“We are the people who do not count”: Thinking the disruption of the biopolitics of abandonment
PhD Thesis by Anna Selmeczi, April 2012
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 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.
Click here to download this thesis in pdf.
