Exclusion and the Dead

The main change that is possible to envision today inside neoliberal global capitalism is fundamentally connected with “life”. It concerns two different ways connected with capitalism of how to govern life. Basically, the post-World War II condition in the West has brought a new relation between life and politics that we know by heart as biopolitics. It operates through a multiplicity of regulative techniques in the everyday lives of people. As conceptualised by Michel Foucault in the mid-1970s, biopolitics designates the entry of phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species into the order of knowledge and power, or simply, into the sphere of political techniques. ¹ But how does it do that? Biopolitics works through a formula I devised and use frequently: biopolitics is simply “make live and let die”. It means making a welfare state for “real” citizens—nationals, not migrants—and let die for all others, including those from former Eastern Europe during the Cold War, the Third World and so on.

But with neoliberal global capitalism this biopolitical managing of life changes radically into a dystopian project of necropolitics that now administers death and not life. Coined just 15 years ago in 2003 by Achille Mbembe, today it seems already historical, but unfortunately this is not the case. Today necropolitics works at full power. “Necropolitics”, published in 2003 and after 9/11 2001, clearly shows the implementation of a military corpus, that presents itself not as an administration of life but a governing over death. ² In a similar way as biopolitics, I define necropolitics as “let live and make die”. Obviously, to make live was the 1970s welfare-state slogan for the first capitalist world, and today it is just to let live, to let live even the “real” in blood and soil nation-state citizens. ³ Therefore, to make live and let live are clearly two radically different modes of life.

Basically, the last decades have shown that neoliberal global capitalism, in order to progress, historically not only did away with the Berlin Wall in 1989, but intensified a rupture in the modes of its properly established governmentality. Moreover, it is important to state that this shift from biopolitics to necropolitics and their coexistence here and now, rubbing shoulders so to say, shows that contemporary biopolitics—through systematic management of big data, austerity programmes and the general immiseration of the biopolitical population—produces a violence that was once reserved for those seen as not “fully” human. And so, if biopolitics is a systematic governing of the life of the population, then necropolitics is much more than this: it attaches life to death in a form of life that is subjugated to death, as austerity, immiseration, merciless exploitation of the ecosystem, etc. Biopower, which is centred on the body of a single citizen, is now shifted to a necropower. More than just targeting bodies, it targets the whole space, to the extent that we see a switch from biopolitical populations to necropolitical deathscapes.

The most important element of this shift is that it is not just a division and differentiation but is established along the colonial/ racial divide. My thesis is that all that we theorise these days regarding the status of refugees and asylum seekers, including citizenship and conditions for a better life, has to be seen through necropolitical lenses. Moreover, it is important that necropolitics functions through measures of an intensified racialisation. This is not just the old racism, but consists of new forms of exploitation, expropriation and dispossession, of people, states, as well as histories and vocabularies, and last but not least labour, via the constructed category of race that is today a norm.

Racialisation

We talk so much about racism these days, because it is the main logic of procedures that are used in threatening migrants, minorities and ethnicities, as well as banning refugees from advancing to Europe, or, better to say, towards the European Union. Racism and racialisation, that is racism’s extensively structural mode of dispossession, differentiation, discrimination, ghettoisation, imprisonment, abandonment, banning, and finally the expulsion of refugees, ethnicities, migrants, minorities, is central to neoliberal global capitalism.

Although it is a centuries-old and systematically used tool of de-humanisation serving colonialism’s looting, killing, and exploitation of people and communities, lands, and natural resources, racism re-appeared as a central mechanism of violent control and differentiation in recent global world history, notably from the 1990s onwards. It showed its violent structural physiognomy throughout the past century in the US, UK, and France. It “resurfaced” nevertheless with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and acquired its full reappearance in relation to the events of 9/11 2001, or it started to be operative after the US and its NATO allies incited wars in connection to and with the use of the 9/11 tragedy, as stated recently by Nicole Hemmer.

From the 1990s onwards, the progression of global capitalism and its neoliberal ideology—after the fall of the Berlin Wall that was presented as the “end” of the world divided into binaries, i.e. Communism versus capitalism—had to shift the capital-labour-gender inequalities to another narrative, and racism in the form of cultural racismentered the world in its purest form. Cultural racism also replaced the role of the (pseudo)scientific category of race that had long been a marker of a supposedly biological racial difference. This pseudo-scientific racism allowed the most brutal genocidal politics of the imperial Occidental powers: Colonialism and the Holocaust. Explicitly, because the latter was executed on European soil by Nazi Germany and its allies, it had to disappear soon after World War II from the Occidental media and public space.

Cultural racism sustains inequalities and exclusions but in a form that seems to convert them into “naturally” existing differences in culture. These differences acquire over time almost hereditary qualities, so that cultural differences are increasingly seen more as being almost “genetically” imprinted onto a specific ethnicity, minority, identity or community, and are slowly but steadily reproduced as effective biological racial marks of difference. This means that in the long run ethnicities and minorities fail to reach the high level of the culture in power. This culture is the culture of the regime of whiteness, which, as stated by Occidental fundamentalism, is the only one that has capacities and possibilities for the future.

But, in 2017, we undoubtedly witnessed a reappearance of what we thought for a long time was gone forever: pseudoscientific racism. In 2017, Nicole Hemmer named this contemporary resurgent pseudoscientific racism an intellectualized racism, a form of racism that reproduces itself visibly amidst the racist, white supremacist and right-wing conservative era of the American President Donald Trump. ⁴ This intellectual racism, Hemmer elaborates, is not the result of not knowing—the myth goes that racists are poor and unknowledgeable. On the contrary, she argues, in the prevalent atmosphere of the alt-right movement in the USA, it grows and flourishes by and through academic scholars who write books to reinvigorate it.

As I explained, due to the atrocities of World War II, which had at its centre the Nazi’s systematic extermination of millions of Jews in Europe, scientific racism after World War II started to be a topic so strongly despised that when it reappeared immediately after 2001— at first still masked with politically correct vocabularies, though slowly and steadily advancing until its position today, brutal racialisation—was hushed down in German-speaking countries. The absence of the word—racialisation as Rassifizierung in German-speaking academic and public discourses—did not make the process disappear, because it was already present in everyday European practices; it just could not be named. Hemmer stated that such racism was brought back by “Trump’s casual rhetoric of genetic superiority, his advisers touting the supremacy of white Western culture, his hesitance to denounce the alt-right […] all this has reenergized advocates of scientific racism.” ⁵ This scientific racism in the mode of intellectualised racism is present today through books and pseudoscientific elaborations that poison, destroy, and harshly subjugate social and political spaces and communities, made inferior, with “evidence” that rediscovers that all those who are not white are less “adaptable”, “poorer”, and that their “incapability” is definitely “hereditary”. ⁶ Central to this narrative is the regime of supremacist whiteness that in Europe and the USA reproduces a system of racial differentiation that presents itself as a benevolent outcome of scientific research, although it is clear that this racialisation is not the outcome of ignorance, but of violent hegemonic power. Hence, from 2017, the once-hidden systematic (pseudo)scientific racism, that was a platform for the genocidal politics in relation to Black African and Latin American indigenous populations, Jews and Roma, etc., through centuries of imperial Western colonialism and enslavement, anti-Semitism and coloniality, “reappeared” publicly on a global level.

It is important to state that although intellectualised racism is a symptom of the Trump era in the United States, it is equally a widespread EU phenomenon firmly present in Austria, Sweden, France, Germany and Slovenia. I will even argue that it is not surprising that scientific racism is the marker of the present time. It came back after having been defunct for a long time, in order to be implemented now on migrants, refugees, and guest workers, through racialised procedures that operate with highly diversified intellectual, academic as well as bureaucratic rhetoric that has been of late a domesticated and normalised form for dispossession and marginalisation. Moreover, it does not come as a surprise that intellectual racism coexists with cultural racism. It is important to emphasise that in contrast to some decades ago, the constructed markers of difference today, such as intelligence and morality that were rooted in class differentiation, are fully racialised. Pupils in Austria are sent to “sonder Schule”—segregated schools, differentiated by “disability types”—to produce homogeneous classrooms, and a highly developed system of segregated apprenticeship programmes, set apart because they are supposedly not able to speak German well. Their “mark of difference” is that despite being born in Austria they have a minority background. Further, cultural racism today sustains processes of purification from traumatic past events that are only possible on the side of the Occident; in this matter the South is a lost cause. Marisol de la Cadena shows that cultural racism and hegemonic cultural “racial purity” involves a rampant nationalism that is always gendered, sexualised, and imprinted onto geography. ⁷

When, after the international community rejected race as biology in the middle of the last century, it rejuvenated racism in the 1990s through culture, presenting cultures as carrying and producing differences, to the point that the outcome of such a perception of culture, known as cultural racism, was accepted as a natural process that situates cultural differences as almost a biological form of difference. Therefore, although being a racist machine, inside the frame of cultural racism culture presented itself as without a race. But from the 1990s onwards, race was in fact produced through culture and culture started to work racially, as Robert Young has demonstrated. ⁸ This enabled culture to mark and reproduce racial differences. The extension of this trajectory today operates in the following way: simply put, all cultures that are not white supremacist cultures are marked as an outside cultural threat that has to be systematically destroyed or banished. This coincides not only with the invigorated demand for blatant integration, but with immigration restrictions, bans on refugees, and so on. These processes are visibly present and without shame.

The way that all these “inferior” cultures now function is presented by cultural racism as carriers of almost genetically inscribed traits that reproduce, but without any future change, thus “infecting” the majoritarian culture in power. At the moment the consequences of such theories are devastating. In the end, the “shortcomings” of different ethnicities and minorities seen, presented and reinforced through such racialised culturally and intellectually offered theories, produce “inferior” cultural communities, almost “biologically”, i.e. genetically immutably immobilised, without a hope of “improvement”. In the USA presently, this terminal racism works as a process of elimination of aid to poor mothers, “so they will stop having children” or in a shift “in immigration law from family-based immigration to merit-based immigra­tion”, in order to obtain through this blatant racism “higher-IQ immigrants”. ⁹ This is connected with drastic cuts in social and health-care assistance to the most needy in various communities. These processes are to be connected not only with opposing and attacking multiculturalism—elaborated by Sara Ahmed ¹⁰ —but with a cutting of government programmes for the poor or as it is proclaimed “culturally inferior groups” that cannot “change” at all. Finally, I can say that this new logic of intellectualised racism will soon start to implement the logic of pre-emptive strikes used in contemporary wars and military actions to gain the advantage by harming “the enemy” at a moment of minimal protection.

The new conservative Austrian government, led by Sebastian Kurz (ÖVP) and with the far-right Heinz-Christian Strache (FPÖ) as his vice-chancellor, will engage—this is a thesis that can soon become a reality— in forming what I call a pre-emptive bureaucratic state—of province and city structures—that will start to send letters to non-profit organisations that have for a long time worked in education, mediation, and protection of migrants and refugees, advising them not to apply for the continuation of their programmes. They will be warned in advance, before any open call is launched publicly. Such a pre-emptive strategy is to be expected as one of the products of intellectual racism, developed from a racialised politics and racialised governmentality that forms a “proper” politics through abandoning those who are seen as different and therefore disturbing, unproductive and in the long run problematic for the majoritarian nation body, as these “inferior” cultural, educative projects are seen as culturally and economically non-profitable. The pre-emptive logic of intellectual racism by the federal bureaucracy, the provincial agencies and city administra­tions will harm the NGOs that have worked with those already having been racialised, abandoned and marginalised at a time when these NGOs are at their most vulnerable, at the time when they come to the end of a programme and of funds and are therefore expected to apply for the next period. Presently, intellectualised racism is fully and repulsively visible and strikes terminally.

All that has been conceptualised until now presents itself in several other passages: from liberalism to neoliberalism; from multiculturalist capitalism to global capitalism; from administration of life towards the administration of death; and, from a change in the first capitalist world of imperial nation-States to militarised war-States. Finally, and of the utmost importance: historical colonialism changed into a contemporary colonial matrix of power, presenting a change or a reappearance of two forms of management of life—governmentality and sovereignty. In all these radical shifts of forms of power, we also see two different forms of the constitution of the social bond: on the one hand a post-socialist ex-Second World—the former Eastern European states—turning into turbo fascist societies, while on the other hand the old colonial imperialist Occidental states that were once nation-States changed not only into war-States but postmodern fascist social structures—of a pure individualisation, fragmentation and mobilisation of  individuals, with persistent rejection of the “other”.

 

Governmentality and Sovereignty: Where Are the Non-Citizens?

Alongside this there has been a change in agency from the modernist notion of a political subject towards a citizen. This is why the emancipatory potential is given to an almost old but re-born politics of managing the city, while the state is corrupted, hegemonic and militarised. In neoliberal times we have two machines of power working at the same time. The mantra, presented by the refugees in the media until recently, stopped gradually following the terrorist attacks in Europe, was clear: “are we not humans, like you, EUropeans”? The outcome of this situation is that huge abandoned populations want what is given to the “EU” nation-State “humans”, who today are only citizens linked directly to the blood and soil of the nation-State. Even though, as I emphasised earlier, we have a lot of second-grade citizens: LGBTQI communities in the former Eastern European states, second and third generations of children of those migrants who came to work in the welfare states in the Occident, as well as postcolonial subjects. The asylum seekers, Roma minorities, etc., and the refugees as non-citizens are foreclosed, ghettoised, and immobilised. That said, the refugees are empowered with their mobile phones and with knowledge that in the EU citizens have a certain level of life guaranteed. Therefore the refugees insist in reclaiming a proper humanity. The reality on the other side is a systematic, hyper violent racialisation process of discrimination, marginalisation and exclusion of refugees in the EU. That this is happening, and that this is less and less disturbing, is because of a much broader shift, change and re-conceptualisation of life and death: from biopolitics to necropolitics. Therefore we detect changes that led to a situation of a loss of political agency and the total neglect of the category of the human subject. In this we see a fundamental reorientation from the figure of agency: from subjects to citizens. Sovereignty decides on the death of these human subjects, who know very well to claim their humanity historically, but they are not citizens. Governmentality is today in direct relation to biopower, and is relegated as an apolitical force to citizens that have now a full right to “govern” the city as in a sort of a travesty of the Greek polis. This is only possible as the state fully exercises its sovereign necropolitical mission that is to get rid of “new subjects”,  who as refugees and as non-citizens are pressing on, into Occidental Europe.

I propose a further thesis and this is a genealogy of governmentality and sovereignty after World War II.We can identify the following: in Foucault, governmentality and sovereignty are separated, whereas in Giorgio Agamben they are conflated. ¹¹ Abandonment was long the status of economic migrants; they were needed for cheap labour, but prevented from entering any public discourse in Occidental public space—in Sweden, Germany, Austria, etc. When the economic migrants were outside of the labour-capital relation in the welfare capitalist States, they were in reality abandoned in their needs, subjectivities and desires, and therefore the abandonment soon changed into a ban. The forms of abandonment differ historically; today the mandatory integration is also a form of a ban. When they are not dismissed as economic migrants or seen as potential threats, asylum seekers and refugees are frequently positioned as “speechless emissaries”, whose wounds speak louder than the words they say. ¹² In Mbembe, they are projected onto each other and simultaneously duplicated. Or, to be even more schematic, the genealogy is the following: Foucault centres on governmentality, Agamben centres on sovereignty, and Mbembe takes both at once, sovereignty and governmentality, although governmentality is now overshadowed by sovereignty but simultaneously present. The change from biopolitical governmentality of life into necropolitical sovereignty over death, as formulated by Mbembe, means deciding who should live and who must die. Furthermore, sovereignty is foundational, vertical, militarised, while governmentality is de-foundational, apparently horizontal, dispersed, and if necessary can be confiscated, seized instantaneously by sovereignty. It can be suspended, social transfers blocked, public access to knowledge and space immediately revoked. Today in global neoliberal capitalism, biopolitical and necropolitical modes of life reproduce themselves near one another, transforming many of the former biopolitical sovereign States into necropolitical ones.

Amnesia, Aphasia, Seizure

In neoliberal necrocapitalism, the whole of society has been transformed into merely one big investment sector that provides new opportunities for the incessant capitalisation of capital in order to make profit. Within this whole process, other, maybe less visible, procedures are taking place in order for institutions to maintain their power at any cost. Today, we have to speak not only of financialisation of capital, but also of the financialisation of (cultural) institutions as such. What is bought and sold here is information itself, as it were, devoid of any content; as financialisation refers to the increase in size and importance of something without a “basis”, so to speak, we can talk literally of financialisation of cultural institutions through their production of an uncontrollable balloon of information that gives the sense that the institutions themselves increased in uncontrollable size and importance. Moreover, a process of “a cleansing of the terrain” is to be added, as we learned from the Balkan Wars. Practices and theories that disturb the incessant production and flow of information should be erased, they have to vanish.

Again I can make a link to Mbembe. He expounds on what I am conceptualising here with two parallel expansions. ¹³ He emphasises that the digital technology of the information age and the financialisation of the economy work hand in hand. Consequently, I can state, that what is taking place is the outcome not of production, but of a hyper-production of information itself; digitalisation is activated as an incubator for the constant production of information— about itself. A second set of expansions has to do with the new work of capital, as we are no longer fundamentally different from things. The outcome is not a liberation, but a new racism. As Mbembe explains, the new technologies “increasingly entail profound questions about the nature of species in general, the need to rethink the politics of racialisation and the terms under which the struggle for racial justice unfolds here and elsewhere in the world today has become ever more urgent.” ¹⁴ Mbembe suggests that it is necessary to demythologise whiteness, as the demythologising of certain versions of history must go hand in hand with the demythologising of whiteness. He says: “This is not because whiteness is the same as history. Human history, bydefinition, is history beyond whiteness. Human history is about the future.” ¹⁵ In order to do this, I propose a radical analysis of the violent processes of “forgetting” instituted through the regime of whiteness. It follows, of course, out of the shift from biopolitics to necropolitics.

Central to these processes is also the logic of (neoliberal) repetition that produces at least two different procedures of (de)historicisation. On the one hand we have the logic of the neoliberal Western world that works as a pure transhistorical machine, and on the other, in the regions in the East and in the South of Europe, we detect a forced technique of embracing historicisation as totalisation. In both cases the result is a suspension of history that works with the primary intention to dispose of any alternative within it! We are witnessing a completely psychotic process of the total evacuation of history, counter knowledges and alternative modes of life and therefore of agency.

In the 1970s, we witnessed the imposition of what I would call a biopolitical amnesia that is not seen as a racialising process of forgetting, but presents itself as a deficit in memory. However, to talk about amnesia is also paradoxical, as we live in a time, at least in the Occident, of hyper-digitalisation, where digital archives are more than just prosthesis, thus the capacity to remember seems almost outdated as a human function. Digital archives do the job instead of us. Therefore, we see that amnesia is also part of a vocabulary that belongs to a former modernist time, and with the archive something similar is going on. Instead, we have digitally enhanced repositories.

In the 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in coextensive with Agamben’s notion of abandonment, the suppression of counter-histories continues as aphasia. In her “Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France” Ann Laura Stoler presents the case of France, which cannot connect the French Republic with the Empire. ¹⁶ Stoler states that the term “colonial aphasia is invoked to supplant the notions of ‘amnesia’ or ‘forgetting,’ to focus rather on three features: an occlusion of knowledge, a difficulty in generating a vocabulary that associates appropriate words and concepts with appropriate things, and a difficulty comprehending the enduring relevancy of what has already been spoken.” ¹⁷

In 2017, French theoretician Marie–José Mondzain published a book with the title that can be translated into English as Confiscation of Words, Images, and Time,with the subtitle “For Radicality”. ¹⁸ She shows that the neoliberal anaesthesia of political action works by delegitimising “radicality”. Mondzain is clear: economic liberalism has seized our vocabulary, the word radicalism is equated with terrorism and we see calls for de-radicalisation. But Mondzain does not capitulate before such demands; she insists: “De-radicalisation is supposed to act like the awakening that leaves the subject of the nightmare and immediately restores it by proposing another dream, that of the return to order and health.” ¹⁹ Mondzain is not naïve, and clearly distances herself from those who train for terrorism. Nevertheless, she calls for a different perspective: “Not only must we not emerge from the crisis, but rather we must intensify it in its radicality, so as to deploy all creative resources and mobilise all revolts in order to bring forth the figure of another world.” ²⁰ Therefore what is it that we have today, after amnesia and aphasia? The answer is seizure. Seizure is co-substantial with necropolitical racialising assemblages; it presents a confiscation and therefore an absolute erasure of counter culture political histories. Schematically drawn this is the possible trajectory:

1970 BIOPOLITICS / Amnesia

1990 ABANDONMENT / Aphasia

2003-2017 NECROPOLITICS / Seizure

What all this implies is another shift, which Marc James Léger describes as the contemporary displacement of the cultural politics of representation in post modern cultural studies for the—much needed—radicalised constituent politics. ²¹ That means it implies collective struggle and oppositionality as the basis of a maybe possible democratisation of neoliberal necrocapitalist societies.

Of course, this proposed genealogy in the process of imposed, produced and instituted failed modes of remembering and forgetting, is definitely connected with the perception of time. Necropolitical seizure is the immobilisation and fundamental negation of time. Mbembe argues that the negation of time is a colonial point of view on time,which means being without history. “Being radically located outside of time, or to connect on the initial logic of repetition—it is repetition without difference. Native time was sheer repetition—not of events assuch, but the instantiation of the very law of repetition.Fanon understands decolonisation as precisely a subversion of the law ofrepetition.” ²²

How history is foreclosed by processes of racialisation shifts in terms of the changes in capitalism after World War II, reproducing the relation between governmentality and sovereignty. Thus, through procedures of necrocapitalist  racialising assemblages imposed onto counter histories we get: the 1970s biopolitical amnesia, forgetting;  the 1990s imposed abandonment and ban as a form of aphasia, “forgetting” as not being able to find the words; and presently, we see that we face a necropolitical sovereign seizure or confiscation, a complete privatisation of communal counter histories by those in power, from the state repressive apparatuses to all sorts of cultural, artistic, archival, political, economic institutions. Counter-histories are urgent under such harsh processes of racialisation. But why is this so important now? Because without counter-histories it is not possible to reclaim the present and envision the future.