Generation Bubble

Can greater participation in the US economy lead to diminished political standing? Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben might just answer “Yes.”

Like the plot of some reform-minded Victorian scribbler’s novel, it seems that the usually suspects in the boardrooms of Wall Street are once again poised to cash in on lavish bonuses despite the ongoing economic recession and the collateral damage it’s visiting on employment numbers. How nice it must be to have the productivity of an entire citizenry (the portion of which that still has jobs, anyway) as an insurance policy against imprudent speculation!

If you’re familiar with the work of Italian philosopher and critic Giorgio Agamben (he’s all the rage in lit-crit circles these days), particularly his concept of Homo sacer, you know that Homo sacer is a juridical designation that has its root in Roman law and applies to individuals who for legal reasons cannot be sacrificed. That is, they’ve been juridically divested of qualia which conventionally apply to them in ordinary circumstances, like, say, those of a law-abiding American citizen who enjoys rights and protections secured her by the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Agamben introduces a distinction in what French theorist and intellectual historian Michel Foucault takes to be a unitary status on the part of the living human individual; Foucault’s disciplined subject represents bios, the organic expression of interlocking discourses that animate her subjectivity, whereas Homo sacer represents zoë, “bare life” that’s been placed outside regimes and discourses by the very powers from which these regimes and discourses flow. Homo sacer as subject is no longer subject to the law, or, more specifically, is a subject who is subject to the law that no longer applies to her. The power of this designation resides with the sovereign. He can decide on who or what counts as  zoë or bios and can determine what Agamben calls “the state of exception.”

Homo sacer, life that may be killed without the charge of homicide being leveled at the perpetrator, denotes “persons sentenced to death,” writes Giorgio Agamben,

the entry into which meant the definitive exclusion from the political community. Precisely because they were lacking almost all the rights and expectations that we customarily attribute to human existence, and yet were still biologically alive, they came to be situated in a limit zone between life and death, inside and outside, in which they were no longer anything but bare life.

A death sentence as ushering one out of inclusion into “definite exclusion from the political community” crucially does not result in any sort of annihilation or juridical limbo. Rather exclusion from the political community means inclusion in the community of those excluded from the political community. Such proscribed individuals, in other words, though they lack juridical standing as possessors of “the rights and expectations […] customarily attribute[d] to human existence,” remain effectively human in the biological and ontological terms.

Those condemned to death thus represent a limit case in the problematic of state versus individual sovereignty. In reserving unto itself the right to sentence a person to death, the state betrays that its sovereignty rests on the power effectively to confer a fuller, more robust identity to individuals than that which falls to them by dint of existence. That which nature distributes promiscuously and in more or less equal measure — the characteristics marking a being as human — the state diminishes by subordinating it to that which it distributes according to a power–knowledge calculus devoted to maintaining the state’s power over individuals. Juridical designations qualifying the individual for inclusion in the political community take precedence over the empirical designations qualifying the individual for inclusion in the human species, which become simply the hallmarks of “bare life.” Respiring, metabolizing, circumambulating, descending from human parents, thinking and speaking — these and other signature characteristics become necessary but insufficient qualities of the human being as a fully fledged member of the political community. Bare life, the creature as creature, unembellished with the politico-juridical designations that are the province of the state, is thus forced into fundamental non-coincidence with itself as a result of the state’s jussive discourse of supreme sovereignty. Bare life, as something less than life, becomes neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for political inclusion. It designates, rather, “a limit zone between life and death” at once “inside and outside” the state’s regimes of political inclusion.

I therefore cannot help but think Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the state of exception quite apposite when it comes to everything that’s going on in the current recession and the government’s seemingly ineffective, and perhaps detrimental, means to address the problem. The sovereign’s organs, in this case, the Federal Reserve System and the Treasury, determine the states of exception that lead to thrifty and prudent people getting screwed by the inevitable inflation to follow. The sovereign and homo sacer, used here in a more attenuated sense as he or she who has been placed outside fundamental economic laws that punish improvident behavior, occupy spaces beyond the thresholds that contain prudent householders and renters, whose own financial well-being has been thrown on the fire in order to deal with the aftermath of the housing bubble.

Condemned property: American homeowners' sacrificial status.

Troubling thing is, though, these thresholds tend to drift and to contract, until the very status invoked as the ideal — “homeowner” as fully realized American citizen, an ideal assiduously cultivated since the beginning of the now collapsed real-estate bubble — no one any longer actually has. Democratizing access to a certain status, in other words, effectively destroys that status. I’m tempted to regard the very concept of “ownership society” and the ensuing financial debacle as expressions of sovereign power, which, because we live in a representational republic (theoretically, at least), is not so straightforwardly autocratic, but perhaps just as efficacious in its deployment as any fiat or fatwa. Every citizen without felony convictions over the age of eighteen has the right to vote, of course, but property ownership has always been the burr under the saddle of universal suffrage. Recall, for instance, all the agitation with the Reform Bill of 1832, which proposed extending the franchise to those whose property was assessed at ten pounds, and not just leaving it a privilege of landowners. The whole political history of the past three centuries is one of greater inclusion in the electoral process.

Yet the “ownership society” seems to me to move in the opposite direction, one in which homeowners are in some respect fuller fledged citizens than renters, the former so much bios to the latter’s zoë. While this sort of expression of sovereign power — a president’s initiative and the regulatory and financial instruments behind it — may be distasteful in and of itself, it also has an incredibly sinister down side we’ve seen in the form of foreclosures, defaults, “torch outs,” and, most distressingly, the post-bubble Hoovervilles popping up in bosky suburbs like Ontario, California and Bellevue, Washington. The pressures of negative equity and unaffordable mortgage rate upticks have created new ranks of Homo sacer as they are demoted from the bios of homeowner to the zoë of homeless. Their demotion in status, along with the habitation choices confronting them (squatting or tent cities), bear an eerie resemblance to slum dwellers of developing-world megalopolises.

Consider Slovenian theorist Slavoj Zizek’s remarks on this. Working with Agamben’s concepts, Zizek observes that

a slum-dweller, much more than a refugee, is Homo sacer, the systematically generated “living dead” of global capitalism. He is a kind of negative to the refugee: a refugee from his own community, the one whom the power is not trying to control through concentration, where […] those in power do the concentrating while the refugees do the camping, but pushed into the space of out-of-control; in contrast to the Foucauldian micro-practices of discipline, a slum-dweller is the one with regard to whom the Power renounces its right to exert full control and discipline, finding it more appropriate to let him dwell in the twilight zone of slums.

With Zizek’s remarks in mind, I think we begin to see why the Federal Reserve has devoted itself to propping up the financial sector at the taxpayers’ expense. And I think that it has to do at least in part with the ideology behind the “ownership society,” which to my mind is simply a permutation of the ideology of consumer society in general. This ideology imposes greater conditions on full participation in society than simply having been born or naturalized in the United States, paying taxes, and avoiding brushes with the Law. It’s similar to when President Bush exhorted citizens shortly after 9/11 to express their patriotism by shopping: participation in civic life has been conflated with participation in the economy. This is an exceedingly foreboding development from political point of view, because it implies that citizenship is something you must purchase, not something that belongs to you by natural right. Certainly a homeless person sleeping in the park theoretically enjoys the same rights as a McMansion owning middle manager, but the elimination of welfare benefits since the Reagan years betrays a collective political attitude far different than the one we publicly pay lip service to. Anything impeding one’s attainment of middle-class status is seen as somehow undemocratic, un-American, and believing this plays right into politicians’ hands. Republican supply-siders, for instance, believe that high marginal tax rates somehow limits the average persons’ success. And out goes the baby with the bath water in the form of disintegrating infrastructure, budget-starved entitlements, and, most importantly, regulations meant to curb excesses and thus mitigate risk. So, as less risk is spread broadly across society, more of it falls on the individual, which in turn affects the premium attached to middle-class security.

What I think we’re seeing in the body politic is something similar to what we see in Internet-access and cellphone markets, namely, “tiered” citizenship akin to the tiered services one can buy at different price points. The ideology of the “ownership society,” in other words, equates citizenship with consumption. And once one accepts this as the condition of her citizenship, her status as bios becomes subject to the vicissitudes of the market until such an exorbitant price is attached to it that she can no longer preserve that status. The otherworld of slums or tent cities then await her, where she wanders anonymously in the gloaming with the other bare life sharing her fate.

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