A question I've had several years now recurred again when reading
Mbembe: how can an individual or a society resist totalizing systems of
government, oppressive regimes, and the large-scale power structures he
describes? Part of my unease with Mbembe's and Foucault’s definitions of
sovereignty, biopower, and necropolitics stems from the fact that that they
leave little or no room for counteraction by the subject—if the subject in fact
exists and is not a pacifying romance. And although I know scholarship has
moved beyond theories of resistance and subversion, the absence of productive
answers to this question still troubles me.
Milton’s image of Truth’s dismemberment recalls the brutalities
enacted on the human body by necropolitical regimes. Truth's death is not a
simple killing: she is tortured and maimed, “hewed into a thousand pieces…and
scattered to the four winds” and therefore fits Mbembe's definition of
sovereignty as the appropriation of the power to decide how to die (Milton 742).
Her identity as Truth also echoes Foucault’s discussion of power’s relation to/manufacture
of truth. By hewing apart truth, those in power demonstrate “no more regard for
the limits of identity than [they] do for the limits of death” (Mbembe 16). For
the violence against truth does not end after she dies: her remains are also
violated and discarded of in a manner reminiscent of mass burials. She loses
both the ability to control her own death and the power over her life essential
to a modernist (and early modern?) understanding of subjectivity.
Milton
presents his fellow Englishmen as restorers of that subjectivity, piecing
together the remains of Truth (whether her personal history or her metaphorical
body, a truth that transcends political agendas) after her death and
counteracting the violence of those who pose as sovereigns [i.e. the
Catholics].[1]
In this case, Truth works as a metonym for the subjects of a necropolitical
regime—the masses it attempts to control, the marginalized groups it attempts
to destroy.
The
recombining of the body of truth seems to in some way counteract (dare I say
subvert?) the necropolitical actions of the "wicked deceivers." And
while it's been established that part of the project of necro/biopower is to
determine who matters and who does not--thereby ensuring that the disposable lose
their histories as well as their lives--can there be some form of resistance
located in piecing together the histories of those a power disposes of?
Then the
question remains: what past are we recovering, and to what ends do we use it? Can
resistance to pervasive necropolitics begin with a move similar to Milton’s, naming
the sovereigns as “a wicked race or deceivers” and denying their assumed right
to kill? Is the restoring of a victim’s presence, remembering their life,
enough of a reclamation of subjectivity in an age when even personal histories
are subject to appropriation and erasure? And what practical effects would this
have when sovereign regimes still hold the power to kill those who speak
against them?
Necropolitics
must be understood in the context of the states of exception and siege, and
Milton’s example, although it demonstrates sovereignty over bodies, does not
engage these additional contexts. Milton [arguably] did not conceive of power
on such a global and pervasive scale as we now experience, but this is not to
say that we must totally disregard his model for action. Milton presents a
possible avenue of resistance: the recovery of victim’s histories and the
naming of oppressive sovereigns as such, but those of us who wish to work
against the contemporary operations of necropolitical structures must consider
additional factors of race, economics, surveillance, and others. (Word count: 603).
[1] Attempting
to restore, but not completely erasing. For according to Milton, Truth will not
be fully whole again until the Second Coming, and thus her body remains, in
Mbembe’s words, “[a] skeleton… simple relics of an unburied pain,” functioning
to “keep before the eyes of the victim—and the people around him or her—the morbid
spectacle of severing” (35).
3 comments:
Your suggestion that remembering the past (as an analogy to re-membering Truth) can function as a form of resistance against the necropolitical seems really critically productive--so I'm going to gleefully extend this metaphor. I'm reminded of Stephen Best's notions of redemption and "living with" pasts, how this will to redeem or lend voice to history functions as a means of manipulation. Is your suggestion that we re-member destroyed histories--that we zombify history--is this a version of Best's redemption? Doesn't an attempt to re-member erased pasts produce those same skeletons that Mbembe mentions? Does a zombie-past, reanimated by us, in the present, function as a signifier of its own violation?
I'm wondering whether resisting the necropolitical involves resisting the urge to re-member, since zombifying the past in some ways places us in a position of sovereignty over it. Perhaps our goal is to develop a form of reading the dismembered past that does not rely only on making it legible through zombifying it. (And perhaps this metaphor lost all its utility a few sentences ago.)
Hi Samantha and Aaron,
What an interesting post and comment. It seems of utmost importance to me that Milton admits that Truth won't be whole until the second coming--until a power greater than ours is once again in the world. Thus, the undertaking of piecing Truth together again is always a futile one. She keeps being dismembered (I think you said this in an earlier post Samantha). I wonder if admitting the futility of the work actually strengthens its resistance. We can never even get close to a state of reanimation (zombie or not :) because even as we attempt to put the pieces back together, new ones are being broken off. The violation is always present. Same thing with our histories. We will never be able to fully piece together the histories of those "power disposes of."
The resistance comes in that knowing we attempt a task that is impossible, we still attempt it anyways. In admitting that Truth cannot be fully reclaimed, Milton admits what Best wants - that "our orientation to it remains forever perverse, queer, askew." But we wouldn't realize the continuing dismemberment, we couldn't realize what our orientation to the past even is, if we didn't seek for the lost pieces. So maybe even though all resistance against a necropolitical state is doomed to fail, the fact that we keep trying to resist it is in itself another form of resistance
Samantha, this is a really interesting question to consider through the reading on necropolitics. “The recovery of victim’s histories and the naming of oppressive sovereigns as such” also put me in mind of Best. Stated so baldly, it’s hard, at least for me, to claim that there isn’t some “truth” to be gained by returning stories that have been erased or forgotten to our understanding of history. (I’m thinking here of the rumored Texas textbook that redefines slavery as “unpaid internship,” a move strikes us as both unethical and completely without truth.)
I see two different ways to put pressure on that conclusion, though. One would be the move you acknowledged at the end of your opening paragraph: to insist that “the subject” is a “pacifying romance,” and models of “oppressive regimes” rely too much on an understanding of subjects as having certain desires (for free speech, fair taxes, health care, etc.) and States as something over and above individuals that block the fulfillment of these desires. This argument loses its force when we’re talking about necropolitics, though, since I think it’s too glib to claim that “the desire not to be killed violently and arbitrarily” functions in the same way as “the desire to Tweet whatever I want about Congressional proceedings.” While the idea of an “oppressive regime” doesn’t hold water when we’re talking about, say, the repression of sexuality in the modern West, arguing about whether the term applies to a State apparatus that is actively killing its citizens seems worse than pointless.
The other point I might raise is that, unlike with Milton’s Truth, “piecing together the remains of Truth” doesn’t do much to help the actual human bodies that were cut up by war or execution. I don’t even know if I would speculate that knowing that the truth of their experiences will be preserved is necessarily a comfort to suffering bodies. My question here is: how are we defining resistance? Perhaps resistance doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the subjects that are suffering ?
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