SFV102 Notes Mbembe PDF

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Lecture Note 7 Mbembe...

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Introduction to Philosophy

Lecture: Mbembe’s necropower Mbembe argues that being human today paradoxically means being subjected to a dehumanizing form of sovereignty called “biopower”. The most extreme form of biopower is “necropower”; the power “to dictate who may live and who may die”. Those who wield necropower can strip others of everything that contributes to their personal sovereignty (freedom, community, political voice, material wealth, religion, culture, etc.) and reduce them to mere bodies to be used, abused and disposed of carelessly. Through necropower, humans have created “death-worlds” populated by vast numbers of “living dead”.

Texts 1) Mbembe, Achille. 2003. Necropolitics. In Public Culture. Vol 15 (1) 11-40. Duke University Press. Key Points 1. Who is Mbembe? 2. What does sovereignty mean? 3. Sovereignty as autonomy 4. The conflict between state sovereignty and personal autonomy 5. Sovereignty as “biopower” 6. Sovereignty as “necropower” 7. Where is necropower exercised? 8. Who wields necropower? 9. Who is subjected to necropower? 10. Glossary of terms Lecture Notes on Mbembe’s Necropower 1.

Who is Mbembe?

Professor Achille Mbembe was born in Cameroon, obtained his Ph.D in history at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1989 and a D.E.A. in Political Science at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Paris). A major figure in the fields of African history, politics, and social science, Professor Mbembe is widely regarded as one of the most important public intellectuals writing about 1

contemporary African and global phenomena in the world today. His research investigates the “postcolony” that comes after decolonization. He is especially interested in the emergence of “Afro-cosmopolitan culture”, together with the artistic practices that are associated with it. He has also critically explored the notion of Johannesburg as a metropolitan city and the work of Frantz Fanon. The central focus of his work is to identify societies that recently emerged from the experience of colonization and the violence that is the main characteristic of this experience. The goal of his work is to change the perception of Africa and to move away from the dead-end of postcolonial theory to a more dynamic way of thinking that will take into account the complexities of post-colonial Africa. 2.

What does sovereignty mean?

The basic meaning of “sovereignty” is: the highest possible power or authority. “Sovereignty” is a political term, because it pertains to how people relate to one another in an organized group. A sovereign is the person or institution with the highest possible power or authority in relation to others in a group. In the oldest meaning of the term, a group would set up a leader or ruler as the sovereign (usually a king or chief). In this case the others give up their own claim to sovereignty and agree to obey the ruler. The sovereign has power over the people. The idea of sovereignty has become more complex because of historical changes in the way we organize societies. Today it has at least two distinct additional meanings: The first is sovereignty as autonomy (based on authority rather than power). The second is state sovereignty, which takes the form of biopower and, in its extreme version, necropower. 3.

Sovereignty as autonomy

Modern thinkers, such as Kant, believe that you should claim your own sovereignty as an individual. In this case, the best synonym is for sovereignty is “autonomy”, where you are your own authority and you take responsibility for your own independent thinking and selfgovernment. For Kant, the best way for a government to preserve personal sovereignty is to create a society of free and equal people where everyone is respected as fully able to present and debate arguments that lead the community towards a rational consensus about rules. Kant thinks that this is the only way to ensure lasting peace among humans. The same would apply to a nation or state. A nation claims sovereignty or autonomy when it claims the authority to govern itself without interference from other states. Then all the states of the world reach consensus about rules through open and honest discussion and clear reasoning. 4.

The conflict between state sovereignty and personal autonomy

Mbembe calls the Kantian vision just described “the romance of sovereignty”, and calls on philosophers to describe what it means to be human in terms of what things are really like. On his account, when nation states began to emerge in Europe, they did indeed set themselves up in Kantian style as autonomous territories with definite borders. This is called state sovereignty. The sovereign states agreed that they were not allowed to rule each other. But inside its own borders, each state set up a ruling body (a government of some kind) as the highest authority. “The King” had now been replaced by “the government”. Any government’s state sovereignty (now understood as power over others) works against the person’s sovereignty (understood as autonomy). This means that the ordinary person is at the mercy of a government’s power. This is a dangerous situation for the ordinary person particularly because governments then have power over the lives and deaths of the persons living in the states. To lessen the risks, governments make commitments (promises) to use 2

their power carefully and rationally. One of the major changes that has occurred is that governments have “civilized” their methods of killing people. These are regulated by strict ethical and legal codes (e.g. laws governing the death penalty, abortion, euthanasia, suicide, warfare, health services etc.), agreed to democratically by the people. As Foucault, has shown, in his book Discipline and Punish, instead of public displays of humiliation and torture, and killing by hanging and guillotine, contemporary societies hide death behind closed doors and bureaucratic ritual. According to Mbembe, this conception of democratic sovereignty, in which the state respects the people’s autonomy as much as possible through democratic decision making, does not give a complete and correct picture of how contemporary states work. In his view, the political spaces in which we live today are governed by a much more dangerous, underlying force; that is sovereignty as biopower. 5.

Sovereignty as “biopower”

“Biopower” literally means having power over other people’s bodies. Powerful groups, including governments, establish and preserve their sovereignty by using biopower to disempower and control citizens. They apply a vast multiplicity of different techniques to subjugate human bodies, across all domains of human social existence. The kind of sovereignty that takes the form of biopower is tied to what Mbembe calls “the generalized instrumentalization of human existence” (human bodies become use instruments that must be controlled to further the interests of a few powerful groups). The dark underside of biopower is that multitudes of people, are forced into what Mbembe calls “the slave condition”. He describes this as the experience of a triple loss: “loss of a “home,” loss of rights over his or her body, and loss of political status. This triple loss is identical with absolute domination, natal alienation, and social death (expulsion from humanity altogether).” But how is it even possible to think of some people as use objects, only there to serve the interests of others? There are many factors that play a role when humans try to split humans into value-laden categories and justify why some people are more valued than others, and some are just use objects, or even simply disposable beings with “junk status”. Patriarchy, religion and slavery have played significant historical roles in splitting humans into hierarchical categories, but Mbembe argues that the main factor in modern times was colonization. At the very same time that the European sovereign states were forming themselves, they also began to colonize and occupy other parts of the world. They believed that the rest of the world was inhabited by disorganized “savages” who could not be rational, autonomous and democratic enough to form regular states. In other words, indigenous peoples were not fully human and the colonial states did not think they needed to apply the same rules of autonomy and democracy to the parts of the world they began to colonize. This dehumanization of indigenous peoples was part of what made it possible to think of some people as use objects in service of others. This way of thinking was inherent to any kind of colonial occupation and its legacy is the kind of social splintering and splitting that today’s post-colonial states still rely on as the source of their biopower. He explains that all occupation is about taking control of a physical geographical space, as well as the bodies within it. Occupiers ignore or disrupt existing ways of using land and arranging property and they impose new kinds of spaces (new borders and boundaries, new activity zones, new enclaves for special interests). The purpose of these new configurations is broadly, splitting and separation for the sake of control and seclusion. These are aimed at 3

controlling the population so that indigenous bodies will serve as a labour force. Think of the creation of zones (the townships, homelands, white suburbia, gated communities and so on) in apartheid South Africa. The colonial occupiers tend to situate themselves on high ground from which surveillance is most effective, symbolizing not only self-protection, but also the power of the panoptic gaze to subdue others. In Mbembe’s words: “Under conditions of latemodern colonial occupation, surveillance is both inward and outward-oriented, the eye acting as weapon and vice versa.” Occupation also means the use of biopower to disrupt existing social relations and cultural habits and impose new hierarchies. It often includes the classification of people according to different categories; the splitting of the population into (often artificial) groups and subgroups, and then the prohibition of mixed marriages, and sometimes forced sterilization. One of the techniques of biopower is the construction of the “imaginary ego”, using racial, cultural, gender differences to justify these classifications. Stereotypes, narratives, histories and philosophies are manufactured to tell people who they are, where they come from (heredity) and how they are valued, to “legitimate” the power to apply different rules to different categories of people. Biopower, in short, works to subjugate certain kinds of bodies so that they will be more easily created and accepted as objects of use that serve the powerful. 6.

Sovereignty as “necropower”

When people’s bodies are thought of as use instruments, it becomes easier for a ruling body to ignore the destruction of uncontrollable or non-useful human bodies and populations, or even actively to dispose of unwanted people. This dark thought introduces the most extreme form of sovereignty as power over others, which Mbembe calls necropower. The desire for necropower goes hand in hand with the persistent “perception of the existence of the Other as an attempt on my life, as a mortal threat or absolute danger whose biophysical elimination would strengthen my potential to life and security.” This perception of the Other as an enemy converts politics to a form of “war” and “makes the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective.” War, becomes the means of achieving sovereignty. In other words, the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. To elaborate on this, Mbembe draws from Bataille’s argument that sovereignty is ultimately expressed as the right to kill. Bataille accepts that sovereignty has many forms, but argues that the most extremely sovereign persons or institutions are those who are capable of transgressing the customary prohibitions against killing and are willing to risk death. By contrast, in this view, those who need to avoid death, open themselves to subjugation. In short, the ultimate form of biopower is necropower; the power to kill or allow to live. Mbembe agrees with Michel Foucault that “the mechanisms of biopower are inscribed in the way all modern states function … the management, protection, and cultivation of life [is] coextensive with the sovereign right to kill. But if a powerful group’s sovereignty is expressed as the right to kill, we have to address an even darker question than the state’s objectification and instrumentalization of human bodies: how is it even possible to think of some people as unwanted, and of some people as more disposable than others? Again, Mbembe argues that the main factor in modern times was colonization. The European sovereign states emerged in the era of humanism (with its respect for equality, liberty and fraternity), and had to negotiate a careful internal balance between state sovereignty (power over people) and the autonomous citizens. But they denied any common bond of humanity 4

between themselves and the natives of other parts of the world. For them, this meant that all the rules, laws, controls and guarantees that states had to negotiate with their own people could just be suspended in the colonies. For them, killing a native African, Tasmanian, or American was not a matter of killing a fellow human. It was not considered to be murder. In this brutal sense some people are considered disposable because they are not fully human. This brutal attitude often drives the religious and cultural genocides too. To be Jewish, Infidel, Protestant, Palestinian, Polish Catholic, Ukranian, Cambodian Viet, Kazakh, Armenian, Tutsi, Oirat, Circassian, Bengali Hindu, Chechen, Cyrenachian, Herero, Nama, Amerindian, Selk’nam, Aboriginal Tasmanian … and so on and on, is to be less than human according to some other humans, and therefore justifiably disposable. It would be hard to find many people today who do not claim to believe in a common humanity across cultures and races. And yet, even today, even though attitudes have changed so dramatically, some people remain more disposable than others. Genocide is still a contemporary horror. This is why Mbembe argues that, instead of “autonomy”, the notion of “necropower” offers us a more adequate conceptual tool to understand what it means to be human in our contemporary world. In his words, necropower means that: “weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.” To get a better sense of what Mbembe means, we should consider some of the practical conditions where the right expose people to the risk of death is exercised. Where is necropower exercised? Who wields necropower? Who is subjected to necropower? 7.

Where is necropower exercised?

Mbembe argues that governments conventionally openly claim necropower (the right to kill) under circumstances of emergency and siege. A state of emergency is pronounced when a government believes that the state is under threat from external enemies. These are supposed to be exceptional instances of emergency, where unusual measures are needed to control the population. For Mbembe, however, emergency has become normalized, and power groups (not limited to state power) keep appealing to (and sometimes work to produce) “exception, emergency, and a fictionalized notion of the enemy.” A state of siege is more complex. It derives from a kind of civil war situation where it is impossible to distinguish between and separate external and internal enemies. The sovereign claims necropower, for example, to target the whole population of a village or town within its borders. Within the besieged spaces, people are cut off from the human world. As Mbembe describes it, military style rules, permissions and prohibitions are imposed on daily life, and people may move only within the range of the weapons held by the local military commanders. At the same time, the local population is disabled through “infrastructural warfare” (or “bulldozing”). Think of Palestine, Mbembe suggests, where systematic destruction occurs through: “demolishing houses and cities; uprooting olive trees; riddling water tanks with bullets; bombing and jamming electronic, communications; digging up roads; destroying electricity transformers; tearing up airport runways; disabling television and radio transmitters; smashing computers; ransacking cultural and politico-bureaucratic symbols of the proto-Palestinian state; looting medical equipment.” In a state of siege, the 5

long term damage to ordinary civilians is extremely high because a great deal of the necropower is exercised through invisible killing. Mbembe cites the example of the Pancevo petrochemical complex, destroyed in the Kosovo campaign. This act “left the vicinity so toxic with vinyl chloride, ammonia, mercury, naphtha and dioxin that pregnant women were directed to seek abortions, and all local women were advised to avoid pregnancy for two years.” To live under a state of siege is to experience a permanent condition of “being in pain”: fortified structures, military posts, and roadblocks everywhere; buildings that bring back painful memories of humiliation, interrogations, and beatings; curfews that imprison hundreds of thousands in their cramped homes every night from dusk to daybreak; soldiers patrolling the unlit streets, frightened by their own shadows; children blinded by rubber bullets; parents shamed and beaten in front of their families; soldiers urinating on fences, shooting at the rooftop water tanks just for fun, chanting loud offensive slogans, pounding on fragile tin doors to frighten the children, confiscating papers, or dumping garbage in the middle of a residential neighborhood; border guards kicking over a vegetable stand or closing borders at whim; bones broken; shootings and fatalities—a certain kind of madness.

8.

Who wields necropower?

Mbembe begins with the chilling observation that our contemporary political spaces have become so complex that states (with their regular, rule-bound armies) are not the only bearers of necropower. In some political spaces (including many African states), Mbembe notes: “a patchwork of overlapping and incomplete rights to rule emerges, inextricably superimposed and tangled, in which different de facto juridical instances are geographically interwoven and plural allegiances, asymmetrical suzerainties, and enclaves abound.” In these spaces, it is just not possible to establish which faction has a justifiable claim to ultimate authority (sovereignty). Further, Mbembe notes, necropower has transgressed the territorial boundaries of conventional states. In his words: “Coercion itself has become a market commodity. Military manpower is bought and sold on a market in which the identity of suppliers and purchasers means almost nothing.” This means that the claim to wield necropower has crossed from the public domain of state politics to the private domain. Mbembe notes that “Urban militias, private armies, armies of regional lords, private security firms, and state armies all claim the right to exercise violence or to kill.” It has even become possible for ordinary civilians and children to claim necropower, as: “Increasingly, the vast majority of armies are composed of citizen soldiers, child soldiers, mercenaries, and privateers.” For Mbembe, this widespread diffusion of necropower throughout the so-called private population suggests that contemporary human existence can be described in terms of the metaphor of “war machines” offered by Deleuze and Guattari. Mbembe thinks of “War machines” as mobile, flexible collections of armed people (“polymorphous and diffuse organizations”), that change shape, group together or split up, depending on tasks and circumstances. War machines and regular armies do not always clash, but are related in complex ways. A state army may incorporate an existing war machin...