[As part of our continuing coverage of the April 30-May 1 conference, BIOS: Life, Death, Politics, we are pleased to publish a version of Gilberto Rosas' contribution to the Closing Roundtable]"Illiberal Technologies and Liberal Societies"
Written by Gilberto Rosas (Anthropology, Latina/Latino Studies)
Whether the topic is the new South Africa, contemporary southern California, Turkey, Greece, or elsewhere on the globe, a recurrent question during the conference has been: is there a qualitative distinction between liberal and illiberal states in terms of biopolitics?
What biopolitics allows us to do is to chart the continuities and differences between totalitarian regimes and those of liberal democratic societies, particularly for those on the margins. My intervention is primarily methodological, situated as I am on the borders of anthropology and ethnic studies. I have spent over a decade researching the Mexico-United States borderlands, specifically those between Arizona and Sonora, and the resulting criminalization of a group of young people.
As many of you are aware, Arizona has passed a draconian measure SB 1070 targeting the undocumented and enabling police to enforce federal immigration law. As the conference met yesterday [on Friday April 30], the act was amended. It currently includes provisions that schools will lose state funding if they offer any courses that "promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals." Moreover, the Department of Education has told schools that teachers with "heavy" or "ungrammatical" accents are no longer allowed to teach English classes.
But these illiberal technologies are hardly new. They follow a series of dramatic raids across the country, in states such as Iowa and Ohio, and there are there are rumors of more to come. These raids create a palpable threat to the lives of the undocumented and, increasingly, to those who resemble them. They reveal the continued significance of sovereign power, how it is experienced relationally, unevenly, and hierarchically in liberal democratic regimes. Certain bodies are the first to be rendered pathologically fat, as in Susan Greenhalgh’s paper, as opposed to the svelte idolized super bodies of the white, wealthy elite. Certain bodies are the first to be tortured; the first to be imprisoned; the first to be criminalized; the first to be rendered as the enemy; the first against which society must defend itself.
The distinction between “the criminal” and “the enemy” that Paul Kahn so ably charted in his keynote lecture yesterday is precisely how the exception is mobilized in immigration enforcement in the US-Mexico borderlands. In this respect the border patrol is excepted; it is designated as a domestic police force despite its reliance upon military technology and tactics.
As many of you are aware, Arizona has passed a draconian measure SB 1070 targeting the undocumented and enabling police to enforce federal immigration law. As the conference met yesterday [on Friday April 30], the act was amended. It currently includes provisions that schools will lose state funding if they offer any courses that "promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals." Moreover, the Department of Education has told schools that teachers with "heavy" or "ungrammatical" accents are no longer allowed to teach English classes.
But these illiberal technologies are hardly new. They follow a series of dramatic raids across the country, in states such as Iowa and Ohio, and there are there are rumors of more to come. These raids create a palpable threat to the lives of the undocumented and, increasingly, to those who resemble them. They reveal the continued significance of sovereign power, how it is experienced relationally, unevenly, and hierarchically in liberal democratic regimes. Certain bodies are the first to be rendered pathologically fat, as in Susan Greenhalgh’s paper, as opposed to the svelte idolized super bodies of the white, wealthy elite. Certain bodies are the first to be tortured; the first to be imprisoned; the first to be criminalized; the first to be rendered as the enemy; the first against which society must defend itself.
The distinction between “the criminal” and “the enemy” that Paul Kahn so ably charted in his keynote lecture yesterday is precisely how the exception is mobilized in immigration enforcement in the US-Mexico borderlands. In this respect the border patrol is excepted; it is designated as a domestic police force despite its reliance upon military technology and tactics.
Much of the debate over the “crisis” of the state hinges on the assertion of sovereign failures to control borders; governments fail in controlling the flow of commercial instruments, currencies, flora and fauna, commodities, labor, and alien bodies (in this case boiling with swine flu and other diseases). Well before the despotic SB 1070, Minutemen and other vigilantes practiced racial terror, thousands died in what are elsewhere termed the killingdeserts, and a politically ambitious sheriff waged war on immigrant--or is it Latino?--communities in Phoenix, Arizona.
Moreover, the Obama administration enlisted officers in immigration through the provision of 287G which effectively allowed officers in communities that agree to it to participate in immigration law enforcement. As we know from Agamben in his much neglected Means without Ends, what enabled camps and related technologies of terror was their designation as a policing operation.
Nevertheless, the vast majority of undocumented migrants make it to their destination, despite militarized policing practices--a peculiar conjunction of the power of death harnessed by the United States' largest police force--or vigilantes and other forms of criminal violence. A racial state of emergency is the normative mode of immigration governance across the U.S. today, particularly at a moment where immigrant and Latino are commonsensically collapsed.
But, as I have arguedelsewhere, neither the border nor the securitization of immigration should be understood as a camp in the classic Agambenian sense of the term. It is not solely a space of death but perhaps a different form of "camp." The state of exception has become the rule with notable liberal, capitalist, and biopolitical permutations. That for-profit enterprises are involved in the warehousing of the undocumented is but one clear difference. More importantly, to close on a positive note, neither the border nor related technologies of immigration enforcement produce the total closure of Agamben's camp.
Nevertheless, the vast majority of undocumented migrants make it to their destination, despite militarized policing practices--a peculiar conjunction of the power of death harnessed by the United States' largest police force--or vigilantes and other forms of criminal violence. A racial state of emergency is the normative mode of immigration governance across the U.S. today, particularly at a moment where immigrant and Latino are commonsensically collapsed.
But, as I have arguedelsewhere, neither the border nor the securitization of immigration should be understood as a camp in the classic Agambenian sense of the term. It is not solely a space of death but perhaps a different form of "camp." The state of exception has become the rule with notable liberal, capitalist, and biopolitical permutations. That for-profit enterprises are involved in the warehousing of the undocumented is but one clear difference. More importantly, to close on a positive note, neither the border nor related technologies of immigration enforcement produce the total closure of Agamben's camp.
Today, on May 1, 2010 as I speak, migrants and their allies are emboldened. They are engaged in dramatic public protests against these forms of rule across the United States. This suggests that despite the continuities between liberal democratic technologies and totalitarian regimes the former provide avenues for resistance and terrains worth struggling for at a moment in which both the left and the right converge in abandoning the welfare state. A new lexicon for an affirmative bios, or what Sharad Chari termed “biopolitical struggle,” must be developed.
