Thinking the Disruption of the Biopolitics of Abandonment

“We are the people who do not count” Thinking the disruption of the biopolitics of abandonment By Anna Selmeczi Submitted to Central European University Doctoral School of Political Science, Public Policy and International Relations In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Supervisor: Dr. Michael Merlingen CEU eTD Collection Budapest, Hungary March 2012 Statement I hereby state that the thesis contains no materials accepted for any other degrees in any other institutions. This thesis contains no materials previously written and/or published by another person, except where appropriate acknowledgment is made in the form of bibliographical reference. CEU eTD Collection ii Abstract Starting from the observation that today the urban emerges as the main site for the production and abandonment of surplus life – a life whose capacities cannot be rendered useful and is therefore not to be fostered – in this thesis I offer a re-politicized reading of abandonment by drawing on my field-research with the largest South African shack-dwellers’ movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo. Grounding this re-politicized reading in the problem of excess freedom that emerges on the horizon of governmental rationality between the political inclusion of the surplus population and their obstructive uselessness, I begin the inquiry by asking how the current order of neoliberal urbanism contains the surplus population when the establishment of the educative trusteeship of development is no longer pertinent. Focusing on where the neoliberal urban order is contested, I approach practices of abandonment – the splintering of infrastructure and forced relocation – as coinciding with governmental technologies that render the poor unequal as political and/or economic subjects. Locating, to start, the epistemological conditions of abandonment in Michel Foucault’s rendering of liberalism as the framework of biopolitics, followed by a discussion of the spatial and juridical technologies of government that materialize the power to disallow life alongside discourses that distance the surplus population from the fostered (bio)political community, the first part of the thesis concentrates on the processes of rendering unequal. Turning, then, to the disruption of this order, I present Abahlali’s politics as a three-fold politics of proximity. I argue that in constructing their politics as 1) a space of speaking and listening, 2) a form of knowledge that maintains the shack-dweller as the subject and the knower of politics, and 3) a legal struggle to claim their place in the city, Abahlali disrupts the biopower that lets die. Based on the resonance of Abahlali’s political practice with Jacques Rancière’s conception of politics, I offer an account of the disruption of the biopower to let die in terms of the appropriation of excess freedom as the equal capacity of everyone to expose the contingency of the order of rule to which s/he is subjected. Building on the centrality of the shack-dwellers’ assertion of equality as thinking and speaking beings, as well as rights- bearing citizens, I juxtapose this account of political subjectification against the notion of everyday resistance as it is deployed in the poststructuralist literature on poor people’s politics. Whereas this approach relegates struggles of marginal populations to a sub-political realm where the equality of all, as inscribed in the rights of the political community, do not apply and where, due to their precarious and abject position, the poor cannot aspire to openly challenge their unequal allotment, as the second part of the thesis shows, poor people’s politics materializes in the transgression of the spatial and discursive boundaries within which their “everyday” struggles are supposed to remain; the crux of Abahlali’s struggle for a place CEU eTD Collection in the city is to say, do and think what surplus people are not supposed to. When, where, and in what terms they find the freedom to do so might give hints for thinking the political subject that challenges biopolitics. iii Acknowledgements For having completed this work and the research that lead up to it, I am most grateful to my supervisor, Michael Merlingen. Having him as my friend is the greatest honor. His intellect, rigor, openness and endless support made this journey possible and tremendously rewarding. I hope you read on: thank you. Throughout my years at CEU I have been fortunate enough to learn from and receive the advice of Prem Kumar Rajaram. I thank him for his engagement and encouragement. I am very grateful to Alex Astrov: for all that I have learned from being his student, and his challenging but always stimulating questions posed to this research. I would like to extend my gratitude to the whole of the International Relations and European Studies Department for the intellectual and material support it provided for my project. At CEU, for creating one’s academic home that even works, there are many people to thank. I would especially like to thank Irén Varga, Róbert Sata, Eszter Stubenvoll, Sára Tarcsi, Júlia Paraizs, Zsuzsa Blum and Eszter Fügedi for their care and their help with all the practicalities surrounding studies and research. This work would be non-existent have I not had the luck to encounter Abahlali baseMjondolo. For all that I have learned and experienced while working with the movement, and, above all, their confidence in me, I will always be grateful. Zodwa Nsibande, my friend, my navigator, my teacher: thank you ever so much for all those days and car-rides. S’bu Zikode, having known you is truly life-forming; I thank you for all our discussions. I am greatly indebted to Richard Pithouse, who has been supportive of my work from the first moment to the last; I feel honored. Thank you Mnikelo Ndabankulu, Mazwi Nsibande, Mashumi Figlan, Mark Butler, Kerry Chance, Michael Neocosmos, David Ntseng, Graham Philpott for inspiration and support. For creating a loving home for me in Durban, I will be always grateful to Jenny and Lawrence Smith, as well as Rose and Graeme Hastie. My friends, whom I have neglected these last few months: Eszter Oláh, Erzsébet Strausz, Vera Asenova, Kriszta Simon, Zsófia Lóránd, Tamás Pásztor, I thank you for your enduring love and support. I thank Ádám Mestyán for his companionship and for, at difficult moments, asking me if I wanted to do this. I did. My family has been an enormous support always. I thank my parents and my sister for their love and for believing in me, and I apologize for all the time that I could not spend with them. Kiven, my love: There simply are no words to express how much your love, strength, and CEU eTD Collection faith in me and this project has helped me. This exercise right now would not be performed without all that, and that’s a fact. Now that your thesis is entering the home stretch, I can definitely promise two things: I will reciprocate, and will not ask you what my contribution was when sitting on a bench at the old-age home. iv Table of contents Acknowledgements............................................................................................................... iv Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 1 1 The problem ................................................................................................................................ 1 2 Excess freedom and the subject of politics .................................................................................. 3 3 Outline of thesis ........................................................................................................................... 9 4 Methods ..................................................................................................................................... 18 Part I The biopolitics of dispersal .......................................................................... 21 Chapter 1 Surplus life and the politics of excess freedom .......................................... 21 1.1 Surplus life ............................................................................................................................ 21 1.1.1 Producing and abandoning surplus life ......................................................................... 21 1.1.2 Thinking abandonment with Foucault’s biopolitics ...................................................... 25 1.1.3 The absolute redundancy of surplus life ........................................................................ 29 1.1.4 The problem of excess freedom .................................................................................... 33 1.2 The biopolitics of excess freedom ......................................................................................... 37 1.2.1 Devoid of freedom: bare life ......................................................................................... 37 1.2.2 Governing life through (un)freedom ............................................................................. 41 1.2.3 Freedom as the equal capacity to act otherwise ............................................................ 48 1.3 The politics of excess freedom – Thinking the disruption of abandonment with Rancière .. 51 1.3.1 The political rationality of depoliticization ................................................................... 57 1.3.2 Neoliberal urban governmentality – the biopolitics of dispersal ................................... 64 1.4 Conclusion

Load more