Letting our hearts break

"When we are face to face with those who are deeply wounded and suffering, there is opportunity to grieve together. Permitting ourselves to feel our grief and despair deeply, letting our hearts break, is necessary for moving through numbness and denial. Because we have already encountered one another, we can reach out in the hard and hurting times with compassionate, healing and life-giving responses. This transforms us, individually and collectively, opening the way for also experiencing joy in on another's good company".

Whitlock, K. (2004). Our enemies, ourselves. In E. Castelli, & J. Jakobsen (Eds.), Interventions: Activists and academics respond to violence (pp. 203). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Who looks after your kids? (poem)

Digging in the work of Kathleen Lahey, I found a footnote with the following poem by Kirsten Emmot, which is also compiled in this collection of poetry about work:

"Who Looks After Your Kids?" 

"Who looks after your kids when you work?"
"Who does the housework?"
"How do you manage working those long hours with a family?"
"How do you manage with the kids?"

Well, there's their father, and a nanny and a day care centre
but they don't really hear, the people who ask.
They don't want to know about it.

What they want to hear is:

Who does the housework? My henpecked worm of a husband. Me, until four in the morning. A Jamaican wetback whom we blackmail into slaving for peanuts. Nobody, we all live in a huge tattered ball of blankets like a squirrel's nest.

Who bakes the bread? Never touch it. Mac's Bakery. The pixies. A little old Irishwoman named Kirsten Emmott comes in every week.

How do you manage with the kids? I don't. I neglect them.
I'm on the verge of a nervous breakdown, please help me.
I'm drinking heavily. I don't give a damn about the kids,
let them go to hell their own way.

Who looks after the kids? Nobody, I tie them to a tree in the back yard every day. My senile old grandmother. The Wicked Witch of the West.

Biopower, racism and the modern states

In my effort to work out a consistent analytical framework for my research, I have been looking at secondary literature on Foucault, particularly feminist sources. Ann Stoler's "Race and the Education of Desire" is a very interesting book in which she develops a "foucauldian" account of colonialism and racism, working upon The History of Sexuality 1 and the set of lectures known as "Society must be defended", given by Foucault at the College de France in 1976.

Besides the great academic interest of the book in relation to the emergence of racist discourses as an effect of biopolitics (and the emergence of the notion of class as an effect of nationalist and racist discourses), I found engaging anecdotal stories having to do with Stoler's research process itself. At the time (mid 90s), the lectures had not yet been translated into English, nor published officially (the Foucault estate did not authorise it) and very few scholars knew of their existence or the topics they addressed, one of them being precisely state racism (in the 17th March lecture).

I am now familiar with a few critiques to Foucault, in particular those that claim that he does not adequately situate the law in the modern society, those that address his lack of an ethical account, and those that contend that Foucault dismisses the power of the modern state. While I do not think that I am in a position to "defend" Foucault (not that I think that his work needs to be defended for that matter) I do believe that several of these critiques situate themselves in a limited moment of Foucault's work and neglect a more comprehensive examination of many different topics that he developed during his life, some of them precisely as a response to earlier critiques.

At the moment it is easy to gain access to the lectures at the College de France, which have been translated into English. However, the transcriptions do not contain the questions that the public asked Foucault after the lectures, some of which we can find in Ann Stoler's book, more precisely, those corresponding to the March 17th 1976 lecture, on biopower and racism. There is a lot going on in this lecture, in the dialogue that Stoler establishes with it and the very strong claims that Foucault makes, particularly towards the end of the talk, which apparently resulted in a barrage of challenging comments. Foucault contended -and I found this very enlightening- that the mechanisms of biopower and the sovereign right (the right to kill) were indistinguishable in socialist and capitalist states. The reason why I find this so interesting, is because one of the paradoxes I have been thinking about for some time, is that penal punitivism can be found not only in neoliberal states, but also in the so called "neosocialist" states (I am thinking of the Andean new socialism in particular). Scholars like David Garland attribute the punitive nature of contemporary criminal policy to neoliberal rationalities and obscure political agendas. But what about economies that are actively attempting to escape the "long neoliberal night" (this is how the Ecuadorian president has referred to preceding governments in various occasions)? An interesting hypothesis would be, in my understanding, that governmental biopower is a major western shift, transversal to economic programmes.

State racism as an analytical tool (used in a comprehensive fashion that is not limited to ethnic racism) for post-colonial studies, I think, could be an enormously useful tool to the purpose of tracing the side effects of biopolitical binaries (normal/abnormal basically) and look at how the law can be a technique to spread these rationalities until they are taken for granted even when they are oppressive.

Noam Chomsky - Michel Foucault debate

I am currently exploring how to put together a theoretical framework that enables a language through which I can look at phenomena (the use of criminal law to counteract domestic violence) that, in my understanding, is not just legal but mostly political. I am drawing from Foucault, particularly his use of genealogy, governmentality and the technologies of the self. I think the debate with Chomsky is a very useful way to understand Foucault's stance vis-a-vis other progressive traditions, such as the Marxist strands in which we can situate Chomsky. The discussion is not directly related to my research but I suppose it is a good starting point to have an initial historical reference for different systems of thought and it is also an enjoyable piece, even for the lay person so to speak, considering that it is not always possible to see great thinkers on video.

Productive power and domination

It is common to find a focus on the productivity of power amongst authors who draw from Foucault: Halley (2008), for example, sees Foucault’s relations of power as merely forces that produce effects. Power creates reality and domains of knowledge. It is always mobile, always transitory and elusive, moving in networks, operating through discourses, techniques and apparatuses that strategically support and are supported by knowledge (Wetherell et al., 2001). 

Centring the productivity of power however, would apparently dismiss the notions of domination and subjugation or at least take our attention away from their occurrence. According to Cooper (1995), the limitations of a focus in power only as a productive force lies in looking at it as merely causation. She proposes, instead, to explore power by centring the differential ability to cause, as well as questions of agency and intentionality. What this ultimately does is enable us to see, on the one hand, that power can be unevenly distributed, that access to power can be unequal and that certain subjects have the possibility to take actions that others are denied. But it also allows to keep in mind that power is not exclusively exercised by one social force and that actors have a capacity to transform the character of power, by negotiating and reshaping its operations. In effect, Foucault (1978) argues that discourses can transmit and produce power but they also open up the possibility of questioning, exposing and undermining power, that is, as Cooper (1995) puts it: “power can involve the creation and use of new forms of knowledge and discipline, or the reallocation of resources” (p. 26).

References:

• Cooper, D. (1995). Power in struggle: Feminism, sexuality and the state. New York: New York University Press.
• Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality, volume I. New York: Vintage.
• Halley, J. (2008). Split decisions : How and why to take a break from feminism. Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press.
• Wetherell, M., Taylor, S., & Yates, S. (2001). Discourse theory and practice. London: Sage Publications.