#thanatopolitics

[feelingpolitical]

But what makes it relevant for our analysis is its intense biopolitical tonality. [...] In order for life's biological substance to be intensified, life must be marked with an unyielding distinction that sets it against itself: life against life, or, more severely, the life of one against the nonlife of others: 'What is life? - Life - that is: continually shedding something that wants to die. Not only is life to be protected from the contagion of death, but death is to be made the mechanism for life's contrastive reproduction. [...] If anything, the open question remains how to reconstruct the internal logic that pushes Nietzschean biopolitics into the shelter of its thanatopolitical contrary.

Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, 98-99

[alovelyvaguery]

Ideas of collective bargaining and self-determination eventually lead to a situation where instead of class warfare, there’s ethnocide, deportation and wilful state neglect to regulate the ratio of the majority and minorities. And so everywhere we see an unmixing of populations and rise of ghettos while purveyors of commonsense guilt-assuaging manoeuvres will have us believe that tourism, instant social news media and the obsessive documentation of every place on the planet for easy consumption by interested parties somehow fosters cultural understanding and a desire for peace through the recognition of the principle that, while we may have different practises, we are, in fact, all one species, we’re all human. Living in close proximity with different people, minoritised populations—populations officially labeled minor—or ‘foreigners,’ and those of different classes and gender identities: this is the luxury of a large urban sprawl, a chance to mix freely, to resist unmixing, because a city is full of refugees of one kind at another. The rich of the world aren’t referred to as a population, they have the luxury of individuation, of vast personal holdings that enable privacy and private space to keep the clamouring multitudes at bay, to prevent mixing. This is to be our class aspiration: escaping the constraints of living with others through private ownership.

[alovelyvaguery]

Looking at my FB feed, it would appear that I am the only person unscarred and unmoved by the passing of Gabo. A great litterateur has died, depriving us of access to more of his work. How great a loss. This should probably move me to tears like everyone else on my newsfeed, but strangely I find that I have no emotion left over from feeling different degrees of empathy for suffering far and near, personally witnessed or through mediated images and stories meant for public consumption. I suppose the facility of empathy is meant to be infinite, but mine clearly isn't. It is a deficiency I contemplate with some shame today, but I cannot help but wonder about the stark difference in the public acknowledgment of the death of iconic figures and those many who had yet to reach such a status and die anonymous, as bug-splats even. What critical number should such anonymous deaths achieve, before they can compete with the death of an icon for public acknowledgment and mourning? What critical gravity must a political situation exceed before there is some form of revolution? 

[processedlives]

I think so. I think it’s an extremely dangerous situation. Most people, even people who don’t seem concerned about nuclear weapons, will, when asked, acknowledge that it’s almost inconceivable that they won’t be used in their children’s lifetime, or their grandchildren’s lifetime, either by accident or by intention. We don’t have an example of weapons invented for war that aren’t used. They are used. The most recent research on nuclear winter that’s appeared in many scientific journals, research that’s been published between 2007 and 2012, shows that even if a tiny percentage of these weapons are used—not 1 percent but .015 percent, which is a minuscule amount of the total arsenal—there will be 44 million deaths immediately, and one billion deaths within one month, from the worldwide consequences of even that small amount. We can see that the weapons are spreading and that the number of near accidents is very high. I think that we can get widespread agreement: many people in the United States are worried about accidental explosions of nuclear weapons, or are afraid of terrorist appropriation of nuclear weapons. Given that agreement, you have to say, “Well, what is keeping us, then, from just saying that we have to get rid of these things immediately?” What’s stopping us is the entirely wrong idea that there’s some legitimate use for nuclear weapons. If anything, the state use of nuclear weapons is far more dangerous than terrorist use, or accidental use, first of all, because of the thousands of steps that have to be taken for massive use of them. Nation states, not terrorists, have put these thousands of steps toward readiness in place. A terrorist might be able to get hold of one, or there might be an accidental dropping of one. Believe me, I dread those things, too. But far more dangerous is the situation of countries that have, as the United States does, this hair-trigger alert of many weapons, because many times, people have come close to misconstruing a signal. There is widespread recognition that hackers may soon be able to create the false image of an incoming missile, which would trigger a nuclear weapons-holding country to use an actual missile, or a set of missiles. Most important, we know that past presidents have contemplated using nuclear weapons even when there was no false signal. The use that is not coming from one of the many accidents that have occurred, but from actual, deliberate use, is what I try to focus on in the book.

Elaine Scarry in response to Sarah Gerard's question, "Would you say that we’re presently in a state of emergency, considering the number of nuclear warheads that the U.S. and other countries have collectively, and the fact that the power to launch those warheads in the U.S. is held solely by the president?"

Read the complete interview here.

[alovelyvaguery]

I mean, sure, we’re bombarded with ever more prescriptive advice about how to make the most of our lives mostly by becoming better consumers and better citizens, but so much of current politics is about death. Death mechanized, distanced, termed targeted killing or collateral damage in the drone wars. Death weaponised by suicide bombers. Death spectacularised as political protest by self-immolators. More than control over our lives, increasingly, everyone wants control over death. We want to wrest this control from the state, denying it this privilege. We want a relevant death at time when life has become so cheap and expendable that objects and tokens far outstrip its value. States want death too, if not through war and ethnic cleansing, then through its deliberate devaluation of underclass lives. Nazism was not the culmination of thanatopolitics, and the clamor of Holocaust commemorators’ “Never Again!” has been futile against the ever increasing instrumentalisation of death.

[ghostsinyourteeth]

It’s been in vogue for a long time now to say we are slaves to technology, but do even know what this means? Do we have any idea what technology actually does and the way it pervades? Or has the technology become so evasive, so dominate that its ways and ruses have become invisible to us? That is, are humans to technology what fish are to the ocean? Are we so enmeshed in it we can longer even recognize what technology is and the way it ensnares us?

Satellites mistaken for stars in the night sky, the incessant buzzing of electricity everywhere, the obese spectrums filling every atom with terabytes of data, the cars zooming through the streets and that slithering steel subway beneath it. The pills falling down your throat, and the bulbs above draping this room in artificial light. The motorized food industry. These man-made words, this technological innovation called language, which type casts all understanding in virtual symbols… Just stop. And think. Think about this this all-encompassing framework — the whole technical apparatus enwrapping everything. “The weariness of the cell” writes George Orwell in 1984, “is the vigor of the organism.” Technology is the organism and it’s thriving. You are the cell and you’re perishing.

…The sunrise always burns my eyes.  Put on the techné of sunglasses. In the car, drive to work. Or does the car drive me? Who, what is driving me? Park that car. Being pulled like a chain into the climate controlled lobby of this gigantic corporation, into a elevator, through the fluorescent hallways, into my office. Capitalism is driving. Sit on the aeron chair, float into the screen, ghost into the hardware, the software, the internet, the electrical grid. Saturate there for hours… At home, a clock oozes neon green beams of a mathematical time into my sockets — 11:52 p.m. Turn everything off. Noise still persists, as if my brain has evolved to decode the radio signals in the air. Induce sleep, silence, with chemical technology. Swash down a Zolpidem and Mealtion with a glass of vodka. A gleaming light blinks across the ceiling in the darkness, that’s my cell phone telling me it successfully charging. Close me and let me charge too…

A microwave or an airplane or an iPad eludes the true nature of technology. Technological things tell us nothing insightful about technology because the essence of technology is nothing technological. The true essence of technology lies in the way, not unlike the ocean, it gathers together everything under its net and frames all aspects of life; the way technology positions us increasingly less as human beings and exponentially more as functional nodes or cogs within a technocratic apparatus. And, who is really in control of this system today? The institutions and bureaucracies try to tame it but they do not own or stand above the churning of technology, they are just points of convergence. Even the big fish can’t control the sea. Economic collapse, addiction, nuclear holocaust, climate change, violence – this is no longer our doing.

Him there. That’s not me. Who appears when I type I? I? Who is that thing thinging? An animal-shaped figure on a surveillance camera. A credit card number. A weight on a scale. A Twitter handle. Fluid digits in a bank account. A social security number. A cell phone number, a voice in a cell phone signal. A user of guns or blogs or special interest platforms. A password input. A marketing demographic. A rendering in a digital photograph. Male. Female. Married, divorced, single. Members, not of a community, but of a territory. Ready-made diagnoses: Bell’s palsy, bipolar, anorexic, healthy? We are fiefs of an architecture, cells of a sprawl of incomprehensible proportions. We are capital, we are data, we are what is circulating within the system — the harvest of a technological takeover of biological life.