Abstract
Abandonment is a powerful concept. Associated with things and peoples forgotten, uncared for, and emptied, abandonment signals socially authorized death via emotional, intellectual, and physical exhaustion. Consider how abandonment is represented in Academy Award nominated films: orphaned children shifting through waste to earn a living in India in Slum Dog Millionaire; men, women, and children enduring the excruciating stripping away of life in Schindler’s List; youth growing up in Rio’s favelas in the midst of violence in City of God, just to name a few. In each case, a helping hand, refuge, even a gift, enhance viewer’s empathy, the affective connections that catalyze social interaction (van Heeswijk, 2007), and stretch our moral imaginaries across social and physical divides to remind us that ‘we’ are social individuals unevenly connected to the worlds of ‘others’. We voice our concern about, sometimes our outrage against, the excesses of abandonment. Sometimes we are able to put ourselves in that place or experience anxiety of potentially being put in that place. It is also possible that in today’s world, we are experiencing an intensified pathological response to abandonment that hinders our development of empathy (Baron-Cohen, 2011).
Geographers regularly draw on the works of Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault to examine the relationship between abandonment and sovereign power, particularly, how excessive sovereign power limits the value of particular groups and individuals and positions itself above the law to suspend their political life (e.g. Coleman and Grove, 2009; Gregory, 2004). The absence of a sovereign power can also result in differentially experienced loss or lack of protection (Shewly, 2013). Elizabeth Povinelli’s reflection on abandonment fits with this scholarship. In Economies of Abandonment, abandonment is the absence of (state) care and the intensification of social vulnerability during ‘late liberalism’, a project of social optimization that emerges from a combined crisis of legitimacy of neoliberal governments and the declared failure of multiculturalism in the 2000s.1 In late liberalism, life that does not produce values according to market logic is allowed to die; when it threatens the security of the market, it will be extracted and killed (Povinelli, 2011: 22). She too draws on the suspension of political being to point that the uneven distribution of social death is an effect of liberal governance. Yet, she also proposes to do something slightly different: to look at the ethical and political work that abandonment does. Economies of Abandonment is a moral reflection on the spatiotemporal dimensions of how political abandonment captures people and social worlds at the margins of society in what seem like ordinary, mundane, and often imperceptible ways. Pockets of abandonment are not aberrations but part and parcel of the trajectory toward universalized equal human recognition—the ‘horizon’ of liberalism (Povinelli, 2012).2 Social difference that stands out of the norm (e.g. citizenship, religious beliefs, sexuality) is apprehended in spatial and chronological registers: as security threat, the past/prior to be tolerated, degraded and rotting, or things that do not make sense. Social difference that challenges liberal government—or makes it ‘tremble’—is bracketed, tolerated, and left alone, until a time when the challenge to be distinctly different can be addressed publicly. Bracketing reinforces a ‘dissipation’ of the obligation to ethically and politically respond to suffering that happens within the brackets. The hope is that the bracketed social difference will exhaust and either become more equal (or at least less different) or cease to exist.
Two concepts in particular stood out for me in Povinelli’s reflection on abandonment: biospacing and enfleshment. Though they are minor characters in the large ensemble of new terms introduced in the book, their diffused deployment captured spatiotemporal dimensions of abandonment worth pointing out. Biospacing describes the uneven spatiotemporal distribution of life and death that emerges from the operation of technologies of liberal governance. Biospacing is guided by racializing discourses that subdivide the human population along biological, cultural, and economic difference. It emerges in such ordinary, chronic, and mundane dimensions of life that often they do not elicit ethical and political responses to the social orders that emerge. While biospacing fragments, enfleshment connects moral worlds. Enfleshment bears resemblance with relational approaches to space in geography (Marston et al., 2005; Massey, 2004) that frame places as forged in and through a constellation of relations (including nonrelations, absences, and hiatuses). It describes how bodies and materialities constantly stretch, react, and form their physiology as a sort of ‘social skin’ connecting us all together (Povinelli, 2006).
Povinelli prefaces Economies of Abandonment with a disclaimer. This book is not an ethnography; it is a sociography of social projects, a way of writing the social from the point of view of social projects. For those of us who delve in the ‘excess’ of relations (Das, 1998) to ground ethics and politics of responsibility, this is a challenging proposition. To travel from a sociography of abandonment to the intimacy of ethnography and back, I draw on Gidwani and Reddy’s (2011) ethnographically informed analysis of the social ecologies of waste in contemporary India. In Gidwani and Reddy’s reading, different socioeconomic classes rub against each other in the foldings of capitalist time-spaces but do not exchange properties. In one anecdote about a high middle-class party in India, Gidwani writes about how the co-substantiation of happiness and success of some with the suffering of others becomes visible in the most mundane and seemingly insignificant encounters. He describes how waiters try to keep pace with the demands made of them by socialites, how they listen in silence when scolded for being too slow or for mishearing an order, and how nobody seems to care where they go next or where and when they sleep. Their night work is the only thing valued: it supports the existence of a creative class and prompts Gidwani to write about unequally lived lives. How frequently do we encounter differently lived lives without the dignity of recognition or obligation to respond because our biospacings are so ordinary, so common? In another anecdote, a successful professional couple in India recognizes and empathizes with the troubles of their nanny—an abusive husband at home—but see themselves unable to intervene in her suffering because such an obligation challenges the social divides through which they gain self-recognition. These encounters are moments in which differently lived lives intersect, where social difference is at its most intimate but is not rendered political. The couple concerned about their nanny eventually offers her a room to sleep in their home and to take on the responsibility of sending her child to an English-language school. Gidwani calls this form of recombined enfleshment ‘the new face of patronage’ in Delhi, reflecting on the limited rearticulation of power-geometries. Enfleshment lays bare how the liberal projects through which we visualize our social worlds (happiness, success, autonomy, freedom, development, improvement, etc.) and abandonment both belong to the same social tissue, and how changing it would entail changing the projects we inhabit. The prize might be too high and the risk of creating radically different forms of enfleshment is unimaginable (compare Sontag, 2004).
Gidwani and Reddy get to the core of the paradox of liberalism that Povinelli is concerned with: differently valued individuals must be sacrificed for the common (greater, less different) good. While we are all subject to discourses of inevitable and omnipotent globalization, modernity, neoliberalism, just to name a few, the subjectivities and agencies emerging through these discourses vary substantially. As subjects of liberal worlds, how do we set our ethical and political compasses in relation to a sociography of potential alternative social worlds? And while not exactly looking for a ‘Russian doll geography of care’ (Escobar, 2007; Massey, 2004)—one in which we care most about those things and places that are closest to us—on what grounds do we construct our maps of loyalty and affect when we craft a sociography of potentials? Do we abandon us?
Social projects ‘are not “things” so much as aggregating practices, incessantly fixing phenomena and cosubstantiating practices’ (2011: 9). It is in this Foucauldian formulation of abandonment that Povinelli finds hope for moving beyond the paradox of lives sacrificed in the name of liberal democracy. In the concluding chapter, she takes us to the perseverance of existing within the internal limits of biospacings to orient practical political acts. In the search for a better world in the distance, a world to which progressive action and social movements are oriented, present suffering is unavoidable. Yet, it is from this very suffering that the move from willful striving to positive living happens or has the potential to happen. It is not that new inequalities are produced and experienced in late liberalism but how intimate and visceral these have become. Endurance of ethical substance is now and here, not in tomorrow’s horizon. The profiles of the surviving and deceased relatives of Indigenous Australians involved in the Anson Bay Mobile Phone Project are a stark reminder of this (Povinelli, 2011: 114).
Povinelli also draws on Charles Burnett’s short film, Killer of Sheep, to emphasize the almost and not-quite moments of potential radical change. Moments of enfleshment abound in the film as powerful reminders of the potential for life otherwise though, curiously, these are kept silent in Economies of Abandonment. We see the main character, Stan, stating that his life is not a failure, exclaiming, ‘I’m not poor, I give to the Red Cross!’ His wife is attentive to her body, carefully arranging her hair and admiring herself on the lid of the cooking pot, which happens to be a tad too large for the pot. She is fiercely protective of her family. Their daughter, probably no more than five, carefully listens to her parents’ ineffective communication. More importantly, they all speak and act; their bodies move through space creating an excess of intimacy and kinship and a sense of self-possession and authorship, like many entangled liberal projects, despite how things do not quite fit together, are slightly broken, malfunctioning, or rotting. Suffering is not a condition experienced only by some; it is an effect of relationships that, through their embodied capacity to cultivate sensibilities and passions (Asad, 2003), stretch, connect, and enflesh.
In Economies of Abandonment, the emphasis is not on the progressive erosion of security but on the political act that begins with intimacy and enfleshment. To connect is to recognize the perseverance of life in the small moments when things almost come together and in the refusal to give up. This is not bare life; it is performative and embodied. It is the will to endure now and here. The point is not to give up or to remain silent until a better horizon is formulated. The point is to change the incomplete truths of the social projects we inhabit and to demonstrate the noncorrespondence between what is claimed as truth and what is within the social projects we live. Abandonment is us, now. ‘To wait, to be patient, to bracket harm until the impasse has been resolved and the account given, is part and parcel of how power is organized in late liberalism’ (Povinelli, 2011: 190).