By Gordon Hull
Consider the following, too brief summary: following Foucault, one can say that biopolitics is about optimizing populations, or something to that effect. This involves a lot of work on the part of the administrative state, which sets itself up to provide services, everything from sewers and other infrastructure to social safety nets. Different places do this differently, but the goal is to provide for the general welfare. At the same time, as Foucault noted from the get-go (see the last lecture in Society must be Defended), the biopolitical “make live or allow to die” generated a correlative “if you want to live, they must die” (SMD 255). Those Others were excluded from the “population” that the state tried to optimize and so were either allowed to die, or (in cases such as the Nazis) actively killed, or (in the case of American Jim Crow) actively suppressed and marginalized and often killed. These various forms of necropolitics are intimately related as both a matter of historical fact (the Nazis thought Jim Crow an excellent example of race management) and conceptual structure under the rubric of something like state racism. So too, the biopolitics of optimization is historically tied to the necropolitics of state racism, as scholars like Dell McWhorter make clear in the American case, or Agamben does in the case of the German Versuchpersonen.
But biopolitics has more than one variant, or at least so I’ve tried to argue. I think it’s useful to view biopolitics in an earlier phase – what I call “public biopolitics” and a more recent neoliberal version. The two can be distinguished in part by how they conceptualize the members of the population they are trying to benefit, and how they think they might do so. For example, intellectual property on the public model is about public welfare and the benefits to everyone of encouraging inventive activity. On the neoliberal version, the emphasis is much more on individual creators and markets. But the neoliberal version very much embeds a view of public welfare – a society of individual entrepreneurs and consumers, whose well-being is measured by various indicia of consumer welfare.
But what about the necropolitics of neoliberal biopolitics? One obvious avenue to pursue is that those who are excluded from markets are allowed to die. The rhetoric of consumer choice is often then utilized to suggest that they deserve their fate because of a failure to opt-in. Whatever the merits of that avenue, it seems clear enough that more can be said. One component of the U.S. piece is going to be data and surveillance. Biopolitics itself arose in the context of data governance mechanisms like the census, and the importance of data to contemporary capitalism is large and growing. One way the surveillance state implements necropolitics is by what Margaret Hu calls “big data blacklisting:” classifying certain kinds of people as ineligible for many of the things to which other members of the population are entitled (such as employment or the ability to board a commercial aircraft), or rendering them subject to ceremony-free death by drone strike.
In a fascinating recent paper, Michelle Gilman and Rebecca Green offer some important clues to another aspect of the story. Most of the literature about data privacy focuses on what happens when people don’t have enough privacy. Gilman and Green focus on the inverse problem: what happens when people have too much privacy, i.e., when they become invisible in a society predicated on visibility? Working primarily with examples of the undocumented, the homeless, day laborers and those with felony convictions, Gilman and Green tell the story of “populations that remain outside seemingly omnipresent surveillance systems” (257), those who live in the “surveillance gap.” If too much surveillance is bad, so is too little:
“Life in the surveillance gap can be isolating, stigmatizing, dangerous, and harmful to a person’s physical and mental health. For one, legal protections available to other members of society remain out of reach to those in the surveillance gap. People also lose out on potential sources of economic and social support, because those who seek to provide services to disadvantaged members of our society often find it nearly impossible to reach them. Moreover, those who fall within the surveillance gap are not included within big data streams that ultimately shape public policy, thus leaving out their experiences and needs from the calculus that goes into creating policy. Frustratingly, the challenges facing these groups remain invisible, further entrenching these groups’ marginalization.” (255)
The dynamic is one of hyper-surveillance and consequent invisibility. For example, consider the undocumented. Subject to relentless pursuit by an elaborate public-private surveillance system, they are driven to hiding so far into the shadows that they – and their children, many of whom are citizens – are unable to take advantage of social services and benefits, including those to which they are entitled regardless of their immigration status. Similarly day-laborers (many of whom are undocumented), who work in the shadows of cash-only transactions and abusive employers. Day-laborers are frequently subjected to a range of illegal abuses ranging from not being paid to being assaulted, but they are unable to enforce their rights, not only because they are in a position of structural weakness, but also because the data trail necessary to document their employment and abuse doesn’t exist. Finally, the homeless live in a paradoxical world where they quite literally live in public, but are also being violently driven from public view by laws that criminalize their being in public places. In the meantime, they are subjected to abusive and intrusive surveillance when they do try to take advantage of social services to which they are entitled. All of these are targeted, produced vulnerabilities. For example, people who own houses don’t have to submit to invasive questions about HIV status to receive governmental services in the form of the mortgage interest deduction. But, as Virginia Eubanks documents in the case of Indiana, the intake requirements for the poor often seem designed to make sure they can’t actually receive any benefits.
So: these are people who are not (usually) directly killed – but they are certainly being put into situations where they are allowed to die, where their death is far more likely. Two moments in Gilman and Green’s article clarify why this is in the direction of a specifically neoliberal necropolictis. First, there is the rhetoric of formal choice being used to justify exclusion. Just like we “choose” to give up all of our data to Internet companies that offer take-it-or-leave-it adhesion terms of service dressed up in deliberately obfuscating terms, so to do those in the surveillance gap “choose” their predicament:
“Ideologies promoting individual choice can place blame on marginalized groups for their predicament. Undocumented immigrants, for example, choose to come to the United States. Criminals choose to commit crimes. Low-wage laborers choose to work by the day. Homeless people choose to live outside of society’s margins …. But in reality, these are highly constrained choices. Thousands of undocumented immigrants come to the United States to flee conditions such as violence, persecution, and hunger. Day laborers lack the documentation or legal status necessary to obtain work in the formal economy” (294)
Only in neoliberal fantasy-land are either set of decisions meaningful “choices.” To develop this narrative, Gilman and Green draw on earlier, feminist critiques of privacy (which argue that privacy rights basically trap women in potentially-abusive “private” spaces where police surveillance is unavailable to protect them) with more recent literature on intersectionality to note that:
“people in the surveillance gap suffer from interlocking forms of oppression and discrimination. For instance, day laborers fall into the surveillance gap due to a combination of national origin, gender, class, skill level, age, language, and non-citizen status. They are subject to structural constraints emanating from the “operation of global capital, through international relations, monetary policies, domestic social policies, the employment relationship [and] the family.” This combination of identities and structural inequalities results in extreme isolation and pushes legal relief out of reach for day laborers, as law protects some of their individual attributes, but ignores or punishes others” (290, internal citation omitted).
In other words, this is a process of hostile classification that condemns certain people to at-most marginal participation in the market, which neoliberal theory presents as the ultimate arbiter of social welfare. This process of hostile classification then forces large numbers of people into a situation where they can neither take advantage of public-biopolitics style welfare benefits nor of their neoliberal market-based replacements.
Second, and perhaps even more tellingly for the way that the surveillance gap presents an evolution of neoliberal necropolitics, Gilman and Green underscore that the situation is quite different in Europe, where there basically is no surveillance gap. Europeans are granted privacy as a fundamental right, and at the same time they routinely surrender lots of data to the state: many European states, for example, require individuals to carry a national-ID card and to register with the local government immediately upon moving. As a result, these American sorts of deliberately-produced populations with too much privacy are not prominent. The American liberty-based framework doesn’t have the vocabulary or the political will (see also: data capitalism’s takeover of the legal system) for a fundamental right of privacy, so there’s no protection from government data and no way to stop government from weaponizing it.
In short, we bury structural social problems – the sorts of things that biopolitics at least in principle originally set itself out to address – under the language of market choice. At the same time, the negative-liberty view of government makes us terrified to try anything different. The result is a specifically neoliberal form of necropolitics. Foucault writes near the end of Society must be Defended:
“How can one both make a biopower function and exercise the rights of war, the rights of murder and the function of death, without becoming racist? That was the problem, and that, I think, is still the problem (263).
Suffice it to say that 45 years later, neoliberalism has changed the terms of the problem, but it’s still not hard to see its contours.
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