ while there will be no sacrifice dedicating the life to the god. In other words, it is not merely the matter of liberal democracy, but it is the state’s power to remove ‘life’ from people. That being the case, the sacred life or bare life becomes indissociable from the notion of sovereignty and Agamben makes a provocative statement that a concentration camp is the ‘paradigm of the political space of modernity, whose metamorphoses and disguises we will have to learn to recognize’. Therefore, under the logic of the camp, life and death are entirely controlled by the politics and subjectivity of the sovereignty. Agamben claims that ‘politics is now literally the decision concerning the unpolitical (that is, concerning bare life)’ and it is the status of the modern biopolitical society today and the individual’s life within it.
Necropolitics
Achille Mbembe (2003) develops a theory of necropolitics by providing the reader with specific moments in time underlining the necropower in who has the right to kill and be killed. Nazi Germany is an example of a necropower in an early modernist state, which combined the “characteristics of the racist state, the murderous state, and the suicidal state” in exercising its right to kill culminating in the “final solution” (p.17). Mbembe, demonstrates that the perception and existence of the Other in the Nazi extermination has its roots in colonial imperialism. Mbembe argues that any historical account of the rise of modern terror must address slavery and the plantation system. In slavery there was an expulsion from humanity where slaves experienced a loss of a home, loss over the right to one's body, and loss of political personhood. Terror formation in apartheid regimes are concentrated around race, “the selection of races, the prohibition of mixed marriages, forced sterilization, even the extermination of vanquished peoples are to find their first testing ground in the colonial world” (p23).
Mbembe argues that the most accomplished necropower is contemporary colonial occupation of Palestine. Spatial control is key in mass expulsions, resettlement and establishment of new colonies. Roads, bridges, tunnels and walls are built to separate Israelis from Palestinians. Surveillance, bulldozing, and infrastructural warfare are key ways the state disciplines Palestinians. In late-modern colonial occupation multiple powers: disciplinary, biopolitical, and necropolitical combine to give the state complete domination over the occupied peoples.
It seems the US prison system can also be understood using the framework of Necropolitics or Biopolitics (but maybe more the former, since it is increasingly less a site of formal discipline?). The prison as a space of exclusion, alienation, and death, its increasing privatization and expansion, its racialization—seems to embody the characteristics of Agamben’s “bare life” theory.
ReplyDeleteThese readings made me think of the argument made by Sarah Lamble in “Queer Necropolitics”, that the politics of mainstream queer assimilation or “sexual citizenship” in the US has been increasingly tied to the advancement of the carceral state. While sexual and gender nonconforming people have been historically punished for making claims to “bodily integrity and self-determination”, LGBT activists have lately invested in the state punishment of others (hate crime legislation for example). While the mainstream “LGB” rights movement has been widely critiqued for its exclusionary (mostly white, cis) and assimilation (focus on marriage rights) approach, it is haunting to add another layer of critique that is a politics of death and punishment.
Dear Grace, Leigh-Anna, Heidi, your blog post this week encapsulate the readings really well. There is a palpable tone of despair in your final paragraph, which I can relate to — I found myself wondering at what scale of responsibility do we attribute death? The work of Margolles, if anything, exacerbates a sense of overwhelm and hysteria — a death that isn’t tied to one body but many — those who are in power (the ‘adults’ in Butler’s words) and the victims of arbitraria. I found Margolles pieces to strike a chord of power that can only be perceived as beyond critique, this is highly problematic, if anything one might understand the work better by looking at the documentation of its creation. The Venice Biennale often creates a strange moment of powerlessness — beyond the world — the site, Mexico, is so far from comfort and so difficult to perceive that we have to wash the floors with blood to stir the audience.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that Teresa Margolles does not use the body, the corpse, but things from the body made me think of the "desaparecidos", the bodies never recovered. In Mexico it is known that people go missing every day, and most likely killed even if the bodies are never seen. By using the blood, for example, Margolles is recovering something from the death to remind us that it still exists, even without a body. It also reminded me of the exhibit on border crossing we saw at Olvera Street: a shoe, a bottle of water, remains of a body that remind us of the person(s) behind them. Like Will mentions, by not being tied to one specific body it reminds us of the many bodies (or even lack of bodies) behind the deaths. Margolles' use of the blood in order to make a flag was also very powerful, in my opinion, taking into account that as a kid in Mexico, you're taught the red in the national flag symbolizes the blood of the heroes that fought for our country. The blood Margolles uses is not from our known patriotic heroes, in fact, we don't even know who it belongs to. But it is the blood of those still dying (for/by/because?) of the country. I also share your views in the last paragraph: who do we hold accountable and how do we hold them accountable? What exactly is the "State" accountable for?
ReplyDeleteTeresa Margolles breaks away from the taboo against death of many societies. To add another layer to this, a body that has suffered a violent death “is taboo because it is evident that the interdiction against taking human lives has been broken” (Gallo 126). Gallo points out that the work of Margolles is an unethical act, however she doesn’t use corpses but the representation of them – anything that could point back to the dead body or as Will mentioned earlier -that it isn’t actually one but many bodies. How does this change this act if the body is implied and never present? The absence of the bodies makes us still feel vulnerable because death is our destiny. Also, I agree that the countless bodies left behind by the crime rate in Mexico are atrocities that the State should not be the only one held accountable for. I’m having a hard time understanding why the art of Margolles to the eyes of the Mexican society and the media, as Gallo points out, is not a shocking event. Have these violent deaths become so common that we have become insensitive to them?
ReplyDeleteThe homo sacer, as being under constant threat of being killed without legal consequences, has, as a concept, strong similarities with Carl Schmitt’s ‘Ausnahmezustand’ (‘Political Theology’), the state of exception. In particular situations, when national peace is under attack, the leaders of a political state can deactivate human rights – temporarily. This paragraph is designed for natural catastrophes or military attacks. This paragraph, in its flexibility (Kaugummiparagraph), is of course in danger to be abused, and might even undermine the whole concept of democracy, since the head of state can by himself define this ‘state of exception’. The latter opens a way to take over power and thus transform democracy into a dictatorship in any moment (Hitler did this in face of the Reichstagsbrand 1933).
ReplyDeleteFrom this perspective, the democratic state, or in the case of the homo sacer (whose status of humanness is neglected), the state of his or her well-being, seems to be under constant threat. Especially in Mexico, as all the other articles reflected, the human individual seems to be under constant threat of being killed (without legal punishment), as the numberless bodies that are constantly discovered, show. Klee’s ‘Angelus Novus’ that in the original looks as if it is soaked in blood, I read as a possibility of commenting, but also transcending, the piles of corpses that history provides us with. Those masses of bodies are building up to a mountain of anonymous death. The angel, spilled with the victim’s blood, or even his own – when seen as a former victim himself, signalizes the inevitability of the upcoming future which equals the impossibility to change the past – and thus opens a space for mourning in between?
Our discussion today reminded me of a design competition from a few years ago: http://www.designboom.com/competition/design-for-death-architecture/
ReplyDeleteThere are a lot of different ways to approach death and these are just a few of the ways people have conceived of relating to it.
Mbembe's framing of necropolitics / biopower in the beginning of his piece reminded me of the typical definition of state sovereignty as a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. This is the definition he employs in his questions about exercising control over mortality. Though he does mention wanting to distance his argument from this traditional definition, coming form an international relations background, it stuck in my head as I thought about these issues. The legitimate use of force and control over mortality is typically supposed to be employed by the state in policing / maintaining order and in national defense.
ReplyDeleteOf course, this becomes problematic when the state uses excessive force against its own people (as in American police brutality) allows "illegitimate" violence to continue against its people (drug-related violence and the various disappearances in Mexico and Latin America) or uses force on others who are not a real threat (Israel & Palestine). While these types of actions are criticized, they are not seriously challenged nearly as much as they should be-- Israel's occupation of Palestine continues, American police are repeatedly acquitted, and violence and disappearances persist throughout Latin America. What does this say about our society when more of us aren't willing to challenge the legitimacy of these uses of force? Is it emblematic of our apathy and desensitization to violence, or of the power of state sovereignty?
It is also really useful to think about the issues regarding both necropolitics and garbage in relation to Mexico's modernity. Intrinsic to its modernization is the rise of consumerism and excess waste. Thus, the realization that our own "sovereignty" is part of the machine that put these these systems into place.
ReplyDeleteAfter speaking to Kendy about many issues in Mexico and the normalization of a certain way of life of which I have trouble imagining its reality, I find myself agreeing with Teresa on why Teresa Margolles’ artwork is not shocking. And not the artwork as it is physically manifested alone, including the occasional body parts she photographs, but in conjunction with the context from which is came from. It’s striking the way much of her art deals with ordinary actions calling attention to seemingly ordinary violence for some. Her artwork does not utilize the latest graphic techniques to lure the viewer’s sense of sight but speaks to viewers’ emotions via simple actions, for example, washing cars. The scale at which she deals with death seems so human. And I was thinking about the question about designing morgues, of which I had no ideas about. After a quick Arch Daily search I found these two:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.archdaily.com/626840/morgue-en-xirivella-renovation-in-arquitectura
http://www.archdaily.com/161447/morgue-in-pizarra-jose-delgado-diosdado-tibisay-canas-fuentes/50155ad728ba0d02f0000f01-morgue-in-pizarra-jose-delgado-diosdado-tibisay-canas-fuentes-photo
These two “warm, welcoming” designs seem to deal with the living. It looks as though death has not touched them. Margolles project of painting the passage white that connects two different program filled spaces began beautifully yet the condition of the space returned to its original. I wonder how a hypothetical importation of these morgues could change its surroundings or if it would eventually return to its original, the state of the morgue as is.