9. Controlling bodies & minds (ii): Bare life & killable bodies

Welcome to Section 9 of the subject Culture, Body, & Mind. This is a 3rd year subject in Anthropology at La Trobe University.

Revision

In Section 8, we focused on Foucault's idea that, in the modern era, we have become docile subjects. This transition has been marked by a transition from the punishment of bodies to disciplining minds.

Context of Agamben

This reading, from my book The Entangled State should give some context about Agamben (along with  Foucault).

2 kinds of life: civil & biological

We are accustomed to thinking of “life” in the West as a singular concept, but this might be misleading. According to Agamben, without realizing it, we conceive of life as being both “civil life” and “bare life”.  Even if you kill a person with bare life, you are not thought to be guilty of murder. Examples of bare life include people in vegetative states on life support machines, convicts on death row, a soldier killing an enemy soldier during a state of war. Of course the primary example is the killing of  Jews in Nazi Germany.

Public life and bare life

Zoe is the biological, bare life. Bios is the public, social life. For example, Jewish people had bios before Hitler came along. Hitler took this bios away; leaving Jewish people and others as bare life or killable bodies.

Homo Sacer

“Bare life”, which is encapsulated in the figure of the Homo Sacer, is a form of life which can be taken without incurring the guilt of murder. Homo sacer can be explained as follows:

 When his legion is losing battle, a Roman soldier volunteers for a kind of kamikaze mission. He says to his commander, "Consider me dead. Let me run amok among the enemy's rank and inflict as much damage as they can before they get me". The commander agrees. The solider is now known as homo sacer. And his life (in the sense of his public life) is given up to the Gods. All that is left on earth is his bare life. He then runs among the enemy soldiers brandishing his sword and, presumably, is killed.

 Homo Sacer is thus a form of bare life. I think introducing the term "Homo sacer" introduced an unnecessary complication in Agamben's argument, but as he and others use the concept, it's important for us to know.

Reading Agamben

Here is the Agamben reading

Agamben, G 1998, Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California. (Read: “Introduction”, "Homo Sacer", “Sovereign Body and Sacred Body”; and “The Camp as Nomos”; “Threshold”). 

Here are my notes on Agamben.

Presentation on Agamben

Here are the notes from my presentation.

Exclusion / State of exception

So how does the state make certain bodies as killable? It is the power of exclusion; the power to deprive humans of their public, social life. This is the main fact of modern political life for Agamben. It's not that states have power, but the power to create a state of exception.

The camp

The concentration camp is the model for modern statecraft. This is because in the camp, the state of exception becomes the rule.

What Agamben's theory is not

Is bare life and the state of exception like Lord of the Flies, a mob mentality? Agamben would say "no". The book "Lord of the Flies" describes an acephalous society (state-less society); whereas in modern society, according to (Foucault and) Agamben, the state penetrates everyday life. 

Applying Agamben's ideas: Holocaust

In evaluating the application of Agamben's theory to the Holocaust, other theories of the Holocaust, including those of Primo Levi, Valentino, and Bauman should be considered.

Applying Agamben's ideas: other cases

Aside from what the Nazis did to Jews, what, according to Agamben, would be other examples of this power put in practice? Agamben provides a few examples mentioned above, people on life support or death row. But other possible applications of the theory present themselves. These include:

*Asylum seekers trying to gain Australian citizenship (bios), but they are excluded by the state [Australian govt] and placed in camps—confined and deprived of citizenship rights.
*Internment of suspected internal spies during WWII in Aust, US etc.
*With indigenous populations, we can adjust Agamben’s argument and state that Aboriginal Australians were never provided with Bios in the first place. They appeared to colonizers merely as Zoe—killable bodies.
* When the state allows people to be killed for crimes (e.g. felons, capital punishment) or because they are on life support (e.g. Karen Quinlan).

Evaluating Agamben ideas: Limitations

Anthropologists are concerned with all kinds of societies. From an anthropological perspective, Agamben and Foucault are only writing about one kind of society. Anthropologists get this insight from political anthropology. For example, we could use Service's model of 4 kinds of society:

1. bands (hunter-gatherers; e.g.prior to colonization among Inuits or in Central Australia,, there was no state, no kings, no chiefs, no leaders. It was a 'band' society. At most 'elders' have more say than younger people, but a consensus is prized. 
2. tribes (New Guinea, gardeners (horticulturalists working on their rain-fed gardens) or herders (pastoralists). No chiefs, but do have leaders.
3. chiefdoms (famously in Africa and North America but also elsewhere). No kings or presidents, no bureaucracy, but do have chiefs. 
4. states (contemporary Aust). Kings, presidents etc.

Societies of type 1-3 are 'acephalous', which means they don't have a state. Clearly. Agamben and Foucault are concerned only with 4. This is one kind of society—civilisations with states. This is probably already an obvious point to you, but let me underscore the point by saying that Foucault and Agamben could not possibly be writing about pre-contact Central Australian bands, the Kwakiutl tribe, or a Hawaiian chief. 

Evaluating Agamben's theory: Critiques

When analyzing Agamben, as an anthropologist,  try, initially at least, to put aside questions of whether capital punishment etc. is right or wrong. In the first case, try to understand whether Agamben provides us with an accurate model for understanding the world. (This is how you should approach all theories, by the way). I can think of several reasons that the theory is misguided:

Critique 1. The theory doesn’t account for agency. Agamben might respond, “Right, there isn’t much agency--that's the way the world is”.

Critique 2. The theory is far too simplistic. For example, political scientists demonstrate that power is not simply the preserve of the state. Other forces, such as the media (‘Fourth Estate’), capital (the market; money influences state), class (which controls the state), etc. etc. Agamben might respond: “I didn’t claim that I could explain how the whole system works; all I said was what matters is the power to make certain bodies killable.”

Critique 3. The theory lumps together cases that cannot be considered as similar. For instance, some social scientists insist that the Holocaust is unique (sui generis); nothing can compare. 

Critique 4. Alternatively we might say Holocaust is not unique, and allow other cases of mass killing are similar. These include the Armenian genocide, Rwandan genocide, Stalin's purges, Allied Bombing of Germany etc.. We might argue that these cases of mass killing are not the same as turning off a life support for a person in a vegetative state. Turning off life support might be the wrong decision, but at least it is intended for the benefit of the patient. Agamben might respond, "My theory isn't about what is right or wrong, it's only about the power to create exception, which has been arrogated by states in the modern era".

To elaborate, maybe Agamben can arguable, "look all I'm saying is that there are two kinds of life. Modern states might decide that an unborn foetus (e.g. abortion), a person with terminal illness (e.g. euthanasia), a vegetative person on life support (e.g. euthanasia) are a form of life that is killable".

Then we anthropologists might retort: "hey Agamben, there are many cultures in which killing people is acceptable for various reasons (e.g. various cases of war, head-hunting, cannibalism, infanticide); but this is explainable from local perspectives. Your overarching theory of bare life is unnecessary."

Agamben, getting frustrated, then could say: "look first of all, I'm only talking about modern states. Secondly, even in those cases you anthropologists are talking about you can see two kinds of life operating right? Killable and not-killable life!"

Questions

To what extent does contemporary Australia have kinds of life that could be defined as “zoe”? Are these bodies killable without being thought of as murder? Agamben claims that modern social science allows us to both “protect life and to authorize a holocaust”? Do you agree?