6 thoughts on “Biopolitics”

1. This past week I had the opportunity to see the exhibition “Carbon 14: Climate is Culture” at the Royal Ontario Museum. The exhibition is programmed by the Cape Farewell Foundation which pairs artists and scientists to “promote cultural response to climate change.” (http://www.capefarewellfoundation.com/projects/carbon-14.html) As I explored the space I noticed just how profoundly this class has affected my perception of, and thinking on, issues related to the environment. Obviously “Climate is Culture” is, in and of itself, a bold claim, particularly in light of our discussions. To narrow in on this week’s topic, I found myself asking repeatedly: “what about the non-human?” Carbon 14 asserted the human factor in climate change, and the potential of “culture” to solve environmental problems, but without any accounting for the non-human. This week’s readings returned me to that question, posed in the first week by Robbins and the agency of the grass itself.

   It was interesting then, to do this week’s readings which all emphasized the importance of accounting for factors outside of the human. Of course this remains fraught ground because we must acknowledge our positionality, writing from the human perspective. Nevertheless, I found that the readings this week provided a way to look at case studies through the lens of the hybrid, as in Mitchell’s study of the mosquito in Egypt and Sunberg’s analysis of the desert and cats along the Mexico/United States border. I appreciated Mitchell’s description of his project, saying that while many in-depth studies of individual factors existed, none combined them all, as if they were “somehow incommensurable”. This seemed like a no-brainer on first read, that scholars should take all actors into account, but as I thought more I realized how little this is actually done. I wonder what analyses that I have read, or written, in the past would look like after shifting the gaze to non-human actors, as part of a hybrid examination.

   I am eager to think more about the connection between feminism and discussion of the non-human. It makes sense that, as Escobar explains: “the more social groups learn to denaturalize taken for granted constructions of gender, sexuality, ethnic identity, the more open they are to new relational configurations in connection with enabling networks.” Where an opening of what falls where in the “nature/culture” binary allows for further cracks to form, and more actors to be accounted for. In returning to the question of representation though, there do seem to be pitfalls associated with looking at the non-human, of ascribing human characteristics to non-human actors. In terms of feminism, one challenge was identified by Emel and Wolch: “Recognizing similar sources of oppression for both women and animals, ecofeminists have attempted to walk a thin line between not romanticizing nature or animals and yet refusing a
   reductionist reason in such considerations.”

   I wonder how identifying non-human actors has worked in case studies from previous weeks, for example in environmental racism or feminist political ecology?

   Additionally, thinking back to Lawn People and our initial discussion of the “agency of the lawn”, how can this week’s readings augment that discussion?

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2. I found Escobar’s paper, the comments by different scholars and Escobar’s reply very helpful in understanding the ongoing debates in political ecology on the social construction of nature. The article, drawing on many different concepts, such as antiessentialism, structures of power, nature regimes, governmentality, local knowledge, and STS, tries to articulate an approach, termed antiessentialist political ecology, that recognizes the existence of a multiplicity of cultural and social constructions while also acknowledging nature’s biophysical reality. I found especially interesting the idea that the different nature regimes are connected and influenced by each other, which leads, according to Escobar, to hybrid natures. However, one of the questions that arose, as highlighted by Hogson, is that what type of nature regime in our globalized societies is not influenced or shaped by a cultural ‘hybridization’? As she rightly puts it, “does some pristine organic nature exist somewhere in the world, untouched by capitalism, imperialism, global media, or other processes of contact, change, and challenge? (p. 19)” Furthermore, I agree with the comments made by Hogson, Rocheleau and Leff regarding the problematic of using different analytical tools to analyze dissimilar nature regimes. Most importantly, such an analytical framework, as Escobar acknowledges in its reply, “emphasizes the differences rather than the connections among regimes.” Keeping this issue in mind, is it possible to successfully employ the same frameworks to analyze different nature regimes that are dissimilar to the extent that they are considered as radical alterity?

   Witnessing the Animal Moment portrays the rise of the animal movement and its importance in social theory. Emel and Wolch start with an in-depth discussion on the different issues, including the food system, the massive habitat destruction caused by capitalist, the animal trade and the biotechnologies. They then depict different activist movements, arguing that their focus is mostly oriented towards wilderness protection and animal rights. The essay becomes relevant for our weekly readings when it starts to explain why these issues/movements, coupled with the critiques on modernism, led to an “opening [of] theoretical space for animals,” especially in disciplines such as feminism and postmodernism. I found especially interesting to learn how these movements have “led to the legitimation of animals and human-animals interactions as appropriate subjects for scholarly investigation.” The discussion on the concept of dualism and how social theory has historically been overly rooted in a ‘sharply demarcated sphere of otherness’ was very relevant to contextualize the papers by Mitchell and Sundberg.

   Mitchell’s Can the Mosquito Speak? depicts an interesting example of how non-human agents can have an important role to play in shaping political, economical and social development of a region. He successfully demonstrates how the invasion of Egypt by the mosquito Anopheles gambiae has had a tremendous impact on the country’s development. He argues that the mosquitoes have not been considered in previous narratives on Egypt’s development because of their status of non-human; they “belong to nature” and therefore “cannot speak” (p. 50). By drawing on the mosquitoes role in hampering the development of Egypt, Michell criticizes social scientists for focusing on the binary relationship between human and non-humans and for overlooking non-human agency. He effectively shows that the development of Egypt – dam construction, the war, the sugar cane industry, the politics, the spread of malaria – can only be explained by a narrative that consider the interconnection between various complex processes involving both human and non-human agency. I was very surprised to learn that the role of the mosquitoes in transmitting malaria to a large portion of Egyptian population was not considered as an important actor in the country’s development. This essay represents a great example of political ecology that draws on a wealth of complex and interconnected historical, technological, ecological and political factors, both at the local (e.g., the impact of malaria on the cell) and the global (e.g., the role of the United States in Egypt’s economical and political development) scale. How many other studies have omitted to take into considerations the role of non-humans (e.g., invasive species, pests)? What are some other examples of complex interactions between human and non-human agency?

   I thought that Sundberg’s clear definitions of the different concepts (e.g., posthumanism, agency, collective) were very helpful in allowing an understanding of her broader methodological framework. I found especially useful her description of posthumanist political ecology as a discipline that “refuses to treat nonhuman nature as the thing over which human struggles and instead builds on and enacts a relational approach in which all bodies are participants in constituting the world.” Like Mitchell, Sundberg considers nonhuman agency even though they “do not speech or act in the way we assume humans do” (p. 322). However, her approach, instead of considering the historical role of various actors and processes, considers the complex stories of daily practices, the specific politics of different sites and the relations and partnerships between the different actors, both human and non-humans. I found especially interesting the concept of “collective”, which shows that the association between different actors (i.e., south Texas Thornscrub collective and the boundary enforcement collective) are crucial in shaping the politics of boundary control. I had never perceived conservation NGOs as ‘collaborating’ with the species they try to protect. I found this approach really helpful in pushing further the analysis of structures of powers and politics. I also found very interesting the analysis of how the dessert greatly affects geopolitical condition at the borderlands. However, I was wondering if a posthumanism approach was essential for an analysis to consider the dessert’s importance in affected boundary enforcement. It is really necessary to consider the dessert as a “participants in socio-political relations” that exercise agency, or would it be sufficient to regard it as an independent natural barrier “over which humans struggle” in a way that affects socio-political relations?

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3. Arturo Escobar’s ‘After nature: Steps to Antiessentialist Political Ecology’ (1999) is an attempt to harness the epistemological possibilities implied by ‘the final decline of the ideology of naturalism’ (i) and crisis of natures identity. From a peculiar and seemingly nuanced understanding of constructivism Escobar sets out to build the epistemological outline of a anthropological political ecology that acknowledges and intertwines the cultural and the biological. He argues that this context (keep in mind that it is 1999) entails an ontological transformation that will allow for new combinations of nature and culture to be permissible and practical. His aim is to answer to the need of a view of nature that goes beyond the truisms of constructivism and manages to theorize how nature is socially constructed and a biophysical reality. His most interesting point is that perhaps acknowledging this and building a theoretical structure for understanding it will lead us to the recognition of a plurality of natures ‘in which both the social and the biological have central, albeit not essential, roles to play.’
   Escobar builds on this epistemological –and ontological- foundation s theory of ‘Regimes of nature’. These regimes represent a sort of taxonomy of the ways in which history and biology articulate. He then suggests a univocal rigid disciplinary and interpretative scheme for each one of these regimes. This to me seems constricting and as Dorothy Hodgson pointed in her comment to Escobar’s article, tautological, since each form of analysis will necessary discover the regime it set out to analyze (19). This is not being naïve and thinking that researchers do their work without any preconception or pre-established theoretical frames, but what Escobar proposes is much more constricting. Furthermore, the idea of these regimes is already rigid enough or is the notion of hybridity meant to solve this impermeability?
   In ‘Witnessing the Animal Moment’ Jody Emel and Jennifer Wolch (1999) firstly explore the specific context and atmosphere that for a few decades then had incorporated animal in many spheres of political discussion. From the meat and farming industry controversies to exotic animal poaching they cover in a descriptive way the majority of the arenas where animals and often other non-human have become the center of political debate. This context is then placed next to postmodern critique from the 1970s onward. This, Emel and Wolch argue, poses a new opportunity for thinking about animals. The ‘cultural turn’ allowed us to see how ‘… around the cultural landscape, the animal is everywhere.’ (523). They argue the induction of animal as part of a valid topic of scholarly work seems to be the perfect accomplice for the postmodern project since the position of the animal in opposition to human in order to define human is questioned the possibility of decentering the unitary subject becomes available. Furthermore the animal is also complicit in unveiling the myth of modern progress by for example exploring the Frankensteinian implications of biotechnology and genetic engineering or showing the hidden side the institutionalization of animal dependency.
   In Timothy Mitchell’s ‘Can the mosquito speak?’ (2002) we witness a very different animal moment. In this account of the 1942 Egyptian context Mitchell attempts to bring into play at equally decisive roles human and non-human actors. In this case the new, often ignored actor is the Anopheles gambiae, a carrier of malaria that irrupted in the already vulnerable peasant population in southern Egypt. It was estimated that between one and two hundred thousand people died in the epidemic. The elements that brought about the disasters, Mitchell claims, are the most important representative of 20th century transformations: techno-economic power, chemicals, malaria and war. In a sort of hybrid analysis he attempts to bring all of these elements into a single explanation. He argues that the connections between the epidemic, the war and famine are also dependent of rivers, dams, food webs, fertilizers and the politics of it all. His point is that in order to fully comprehend a context as that of mid 20th century Egypt, social analysis has to make the issues of power and agency part of the question instead of a given previous knowledge and with this allow for hybrid agencies to be considered.
   Juanita Sundberg’s ‘Diabolic Caminos in the Desert & Cat Fights on the Río’’ is a clear attempt at addressing the role of non-human actors in sociopolitical processes. In order to do this she firstly addresses the need to reconceptualize agency. Sundberg contends that this can be dode by harnessing the framework of political ecology and post-humanist theory. Once these perspectives give room to understanding how the human and the non-human are mutually constituted in and through social relations (32) there is a need to reframe agency from notions of conscious intention to notions of the capacity for affect. Thus, the traces that actors leave can be much more varied than those of the human actor (returning to Mitchell, the mosquito cannot speak). Sundberg applies this notions to the case study of boundary enforcement in the Mexico-U.S. border, where, she argues, a series of non human actors played as important roles as the INS, the border patrol and border crossers. The inaccessible dessert landscape, the ocelot and the jaguarundi played in a vast network of actors and were said to determined –or help to determine- the escalations of post 9/11 boundary enforcement. Sundberg argues that for post-humanist political ecologies the issue is a relational one: “all beings… are treated as constituted through sociopolitical relations.

   Questions:
   How can we account for non-human agency? Is our understanding of agency always mediated by human agency? Is the concept of hybrid agency more useful? Or do we only need to account for diverse ways to establish historical-biological relations?

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4. While this week’s readings sit under the umbrella of ‘biopolitics’ (the governance of life), I thought they all provided powerful examples of the re/turn to understanding the agency of the nonhuman. To a significant degree, all were concerned with the enrolment of nonhuman actors into webs of explanation or *collectives* (as per Sundberg) and demonstrate in different ways the approach of Actor Network Theory. In this sense, I found them illuminating case studies in methodologies and approaches to bringing nonhuman elements into explanation.

   Emel and Wolch (1998) provide a harrowing account of the ways in which humans and animals have shaped – and continue to shape – each other, through networks of trade, disease, technology, and social movements. They account for the multiple ways in which our lives intersect with animals, from colonial expansion and national agriculture, through to domestic animals and entertainment. Their unique act of assembly in this chapter constitutes a powerful political intervention – I really hadn’t thought about all the pieces fitting together in this way, bringing the ethical back into the economic. It made me think about metaphors for ‘biological economies’ or ‘industrial metabolism’, and about how such terms – while analytically interesting – also impose their own politics by framing things in terms of labour and energy rather than ethical orientations to the life and death of other beings. From this assembly, they discuss two solidarities (perhaps similar to collectives) that have formed to campaign for animal rights in different ways – the conservation/wilderness movement (which seeks the protection of the species-within-ecosystems) and the animal rights movement (which seeks rights-of-non-suffering).

   Escobar (1999) outlines an ‘antiessentialist’ political ecology which, in my view, is fraught with tension. The idea, if I understand correctly, is to come up with a framework to understand socionatural relations without ascribing essential qualities to nature or society. Sure, I guess that makes sense. So he proposes organic, capitalist and techno natures as vehicles through which such understandings might be built. He highlights that such vehicles contain their own internal logics and dynamics, and thus nature’s role is not pregiven or essential but enrolled in multiple parallel narratives, all ‘held in tension’. In a way, this presages Mitchell’s (2002) chapter which searches for coherent ‘circulations’ (eg of capital) which can guide analysis. The tension I have with Escobar’s argument is articulated in the commentaries following it, which are 1) nature is not actually ascribed agency beyond these social constructionist frames, it is perhaps *too* antiessentialist, and 2) the ontological distinctions between the categories are quite arbitrary and imposed by Escobar himself, implying that relations are more coherent within than across these regimes, thus perhaps becoming socially or analytically essentialist(?)

   Mitchell (2002) makes some powerful inroads into bringing the nonhuman – mosquitoes, chemicals, dams, cesspools, sugar cane biology and so on – into his explanation of the multifaceted human disasters of war, famine and malaria in Egypt in the 1940s. He takes great pains to articulate the distance between intent and effect of human actors in the world, making the case that social theoretic frameworks cannot presume to capture and represent the logic of intent in order to reproduce the world. Quite simply, too many things get in the way. Further, he employs a kind of epistemic approach to examine the shifting terrain of expertise and authority which co-constituted these disasters, which in a sense could be seen as operationalizing a kind of multi-layered explanation advocated by Escobar.

   Finally, Sundberg (2011) provides a cogent (if somewhat implicit) example of Actor Network Theory, which approaches non-humans (deserts, roads, ocelots, stadium lights, illegal drugs) as actors which can change the nature of the collective. I really appreciate the clarity of the argument and its evidence, as well as its humility (which is refreshing!). What it did make me wonder, though, was whether ocelots really have agency in this scheme, or whether the ‘thick-brush-as-habitat argument’ constitutes the agency of ocelots rather than of conservation scientists translating the interests of ocelots. Certainly ocelots exist and have habitats, but real actual ocelots don’t feature here… In the context of biopower it raises some interesting questions about the governance of non-human life, and about various attempts to build/expand protagonistic and antagonistic collectives to strengthen certain trajectories of habitat management.

   QUESTIONS – what rationalises all of these papers as examples of ‘biopower’? In what ways does this framework add value to our understanding of their arguments?

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5. Reflection on Biopolitics and the non-human
   Colin Sutherland

   While Escobar’s article After Nature: Stepts to an Anti-essentialist Political Ecology (1999) set the stage for the rest of the readings in terms of how we approach the non-human, I found myself far more attracted to the practiced theory found in Mitchell (2002) and Sundberg (2011) and the more historical approach of unpacking the non-human by Emel and Wolch.

   Mitchell’s (2002)) chapter Can Mosquitos Speak? brings up a number of issues with just stating the title. Immediately the reader is asked a question that encourages self-reflection on how we perceive non-human actors. Using the word ‘speak’ contests (as Wolch and Emel point out) the human action we associate only with human agents. Mitchell’s paper digs deeper than this highlighting the invisibility non-human actors have in our histories and their labeling as passive elements of a human-centric landscape. I found Mitchell’s chapter different from what is looked at by the other authors because even though the mosquito is shown to have an impact on history and the development of Egypt, there doesn’t seem to be a more active conversation on the limits of non-human agency (if there are any). Instead it functions as an exercise in showing the profound impact non-human agents can have in what I found to still be a human centric analysis of history. Even thought the mosquito was not looked at in the history of Egypt before, I wouldn’t say that the importance of the non-human has never been explored. While a different context and a different intensity I would say that Canadian history’s emphasis on the centrality of water ways and non-human actors like the fishery and the beaver pelt industry were at the very least nods to what could be achieved with the approach taken by Mitchell. It would be interesting to see if there is a sense of agency bestowed upon these non-human prior to the political ecology project.

   Sundberg (2011) I found took these notions further through the use of a post-humanist conception of agency. While not only framing the agency of non-human actors within the existence of their own agency, I find this approaches’ acknowledgement of a broad range of agents. While still focusing on ‘human problems’ like border conflicts, Sundberg shows how these ‘human problems’ can be reframed as being important to the non-humans, like the ocelots for example. I found this co-existence of problems on the boarder to be really helpful although it makes me wonder what a more non-human centric problem would look like. How might a political ecologist approach an issue like sea pollution with a point of view more weighted in the non-human? How could other disciplines inform this type of approach? While I don’t imagine it is possible for us to imagine this, I do wonder how might a blue whale analyze the history of plastics in the Ocean? How might the whale frame the human?

   Finally, Emel and Wolch (1998) in their review of the context in which animals, a specific group of non-human actors, have been treated in western society touch on a wide variety of issues that can be explored. While I found this chapter to be much more informative than analytical I thought it was a great starting point for a conversation on the experiences of animals within the human context. Of interest to me were issues like the anthropomorphizing of animals in popular culture and even education settings, the limitations of dualisms, the interesting ways in which we (humans) frame our dependency on animals. Is anthropomorphizing animals liberating or constraining? Is it really better to be framed within human agency? Or is it possible that non-human agency could be perceived as ‘better’? If there is a difference between humans and non-humans, can we say there is a difference between the non-human-biotic and the non-human-abiotic?

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6. Drat, posted in the wrong section yesterday…sorry!

   The selection that we’ve read this week is so theoretically, and empirically rich that I hardly know where to begin. I’ve never read anything specific to animal geographies before; its exciting to have so much new terrain to explore.

   Obviously, one key aspect that emerges in these selections is the matter of agency, which seems to be a primary concern of both Mitchell and Sundberg. Sundberg argues that we have to understand agency beyond intention, positing agency as a “doing-in-relation, a collective enactment rather than an individual attribute or intention” (331). Similarly, Mitchell asks us to question our assumptions about agency and understand the “kinds of hybrid agencies…[that] are able to portray their interactions as history, as human expertise overcoming nature” (53). Over and over in this class we’ve run up against the question of how we understand nonhuman agency and what place it has within political ecology. Conversely, I think we’ve talked little as to how introducing different notions of nonhuman agency call us to question how we understand our own. How do our conceptions of human agency change when we do not privilege the human? Is that even possible?

   In contrast, Emel and Wolch seem less interested in matters of agency; rather, I would posit that their aim is to ‘make visible’ the “the thoroughly modern instrumental rationality that characterizes contemporary human-animals dependency [that] has rendered animals both spatially and morally invisible” (527). Essentially, they’re I think trying to treat animals in a similar way to how poststructuralists feminists/postmodernists have treated matters of race, class, gender and other fields of difference. I find this approach useful, but I also find it troubling, in that it deconstructs without offering new actions. In contrast, thinking about agency as a ‘doing-in-relation’ is appealing. In some sense, it grants us agency by compelling us to reconsider what it means.

   One thing I noted in Escobar is that a few of his sources make references to the role of spirituality in conceptions of nature, such that the spiritual is on equal footing with the biophysical and social in some cultures. This is interesting, and I wonder if it’s because of Escobar’s training as an anthropologist that he’s more likely to incorporate nature/spirituality than a Geographer considering similar issues. In the end though, I can’t stop thinking about an art project that I’ve encountered the past two summers when I’ve been in Churchill, Manitoba. The project is titled ‘Becoming Beluga’; it’s a group of artists whose primary objective is to explore interspecies interaction with a school of beluga whales that summers at the mouth of the Churchill estuary. In essence, the artists experiment with different ways of ‘performing’ for the whales, primarily through music, though past performances have included a contortionist. When I was there, they were also in the process of making a whale-sized neoprene suit in order to be able to swim with the whales as a whale. On the one hand, I think this is an interesting moment of exploring and playing with the boundaries that separate whales and humans. On the other hand, it just, well, strikes me as ridiculous. The project itself sits in a really interesting context as well; much of Churchill’s tourist industry is built on animal sight-seeing. I don’t yet have a concluding statement to offer, but I do think there’s a lot there to think about.

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