BIOS: Life, Death, Politics; "Priscilla Wald on Cells, Genes, and Stories"

Left: Henrietta Lacks and her descendants

[As part of our continuing coverage of last week’s conference, BIOS: Life, Death, Politics, Kim O’Neill writes on Priscilla Wald’s keynote address]

Priscilla Wald on Cells, Genes, and Stories

Written by Kim O’Neill (English)

Priscilla Wald’s work inspires us to look for the common narratives that connect seemingly disparate texts. In her April 30 keynote lecture she connected Hannah Arendt and Franz Fanon to the life story of Henrietta Lacks and the fiction of Octavia Butler. She argued that, “The creation of new and unfamiliar organic entities, such as cell lines, commingled with the haunting images of human beings stripped of their humanity [challenge], in their uncanniness, conventional definitions of human being and humanity.”

In the post-World War II, mid-Cold War United States, the cervical cancer cells of an African-American woman fueled biomedical innovation alongside scientific racism. In the same moment, ambivalent advances in medicine and technology inspired apocalyptic speculations among science fiction writers. Wald suggested that the atomic bomb and the immortal cell both forced Americans of this era and today to rethink who counted as human and whether humanity can survive.

For scholars, including participants in this semester’s Unit for Criticism faculty-grad seminar on Bios, Wald helps to situate Foucault’s biopolitics in an eerily familiar context. The threat of nuclear and biological terrorism in the Far and Middle East still stirs fear for the security of Americans and others inside U.S. borders. Wald described the racist language that commentators used to label Lacks’ “HeLa” cells promiscuous, even dangerous. In awe of the cells’ longevity, their ability to thrive and to travel (as far as the U.S.S.R.), journalists registered shock about the blackness of the Hela cells’ progenitor but ignored the living family members who received neither monetary nor medical benefit from the research the cells enabled.

Neither Lacks nor Lacks’ descendents could own her cells, but ownership of those same cells proved troublesome to the researchers who could. Lacks’ death evinces the racial inequality at the center of U.S. medical history and troubles assumptions about cells, genes, and DNA as the building blocks of humanness. Lacks’ story also reminds us that human rights serve as an imperfect antidote to social death, since her human life was less important to researchers than her cellular viability: the cancer cells that ”immortalized” Henrietta Lacks also killed her.

Wald’s presentation encouraged tough questions rather than definitive answers. Listeners asked her about the role of the state in destabilizing our sense of human being, about the pre-WWII stories that inform that anxious cultural narratives, and about how newer innovations like epigenetics/epigenomics have changed or reinforced the story. I asked about the discrete contexts that shape particular national or local anxieties.

To my mind, Wald’s arguments help us see how desperately Americans want to understand themselves as members of a global community. If people around the world hoped that science could explain human being, they worried also that humanness, and with it human acts like genocide, were fundamentally inexplicable. For me, this Cold War story reveals all that its contemporaries couldn’t know. So I wonder what they did with the narratives that reminded them just how unknowable humanity had become.

These questions bring me back to where Wald began, to the story of Henrietta Lacks. As Wald explained how the medical community appropriated Lacks’ cells and distorted her story, I was temporarily distracted by déjà vu. I had just heard this story…but where? And why didn’t I know that Lacks was black?

The answer to both questions is Stephen Colbert. On March 16 of this year Colbert interviewed Rebecca Skloot, web journalist and author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Her 5-minute segment on The Colbert Report explains how Lacks died of cervical cancer and how her impoverished family still cannot afford health insurance, ironies that trouble the medical advances that Lacks’ cells made possible and the prodigious profit that those same cells afforded biomedical companies, researchers, and stockholders. If Skloot failed to mention that Lacks was African American, it is probably the fault of Colbert, who, in a humorous mode, diverted the story to that of his own immortal cells, which researchers collected and then threw away.

Cell celebrity and celebrity cells have become a television sensation, with Henry Louis Gates chronicling black celebrity genealogies and genetics for PBS, NBC doing the same for the likes of Sarah Jessica Parker, and George Lopez revealing (un)shocking ethnic heritages on his own show. But for Priscilla Wald, Henrietta Lacks is not a deracinated exemplar who paved the way for celebrity genetics, but a subject whose story of injustice haunts U.S. culture.

I conclude, therefore, by asking how we can interpret this new chapter in the long story of Henrietta Lacks. Do we read the reemergence of Lacks and her cells in stories by Skloot and Wald as a kind of narrative revolt against the Cold War stories that tried to contain her? What cultural work do these new tellings do? Does Lacks unearth fissures in biopolitical discipline, or does the ongoing conflation of genetic material with human origin, which we see in celebrity cell TV shows, illustrate a cultural regression back to Cold War assumptions about being human?

BIOS: Life, Death, Politics; "On Criminals, Enemies, and Enemy Combatants": Paul Kahn’s Keynote Lecture

Left: Guards lead a detainee at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base

[In our continuing coverage of the 4/30-5/1 conference, BIOS: Life, Death, Politics, Michael Verderame writes on the afternoon keynote lecture by Paul Kahn (Yale Law)]

Written by Michael Verderame (English)

Paul Kahn’s keynote address focused on two categories often opposed to one another in legal and political thought—the enemy and the criminal. The crucial distinction between the two categories, for Kahn, lies in their relationship to the circle of social concern. Enemies exist outside the boundaries of society, and therefore the state can legitimately exercise violence, even lethal violence, against them. Criminals, on the other hand, despite their transgressions, retain membership in the social order, and the state is restricted in what modes of punishment it can properly exercise.

The preservation of the enemy/criminal distinction, Kahn argued, is crucial to the political imaginary underlying the modern liberal, paternalist state; the presence or absence of “love,” in his words, is what enables societies to tell the difference between criminals (deserving of punishment but still members of the social “family”) and enemies. The most egregious instances of torture and abuse of civil liberties arise when the distinction is collapsed or blurred, as in the case of treason against the state or the War on Terror’s new enemy/criminal hybrid category, the “unlawful combatant.”

Kahn’s intriguing and eclectic talk ranged from American Revolutionary War history to the constitution of the European Union (which, in its hypertechnicality, Kahn sees an attempt to eliminate the sovereign while retaining the rule of law) to contemporary films such as The Matrix, Taken, and Inglourious Basterds. The common thread in Kahn’s historical narrative is the use of violence, and the “sacrificial history” of wounded, maimed, and dead bodies, to symbolically reconstitute the law. This link was made explicit in Abraham Lincoln’s speech commemorating veterans of the Revolutionary War, in which Lincoln described veterans’ bodies as literally embodying a “religion of law.”

In the lively discussion following Professor Kahn’s talk, several people asked about the conspicuous absence of race in his narrative about the construction of enemies and criminals, and indeed at times Kahn did seem close to endorsing a narrative of progress that covers up racial difference. Kahn repeatedly situated his remarks in the context of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but another contemporary political context sprang immediately to mind for me: the current hostility towards undocumented immigrants, culminating in repressive legislation in Arizona. Undocumented immigrants, like “enemy combatants,” trouble the distinction the state attempts to preserve between criminals and enemies. Marked as racially and ethnically other, they are defined both as “criminals” (for being present in the country illegally) and, increasingly as “enemies”—a foreign presence, almost an invading army, that threatens to transform the cultural character of the polity and is therefore undeserving of the due process protections normally afforded to criminal defendants.

I wonder how this increasing figuration of undocumented immigrants as “enemies” can be assimilated into Kahn’s narrative, which seems to paint the narrative of American history as over time broadening, not restricting, the scope of social concern.

It seems to me that the relationship between criminals and enemies has become increasingly porous in other ways in the last few decades. The creation of a homeland security apparatus, complete with color-coded terror alerts, explicitly militarizes the domestic political body in new ways. For the last few decades it’s been common to speak of America’s inner cities as “war zones” and for major cities’ police departments increasingly to adopt military tactics and procedures. Political responses to the September 11, 2001 attacks (sometimes coded as criminal and other times as acts of war) also highlighted the instability of these categories.

John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban,” provides an especially intriguing test case for Kahn’s theory of parental love as underlying the distinction between criminals and enemies. The uncertain legal status of the prosecution of the white, upper-middle-class, quintessentially “American” youth who chose to take up arms with the Taliban, became a Rohrschach test of the limits of liberal paternalism. Was Lindh a “criminal,” who had violated his country’s laws but remained within its sphere of concern, or was he an “enemy,” who had aligned himself against the United States and forfeited his membership in the polity?

In the end, Professor Kahn steered clear of making normative judgments about the categories of criminal and enemy, instead charting the beginnings of a genealogy of how these concepts have functioned in our juridico-political imagination. But I wonder if it possible to envision a state which classified neither criminals nor enemies, or must both categories be classified in order to constitute a state in the first place?

BIOS: Life, Death, Politics; Closing Roundtable Gilberto Rosas, "Illiberal Technologies and Liberal Societies"

[As part of our continuing coverage of the April 30-May 1 conference, BIOS: Life, Death, Politics, we are pleased to publish a version of Gilberto Rosas’ contribution to the Closing Roundtable]

“Illiberal Technologies and Liberal Societies”

Written by Gilberto Rosas (Anthropology, Latina/Latino Studies)

Whether the topic is the new South Africa, contemporary southern California, Turkey, Greece, or elsewhere on the globe, a recurrent question during the conference has been: is there a qualitative distinction between liberal and illiberal states in terms of biopolitics?

What biopolitics allows us to do is to chart the continuities and differences between totalitarian regimes and those of liberal democratic societies, particularly for those on the margins. My intervention is primarily methodological, situated as I am on the borders of anthropology and ethnic studies. I have spent over a decade researching the Mexico-United States borderlands, specifically those between Arizona and Sonora, and the resulting criminalization of a group of young people.

As many of you are aware, Arizona has passed a draconian measure SB 1070 targeting the undocumented and enabling police to enforce federal immigration law. As the conference met yesterday [on Friday April 30], the act was amended. It currently includes provisions that schools will lose state funding if they offer any courses that “promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” Moreover, the Department of Education has told schools that teachers with “heavy” or “ungrammatical” accents are no longer allowed to teach English classes.

But these illiberal technologies are hardly new. They follow a series of dramatic raids across the country, in states such as Iowa and Ohio, and there are there are rumors of more to come. These raids create a palpable threat to the lives of the undocumented and, increasingly, to those who resemble them. They reveal the continued significance of sovereign power, how it is experienced relationally, unevenly, and hierarchically in liberal democratic regimes. Certain bodies are the first to be rendered pathologically fat, as in Susan Greenhalgh’s paper, as opposed to the svelte idolized super bodies of the white, wealthy elite. Certain bodies are the first to be tortured; the first to be imprisoned; the first to be criminalized; the first to be rendered as the enemy; the first against which society must defend itself.

The distinction between “the criminal” and “the enemy” that Paul Kahn so ably charted in his keynote lecture yesterday is precisely how the exception is mobilized in immigration enforcement in the US-Mexico borderlands. In this respect the border patrol is excepted; it is designated as a domestic police force despite its reliance upon military technology and tactics.

Much of the debate over the “crisis” of the state hinges on the assertion of sovereign failures to control borders; governments fail in controlling the flow of commercial instruments, currencies, flora and fauna, commodities, labor, and alien bodies (in this case boiling with swine flu and other diseases). Well before the despotic SB 1070, Minutemen and other vigilantes practiced racial terror, thousands died in what are elsewhere termed the killing deserts, and a politically ambitious sheriff waged war on immigrant–or is it Latino?–communities in Phoenix, Arizona.

Moreover, the Obama administration enlisted officers in immigration through the provision of 287G which effectively allowed officers in communities that agree to it to participate in immigration law enforcement. As we know from Agamben in his much neglected Means without Ends, what enabled camps and related technologies of terror was their designation as a policing operation.

Nevertheless, the vast majority of undocumented migrants make it to their destination, despite militarized policing practices–a peculiar conjunction of the power of death harnessed by the United States’ largest police force–or vigilantes and other forms of criminal violence. A racial state of emergency is the normative mode of immigration governance across the U.S. today, particularly at a moment where immigrant and Latino are commonsensically collapsed.

But, as I have argued elsewhere, neither the border nor the securitization of immigration should be understood as a camp in the classic Agambenian sense of the term. It is not solely a space of death but perhaps a different form of “camp.” The state of exception has become the rule with notable liberal, capitalist, and biopolitical permutations. That for-profit enterprises are involved in the warehousing of the undocumented is but one clear difference. More importantly, to close on a positive note, neither the border nor related technologies of immigration enforcement produce the total closure of Agamben’s camp.

Today, on May 1, 2010 as I speak, migrants and their allies are emboldened. They are engaged in dramatic public protests against these forms of rule across the United States. This suggests that despite the continuities between liberal democratic technologies and totalitarian regimes the former provide avenues for resistance and terrains worth struggling for at a moment in which both the left and the right converge in abandoning the welfare state. A new lexicon for an affirmative bios, or what Sharad Chari termed “biopolitical struggle,” must be developed.

Photos from BIOS: Life, Death, Politics, 4/30 – 5/1/2010

Priscilla Wald (Duke) opens the conference with her keynote address, “Human Being After Genocide: Cells, Genes, and Stories.”

Photos from BIOS: Life, Death, Politics,

April 30 – May 1, 2010

Timothy Campbell (left) and Cesare Casarino (below) follow with a panel addressing Tekhne and the Life-Image, respectively.

Neni Panourgia (Columbia), Baris Karaagac (York), and Elizabeth Dauphinee (York)consider comments from the audience during the second panel.

The first day concludes with a keynote by Paul Kahn (right) on the distinction between criminal and enemy.

The second day opens with a keynote
address by Paul Rabinow (left).

Susan Greenhalgh (UC, Irvine), Sharad Chari (London School of Economics), and Jonathan Inda (Illinois) present papers on the obesity ‘epidemic’, the remains of apartheid in South Africa, and the intersection of race and the pharmaceutical industry.

Right: Cesare Casarino poses a question to the panel.

Above Left: The conference concludes with a roundtable featuring short presentations by (pictured left to right) Emanuel Rota, Gilberto Rosas, A. Naomi Paik, and Jennifer Baldwin.

BIOS: Life, Death, Politics; Campbell and Casarino on Tekhnē and Time-Images Guest Writer: John Claborn

Tom Joslin and Mark Massi, Silverlake Life

[On April 30 and May 1, 2010, the Unit for Criticism partnered with the Holocaust, Genocide and Memory Studies initiative for a a conference, BIOS: Life, Death, Politics. In the first of a series of guest blogs from the conference, John Claborn writes about the panel featuring papers by Timothy Campbell (Cornell) and Cesare Casarino (U Minnesota).]

Campbell and Casarino on Tekhnē and Time-Images

Written by John Claborn (English)

In his anecdotal preface to the first panel of the Unit for Criticism’s co-organized conference, Bios: Life, Death, Politics, James Hay introduced panelists Timothy Campbell and Cesare Casarino as “Italianists” engaged with Foucault’s College de France lectures of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The presentations by Campbell and Casarino complemented each other well, as each began with an explication of biopolitics (drawing heavily on theorists like Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, and Roberto Esposito) followed by an attempt to theorize potential openings for resistance to modern biopolitical regimes.

Campbell’s paper, “‘Enough of a self’: Thanatos and the Tekhnē of Bios,” first offered a reading of Foucault’s concern with tekhnē in his work on the “Hermeneutics of the Self” and its relation to “modern modes of being subjects.” Foucault, Campbell interprets, advanced a “tragic reading of bios,” in which self-care as a modern mode of subjectivation constricts and captivates bios. Since Greek antiquity, tekhnē has separated from bios and now approaches it no longer as an object but as something to be mastered or “tested” within a “regime of the care of self.” Campbell then proposed a notion of “attention” as a possible mode of resistance to this constrictive regime, seeing attentiveness as a withholding of judgment and negation (i.e. the opposite of “testing”) from the object. A tekhnē of attention “reaches out” to the object not in order to test it, but rather to engage it in “creative play.”

Casarino advanced a notion of the “life-image” based on his reading of Gille Deleuze’s Cinema 2: the Time-Image as a “history” of time’s radical transformation under post-World War II biopolitical production (and reproduction) and post-Fordist capitalism. He showed a clip from the 1993 AIDS documentary Silverlake Life to illustrate the emergence of the life-image out of the “time-image.”

The time-image consists of shots that “express” duration rather than movement (of the camera or of figures in the mise-en-scéne). The documentary shows sequences of “cinematic still-lifes” (devoid of human presence) and various “whatever spaces” that express the alienation of the AIDS victim—the “walking dead,” as the voiceover says—from everyday, biopoliticized life. For Casarino, the life-image is not a representation of life but an “expression” of “enduring” life through the quasi-religious experience of the cinema.

In the discussion afterwards, the audience raised a few questions for Campbell: What is lost by removing “modernity” from the title of the talk (included on the conference schedule, but removed for the actual talk)? What exactly does Foucault mean by “test”? Does this concept need further elaboration and stronger historical grounding?

Some questions I have: how might this notion of “attention” benefit from an engagement with cognitive psychology and neuroscience? And does “attention” as resistance risk a kind of pure formalism reminiscent of Heideggerian authenticity? What is its political, ethical, and historical content?

Some questions for Casarino were also raised: How does the specificity of the video (vs. cinematic) medium in Silverlake Life affect the argument about the life-image? Can the life-image be thought of as emerging out of the “creative play” (tying into Campbell’s talk) of the time-image? What is the relation of the life-image to bare life?