Agamben, Hutchinson, Waquant: Human Valuation and Agency in a Neoliberal Economy

The readings from Agamben, Hutchinson, and Waquant address the matter of human value and the constitution of human agency, and its limits, within systems of sovereignty and structures of power.  All of this bears relevance to Graeber’s project concerning the cultural logic of debt and its links to violence and power.

For Agamben, the question of human value and political agency is factored in terms of the distinction between zoe and bios.  Agamben derives these terms from Aristotle (Politics) and draws on Foucault’s work on bio-power.  The key point that Agamben seems to be making is that human agency reduced to the level of “bare life” (as opposed to meaningful political participation) is what characterizes political systems, including modern democracies, that work to exercise power and control over the very conditions of human existence at every level of social and political life.  All politics becomes biopolitics, the politics of bare life (Agamben 1998:3).  Moreover, this “politicization of bare life as such,” Agamben argues, “constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political-philosophical categories of classical thought” (4).  Agamben advances the idea that “the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power” (6).  It is not difficult to see how these ideas inform the theoretical structure of Graeber’s debt analysis.

Hutchinson observes how “government structures everywhere are… dependent on the enforced ‘forgetting’ of the violence that inevitably upholds them” (69).  I am not sure to what extent such a claim can be applied in any absolute sense to all types and forms of government whether in Sudan or any other nation.  However, it is a pointed observation and very much connects with Graeber’s observations about how structures of power work to foster violence and naturalize assumptions about the proper role of debt in human relations and every level of social life.  Perhaps this could also apply to matters of bio-power and bare life.  I am not entirely sure about the connection, but perhaps it is one worth considering.

Waquant tries to connect the rise of a neoliberal economy with a specific cultural logic (much as in Graeber’s account) that not only disregards but explicitly punishes and disempowers the poor and other marginal groups to a position of perpetual bare life under the administration of techniques of bio-power and economic control.  Her intellectual project in Punishing the Poor is, as she describes it, “intended as a contribution to the historical anthropology of the state and of the transnational transformations of the field of power in the age of ascending neoliberalism” (Wacquant 2009:xviii).  The cultural logic of a neoliberal economy supported by an unregulated penal state, in which poverty is the crime and it is the poor who are punished for being poor, is in Wacquant’s account at root the result of a kind of neo-Darwinian emphasis on competition that valorizes individual acquisition and personal responsibility while it pushes the burdens of the state essentially onto the backs and shoulders of the poor.

Debt in Wacquant’s critique is configured not so much as political punishment (though it is, de facto, that) as it is the abandonment of all sense of social responsibility.  It is on the basis of this critique that bare life is structured as an economically basic and politically enforced state of affairs.  Neoliberalism, Wacquant argues, “is constitutionally corrosive of democracy” (313).  Again, Graeber’s analysis applies in this connection, particularly on the link between debt and violence, and politics and power—the codification of a politics of bare life (in which almost all are mostly barely getting by) and the reduction of the human being to the animal body. Debt is business and business is booming.

References

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

--. State of Exception. 2005. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Graeber, David. 2014. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing.

Hutchinson, Sharon Elaine. 1998. "Death, Memory and the Politics of Legitimation: Nuer Experiences of the Continuing Second Sudanese Civil War." In Richard Werbner, ed. Memory and the Podtcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power. London: Zed Books, pp. 58-70.

Wacquant, Loïc. 2009. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham: Duke University Press.