Beyond Biopolitics : Essays on the Governance of Life and Death

400 Pages·2011·1.94 MB·English

by  Patricia Ticento Clough and Craig Willse

Beyond Biopolitics

patricia ticineto clough and craig Willse, eds.
Beyond
Biopolitics
Essays on the Governance of Life and Death
Duke University Press Durham and London 2011
© 2011 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-f ree paper ♾
Typeset in Quadraat by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-i n- Publication Data appear on the
last printed page of this book.
A version of Chapter 1, “National Enterprise Emergency: Steps Toward an Ecology
of Powers,” by Brian Massumi, appeared in Theory, Culture & Society 26:6 (2009) and
is printed by permission of the publisher, SAGE Publications.
A version of Chapter 2, “Human Security/National Security: Gender Branding and
Population Racism,” by Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse, appeared in Social
Text 105 28:4 (2010) and is printed by permission of the publisher, Duke University
Press.
A version of Chapter 3, “‘The Turban Is Not a Hat’: Queer Diaspora and Practices of
Profiling,” by Jasbir K. Puar, appeared in Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer
Times (2007) and is printed by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press.
A version of Chapter 4, “Strict Scrutiny: The Tragedy of Constitutional Law,” by
Sora Y. Han, appeared in Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties 4:1 (2008) and
is printed by permission of the journal.
A version of Chapter 8, “Strange Circulations: The Blood Economy in Rural China,”
by Ann S. Anagnost, appeared in Economy and Society 35:4 (2006) and is reprinted by
permission of the publisher, Taylor & Francis Ltd.
contents
Acknowledgments vii
IntroductIon
Beyond Biopolitics: The Governance of Life and Death
Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse 1
part i Unexceptional control: Governance, race, and population
1. National Enterprise Emergency: Steps Toward an Ecology of Powers
Brian Massumi 19
2. Human Security/National Security: Gender Branding and
Population Racism
Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse 46
3. “The Turban Is Not a Hat”: Queer Diaspora and Practices of Profiling
Jasbir Puar 65
4. Strict Scrutiny: The Tragedy of Constitutional Law
Sora Y. Han 106
part ii preemption: death and life- itself
5. Necrologies; or, the Death of the Body Politic
Eugene Thacker 139
6. Mnemonic Control
Luciana Parisi and Steve Goodman 163
7. Thanato- tactics
Eyal Weizman 177
part iii transforming Value: the Measure of life capacities
8. Strange Circulations
Ann S. Anagnost 213
9. Necropolitical Surveillance: Immigrants from Turkey in Germany
Çağatay Topal 238
10. From the Race War to the War on Terror
Randy Martin 258
part iV technological investments:
temporality, Media, and Methodologies
11. “Seeing” Spectral Agencies: An Analysis of Lin+Lam
and Unidentified Vietnam
Una Chung 277
12. Here We Accrete Durations: Toward a Practice of Intervals
in the Perceptual Mode of Power
Amit S. Rai 306
13. Fascia and the Grimace of Catastrophe
May Joseph 332
14. Blackness and Governance
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney 351
Bibliography 363
Contributors 381
Index 385
acknoWledGMents
Many of the chapters in this book are elaborations of presentations
given at a symposium held at the Graduate Center, City University
of New York (cunY), in 2006. We are thankful for the support of
the Center for the Study of Women and Society, which hosted the
symposium, and the Graduate Center, for funding the event. We are
especially grateful to all those who participated in the symposium,
and from whom we learned so much.
Many graduate students and faculty at cunY have made possible
the ongoing elaboration of social theory and social criticism that
has informed this collection. In light of that effort, we happily thank
each other. This collection represents the work we did together when
we were first active at the Center for the Study of Women and Society
(Patricia was director and Craig a fellow) and now as fellow sociolo-
gists. Doing the work of scholarship together proved rewarding and
productive.
We also thank our current and former colleagues at cunY, espe-
cially Neil Smith, David Kajanzian, Michelle Fine, Joe Rollins, Vic-
toria Taylor Pitts, Soniya Munshi, Greg Goldberg, Jean Halley, Hosu
Kim, Jonathan Cutler, Jacqueline Berman, Jeff Bussolini, Ananya
Mukherjea, Grace M. Cho, Lauren Jade Martin, Una Chung, Jamie
Skye Bianco, Rachel Schiff, Mitra Rastegar, Sam Han, Elizabeth
Bullock, Aaron Weeks, Kate Jenkins, Kim Cunningham, Deborah
Gambs, and Karen Gregory. We thank as well our friends and col-
leagues from our wider circles whose support and thoughtful en-
gagement made this work possible, especially Dean Spade, Christina Han-
hardt, Kerwin Kaye, Beth Bernstein, Em Thuma, Jackie Orr, Vivian Nixon,
Anahid Kassabian, Amit Rai, Joseph Schneider, Steven Seidman, Anne Hoff-
man, Norman Denzin, Jasbir Puar, Stefano Harney, and Bruce Reis. To our
families we also send thanks: Christopher Martin Clough, Elizabeth Hariss
Clough, and Lucy Nash Clough, as well as the Steppe family, the Willse family,
the Spade- Goldschmidt- Lenz family, and David Proterra.
Finally, we would like to thank everyone at Duke University Press—Ken
Wissoker, Sharon Torian, Courtney Berger, Jade Brooks, Neal McTighe, Jeff
Canaday, and Christine Choi. We especially wish to thank J. Reynolds Smith,
who stood behind this work from the start.
viii Acknowledgments
patricia ticineto clough
and craig Willse
Beyond Biopolitics
The Governance of Life and Death
Both in the United States and around the world, neoliberalism con-
tinues to raise difficult questions about the rightful conduct of the
state. This is in part because in neoliberalism an extralegal admin-
istrative discourse has turned the legitimacy of governance over to
technical systems of compliance and efficiency that underwrite the
relationship of the state and the economy with a biopolitics of war,
terror, and surveillance. From the very start of Barack Obama’s ad-
ministration, for example, there was an intensification of an admin-
istrative and bureaucratic legality, even though the administration
was set to reformulate neoliberalism. In the first few months of
2009, the administration responded to the debate regarding prac-
tices of torture authorized and administered by U.S. government
and military officials during the Bush regime’s “war on terror.” The
practice of waterboarding was particularly controversial.
While public knowledge of waterboarding already existed, a series
of events—Attorney General Eric Holder’s unequivocal comment
during a confirmation hearing on January 16, 2009, that waterboard-
ing is torture, Obama’s issuance of an executive order on January 22,
2009, banning the use of harsh interrogation tactics, and the release
in April 2009 of the so- called torture memos—coalesced to produce
calls for the investigation and possible prosecution of Bush admin-
istration officials who had authorized waterboarding. While some
members of the Obama administration voiced an interest in “mov-