Nation of Accusers

The Frightful Nobody

2011-11-23T11:42:00.000-06:00

I seek to reach you on these last of all possible days.

Your spaces know no breach
And in the climb up with you,
In you – or terror walls.
You run your hands through
Their clawed dimming efforts,

“the ceiling even”

It was no surprise

When you didn’t
Come back out.

You know, they still

Run the ovens.
Nothing has changed,
Lord
Nothing has changed.

the interview

2011-11-22T15:55:00.002-06:00

The interview

Why you always come at me with those preludes?

As if introducing the constant would regenerate.

something about the drugs, isn’t it. Always.

And a constant farmer, whose plight. The pigeons

Docked and nestled for the winter. You have no

Ideas but could spell out how this was like that

Quite eloquently. Like an army of ……

You see I cant

i can see your talents from the communist eye

Flashing I set up in this here café. “it’s wireless”

As if that were an accomplishment. First of all,

It’s completely made of wires. Second,

So are we.. there’s something to their

swifting ability to bird or strangulate

A whisker or rope. The committee caught

With concern a dialect of violence.

I’ve composed a meadow to counteract,

It’s okay. Full of green, with what wrought

From. Deer blood drinking days

Pauper’s graveyard again. In vellum.

Im a gonna git yous it’s okay it’s hide and seek,

Slicked grass if you put trundle in here that might work

Gassings and psychosexual CIA Argentinian

Training sessions. “political violence”

Against it. It’s okay. Everything is checking out

With you today. We’ve got to vet the

Who youre fucking list and get the gist of who you .

You know. Kindly give us your kindle and bend over

You stupid asshole. Sorry for the hassle,

But everything has to be crystal.

God you’re amazing.

2011-07-18T15:57:00.000-05:00

whatever you do, don't.

(Why aren't you?)
such assumptions!

we could increase the list, ad infinitum.

2011-07-08T14:19:00.001-05:00

it was a safe place to go and there was a him there but had no name. and ma. so that was good. i was so sick of saying the lord's prayer when it was led by the very person who violated the core of my being. that was sundays. so fri nights and sat morns were cool then. and Rabbi Berger was as well. because i knew there that nothing could happen to me. which is why i liked school at Beth El. like that i remember the little multicolored rug thing i took naps on too so perfectly and the floor was cold there. but yeah, Rabbi Berger and really everyone. I remember Helen Stahl so many, even before Morgantown. It had already started in Durham. I wonder if Duke knew. but eventually i took leave of it all. or it of me. until today. which is where i return. my father, the fakest nice man ever. my father, the ___(expletive deleted). my father who art. did his congregation know? no. small wonder to tremble before YWH. it was an act of pride on my part to conflate the two and blame Him and him, as if they planned it together. it's important to name and claim this now, to survive and not be a victim so forgive me dear reader. i'll spare you the details but if you give a crap that's why i deleted most of the I's from the poems. false pride?

it's different now, an experience you would not want to miss! to have a host of friends. to be loved. actually. this means also reciprocally to have an improved and healthy sense of service. which is where i now go. to the Temple, which I am not barred from by any means but welcome in, and it is one of the more important days of my planetary life - and if this sounds not all clear that's okay why would it be. just some momentous encounters with allpower and taking leave of something so utterly and completely wrong. i'm glad i had a safe place. glad mom was there. it looked like this

a little more

2011-07-07T16:26:00.000-05:00

more power, more movies, more gift cards more cufflinks more downtime more prescriptions more reading more running more features more thoughttrains more cigarettes more bargains more twits more friends more updates more mileage more miles more savings more groupons more orgies more fasting more prayers more parties more dances more dollars more sense more bad puns more gut splashi movies more william dafoe more what's her name Stone for the summer more Vogue more slaughterhouses more Gag aaa. more triple As more scholars more diabetes more hot days more Armageddons more likes more bands more criticisms. a horse is a horse of course of course of course unless the horse....this is the part where you pull apart your History. less dreamy. no not at all. more Mekons. it sucks to run out of everything at once. more poverty cycles. emphatically, more eways. more eways to say more. more hits and ways to see hit as hit as a band as a reckord as a single as mp as troops as faces as thee faces as you hit me in the face. more ignorance fun more skin. more skin camps. emphatically more rating systems. more corrections. This Land is Your Land. This Land is My Land. more land more empire more missiles more The Hills more hotels more hexes more dailykos more trucker blogs. i can't do the trucker blogs. more meetings more prayer more steps more power more hey can i talk to you for a sec more texts more ebooks more PADS more i-anythings, IPAID more TABLETS more wires for the wireless world. a death counter. more the same less recurrent ecological holistic bike acupuncture homeopathic wisdome transcendent mantra organic local sex shops.

poem without a hero, happy birthday Akhmatova extended

2011-07-03T09:31:00.001-05:00

This has turned into, among other things, a celebration of Anna Akhmatova’s contributions as a poet and person – as a hero. I was sitting around thinking about how under Stalin’s terror (okay, wait a minute. There is a dilemma working with this term that needs to be addressed. To those readers in America, do not use the worst Atrocities (and they were) under this regime to legitimate the cold advance of ruthless Captains of Industry, where three conglomerates control 75% of the world’s wealth now. Do not use this as a mode of legitimizing the military-industrial complex as Eisenhower aptly depicted it ages ago, or the prison-industrial complex as Angela Davis succinctly outlined. The United States now leads the world in NUMBER AND PERCENTAGE of residents we incarcerate, according to the Pew Center. I merely ask readers to heed Cavafy’s warning in “Waiting for the Barbarians.”), volumes of Akhmatova’s work were entrusted to the memory of ten people and summarily burned, to protect as many people as possible.

What poet’s work (of those alive today), in the United States, would you do this for? I am asking you. Fortunately, this has yet to come to bear. Perhaps this is because the superstructure of Empire is such that Literature has been eviscerated of so many of its powers. Perhaps. There is a process of incorporation as Geoffrey Waite outlines in Nietzsche's Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or, the Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life. So, with that process ( and this is not a “new” thought though Waite gets much further with it and that’s truly a brilliant book) as Adorno and Horkheimer get at The Culture Industry is alive and well. Hell, we may even have posturing revolutionaries on the White House Lawn! That’s nothing new either. Soul Asylum played there for Chelsea Clinton’s birthday. It’s just when that happened, Grunge was a brand, nothing more. Isn’t History repeating itself?

Poem Without a Hero is a brilliant Triptych, covering 1940-1962 bearing the image of Olga Sudeikina and Vsevolod Knyazev to open the text. I don’t know all the details, but both were famed poets who were part of the Stray Dog Salon (and Sudeikina was a dear friend of Akhmatova’s, an actress, translator, dancer – and, married) and Knyazev fell in love with Sudeikina. This culminated tragically when he shot himself in the head at her flat when he found out she had fallen in love with Aleksander Blok. Shit. This is starting to sound familiar. Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayword assert that Poem without a Hero melds this with the revolution and retributions – a parable for the sins of the world is how they put it. They also say she herself was somehow involved in the affair(s). Such is the framing of this text. Sudeikina “appears here as Confusion-Psyche, Columbine, the Goat-Legged Nymph, the Dove, the Petersburg Doll, and as one of Akhmatova’s doubles” according to the Zephyr Press translation by Hemschemeyer.

Love, revolution, the horrors of war, merciless destruction, unimaginable imagination and hope, all characterize the verse and her mind. For her, perhaps the opening lines from Byron (“I want a hero…”) seemed apt for her time and I’d contend even more apt for our own. They had her. Who? Or perhaps we need an anti-hero hero. But, even then, poem without a hero is an historically, emotionally and romantically charged text – and puts any of the contemporary obsession with bad, masturbatory, exploitative memoirs in their proper historical place.

all of this is prefatory. I’ve no intention of writing an exposition (at least currently) on PwH (really, someone should tell the deleuzians and guattarians to go take a hike. The body isn’t without organs. We are so not done with the material relations of production and their followers often reflect the bourgeois (and very alluring) idea that we could be done with History. In a way, there’s a connection between the likes of Hardt and Negri and Francis Fukuyama. Kojeve’s Hegel rises again, incorporated. Give me a break. People are dying, disproportionately nonwhite women and children. Is it a stretch to say this approach then would be both racist and sexist? No. You can’t wave away the second wave with a little magic wand or your ipad or whatever.)

-

But there are poems that did not get into the text. Unlike her usual MO, Akhmatova demanded that they be written down . This was both dangerous and also says something about them. I’m not sure what, but I think she really wanted to communicate exactly these words. I thought I’d put them here – and hope this garrulous (forgive me, I live alone) spleen invites the reader to get the book and read it all. And commit it to memory. They appeared in the Soviet version for the first time in 1989. Again, this volume which was well worth the carrying throughout my trip to the Saint Marks Reading at Solas and in my backpack, is published by Zephyr Press. Reeder did a brilliant job of editing and Hemschemeyer’s translation is nuanced…

(10)

The enemy tortured: “Come on, tell!”
But not a word, nor a groan, nor a cry
Did the enemy hear.
And the decades file by,

Tortures, exiles, and deaths….I can’t sing

In the midst of this horror.

(11)

Ask my contemporaries –

Convicts, hundred-and-fivers, prisoners –

And we will tell you

How we lived in unconscious fear,

How we raised children for the executioner,

For prison and for the torture chamber.

(12)

Sealing our bluish lips,

Mad Hecubas

And Cassandras from Chukloma,

We roar in silent chorus

(We, crowned with disgrace):

“We are already on the other side of hell”…

What are you muttering midnight?

In any case, Parasha is dead,

The young mistress of the palace.

The gallery is uncompleted-

This wedding embellishment,

Where, prompted by the north wind,

I am writing all this down for you.

Incense streams from all the windows,

Cut off, the favorite lock,

And the oval of the face grows dark.

January 5, 1941

Following Anna Akhmatova's 122nd Birthday

2011-06-28T11:12:00.001-05:00

This all started out with the intent to celebrate Anna Akhmatova’s birthday for seven or twenty-four days, the latter of which is equal to the number of “official” entries in her Poem without a Hero. It also stemmed from noticing that on Facebook Walt Whitman received many, many accolades on his birthday and I got all snarky and said yeah well, who will say anything about Anna Akhmatova’s birthday. Grace said I better remind everyone then. Grace. Fittingly, on or around 23 June, I fell ill. It’s a flu. For a while, couldn’t think nor read but am getting back. Akhmatova was born 23, June 1889 making her 122 years old this year. She was born in the Ukraine out at Bolshoy Fontan, near Odessa. I wish I was there. For now, I’m in Ukrainian Village. There's a contradictory or ambivalent impulse in me right now. On the one hand, it would seem now is the era of the memoir. Not that this is a newsflash. As with Facebook itself, just because it happened to a person, next up is to tell the world. Yet, simultaneous to this is a totalizing disappearance of history, and to some extent of the dialogic nature of historical narrative. Or, maybe the collapse of storytelling. At any rate, there does seem more than enough of this is my life. Is it, as is said in The Sheltering Sky that “other people’s dreams are boring?” I thought mine were interesting and everyone else’s dreams were boring. No. I didn't love The Sheltering Sky as a film, but then I dug the part when Paul Bowles appears and utters those lines, lines that never leave me. Lines I carry with me daily. "Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."

There is a poignant truth in that and I’ve done my share of taking moments for granted. Like, most of the time. Things did not seem so limitless to Akhmatova. The fundamental structure of the statement hinges on death being off at some distance. In this sense, I hope for you dear reader that the Bowles quote is more relevant. For Akhmatova, death was never at a distance, things didn’t seem limitless, yet in her work she established a Classical limitlessness that I cannot apprehend fully. Ever. I’m just getting used to her work. It was about four years ago I really started reading her closely when teaching “Daring Truths” on parrhesia (this is from Fearless Speech, which is now out of print) and poetry as witness. Greg Purcell had Joshua Clover, Simone Muench, and myself up to The St. Mark’s Bookshop Reading at Solas. Simone and I were reading from our collaborations, which have now come to fruition in Disappearing Address.

It was such a stunning evening and I don’t know why but certain days stay with you like they were written into your skin. I believe in Fate. Actually, that’s a stain on the term. I don’t “believe” in it any more than I believe in socks. Fate had it that The Complete Poems Of Anna Akhmatova, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer, edited and introduced by Roberta Reeder on Zephyr Press. All 960 pages of it. I must read this. (To fill in just a millisecond please, the students in my daring truths class, well some of them, really took to her work. And we had a profound experience engaging with it collectively. “Requiem” – to read this poem for the first time and to share this experience with students also reading it (differently) for the first time, well that was sublime. And, I mean that with the horror and the a-mazing ajar beyond the beautiful. And grief.) So, given the dramatic impact her work from Forche’s anthology had, it seemed natural to get all the poems and read them all. I made some silly declarative about reading them all, which I’m at the end of completing. It was duly noted that I may have a tough time lugging around a 960 page book. Later, for a holiday present, Simone snagged me a pocket Akhmatova so I could her bring her with wherever I went. It’s in the car or backpack, alternately.
I would defer to scholars of Ukrainian Literature on many matters. I know not yet the languages necessary to communicate. I do know that Akhmatova’s style combines what seems at first glance to be “easy” reading, syntactically speaking. It is declarative, alive…as “Requiem” opens. This is a different inclusivity than Whitman’s. Conditions were different, true. Completely different. People had to memorize her work in order to preserve it.

No, not under the vault of alien skies,

And not under the shelter of alien wings –

I was with my people then,

There, where my people, unfortunately, were.

Instead of a Preface

In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad. Once, someone “recognized” me. Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me, who, of course, had never heard me called by name before, woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there):

“Can you describe this?”

And I answered, “Yes, I can.”

Then, something that looked like a smile passed over

what had once been her face.

What had once been her face. She was there in the lines to try to see her son, who was arrested for being. How did Akhmatova live with Typhus, enduring the executions of lovers, incarceration of her son, and countless other agonies while also producing a poetics that speaks with these agonies but is not beholden to them by any means? And even though it is a dumb question, why aren’t more people reading her now? The radical disjuncture between American Contemporary Poetry and the historical context of imperial political oppression and total war has been cemented by hundreds of well-intentioned academic elites who seek to groom their protégés into some funhouse version of Kasey Kasem meets Norton. Unemployment, racism, speciesism, sexism, sexual oppressions, the Empire – all. The poet doesn’t have to be political, but call me old-fashioned, I recall Mnemosyne. Memory. History. We are killing ourselves. A people without a we. The poet who has no sense of History could use a heavy dose of Akhmatova, and who could not?

2011-06-23T00:56:00.000-05:00

Your Elitism is matched only by the hubris inhering in your atomized unreflective self-
reflections. Worsened by lacking the credibility in any social circle to lay claims to it
(which you need, necessitate *and* in clinging to it, you're thrown because it isn't you,

you aren't one among many), History's against you. Hence the hubris (which is of course,
ironically, History). Thought that looks itself alone. Shelled, but unturtlelike. Turtles
aren't cowboys. Or girls. Cowgirls. When you get over it, occidentally speaking from the
position of oppositional ideas, rather than the supercession it's all the eternality with its
external proofs of pain. The antennae redistribute this intensely private pain right back to
the self and mistake that for publicity.

I'VE SEEN THE UPLOADS AND THE DAMAGE DONE

2011-06-17T07:33:00.000-05:00

2011-06-17T06:23:00.000-05:00

to the what on earth

the thee nation ov accusers.

or troupe, 1975.
to the Waco-hating (but oh we are progressive)
to the vitriol for miles.
to the antiwhitman without the inclusions.

for this my final and unending telephone book
of your frisson.

*
there are no lectures, no festivals for you,
just the same tapes
which serve as solemn and unending reminder
of what
my white knuckles used to look like
and so easily could again if
we should meet.

American Exceptionalism and Consumption

2011-06-13T03:35:00.001-05:00

It would take the resources of four earths to consume as Americans do, which is 50 billion pounds of dead cow flesh a year. The 10 to 16 to 1 ratio of plants to flesh is not sustainable. For some reason, Americans seem deluded into thinking the consequences of these actions will fall only upon developing nations, those "other" people. American Exceptionalism is "in" again, denial ascends as the horror sinks in. This makes Upton Sinclair look like good times.

Visible Troubledoor

2011-06-06T20:29:00.001-05:00

It's best if we hide here

Which would be the

If the

looking (her)

here. We've published a tract for the visible

chick

/it's her factory\

\\m//

Red it in books far coroner.

Farewell Akilah Oliver

2011-02-24T19:35:00.004-06:00

I remember having the great fortune of reading with Akilah Oliver and Brandon Shimoda at the University of Arizona's Poetry Center. Oliver's intensities, grace, mind, kinetic abilities to intertwine verse language sound context idiom and her loves and Strength were evident to all present. Personally, this happened weeks after one of the most harrowing periods of my life. Akilah, both her verse and person, made it all such an amazing event to be a part of. We spoke vividly of an Oliver/Jenks tour because no one would expect it and we thought it a fine mesh of dictions and differences. I was flattered and thrilled. Soon. We'd do that. We'd get around to that. Her "The Putterer's Notebook" and other works astound. I just found out of her passing. Wish there was a way to say it more thoughtfully other than to say her verse and person are generous energies - and she will be missed. Dearly. She gave without knowing, at a time when I needed it most (away from home was at that time, a real challenge). To all friends and family, my heart goes to you. In the end, I do not have words really. Nothing adequate. There is no right word for a loss such as this. last January.

deletion, anger, resolution: love.

2010-12-10T20:46:00.003-06:00

in the nation of accusers, the best thing to do would to lead by setting the example rather than being overly reactionary and grumpy - which I was. But, the best I can do is say anger is the dubious luxury others can enjoy - I cannot have it in my life and so I let it go.

anamorph, and the scary thing about watching Cheaters

2010-12-07T03:58:00.004-06:00

Been taking in Anamorph, starring William DaFoe. It's better than CHeaters. Joey Greco looks like a very cool american poet. Can you guess? Anyway, the scenes in this film are appalling. Also, Defoe's donning a 1965 George Harrison wig. This is infinitely more tasteful than the Antichrist look. Still, it may also be more frightening.

all along the watchtower: philip jenks gives a deep reading

2010-09-12T14:35:00.003-05:00

2010-07-06T06:32:00.004-05:00

Orlando: I do desire we may be better strangers.

"horns"

and now a little round of get the guests...

2010-06-27T23:35:00.005-05:00

On Birthing and Our First and Second Births: Towards a Feminist Theory of Natality

2010-06-11T12:15:00.000-05:00

3. On Birthing and Our First and Second Births: Towards a Feminist Theory of Natality

“Moreover, since action is the political activity par excellence, natality, and not mortality, may be the central category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical, thought (Arendt 1958, 9).

“With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance” (Arendt 1958, 176 emphasis mine).

What about our first birth? When Hannah Arendt posited natality as the grounding for her political ontology (as opposed to the grounding of metaphysics in mortality), she successfully rebuked the death-centered philosophies of the Western canon with the “naked fact of our original physical appearance.” Having already presented my account of the scale of Arendt’s contributions in formulating a politics of action through plurality and natality, I will not return to these points. Arendt located her concept of natality in Augustine’s “that there be a beginning, man was created before whom there was nobody” (Arendt, citing Augustine 1958, 177 emphasis mine). While Arendt spent a considerable amount of time and energy working through the meanings and implications of the meaning of beginnings, birth, and creation she never discussed the second half of this quote: before whom there was nobody. Arendt makes the genuine contribution of grounding natality in plurality, where people in all their diversity come together. In the setting of understanding (in the Arendt’s sense of the word) the politics of new reproductive technologies, our second birth must also be understood as being grounded in our first birth.
Kathleen Jones, in her outstanding critique of masculinist models of power and authority, made this point by way of reading Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born and Carol Gilligan’s work in tandem with Arendt’s concept of natality (Jones,1993). Jones focuses on Arendt’s critique of authority as mastery as,

a scarcely veiled desire to return to the womb, as a wish to be reincorporated by making the many into one, this renunciation of action, and the exchange of authority as augmentation for authority as command both mark a kind of resentment that we were ever “of woman born.” Why couldn’t we be protected from life’s futility and the haphazardness of living in the world of plurality, of difference (Jones 1993, 170)?

Masculinist conceptions of authority (conflict resolution through making the many into one) are at odds with Jones’ goal of constructing a theory of compassionate authority. And, Jones successfully articulates an empowering theory of authority. But, while I am very sympathetic to her project, Arendt rarely wrote on the meaning of being “of woman born,” and the one case where she did, another host of assumptions and problems present themselves. Jean Bethke Elshtain in “Political Children” argues that Arendt made the case for the “first natality” at her worst moment, her attack on desegregation in “Reflections on Little Rock.” In this piece Arendt argues against the politicization of children. Elshtain writes, “Those who indoctrinate the young politically produce controlled robots or rabid zealots, not free agents. Protection of the first natality in order to make possible the second…is a private, hidden activity” (Elshtain 1995, 266-267 emphasis mine). Even here, the political significance of the “first natality” is left uninterrogated. Or, it is a form of natality relegated to the realm of necessity, a natural given that should not be exported into the social or political realm. I want to pursue another trajectory, one that does not assign the activity of motherhood and the moments of birth solely to the realm of necessity. What implications might this being “of woman born” have for constructing a theory of action and resistance, particularly in the context of new reproductive technologies?
Mary O’Brien’s The Politics of Reproduction, articulates a socialist-feminist critique of Arendt (1981). O’Brien takes Arendt to task for her discrediting of the realm of necessity in the categorical division of the public and private realms. O’Brien reads Arendt as an Aristotelian at heart, making the now more common criticism of what I call Arendt’s “polis envy.” Perhaps the division of private as necessity and public as freedom would not be so troubling, but for the long history of women and slaves being relegated to that “realm of necessity.” By locating freedom in the public realm (and grounding her theory in Athenian “democracy”), O’Brien charges Arendt with working from within “an exclusively male perspective” (1981, 110). More pointedly, within the realm of necessity, Arendt presents reproduction as a natural, “animal” activity. In so doing, Arendt “throws out the significance of reproductive labour, genetic continuity, and forms of social relations of production” (O’Brien 1981, 149). For O’Brien, the capacity to begin anew on the social level – in any egalitarian sense of the word – must include a reconfiguration of the social relations of reproduction.
While O’Brien spends a considerable amount of time on Arendt, apparently, she is less interested in her philosophy of natality and plurality – or for that matter – her critique of (masculinist) authority as mastery. However, O’Brien’s critique of Arendt’s categorical distinctions may explain why Arendt worked through natality as second birth, rather than valorizing the political significance of the first birth. For Arendt, natality, as a source of freedom cannot be in the realm of necessity. Thus, “birth was not, and will not become, a worthy subject for male philosophy. It is negated so that man may make himself, control the conditions of his self-made second nature and house his divided self in an uneasy separation of the public and private realms” (O’Brien 1981, 156-157). Must a significant political philosophy of new beginnings, a philosophy also grounded in plurality, that celebrates those spaces where word and deed do not part – must this philosophy originate in the idea that man is the originary appearance of freedom, “before whom there was no one”?
Kimberley Curtis argues effectively that feminist critiques of Arendt fail to accurately account for the significance of the “realm of necessity” in her essay, “Hannah Arendt, Feminist Theorizing, and the Debate Over New Reproductive Technologies” (1995). For her, while feminists such as O’Brien have made valid criticisms of Arendt, they have “rushed head-long past the considerable and important existential weight she accords to the natural-bodily dimension of life, including reproductive life” (Curtis 1995, l71). The life of animal laborans, laboring within the realm of necessity, is not meaningless but a calling to “remain touched by and involved with the conditions under which life has been given” and as such, serves as the very grounding for “our ability to politically resist those conditions that degrade and violate the human status” (Curtis 1995, 174). Her essay is particularly relevant here as it crystallizes the possibilities of Arendt’s (and feminist theorists’) critiques of (post)modernity as they pertain to new reproductive technologies.
Curtis locates Arendt’s sense of wonderment and gratitude in the miraculous “givenness” of the world of nature, writing that Arendt “perpetually reminds us that we are not nature’s creators” (Curtis 1995, 173). Technological developments such as Sputnik, the atom bomb, and new reproductive technologies (e.g. IVF, cloning, provider-dependent contraception) introduce “the logic of a perpetual and finally empty war with the life process and its finitude” (Curtis 1995, 180 emphasis mine). This logic that stands “outside the human condition” but inside the realm of “nature” instrumentalizes the “given” bodily world of reproduction and of nature.
Absent a sense of wonderment (or as Arendt and Augustine might have it, caritas) at that which is “given as a free gift” (Curtis, citing Arendt 1995, 183), the distinction between freedom and necessity dissipates: “What may be at stake is the ability to encounter that which we are not” (Curtis 1995, 185). The instrumentalization of the natural realm produces the possibility of a limitless reencounter with the same (e.g. eugenic policy). For Arendt, we cannot know nature in any final sense. Releasing the unpredictability of human action into nature, creating nature, could result in producing a predictable set of events that retain unpredictable, dangerous, and limitless outcomes. Curtis’ work presents the most articulate and challenging argument to date on the relevance of Arendt’s thought to reproductive technologies – and she rightly delineates the limits of some feminist critiques of Arendt. Though Arendt does not give adequate attention to the gender dynamics of natality, Arendt’s work frequently avoids many of the pitfalls of masculinist theories of power.
I see an abyss in this before-whom-there-was-no-one of natality, akin to the problematics of the sublime. However, Arendt effectively holds these dangers in check through her concepts of plurality, memory, forgiving, and memory. Freedom, at the end of the day (or the beginning), is grounded in an abyss. This “no one” is found elsewhere in her work. It is manifested in Arendt’s account of action at times, “action, though it may proceed from nowhere, so to speak, acts into a medium where every reaction becomes a chain reaction…” (Arendt 1958, 190 emphasis mine). It is present in Arendt’s account of feeling (particularly relevant, given Arendt’s attention to caritas in the context of natality), where “thought is related to feeling and transforms its mute and inarticulate despondency” (Arendt 1958, 168). This is crucial to a critique of new reproductive technologies because Arendt highlights humans’ inability to know nature in any final (or originary) sense. Acting as if we do (know), is not only a mark of hubris but potentially lethal – politically and literally.
Arendt’s concept of natality carries with it a danger, by her own admission – a danger that emerges from its fundamental boundlessness and unpredictability. Arendt avoids the dangers of a politics grounded in the abyssal boundlessness of coming “in the first instance” from nowhere with the fundamental egalitarianism of plurality and the historical rootedness of remembrance, forgiveness and promising. I propose to articulate a politics of freedom that does the work of natality, but is also grounded in the political relations of reproduction, and the phenomenological reality that we are of woman born. In a masculinist logic that is independent of the human condition we may, in the first instance, come from a “nowhere.” The valuable sense of the mystery of being can ground political recovery in the idea that we come not only from a “somewhere,” but that we come from embodied subjectivities, reminding us of the context and consequence of our embodied beginnings in space, place and time. Whatever happened “in the first instance,” being of woman born for as long as humans can remember is a bodily grounded encounter with the miraculous.
Politically speaking, while grounding natality in Augustinian concepts of caritas (engendering a love of the world, a love for that mystery of being) has its advantages, as I have discussed in Chapter Four, the Augustinian concept of natality is incomplete in one respect: the abyss of “before-whom-there-was-no-one.” While Arendt successfully reduces this problem by turning to plurality, the contributions of contemporary feminist theorists on giving birth and being “of woman born” situate the politics of action within the corporeal ground of Being. This is one reason why the Norplant® Condition is particularly significant. The Norplant® Condition serves as a rearticulation of the masculinist instrumental rationality of disciplinary power on the mind-body experiences of women – and of all those who are of woman born. In one sense, the “logic” of new reproductive technologies does its work in the realm that Arendt misses: the fundamental socio-political import of women and of women’s reproductive roles in contemporary society. Curtis takes some of the force away from criticisms by Rich and O’Brien, but does not address the problematics of a politics located in the originary notion of the “first instance” and sometimes also downplays the significance of birthing and contraception as a cultural-political practice.
Virginia Held, in her essay “Birth and Death,” also makes a case in keeping with Arendt’s “natality and not mortality” approach to political philosophy, but does so in the context of women’s experiences with a focus on the significance of motherhood and birthing. Held notes that while constructions of divine births are common in western cultural imaginaries, imaginative portrayals of a woman giving birth, deciding to give birth, choosing not to give birth – are rare in cultural representation. Men, it seems, are more interested in the cultural representation of mortality and death (Held 1990, 95).
Sara Ruddick writes along similar lines in Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Ruddick creatively and insightfully constructs a relational politics to counterpose the “flight to objectivity” of masculinist Reason. Building on Elshtain’s sympathetic reading of Arendt’s natality in her essay “Reflections on War and Political Discourse,” Ruddick reflects on the natality of birthing, rather than of being born:

Unlike mortality, natality is expressed in a distinctive relation to a particular woman. For every human, to experience fully the “capacity rooted in birth” requires imaginatively comprehending that particular relationship. Central to natality…are interwoven notions of beginning, action, difference, singularity, and promise. To these we can add maternal concepts of humility, trust, vulnerability, and protection, which characterize the birthing act….to give birth is to commit oneself to protecting the unprotectable and nurturing the unpredictable (Ruddick 1995, 209 emphasis mine).

Ruddick’s ethic of “protecting the unprotectable and nurturing the unpredictable,” like Arendt’s sense of the frailty of human affairs contained within her “care of the world,” is bound up with the lived experiences of women birthing. This is not only significant in that it asserts birthing as an action, but also because it articulates meaning in corporeal existence, refusing the mind-body dualism of masculinist Cartesian thought.
Adrienne Rich, in her classic Of Woman Born points to mind-body dualism in “male medical technology,” where childbirth is “defined as a medical emergency” (Rich 1995, 176). Again, childbirth is an event that naturally “happens” and the actions that go into birthing are erased by this naturalization. Childbirth is then, “alienated labor” (Rich 1995, 156). The meanings and significance of childbirth and birthing are subsumed under the male technological apparatus of “reason,” and the productive (what I call “meaning-giving”) aspects of this labor are shadowed by the meaning-given – or lack thereof. Rich contrasts this with a popular refrain found on a feminist poster: “I am a woman giving birth to myself. (For her) Such an image implies a process which is painful, chosen, purposive: the creation of the new” (Rich 1995, 156 second emphasis mine). Rich, O’Brien, Held, Ruddick, and Jones all (albeit in different ways, with varying points of emphasis) displace the “before whom there was no one” of natality, re-placing it in the realm of lived human affairs. Curtis, in turn shifts the ground of feminist reception of Arendt, by locating a profound sense of meaning in Arendt’s accounts of reproductivity.
While one may (as some have) criticize Rich and others for reifying the masculinist notion that a woman’s primary function is to reproduce, Rich, O’Brien and others are working to reconfigure the meaning of birthing. In so doing, they place it in the field of conscious action – rather than reproducing masculinist understandings of birthing as a natural event. Perhaps Rosi Braidotti said it best writing, “The question for the feminist subject is how to intervene upon Woman in this historical context, so as to create new conditions for the becoming-subject of women here and now” (Braidotti 1994, 168). A critique of presumptions that define “motherhood” intervenes at the center of masculinist assumptions of “Woman” as reproducer. As Arendt has noted, words and deeds are boundless (“setting off a chain of events”) and with that there is a danger in radical feminist assertions regarding the nature of male power. But, the danger of strategic reconfiguration of meaning is intrinsic to the nature of speech-acts. Eschewing radical feminist criticism on the grounds that it may be turned on its head is like backing off from Foucault’s contributions to poststructural feminism on the grounds that his work will be used to generate nihilism or relativism.
Action and an understanding of action, particularly action in resistance to the logic of new reproductive technologies, is enriched by radical feminist reworkings of the meaning of birthing and motherhood. While feminist critics of the 70s and 80s may be criticized for their reductivism, their insights into politics, the politics of gender, new reproductive technologies, and motherhood cannot be overlooked. My synoptic reading of Foucault, Arendt, and feminist theories of embodiment has aimed to do the work of understanding the Norplant® Condition as a political problem of liberalism, while articulating the corporeal grounds of natality and resistance. However, it is hoped that this reading has a double-function in that it also works to provide an understanding of these thinkers in the context of contemporary political theory. I conclude with a reiteration of how Foucault, Arendt and feminist theories work together and against one another in the context of the Norplant® Condition.

Toward a Feminist Rendering of Natality

2010-06-10T10:14:00.001-05:00

Six.

1. Introduction

In the past chapters I have posited the hyper-rationalization of the body politic as a key component in the disciplinary development of the Norplant® Condition. Rationalization has hinged, not always on the tools of oppressive coercion, but also on the subjectivist ideology of choice, responsibility, autonomy. With the modern era, autonomization doubled back upon man and the institution of the anthropomorphic automaton commenced. It is not that man has disappeared, but that man has reappeared with a grim vengeance, giving a new and perverse meaning to the very notion of autonomy. This reproduction of the ideology of choice, born of a radical subjectivity, functions as the heart and soul of disciplinary liberalism. In this regime, “man” is an anthropomorphic technological apparatus, a choosing machine. The notion of man as anthropomorphic technology is hardly new. Thinkers as diverse as Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault and Haraway (to name a few) have approached this topic. However, within this transformation, by what means is egalitarian action possible?
In order to get at these questions, it is first necessary to return briefly to the thematics of liberalism, that I first developed in the context of Foucault’s and Dumm’s work. From here, I turn to feminist contributions in thematizing the Norplant® Condition as a problem of patriarchy. Within my analysis of the Norplant® Condition I suggest that it is complex and expansive enough to require a synoptic theoretical approach, combining elements of feminist theory, with the works of Foucault and Arendt.
My account of the Norplant® Condition serves as a context for an inquiry into the nature of natality, action, and resistance. Arendt’s concept of natality is typically (and understandably) presented in the context of its Augustinian roots. Her account of Kant serves, on one level, to schematize and publicize the creative act of new beginnings within decisive limits – limits that acknowledge the destructive danger inherent in bringing the new into being. These limits mark the distinction between creative acts born of natality and creative acts born of pure introspection. For Arendt, action “proceeds from nowhere,” from a “mute” and “despondent” night of being, but when held in check by plurality, promising, and memory the potential for making this night of being politically manifest is reduced dramatically. Conversely, the infinitized and lonely (infinite because progress posits no end-point and lonely because progress works from the notion of Man, not people or “men”) logic of progress that haunts contemporary disciplinary liberalism is also born of creative acts, but they are acts without intersubjectivity. The Norplant® Condition emerges from a hyper-subjective problematic of progress – a progress without a past or a future.
Both Foucault and Arendt were profoundly aware of the dangers of freedom as liberty without boundaries. Neither Foucault nor Arendt sought Liberty through Revolution. Both Foucault and Arendt provided provisional accounts of the possibilities of action and resistance. While Arendt’s account of natality and plurality grounds Foucault’s resistance further, feminist insights that we are of woman born (as opposed to Augustine’s “before whom there was no one”), articulate the corporeal dimensions of existence and action.

2. Disciplinary Liberalism

Following Foucault’s account of the early history of liberalism provided in Chapter Three, early liberalism is premised on the idea that “one always governs too much.” In contrast to Marx’s emphasis on the close relationship between the emergence of capitalism and liberalism, Foucault presents classic liberalism (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) as a form of “critical reflection on governmental practice.” While it is beyond the scope of this dissertation, a point of emphasis on the discourse of liberalism may still be connected to historic changes in political-economic relations. The emergence of private property, for example, necessitates and is necessitated by such a “critical reflection.” Still, Foucault’s contribution is highly significant in that liberalism in any period cannot be construed strictly as an “economic” or “juridical” phenomenon. It is a mode of understanding the world and in what form do we exist within that world. Whether caused by (or a result of) privatization of property, classic liberalism is marked by a profound skepticism towards the State and more generally, towards governance.
In its early formations, classic liberalism is defined by the notion that “one always governs too much” (Chapter Three). This stands in stark contrast to the practice of Polizeiwissenschaft – which is born of the notion that there is always more governing to do. Liberalism, in contradistinction to classic liberalism, emerged in the nineteenth century as a hybrid of the Nightwatchman State of classic liberalism and the hypervigilant State and civil society of Polizeiwissenshaft. As I noted in Chapter Three, the birth of biopolitics and the emergence of the politics of population mark the impact of Polizeiwissenschaft on classic liberal ideology. The rationality of the marketplace, reproduced and reified by the State, extends its invisible hand outward into the social realm as population – the literal “body politic” – is constructed under the purview of political economy.
In both cases (the Nightwatchman State of classic liberalism and the emergence of Polizeiwissenschaft in liberalism), the concept of tolerance plays a crucial role. Liberty, the treasured concept of individualists who hearken back to the imaginary of classic liberalism functions not only as a means of individual “freedom” but also as a legitimation for the expansion of corporate and state power in the social realm. The discourses of liberty and tolerance legitimate every liberal regime, providing a source for consent (or silence) during the articulations of governmentality as police science. These articulations are marked by the “modernist” trends toward rationalization, bureaucratization, and differentiation.
In short, liberal hegemony operates through a discourse of tolerance. Tolerance found in the “marketplace of ideas” fits hand in glove with the marketplace of capitalist development. Tolerance is grounded in the cherished concepts of choice, autonomy, and privacy. Despite barriers that circumscribe the parameters of “free” choice (gender, race, class, (dis)ability, education are a few), the myth of the free agent continues to haunt liberal “democracy.” The grounding legal framework for highly creative and challenging artistic creation also serves as the touchstone for corporate “individual” “free” expression. Tolerance introduces a “geography of legitimated exclusion,” while appealing to a rhetoric of inclusivity simultaneously does the work of exclusion. Inclusivity, however open, can never be (and perhaps should never be) absolute. The contours and surfaces of that exclusion are articulated politically, economically, and socially. This articulation of exclusion takes place primarily in the realm of the political. If politics is defined by the quest for hegemony, it is important to note with Fontana that “hegemony necessarily implies the creation of a particular structure of knowledge and a particular system of values” (Fontana 1993, 140). Structures of knowledge and value systems are defined against and through a differentiating background or Other. Even the inclusive, “Universal” process-oriented framework of the neutral liberal State defines itself against constructions of positive liberty or for that matter, constructions of freedom that confound and refuse the naturalized disembodied framework of liberalism altogether, as found in contemporary feminist political theories, and the works of Arendt and Foucault.
Differentiation of society is neither the cause nor the effect of the “multiplicity of force relations” that characterize relationships of power in liberal and “advanced” or disciplinary liberal discourses (Foucault 1990a, 72). Rather, differentiation is the localization and diffusion of those power relations. Whereas characters such as Luhmann see this as a cause for celebration (or at least, no cause for concern), there is a radical disjuncture between the language of differentiation and the material reality of gender, race, and class divisions – to name a few. Liberalism operates under an assumption of endless differentiation (a perpetual diffusion and differentiation of “traditional,” ossified premodern socio-political structures) carried out through the promise of the disembodied holder of democratic rights. Under the liberal tradition, universal rights produce and enable social, economic and political freedom. Such rights are maximized administratively by the State through a process of incorporation (Einverleibung). The construction of the subject as the bearer of universal rights and the State as the “Nightwatchman” of those rights, this particular notion of freedom, has been incorporated by the State. While the notion that the free-choosing individual relies heavily upon the idea of the Liberal State, the construction of the self as autonomous is necessary for the propagation of liberalism. In Liberal discourse, tolerance of each free, universal individual enables and produces a landscape for the production and subjugation of subaltern groups.
While political incorporation is not a novel political phenomenon, it emerges as a crucial means in the development of disciplinary liberalism. One salient example is American abortion rights advocacy. The activism often works within the rhetoric of liberalism (e.g. Planned Parenthood), through appeals to a “right to privacy.” While there can be tremendous value to working strategically within the “transcript of the hegemons,” it functions less as a form of resistance to Liberalism and more as a means of reaffirming it. Blanket appeals through liberal neutrality to a “right to privacy” by subordinate groups demanding social justice may have unintended consequences, including the reification of the systemically embedded relations of power that cause the need for social justice in the first instance. The private realm may be and often is a site for autonomy and freedom, but in the context of liberal discourse has the “right to privacy” served women and minorities well? The private realm is also a space that one “owns” and often serves as the very space for patriarchal domination. Privacy is the space for the subject to objectify, a space for domestic violence and enslavement (Schneider 1994, 36-59). Privacy is the white hood of the Nightwatchman. In the end, rights-based discourse may jeopardize human difference, sacrificing plurality on the altar of Universality. Rights-based discourse frequently reifies the foundations of the very patriarchal system that abortion rights advocates seek to challenge. A struggle for reproductive freedom is subsumed and incorporated into a debate over whose interpretation of rights is more compelling. At the end of the day, the geographies of exclusion that shape purportedly neutral rights discourses are left unquestioned. Is it possible to engage in a form of political resistance (or action) that renegotiates these grounds?
In Chapter Three, I articulated Foucault’s argument on disciplinary power as the threefold process of producing, analyzing, and manipulating the subject. Disciplinary liberalism is the emergence of this threefold process within the field of liberalism. The Norplant® Condition embodies a process of producing, analyzing and manipulating a calculable, normalized subject. Having “turned the assertion of guilt into a strange scientifico-juridical complex,” contemporary liberalism offers criminals such as Darlene Johnson, the “choice” of prison or surgical contraception (Foucault 1979, 19). In conjunction with the production of the criminal, of the “abject” Other, the normal citizen is produced through the incorporation of power in the rhetoric of choice. On a broader level, within disciplinary liberalism, women have such “choices” too. Women have a vast array of “choices.” Before proceeding, I want to examine some of the more common contraceptive “choices” that women have and follow with an important question.
1. Surgical sterilization is the most common form of contraception in the United States. A major side effect of sterilization is its permanency. Unfortunately, the line between voluntary and involuntary sterilization is not clear. Informed consent is very difficult to define and determine. Moreover, the same twentieth century societies that have produced a practice of widespread voluntary sterilization (before the twentieth century, sterilization as a form of contraception was extremely rare) have also produced an ideology of “more children for the fit, less for the unfit,” as Sanger described it. Eugenics and the emergence of biopower are lasting and foundational moments in the disciplining of reproductivity. Other potential side effects include loss of sex drive and “poststerilization syndrome that includes menstrual pain and irregular bleeding patterns” (Knight and Callahan 1989, 147).
2. Abortion: When discussing the side effects of abortion, the development of the notion of fetal personhood must be considered. Being “pro-choice” does not mean being pro-abortion – and given the political and cultural climate of the procedure – it is not surprising that depression has commonly been reported. There are a wide variety of techniques, documented meticulously by Knight and Callahan, with potential side effects including severe cramping, bleeding, hemorrhaging, and infection. “Back alley” abortions, utilizing coat hangers, “knitting needles, goose quills dipped in turpentine, celery stalks, drenching the cervix with detergent…drinking purgatives or mercury, applying hot coals to the body” – all of these methods have a whole host of side effects including all of the above and death (Rich 1986, 267). Pregnant poor women and pregnant women living in areas where abortion is illegal or highly regulated are forced to choose between these dangerous methods and birthing. In some cases, they may have the “choice” of a safer procedure, provided they prove they were victims of rape or incest.
3. Oral contraceptives: Among the many side effects are: “weight gain, gum inflammation, nausea, headaches, breast tenderness, increased urinary tract infections, vaginitis, chloasma (facial skin pigmentation or “giant freckles”) menstrual spotting, and libido changes….Irritability, anxiety, depression, changes in libido, and headaches…increased difficulty in achieving orgasm, decreased sensation of the vulva” (Knight and Callahan 1989, 113). Oral contraceptives are also associated with “vascular problems…clotting factors in the blood…alterations in blood vessel walls, creating an increased risk of pulmonary embolism, cerebral thrombotic stroke, cerebral hemorrhagic stroke…(along with) hypertension, chances of a fatal myocardial infarction (heart attack) and high blood pressure” (Knight and Callahan 1989, 114-115). However, oral contraceptives are contraindicated for women with “a history of blood clotting disorders, coronary artery disease, estrogen-dependent malignancies, or liver damage” or for women who smoke (Knight and Callahan 1989, 112).
4. Depo-Provera and other injectables: Side effects include changes in menstrual cycle (very heavy, infrequent, no cycle), irreversibility for the duration of the injection, “weight gain, abdominal bloating, headaches, mood changes, nervousness, and fatigue” (Knight and Callahan 1989, 125). Although “anecdotal,” one physician has reported to me that menstrual cycles often take some time to occur regularly up to a year after Depo-Provera is effective for birth control. Depo-Provera is also linked with the loss of bone mineral content, lack of return to fertility, breast cancer and cervical cancer.
5. Norplant®: reported side effects include migration of the device after insertion, irregular menstrual cycles (very heavy, infrequent, or none) visual disturbances (including partial blindness), convulsions, acute depression, lethargy, weight changes, scarring at implant site upon removal, vaginitis, and migraines). Other reported side effects include “breast discharge, inflammation of the cervix, inflammation of the vagina, vaginal discharge, abdominal discomfort, and musculoskeletal pain.” Should the device fail, “there is a greater chance that the pregnancy will be in the tube” (Planned Parenthood of East Central Illinois, October 14, 1997). Norplant® users are also provided with the same warnings that are given to women using oral contraceptives.
6. IUDs: There are a wide range of IUDs and clearly some are safer (Copper-7) than others (Dalkon Shield). In general, IUDs are associated with pain and bleeding (Knight and Callahan, 1989: p. 155). Having spent two years compiling summaries of medical records for over 350 women who used Dalkon Shield, some of the common side effects of this device are perforation of the uterine wall, endometriosis, pelvic inflammatory disease, and ectopic pregnancy. PID can also cause sterility. Additionally, PID and ectopic pregnancy can be fatal conditions. Should the device become detached and then discharged, one potential effect is pregnancy.
7. Vaginal Ring: Like Depo-Provera and Norplant®, vaginal rings release long-lasting steroids. However, unlike Norplant® and Depo-Provera, the contraceptive is user-controlled. Menstrual irregularity is reduced or eliminated by removal of the device for a week (Knight and Callahan 1989, 135). Pregnancy (if placed incorrectly), irregular bleeding, “vaginal irritation…objectionable odor,” and potential for infection remain as side effects (Knight and Callahan 1989, 136-137).
Why then, are contraceptive choices predominantly “for women?” While some research and marketing has focused on contraception for men, current choices mainly include condoms, vasectomy, and coitus interruptus (Knight and Callahan 1989, 285-312). While early critics of new reproductive technologies (e.g. Corea, Rowland, Raymond, Dworkin, Daly) have been taken to task for their essentialism (e.g. blaming the male doctors and developers), the patriarchal components of disciplinary liberalism - particularly in the field of reproduction (i.e. the ground of human existence) – are historically, “empirically,” and anecdotally grounded. Women are presented with a wide array of “choices” (some with irreversible effects, some entirely provider-dependent, and many with effects that can dramatically impact and change a woman’s life). Condoms are men’s only widely available, non-surgical, mildly effective choice. But, given the condom’s lack of effectivity, there are no commonly distributed highly effective forms of contraception for men.
The sphere of reproduction is reified through political socialization and technological development as a woman’s sphere, when it comes to preventing birth. Being responsible for, what Arendt called (always derisively), the “realm of necessity,” is one facet of power working to produce a certain type of citizen. Disciplinary power works through the sphere of reproduction not through force or coercion (though that is common enough too, as in the case of involuntary sterilizations or regulation of abortion), but through the construction of the choosing subject. For the choosing (disciplinary liberal) subject, freedom is coextensive with choice. Recalling Dumm’s framing of freedom in spatial terms from Chapter Five: “In presenting space as neutral, Berlin makes it the ground of freedom. To establish this space as the ground is to render it outside of contestation or struggle…But when one remembers that space itself is produced, or, more provocatively, insists upon investigating the ways in which it is produced, one is better able to see the manner in which the neutrality of space operates as an architectural metaphor for grounding” (Dumm 1996, 48). The grounding of reproductive choices is presented as a neutral space (for women) to decide which potentially deadly device to use. Emphatically, my point is not to criticize contraception. It seems there are dangers that accompany any effective contraception. But, rather to problematize the relegation of that danger to women. Choice is a matter of subject-production and to the extent that a person (man or woman) accepts the grounding of choice as neutral, the politics of reproduction have been naturalized through and through.
Manipulation also takes place through the production of the analyzable subject. The insertion of Norplant® into the U.S. judicial system and its proposed use in the welfare system evince a medicalization of the political realm. Another common instance of overlapping medical and political power in the realm of reproduction include abortion and the primacy of fetal personhood. Literally, the way in which a subject is analyzed fixes that person within a field of power relations. Power is not only a matter of power over, but how I know you. In Darlene Johnson’s case, she was known to be a criminal, a child-abuser, accountable, and likely to have more children. In the case of the Philadelphia Inquirer incident, black women were known to be poor and give birth to too many children.
In these cases, the notion of the productive subject emerges. Power, in this light is not only about analyzing and manipulating subjects. It is also a matter of making those subjects productive. It is here that the Norplant® Condition as it is expressed in the field of disciplinary liberalism can be understood best as a form of humanware (Reid and Yanarella 1996, 181-219). As punishment, Norplant® is a flexible disciplinary measure. Its proposed compulsory use by mothers on welfare, Kimmelman’s proposal that black women in poverty use the device, measures such as these in conjunction with its uses in judicial settings point to a politics of surveillance. In its most excessive formation, the politics of surveillance criminalizes the citizenry.
But what operates in the background of the disciplinary subject? What drives disciplinary power to productivity? Within Foucault’s discourse of the prison and Dumm’s account of the “disciplinary origins of American democracy,” there is a trajectory in keeping with Nietzsche’s genealogy of Christianity – disciplinary power is oriented around not only making a predictable and productive subject, but a better subject, a good subject. While American disciplinary power is influenced by the discursive regime of the “good subject,” (at least within the American context) the good subject is coextensive with the productive subject. And the productive subject cannot, at the end of the day, be separated from the “straitjacket of logic”: instrumental rationality (Reid, 1978). Predictability, calculability, and productivity are bound up with the instrumental rationality of capitalist incorporation. American and European political theory sides with what Derrida calls the manic positivity of liberalism (referring to Fukuyama’s right-leaning Hegelian accounts of the victory of liberalism in The End of History and the Last Man) in bypassing the political economies of domination that lie at the center of liberal “tolerance.”
Weber writes in “The Origins of Discipline in War,” that the discourse that permeates capitalist development is found in the increasing rationalization of the workforce – a discourse that is rooted in military discipline:

The psycho-physical apparatus of man is completely adjusted to the demands of the outer world, the tools, the machines – in short, it is functionalized, and the individual is shorn of his natural rhythm as determined by his organism …Thus, discipline inexorably takes over ever larger areas as the satisfaction of political and economic needs is increasingly rationalized (Weber 1978, 1156).

The emergence of lean production, flexibility, and the workforce as humanware signifies an internalization of discipline (flexibility read as “freedom” doing the work of hegemony), born of the instrumental rationalization extending its way through the economic realm and into the political and cultural fields of everyday life (Reid and Yanarella 1996; Reid 1978; Arendt 1958; Arendt 1994; Laclau and Mouffe 1993). The reification of a logic that is “independent of the human condition” is found in the emergence of new reproductive technologies, whose political effects are found in the “coercive link with the apparatus of production” (Foucault 1979, 153).
Like Weber, Foucault introduces the formulation of disciplinary power by way of military development. Foucault writes on the workings of power in the “body-machine complex”:

Over the whole surface of contact between the body and the object it handles, power is introduced, fastening them to one another. It constitutes a body-machine weapon, body-tool, body-machine complex…The regulation imposed by power is at the same time the law of constitution of the operation. Thus disciplinary power appears to have the function not so much of deduction but of synthesis, no so much of exploitation of the product as of coercive link with the apparatus of production (ibid.).

While exploitation is possible (and practiced) in the case of Norplant® and Depo-Provera, these devices function as disciplinary apparatuses, often chosen freely (see select list of birth control options above). Depo-Provera and Norplant® are characterized in advertisements as, “Birth control I only have to think about 4 times a year? Terrific.” Leaving aside the question of whether a woman thinks of Norplant® or Depo-Provera if she experiences any of the above listed side effects, there is something to think about in provider-dependent contraceptive technologies, and perhaps more than once every five years.
Is Planned Parenthood’s advocacy of population control disconnected from its distribution of these technologies? I am not presenting a discourse of conspiracy, but rather a discourse of power dwelling in the body-machine complex of disciplinary liberalism. Such devices are articulated “ready-made” for ideological insertion: Provider-dependency puts the politics of meaning in the hands of the provider. The Norplant® Condition is a “flexible” condition – ready-made for uses in authoritarian and liberal settings alike.
In the case of the United States, approval by the FDA touched off a series of discussions, legislative proposals, articles and debates on controlling black poverty and welfare “accountability” measures. As Betsy Hartmann has noted, the device took a decidedly different (and grimmer) turn in developing nations. Women in impoverished villages of Bangladesh and Egypt, no matter how often they think about the device, often do not have the “luxury” of removal on request (Hartmann 1995, 211). As I have discussed in Chapter Two, the methods of Norplant® insertion (in conjunction with population control policy) are also exploitative in Lombok, Indonesia (Hartmann 1995, 73-83).
Thus, it seems there is a tension between the coercive “subtle” forms of power that take form in liberal “democracies” and the more exploitative forms of power in developing nations. Disciplinary liberalism is hardly characterized by a unilateral disappearance of coercive power. There is a coercive component to the Norplant® Condition, as documented throughout this dissertation. Involuntary insertion of the device in Indonesia and lack of informed consent in trial phases are but two examples where coercive power works within the Norplant® Condition. While the full range of the politics of uneven development is well beyond the scope of this work, I present the limited choices (however problematic) that citizens have in the realm of necessity in “developed” nations as being built on and through relations of dependency, now referred to as “global capitalism.” Disciplinary liberalism then, constructs its internal relations of power through hegemony, which are in turn, dependent on relations of domination with and within “third world” nations.
Foucault’s and Arendt’s contributions to an understanding of the power dynamics of new reproductive technologies are substantial. But, neither spoke adequately on the topic of gender in power. I arrive at a reconfiguration of the power dynamics of the Norplant® Condition by way of a critique of Arendt’s concept of natality. While Arendt makes a crucial contribution to the formulation of a theory of action and resistance by grounding her political philosophy in new beginnings, there is a problematic component to her Augustinian influence. This influence is rooted in the masculinist notion that man gives birth to himself. In the context of the Norplant® Condition, disciplinary power, instrumental rationality, and the “straitjacket of logic,” are shot through with the masculinist mythos of autogenesis.
Before I turn to consider the contributions by feminists such as Mary O’Brien, Sarah Ruddick, and Adrienne Rich, I must speak to this rather untimely meditation. After all, I have spent many pages questioning the foundations of the idea of the abstract (liberal) self and trying to expose the ideological grounding of neutrality. Why on earth, a good poststructuralist might ask, would I close with thinkers who romanticize the category of Woman? Will I not end by essentializing and romanticizing birth and birthing, thus reifying (rather than destabilizing) the constructedness of gender identity? Following Bordo on this point (and in my attempts to perform a critique, another forbidden zone for some poststructuralists), that in deconstructing gender we may “cut ourselves off from the source of feminism’s transformative capabilities” (Bordo 1993, 243). Contemporary postmodern theory runs the risk of exhausting the fragile political potential of political theory and does so when it fails to acknowledge the strategic, pragmatic and historical conditions under which we speak. Bordo writes, in a particularly pertinent passage:

Most of our institutions have barely begun to absorb the message of modernist social criticism; surely it is too soon to let them off the hook via postmodern heterogeneity and instability. This is not to say that the struggle for institutional transformation will be served by univocal, fixed conceptions of social identity and location. Rather, we need to reserve practical spaces both for generalist critique (suitable when gross points need to be made) and for attention to complexity and nuance (Bordo 1993, 242-243 emphasis mine).

While there are dangers to positing radical female difference (and as Foucault and Bordo have noted, “everything is dangerous”), there is something to the fact that women, not men, tend to give birth – for example (Bordo, citing Foucault 1993, 223). I believe there is something practical and beneficial in attempting to re-cover and reconstruct the institutionally inscribed meanings of birthing and motherhood. The contributions of Rich, Ruddick, O’Brien and others highlight the gender power relations in the social relations of reproduction and in so doing, they provide “complexity and nuance” to Arendt’s gender-neutral concept of natality in a way that postmodern thinkers seem unwilling.

Leslie Scalapino

2010-06-09T12:53:00.004-05:00

I mourn the passing of Leslie Scalapino. Her brilliant work with temporality, narratival structure, gender, sonics, meaning, transcendencies, corporealities, the Mind...I was always amazed by what she was doing. With many, all too many perhaps, of course the work and the person are not equally amazing - but with Leslie this was not the case. She mentored and supported and influenced so many, and was a force of good. No, I did not know her well. She knew me by name, perhaps because every time I could I'd go see her read and I'd bring the same books for her to sign. Her work and kindness gave me reason to believe when there were many poets who would find a way to supply a backhanded compliment. They were not, are not, so actualized. I am not. I'm not so eloquent. It's better just to hear her for yourself. I will say one thing though.

In 1985, I was reading Rilke, Rimbaud, Patti Smith, Jim Morrison and beyond that mostly the beats. I had little idea of what poetry could be but knew what I was writing wasn't anything like what I was reading in high school. I found a copy of That They Were at the Beach in a bookstore and there was something unlike anything else and I connected with it and thought that maybe what I was writing wasn't worthless after all. It was cool too, I recall that after researching it further, that she went to Reed College as I was about to head out there. When I got there, her work appeared in American Poetry Review (I hadn't yet found other outlets) and I'm grateful for that. I carried that around in my backpack everywhere. Like a little blanket. I was 17. All I can say is her work gave me belief in poetry happening while I was alive and life while I've been alive.

I wish I had something grand to say, something beautifully elegant. She gave so much and made so much. It's a sad time, sad, sad time. I cannot estimate the gift of her verse and life.

The Ideology of Choice: The Norplant® Condition and Voices of Resistance

2010-06-09T01:44:00.002-05:00

CHAPTER FIVE

The Ideology of Choice: The Norplant® Condition
and Voices of Resistance

1. Introduction
“Between equal rights, force decides” (Marx 1990, 344).

To this point, the contributions of Foucault and Arendt in understanding Norplant® as a problem in political power have been introduced and briefly examined. Foucault’s compelling notions of disciplinary power, power/knowledge, as well as his elaboration of power in The History of Sexuality, Volume I, all highlight the hegemonic components of power – a form of power which is held in place from the bottom up and the top down. Because power is not only located in force, but is also discursively imbricated in the structures of knowledge itself, ruptures in power relations are not only possible - they seem likely. The omnipresence of power can set power against itself. Yet, Foucault’s articulation of resistance (despite his focus on the microcomponents of power) remains somewhat abstract. What is it about human political action that makes resistance and change possible in hegemonic power relations? Foucault’s healthy skepticism towards humanism may have contributed to his reluctance to more fully entertain the corporeal aspects of change and resistance at the human level. Arendt’s focus on natality through the category of action provides an ontological basis for an anti-foundationalist inquiry into the origins of resistance and change.
Any work of political science (or social science in general, for that matter) that critiques the ideological function of positivism in a field of research encounters the perilous dilemma of providing a research design that does not fall prey to the same criticisms. While there is no “outside” to ideology, the instrumental rationality that organizes positivism, that prosthetic limb of the disciplinary State, is not a “natural” or inherent condition of political science. My intersubjective model collects the contributions of Foucault, Arendt, traditional medical specialists, “alternative” medicine practitioners, and recipients of Norplant® from various cultural settings. Because of the small “N” in the research design, according to standard social science, the generalizability of the model is limited. But, the smaller number of interviewees affords the opportunity of opening a depth hermeneutics between “text” and “subject” that could not easily be attained with data from a large-scale survey. A synthetic model can be derived through a hermeneutic analysis of the Norplant® problem. In order to arrive at a point where such an analysis is possible, it was necessary to provide a political history of Norplant®. The historical account interpolates with the following case studies, throwing the experiences of individuals into broader historic relief, making an understanding of hegemony and resistance possible.
The matrices of gender, class, race, and locale intersect with and through Norplant’s discursive framework, formulating hegemonic relationships. Not only do socio-cultural indicators (e.g. gender, race) mark power relations, but power is also embedded in the structures of scientific inquiry and technological practice. If power is located within the framework of knowledge, the Norplant® Condition is also a matter of the structures and structuration of perception. Here, epistemological questions of subject and object, knower and known are simultaneously scientific, medical, and political. How then are Norplant’s discursive regimes of power/knowledge shaped by medical communities?

2. The Medicalization of the Political: Norplant® as Disciplinary Apparatus

This section addresses the manufacture and perpetuation of medico-political ideologies. An important component in understanding how Norplant® operates as a disciplinary social apparatus is an account of Norplant® beyond its trial phases. It is important to address in greater detail the proposed role of Norplant® in United States’ welfare policy, its role in criminal sentencing in the United States, and how these judicial and social historical conditions of Norplant® interrelate discursively both nationally and internationally.
While some policy analysts and critics have objected to Norplant® in the United States on grounds of invasion of private rights, such a criticism remains ensconced within a traditional liberal ideology of the sovereign self. By affirming the body through rights discourse, one may reinscribe the exclusionary ideology of liberalism by atomizing social and political discourse. Put differently, the meaningful social and political articulations of Norplant® (and of rights discourse) are avoided through an appeal to individual sovereignty. While individual sovereignty has its utility, it has become the means and the ends of politics in disciplinary liberalism. Can there be a politics of bodily autonomy that does not slide into subjectivism? It is vital to construct alternate paths of self-identity - paths which move beyond the subjectivism of the “unencumbered self” but do not fall into the reification of “consensus” that plague communitarian discourses. These paths locate actors not only in matrices of power/knowledge//resistance, but also in natality and plurality. My feminist rendering of Arendt and Foucault in the context of reproductivity in this chapter and the next aims to speak to this question.

A. Norplant® and Sentencing in the United States
In one sense, the policy of offering Norplant® as an alternative to prison could be considered as the least problematic of all Norplant® policies. After all, the surrendering of rights comes with the territory of criminal offense. When faced with the inevitable reality of the rights and privileges one loses in prison (freedom of movement, expression, autonomy, reproduction), convicted child abusers and other criminals might gladly accept the option of Norplant® as an alternative to prison. While Callahan observes that selecting Norplant® as an alternative to prison is hardly a free choice, she also observes that it may be a desirable option: “Refusing to allow Norplant as a condition of probation because women are or would be “compelled” to accept it as an alternative to incarceration is like preventing a mugging victim from handing over her cash on the grounds that her choice to do so is not free, thereby forcing her to accept the other alternative. This is unjustifiable paternalism at its worst” (Callahan 1995-1996, 71). In a rare event, I take exception to Callahan in this compelling essay. Callahan’s reasoning retains viability only when one examines the abstract generality of alternatives to prison without focusing upon the substantive aspects of the Norplant® alternative. Along with its political and social ramifications, Norplant® is a medical device with specific medical side effects. It is contraindicated for people with diabetes, may cause seizures, and causes menstrual irregularity in approximately half of its users – among other things. A judge who presents this option blurs an increasingly nebulous boundary between law and medicine.
Moreover, Callahan’s reasoning works from the two options that are presented: Norplant® or prison. Judges and critics might also consider the possibility of creating non-medically invasive probation conditions. This either/or conundrum is in fact one that is artificially manufactured by the State in an effort to “get tough” on child-abuse. Virginia Blum makes an important observation in noting that such a policy only protects “imagined” or “future” children (Blum 1995, 259-261). In itself, such a policy does nothing to protect the abused, while establishing and protecting the rights of the (imaginary) unconceived. Rather than resorting to the either/or scenario, parole conditions that limit the abuser’s contact with living, actual children might be more effective.
Moreover, as Steinbock notes such a policy carries with it broader political and social implications: this “choice” (however justifiable by the context it may be) is more often likely to be presented to minorities and women in poverty (Steinbock 1996, 53-78). While Callahan does accurately observe that reproductive restrictions are an inherent part of incarceration, the fact that they are does not in itself legitimate such restrictions. They still may have the net effect of continuing to disproportionately limit the reproduction of minorities and women in poverty. When reproductive restrictions are expanded into the field of probation, the potential social and political impact expands to include the incarcerated, probationers, and potentially parolees. I focus on Callahan’s piece not to single her out for criticism but rather because her piece signifies the problematics of liberalism; once the premises set by the State are accepted, the argument flows naturally. Indeed, Norplant® is better than prison for many. But by what political logic have we come to these two options?
I will get to this problem by way of the most famous case of Norplant® sentencing: The People of the State of California v. Darlene Johnson. However, before turning to this case, it must be noted that while Johnson’s case is the most frequently cited, it is not the only case of its sort in the United States. In 1988, Debra Ann Forster agreed to lifetime probation for abandoning her eighteen-month and six-month-old sons in a sweltering Phoenix apartment. The sons had to be hospitalized in serious condition for over a week. Judge Lindsay Budzyn included lifetime proof of contraception in Mrs. Forster’s probation. A more extreme precursor to the Norplant® cases involved Melody Baldwin, a thirty-year-old woman with a history of personality disorders who killed her four-year old son with an overdose of her prescription medications. Baldwin, at the court’s encouragement, agreed to sterilization in Indiana (Lewin 1/10/91, A-20). Lynn Smith and Nina J. Easton document several other cases involving the use of Norplant® in sentencing:
Judges in several states have ordered women to be implanted with Norplant as a condition of probation. In July, a Florida woman who pleaded guilty to child abuse agreed to have Norplant inserted in addition to going to jail and receiving counseling. In February, a mildly retarded Illinois woman, who also pleaded guilty to child abuse, was ordered to have Norplant implanted and to obtain a court order before ever having it removed. The judge denied an objection by the American Civil Liberties Union, saying “How many children should a parent be allowed to abuse before the state has the right to say, ‘You can’t have any more children until you can show you are not likely to abuse another child?’ And how many children of a parent should the taxpayers of this state have to support in foster homes or alternate care before the state has the right to say, ‘You can’t have any more children until you take care of the ones you already have?’ Child-abusing mothers in California, Texas and Nebraska have also been ordered to be implanted with Norplant (Smith and Easton 9/26/93, 27).

Perhaps the case of The People of the State of California v. Darlene Johnson gained the greatest notoriety of all these cases due to Judge Harold Broadman’s history of controversial sentencing, particularly with regards to women and reproduction. In 1988, Broadman ruled in a divorce case that Virginia Davison must undergo a hysterectomy in order to receive full spousal support. She “consented” and the hysterectomy was performed that same year (Alexander 1-10-91, A1;12). While Broadman denied that this was his intent, Davison stated she was “coerced into having it” (ibid.). In September of 1990, just a few months after the approval of Norplant® by the FDA, Broadman ordered Linda Zaring, who pleaded guilty to heroin use, to have the device implanted. However, Zaring arrived ninety minutes late for a hearing and was sent by Broadman to prison (ibid.).
When Harold Broadman of the Tulare Superior Court on January 2, 1991 ordered Darlene Johnson to select either Norplant® or prison for her crimes of child abuse (The People of the State of California v. Darlene Johnson), the decision received extensive media coverage, placing the Norplant® problem into American public discourse. While it may be useful to detail various critiques of Broadman’s decision, it seems more productive to examine how the case produced and was produced by a particular discourse of liberalism. Here, a relation of power produces a mode of subjectivity at non-corporeal and corporeal registers. On a spatial level, this mode of subjectivity is delinked from what Foucault calls the “heterotopia of deviation” (e.g. the prison) and set “free” into the public realm. Yet, the freedom offered Darlene Johnson (and that freedom is unequivocally real) – and its ontological significance – is haunted by the disciplinary production of new and/or alternately configured spaces of power relations. Callahan’s logic encapsulates the conundrum of the Norplant® condition in this sense: We are “free” if we are not in prison.
Yet the parameters of Darlene Johnson’s (albeit rightfully) limited freedom were further constrained by the way in which she was introduced to Norplant®. At the time of the sentencing (January 2, 1991), the FDA had approved the device for use in the United States less than a month ago (December 10, 1990). The application of the “Norplant Condition” was the first of its kind. According to the Appellant’s Opening Brief for the Tulare Superior Court, the Court did not fully inform Johnson of the nature of the device:
The only information it (the Court) provided was that, “it’s a thing that you put into your arm and it lasts for five years,” that “it’s like birth control pills, except you don’t have to take them every day,” and that it had been approved by the FDA, was not experimental, and was not permanent (C.T. at 44-45). When Johnson asked whether the device was harmful to the body, the court’s only reply was, “well, it’s like a birth control pill” (Id. at 45).

The Court never informed Johnson of surgical aspects of insertion and removal, medical contraindications, or of the device’s potentially deleterious side effects. Ironically, while the Court went out of its way to protect “future” or “imaginary” children, the Court abstained from denying Johnson of the custody of the very children she was convicted of abusing (The People of the State of California v. Darlene Johnson 4/24/91, 10).
Broadman’s sentencing elicited immediate criticisms – not only from civil liberties advocates, but also from those that designed and developed the Norplant® device. Dr. Philip Darney, whose research on Norplant® led to FDA approval, stated his explicit disapproval on record:
Norplant was developed for the purpose of expanding available methods of contraception and for the purpose of insuring access of reproductive choice for all women. It was developed out of a respect for human dignity and out of a belief that women should be able to have the number of children they want, when they want them. These principles, as well as basic standards of medical practice and medical ethics, are antithetical to this Court’s imposition of Norplant as part of a criminal sentence The People of the State of California v. Darlene Johnson, Appellant’s Brief citing Darney 4/24/91, 13).

Embryologist Sheldon Segal, who developed Norplant®, echoed Darney’s sentiments: “I just don’t believe in restricting human rights, especially reproductive rights. And I’m also bothered because this is a prescription drug, with certain side effects and certain groups of women for whom it may not be appropriate. How does the judge know if the woman is diabetic or has some other contraindication to the drug? That’s not his business” (Lewin 1/10/91, A13).
All parties involved are operating from a rhetoric of choice. From the perspective of the State, Darlene Johnson could choose Norplant® or prison and pregnancy or smoking. From Johnson’s perspective – as well as her attorneys – at issue here is a violation of her access to an informed decision. A choice without access to knowledge is not a choice. From the perspective of Norplant’s developers, the foundational concept behind the device is the expansion of individual choice and freedom. A woman has the right to choose. Lastly, from Callahan’s perspective, while there may be coercion in the process of using Norplant® in legal sentencing, the option of choosing between two undesirable alternatives is better than no option at all, i.e. prison. It is an understatement to say that the issue of choice is a foundational and crucial component of the politics of reproduction. In a broader sense, it would be an understatement to suggest that individual choice is a foundational component of the disciplinary liberal state. The notion is so entrenched in American political culture that “choice” is often synonymous with freedom.
Corrêa speaks on the ideology of choice, developing a pertinent marxian analysis of the quandary that the notion of choice presents in the Norplant® case:
The major divergences defining the debate can be described as the opposition between those advocating “choice” as the privileged approach to fertility regulation, and those asserting that the powers of technology largely prevail over the ability of women to preserve freedom and autonomy of decision. The first approach suggests the individual women (sic) is a consumer, facing the product without any social mediation. Power is attributed to the individual as if she can overcome social constraints and technological pitfalls. The existing “safety net” of mediating mechanisms which permit a first decision, occasional changes of mind and complaint against risk or abuse remains subsumed within the fetichism of choice (Corrêa 1994, 11).

Corrêa develops this notion of the fetishism of choice from Marx’s concept of the fetishism of the commodity (Corrêa 1994, 14;18). Corrêa takes what Marx applied to the realm of production into the realm of reproduction. In so doing, she delves into the ideological grounding point for subject-formation. In the case of Marx, the fetishism of the commodity obscures the political and social context of its production. In the case of the fetishism of choice, the allure and viable significance of the very notions of autonomy obscure the ways in which the subject is socially, politically, economically, and culturally produced.
The rhetoric of choice and the establishment of identity through rights discourse are the supporting structures of the very ideology that led Broadman to sentence Johnson to either prison or Norplant® and that lead others to encourage the mandate tying Norplant® to welfare. These forms of judgment that seek to produce a normalized, calculable and predictable individual originate in the assumption that action either has no epistemic and material grounding or that the conditions of action are irrelevant to its judgment. Born of a logic that “brooks no dissent,” Broadman’s decision succeeds in detaching itself from the human condition altogether. This loss of common sense is not an aberration or an outlier within the state of disciplinary liberalism. Rather, it is a condition of the (re) production of instrumental rationality. Instrumental rationality performs a perverse double function, simultaneously rendering the subject “invisible” by disappearing contingent aspects of human difference while doubling back upon itself a cold light of reason that illuminates the full accountability of the atomized self.
Disciplinary liberalism affirms choice but does not affirm a comprehension of the conditions and context of choice. In the somewhat different context of discussing the nature of “negative freedom” in Berlin’s work (for Broadman’s decision cannot be seen to be either solely an expression of “negative” or “positive” freedom), Thomas Dumm articulates this problematic from the field of the politics of space:
In presenting space as neutral, Berlin makes it the ground of freedom. To establish this space as the ground is to render it outside of contestation or struggle. Space is uncontestable as a neutral ground to the extent that one is prevented from questioning its production or recognizing that the production of space is always already an architectural enterprise. But when one remembers that space itself is produced, or, more provocatively, insists upon investigating the ways in which it is produced, one is better able to see the manner in which the neutrality of space operates as an architectural metaphor for grounding (Dumm 1996, 48).

Johnson could either choose Norplant® or prison. Like Berlin in this respect, Broadman makes the either/or space of that decision uncontestable. To contest the decision on the grounds that she was not well informed (as both Johnson and her attorneys did) reifies the illusion of neutrality. Rather than being restricted to the field of judicial politics, the politics of disciplinary liberal neutrality is also manifested in programs aimed at providing incentives for women to use long-lasting contraceptives.

B. Norplant® and Welfare in the United States
In 1991, State Representative Patrick of Kansas proposed House Bill 2089. This bill aimed to provide cash incentives to public assistance recipients who were 1) female and 2) receiving aid to families with dependent children (Kansas 1991). These recipients would receive a “grant” of $500 for the implantation of Norplant® and an additional annual sum of $50 “during the period that the contraceptive remains implanted and continues to be effective in preventing pregnancy”(Kansas 1991). Examinations for recipients by health care providers were also to be subsidized under this bill. The bill also stipulated that the secretary of social and rehabilitation services would notify all eligible public assistance recipients of this program of this grant option.
Other states joined in the effort to make the Norplant® “option” more attractive. Former Ku Klux Klan Wizard and Republican State Representative David Duke, made a similar proposal in Louisiana – suggesting a $500 cash bonus to welfare recipients in exchange for their consent to have Norplant® implanted in their bodies. A vast array of factors – including the United States’ deeply problematic history of involuntary sterilization/contraception, the racially charged aspects of the Philly Inquirer incident, Duke’s former membership in a right-wing hate group were among the factors that contributed to rising criticisms of the Norplant® condition. Despite criticisms from the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Medical Association, the Black Women’s Health Project, and for that matter, the Director of Biomedical Research at the Population Council, proposals to tie Norplant® to welfare in some form in the United States exploded onto the political scene at the state level. Corrêa cites an Alan Guttmacher Institute report “of approximately twenty bills, amendments and welfare reform proposals involving Norplant” in thirteen legislatures from 1991 to 1992 alone (Corrêa 1994, 9).
Significantly, none of the proposals have been enacted. That being said, the fact that women in poverty remain the focal point for the discourse of reproductive “irresponsibility” (few of the measures aim at limiting male procreation, for example) remains highly significant. The gender, class, and race dimensions of the Norplant® condition necessitate an analysis that goes beyond the problematics of the ideology of population control and into the ways in which subjectivity is reproduced and literally contracepted in the capitalist disciplinary liberal state. If Norplant® (and other long-acting contraceptives) were solely a matter of population control, it is likely that their popularity and marketing would be limited only to areas with high fertility rates.
Attempts to link Norplant® to welfare underscore a pronounced rhetoric of “responsibility, the Janus-face specter of the fetishism of choice. Here, reproduction is not something people do, but a privilege of affluence. When poor people reproduce, women are labeled as “irresponsible.” Steinbock details what may constitute the most egregious proposed bill to date in her “The Concept of Coercion and Long-Acting Contraceptives,” a bill which does provide a sort of perverse gender equity on this policy matter. At the time of the essay’s publication, the Ohio bill was pending. It stipulated the following:
A bill is pending in Ohio that would provide a new welfare mother with a one-time payment of $1,000 and would increase her monthly cash assistance to 150% of her base subsidy if she is sterilized by tubal ligation. If she agreed to have a long-acting contraceptive such as Depo-Provera or Norplant, she would get a $500 payment and a 10% increase of her base subsidy every six months until she reached the 150% level. Under the bill’s provisions, the welfare mother would be required to identify the father of the child. He could elect to pay child support, perform community service work, be sterilized and receive $1,000, or be sent to prison for two years. Also, a new welfare mother would have to pass a test prepared by the state Department of Human Services to show she has appropriate parenting skills. The newborn of a person who refuses to take the test or who fails could be placed with relatives in a foster home (Steinbock 1998, 66-67).

Steinbock’s essay proceeds to separate the excesses of the Ohio measure from less coercive measures, such as the Kansas measure. From this point of separation, she considers the potential legitimacy of such incentives using the “compelling State interest” test of Skinner v. Oklahoma (Steinbock 1998, 66-70). After all, “Norplant bonuses are not conditioned on anything so drastic as organ donation or serving as a surrogate mother. They merely require women to suspend procreation temporarily” (Steinbock 1998, 70 emphasis mine). Others have argued that such a requirement is hardly banal and might also point out that such measures (with the Ohio sterilization/prison/community service option excluded) do require women and only women to undergo such medical treatment. However, the saving grace of the “cash incentive” program is that the State has a “compelling interest” in limiting the reproduction of women who are not financially equipped to raise any more children. Moreover, cash incentive programs – when small enough – are a matter of choice (Steinbock 1998, 71). When they are too large, they constitute a threat to “the values of autonomy and equality and should be rejected for these reasons” (ibid.). Despite her rejection of many of the proposals, by grounding that rejection in the balancing of the State’s compelling interests with a quantification of individual autonomy, the analysis frames the policy not in terms of women’s needs, nor in terms of the needs of people in their inscrutable particularities, but in terms of the needs of the State.
To follow Arendt, Steinbock’s argument - like that of the legislators who have proposed linking Norplant to public assistance – is well on the way of making everything possible once the premise of the State’s compelling interest is accepted. It does follow a certain logic that those who depend on State resources for sustenance should refrain from increasing the consumption of those resources. The State, indeed, does have a compelling interest. However, who decides that policy should be framed in terms of the interests of the State? Are the interests of the State consonant with the welfare of its people? By framing reproductive and distributive policy in terms of the State’s interests, the accountability of the State is dispersed onto individuals.
This act of framing emerges from a representation and understanding of the State as neutral, as a space and place beyond ideology. Once the State is conceptualized as an embodiment of neutrality, criticism and resistance to policy initiatives are circumvented. The State hypostatizes its own ideological contours, solidifying them as part of the laws of Nature. In this realm, the compelling interest of the State takes precedence over the compelling interests of the public, of human pluralities. Yet, there is more to the policies involving cash incentives than the discernable inscription of the State as outside “itself.” Cash incentive programs also fix and produce predictable forms of subjectivity. Both the voluntary welfare program proposals and the Planned Parenthood “Dollar-a-Day” program represent not only a re-location of human accountability, but also an attempt to create a predictable, normalized, routinized subject. It is with this in mind that I turn to Planned Parenthood’s Dollar-a-Day Program.

C. Norplant® and Teen Pregnancy: the Dollar-a-Day Program
In Denver, Colorado a Planned Parenthood program aimed at stemming the rise of repeat teen pregnancy – particularly teenage girls, “mostly black and Hispanic” who have given birth before the age of sixteen (Steinbock 1998, 71). In response, the Dollar-a-Day Program was introduced: “The program requires girls to come to one meeting a week, where they receive their seven dollars, paid out for symbolic reasons in one dollar bills. Girls who become pregnant must drop out of the group” (Steinbock 1998, 71). Girls were introduced to Norplant®; long-lasting contraception was encouraged, but not a precondition for participation. Steinbock notes the success of the program:
After five years, the program was judged a success. Only 17% of the girls in the program became pregnant; this compares very favorably to a 50% risk of repeat pregnancy within two years for girls who have become pregnant before age sixteen. In addition, the program is claimed to have saved Colorado in excess of a quarter of a million dollars in welfare and Medicaid payments. Despite these advantages, President Faye Wattleton and a majority of the board of Planned Parenthood Federation of America denounced the program as “coercive.” Paying teenagers not to get pregnant, they felt, went against the organizations long-standing and deeply held policies advocating reproductive choice and individual rights (Steinbock 1998, 71).

Steinbock draws a distinction between the Planned Parenthood Program (which she terms “liberty-enhancing”) and the proposals to give “rewards” for accepting Norplant® (which undermine the values of autonomy and equality) (Steinbock 1998, 73). I seek to unpack this distinction because Steinbock’s analysis carries with it the hallmarks and problems of the practice of liberalism, particularly in relation to the field of new reproductive technologies.
For Steinbock, the reason why this is an acceptable program while other incentive programs are not is that it satisfies for her, “the choice prong” (Steinbock 1998, 73): “The girls are not threatened or forced or pressured into avoiding pregnancy. Rather a small financial incentive is offered…if they decide not to join, they are not thereby made worse off”(Steinbock 1998, 71-72). This reasoning is flawed internally (i.e. by her own logic) and externally (i.e. the logic as a whole problematizes the very notions of autonomy and equality that she champions).
First, Steinbock suggests that the former examples (offering $500 for Norplant®), as well as this example, are distinct in that the latter involves only a small financial incentive. The Dollar-a-Day program was a two-year program, which supplied young teenagers with seven dollars a week or $365 a year – or $730 per successful program participant. This is $230 higher than the amount offered in many of the bills presented in state legislators tying Norplant® to welfare that Steinbock eventually found problematic. Recall that Steinbock opposed the welfare measures on the grounds that women in poverty would be unduly influenced by the $500 financial incentive. Why is it that a sixteen-year-old mother of at least one child would not be unduly influenced by the potential benefit of $730? Because the cash flow is incremental and is presented in a symbolic fashion, the value of the currency is diminished in this analysis.
This problem in the essay highlights the broader problem of positivist attempts to quantify the notions of coercion and autonomy. At what juncture does pressure dissipate into support? At what juncture is reward actually coercion? Steinbock’s essay is excellent in that it begins to ask these questions, but in founding her analysis on the ambiguous and problematic notion of choice, the social, political and cultural complexities of reproductive policy are bypassed. Thus, the complexities of gender discrimination and racial discrimination simply do not enter into her discussion. Yet, her account stated the program targeted only girls. By her own account participants were “mostly black and Hispanic” (Steinbock 1998, 271). Yet, in the same essay that places a premium on “the values of autonomy and equality,” questions of gender and racial (in)equality were not discussed. This is due primarily to the primacy that Steinbock, Robertson, and the architects of many of these policies (e.g. Representative Patrick of Kansas) place on the concept of choice. If the “choice prong” is satisfied, if the “subject” is ostensibly free and autonomous – then the values of equality and autonomy are ensured. The liberal self is a hypothetical, faceless subject – without a body, without geography, without history. The “reward” system of a dollar a day for Norplant® – or any contraception – carries markedly different significations for groups of people whose reproductive rights have been systematically denigrated, as Dorothy Roberts succinctly points out (1997). Race, gender, class and reproduction can not be separated – particularly when one aims towards the values of equality and autonomy.
In their essay, “Other “isms” Aren’t Enough: Feminism, Social Policy, and Long-Acting Contraception,” Hilde Lindemann Nelson and James Lindemann Nelson also analyze the “Dollar-a-Day” program as a case that complicates the “choice” paradigm. The Lindemann Nelsons are quick to note that perhaps such a program should at least be augmented by a similar program aimed at increasing boys’ sexual responsibility. Their point here is that approaching reproductive policy through feminist perspectives enables the analyst to encounter ways in which programs can be both more effective and egalitarian. By integrating the standpoints of those who are most likely to be directly impacted by policy, feminist policy analysis points to ways in which the compelling interests of those impacted by State and social policy are not neglected.
Feminist policy analysis, when taken another step further, might point to the questions above and beyond the significant issue of coercion implicit in the Dollar-a-Day program. Such an analysis could elucidate the ways in which girls and boys are being made. While the Lindemann Nelsons’ do implicitly allude to this by suggesting that boys be integrated in these programs (excluding boys gives them the wrong message – a social inscription that marks their reproductive behavior through and through), the bulk of their work and most of the literature on this topic fixates on the topic of coercion. Steinbock notes the high rate of physical and/or sexual abuse among participants and champions the sense of self-esteem that the program instills in participants (Steinbock 1998, 73). Robertson labels the dollar-a-day reward as “symbolic” and both Robertson and Steinbock consider the reward to be low enough that those who enter the groups do so for non-monetary reasons. Yet, if the “symbolic” realm is so significant, why is it not attended to in greater detail?
On the whole, it seems that the work that is being done is good work. Teens are getting “support,” not “pressure.” Indeed, there is something to be said for a network of people who can mutually provide support for issues as difficult and challenging as teenage pregnancy and child-abuse. But, there is also something to be said about the process of normalization, an institutional inscription of a particular vision of human reproduction – a vision that is disproportionately inscribed on black girls and Latinas. Perhaps most importantly of all, there is something to be said about who is excluded. If the group were actually a support group, then other provisions would be made for those girls who became pregnant. In the Dollar-a-Day program, the solution is exodus. If anything, more support is needed for these girls, instead of exclusion from their support group. The Planned Parenthood of Denver has created a “heterotopia of deviation.” This space (or non-space) of exclusion constitutes the parameters through which normalcy is defined and instantiated. The Dollar-a-Day program may not only have the “happy” consequence of reducing the rate of teen pregnancy, it may also make pregnant teen mothers feel worse than ever. For seventeen percent or close to one out of every five participants (Steinbock 1998, p. 71), there is no support, just exclusion. For the remaining eighty-three percent, there is the act of excluding an other. This may be helpful as a means of reducing the rate of pregnancy, but it may also have unintended consequences – consequences which include socializing young girls to exclude.
The Dollar-a-Day program is particularly interesting because it points to and has the potential to be what Foucault terms, a “crisis heterotopia” – a “privileged or sacred or forbidden place(s) reserved for individuals who are in a state of crisis with respect to society” (Foucault 1994, 179). Foucault notes however, that these spaces are increasingly rare – that they are being replaced by heterotopias of deviation: “those in which individuals are put whose behavior is deviant with respect to the mean or the required norm” (Foucault 1994, 180). The Dollar-a-Day program functions in part as a crisis heterotopia that depends heavily upon the construction of a deviancy. This is part of a process of
creating a different space, a different real space as perfect, as meticulous, as well-arranged as ours is disorganized, badly arranged, and muddled. This would be the heterotopia not of illusion but of compensation, and I wonder if it is not somewhat in that manner that certain colonies functioned (Foucault 1994, 184).

In the well-arranged spaces of the Dollar-a-Day program, everyone is paid for their “good” behavior and those who are bad are excluded. In this act of “compensation,” a divided and rationalized subjectivity is produced. I am not saying that aspiration of preventing teen pregnancy is right or wrong, but rather delineating how this particular program contributes to a socialization process – a process that answers to predictability and hyper-rationality. The program is so dedicated to the prevention of pregnancy, that the physical, emotional, and mental health of those who become pregnant is not only not a non-priority, it is a non-issue. This process of creating successful people and disappearing others has been missed not only by the creators of the program, but by many of its supporters and critics – including Planned Parenthood’s national center. As long as the issue of choice is satisfied, few questions are raised. Ironically, the issue of “choice” often clouds further inquiries into the meaning of reproductive liberty and freedom.
Foucault’s notions of power present ways of understanding the problematics of Norplant® beyond the contributions of more positivistic policy analysis. In conjunction with feminist perspectives on reproductive technologies, Foucault’s analysis underscores the medicalization of the political realm. The case of Darlene Johnson, legislative proposals to link Norplant® to welfare and the Dollar-a-day program highlight the production of predictable, normalized identities through exclusionary and disciplinary tactics. I have argued thus far that Foucault’s notions of resistance and action are, however, more limited. Below, I turn towards the topic of resistance with attention being paid to women who were the recipients of the Norplant® trial phase and to women whose medical practices lie outside the parameters of “traditional” modern medicine. Through these accounts, an appreciative critique of Foucault’s concepts of power is provided.

3. Resistance and Feminist Action: The Case of Abigail Odam and the Women’s Health Movement

The case of Abby Odam is particularly complex in that it engages the rhetoric of choice - its institutional, disciplinary grounding not by interrogating choice per se but through a radicalization of the concept. Odam’s anarchist feminist praxis both points to the possibilities and dangers inherent in Arendt’s accounts of action and natality. In presenting the following account of what led to Odam’s arrest, it is important to indicate that this is not intended to be an “objective” account for an objective account would delineate little to nothing about Odam’s understanding of the situation.
To put it differently, I have asserted the values of human particularity – especially how that is expressed and passed down through narrative. It has been argued that such “storytelling” constitutes a fundamental aspect of the maintenance of human plurality in a fragile world. While considerable attention has been given to the disciplinary construction of subjectivity, my attention is directed towards ways in which “subjects” inscribe upon the social their own vision, which frustrates and redirects forms of disciplinary power (Grosz 1994). Thus, some care must be taken to be “true” to the subject, in this case Abigail Odam. Yet, additional care and recognition must be paid to the multiplicity of subjectivity(s). In their analysis of qualitative data collection techniques (using women’s experiences of motherhood and postnatal depression as key examples), Natasha Mauthner and Andrea Doucet detail the complexities of attending to the complexities of “voices,” “stories,” and “self” (1998, 119-146). In addition to a multiplicity of voices and identities, each self or “voice” contains a multiplicity. Mauthner and Doucet point to the literature on the discursive construction of the self and acknowledge the difficulty of re-presenting a knowable subject (Mauthner and Doucet 1998, 136). While to some, such a framework would seem to lead to the impossibility of valuable social research, this important theory of subjectivity can inform a practice of humility on the part of the researcher: “We pay attention to what we think this person is trying to tell us within the context of this relationship, this research setting, and a particular location in the social world, rather than making grand statements about just who this person or ‘voice’ is (Mauthner and Doucet 1998, 136-137). The tension between the desire to know and the impossibility of knowing the subject can produce valuable results when a certain self-reflexivity comes into play. In the cases of Abby Odam, I am looking at how and in what ways these figures inform and resist disciplinary liberal power relations.
Abby Odam is a direct entry midwife “who practiced for 10 years in San Diego, California. She was convicted of five counts of "practicing medicine without a license" and one count of child endangerment on Feb. 14, 1997 but was free on bail pending sentencing April 2. On March 21, she was jailed for "conspiracy" based on a sealed indictment, with bail set at $1,000,000.” The conspiracy indictment resulted from her refusal to resist the request for assistance in home birthing upon her February 14 release. Due to the fact that Odam had been arrested for practicing without a license, the indictment of “conspiracy” could be and was, handed down. Odam’s sentence of four years and eight months was eventually reduced to a release date scheduled for September 13, 1999. It has been noted by supporters in the midwife community (and it must be noted that the community is sharply divided over Odam’s case to this day) that Odam’s sentence was above and beyond what could be considered typical for this sort of violation. At this point I turn to an account of the events surrounding her arrest:
The case that caused so much furor was a lady who had a previous classical Caesarean – To shortly sum up – this type of incision is more likely to rupture during another birth. Routinely these women have planned Caesareans before their due-dates: Colleen came to me wanting a vaginal birth with a previous incision of this type – We researched the risk of rupture and found it to be two to four percent. She decided she wanted to take the risk. Her uterus ruptured – the baby was stillborn. It was tragic. She is very thankful for having the choice that I didn’t defend myself first and not take her on. This infuriated the other midwives: How dare I allow such a choice? My job as I saw it was to support families – sharing my knowledge and my limitations…I have briefly tried to summarize my thoughts. It has been fun. I’ve never written before – as I’ve never read Foucault and Arendt. I’ve been addictively serving families day and night – didn’t even read the mail – no (Odam, 10/1/97).

Is Odam’s account of the events leading to her imprisonment “accurate?” Indeed, other midwives, doctors, members of the jury found the case to be more (or perhaps, less) complex. Yet, the point of this moment of criticism is not the construction of a judgment or an attempt to hand down (yet another) sentence.
Rather, I want to emphasize how Odam perceives her role as a midwife/activist and as a member of the human community. Odam sees her case as something of a political referendum on the practice of midwifery, contextualizing it in a long-standing tension between modern medical models of birthing and midwife-assisted models: “The OB sees birth as a crisis about to happen, as the midwifery model sees the woman as going through a healthy process – her job being to facilitate.” (letter, 4/17/98). Medicine, for Odam, seems not to be a matter of health care, but rather a problematic imposition of power. Medicine here, is not a matter of making people better, but of establishing a relationship of dependency, a muting of women’s autonomy.
Nor is this model of midwifery solely a matter of women’s autonomy. Odam understands her practice as a mode of respecting the life process in all its complexity, choosing to offer “non-doing” or action through non-action as often as modern obstetricians may offer medical intervention. For Odam:
the medical model takes one away from the life process. It serves to distract from the true sense of health and well being. In a sense I was practicing medicine by using any tools at all – so I have come full circle – maybe the courts are right – using tools of any kind is medicine – even the listening to the heartbeat of the baby causes a separation of baby from mom – separation being the imprinting that all of us are trying to heal (ibid.).

Odam’s critique of medical technology is particularly interesting in the context of what expecting mothers lose through ultrasound:
Few OB’s ask a woman what she thinks. Technology only feeds into this – i.e. ultrasound – in which you can see the baby on the screen and the doctor decides if the baby is perfect, is worth keeping. When women see the baby they have lost the fantasy, the dreaming of the child, the wonderment – to have a fixed image raises expectation – then the reverse = disappointment, then lawsuits…the lack of accepting what is, that we are perfection and whatever we are is divine (letter, 4/17/98).

Whatever difficulty one may (or may not) have with other aspects of Odam’s praxis, the notion of wonderment at who we are serves as a vital (in the literal sense) moment in confounding and resisting the instrumental rationality of the disciplinary liberal state. Disciplinary liberalism aims to produce the good subject.
Odam sees the practice of midwifery as a fundamentally political practice, a practice that refuses State interests in favor of the compelling interests of “the family in intimacy” (ibid.). This intimacy was shared by the community of people who had participated in homebirths on a regular basis. Odam writes of the loneliness and sense of community experienced by these families:
They have a wonderful network – that was the most rewarding part of my work. Every Friday night I had “classes” which were really networking nests. The house was filled with mothers, fathers, and babies sharing and passing on information. Homebirthing is considered so “alternative” that it is lonely for the one percent who do it…I was always putting women in touch with others in their neighborhoods (ibid.).

Given these understandings of some of Odam’s basic ideas as to the meaning and function of midwifery and modern medicine, the value of alternative communities, and the dangers of technology, how do these ideas reflect Foucault’s concepts of power, knowledge and resistance? Furthermore, to what extent or how can her work be conceptualized within Arendt’s framework? Is it resistance? Is it natality-in-action, rooted in a deeply embedded sense of human plurality? Or is it a vision that looks in one direction, all the while darkened by its own shadow?
In the context of Foucault’s work, the modern medical model can be considered a mode of domination where “an individual or social group succeeds in blocking a field of power relations, immobilizing them and preventing them any reversibility of movement by economic, political, or military means…In such a state, it is certain that practices of freedom do not exist or exist only unilaterally or are extremely constrained and limited” (Foucault 1997, 283). Odam’s critique of the problems that modern medicine – particularly modern medicine in the field of reproduction – highlights this process of blocking a field of power relations (recall here that for Foucault, freedom exists within power relations) and echoes the process of minimization of Norplant® recipients’ experiences. For her, the medical model portrays a univocal conceptualization of the Truth. Those who fall outside that notion of the truth must be corrected or disappeared, literally. In this respect, Odam’s work echoes certain aspects of the Foucauldian critique of the disciplinary apparatus of the State – as it relates to new reproductive technologies, but does it qualify as a form of resistance and/or Action?
Approaching Odam’s practices in the context of Foucault’s contributions would not result in handing down another sentence. It would not sit in judgment, but would seek to open doors – new possibilities for thought and action. It is in this vein that I continue. For Foucault, power is relational and has no point of exteriority or point of origin. This seems markedly divergent from Odam’s scheme in many respects. For Odam, while power does have a relational aspect (power is not the sole possession of “technodocs” but is dispersed and present in every man, woman, and child), it seems that in her fixing the moment of birth the site for “imprinting” locates power in one specific space and time. This is particularly important because there is a risk of occluding or dissolving the importance of other sites of power relations in conjunction with the birthing moment. Moreover, once power is conceptualized as being fixed in a specific space and time, politics and the transmission of meaning itself are actually put at risk. The vitality of the unpredictability of action is rooted in the unpredictability of birth – that we are newcomers. Within Odam’s framework, there is a potential for reading the unpredictability of birth as predictable. Ironically, in its own way, action is routinized – albeit in a form and fashion that is critical of contemporary social, medical, and political values.
But, perhaps I am too quick to hand down a sentence. Foucault makes a vital observation in his construction of the notion of resistance as “distributed in an irregular fashion” (Foucault 1990, 96). They are “mobile and transitory…fracturing unities and effecting regroupings, furrowing across individuals themselves, cutting them up and remolding them, marking off irreducible regions in them, in their bodies and minds” (ibid.). While the construction of this form of resistance may indeed have strategic and significant implications, Odam’s work attempts to and does, cut across the constructed unities of Sovereignty and Law. This much, it seems, can be agreed upon by the prosecutor, the jurors, Odam, and members of the midwifery community. Odam’s investment in “natural” birthing processes opens the door for others to consider the possibility of reproductive health outside the modern OB/GYN model. This is no small task. Practices that stand in contradistinction to the tenets of scientific method can and do work to problematize the constructed univocity of science’s rhetoric of neutrality. They ask and demand a standpoint on human action that is located not outside the realm of human affairs, but deeply embedded within them.
It is in this sense that Odam’s practices are consonant with important aspects of Arendt’s concepts of plurality, action and natality. The concept of natality, that each person is a beginner – works from a revelatory sense of being-born-into-the-world. It is not that a sense of the miraculous and the revelatory is absent from Foucault’s work, but that it is central to Arendt’s work. It is from this notion of the miracle of the new that a politics of recovery is delivered. Seen in this light, Odam’s celebration of the “natural” realm where “whatever we are is divine” is not a passive capitulation to the forces of domination – but a celebration of every one of us who has been born:
The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, “natural” ruin is ultimately rooted in the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence which Greek antiquity ignored altogether, discounting the keeping of faith as a very uncommon and not too important virtue and counting hope among the evils of illusion in Pandora’s box. It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their “glad tidings”: “A child has been born unto us” (Arendt 1958, 247 emphasis mine).

The notion each of us is and can never be again is a powerful notion – one that formulates a politics based on distinction and difference. This celebration of distinction, which might be mistaken for a politics of contention, is balanced by a sense of recognition of a divinity not in singularities but in pluralities. These pluralities intersect, adumbrate, frustrate the monological trajectory of normalization – a normalization process that is technologically instituted and enforced.
On the whole, much of the politics of midwifery (including much of Abby Odam’s career) is a matter of what Leo Strauss calls “writing between the lines” (Scott, citing Strauss 1990, 183). The politics of resistance is not only a matter of guerillas and insurgent groups, but also of the transmission of meaning. Alternate forms of signification are not devoid of political content. Rather they serve as the wellspring of political action, as opposed to political behavior. Radical forms of midwifery, such as those espoused by Abby Odam, challenge the Norplant® Condition in many significant respects. The revelatory character of birthing, that each of us is revealed in the world as miracle presents a demonstrable challenge to the rising tide of biopolitics that has been expressed in the eugenic components of new reproductive technologies. Odam’s construction of technology as problematic is more than the mere statement that it is “bad” – after all, she acknowledges her use of technology on a regular basis. It is consonant with readings of the ideological basis of technology, that technology and ideology go “all the way down.” There is an ideology in the use of any instrument. Lastly, Odam’s community of home-birthing “participants” delineates the ways in which narrative and “nesting” comprise support in a fragile political order. These “networking nests,” constitute what Benhabib calls “the redemptive power of narrative” (Benhabib, 1990). As I noted in Chapter Four Benhabib writes, “for who we are is revealed in the narratives we tell of ourselves and of our world shared with others. Even when tradition has crumbled, narrativity is constitutive of identity” (Benhabib 1990, 187 emphasis mine). Traditional medical models of birthing and health – and political models of community did indeed “suffer a sea change” in the storytelling that went on every Friday night at Odam’s. Moreover, Odam continued to narrate her experiences and beliefs from a most desolate space, the prison. And, it is through narration (in part) that her arrested time and space was recovered and reclaimed. Odam wrote to a larger public (her accounts being posted on the World Wide Web), her supporters (published in a newsletter, Letters from Abby), and privately. Odam’s narratives are sites of remembrance reclaiming meaning and I would argue, power (as in Arendt’s potentia). This re-member-ing rearticulated the dividing practices of the disciplinary apparatus of the penitentiary. Odam’s story indicates the ways in which the powers of memory and narrative function to begin anew – in dire circumstances.
The notions of plurality, alternative communities, storytelling, and critiques of technology found in Odam’s practice are, in many respects, part of a broader movement. The women’s health movement can also be considered in this light. While it enjoyed a broader popularity during the 1960s and 1970s, it has hardly disappeared. The Chicago Women’s Health Center stands as one of the few remaining facilities in the U.S. entirely dedicated to the principles of self-empowerment that guided the American women’s health movement of the 1970s. A staff member noted:
it is a nonprofit, women-controlled center - women-owned and operated involved in the health and health-related education of the clientele regardless of their ability to pay. It has been in existence for 22 years. It seeks to generate self-help, self-empowerment, and preventive care. It is the last collectively operated facility of this sort in the United States (7/17/97).

Like Odam’s practice in some respects, the Center aims to provide a wide array of health care options, maximizing each woman’s autonomy by encouraging and supporting women: “There is definitely room for more alternative holistic approaches, even though the traditional medical practice is available. In addition to making the goals accessible by making the different technologies and techniques accessible, there is the function of outreach - which educates the clientele. This education informs women to listen to their bodies” (7/17/97).
While the Center is “more open to women-center reproductive technologies (cervical caps and fertility awareness)” and is “less open to more invasive procedures (Norplant® and Depo-Provera),” both are made available at the Center. The availability of these technologies hardly represented a wholly receptive attitude towards new reproductive technologies, however. She noted:
Reproductive technology is simply not done for men. It is done by men for women. (Modern male medicine treats the woman’s body as a crisis) A lot of what goes on in your body is not an emergency, a medical crisis. Traditional medicine treats women’s bodies like there is always a crisis going on. The Chicago Women’s Health Center seeks to create the “informed consumer” - to work with women, to empower them to listen to themselves. For example, pelvics are easier sitting up at 45 degrees, rather than prone, at the physician’s mercy (7/17/97).

Both Odam and the Health Center representative see the “traditional” model of medicine as treating women’s bodies as crisis. Informed by a feminist ethic of care of the self, learning to listen to our bodies, refusing the hysterical notion that women’s bodies are in crisis by definition, and enacting this ethic through practices that do not put a woman at a physician’s mercy – all of these practices could be read solely as “health care” matters (albeit important ones) or they could be read as a political engagement with our bodies and the world.
I have noted that we cannot understand the full force of reproductive technologies without confronting not only what happens to our bodies (via Foucault), but also how our bodies literally participate in the production of power relations. The act of lying prone that the women’s health center worker discussed could easily (and often does) constitute part of the production of a particular masculinist power relationship. Yet, within the posture is an “I can,” a physical insertion of the self – a listening to one’s body – whereby “I-can-raise-myself-up.” While we are by definition, possibilities, these possibilities are enframed and configured “from below” (Foucault 1990, 94). Power relations operate and function in our bodies. It is no small task to create a space of appearance whereby those power relations are reconfigured, challenged, and frustrated.
Odam’s practice and the women’s health movement provide avenues for resistance and evidence of counterhegemonic action in the field of reproductive health. Both point to ways in which health care professionals can and do provide methods of care of the self that stand in opposition to the modern medical paradigm of health care. The political ramifications of these practices are significant because they present a valuable and compelling critique of technology and a liberation of women’s body’s from male-dominated medico-political orders. This critique and this “listening to our bodies” is achieved in part through the construction of alternative communities of storytellers – people who listen to each other and themselves, despite what they are told. This has ramifications for understanding resistance within the disciplinary liberal State – a topic marking the conclusion of my research.

springboard shoes

2010-04-10T15:12:00.000-05:00

Late last night saw some guy walking in these with a small portable television as a necklace and a helmet on and I thought is this real? Pulled over to gas station and some guy in a suit seemed 1955 in there, dress, demeanor - he and the cashier only talked in pennies. ("What is this 3 hundred fifty nine cents? You robbin me without a gun!") I left and the was springboard guy again. On my corner, a bald man stood in the intersection waving a wig screaming "we are going to the gas chamber!" One onlooker said "that dude is crazy" The bouncer from the local ukrainian dive averred, "he's probably a cop." This last statement made sense in the context of the trip. I got inside quick and wondered what's going on.

Working Through and Out of the Straitjacket of Logic: Arendt’s Politics of Natality and Memory

2010-03-02T04:38:00.002-06:00

Chapter Four

Working Through and Out of the Straitjacket of Logic:
Arendt’s Politics of Natality and Memory

1. Introduction

“It has often been observed that the validity of the statement 2+2=4 is independent of the human condition” (Arendt 1994, 318).

“For there is a divine and, if I may express it, productive energy which cannot be made, but makes” (Augustine, (426 AD) 1998, 536).

“That there be a beginning, man was created before whom there was nobody” (Augustine (426 AD) 1998, 532).

Whereas Foucault’s considerations of the dangers of sovereignty lead me to a critique of liberal discourse, Arendt’s political philosophy provides an inquiry into the ontology of action and resistance. While Foucault’s notion of resistance elucidates the dynamic relations of power and resistance, I have contended that Foucault’s writings provide less of an understanding as to how resistance and power are produced. Arendt, through her concepts of action and natality, focuses on the origins of resistance and change. This chapter aims not only to elaborate on the concepts of natality and action, but also to delineate Arendt’s contributions to counterhegemonic egalitarian theory - a power/knowledge axis that works in resistance to the instrumental rationality that guides the Norplant® Condition.
I will first focus primarily on texts from Arendt’s “middle period” (The Human Condition, Between Past and Future, On Revolution), elucidating some of her key contributions to my critique of Norplant® and liberalism. From here, I work through divergent feminist readings of Arendt, focusing primarily on the work of Bonnie Honig and Seyla Benhabib. Before turning to a closer reading of her earlier and later periods, I confront Anne Norton’s valid account of Arendt’s racism. It is at this juncture that I work through her earlier and later writings (Rahel Varnhagen, The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Life of the Mind) with a focus on her critique of reason and her turn to “common sense.” By broadening my focus on Arendt, the Augustinian basis of natality and action elucidates her creative appropriation of Kant’s concept of sensus communis. I close the chapter with a consideration of the difficulties and potentialities associated with Arendtian politics and action.
But the reader may still be asking, why combine the works of Arendt and Foucault? Foucault and Arendt converge through their problematization of reason – and more specifically they converge on the tension between reason and freedom. The construction of reason as a normalizing phenomenon is construed as one of the central organizing principles in Foucault’s work. It is important to note that much of what concerned Foucault – the rise of disciplinary regimes, the role of normalization in constructing subjectivity – also was of grave concern for Arendt. True, it would be a mistake to map Arendt’s critique of the rise of the social directly onto Foucault’s ideas on normalization, power, and disciplinary regimes. There are obvious and less obvious differences - particularly in the field of the foundations and origins of subjectivity or for that matter Foucault’s focus on sexuality and Arendt’s on matters of democratic governance.
Foucault complicated matters by defining the methods and means through which power works to differentiate and articulate subjectivity. Individual uniqueness, that necessary condition for freedom in Arendt, is seen at times in Foucault’s work as a site of partitioning, of subjectifying a person, making her a subject. Yet, their critiques successfully complement one another. While Foucault offers a more incisive account of surveillance and power, he fails to adequately account for modes of resistance to that power. Arendt’s critique of reason when grouped with her concepts of natality and action provide grounding for articulating a novel understanding of resistance.

2. The Archimedean Point As Threat to Natality

Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition interrogates a modernist instrumental rationality that underlies both science and politics, taking as the point of departure the launching of the first earth-bound, man-made object into space. Such a venture enables one to conceive of world and human situations not from a particularized, local standpoint but from the Archimedean point. This vantage point, located outside the earth’s atmosphere, enables observers to view life as behavior and process rather than as action and activity. Like many other modernist theorists (particularly Weber), Arendt is concerned here with a sense of alienation and homogenization that pervades the modern human condition. Unlike Foucault, Arendt explicitly addresses in vitro fertilization or IVF and eugenics, drawing a connection between outer space exploration and these procedures:
It is the same desire to escape imprisonment to the earth that is manifest in the attempt to create life in the test tube, in the desire to mix “frozen germ plasm from people of demonstrated ability under the microscope to produce superior human beings” and to “alter their size, shape, and function” and the wish to escape the human condition (Arendt 1958, 2).

Arendt’s framework for addressing the issue of what we are doing is based in her notion of Vita Activa, which contains three categories of human activities: labor, work, and action. Labor is content of biological life itself - reproduction, growth, decay - all fall into this category. Work, for Arendt, is “unnatural” insofar as it does not pertain directly to human survival. It is the artifice that houses each human life. Worldliness is its human condition that is tied to the establishment of a certain durability in the world. Action is “the only activity that occurs directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world” (Arendt 1958, 65). Plurality is the condition for all political life as politics is the coming together of human differences.
While all three categories are rooted in natality, it is action that is most closely tied to natality. It is here that Arendt distinguishes herself from one of her primary influences, Martin Heidegger:
The new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting. In this sense of initiative, an element of action, and therefore of natality, is inherent in all human activities. Moreover, since action is the political activity par excellence, natality, and not mortality, may be the central category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical thought (Arendt 1958, 9).

The emergence of reproductive technologies, which could interfere with the spontaneity of a new beginning, impedes the possibility inherent in plurality and in politics itself. The isolation of so-called “gay” genes and diagnosis of potentially “handicapped” children are but two contemporary examples of this process in that both may result in selective abortion. Here the specter and reality of negative eugenics compound the problematics of abortion further. Even in the midst of the hegemony of disciplinary and governmental mechanisms, Arendt provides a means of thinking through the creative construction of political communities by reflecting on the inherent unpredictability of natality.
Moreover, natality may provide an alternative construction of the notion of freedom, which Foucault finds so problematic in History of Sexuality, Volume I. Foucault writes against the freedom of the autonomous agent, identifying the means by which the agent’s “freedom” participates in a complex net of power relations. In an essay from Between Past and Future, “What is Freedom?” Arendt pursues the issue of freedom in corporeality and beginnings through her account of St. Augustine’s notion of initium:
In the birth of each man this initial beginning is reaffirmed, because in each instance something new comes into an already existing world which will continue to exist after each individual’s death. Because he is a beginning, man can begin; to be human and to be free are one and the same. God created man in order to introduce the world the faculty of beginning: freedom (Arendt, 1993: p. 167).

Freedom and action can and do occur in a world characterized by automatic process and global hegemony. Historical process itself can become as ineluctable as “nature,” but the “infinite improbability” of acting against naturalized processes is part and parcel of human action.
But can a political theory of democratic resistance be safely and securely built on the power of “infinite improbabilities” or miracles? In order to understand the context and the body of Arendt’s notion of natality, I turn to her dissertation, Love and Saint Augustine. In her dissertation, the philosophical roots of natality and the conditions of remembrance are elucidated:
The decisive fact determining man as a conscious, remembering being is birth or “natality,” that is, the fact that we have entered the world through birth…Gratitude for life having been given at all is the spring of remembrance, for a life is cherished even in misery… “Give thanks for wanting to be as you are that you may be delivered from an existence that you do not want. For you are willing to be and unwilling to be miserable.” (Augustine; “The Free Choice of the Will III, 6, 64). Unlike the desire for the “highest good,” this attachment does not depend on volition, strictly speaking. Rather, it is characteristic of the human condition as such (Arendt 1996, 51-52).

Remembrance is the tissue of foundation, a fundamental component in the construction of a political and social “we.” It is through remembrance that “we” exist. Moreover, it is through natality that remembrance exists. Moreover, it is in Love and Saint Augustine, not Between Past and Future that Arendt first devotes considerable attention to the role of temporality in the constitution of the subject. She writes:
Since our expectations and desires are prompted by what we remember and guided by a previous knowledge, it is memory and not expectation (for instance, the expectation of death as in Heidegger’s approach) that gives unity and wholeness to human existence. In making and holding present both past and future, that is, memory and expectation derived from it, is the present in which they coincide that determines human existence (Arendt 1996, 56).

Arendt’s thesis presents a possibility for the construction of viable political spaces, rooted not in “the highest good” or “volition as such” (that cult of the will took a dangerous turn across Europe in the coming years), but in the human condition that we are born. Moreover, Arendt’s thesis suggests a turn away from Heideggerian “expectation” and towards the centerpiece of remembrance.
Arendt’s theorization of natality, which is to say of human potential in the literal sense, originates in an anxiety over what is termed the rise of the social. Increased social bureaucratization and a subsequent depersonalization of human affairs characterize the rise of the social. Characterized by a “rule by no-body” and the transformation of communities into groups of jobholders, the social is primarily responsible for the drift of human action and distinctive speech from the public to the private realm. Yet, what is the social? In part, the social can be readily conceived as oikos, that realm of human necessity that dictated the private lives of Athenians. In this construction, the freedom of the polis, a free space where men could come into distinction was contingent upon a radical division between the public and private realm. The “housekeeping” work of the inner private world - which was usually relegated to women and slaves - enabled a true freedom of thought and speech to occur. But with the rise of the modern era, this “realm of necessity” was ejected outward into the public realm and subsequently politicized. Feminists, other activists and theorists have roundly criticized Arendt’s attempts to keep matters of human necessity out of political consideration. There are problems with Arendt’s accounts of privacy and the social. But, in order to get to those problems, it is first necessary to provide further explication of her political theory.
Arendt’s critique of the modern era focuses on the emergence of material abundance and the obliteration of more traditional social and political boundaries which held human development in check. The transformation of the objects of labor into consumable items and the overall victory of consumerism indicates the decline of the category of work performed by homo faber. Such a decline is matched by a “victory” by animal laborans - marked politically by an unreflective behaviorism and socially by “automatic functioning.” Permanence, stability, and durability wane under the sense of natural abundance and fertility produced by the industrial revolution. It is here that one sees traces of the increasing significance of the Archimedean point in that through this abundance humans begin to step outside the boundaries of their own perspectives.
For here we no longer use material as nature yields it to us, killing natural processes or interrupting or imitating them...Today we have begun to “create,” as it were that is, to unchain natural processes of our own which would never have happened without us, and instead of carefully surrounding the human artifice with defenses against nature’s elementary forces...we have channeled these forces, along with their elementary power, into the world itself...The result has been a veritable revolution in the concept of fabrication...the process of the conveyor belt and the assembly line (Arendt 1958, 148-149 emphasis added).

Technologies are appearing more and more as actual necessities or conditions of human existence, “so that the apparatuses we once handled freely begin to look as though they were ‘shells belonging to the human body as the shell belongs to the body of the turtle’”(Arendt, citing Werner Heisenberg 1958, 153). In this sense, technology ceases to have the qualities of being man-made - no longer something we make happen but something that happens upon us. In the context of contemporary reproductive technologies, Arendt’s observations bear particular relevance. Many reproductive technologies now channel natural forces into the world (e.g. human selection of genetic codes) along with their elementary power in that we know little, if anything, of the long term effects of such interventions upon the world, let alone humans.

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Arendt in both The Human Condition and “Understanding and Politics” attributes this key passage as being central to the concept of natality. Readers in search of Augustine’s quote may be cautioned that Arendt’s citation is incorrect. The key passage is at xii. 21 (“Of the impiety of those who assert that the souls which partake of supreme and true blessedness must nonetheless return again and again, in cycles of time, to labour and misery”), rather than xii. 20 (“Of ages of ages”). This is important to gain context for the quote, in Chapters 21 and 22 (“Of the creation of the one first man, and of the human race in him”). Chapter 22 introduces several key themes that Arendt worked from – including the concepts of novelty and solitude. This latter concept figured into her account of totalitarianism during her juxtaposition between loneliness and solitude. See in particular, the closing pages of her essay “On the nature of Totalitarianism.” (Arendt 1994).
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason articulates the ways in which reason constructs madness. The self-reflecting, self-conscious subject knows himself. This foundational moment of the subject articulates also the other as out-of-reason, abnormal, not a subject. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception confronts the construction of the normal and the pathological through “rational spaces of disease” (1994a, 9) and more generally “classificatory thought” (ibid.). The Archaeology of Knowledge eventually broadens the analysis to a whole array of institutions, economies, legalities, and political relations connected and defined by discursive formations (1972, 179). The Order of Things: Archaeology of the Human Sciences comprehensively confronts the Age of Reason; the ascendance and decline of “man” in “our” era (1994b). I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother... returns to the issue of the construction of sanity and madness, with the barely implicit normative critique of the problematics of normalization within the medical-juridical complex (1982). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison presents a genealogical analysis of the institutionalization of reason – or as Weber might have it – of the birth of rationalization of the social realm (1979). The History of Sexuality Volumes I-III articulates the ways in which power, knowledge, and sexuality intersect to construct an artifice of normalized behaviors (1990a, 1990b, 1988). Again, I must add, the hardly understated critique of this process is that it is deeply problematic for Foucault. Power/Knowledge and Foucault’s other posthumously published essays do not display a deviation from this critique of reason as an ontological site of normalization – they only confirm it (1980). Christopher Norris, Jana Sawicki, Habermas, Benhabib, Honig, Osborne (to name a few) all focus on the function, role, and connections between reason, reasoning, rationalization, and rationality in Foucault at crucial moments. Moreover, for Foucault these concepts are often seen as sites of normalization, problematizing the multiplicity of human relations. Ironically, by some narratological twist, Foucault’s analysis of the rationalization of the socio-political realm through the age of reason is presented in modern academic discourse as separated by light years from the analyses of Arendt, Adorno, Horkheimer, and perhaps even Habermas – despite Habermas’ vociferous protests. The problem here is not that there is no divide between critical theory, poststructuralism and postmodernism, but that no thinker fits neatly into any category. What this chapter will show is not that Foucault was secretly a critical theorist or Arendt a postmodernist in disguise, but rather that both were secretly neither. In short, Arendt’s critique of the Archimedean point and the rise of the social is thoroughly rooted in a problematization of the view “from the outside.” In other words, Fish rightly pointed out the objectivist origins in critical theory – a perspective that was the centerpiece of Arendt’s criticism in her landmark text, The Human Condition (1958). Nor is Foucault’s relationship to postmodernism (or any of the “posts”) unrelated or disconnected to the very influences that surrounded Arendt – from Marx to Nietzsche to Heidegger. And, finally for now, the internal “politics” of postmodernism (i.e. the infamous separation of Foucault from Derrida) display Foucault’s attachment to a theoretical strain that I will argue, still hews to the vitality of critique – a perspective which is deeply connected to Arendt’s critique and rearticulation of human reason in the world.
Because the concept of “articulation” plays a prominent role in this chapter, it is important to present a more detailed definition of the term. Specifically, I use the word “articulate” with the works of Laclau and Mouffe, Grossberg, and Gramsci in mind. Laclau and Mouffe devote considerable attention to the concept (1985) as does Grossberg (1992) and Gramsci (1991). For Laclau and Mouffe, articulation is “any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as the result of an articulatory practice. The structured totality resulting from the articulatory practice, we will call discourse” (Laclau and Mouffe 1993, 105). While the first sentence of this definition is tautological, the second is particularly useful as the concept of articulation can be considered as the work of discursive regimes. This Foucauldian component to their argument (Laclau and Mouffe 1994, 105-114) is elaborated upon in Chapter Five. Put crudely, articulation is seen as the act of defining and “fixing” social meaning. Grossberg simplifies the concept considerably in the glossary to his text, noting that articulation is “the practice of linking together elements which have no necessary relation to each other; the theoretical and historical practice by which the particular structure of relationships which defines any society is made” (1992, 397). For the purposes of this work, articulation is power actively working through a specific framing of social meaning within a situation or field that could be framed or articulated in other ways.
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Perhaps Arendt has not gone far enough here in that the very process of observation, especially as it pertains to scientific gazes, is in itself rooted in a division between self and other, subject/object wherein the object of study is denied any fundamental subjectivity. In keeping with this notion, she writes “As a scientist recently put it, modern motorization would appear like a process of biological mutation in which human bodies gradually begin to be covered by shells of steel” (Arendt 1958, 322-323).

Back by Viewer Request: The Hills, Men of a Certain Age, etc.

2010-03-02T00:02:00.001-06:00

One from the archives for you dear reader.

watched The Hills. Also, noted that William Dafoe had some hair job (wig, implants?) in The Antichrist. It was a pretty good movie, but I kept being distracted by his hair. Some of the distance shots look like Hugh Grant. I don't know who that is insulting or complimenting. I wish Greg Oden was around.

this week is christmas lights and tree and ornaments. praise jesus. have you watched Join Us?

goalie

2010-02-23T23:02:00.003-06:00

I used to play ice hockey. I was the goalie. then -

NORPLANT History III: Reducing the "underclass", neo-Malthusian fallacies, and social darwinism in America

2010-01-10T23:17:00.004-06:00

This concludes the second chapter dear reader. After this, we will turn to the fourth (1st and 3rd available in archives).

4. The Inquirer Debate: Reducing the “underclass”
In keeping with traditional American attempts to utilize birth control as a means of social, economic and racial “betterment,” the Philadelphia Inquirer published an editorial on December 12, 1990, just two days after the FDA approval of Norplant®. The editorial was entitled: “Poverty and Norplant: Can Contraception Reduce the Underclass?” Donald Kimmelman linked a report by a black research organization on high levels of black poverty (a report that emphasized child poverty) to this new contraceptive. Kimmelman wrote,
Dare we mention them (the two developments) in the same breath? To do so might be considered deplorably insensitive, perhaps raising the specter of eugenics. But it would be worse to avoid drawing the logical conclusion that foolproof contraception could be invaluable in breaking the cycle of inner city poverty...the main reason more black children are living in poverty is that people having the most children are the ones least capable of supporting them...(and)...No one should be compelled to use Norplant...What if welfare mothers were offered an increased benefit for agreeing to use this new, safe, long-term contraceptive....All right, the subject makes us uncomfortable too. But we’re made even more uncomfortable by the impoverishment of black America and its effect on the nation’s future. Think about it (Kimmelman 12/12/90 emphasis mine).

Kimmelman’s piece embodies the problematics of the Norplant® Condition in disciplinary liberalism. Kimmelman draws on a logic independent of the human condition, one which has as its telos the betterment of black America and the nation’s future (as if the two were separate and distinct), but does so without investigating fully the political and ethical ramifications of such a “logical conclusion.” Using this reasoning Kimmelman advocated providing financial incentives to welfare mothers who use Norplant®.
Norplant® was not celebrated in editorials as a means of expanding women’s reproductive freedoms, but as a means of achieving greater social “progress.” By providing cash incentives to welfare mothers, the problem of black poverty would be reduced. Kimmelman’s argument is problematic because it targets black mothers as the primary cause of black poverty, as Roberts and others have noted. The “least capable” mothers need to be encouraged not to reproduce: or as Sanger put it, “less from the unfit.” More complex considerations of the structural causes of poverty (reaching everything from changes in global economy to class, race and gender stratification) are not the reason why people are born into poverty. These problems are “disappeared” with one simple surgical procedure. That Kimmelman’s logic had eugenic overtones was evidenced in part by his conflation of poverty and race, as he used the terms “poor” and “black” interchangeably. Lastly, because white Americans frequently stereotype black mothers as inadequate, Kimmelman’s statements regarding black mothers serve to represent the history of white prejudice.
Dr. Sheldon J. Segal, Norplant’s creator, was deeply offended by the article noting that Norplant® was “developed to improve reproductive freedom, not restrict it” (Roberts 1997, 106). But the largest outcry came from within the Philadelphia Inquirer itself. Black staff members were outraged by the editorial in particular. Steve Lopez shot off an angry rebuttal in the Inquirer on the following Sunday:
What we have, basically, is the Inquirer brain trust looking down from its ivory tower and wondering if black people should be paid to stop having so many damn kids...(and then attacking the editorial-page editor, David Boldt), By combining contraception and race, the voice of the Inquirer calls to mind another David. David Duke (Roberts, citing Lopez 1997, 106-107).

The Inquirer’s recommendation of cash incentives for welfare mothers to use Norplant® directly mirrored David Duke’s proposal of a $500 instant cash benefit for those who “volunteered.” Public criticism was also so sharp that eleven days after the editorial was published, the piece was retracted publicly and an apology was given, a first for the Inquirer (12/23/90, C4). Yet, Boldt did not back down, writing of his dismay at public reaction in his piece, “A “Racist-Pig” Offers Some Final Thoughts” (12/30/90, 7F).
The Inquirer was not alone in its policy recommendations. Newsweek, The New Republic, the Richmond-Times Dispatch, the Washington Post all offered support for Kimmelman’s piece. Moreover, discourse in the national media reflected political discourse at the national and state level. While a detailed consideration of state proposals to tie Norplant® to social welfare is provided below, Roberts’ greatest contributions are in addressing the linkages of race and reproduction. In addition to the basic premise that race and reproduction are necessarily linked in the American context, Roberts puts forth an analysis of the racial politics of welfare discourse. While some (e.g. David Duke and Donald Kimmelman) did explicitly suggest the use of Norplant® to reduce the black population, most politicians, policymakers, and journalists have not suggested this. But, race is significant because a disproportionate percentage of blacks are on welfare: “Black women are only six percent of the population but they represent a third of AFDC recipients” (Roberts 1997, 111).
Roberts concludes the text with a consideration of the meaning of liberty. For Roberts, white academics, white feminist health advocates, and population control advocates have all too often failed to consider the racial repercussions of their proposed policies. That race remains unexamined in a field that is explicitly racialized leads to the question of liberty for whom? Reproductive rights are often white reproductive rights, which may or may not be beneficial to members of black communities. Eugenicists, population control advocates, and white feminists have often worked together on issues of (white) social betterment. Following Patricia Williams’ critique of rights discourse, reproductive rights advocacy fails because it does not contain a sufficient definition of personhood. This (liberal) “neutral” definition of rights works well for those in position of power, i.e. whites. But it fails to address the experiences of black women, which have been characterized by a consistent denial of the power of their personhood. Identity, resistance, empowerment - all are impossible without the fundamental assertion of specific personhood. A social justice perspective on rights recognizes explicitly the connection between humanization of individuals and empowerment of a group (Roberts, 1997, 310). Such a connection, I will argue later, is imparted meaningfully through the communal nature of storytelling and memory, as detailed by thinkers such as Arendt and Benhabib.
In addition to black critiques of American reproductive policy, Native American groups have spoken out against the use of Norplant® and Depo-Provera in their communities by the Indian Health Services. This has resulted in reports such as Lin Krust’s and Charon Asetoyer’s project for the Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center (NAWHERC), A Study of the Use of Depo-Provera and Norplant by the Indian Health Services. The report expresses “considerable apprehension about the distribution of Depo-Provera and Norplant® to Native American and Alaskan women, given the history of the drugs and of the IHS” (Krust and Asetoyer 1993, 1). While the report is useful as a whole, its importance for this study rests in gaining a sense of Native American and Alaskan women’s experiences with contraceptive policies as well as understanding the role of IHS in facilitating these policies.
As in Islamic cultures, Native American cultures place a particularly strict religious, cultural and social boundary around menstruation: “Sundances, sweats, or other spiritual ceremonies...any place where the pipe is used...meetings of the Native American church,” all of these functions are avoided during menstruation (Krust and Asetoyer, citing Lewry 1993, 10). Sexual activity is also avoided. Ironically, a very significant function of contraception (to have the freedom to have sex without the risk of pregnancy) “becomes a moot point” (ibid.).
According to NAWHERC, “the IHS has a deplorable record when it comes to Native American reproductive rights” (Krust and Asetoyer 1993, 11). Echoing Robert’s accounts of the experiences of many black southern women in the 1970s, the authors report an alarming history of involuntary and/or coercive sterilizations on Indian reservations. In 1975, 25,000 women had been sterilized at IHS facilities alone. GAO investigations uncovered a pattern of coercion and misinformation in these procedures. During the 1980s, mentally challenged Indian women were given Depo-Provera to regulate and/or eliminate their menstrual cycles. While elimination of cycles occurs in approximately fifty percent of recipients, the other half experience the profound menstrual irregularities previously mentioned. Like Roberts, the authors suggest that with this recent historical background, it is hardly surprising that reproductive and racial politics are intertwined (Krust and Asetoyer 1993, 12). It is within this historical context that Norplant® was introduced to Indian reservations.
Once introduced into the IHS system, both Norplant® and Depo-Provera were treated as any other contraceptive. Reflecting a familiar criticism, the IHS is criticized in the report for failing to provide any national tracking system of recipients and for not having any standardized procedures for informed consent. This stands in marked contrast to significantly more rigorous guidelines for sterilization, which emerged from past sterilization abuses. While sterilization is necessarily permanent, are the potential damages from Norplant® and Depo-Provera insignificant enough to not merit rigorous medical follow-up? If a patient does knowledgeably consent to use of the device, then a national registry should not be nearly as significant. But without standards of informed consent, how can anyone be certain how many Indian women have been provided with Norplant® without adequate information or adequate understanding of the given information?
The authors then disclose samples of IHS health care provider responses to their questionnaire. The study found a wide variation in quality of data on Norplant® and Depo-Provera recipients. Some were extremely comprehensive, tracking the number of women requesting and receiving the devices and the number of each reported side effect. Others could (or did) only provide basic figures, such as number of Norplant® recipients at the given clinic. Some clinics tended to “push” either one of these methods over methods with higher “user failure” rates. One provider writes, “I push Depo for all women if they are interested” (Krust and Asetoyer 1993, 19). NAWHERC finds a wide variation in the presence and level of counseling prior to insertion of the device. This leads them to conclude that a national standard procedure for interviewing, counseling, inserting, and removing the Norplant® devices (and Depo-Provera) would benefit further research and recipients. High staff turnover and high patient mobility are complications that merit further tracking of the patients, rather than less. Wyeth-Amherst’s “hands-off” approach may relieve them of services that demand resources, but it does so at the expense of the well-being of thousands of Native American women in the United States. Given the seriousness of some side effects, it is important that rigorous standards be adopted. By ensuring accountability through federal regulation, patients and researchers can benefit.
NAWHERC’s enhanced institutional approach is attractive because it leaves the institutions of liberalism intact, while seeming to add the “safeguard” of federal tracking and data collection systems. This approach is faulty for two reasons: 1) it relies further on the very systems which have compromised Native American women’s well being and 2) It fails to work from the “bottom-up,” an approach which would bring the experiences of Native American women who have been through the IHS health care system into the foreground. What evidence has been provided by the researchers to conclude that the collection of data and provision of federal tracking systems would result in a greater consideration of the well being of individual women? Interestingly, NAWHERC’s “top-down” approach places trust in the very structures of disciplinary liberalism that contributed to the abuses of the 1970s and 1980s. The IHS involuntarily sterilized women during the 1970s, touching off a storm of controversy within reservations and among the public at large. If racial politics and reproductive politics are intertwined, as even the authors suggest, then what are the racial politics of this solution? A social justice perspective on rights would focus upon the personhood of the individuals impacted by the technologies. It is not that further collection of data is necessarily harmful, far from it. Rather, it is harmful to think that this is a sufficient solution. Were this the case, then further data collection on involuntary sterilization could also have been a sufficient solution. Women’s health collectives outside the IHS, women’s groups oriented around the technologies, and groups of Native American women being integrally involved in all “data” collection and policy initiatives – these are definite and real possibilities. Such groups could serve to resist and check any continued abuse of power by the IHS and the federal government.

5. Norplant® as Population Control: The Malthusian Fallacy
Once men begin to feel cramped in their geographical, social, and mental habitat, they are in danger of being tempted by the simple solution of denying one section of the species the right to exist (Hartmann, citing Claude Lévi Strauss 1995, xxii).

While each of the above case studies reveal a pattern of abuses, less attention is paid (with the exception of Roberts’ text) to the issue of why Norplant® has been pushed heavily in Third World countries and in certain sectors of the United States. What are the politics of contraception in the twentieth century? Betsy Hartmann provides a compelling analysis in Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control. Norplant® and other contraceptive technologies are being pushed because there is a sense of crisis over recent world population growth. Hartmann states that the “philosophy of population control” has three assumptions:
1. Rapid population growth is a primary cause of the Third World’s development problems, notably hunger, environmental destruction, economic stagnation, and political instability.
2. People must be persuaded – or forced, if necessary – to have fewer children without fundamentally improving the impoverished conditions in which they live.
3. Given the right combination of finance, personnel, technology, and Western management techniques, birth control services can be “delivered” to Third World women in a top-down fashion and in the absence of basic health care systems....efficacy in preventing pregnancy should take precedence over health and safety considerations (Hartmann, 1995, xix).

Hartmann’s text is a comprehensive attempt to refute these basic assumptions, revealing their dangers while showing pragmatic alternatives. It is a fact that the world’s population is growing at an astronomical rate. While the population has more than tripled since 1900, the rate of its increase has also increased noticeably. This is due primarily to an increase in life span resulting from improvements in medicine, food supply, and public health (Hartmann 1995, 5). In industrialized nations, decreasing mortality rates have been met by decreasing birth rates, resulting in “replacement-level fertility.” While the population growth rate is also declining in non-industrialized settings (albeit at a slower rate), the discrepancy in birth rates between Third World countries and industrialized nations is vast.
There are compelling economic, social, and cultural reasons for this discrepancy. Children, in many “Third World” settings, are necessary assets to family income. In industrialized countries, children consume considerably more than they produce while in many Third World countries the reverse is true. “In Bangladesh, for example, boys produce more than they consume by the age of ten to thirteen, and by the age of fifteen their total production has exceeded their cumulative lifetime consumption. Girls likewise perform a number of valuable economic tasks, which include helping their mothers with cooking and the post-harvest processing of crops” (Hartmann 1995, 6-7). For Hartmann, a high birth rate is often an indicator of a people’s endangerment. For many readers in industrialized nations, it may be more difficult to imagine that a high “birth rate” may be resulting from the need for help in the fields, care for the sick, and basic survival through a higher infant mortality into adulthood. According to Hartmann, population control advocates invert this equation (high birth rates result from threats to communities), asserting that high birth rates themselves are the root cause of the very problems that plague many communities. A broader understanding of “Malthusian” and anti-Malthusian arguments is significant because neo-Malthusian ideology influences contraceptive policies implemented by the Population Council, USAID, and other key agencies.
Malthus predicted that barring a major shift in human behavior, human populations would double every twenty-five years. Because the planet has a limited “carrying capacity,” only the misery of “poverty, famine, and pestilence” along with “war and slaughter” would keep overpopulation in check (Hartmann 1995, 14). While this apocalyptic view of human future (Malthus being after all, first a clergyman and then an economist) has a certain pessimistic appeal, Hartmann notes that there are basic flaws in his argument. Malthus failed to acknowledge the possibility of shifts in the need for more or less people in a given community. As societies transform, the need for more or less children will shift with them. Second, to a large extent, he failed to acknowledge human capacity to intervene into nature, thus increasing our productive capacity to match the needs of a rising human population. Neo-Malthusians modify Malthus’ analysis and apply it selectively to Third World nations and in some instances, to minorities in the West. Because there are high birth rates and low living standards in these instances, neo-Malthusians take this correlation to be causal. The reduction of high birth rates will result in higher living standards. Thus, members of the upper and middle classes of the industrialized West are free to reproduce, while members of the “Third World” are only hurting themselves through reproduction and demand radical measures of social intervention.
While Hartmann may be correct in asserting that the appeal of Malthusian ideology lies in its connection to incipient racist, sexist, and classist tendencies in the industrialized West, to some extent its appeal also rests in the fact that it does seem to possess explanatory power. The environmental destruction being visited on the earth has no historical parallel. Could the vast consumption of non-renewable resources, proliferation of famines, deforestation of rain forests, and astronomical pollution rate not be related to the population explosion during the twentieth century? Regardless of the answer, it remains true that social policy needs to be shaped to fit the fragile and finite confines of the earth. While many of the aspirations of ecological neo-Malthusianism remain fundamentally sound, the premises are faulty.
Famines are not a function of lack of food. In many cases, famines are a function of war, or more pointedly, function of a breakdown of political representation and economic stability. The countries of Africa frequently suffer from famine, which may be related to low productivity. As Hartmann notes, between sixty and eighty percent of the rural labor force in Africa has a very low productivity rating. The most common agricultural tool is a hoe. The focal point in Africa’s agricultural economy is the production of cash crops for export. This lack of focus on food crops has a long history in Africa directly connected to Western colonization. World Bank dependency in Third World regions has resulted in this continued focus, with the need to re-pay debts in order to re-finance loans from the World Bank.
For Hartmann, what is needed in Africa is not a draconian population control policy, but the implementation of widespread agricultural reforms. Paul Ehrlich, the author of the landmark The Population Explosion and avowed neo-Malthusian, operates his logic from a simple equation. The impact (I) of a population on the environment is equivalent to its size (P) times its affluence (A) times the index of the environmental disruption caused by the technologies that produce consumable goods (T). The I = PAT equation is ironically, an equation (like 2+2 = 4) that stands independent of the human condition. It places the pluralistic dynamism of reproductivity into the “straitjacket of logic,” a logic that stands at the center of disciplinary liberalism.
Hartmann’s trenchant critique offers a significant response. First, there are compelling reasons to believe that of the three, technological development has the greatest impact. To take an extreme example, whether the earth’s population is six, ten, or twenty billion, a nuclear exchange could induce a nuclear winter in a relatively short period of time. The example of the nuclear exchange carries over to her second point, which is that Ehrlich fails to address the role of social and political power. Power constructs P, A, and T as well as the relationship between these variables. Moreover, each of these variables reduces diverse and specific cultures to one group: the world population. Different cultures have different rates of consumption, but they also have different rates of contribution to the world’s well being. Inquiring into the inappropriate uses of technology (such as for the increase of affluence) will yield a more capacious understanding of the world’s ecological crises. An understanding of postindustrial dependence upon the automobile instead of mass transit, upon contraception instead of fundamental social reform – these dependencies (and many others) are part and parcel of the world ecological crisis. The population “bomb” serves as a means by which western middle and upper class elites can displace the problems generated by their lifestyle choices onto m/Others in the Third World.
Is the World Bank correct to assert then that population growth is “a serious brake on development” involving “lost opportunities for raising living standards, particularly among the large numbers of the world’s poor” (Hartmann 1995, 30)? Sub-Saharan Africa’s ten poorest and ten richest countries have nearly the same population growth rate. If population growth explains economic well being, then it would vary between the richest and poorest countries (Hartmann 1995, 31). Poverty, in many instances, is a function of a lack of public resources devoted to the well being of its people. As public expenditures move away from education and health care and into military budgets, it is unsurprising that poverty will increase. Neo-Malthusians ask the wrong questions:
They do not ask who owns the land, who fells the forests, who draws up the government budget, who steals the international bank loans, who were the colonialists, and who were the colonized. By a wave of some magic wand, they deny the role of the rich and powerful in creating and perpetuating the poverty of the powerless. Their ideological fervor masks a profound fatalism: The poor are born to their lot, and the only way out is for them to not be born (Hartmann 1995, 34).

Even political instability and revolution are attributed to a crisis in population growth (ibid.). Like Sanger, Malthusians are quick to “solve” public crises of poverty and social welfare through population control policy changes.
In a drive to reduce population at any cost, effectivity of contraceptive devices takes precedence over the safety of the devices. Provider-controlled contraceptives have emerged in light of the user “failure” rate among user-controlled contraceptives. Women’s and men’s choices to reproduce are then read as “failures” by population control advocates. It is within this ideological context that IUDs, Norplant®, and Depo-Provera have emerged. Ironically, population control advocates have contributed to women’s lack of reproductive control. Population control policies work hand-in-glove with patriarchal power relations, inhibiting women’s reproductive autonomy.
According to some critics, family planning programs in the Third World function in part as conduits for neo-Malthusian ideology, emphasizing the reduction of birth rates, rather than the provision of fully informed reproductive services to women and men. Family Planning clinics in the Third World are discouraged by their funding sources (e.g. U.S. Agency for International Development or AID) from providing condoms and encouraged to “install” provider-controlled technologies of contraception. An AID leaflet distributed to the Philippines agencies reads: “Discourage condom acceptors and encourage more IUDs and pills. The clinic is evaluated on the method accepted by the clients. There will be no more supply of condoms: so convince your condom acceptors to shift to pills and IUDs” (Hartmann 1995, 65).
Family planning agencies also provide a variety of economic incentives for forms of contraception both in and out of the United States. Frequently, “acceptors” are provided with a one-time cash incentive for sterilization or IUD insertion. On a significantly smaller scale, Planned Parenthood clinics have offered teenage girls funds that accumulate while they retain Norplant® in their bodies. Aside from biasing poorer women and girls against forms of birth control that do not “pay,” such programs can carry the added dilemma of encouraging users to retain the devices despite deleterious side effects. Other women are paid with animals that serve as capital within their social framework. In Thailand, women were given pigs by the Community Based Family Planning Services (CBFPS) for spacing their pregnancies (Hartmann 1995, 68). Other countries offer stringent disincentives to further pregnancies. Hartmann quotes Singapore’s Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew’s assessment of reproductive rights:
Free education and subsidized housing lead to a situation where the less economically productive people in the community are reproducing themselves at rates higher than the rest. This will increase the total population of less productive people (Hartmann 1995, 70 emphasis mine).

The fusion of neo-Malthusian and social Darwinist ideologies has produced policies that hold populations with higher birth rates accountable for structural economic problems such as underemployment and poverty.
It is through such an ideological fusion that reproductive policy has become critical not only to “health” concerns but to a broad array of social welfare issues. In Indonesia, the World Bank, UNFPA, and AID have pushed for stringent contraceptive policies (involving Norplant®, sterilization, and IUDs) through massive campaigns. In 1995, roughly 1.5 million Indonesian women have received Norplant®. Just as in Brazil and Bangladesh, critics question whether these insertions were performed with informed consent. Of equal importance, removal on demand is not guaranteed in Indonesia, the world’s largest Norplant® consumer (Hartmann 1995, 77).
Without a doubt, the Indonesian family planning program is a “success” story, marking dramatic drops in birth rates since the implementation of the long-term contraceptive policy. Yet, the success of this policy is rooted in both coercive and manipulative methods as well as hierarchic structuring. According to AID, “The most ready explanation given for the success of the Indonesian family planning program is the strong hierarchical power structure, by which central commands produced compliant behavior all down the administrative line to the individual peasant” (Hartmann 1995, 78). Family planning counselors engage in “safaris” to “educate” the people of Indonesia. In the late 1970s in East Java, the military accompanied family planning counselors to ensure adequate insertion rates. In 1990, police and army officials went house to house, taking women and men to IUD insertion sites. In Lombok, a family planning worker disclosed their method: “If the target is still high and has not yet been reached and the people are difficult to reach, the army makes them a little bit afraid so that they are willing to come together for a family planning session” (Hartmann 1995, 79). Community rewards and recognition for the best positive attitude are also provided by the Indonesian government.
These practices gain credence in the international community because the population “bomb” is seen by many to be more dangerous than the threat of nuclear catastrophe (Cadbury 1994; Hartmann 1995, 93-112). By 1958, President Eisenhower had established the Draper Committee. While this committee was not designed to examine population crises, Draper made the “population problem” the focal point of his career in and out of government. Draper’s 1959 mapping of the explosion earned worldwide press coverage and helped to establish population as a critical world crisis. By the 1960s, the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) began allocating funds for international “family planning” programs. With the exclusion of John D. Rockefeller III, western leaders in political and business communities strongly advocated a “top-down” approach to “family-planning” by 1974 at the World Population Conference at Bucharest. This approach has come to fruition in the 1980s and 1990s and is central to the Norplant® “problem.” As policymakers and health care advocates increasingly have sought out contraceptives as a corrective to social problems such as poverty, the underlying structural foundations of unequal distribution of wealth are ignored. Moreover, the “acceptor” of the device is held accountable for systemic economic and political transformations that exist well beyond any individual.
Hartmann tirelessly develops her thesis on the impact of neo-Malthusian forms of birth control. For her, technology is not neutral, but reflects the values of its creators. The sense of urgency generated by the “population explosion” thesis led to the prioritization of efficacy over safety, as in IUDs, Norplant® and Depo-Provera. These same concerns led to minimizing “user failure” through the development of non-removable birth control devices. This occurred at the expense of women’s autonomy and health. Barrier methods are usually safer and can also serve to inhibit the spread of HIV. This bias has been exacerbated by the fact that the bulk of contraceptive research has been devoted towards controlling women’s fertility. Hartmann’s thesis carries the implication that the lack of attention to women’s health and well being on a specific level has been generated from focusing strictly upon “population” as the object of analysis. To the extent that a device can effectively reduce a population, particularly a population of the “unfit,” it is a good device – without regard to its specific impact on women and men.
In response to neo-Malthusian efforts, Hartmann provides a summary of policies aimed at stemming population growth, while improving the distribution of economic, social and political power. South Korea, Cuba, Sri Lanka, and Kerala all have experienced massive demographic transitions independent of personally invasive population control policies. She sites the following “ingredients” for the success of a more humanized population “control” program:
1) Income and land redistribution;
2) Employment opportunities and social security;
3) Improvements in the position of women, including a later marriage
4) Reductions in infant mortality;
5) Accessible health care and education (Hartmann 1995, 300).

Through an emphasis on social justice, it is possible for population concerns to be addressed while emphasizing the specific needs, the very personhood of women and men around the globe. Even if one takes the most adamant population control position, education (specifically, literacy), economic opportunity, and increasing women’s status are greater predictors of birth rates than the level of distribution of contraceptives.
6. Conclusion
In Indonesia, the abuses of Norplant® are so common that grim pronouncements of technological determinism may seem appropriate. Yet, in Brazil the device has been mediated by a stronger civil society, democratic citizen-state relations, and has resulted in resistance to the seemingly inexorable forces of technological development and political hegemony. In the United States, the political framework enables the possibility of stronger monitoring of reproductive policy. But such monitoring is less likely in the very settings where abuse of Norplant® is most common. While Norplant® may be less likely to be abused in some settings than others, the device and the discourse that surrounds it is also a production of a certain problematic in liberalism, one that is bound up with an instrumental relationship to rationality – if not the very notion of rationality itself. Foucault’s genealogical and archaeological models are utilized to unearth the instrumental rationality that inheres in disciplinary liberalism. It is to these topics that Chapter Three is directed.

a howling hex movie

2010-01-05T15:10:00.004-06:00

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A Brief History of Norplant, Pt II - Cases in Egypt, Bangladesh, Colombia, and of Eugenics in The United States

2010-01-05T01:52:00.004-06:00

C. The Egyptian Case
Soheir A. Morsy documents the Norplant® trials in Egypt, which closely resemble the Brazilian experience in “Bodies of Choice: Norplant experimental trials on Egyptian Women” (Mintzes, Hardon, Hanhart, eds. 1993.). While the media and the Population Council provided glowing reports of the device, these reports were introduced into a critical attitude regarding population control policies among the public at large as well as state officials. Morsy sees Norplant® as the eerie realization of many of William Shockley’s policy recommendations for population control. Shockley supported cash inducements for an imagined subdermal “contraceptive time capsule” for women with low IQ’s, “a subcutaneous injection of a contraceptive time capsule which provides slow seepage of contraceptive hormones until it is removed” (Morsy 1993, 90). While the Norplant® experience differs markedly from Shockley’s vision, its provider-dependency, particularly in areas where removal is refused and population control is strongly advocated is a cause for consternation.
Egypt serves as another area of the world where these factors converged. Morsy notes that between 1975 and 1983, slightly over half (51.5%) of U.S. budgetary allocation to Egypt for health development was earmarked for population control (Morsy 1993, 92). Both the World Bank and USAID have pressured Egypt directly towards population control. The mid-eighties marked a shift in policy emphasis towards population control and Norplant® was introduced as a partial solution to the problem. The national media praised the device as “the magic capsule.” Yet, some criticisms of the Norplant® trials were mounted in the opposition press. Physicians in Egypt also became increasingly skeptical; noting that the device was not legal in the United States but was being tested on women other countries. Users’ criticisms of the device virtually mirror those presented in the above cases. While the Egyptian experience does bear some similarities to Brazil’s (side effects, public discourse regarding population control), policy changes have not emerged from criticisms raised by users, oppositional media, women’s groups, and concerned physicians.
It must be noted that from woman to woman and from country to country, the Norplant® experience is diverse. While there do seem to be problems built into the provider-dependent contraceptive technologies such as Norplant® and Depo-Provera, there are many cases where women who these technologies are pleased with their results. Thus, the Norplant® experience has as much, if not more, to do with political context than with the substance of the technology. Users’ experiences in Finland were less negative, due in part to greater access to information at the time of insertion, physician willingness to remove the device and greater access to general health care than in many Third World settings (Ollila, Kajesalo and Hemminki 1993, 47-69). While it may or may not have had any impact, it should be noted that Leiras Pharmaceuticals, the owner of Norplant®, is located in Finland. Oversight of research may be more comprehensive when the given site is in close geographic proximity. What is alluring about Norplant® is that many people are satisfied with it. This satisfaction is frequently used to minimize the real and existing experiences of those women who were not adequately informed of the risks of the technology and those who have experienced the side effects.

D. Norplant® in Bangladesh
In Bangladesh, Norplant was subjected to intense debate and scrutiny. While the Technical Advisory Board in Bangladesh never approved of Norplant® trials, the Bangladesh Fertility Research Program (BFRP) bypassed its evaluation. Advertisements were placed in newspapers for participating in the trials, calling the device “a wonderful innovation of modern science” (UBINIG 1988, 101). Yet, as many noted in Bangladesh, it seems that the very principles of science (neutral oversight) were averted in order to conduct these experiments. 151 doctors and pharmacists petitioned the end of the trials and the Population Council postponed the 1981 trial. However, in 1985 the trials commenced again through BFRP and funded by The Population Council and Family Health International. The UBINIG report charges that BFRP protocol focuses not upon the safety of the device, but rather upon its effectivity.
Moreover, the ideology of population control guided BFRP’s accounts of the device, through management of reproduction among the “semi-literate." In a February, 1985 report (which commenced the onset of the trials in Bangladesh), researchers had concluded:
This long lasting method has the potential advantage of not requiring day-to-day use and therefore may be particularly suitable for our semi-literate population...The effectivity question is mentioned and is specially targeted towards the semi-literate population, in other words, the poorer section of the population, so that population control can be ensured (UBINIG, citing BFRP 1988, 102; emphasis mine).

The difficult and serious problem of population Norplant® programs in Bangladesh were not “for women,” as advertised but at best for the population, and at worst for the literate population. In the best scenario, women and men are confronted with a set of problematic and historically traditional assumptions about the role of women in society, which view women as bodily vessels, as essentially reproductive beings. In the worst scenario, the previous assumptions remain intact while classist and ethnocentric assumptions enter into the equation as well. It is better for the semi-literate not to reproduce because semi-literate people are poor. Putting aside for now the problems built into these very assumptions; both beg the question, better for whom?
UBINIG’s account of Bangladesh’s Norplant® trials also notes a similar pattern of disregard for the well being of the users. Additionally, a noteworthy criticism is raised. BFRP was wise to not distribute the device to women with contraindications. The device was not distributed to smokers, women with cardiovascular disease, diabetes, overweight women, women with liver disease (UBINIG 1988, 103). Yet, in the post-trial phase, has the device been given to any women with these conditions? The Norplant® experiments are then the results of the best possible case scenario, one that is arguably unrealistic. When combined with the plethora of side effects (menstrual disturbances, migraines, depression, weight loss, and in some reported cases, epilepsy), can one legitimately assert that for most women, the device is safe and effective or just effective?
All of the women interviewed for UBINIG’s study reported problems with Norplant®. These results parallel studies on Norplant® in Bangladesh by BBC (Cadbury 1994). In the literature, personal accounts by users put the experience in a painfully real context. Anwara Khatun, a 30-year-old test subject, spoke of her experiences: “I do not have any appetite, I am going to die. The menstruation is very irregular and during the last Shabe-Barat (a religious occasion). I had menstruation for two months at a stretch” (UBINIG 1988, 106). Moreover, these anecdotes put the notion of “side-effects” in another, more human light. The instrumental rationality of what one might term in Foucault’s language “the medico-political complex” eclipses the real, lived experiences of women and men. The device serves its purpose: it is highly effective. Yet the human costs of that effectivity (be they political, cultural, social, religious or personal), are in terms of policy implementation, insignificant. What is effective to BFRP, for example, may not be as effective for the semi-literate, impoverished woman who uses the device and is beset with migraines, depression, or irregular menstruation. Power relations produce a particular understanding of effectivity and safety for that matter – definitions that are arrived at through a logic that is, as Arendt cogently stated, “independent of the human condition” (Arendt 1994, 318). While I develop my critique of abstraction, reason and rationality in the following chapters, at this moment I want to emphasize that the very grounds upon which meaning is articulated (which I would say is the nature of politics itself), are produced through a veil of scientific neutrality, obscuring the lived human experiences of women and men throughout the world.

E. Norplant® in Colombia: A Medical Perspective or Who Is the Enemy?
Medical studies of Third World experiences with Norplant® trials are markedly different from accounts provided by critics. A noticeably different account of a Norplant® trial can be found in, “Two-Year Prospective Study in Columbia of Norplant® Implants” (Lopez, Rodriguez, Rengifo, and Sivin August 1986). While it is possible that the deciding factor here is that women’s experiences in Colombia are markedly different from those in Brazil, Egypt, Bangladesh, and other countries, it is also likely that the differences emerge from differences in methodology and focus. Norplant® was evaluated in the Colombian study in contrast to a copper IUD. Lopez et al sought to examine the “safety, effectiveness, and acceptability of Norplant implants” (Lopez et. al. 1986, 204). Lopez et al reported that Norplant® was highly effective, with no pregnancies in the study group and 1.1/100 in the IUD study group. Menstrual disturbances were reported as the most common side effect, with these effects diminishing for many as the study continued. Fourteen of the 100 users terminated Norplant® use as a result of these disturbances (Lopez et al, 1986, 206). Most did not experience pain at insertion (81%) and some experienced only minimal pain (18%) (ibid.). Medical follow-up was relatively consistent, though five percent “failed to make the required subsequent visits” and sixteen other women were not considered lost to follow-up even though they were not seen in the second year of the study. Continuation was reported at a high rate and no serious risks to health were reported. Lopez et al concluded that “given the effectiveness, acceptability of the method as indicated by the first two years of experience with the method in Colombia...the Norplant implants will provide and important addition to the contraceptive armamentarium” (Lopez et al, 1986, 207 emphasis added).
While the full implications of the dilemmas posed by the instrumental rationality of the Norplant® Condition are elaborated upon below, several points must be touched upon before continuing. First, I assume that everything that Lopez et al have asserted is true. There are no grounds to challenge the reliability of this data. However, the parameters of the authors’ truth-claims are likely to be constrained and mediated by other factors, other truth-claims. What were the experiences of the fourteen- percent of women who had the device removed because of menstrual disturbances? Is this the reason why they reached the conclusion that the device was effective and acceptable (again begging the question, to whom?) but did not state in conclusion that the device was safe? This seems particularly noteworthy as the safety of the device was to be evaluated in this report. Were there women who were refused removal or pushed not to remove the device? No adequate account of medical counseling to ensure that women could have the device removed at any time was provided. Of what does “lost-to-follow-up” consist? Writing from the perspective of a medical researcher, this constitutes missing data and it is. But it is also a life at-risk. The device loses its effectivity over time and can lead to ectopic pregnancy, which can be fatal. It is also a life with an economic and social context. Some may be too poor to return. Others may have not been fully informed as to the necessity of returning. Lastly, why were the sixteen missing women not considered lost to follow-up? In many cases, the effectivity of the device is of greater importance than the “side-effects” or its actual, physical dangers to some people. These questions lead to a consideration of the assumptions built-in to the Norplant® study in Colombia. Norplant® is considered to be a tool, a tool in a battle. Considerations of safety tend to drop out of view in battle. “The contraceptive armamentarium” is an armory, a “place where arms and instruments of war are kept” (Webster 1972, 102-103). Some may argue that this is just a turn-of-phrase, a nice way for Lopez et al to close an essay, and it is. Yet, the model of war dominates much of the medical profession’s assessment of biological challenges. And, if Norplant® is part of an armamentarium, then who is the Enemy?

3. Norplant® in America: Less for the Unfit?
In 1992, the Kaiser Forums, sponsored by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, held a two-day conference in the United States on the issues surrounding Norplant® and poor women. This conference is of particular interest because it brought together divergent perspectives from members of the health profession, researchers, contraceptive experts, and policymakers. Six of the essays presented were published in a volume, Norplant and Poor Women (Samuels and Smith 1992). The conclusions that were reached in this conference point to the potential for interdisciplinary collaboration on this topic. Participants concluded:
1) that the device should be readily available;
2) that free consent is mandatory, as is full information on all options, including teens and incarcerated women;
3) that every step should be taken to prevent any harm to any woman;
4) that the device only be prescribed when there are clear benefits to the individual;
5) that health care is mandatory;
6) removal on all requests; and
7) “Economic incentives should not be so great as to be coercive”
(Samuels and Smith 1992, xiii-xiv).

While some may take issue with the specifics of these recommendations, it is worth noting that short of those who favor banning Norplant®, Depo-Provera, and other injectables, this marks an attempt to integrate considerations of women’s well being into Norplant® policy. What would the Colombian study look like, for example, had these standards of “success” been adopted?
While the Kaiser Forums indicate a viable avenue for feedback on the Norplant® experience, is this site of democratic communication indicative of the United States’ reproductive policies? A closer examination reveals divisions between women’s health advocates, researchers, and practitioners within the Forum. While the Senior Associate for the Center for Biomedical Research of the Population Council, Irving Sivin, announced that the main obstacles to Norplant® were “price, provider attitudes and the cost to governments and public-sector providers,” Julia Scott of the National Black Women’s Health Project and Feringa, Iden and Rosenfield of Columbia University’s School of Public Health reiterated the history and potential for abuse of contraceptive devices (Sivin 1992, 1-19; Scott 1992, 39-52; Feringa, Iden, and Rosenfield 1992, 53-64).
Debate over women’s reproductive rights has raged within the United States, long before the Food and Drug Administration’s 1990 approval of Norplant®. At the core of this debate is a long-standing critique of traditional medicine that pre-dates criticisms by radical feminists (e.g. Corea, Rowland, Klein). Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English provide a comprehensive history of women’s health, with a particular focus on America since the mid-nineteenth century (Ehrenreich and English 1978). For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women details the professionalization of health care and its sexist biases. To generalize broadly, care of women’s reproductive needs once fell into the hands of midwives and healers, who emphasized the care of the individual. The modern, masculinist rise of medical “expertise” posited the mother as intrinsically pathological (Ehrenreich and English 1978, 211-265). Concomitant to this rise was the delegitimization of midwifery, which in turn, eliminated women as primary health care providers. While Ehrenreich and English’s piece is limited in its assessment of the dangers of modern medicine (detail on ethnic diversity, class bias, and the complexity of power relations are missing here), it provides a superlative historic account of gender biases intrinsic to medical knowledge and practice. In Chapter Five, I elaborate on contemporary forms of women’s health care informed by feminist readings of modern medicine, as in the case of lay midwife Abigail Odam.
To follow Ehrenreich and English into the eighties and nineties, it is unsurprising that a contraceptive device would be posited by U.S. policymakers as a solution to drug abuse (or “fetal drug abuse”), child abuse, poverty, or the growth of certain sectors of the population. In 1870, Professor M.L. Holbrook had addressed a medical society, asserting that it was “as if the Almighty, in creating the female sex, had taken the uterus and built up a woman around it” (Ehrenreich and English 1978, 120 emphasis in original text). In 1883, G.L. Austin wrote in his book that ovaries “give woman all her characteristics of body and mind” (ibid.). American culture has a long tradition of focusing on individual responsibility for social dysfunctions and it also has a long misogynist tradition of sexualizing the essence of a woman’s personhood. Thus it is not surprising that when women are held accountable for social dysfunctions such as poverty, policymakers focus on women’s sexuality. It is through this biological and ethical reductionism that many in the United States have managed to look to control of women’s reproductivity to solve problems of abuse, poverty, and over-consumption of non-renewable resources.
Yet, how does Ehrenreich and English’s work fit into the specific context of the political history of birth control? James W. Knight and Joan C. Callahan, in what is arguably the most comprehensive text in English on birth control address this topic contextually in Preventing Birth: Contemporary Methods and Related Moral Controversies. During the nineteenth-century, contraception in the West was often subjected to intense moral criticism. This criticism often found its basis in Victorian mores that suggested that birth control would engender sex for the purpose of pure pleasure, which was deemed obscene. These mores were bolstered by Jewish and Christian heritages that “associate(d) nonreproductive sexual interaction with moral evil” (Knight and Callahan 1989, 37). Some advocated expanding reproductive freedom for the purpose of sexual equality (Robert Dale Owen) and reducing poverty (Charles Knowlton). Yet, most in the medical profession found these opinions reprehensible. A Lancet editorial from 1869 stated that contraception for women “brought into the condition of mind of a prostitute” and that for men, sex with contraception was inseparable from masturbation (Knight and Callahan 1989, 31-32; emphasis mine).
By the latter part of the nineteenth century, attention turned to the dangers of population growth, and “Malthusians” articulated an international movement to legitimate contraception for Malthusian and/or economic purposes. While this provided some currency to contraception as a rational activity, the Malthusian movement lost popularity by the 1920s, due to a decline in populations worldwide. It is within this context that an emphasis on birth control emerged, from the likes of Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger. Knight and Callahan note that for them, birth control was about care: “health, family life, and women’s reproductive freedom” (Knight and Callahan, 1989, 33). The tension between these two “schools” of thought has never completely dissipated and has returned in recent years.
The words and actions of Margaret Sanger embody this tension between Malthusian population control advocacy and birth control advocacy. Understanding Sanger is important not only as an indicator of these distinctions, but also because she embodies the complexity of (disciplinary) liberalism. Sanger alternately argued for birth control (better care for individuals, more individual autonomy) and for eugenics (stating “more children from the fit, less from the unfit” and advocating sterilization of “the whole dysgenic population”) (Knight and Callahan 1989, 40). The form and type of care she advocated was contingent upon class and social standing. She was pro-natalist for the “fit” and anti-natalist for the “unfit,” a policy perspective that has its closest corollary in the Nazi regime (Knight and Callahan, p. 1989, 39-41). This is not a contradiction, but a form of eugenics. The liberal doctrine of autonomy exists, perhaps even in an exaggerated form, but it only exists for the fit, which is to say the members of the socially and economically dominant classes. The unfit are subjected to the “freedoms” or Liberties of the fit. Contra Marx, the contradictory nature of this relationship serves to perpetuate, rather than eliminate it. Freedom and autonomy exist on an unparalleled level, as long as one understands that this means total freedom, which includes the freedom to oppress. In Sanger’s case, the unfit are disciplined into literal sterility. Yet, disciplining of the unfit is freedom, and of equal importance, it is Good. This notion of the Good is born of a utilitarian impulse in eugenic ideologies.
Twentieth century western political history has witnessed the emergence of vigorous contention over reproductive rights. In the realm of contraception, this is characterized generally by three schools of thought: 1) pro-natalist, 2) anti-natalist, and 3) hybrids of the former two. None of these positions is “safe” from extremism. Pro-natalist extremism has been manifested in American abortion clinic bombings (and shootings) as well as Mussolini’s proclamations of repopulation. Anti-natalism governs China’s population policy positions. And, as has been discussed, both Nazi population control policy and the work of Margaret Sanger underscore the potential dangers of natalist and anti-natalist hybrids. United States contraceptive policy in the twentieth century has been marked by natalist and anti-natalist tendencies. While it is easy to assume this results from competing interest groups’ attempts to influence policy-making, Margaret Sanger’s poignant story signifies the possibility that natalism and anti-natalism have been intentionally combined in a synoptic policy model.
Was Margaret Sanger’s “more children for the fit, less for the unfit,” a personal inconsistency or did it signify dominant attitudes among policymakers, health officials, and the public at large? “By 1932, twenty-seven states had laws allowing involuntary sterilization of the feeble-minded, insane, criminal, and physically defective” (Knight and Callahan 1989, 40). This was the era where Oliver Wendell Holmes could declare from the United States Supreme Court that “three generations of imbeciles are enough” (Knight and Callahan 1989, 10). Yet, reproduction was limited not because it was inherently problematic (as in the Malthusian construct), but because reproduction of the unfit was problematic. United States policy at least sought to maintain the reproduction of the fit, while reducing drastically the reproduction of the unfit.
These policies did not die out with the realization of the dangers of totalitarianism, but continued unabated until the early 1960s. When combined with the tenuous legalization of elective abortion in 1973, it is unsurprising that United States’ contraceptive policy has been met with considerable skepticism among many women, the poor, minorities, and advocates for each of these groups. When one considers the blight of racism in American society combined with eugenic sterilization of “unfit” women and men, that the Norplant® experiment has particular implications for minority groups is undeniable.
Dorothy Roberts provides a superlative analysis of race and reproduction in Killing the Black Body. Roberts makes the acute observation that racial issues and reproductive issues are inextricably linked:
Scientific racism explained domination by one group over another as the natural order of things: Blacks were biologically destined to be slaves, and whites were destined to be their masters. It also forged an indelible link between race and policies governing reproduction. Because race was defined as an inheritable trait, preserving racial distinctions required policing reproduction. Reproductive politics in America inevitably involves racial politics (Roberts 1997, 9).

Policies that may not be explicitly intended to do damage to blacks are racialized not out of some suspected conspiracy but because reproduction, genetics and race are connected.
White control over black slaves’ reproduction was an essential component of slavery. Social regulation of reproduction is not a part of some imagined history, but a foundational component of black women’s political history in America. Women in slavery existed to work, to reproduce, and for the sake of sexual abuse. This very literal objectification of black women in America has had far reaching consequences. While slave women’s personal “housework” has been identified by Angela Davis (and Roberts) to be a site of resistance, marking a space where white oppression was dimmed, the power of the whip and the auction block is not merely “historical background.” It is part of the cultural memory that has produced reproductive policy. It has made it easier to racialize what Sanger and other eugenicists called “the unfit.” Indeed, it made it easier for reproductive control to be linked to genetic supremacy. Americans were hardly foreign to the notion of breeding individuals for the purpose of social betterment. Breeding had been normalized in America, long before Sanger’s appearance. In this historical context, that Sanger’s feminist vision of birth control, which indicated a strong sense of bodily autonomy, managed to slip into eugenic versions of population control is unsurprising.
Roberts proceeds to detail the horrors of the eugenics movement in America. In addition to her comprehensive account of eugenics in America, Roberts provides a needed history of blacks’ experiences of birth control and eugenics. Many black leaders (e.g. Marcus Garvey) were critical of birth control, with the experience of oppressive reproductive policies being a guiding factor. Du Bois, however, adamantly supported birth control - sometimes with an elitism that mirrored Sanger’s (Roberts 1997, 85). However, according to Roberts, black birth control advocates differed significantly from their white counterparts. Black advocates saw birth control as one tool in a fight for social justice. Sanger and many other white advocates viewed birth control as the tool in this fight. That birth control was a singular device in the fight against poverty and poor health conditions often led to more extreme measures being considered, such as sterilization. Du Bois and other black activists opposed these measures. Additionally, black advocates opposed eugenic arguments of racial superiority. While some of their statements and actions reflect elitism, that elitism tended to be social, rather than hereditary in nature. These distinctions are significant because a majority of those who were involuntarily sterilized during the rise of the eugenics movement in America were black. In the 1930s and 1940s, the North Carolina Eugenics Commission sterilized 8,000 “mentally deficient” people, of which 5,000 were black (Roberts 1997, 90). In 1955, a South Carolina State hospital reported 23 sterilizations - all of which were of black women.
Roberts notes that while these are significant events, most black women were not sterilized under eugenics laws. The 1970s signified a period of great increase of sterilization for the purpose of birth control. Many women, black and white - particularly black women in the South, have reported incidents of lack of informed consent and/or sterilization for no medical reason. Roberts’ text is replete with horrifying accounts of these incidents, mirroring the experience of women in developing countries during the Norplant® experiments. Included in her anecdotes, are the experiences of fourteen-year-old Minnie Lee Relf and twelve-year old Mary Alice Relf, two of six black children living with their parents in Montgomery, Alabama in 1973. The Relf parents were asked if they would volunteer their two youngest daughters for experimental use of Depo-Provera. Mrs. Relf signed the informed consent form with an “X” because she could not read. In actuality, all governmental programs involving Depo-Provera had been stopped due to it being linked to cancer. Minnie and Mary Relf had been actually been intentionally sterilized and their family had been deliberately misinformed by the federally funded Montgomery Community Action Agency (Roberts 1997, 93).
The Relfs went to the Southern Poverty Law Center for help and a class action lawsuit was filed, as this procedure (and many like it) was common during the 1970s among poor women, particularly minorities. Roberts, a professor at Rutgers University School of Law, examines Judge Gerhard Gessell’s conclusion that “an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 poor women like the Relf teenagers had been sterilized annually under federally funded programs” (ibid. emphasis mine). Moreover, half of these women and children were black. Some were threatened with loss of benefits. These actions circumvented the failure of equally radical sterilization legislation proposed in the House of Representatives during the 1960s. Through this history, Roberts provides a significant, alternative perspective on the “war on poverty.” Liberalism, in its modernist variation, does not entail liberation or autonomy. It may, as I shall discuss later, provide the illusion of autonomy as a mechanism for discipline and coercion.
Federal guidelines for government-subsidized sterilization emerged directly from these tragic incidents. These guidelines do provide some basic protection against future abuses of sterilization. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of women in poverty were involuntarily sterilized before any such action was taken. That such a social experiment on women and children in poverty, fifty percent of whom were black, transpired in the 1970s substantiates Roberts’ point that race and reproductive policy are integrally related in America. While the auction block and the whip may have disappeared, the white clinical gaze of disciplinary liberal Progress continues to do its work within a rhetoric of free choice.

The Human Laboratory

2009-12-18T17:15:00.003-06:00

Does anyone know where to get the film (torrents aside) "The Human Laboratory"?

a brief history of norplant, part one

2009-12-18T15:51:00.002-06:00

yes, I know. I started at the third chapter - then went to posting the first and now the second. Dear reader, please do not think (and this is often a mistake made within the United States, understandably) that Norplant no longer is being used. "Norplant II" is now in place. And, regardless of whether this particular device is utilized within the US, it is used globally and pointedly highlights patriarchal capitalist structures of hegemony further. Moreover, provider-controlled new reproductive technologies continue to be approved (e.g. Depo-Provera). More on Depo after we are done with this.

Chapter Two
A Brief History of Norplant®
1. Introduction
The function of this chapter is twofold. First, I seek to provide an international, historical context for Norplant® research and development that elucidates the human costs of the device. As such this history is not intended to be comprehensive, as I sometimes focus on elements of Norplant® development that do not feature prominently in medical and policy accounts of the device. Second, while my critique of disciplinary liberalism throughout the dissertation focuses primarily upon United States policy and reproductive politics, the ideology of choice in the U.S. has an international context. The rhetoric (and existence) of reproductive freedom in the U.S. is founded upon and bound up with the politics of Norplant® in developing nations – nations functioning as “human laboratories” for the hegemons of disciplinary liberalism.
The history of Norplant® follows a pattern of instrumental rationalization, a transformation in emphasis upon birth control to population control. In this light, Norplant® functions – at least in part – as an instrument of state (and international) policy. The Malthusian implications of this transformation are educed with the help of Betsy Hartmann’s Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control. Norplant® and other contraceptive new reproductive technologies did not spontaneously develop. They functioned, in part, out of the Malthusian logic of the World Health Organization, the Population Council, the World Bank, and vested corporations (Leiras, Wyeth-Amherst). Burgeoning fears of the damage incurred by the “population explosion” helped to fuel the construction of a device which was as effective as sterilization and impossible to remove without medical consent and action. This new contraceptive logic and technology was tested on “Third World” populations. Eventually, the Norplant® trials were declared a success (when they were not banned) and the United States Food and Drug Administration quickly approved the technology. Within days of the device’s approval on December 10, 1990, journalists and policy analysts placed the device within discourses of poverty reduction. Numerous attempts to utilize Norplant® as a tool in welfare reform and legal sentencing have been made within the context of this logic. The following history of Norplant® attempts to unpack not only the events that mark its development and release, but also the political logic that guides these events.

2. The Norplant® Experiment
A. An Overview
In 1966, the Population Council’s Center for Biomedical Research initiated laboratory research and development for Norplant®. By the time Norplant® was released, it had been developed into a system of six Silastic capsules, each being 34 millimeters long and 2.4 millimeters in diameter. Each capsule contains levonorgestrel, delivering 216 mg. for the whole system (Knight and Callahan 1989, 130-131). The recipient is given a local anesthetic to the inner side of the upper arm (location may vary) and the sterilized capsules are inserted into a sterile trocar which inserts the capsules in a “fan” through a small incision. This usually takes three to five minutes. Removal is more difficult because tissue has often formed around the device. Some migration of the device has also been reported. The average removal time is reported to be 20 minutes (ibid.). The “success” of the device is hardly debated. It is more effective than the Pill or IUDs and as effective as Depo-Provera. For the most part, the device works by preventing ovulation, though as Knight and Callahan note, there is no knowing whose ovulation is suppressed and whose is not. Norplant’s “backup” system includes the generation of mucous less penetrable to sperm (Knight and Callahan 1989, 132).
The first clinical release of progestin is documented two years later in Santiago, Chile. By 1974, a six-capsule Silastic system was developed, with clinical trials in Chile. By 1975, a six country clinical trial was initiated in Brazil, Chile, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Finland, and Jamaica under the Population Council’s International Committee for Contraception Research (ICCR) with pre-introduction trials following in 1980 in Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States. Comparative trials for Norplant® and Norplant-2 commenced in 1982 in Dominican Republic, Sweden, Chile, Finland, and the United States. Finland’s Leiras Pharmaceuticals was then licensed to make and distribute Norplant®, with Finland being the first country to approve of the device. By 1984-85, pre-introductory trials commenced in Bangladesh, China, Nepal, Philippines, Singapore, and Sri Lanka, bringing the Norplant® trial experience to over 18,000 women in 20 different countries. In 1985, the World Health Organization concluded that Norplant® is an “effective and reversible long-term method of fertility regulation...particularly advantageous to women who wish an extended period of contraceptive protection.” While the Population Council and USAID have argued that the experiments were distributed evenly across different settings and cultures, at least fifteen of the key countries mentioned are Third World countries (Cadbury 1994: interview with USAID worker).
Participants in the Bangladesh trial have stated that they were not warned of the side effects of the device and were not told that it was in the experimental stage (Cadbury 1994). Women experienced adverse side effects (bleeding, severe visual disturbances including partial blindness, acute depression, and lethargy) and asked for the removal of the devices. Yet, the doctors often refused them, when they were able to find them (Cadbury 1994). One particularly chilling incident occurred in Bangladesh where a woman told a staff member that he had to remove it, that “it is going to kill me” (Cadbury 1994). In this instance, she was told “When you die, we will go to your body and remove it.”
Problems with the Norplant® trials were not limited to Bangladesh. In January of 1986, Brazil’s Ministry of Health rescinded the permission it had granted to The Population Council to conduct Norplant® trials, marking the first time this agency had ever rescinded permission for contraceptive research (Barroso and Corrêa 1995, 292-306). Haitian participants and observers have also complained about the lack of informed consent and inadequate follow-up care (Cadbury 1994). Officials in India also preempted further Norplant® research.

B. The Brazilian Case
The Brazilian story is particularly noteworthy because it marks both the perils of the technology and the gender and class dimensions that encompass it as well as the capacity for organized democratic discourse and action to take place in Brazil’s New Republic. Carmen Barroso and Sônia Corrêa present a trenchant analysis of the complexities of the Brazilian phenomena in “Public Servants, Professionals, and Feminists: The Politics of Contraceptive Research in Brazil” (Ginsburg and Rapp 1995, 292-306). What is of particular importance to this narrative is that a forceful argument against the continuation of Norplant® in Brazil was that it was funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an agency which is known for its promotion of population control. That the agency served the dual function of advocating population control and funding provider-dependent contraceptive research in developing countries (through Family Health International, Johns Hopkins University, and the Population Council) raised concerns in Brazil among state officials, some health professionals, feminist activists, the media, and the population at large.
In a country consumed with the idea that a large population was needed in order to face the threat of imperialism, contraceptives were seen as technological tools for population control and therefore were subject to a special scrutiny that went beyond their effects on individual users (Barroso and Corrêa 1995, 295).

A combination of anti-neo-Malthusianism and nationalism exacerbated the pre-existing skepticism towards the new reproductive technology. Moreover, 1985 marked the end of the rise of the New Republic and the end of the military regime. With a decrease of social hegemony, social activists, feminist critics, journalists, and other concerned citizens were galvanized by the possibility of active participation in self-governance (ibid.). The formation of the Committee on Reproductive Rights in the Ministry of Health exemplified the potential that the emergence of the New Republic had in comparison to previous regimes. Norplant® was subjected to media attention as well in “daily newspapers, weekly magazines, and even prime-time television shows” (Barroso and Corrêa 1995, 296). Reasons provided for blocking further research, “included lack of the use of the official informed-consent form; insufficient registration of data used for screening and follow-up; an unauthorized increase in the number of centers and subjects tested; and heterogeneity of procedures used in the various centers” (ibid.).
The formation of the critique of Norplant® in Brazil is critical not only to a full understanding of the political history of the device, but also to an understanding of the ways by which substantive critique of public policy can be effectively mobilized. Feminist critiques of informed consent procedures in Brazil have pointed to at least three obstacles in achieving true informed consent: 1) scientists’ excitement over the product can lead to a downplaying of side-effects, 2) a gap in understanding regarding the meaning of “experimental procedures” between researcher and subject, particularly in Third World cultures, and 3) the presence of race, class, and gender stereotypes which can lead to paternalism on the part of the researcher (Barroso and Corrêa 1995, 299).
This critique of informed consent is both significant in itself and as a summary of what is problematic with the Norplant® trials at a more general level. The lack of adequate consent and understanding on the part of the “subjects” reveals a nexus of scientific hubris, cultural imperialism and race, class, and gender bias. In this context, it is possible for a researcher to minimize the documented side effect of prolonged menstrual bleeding in 59% of Norplant® users or to discount the meaning of seventeen percent of recipients wanting the device removed (Cadbury 1994). Masculinist, ethnocentric, and classist biases can contribute to a lack of understanding of the meaning of menstruation, particularly among poorer women in Third World settings (Cadbury 1994: interview with anthropologist). Not only can prolonged menstruation interfere with daily activities, but also contributes to more clothing to wash. This is dangerous in communities where clean water is inaccessible. Observers in Haiti have noted that clean water costs money, which has led to many Norplant® recipients having to utilize wastewater for cleansing. While no studies of the sanitary impact of this procedure have been performed, it is degrading and carries additional risks of dysentery and other illnesses. Norplant® researchers have given scant attention to the medical, cultural and emotional impact of prolonged and intermittent menstruation at a global level. This is also observable in cultures where women are forbidden to worship or participate in other crucial social functions during their menstrual cycles. A ninety-day absence from places of worship can easily contribute not only to personal religious alienation, but also to a decline of social status within the community.
On another level the disruption of the menstrual cycle has been reported to disrupt the user’s sense of time. A woman’s intimate relationship to corporeal timing should not be taken lightly. This relationship not only varies from person to person, but also from culture to culture. It is for these reasons that some Brazilian feminist groups can legitimately assert that menstrual disturbances are “major aggravations” that reach into the “core of feminine identity” (Barroso and Corrêa 1995, 299).
These concerns were heard by members of the Brazilian Ministry of Health and taken to heart, along with the plethora of other reported “side effects,” including depression, loss of libido, weight gain, and in some instances, permanent infertility (Barroso and Corrêa 1995, 300). Lastly, concerns were raised regarding distance to treating physicians (for removal and/or periodic checkups) and some physician’s reluctance to remove the devices - a concern that mirrors the Bangladeshi experience.
Some time has been taken here to address Barroso and Corrêa’s superlative article because it presents the foundations of the problematics of the Norplant® experience both in and out of Brazil. Furthermore, the case of Brazil reveals a site of resistance and natality. While the theoretical components of this contribution will be elaborated upon in later chapters, it is important to note that historically and politically, the Brazilian experience did mark a space where word and deed came together and a new understanding of human needs was achieved. It would be easy to cynically mark the creation of a board within a governmental agency as mere reformism. But this is would be false. Barroso and Corrêa astutely note:
Pessimists saw the Brazilian Norplant® episode as a no-win game, where both sides lost and nothing was gained. However, in 1988 the Ministry of Health approved the Norms of Research on Health, in which there is a chapter on ethical aspects with detailed instructions about informed consent. Local ethics committees started to be a reality...and public consciousness had been raised...The quality of communication was surprising given the usual pattern. Before it was as if feminists and researchers had articulated parallel discourses addressed to distinct audiences. During the Norplant® episode, the discourses were interlinked. The general public had never been so well informed about technical procedures and physiological principles...This diversity of opinion, as well as the effort to make traditionally complex and obscure issues transparent, made the Norplant® episode a moment of democratic communication (Barroso and Corrêa 1995, 304).

These statements may seem less naive to the pessimist when put into their political-historical context. The Brazilian Norplant® experience came on the heels of a powerful military regime, marked by the absence of communication and the inability to foster effective democratic political movements. While it remains true that those who suffered did not gain from these reforms, the likelihood of similar experiments on the public was diminished significantly and the likelihood of more Norplant® experiments was entirely abolished in this nation.
Yet, was the Brazilian experience an isolated “moment” or was it the beginning of a longer trend towards public consciousness of women’s needs and democratic communication? Of particular import is the follow-up study performed by Giselle Garcia and Solange Dacach, “Norplant - five years later (Brazil)” (Mintzes, Hardon, Hanhart, 1993, 69-79). Garcia and Dacach’s is similar to Barroso and Corrêa’s in that both suggest the Norplant® experience has had deleterious effects on women and unexpectedly positive side effects in the political sphere as a result of that health crisis. In Rio de Janeiro, the University of Campias authorized research by two family planning organizations to carry out Norplant® trials between July 1984 and January 1986. Six and a half years after this program was initiated (and later abandoned, due to criticisms), Garcia and Dacach wrote to the 309 women in an attempt to follow-up on their status. Fifty letters were returned due to change of address. Garcia and Dacach note that researchers did not take into account that many participants were migrant slum dwellers and thus, no follow-up long-term care could be provided (Garcia and Dacach 1993, 70). Of the 309 women, they could only find fifty-two. Of the fifty-two, fourteen (or twenty-seven percent) still had the Norplant® in their arms over five years later - putting them at legitimate risk for ectopic pregnancy and other complications. Doctors that remained in the area did not know how to remove the implants, while doctors that did know how had left the region after the cancellation of the studies. As the Network funded Garcia and Dacach’s study for the Defense of the Human Species (REDEH), they could not interview the subjects and leave them with the devices still in place. REDEH funded the removal of the devices for the women who requested it or who were past the five-year deadline. Garcia and Dacach ask questions worth considering in the light of to Barroso and Corrêa’s somewhat optimistic piece: “We were only able to contact a small proportion of the women who had taken part in trials. “What happened to the other women? Who will contact them and pay for the removal of Norplant from those women” (Garcia and Dacach 1993, 71)? This sense of abandonment does not seem to be constructed purely by the authors. Interviewees stated: “I don’t know where they (the doctors) are...I’m longing to find them” and “I’m worried. I even cried at work this week because they told me a woman died from Norplant” (Garcia and Dacach, 1993, 72). It would seem, in a moment of pure democratic communication, the very women who suffered the most in Brazil were marginalized.
Interviewees said they opted for Norplant® often because of extreme poverty. Lack of health, education, policing, housing reduced the desire to have more children. Crime in the shantytowns - or lack of safety was also noted. Others noted that the device was pushed on them. One interviewee said, “I didn’t go to BEMFAM for Norplant. I went for a preventive. I was sent to a girl who said she was a nurse. Then she started talking about Norplant. Nowadays I know what “inducing” means. They induce people. That day I met various girls, young girls who had never had children and were using Norplant” (Garcia and Dacach 1993, 72).
Garcia and Dacach’s assessment is particularly important because it puts a human face on the suffering of the Norplant® users. While one can speak of alienation and poor sense of self resulting from changes in menstrual cycles, anecdotal evidence is sometimes more effective in communicating these phenomena: “After five years it started coming twice a month” and “I had no way of stopping it. My sister-in-law ran to her house and got a tablecloth and stuffed it in between my legs. I was green already. I couldn’t take it anymore. He (person previously mentioned)...took me to the hospital. I had to stay eight days on a drip. Four different people here from Jacare donated blood to me” (Garcia and Dacach 1993, 73-74). Another woman reported losing 22 kilos after menstruating constantly for nine months (Garcia and Dacach 1993, 75). The state of this woman’s health was reported as “shocking” during the time of the interview. The hemorrhaging had continued and she was hospitalized and eventually needed a hysterectomy as well as extensive psychological counseling.
Lastly, a statement pertaining to the “decrease in libido” from one of the interviewees: “After Norplant I didn’t feel anything. I became frigid. Before Norplant I was a real woman. After I put it in, I stopped being a woman. All I’m good for is working and feeding the kids” (Garcia and Dacach 1993, 74; emphasis added). Here it seems a device which was touted for its capacity to liberate users from the difficulties of daily use (which can result in higher “user failure” rates), has been transformed from a site of liberation to one of normalization. Indeed some have argued that the “user failure” (e.g. forgetting to take one’s Pill) that Norplant® and Depo-Provera were designed to eliminate were forms of women’s everyday resistance to population control policies that are strongly pushed in Third World countries (Hammami R. and Rieker M. 1988). The political logic of this contraceptive technology cannot be disconnected from the perils of its “side effects.” Are Barrosso and Corrêa perhaps naive to assume that the marketing of this device was a sign of researchers being unaware of the perils of its effects? The possibility that the nexus of sexism, racism and classism runs deeper than previously assumed must be considered. If Norplant® has the unintended “side effect” of making many women only good for working and feeding the kids, no one at Leiras Pharmaceuticals, The Population Council, USAID, or elsewhere raised any objections to this side effect of normalization. Rather, in light of the data that showed the majority of users reporting prolonged bleeding (for example) these organizations redoubled their efforts to test and market the device internationally. It seems that it was not uncharacteristic for researchers and doctors to blame the side effects of the device on the women:
They told me I might get much thinner or fatter, have headaches, feel sick. If I suffer from headaches, that’s my problem, not the doctor’s. I have to accept it. It was me that wanted it. The doctor didn’t force me to put it in.Wasn’t it me who decided to have it? It’s our own problem (Garcia and Dacach 1993, 76).

While the plight of Norplant® recipients who were abandoned by researchers and health officials after the ban on the device is highly significant, other more positive political developments suggest that the reported “democratic moment” signified not an aberration in Brazilian politics, but a significant shift.
By 1991, public discourse had shifted to a concern regarding the high rates of sterilization of Brazilian women. A Parliamentary Committee was established to investigate the cause of this development. Two key health providers in Rio de Janeiro were found to be performing “abusive surgical sterilization.” A critical aspect of this investigation was the testimony of women who had been abusively treated by health professionals. While it is potentially callous to assert that this suffering of Brazilian women marked a positive political moment, it is precisely in the naming and acknowledgement of their suffering that democratic communication was realized in the New Republic. This communication has reduced the number of women who have been abusively sterilized as well as eliminated future Norplant® research.
The experiences of women in Brazil have been examined in detail not because they are extreme, but rather because they reflect problems encountered worldwide during the Norplant® research phase. Researchers in Thailand found similar problems including lack of informed consent, providing Norplant® to women with contraindications, no routine medical follow-up arrangements, no early removals, lack of training for removal, and no tracking of women for removal (Richter, Panut-Ampon, and Kiatboonsri 1993, 81-88). A researcher in Lombok, Indonesia also reported problematic instances of abuse of the device. Of the nineteen Norplant® recipients interviewed, two had indicated they were happy with their previous form of birth control (The Pill), yet they were ordered to do so (Hanhart 1993, 27-45). Other observations included interference with religious activity (as Islam forbids prayer, fasting or entry into the mosque during menstruation), reluctance by doctors to perform early removal of the device, and cost of the device (10,000 rupiahs or on average 3-6 days work), as well as cost of removal (ibid.).

The Hills, Hair, Men of a Certain Age, etc.

2009-12-15T05:47:00.003-06:00

watched The Hills. Also, noted that William Dafoe had some hair job (wig, implants?) in The Antichrist. It was a pretty good movie, but I kept being distracted by his hair. Some of the distance shots look like Hugh Grant. I don't know who that is insulting or complimenting. I wish Greg Oden was around.

this week is christmas lights and tree and ornaments. praise jesus. have you watched Join Us?

think what we are doing

2009-12-14T03:07:00.006-06:00

"we must think what we are doing" (Arendt, 1958).

re-reading Arendt. again. this time, it's the second edition of Origins of Totalitarianism. Summer 1950 was the first preface. Holocaust was not even shadow. no. It's still happening. We did it to the animals and then to each other. We taught each other how to hang on the disassembly line. Gladly. and Profited. Complicity. Some think that Eichmann stops at Eichmann. at the Nazi. NO. culpability extends beyond. the banality of evil is not an outside to look in on. this i know from this week. do i separate myself? no. it's my fault too. will you say, oh try to forgive yourself!? One can never forgive oneself. never. forgiveness is external. some other.

But in this edition, as you may well know dear reader, there is Chapter 13: "Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government." Prescient, genius. Between this and Arendt's notion of natality (not surprising that no man has ever come up with anything close to natality, none, ever, anywhere), something amazing happens.

When Derek Walcott said that "your opinion is of no consequence" in 1993 to us in a graduate seminar, he was siding with what he termed "the Grand Sweep of History." He gestured with his hand. Totalitarian ideology thrives in academic environs from community colleges to Ivy League and all between. Freire was right (sort of). hooks was right (closer).

"It is the monstrous, yet seemingly unanswerable claim o totalitarian rule that, far from being "lawless," it goes to the sources of authority from which positive laws received their ultimate legitimation, that far from being arbitrary it is more obedient to these suprahuman forces than any government was before, and that far from wielding its power in the interest of one man, it is quite prepared to sacrifice everybody's vital immediate interests to the execution of what it assumes to be the law of History or the law of Nature. Its defiance of positive laws claims to be a higher form of legitimacy which, since it is inspired by the sources themselves, can do away with petty legality. Totalitarian lawfulness pretends to have found a way to establish the rule of justice on earth - something which the legality of positive law admittedly never could attain" (Arendt, 1951 renewed).

this is the state of affairs, "naturally" in post-9/11 global relations. Sure, That may annoy you dear reader. Surely, we do not wish to discuss that anymore. the "war" is over. or perhaps it isn't convenient. every grocery store is covered in blood. covered.

strolls are genocidal. "Terror is the realization of the law of movement; its chief aim is to make it possible for the force of nature or of history to race frely through mankind, unhindered by any spontaneous human action." (Arendt, 1951, 465).

"Terror is lawfulness" (ibid).

"Terror is the execution of the law of movement whose ultimate goal is not the welfare of men (sic) or the interest of one man (sic) but the fabrication of mankind, eliminates individuals for the sake of the species, sacrifices "parts" for the sake of the "whole." The suprahuman force of Nature or History has its own beginning and its own end, so that it can be hindered only by the new beginning and the individual end which the life of each man actually is" (ibid).

"with each new birth, a new beginning is born unto the world, a new world has potentially come into being" (ibid).

"the pure negative coercion of logic, the prohibition of contradiction, became "productive" so that a whole line of thought could be initiated, and forced upon the mind, by drawing conclusions in the manner of mere argumentation. This argumentative process could be interrupted neither by a new idea (which would have by another premise with a different set of consequences) nor by a new experience. Ideologies always assume that one idea is sufficient to explain everything in the development from the premise, and that no experience can teach anything because everything is comprehended in this consistent process of logical deduction. The danger in exchanging the necessary insecurity of philosophical thought for the total explanation of an ideology and its Weltanschauung, is not even so much the risk of falling for some usually vulgar, always uncritical assumption as of exchanging the freedom inherent in man's (sic) capacity to think for the strait jacket of logic with which man can force himself almost as violently as he is forced by some outside power"(Arendt, 1951, 470).

"The preparation of victims and executioners which totalitarianism requires in place of Montesquieu's principle of action is not the ideology itself - racism or dialectical materialism - but in its inherent logicality. The most persuasive argument in this respect, an argument of which Hitler, like Stalin was ver fond is: You can't say A without saying B and C and so on, down the end of the murderous alphabet. Here, the coercive force of logicality seems to have its source; it springs from our fear of contradicting ourselves"(Arendt, 1951, 472-473).

"the "ice-cold reasoning" and the "mighty tentacle" of dialectics which "seizes you as in a vise" appears like a last support in a world where nobody is reliable and nothing can be relied upon. It is the inner coercion whose only content is the strict avoidance of contradictions with others. It fits HIM into the iron band of terror even when he is alone, and totalitarian domination tries never to leave him alone except in the extreme situation of solitary confinement. By destroying all spaces between men (sic) against each other, even the productive potentialities of isolation are annihilated; by teaching and glorifying the logical reasoning of lonelieness where man knows that he will be utterly lost if ever he lets go of the first premise from which the whole process is being started, even the slim chances that loneliness may be transformed into solitude and logic into thought are obliterated. If this practice is compared with that of tyranny, it seems as if a way had been found to set the desert itself in motion, to let loos a sand storm that could cover all parts of the inhabited earth (Arendt, 1951, 478)...."But there remains also the truth that every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; this beginning IS the promise, the only "message" which the end can ever produce. Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man (sic); politically, it is identical with man's freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est - "that a beginning be made man was created" said Augustine (De Civitalate Dei, Book 12, Chapter 20). This beginning is guaranteed by each new BIRTH; it is indeed every man" (Arendt, 1951, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 478-9.

have you read the end of the Promise of Politics?

reader, if you are still here - merely to note that it takes a woman to note creation, not mortality. To find an epistemic foundation in natality, rather than mortality. This isn't to say, obviously, that creation and being result in all that is fine and wondrous. far from it.

tonight I'm thinking Holocaust. I can clean my house. There are beloved friends and family, blessed friends and family. Still, these genocides. What happens between us happening beings is natal. And redemptive. Within that, some possibilities. And every day I meet corporeal real possibilities. The time is not later.

obvious

2009-12-14T00:59:00.003-06:00

rather than being loved
is however.
d it's crosshatched
there's a raven down
the street with little
exes on her/his feet.
i do not know gender
but went out on a limb.

Christ and all his bells
and whistles. the loudest
sound resounds down across
this sharp tooth valley
rainbo alley. i can hear
edith's voice somewhere
so it's a temporary loan.

.

you think you loaned something
to someone. i found my glove at
919 N leavitt in the night.
i figure this is where i will
be stabbed eventually or someone.

pay your dues.

hi calypso and the run down 70s
disco army luded out now defecting
for other temporal solutions.
like this one here.
gun. temple. buddha. krishna.
god i love you so much.
do you know what i would do for you?
is it obvious yet?

Introduction: The Norplant® Condition as a Problematic in Contemporary Liberalism

2009-12-13T23:41:00.002-06:00

let's backtrack for a second (or a third). here's the beginning of the beginning for this one...
Introduction: The Norplant® Condition as a
Problematic in Contemporary Liberalism

1. Introduction

In recent years, vibrant international women’s health movements have articulated a meaningful politics of reproductive well being. Many have convincingly argued that governmental policies of population control may interfere with women’s (and men’s) reproductive rights through coercion, “incentives,” and a lack of informed consent (Corrêa, 1994; Hardon and Hayes ed. 1997; Hartmann 1987; Mintzes 1993). Frequently, reproductive rights advocates have convincingly argued that the centerpiece of reproductive freedom is access to free and informed choice. In so doing, women (and men) can achieve reproductive autonomy. While I agree with the aspirations and many of the aims of the reproductive rights movement, the discourse of “free choice” is in many instances bound up with the power relations of liberalism – and is a better predictor of liberalism and a free trade economy than an indicator of women’s reproductive autonomy. In the following pages, I examine Norplant® – particularly in the United States – in the context of developments in contemporary liberalism. To what extent can a discourse of autonomy depart from the rhetoric of contemporary liberalism? What are the possibilities for other ways of thinking about freedom?
Liberal discourses of free choice produce and marginalize “others.” Marginalized groups and individuals function as the background against which unencumbered freedom is understood and produced (Fish 1994). For too long, women, minorities, subalterns have been that background for such conceptions of freedom. The discourse of free choice does not alter the hegemonic grounding upon which it is built. The growing debate over the medical safety of Norplant® and its function as a tool for social policy delineates a problematic development of the liberal state. Rather than referring to this development descriptively as “neoliberalism” or “advanced liberalism,” I seek to articulate the ways in which liberal freedoms are produced through disciplinary political technologies. Recently, Norplant® has been “prescribed” by judges and political representatives as a condition for parole or the receipt of welfare. Internationally, Norplant® was tested (and some would argue, is still being tested) on populations in developing nations, raising ethical questions about informed consent. Once the trial phases of the device were completed, some critics have charged that the device has served as a tool for population control. In the following work, I examine the construction of disciplinary power through what I term “the Norplant® Condition.” This term encompasses the above functions of the device and the discourse that surrounds these functions.
While power as a concept is not a novel theme in political theory, a distinct gap has emerged in theoretical developments by Lukes, Gaventa, and more recently, Foucault. While each provides a worthy critique of the more limited schemes presented by pluralists such as Dahl and of the works of Bachrach and Baratz, there seems to be limited space for “a way out.” Theories of hegemony and oppression, which cannot articulate a means of resistance, are far from useless, but they remain incomplete. How far have we come from Weber’s “iron cage” or the nightmares of Kafka? I seek here to delineate not only an explanatory framework for contemporary power relations in America, but also to pursue the ontological foundations for a counterhegemonic theory of egalitarian resistance.
At the most basic level, it is posited that Foucault’s work contributes to a highly sophisticated explanatory framework of power, which serves to expose hegemonic relations at the most public and private levels. By focusing particularly upon Foucault’s notions of power, liberalism, and biopower, a meaningful critique of disciplinary liberalism will be provided. Rather than merely providing yet another literature review of Foucault’s key texts, I seek to demonstrate the usefulness of his contributions in light of the Norplant® controversy. This controversy underscores many of the major themes of power, discipline, and the move to reform or reconfigure the “defective” subject.
Ideally, by pursuing a genealogy of the Norplant® controversy, not only will critical contributions by Foucault be delineated, but also a more capacious understanding of the parameters of this controversy will be presented. With this endeavor, the problematics of Foucault’s theoretical contributions in the field of political theory and activism emerge. It is at this juncture that I turn to Arendt, in an attempt to ameliorate some of the more precarious features of Foucault’s work for this study, primarily his inability to articulate a theory of sustained democratic action. Arendt traces action to the categories of natality and plurality. She rightly asserts that mortality, rather than natality, has been the central category of political philosophy. By turning towards her reading of Kant’s notion of “enlarged mentality,” Arendt makes substantial inroads into how we can think through and believe in the concept(s) of new beginnings at the end of this century. This is no small contribution. However, Arendt’s model remains insufficient insofar as it remains silent on the issue of marginalization. By denigrating the realm of necessity (which includes reproduction), Arendt excludes some of the most fundamental spaces of natality, including the act of birthing and being-born. Arendt’s association of freedom with our “second birth” in plurality is entirely correct. But, she neglects to adequately integrate the connections between her account of natality and caritas with the corporeal realm of human reproduction. I pursue an “against the grain” reading of Arendt in that her own celebration of new beginnings or natality which originates from a plurality of voices invites us to entertain the historical, social, and philosophical limitations of her work and rework them in the context of feminist perspectives.
The Norplant® controversy is uniquely situated in that the dividing lines between public and private are constantly being rearticulated throughout this topic. The case studies of the Norplant® controversy will serve a double function. On the one hand, the policy ramifications of these enterprises can be given greater consideration than they would were I to remain at the level of “pure” theory. Ideally, the genealogical and social basis of my pursuit will strengthen my theory. On the other hand, the development of a synthesis of the works of Arendt and Foucault will underscore some of the problematic policy implications in the Norplant® case. In the following sections below, I will provide introductory definitions of disciplinary liberalism and the Norplant® Condition, both of which are treated in greater detail in the ensuing chapters. From here I proceed to discuss the nature of my method and research techniques, elucidating what I seek to accomplish and how. Subsequently, I present the reader with a more detailed introductory account of the dissertation. I hope to provide the reader with something of a map for the direction of each chapter, illuminating my central contentions over the works of Foucault, Arendt, and feminist theory in the context of Norplant®.

2. Defining The “Norplant® Condition” and “Disciplinary Liberalism”
Before proceeding, it is important to provide an introductory account of two key terms: "the Norplant® Condition" and "disciplinary liberalism." While I deal extensively with the discourses of Norplant® and liberalism in the following chapters, I hope these general statements provide the reader with a thematic introduction. I have amplified the standard definition of the Norplant® Condition well beyond its standard legal usage (where it applies specifically to Norplant® use as a condition on sentencing) and focused on specific tendencies in liberalism. However, in order to get at my discussion of disciplinary liberalism, it is first necessary to provide a general account of American liberalism. Put differently, disciplinary liberalism did not spontaneously emerge in the twentieth century, but has a long and complex history.
The subjectivist discourse of choice in contemporary American liberalism has historical antecedents reaching back through the ratification of the Constitution into humanism and the works of Thomas Hobbes (Hobbes 1985). The Renaissance celebration of man’s great potential melded with the Protestant Reformation’s affirmation of liberty of conscience to reveal the potentialities of individual freedom (Tocqueville 1966; Lipsitz and Speak 1993). From a philosophic standpoint, one could say that early American liberalism combined Milton’s celebration of free expression in Areopagitica with Locke’s announcement of natural rights in his Second Treatise on Government (Milton 1968; Locke 1937; Fish 1994). This is true, but entirely incomplete. From its inception, American liberalism has welded these perspectives to capitalist beliefs and practices (Tocqueville 1966; Hartz 1955; Weber 1958). The early American project of welding free trade to free conscience produced a “rugged individualism” that permeates both “classic” liberal (i.e. conservative) and “reform” liberal (“liberal”) ideologies to this day (Hudson 1996, 69-110). The celebrated protection of individual freedom by limited governance in The Federalist Papers effectively institutionalized and reproduced an ideology of individual freedom (Hamilton, Jay and Madison 1977). The rise of capitalism in the nineteenth century provided further economic reinforcement for the ideology of individual liberty in the United States (Hudson 1996, 73).
John Adams announced that the proper end of government is “the happiness of society...(and the) happiness of the individual is the end of man” (Adams 1995, 34). For Adams, the best government “communicates ease, comfort, security, or, in a word, happiness to the greatest number of persons, and in the greatest degree” (ibid.). For Adams, such a government “makes the common people brave and enterprising...sober, industrious, frugal” (Adams 1995, 37). Adams’ work displays the complexity and tensions of American liberalism, a characteristic that I discuss in detail below (as well as in Chapters Three and Six). Adams celebrates the individual in that any governmental practice that would impede the very end of man could not be instituted.
While Adams fully acknowledges the significance of individual liberty, his vision of the “common people” in the Republic is also readily apparent. The Republic produces brave, enterprising, sober, industrious, and frugal citizens. The tension between an emphasis on the individual and upon the disciplinary production of a certain type of industrious citizen has continued to play itself out throughout the history of American liberalism. The production of a free, but good citizenry within the practice of American liberalism is not only inextricably bound up with capitalism, but also with technologism (Gandy 1993; Noble 1997; Winner 1986). Technology in the United States does not only have a long history in the political and social discourses of productivity and progress, but also in the very institution of American liberal democracy itself (Ezrahi 1995; Noble 1986). Technology is a highly effective theater of “human historical progress,” providing evidence that we can understand things as they really are (Ezrahi 1995, 159). While my focus on the discourse of Norplant® in the context of disciplinary liberalism is contemporary, it emerges from these broader histories of technology and liberalism.
When I speak of “the discourses of liberalism” and of “disciplinary liberalism,” I do so not to be opaque but in order to speak about not only a mode of governance (e.g. specific institutional frameworks that are commonly referred to as “liberal”), but also to examine liberalism and disciplinary liberalism as a way of thinking about the world. Disciplinary liberalism is an ideological framework, a form of world-making, that enframes and produces sets of practices and subjectivities. Thus, my interrogation of disciplinary liberalism reaches at times directly into political regimes that are not explicitly “liberal,” as in my accounts of the logic or discourse of population control in some developing nations. Such policies are frequently formally articulated by international organizations whose precepts function out of a discourse of liberalism, as in the case of the Population Council or for that matter, Planned Parenthood.
Initially, my account of liberalism follows Foucault’s, where liberalism is characterized by the competing notions of the Nightwatchman State (“one always governs too much) and by the “Police” state (“one always governs too little”). However, my account differs from Foucault’s in that I place greater emphasis on the concept of tolerance in liberalism. Specifically, I focus on how the concept of tolerance performs the ideological function of legitimating the purported neutrality of the liberal state and society. Even more “inclusive” or democratic political systems create spaces of legitimated exclusion, populated by living, breathing women and men. Sometimes those spaces of exclusion are sustained through reproductive policy. The reproductive “freedoms” of women and men in countries such as the United States are integrally bound up with more coercive reproductive policies in developing nations.
The ways in which people are not tolerated and the ways in which subalterns either become productive members of society or serve as sources for others’ productivity within contemporary liberalism broadly constitutes what I term disciplinary liberalism. In contemporary liberalism, the methods employed often constitute what Foucault terms “a strange, scientifico-juridical complex” (Foucault 1979, 19). This complex involves the threefold process of analyzing, manipulating, and producing subjects. Following the works of Dumm and Reid and Yanarella, I examine the ways in which Norplant® works to not only produce the productive citizen, but also the good citizen.
The Norplant® Condition, broadly speaking, marks those discursive spaces where Norplant® functions as a disciplinary practice. I focus on Norplant® in its trial phases (as a mode of examining, manipulating, and producing “Other” populations in the Third World), as a condition for welfare, as a condition for parole, and discourses surrounding the device as a tool for population control and poverty reduction. But the Norplant® Condition is more than the sum total of these practices. Deviating from the more “positivistic” strains in Foucault’s work, I seek to delineate a critique of contemporary liberalism through a hermeneutic analysis of the discourse of Norplant®. In other words, the Norplant® Condition is examined as a case study of the transformations of liberalism.
These transformations are sufficiently complex to require a synoptic account, working from the contributions of Foucault, Arendt, feminist theory, and aspects of critical theory. In this light, the policies surrounding the Norplant® Condition are read as a set of effects, emerging from a series of power relations known here as disciplinary liberalism.

3. On Method and Research
While there are many efforts to trace the Norplant® experience within specific locales (and such efforts have their merits) or on specific issues (e.g. Norplant® and poverty; Norplant® and sentencing), far fewer attempts have been made to present a more comprehensive account of Norplant®, placing it within a broader political context. While each new reproductive technology merits specific attention, I seek to provide research that is relevant to the politics of new reproductive technologies at a more general level. Such an endeavor has the advantage of tracing political dynamics on a wider scale, but does so at the expense of the tremendous precision that a single case study may bring. Science builds on the contributions of others and this project is no exception. I work from case studies conducted on-site in Bangladesh, Haiti, Egypt, and Brazil (to name a few), attempting to integrate the observations of other researchers with my research in the United States. By integrating the contributions of other activists and social scientists, I seek to work from the precision of their studies toward a more comprehensive understanding of the Norplant® Condition within the context of disciplinary liberalism.
In broadening my scope, I seek to articulate the normative theoretical dimensions of reproductive policy. While countless others have provided valuable critiques of reproductive policy, I seek to bridge a gap in the literature on Norplant® and other new reproductive technologies. On the one hand, radical feminists who have addressed the problematics of Norplant® and other reproductive technologies tend to fall into the trap of under-theorizing power, turning it into a dominated/dominator, female/male relationship. On the other hand, those who seem more willing to problematize the ontological foundations of power seem less likely to entertain the possibility that the construction of gender plays a constitutive role in the formation of hegemonic relations. Moreover, while many theorists offer thoughtful critiques of modern and postmodern development, attempts to provide even the most rudimentary “solutions” rarely emerge as a crucial element in a theoretical undertaking. Poststructural social scientists have presented viable reasons for being wary of “solutions.” What I seek to present here is not a “way out” of disciplinary liberalism, but rather an articulation of existing practices and modes of thought that already confound and reject the instrumental rationality of disciplinary liberalism.
This dissertation is, first and foremost, a work in and about political theory. Because theoretical questions occupy the center of my inquiry, I have attempted to provide a more thorough and exhaustive (and perhaps at times, exhausting) account of the works of Foucault, Arendt, and feminist theorists. An in-depth understanding of the benefits and limits of previous theoretical contributions plays an integral role in constructing my critique of Norplant® and disciplinary liberalism. Developing such an understanding and critique occupies the center of my method. Ideally, this enables me to pursue more fully the hermeneutics of the Norplant® Condition, as I work to integrate theoretical contributions with policy initiatives. My inquiry into the theoretical contributions of Foucault, Arendt, and feminist theories in the context of Norplant® and liberalism resulted in a synoptic approach to the Norplant® Condition.
My research on the Norplant® Condition emerges from close readings of state proposals to tie Norplant® to welfare, interviews with non-traditional and traditional health care practitioners who have experience with the device, interviews conducted by social researchers of women who have had the device implanted, legal cases that tie sentencing to Norplant®, and secondary literature on the device and other forms of contraception. Ideally, this data provides a grounding for producing an historical account of Norplant®, a cross-section of experiences by “recipients,” providers, and third-party observers. This research in turn, serves to inform my critique of disciplinary liberalism.
While the case of Abigail Odam does not serve to “measure” resistance and natality scientifically, it does serve as a site of natality-in-action (and resistance) within the politics of reproduction. I rely upon narratives of Odam’s experiences and philosophy provided to me by Odam through personal correspondence. I also rely on Letters From Abby, a newsletter distributed by her supporters. I also look to some of the non-traditional women’s health care practices as sites of natality and resistance, practices that emphasize listening to and empowering their clients. I conducted interviews of key reproductive health coordinators at women’s health care practices in Chicago. I hope that these narratives underscore the reality of resistance to some of the more problematic aspects of the medico-political complex that constitutes the Norplant® Condition in disciplinary liberalism.

4. Looking Ahead: On What This Dissertation Does and Does Not Do
Before proceeding further, I aim to provide a more comprehensive account of what I aim to demonstrate in the following work. This account will provide the reader with a sense of what this dissertation is not about. I do not aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of the Norplant® device. Nor do I interrogate the full history of the development of contraceptive practices. Rather, I seek to interrogate the discourse of Norplant® policy. While facets of the technology are essential to such an analysis (e.g. provider-dependency), the scope of my research on the device is limited to: 1) a normative theoretical account of the ways in which it plays a role in advancing and problematizing public policy initiatives; and 2) the ways in which public policy involving new forms of contraception transform the nature of democratic critical theory.
In Chapter Two, I focus on the history of Norplant® in developing nations, where clinical trials were primarily conducted. Here I elucidate historical, scientific, and political phenomena that undergo more intensive theoretical critique in the following chapters. I trace the history of Norplant® in Brazil, for example, where the trials were eventually banned, led in part by members of the women’s movement and the health community. In another instance, I critique population control policy (Chapter Two) from the standpoint of Arendt’s critique of reason (Chapter Four). Chapter Two then can be understood as performing the dual function of depicting the problematics of Norplant® development and distribution, while also serving to an historical background for a broader critique of disciplinary liberalism through a synoptic approach that integrates the works of Foucault, Arendt, and feminist theory. In Chapter Two, I specifically focus on Brazil, Egypt, Bangladesh, Colombia, and the United States. I work to integrate testing and distribution of the device in these countries within a broader thematic critique of liberalism and “late” modernity. I develop a critique of instrumental rationality, with a focus on racism and classism in population control policy and proposed poverty reduction policy.
In Chapter Three, I attempt to provide a more comprehensive appreciative critique of Foucault’s contributions in the field of political theory, with a particular focus on the topics of ideology and power. I begin “out of sequence,” focusing first on Foucault’s model of disciplinary power as a mode of understanding and explaining the Norplant® Condition. Within this context, I begin to examine potential problems in Foucault’s work, namely his problematic relationship to corporeality and the limits of his vibrant notion of resistance. Having provided an initial grounding to Foucault’s genealogical method, I turn to his archaeological method, where some of Foucault’s finest contributions to an understanding of ideology and the human sciences were developed. Here, disciplinary liberalism is understood as an epistemic shift in contemporary discourses of freedom in the context of liberalism. This shift is presented as an accelerated form of instrumental rationality – an instrumental hyper-rationality of sorts. The background assumptions of the socio-political structures of society serve to “disappear” the negative side effects of new reproductive technologies within a narrative of liberal progress.
From here, I work to develop a more comprehensive definition of liberalism. Foucault presents great contributions to theorizing the work of liberalism, including his account of the tensions between the discourses of the Nightwatchman State and that of “Police Science.” I link this development in Foucault’s work to his account of the clinic in The Birth of the Clinic. Norplant® is presented here as a medical rationality of governance, signifying not only a technological “breakthrough” but also a transition in the way in which citizens and populations are produced and disciplined. However, my work seeks to elaborate further upon the concepts of tolerance, incorporation, corporeality, choice, and instrumental rationality in the discourse of liberalism. I develop this theme, working from the contributions of Dumm, Reid, Reid and Yanarella, and others. Foucault’s work serves to provide a more comprehensive understanding of power, a notion of power as an active relationship of subject-production, rather than a possession. The Norplant® Condition is understood as a mode of subject-production in the context of disciplinary liberalism.
While Foucault highlights the significance and role of resistance in power relationships, I find his account of resistance to be limited. The nature, contours, conditions, and ontological foundations of resistance remain uninterrogated in much of his work. Arendt’s accounts of action and natality provide such a thorough account of the roots of resistance. Arendt successfully constructs an anti-foundationalist account of new beginnings, which is no small achievement. She provides an account of beginnings contingent upon pluralities, rather than some elusive political myth of origination. It is for these reasons that I turn to Arendt’s contributions in Chapter Four, attempting to elucidate further an understanding of the workings of the Norplant® Condition within the context of disciplinary liberalism.
In Chapter Four, I seek to provide a more complete account of Arendt’s political theory, with a particular focus on the role of action and natality. The rise of instrumental rationality is read as a mode of undercutting the very currents that feed the possibility of vibrant political communities. That being said, Arendt’s political theory interrogates the possibilities and realities of resistance and action. I trace Arendt’s theorization of natality from her dissertation Love and Saint Augustine into her last works in The Life of the Mind. In her relentless critique of modernity, Arendt works from the premise that each human constitutes a new beginning – and by extension – that words and actions are also “natal” new beginnings. Through natality, Arendt finds a way to introduce a sense of commonality into politics without sacrificing difference and plurality. Moreover, the work of natality in the human community (or what she calls the “web of human relationships”) recovers the values of memory and imagination. Memory and imagination do the work of instituting a political ontology of remembrance and the promise of a future, absent the teleological premises of the likes of Hegel or Marx.
But Arendt’s contribution to an understanding of the Norplant® Condition is not limited to her concepts of natality and action. Arendt formulates a powerful critique of the concepts of reason and rationality, one that puts the everyday practices of contemporary science and politics into question. Arendt’s work on reason supplements Foucault’s in that she delineates the political ramification of the rise of the “straitjacket of logic” in politics. It is from this perspective that Arendt turns away from logic and towards a neo-Kantian appreciation of the value of common sense and understanding.
Her synthesis of Kant’s notion of common sense and Augustinian natality produces a political philosophy that values the diverse contribution of others in the field of understanding and judgment. Because Arendt relies heavily on the notions of natality and plurality, her rendering of Kant does not produce a universalization of subjective perception. In political terms, concrete embodied pluralities are the necessary condition of the very instance of natality. By integrating Kant’s contributions, Arendt successfully balances the secure necessity of commonality (or sensus communis) with the unpredictability of natality.
Having developed my accounts of Arendt and Foucault, I return to a consideration of Norplant® as a technology of disciplinary liberalism in Chapter Five. Specifically, I focus on proposals in the United States to utilize Norplant® as a tool in welfare policy, its role in criminal sentencing in the U.S., and Planned Parenthood’s Dollar-A-Day Program to reduce teen pregnancy. Here, I develop a critique of the ideology of choice in contemporary rights discourse while seeking to elucidate sites of natality and resistance in the politics of reproduction.
I examine the topic of lay midwifery as a site of natality and resistance, focusing on Abigail Odam. Odam’s story, in many respects, reflects the difficulties and possibilities of action and resistance in disciplinary liberalism. Odam, who was charged and convicted for conspiracy and practicing medicine without a license in California, served over three years in prison for her crimes. Her narrative here functions to inform my broader narrative on the thematics of disciplinary power, the medicalization of the political realm, and the reality of natality even under extreme duress. Odam’s everyday acts of political resistance and natality put a sense of the miraculous at the center of her political life. Here, human beings in all their inscrutable particularities are embraced as an integral part of the natural world. Writing, “whatever we are is divine,” Odam effectively provides a valuable response to those forms of new reproductive technologies that serve not only to intervene in the natural realm, but also implicitly claim a sovereignty over nature. The Norplant® Condition (and more broadly the very foundation of liberalism itself) works from the presupposition that unanticipated social, political, and physical consequences either do not exist or cannot outweigh the benefits acting directly into nature.
Building on Foucault and Arendt, I detail some of the ways in which our bodies literally participate in power relations, including resistance and action. In the context of the politics of new reproductive technologies (if not politics as a whole), the ideology of free choice functions as masculinist strategy for presenting the uneven power relations of gender as being fundamentally neutral. The modern medical paradigm of health care, its grids and networks of apprehending and comprehending corporeality, does not only analyze its disciplined subjects – it produces them from the inside out – producing souls and bodies. Foucault’s narrative of resistance, when coupled with Arendt’s accounts of natality, action and plurality produces broader understandings of the potentiality and reality of counterhegemonic egalitarian action. This form of action is bound together by the construction of a politics of memory that binds disciplined subjects as storytellers and actors in the drama of human possibility.
With these accounts of Foucault, Arendt, and Norplant® as a foundation I develop a broader critique of disciplinary liberalism in Chapter Six. This critique seeks to question the premises of contemporary rights discourse. While claims to a right to privacy, for example, have served a strategic function of defending women’s reproductive autonomy, privacy has also served the interests of patriarchal and capitalist hegemony. Must the politics of women’s and men’s bodily autonomy be bound up with the liberal concepts of sovereignty, choice, and privacy? Kimberly Curtis has thoughtfully pointed out in her article, “Hannah Arendt, Feminist Theorizing, and the Debate Over New Reproductive Technologies,” that Arendt’s contributions are not limited to her concepts of natality and action. Like Honig and Jones, Curtis shows the ways in which Arendt’s political theory throws the very premises of liberalism into question. Curtis notes that traditional models celebrating reproductive choice become increasingly problematic in the field of new reproductive technologies. Increasingly the arena in which people are making choices includes the very foundations of human existence. Curtis provides an illuminating example:
“The ability to “create” a zygote in vitro by first surgically extracting eggs from a woman’s ovary, uniting them with strong-looking pre-selected sperm, allowing the zygotes to grow a few days in vitro, then placing some of them in either the original womb or the womb of another woman to develop until maturation is additional evidence of the human capacity to intervene in the conditions of life” (Curtis 1995, 160).

What Curtis cautions against, following Arendt, is the idea that from this capacity to “intervene” in the natural realm human beings are now sovereign over the natural realm. Curtis cites “the unfinished story of nuclear technologies” as a response to this folly (ibid.). The value of natality is that it serves to construct a vibrant politics of memory that is grounded not in the hypersubjectivism of disciplinary liberalism, but in the intersubjective dimensions of action and plurality in what Arendt calls “the space of appearance.”
But for all their contributions, Arendt and Foucault never adequately addressed the integral value of gender in understanding the dynamics of political power – particularly when applied to the politics of reproduction. Curtis and others have elucidated the value of Arendt’s work, despite feminist criticisms, but many of these criticisms remain valid and pertinent. They point to the fundamental significance of feminist criticism of new reproductive technologies. The works of feminist thinkers such as Bordo, O’Brien, Ruddick, Rich, and Jones serve to inform my critique of the Norplant® Condition not only through their critiques of the masculinist presuppositions of politics and the human sciences, but also through a more thorough account of the meaning and significance of embodiment. In short, Arendt’s account of natality focuses on the significance and value of our “second birth” in the field of public action in the space of appearances. While Arendt’s account of animal laborans does highlight the significance of reproductivity to natality, the significance of our first birth – of our being “of woman born” – was developed more adequately by thinkers such as Rich and O’Brien.
It is within this context that I propose a synoptic approach to the Norplant® Condition and more broadly, to disciplinary liberalism. I revisit Arendt’s notion of natality, while grounding it in the social relations of reproduction – attempting to integrate the significance of birthing and being of woman born into Arendt’s understanding of “new beginnings” and her notion of enlarged mentality as well as Foucault’s concept of resistance. The boundlessness of words and deeds are integrally bound up with a corporeal politics of intersubjectivity. From this perspective, Odam’s politics of midwifery, Brazilian feminist resistance to Norplant® testing, and resistance by women to invasive reproductive technologies are sites of resistance and radically egalitarian moments of natality-in-action. In a feminist context, natality serves as a powerful reminder to imaginatively re-member our capacities as politically active creatures. Such a politics of memory, action, and possibility serves as one response to the rise of disciplinary liberalism and the human casualties that it produces. In so doing, I hope to produce one reminder to, as Arendt was known to say, “think what we are doing.”

5. Conclusion
While Foucault’s notions of power produce keen insights into an understanding of the workings of reproductive policy in liberalism, Arendt’s concepts of natality, plurality and action serve to enhance my theorization of resistance. Moreover, Arendt’s critiques of reason, rationality and the Archimedian point further the construction of a politics of memory in my critique of disciplinary liberalism. Feminist theorists and activists have provided substantial contributions, elucidating the roles of gender and corporeality in critiquing others’ contributions and in producing a politics of natality that remembers that we are in the first instance, of woman born. Moreover, feminist theorists have elucidated the significance of subaltern experiences – experiences that can speak and act against disciplinary regimes of power/knowledge. Odam’s account of her homebirthing classes, for example, serves to depict one example of the vibrant web of human relationships that may, if only for a brief time, enable women and men to take meaningful embodied action. I hope that my synoptic accounts of the works of Foucault, Arendt, and various feminist theorists and activists will open up further inquiries into the political ontology of power, natality and resistance.
The Norplant® Condition is not only about the sovereign power of the State forcing helpless subjects to execute its will upon themselves, but also about the process of understanding the problematic role of choice in the liberal state. Can there be praxis that champions autonomy without celebrating the liberal rhetoric of subjective choice? The discourse of Norplant® functions as a site or a collection of sites where the lines between coercion and choice break down. The works of Foucault, Arendt and feminist theorists provide viable avenues for constructing a meaningful politics of remembrance and embodiment. It is toward such a politics that the following pages are directed.

definitions of ideology and liberalism

2009-12-13T19:47:00.001-06:00

going backward. see below for beginning

7. Definitions of Ideology and Liberalism

While this inquiry into Foucault’s concepts of ideology and liberalism is necessarily incomplete, it has provided a means to reflect upon ways to expand his notion of liberalism not only to apply to Norplant®, but to political phenomena at large. At this juncture, it is useful to synthesize these definitions to arrive at operational definitions of both terms. These ideas are particularly critical for a consideration of the emergence of disciplinary liberalism in Chapters Five and Six. Liberalism is one type or form of ideology. Because the ideology of the end of ideology is so pervasive in the field of Political Science, obtaining working definitions is extremely difficult. “Ideology” is “over.” Thus, there is no reason to even mention it. Conflict does exist at a political level, but usually over distributive matters (wages and taxation, for example). One definition states that ideology “is a system of beliefs that explains and justifies a preferred political order, either existing or proposed, and offers a strategy (institutions, processes, programs) for its attainment” (Paris and Reynolds, citing Reo Christensen 1983, 52). Terrence Ball and Richard Dagger concur in their introductory text, adding four functions of ideology “for the people who hold it: the 1) explanatory, 2) evaluative, 3) orientative, 4) programmatic” (1995, 9). Ball and Dagger’s contribution is particularly helpful in illuminating an approach or a way of thinking that inheres in the holders of an ideology. This orientation is similar to, but distinct from, Foucault’s concept of the episteme. Through ideology, the world is explained and evaluated according to its particular orientation. This orientation is directly connected to a programmatic strategy of taking action. Because Ball and Dagger connect evaluative and explanatory orientations with action and show that these conditions are present throughout the history of ideology, I will work from their definition.
Murray Edelman restates this definition eloquently in calling ideology a form of worldmaking (Edelman 1988, 120). In many senses, this term compresses Ball and Dagger’s definition even further. Liberalism then, is a form of worldmaking. It enacts its orientation, explaining and evaluating the world through its lens while seeking to make the world according to its own orientation. Two tendencies or sub-fields to follow Foucault mark this orientation:
1) “classical” liberalism and 2) interventionist or “welfare” liberalism. The first of these sub-fields is characterized by a counter to the development of Polizeiwissenschaft, based on a profound skepticism over the need for governmental intervention. Thus, theories of the State under this model are characterized by excessive minimalism. However, the development of this form of liberalism over time has led to or included a particular logic or mode of thinking about how to minimize the State. This mode of thought has contributed to a mode of pragmatism and utility in fields, which would have traditionally been “off-limits,” or of less concern to the classic liberals. Bentham’s Panopticon, in many ways, embodies this logic of liberalism. Liberalism eventually sought to rationalize development in economy, State, and civil society – which is to say – nothing short of the world itself.
But Foucault’s articulation of this development is incomplete. These modes of liberalism are sub-fields because they share a vision of worldmaking beyond the drive to rationalization. They are both directly connected to the ideological components of toleration, as detailed in Dumm’s analysis of the Quaker “Inner Light” and Lockean interiority. It is through the field of “tolerance” that the liberal episteme creates a geography of legitimated exclusion, to follow Fish’s reading of Milton. To tolerate the “liberty” of companies can easily translate into the capacity to exclude the personhood, the viability of subaltern groups. This exclusionary strategy achieves its legitimacy curiously by appealing to the very principles it violates, i.e. human dignity, liberty, autonomy, and toleration.
The rise of instrumental rationality in disciplinary liberalism does not display a flight from ideology, but rather an ideological scientization and technologization of the political realm. By focusing in on the “theoretical contradictions” and “defects” within the logic of disciplinary liberalism, the instrumental components of liberalism can be exposed. However, contra Foucault, I assert that to question the ideology of liberalism as a discursive formation may “uncover the philosophical presuppositions that may lie within it” (Foucault 1972, 186).
While the epistemic and political ramifications of liberalism have been outlined, its economic component is also significant. Concomitant with the development of the rhetoric of the “marketplace of ideas” (or one may argue, prior to) was the development of the open marketplace itself. While the full implications of the emergence of capitalism are clearly beyond this working-definition, the very logic of human rights – liberty, autonomy, equality – all serve as foundational moments in the creation of a “free” market. The classical form of liberalism depended on (and created) a collapse of feudal economic systems as it sought the devolution of governance and the eventual rise of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. The transformation of liberalism into the non-economic spheres does not mean that liberalism ceased to be “economic.” Rather, the logic of the marketplace ceased to be limited to the marketplace itself – as I have detailed in my reading of Reid, Dumm, Tocqueville, and Yanarella and Reid’s reflections on “humanware.”

8. Conclusion

Foucault’s concept of discursive formations is critical not only to an understanding of Foucault’s work, but more importantly for this study, for an understanding of a way in which the world is ordered. This ordering of the world is not solely about “language,” but is also, as has been discussed, about the construction of an epistemic sovereignty of the gaze of liberalism. Experience, perspective, knowledge and action are bound up with the construction of a discursive formation. In the context of this study, the experiences of women who have “used” Norplant®, the dimensions of “choice” of the product and “freedom” to use it exist within a larger context of power relations.
This larger context of power relations is best understood as the ideological formation of liberalism. Such a formation is integrally bound up with what Foucault labeled “the empire of the gaze.” The medicalization and disciplinization of liberalism can best be seen as the extension of liberalism into so-called “non-economic” realms. The “medicalization of rationalities of government” produced a system of moral hygiene among the disenfranchised in particular (Rose 1994, 57). Foucault notes that within this is a “virtue to destroy, a purified purifying gaze” (Foucault (1973) 1979, 51 emphasis added). This discourse of medical purification of subalterns will be traced directly into proposals to tie welfare to Norplant® insertion, cash benefits for Norplant® receipt, Norplant® as the end to the class problem, and the discourse of population control. This purified, purifying gaze can be traced further into the Norplant® trials at an international level. This concept of liberal purification and disciplinization is the central problematic of Chapters Five and Six and the centerpiece of this study.
While Foucault contributes to an understanding of the intimate relationship between the human sciences and the rise of modern and postmodern forms of power (disciplinary, power/knowledge), Reid further articulates the hegemonic components of contemporary power relations. Moreover, Reid contributes to this analysis further by articulating ways in which a strong sense of totality can be re-covered through praxis rooted in “time’s body.” It is not that Foucault was a “nihilist,” but rather that there are distinct limits to his conceptualization of resistance. By thematizing counterhegemonic strategy within the context of embodied practices of intersubjectivity, the “Inner Light” of disciplinary liberalism’s subjective slide can be challenged. I have spoken above on the significance of the anecdote and “storytelling” precisely in this context. The ideology of liberalism produces a state of consciousness (which according to Tocqueville, is rooted in Cartesianism) that is forever skeptical and judgmental of the words and deeds of others. Anecdotal evidence and storytelling refuse Cartesian doubt, relying on the construction of what Arendt terms a “web of human relations.” By grounding the web of human relations in embodied, intersubjective inter-action, the possibility of a vital “politics of experience is created.” Arendt’s contributes to this analysis with her category of action and her concepts of natality and plurality. Moreover, her critique of reason presents further ground for articulating the problematics of instrumental rationality in the discursive regime of disciplinary liberalism. However illuminating (and necessary) her concepts may be at the ontological level, the lack of corporeal grounding in her thematics of action excludes “the Arendtian body” from vital understandings of counterhegemonic political action.

not

2009-12-13T11:05:00.001-06:00

ﻬﻬﻬ
it isn’t.
did you see the swarms?
punted into space
it’s a gaunt
creature.

what gives an army?
are you always so –
it’s just the parallax .
skin moments

ﻬﻬﻬ
a guest beneath the house the studded clouds
articulate most every. a conversation is
crushing. it’s a pathway. it’s a handle
as if there were on some other side some,
someone. no. this is not that sort. I will
do tarot pack my tarot pack behind
shut doors. It’s a worry, to recline as
if the dearticulation would stun.
No. poet idiots sprawl the city
addled by larynx as abyss>

ﻬ
can’t copy this symbol
portent animal
and he connives
to enthrall.
After all,
this sideshow
where everything
is its opposite
affects and participants.

unintended.
“not what I meant”
to be the fumigated
ants, rows spun into
agony and the DuPont
circles they run in.

title

2009-12-12T10:41:00.005-06:00

this is running backwards i am this is running, wards of them.

read one to you but the sound refracted off your back
and the door and the door it wasn't because you were mad
or anything, nono. may that the bent mercantile ships
might come in may that. but it's winter
and sorry.

used to write
clipt verse.
why don't you write west virginia again?

WHAT IS LIBERALISM?

2009-12-12T10:28:00.002-06:00

this is running backwards. See below for beginning. Chapter Three opens this post. I'm quite tired of Chomsky.

4. What is Liberalism?

It is at this juncture, by way of an understanding of Foucault’s notion of the episteme, as well as his reading of science and ideology that I now turn back to the question, what is liberalism? It is by way of two of Foucault’s lectures (“The Birth of Biopolitics” and “Security, Territory, and Population”) that I return to this question (Rabinow, ed. 1994, 73-79). While Foucault splendidly presents the history of nineteenth century liberalism and its impact on twentieth century politics, he neglects to provide a similar space in his writings devoted to any transformations (or “ruptures”) of the concept in the late-twentieth century. Thus, Foucault will serve as a starting point for the genealogy of this concept, around which a more comprehensive definition can be built.
Foucault notes rather than a replacement of the “territorial state” with the “population state,” one encounters not a replacement but a whole new set of objectives, problems and techniques that surround modern forms of governance (Rabinow 1994, 67). The notions of governmentality (which I will address below) are opened up from this consideration. However, Foucault’s “Security, Territory, and Population” is important in its historicization of the birth of the concept of population. Population became more than the sum of people living in a given area as a result of contributions by the physiocrats. Here, population was a matter that could be rationally analyzed and altered for the purposes of political economy: “So there begins to appear, branching off from the technology of “policy” and in correlation with the birth of economic thought, the political problem of population” (Rabinow 1994, 70).
Foucault then weaves the logic of biopolitics into the history of nineteenth century liberalism (Rabinow 1994, 73). It is through liberalism that population was transformed from a phenomena to a problem. Foucault contrasts liberalism to the growth of Polizeiwissenschaft, an eighteenth century form of German governance that sought to strengthen the state through a growing governmentality. Here the principle was “one is not paying enough attention, too many things escape one’s control, too many areas lack regulation and supervision, there’s not enough order and administration. In short, one is governing too little” (Rabinow 1994, 74). Here, the discourse of population finds a place with little contestation – it is articulated as phenomena.
In contrast, the early history of liberalism marks the notion that “one always governs too much” (ibid.). Through a critique of government, liberalism begins not with the state but at the level of society. This form of critique develops into “a regulative scheme of governmental practice” (Rabinow 1994, 75). It is within this form of rationalization that Bentham’s work emerged. Foucault prefers not to point to economic developments in his account of liberalism (although he does acknowledge their impact), nor does he point to “juridical thought.” Rather, Foucault refuses to attribute a coherent causal relationship between any one field and the emergence of liberalism. He writes, “Rather than a politics pursuing a certain number of more or less clearly defined goals, I would be tempted to see in liberalism a form of critical reflection on governmental practice” (Rabinow 1994, 77). One aspect of this “critical reflection” included an attempt to delineate the rational minimum of state interference. Another version of this critical reflection has involved state “intervention” (as in the case of Keynsianism in American neo-liberalism), but a state intervention which has oriented itself towards “extend (ing) the rationality of the market” (Rabinow 1994, 79). In light of this analysis, population (family planning, birth control, and abortion) functions as a matter subject to the purview of liberal economic consideration. As “rational” economic concerns of governance are extended into terrains that are new to liberal consideration, family planning, issues of justice and racial and economic distribution become state issues pertaining to contraception.
Foucault’s notes to this lecture provide insight into the formation and development of his concept of biopolitics. His accentuation on liberalism presents a more accessible concept – one that continues to haunt contemporary political relations. Biopolitics is not only a concept whose genealogy can be traced through the histories of eugenics. It is also deeply intertwined with the development of liberalism. These are Foucault’s most well developed articulations of the concept of liberalism. In The Foucault Effect (edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller), contributing authors offer reflections on Foucault’s notions of liberalism, but none of Foucault’s included essays and interviews (“Politics and the Study of Discourse,” “Questions of Method,” and “Governmentality”) deal directly with this topic. Gordon’s “Governmental rationality: an introduction” provides a superlative analysis of Foucault’s writings in this text. For Foucault, both the minimal state and its expansion are contained within the genealogy of liberalism. As described above, this contradictory development is neither fully economic nor fully juridical. In making this statement, Foucault articulates a critique of marxian ideology-critics, who have tended to delineate a causal model of liberalism’s development. In so doing, ideology-critics assume that liberalism’s constituent elements are cohesive (Burchell, Gordon, Miller, eds. 1991, 18). Given Foucault’s prior statements on the relationship between ideology and science, it would seem that his critique of ideology focuses upon a particular mode of ideology-critique. This distinction is critical, so as to avoid lapsing into a misreading of Foucault purely as an “end of ideology” thinker (along the lines of Fukuyama), a tendency that Habermas fell into in his exchanges with Foucault.
Foucault’s lecture “Governmentality” (which the “Security, Territory, Population” notes were prepared for), analyzes a transformation or set of transformations in the types and forms of governance during the sixteenth century in Europe (Burchell, Gordon, Miller, eds. 1991, 87-104). Foucault addresses the governance of oneself, of souls, of children, of the state, of “the world.” The transformation towards Machiavellian “arts of governance” and away from the rule of the Sovereign marked the beginnings of liberalism. In conjunction with this, the emphasis on the extended family was replaced by an emphasis on the phenomena of population. This was part of the larger process of rationalization and bureaucratization of the state. The state becomes an ensemble of police science. This ensemble targets the population as its principle form of knowledge as a means of strategically administering its power base. Increasingly, this governmentality, this form of liberalism takes hold, leaving familial structures and the rule of the Sovereign behind. To many political theorists, none of this is particularly revelatory. Foucault’s observations on the history of “governmentalization” and liberalism here do not offer an acute insight into governmental developments. However, what Foucault does offer in this essay is an important set of reflections on the notion of police science, which pertains not only to internal security, but also ultimately to the political meanings that lie behind his reflections on the history of surveillance. These notions of governmentalized security that penetrate human relations, even at the cellular level, demarcate a nuance in the development of power, provided by Bentham as well as many other liberals of his time.
Yet, to rely solely upon Foucault’s sometimes thin definition of “liberalism” is insufficient for the purposes of this study. I concur with his observation of the growing tendency to adhere towards the power of laissez-faire matched by the extension of the “rationality” of the market into the “non-economic” spheres of population. But, Foucault stops short, leaving significant aspects of the theme of liberalism completely out of the realm of analysis. It may be true that “liberalism” is that sphere marked, more than anything, by a particular spirit of reflection, of thinking – rather than a purely economic or ideological relationship. However, Foucault often leaves the contours of this spirit of reflection, this mode of thought, empty. It seems a concept commenced but not completed. In other words, how does this mode of thought differ from any other? Moreover, in a rush to negate economic and ideological determinism, Foucault sometimes avoids the roles of economy and ideology in the construction of liberalism. Colin Gordon closes his introduction to The Foucault Effect with a reflection on Foucault’s ambivalence towards liberalism. He writes:
Foucault was, one might say, sufficiently respectful of the historical effectiveness of liberalism as an art of government to doubt the liberal (and Marxist) nightmare of an ever-expansionist and despotic tendency within the state. Although not enamoured of minimalist anarcho-liberal individualism...Foucault does seem to have been (at least) intrigued by the properties of liberalism as a form of knowledge calculated to limit power by persuading government of its own incapacity; by the notion of the rule of law as the architecture of a pluralist social space; and by the German neo-liberals’ way of conceiving the social market as a game of freedom sustained by governmental artifice and invention (Burchell, Gordon, Miller, eds. 1991, 47).

While Gordon provides insight into the architecture of Foucault’s thought, I aim to provide further developments to the concept of liberalism. Liberalism is not only the tension between the rationality of the Nightwatchman State and the expansionism of the rationality of the marketplace into non-economic arenas. I want to introduce my reading of liberalism by way of Foucault’s contributions on the medical rationalities of (liberal) governance.

5. The Birth of the Clinic: Towards and Understanding of the Medical Rationalities of Governance

“Whilst my physicians by their love are grown
Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie
Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown
That this is my southwest discovery
Per fretum febris, by these straits to die”
- John Donne (1568-1639)
Foucault’s accounts of medicine and medical discourses link medical rationalities with the broader rationalities of liberal governance. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception unearths the methods through which the subject was mapped through observation and expertise. Foucault’s archaeology pursues the question of how did eighteenth and twentieth century doctors see what they see as natural fact? This facticity is constructed out of a relationship between the interiority of the patient and the positivities of the doctor’s gaze. It is within the eye that empiricism finds its foundation: “The eye becomes the depository and source of clarity,” creating a “concrete a priori” of empiricism (Foucault (1963) 1994, xiii). In this patient-doctor relationship, “the patient is only an external fact; the medical reading must take him into account only to place him in parentheses” (Foucault (1963) 1994, 8). This “externalization” of the patient pertains to the Norplant® problem specifically and more generally to masculinist western medical constructions of women. Women have historically been placed “in parentheses” by the medical profession. Within the Norplant® case, the corporeal lived experiences of women (and men) impacted by the device are placed “in parentheses” by a broader medico-political discourse of disciplinary liberalism. The primacy of the gaze and the placing of the subject/patient in parentheses function in the Norplant® Condition in studies that prioritized efficacy over safety, as in the Colombia case study. The mapping and dissection of subjects does not only enframe embodied subjectivities, it produces new subjectivities: “whilst my physicians by their love are grown cosmographers, and I their map.”
As disease came to be read as an epidemic, the notion of police was introduced into medical practice. Regulation, enforcement, assistance, exhuming – all of these practices found their way into medicine. This collusion of political ideology and medical technology is the foundation of the “empire of the gaze” (Foucault (1963) 1994, 38). This emergence of a particular type of vision emerged as part of the Enlightenment:
The great myth of the free gaze, which, in its fidelity to discovery receives the virtue to destroy; a purified purifying gaze; which freed from darkness, dissipates darkness. The cosmological values implicit in Aufklarung are still at work here (Foucault (1963) 1994, 51-52).

“The sovereignty of the gaze” emerges from the “ocularization of science.” Years before the publication of Discipline and Punish, Foucault had already articulated his theory of the gaze and its role in the construction of institutional power. Here, power is understood not in the traditional sense, but in a more totalizing sense. Ocularization, the empire of the gaze produces a particular type of individual.
That individual is produced within the gaze of the clinic and hospital. Foucault’s analysis of the hospital is relevant here because he presents a historical precedent for the Norplant® Condition. Unsurprisingly, the rich for research have traditionally used the poor. Research is constructed as help in medicine; this relationship of domination is constructed as a relationship of reciprocity. Foucault finds that this “reciprocity” particularly salient in pre-Revolutionary France, but continues beyond the Revolution: “These themes, which were so characteristic of pre-Revolutionary thinking and which found frequent expression...were given new meaning and immediately applied in the liberalism of the Directoire” (Foucault (1963) 1994, 85). In this sense, liberalism and medical relations to the body in the clinic (as acted-upon, as a target for “help”) are brought together by Foucault.
David Armstrong, in his essay “Bodies of Knowledge/Knowledge of Bodies,” traces the early influence of Kuhnian paradigm shifts in medical sociology. It is here that Armstrong’s analysis begins to shift, producing strong misreadings of Marx and Foucault. He writes,
But what if, following Foucault, there was no ordinary individuality, no autonomy, no discrete body, prior to the advent of the hospital and its clinical technics?....Then, the process of corporeal objectification becomes not a destructive assault on human individuality but the very practice through which that individuality is given a literally solid foundation and manifestation (ibid.).

In many ways, this is a profoundly insightful account of the construction of individuality through medico-political rationalities. Yet, Armstrong’s overly narrow reading of Foucault suggests that there was no pre-modern body. Foucault’s project is more expansive, as he delineates the construction of the self. Thus, Foucault writes extensively on the inscription of language upon the self during the classical period (Foucault (1966) 1994, 250-302). In contrasting the “life” of language to that of living beings he writes, “There is one major difference...between languages and living beings. The latter have no true history except by means of a certain relation between their functions and the conditions of their existence” (Foucault (1966) 1994, 293). I read Foucault here as indicating not that there is no “body,” no relations of reproduction, but that the history of the body outside of language is limited to corporeal functions – what Arendt terms “the realm of necessity” or animal laborans. Institutional “entrenchment” is not essential to the “creation” of the body but fundamental in the creation of subjectivities. Armstrong confuses Foucault’s account of the body with his account of subject-formation. The body is a porous, living, breathing, bleeding pre-objective structure that begins and ends with and in the world. The recognition of corporeal objectification may in fact be “the very practice through which (that) individuality is given a literally solid foundation and manifestation.” Significantly (as I argue below, following Reid, O’Neill and Merleau-Ponty), the recognition of corporeal pre-objectification may be the very practice through which individuality (and the entire schema of subjectification) is destabilized.
Following Foucault, Armstrong steers away from such questions of “destabilization” and “critique” and moves instead to reflect on questions of the social inscription of the body. Of particular import, he raises the question, “But what would a picture of a constructed body imply for the history of the body” (Jones and Porter, ed., 1994: p. 23)? This is significant for an understanding of the conjunction between ideology, the history of the body, science and liberalism in the construction of a political theory of liberal incorporation of the gendered body. The emergence of the constructed body is oriented towards making the body legible. Disciplinary liberalism makes Norplant® recipients “legible” on several levels – as a mode of re-inscribing gender (a technology “for” women) and simultaneously as a mode of surgically removing capacities that only women have. Moreover, Norplant® has implications for making the body legible by nation (through the “population explosion” and its use as a form of population control) and by class and race (as seen in attempts to tie Norplant® to welfare and in popular media treatments of the device), to name a few.
Rose notes Foucault’s account of the instrumental functionalization of medicine in governmental institutions. Writing on Foucault, Rose writes that medicine was perhaps the first “positive knowledge to take the form of expertise, in which the human being was not only to be known but to be the subject of calculated regimes of reform and transformation, legitimated by codes of reason and in relation to secular objectives” (Jones and Porter ed. 1994, 49). Medicine has a governmental form that is associated with the distribution of problematic groups into certain sectors in the interest of social and individual health and well-being. The logic of population control functions out of such a medical rationality, one that places “problematic groups” (e.g. those mothers who exceed “replacement levels of fertility; discourses of the “unfit” and “fit” populations). The Inquirer episode and other proposals to tie welfare to Norplant® also function out of a discourse that divides and assembles groups and subjectivities in the interest of a greater common good.
Medicine is constitutively social wherein the science of police that emerged during the Enlightenment engages itself with the process of “administering life.” Political administration is integrally related to matters such as “the police of health and cleanliness” (Jones and Porter ed. 1994, 54). Rose elaborates on the linkages between medical and political rationalities in Foucault:
Medical rationalities provided the matrix within which government problematized the population - delinquency, criminality, indigence, inebriety were construed as sicknesses afflicting the social body, they were rendered thinkable in medical terms, as so many products of the foul moral miasma circulating at the heart of the great cities. This medicalization of rationalities of government was not merely a matter of metaphors, for it was embodied in a range of programmes of moral hygiene entailing opening up these swamps of vice to the purifying gaze of civilization (Jones and Porter, ed., 1994: p. 57).

The medical rationalities of Norplant® provide the “matrix” within which populations are both produced and problematized. So-called “irresponsible reproduction” (as nonsensical as a notion of “irresponsible Being”) is part of this self-same “swamp of vice” (recalling what Inquirer editor David Boldt accusingly referred to Americans’ politically correct weaknesses as “a warm vat of sensitivity”(Boldt 12/30/90, 7F)) and is subject to “the purifying gaze of civilization.” This gaze is achieved through the “apparatuses of health” in the liberal state - “the medical administration of public space, the hygienic regulation of domestic life, the curative clinic, the medical staffing of the population, and the insurantial mitigation of suffering” (Jones and Porter, ed. 1994, 64).

6. Liberalism and Tolerance: The Limits of Foucault in Contemporary Political Theory

While a total theoretical development of the concept of liberalism could easily occupy volumes of writing, it is hoped that these small contributions can serve to augment further readings of liberalism and Foucault. Additionally, this theoretical development serves as an important component in my construction of a critique of new reproductive contraceptive technologies. To retrace, thus far I have:
1) Presented the significance and relevance of Foucault’s notions of disciplinary power and the emergence of the disciplinary society in Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison;
2) Addressed the development of his notions of power and resistance;
3) Articulated key features of his archaeology (discursive formation, episteme);
4) Assessed the fundamental elements of Foucault’s accounts of liberalism (governmentality, ideology, police science, the Nightwatchman State);
5) Addressed the role of the gaze;
6) Presented a wider configuration of the role of the body in Foucault.

In these contributions, Foucault provides innovative and useful ways for comprehending and explaining the development of disciplinary liberalism, with its scientifico-medico-juridical complex. Moreover, I have attempted to briefly elucidate how each of these contributions provides ways for understanding how the discourse of new reproductive technologies works within that complex.
However, I want to elaborate on my thematization of contemporary liberalism (be it “corporate” or “disciplinary”) by way of Herbert G. Reid’s “Totality, Temporality, and Praxis: Existential Phenomenology and Critical Political Theory” (Reid (Winter 1978), 113-135) and Ernest J. Yanarella’s and Herbert G. Reid’s “From “Trained Gorilla” to “Humanware”: Repoliticizing the Body-Machine Complex Between Fordism and Post-Fordism” (Yanarella and Reid 1996, 181-219). In so doing, first I aim to provide further thematization of the substance of contemporary liberalism – particularly the corporate state’s hegemonic grounding in instrumental rationality. Then, following Reid’s deployment of “time’s body” (and the roots of praxis in time) and “indeterminate corporeality” as well as Yanarella and Reid’s reflections on Carol Bigwood’s writings on embodiment, I show how these thinkers provide critical ways for understanding the reality and significance of embodied resistance. I argue that it is not so much that Foucault was “against” such resistance (indeed his writing is often sympathetic with it), but despite such sympathies there are limits to his notions of resistance and corporeality – as there are with any.
Subsequently, I develop a more capacious definition of liberalism, working from Thomas Dumm’s Democracy and Punishment: Disciplinary Origins of the United States (Dumm 1987). Here, I work from two points. On a specific level, Dumm improves upon Foucault’s framework by focusing on a concept never covered by Foucault - the role of tolerance in the institutionalization of liberal hegemony. More generally, Dumm’s reflections on Foucault, Tocqueville, and Hartz contribute significantly to the genealogy of Norplant®. Fleshing out Foucault’s biopolitics while elaborating on Dumm and Reid (as well as Yanarella and Reid, and Emily Martin), I conclude that contemporary developments in new reproductive technologies mark another transition in liberalism into an econo-political realm of “flexible bodies” peopled by “humanware.”
Reid shows how “the corporate state with its favoured horizon of technological world-domination” through instrumental rationality begins to constitute what he calls “the hegemonic liberal tradition” (Reid 1978, 123 and 113). Reid, like Bordo in this regard, grounds his critique (in part) in the “life-dualizing” (subject-object) terms of instrumental rationality (Reid 1978, 113). Praxis stands at odds with the hegemony of the corporate liberal state, rooted in time and temporality. This serves as what Reid calls “the dialectics of totality and temporality” (Reid 1978, 177). The hegemonic liberal tradition – when grounded in the means-ends discourses of instrumental rationality (from the rise of behaviorism in the social sciences to reproductive technology policy (“police science”) to governance through opinion polls) shows not only the ideologization of science but also the technologization of the ideological. It is not that Foucault never addresses the impact of rationality on governance (as in governmentality), nor is it that his archaeologies fail to address the role of reason in disciplining subjects (turning them into populations), but rather that his contributions are not articulated fully in terms of the emergence of liberalism and furthermore that the role of ideology is ancillary to Foucault’s method:
The problem of developing a critical concept of ideology and the difficulties of focusing the critique of liberalism on fundamental levels of analysis are complementary facets of a common problem. This problem may be thought of as the weak sense of the totality in American social science which seems to testify to the domination in our modes of perception, conception and evaluation of the pattern of instrumental rationality which de Tocqueville identified as central to the American method of orientation and thought (Reid 1978, 123).

Because Foucault was quite wary of the notion of critique, questions pertaining to totality are posited in a “weak” or provisional sense (hence his articulation of episteme). Reid’s presentation of the vertical (religious, mythic) and horizontal (corporate state) structures of liberal society articulates the deeply embedded hegemonic components of instrumental rationality. Of equal importance, Reid points to the ways in which a “weak sense of the totality” (which I read as a weak sense of critique), is an incorporated expression of that self-same totality. In the case of the Norplant® Condition, the use of Norplant® in criminal justice is easily tolerated because the focus is upon the individual “criminal,” rather than upon the ways in which reproductive technology (criminal) policy is an articulation of hegemonic modes of domination. An “insurrection of subjugated knowledges” may make for a fine ideal, but Foucault does not adequately express the ways in which subjugated knowledges become “self” (or other) aware. How then, working from Reid’s language, does a strong sense of totality come into being? Or, to use language closer to Foucault’s, what are the mechanics of resistance in power relations?
Reid juxtaposes hegemony and praxis. Whereas the former is grounded in instrumental rationality, the latter is grounded in temporality. His emancipatory theory is grounded in an intersubjective grounding in “time’s body.” Working from Merleau-Ponty and John O’Neill, this “body” is pre-objective and constitutes the “infrastructure of intersubjectivity” (Reid 1978, 114). Subjectivity, according to O’Neill’s rendering of Merleau-Ponty, is temporality – a “living cohesion” in which the embodied self experiences itself while belonging to this world and others, clinging to them for its content” (Reid 1978, 115). Reid notes perceptively that it is here that Merleau-Ponty and O’Neill reconfigure “the intentionality concept of idealist phenomenology” (ibid.). The perceptual relationship between the “mind’s body and the world” transforms intentionality into a relationship of “indeterminate corporeality” (ibid.). The “life world” is not grounded in subjectivity or intentionality, but in intersubjective, corporeal, worldly (inter)relations. Reid then redirects Merleau-Ponty’s contributions to Marx’s reflections on the “socio-cultural history of the senses and the roots of praxis” (ibid.). This is significant because it is here in this way that we are, as “body-subjects (embodied subjects)...perceptually open...to a shared world (Reid 1977, 125 emphasis mine). While the subject (or intentionality) hardly remains explicitly “fixed” in Foucault’s writings, he neglects to address the corporeal basis of emancipation (or in his more provisional language, “resistance”) and the temporal dimension of intersubjectivity. In so doing, Foucault’s archaeologies and genealogies sometimes fail to ground the ways in which the corporeal can and does inscribe the social.
Reid elaborates on the thematics of temporality and praxis further in the context of the relationship of these themes to totality:
Neither are the temporal forms of the life-world ever completely institutionalized, which is not to say that they are “unsocialized,” that behind the model or concept of “socialization” there lurks a “state of nature” of liberal theories of social contract. A critical phenomenology tills the fundamental spatio-temporal ground, or what O’Neill calls “time’s body,” out of which persons and groups may cultivate a situated, perspectival, or non-sovereign freedom to transform the social meanings of vocational time and public life in a more or less open dialectic of conscious historical change. In more familiar terms, the institutionalization of science and technology is ultimately grounded in the socio-historical temporality of the life-world (Reid 1978, 127).

By problematizing the cultural horizon of instrumental rationality (and its infinitized dimension of liberal progress), Reid opens up at least one counterhegemonic project that drills holes in (if not “destroys”), Kosik’s “pseudoconcrete of the alienated everyday life” (Reid, citing Kosik 1978, 130-131). I see Reid’s deployment of O’Neill’s “time’s body” as particularly crucial for this study because it points to the ways in which the dimensions of birth and death are instrumentalized through hyper-rational public policies (Foucault’s “police”) and “late” capitalist development.
The life-process itself is imbricated in the institutional structures of disciplinary liberalism. It is a discourse that makes “birth and death mere null points in order to destroy time’s body” (O’Neill 1975, 34). I would add, however, that the pseudoconcrete poured over time’s body reflects gender, race, and class dimensions. The Norplant® Condition may be an expression of an accelerated, disciplinary form of liberalism – but the masculinist, racist, and classist dimensions of disciplinary liberalism cannot be overlooked. The Lockean fear of the “other” founds the dividing practices that answer to the question, “Who are the patients?” in the Empire of the Gaze.
By grounding emancipatory theory in an intersubjective, “indeterminate corporeality” (Reid 1978, 115), the dualizing Gaze of disciplinary liberalism is problematized. Citing Carol Bigwood, Yanarella and Reid elaborate upon the themes of corporeality and intersubjectivity further in an illuminating manner:
We contend, with Carol Bigwood, that we “need to remain true to our embodied experience that shows us the world is, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) explains in detail, not what I think but what I live through. We are not separate from the earth-world-home but are of it to the very depths of our sentient being” (1993, p. 285). As Bigwood shows, we need “alternative models of subjectivity based on an openness to the other and to the body” (Yanarella and Reid 1996, 211).

Foucault’s total denaturalization of temporality (time as artifice) serves to elucidate structures of disciplinary power but fails to acknowledge the human (and earthly, as if the two were distinct) pre-objective grounding of time and the multiple possibilities of “indeterminate corporeality” (Reid 1978, 115). By making the Arendtian turn, the ontological foundation of possibility in natality is produced, yet as I will show – she too comes up short when theorizing the corporeal realm. Bigwood’s reading of Merleau-Ponty specifically locates emancipatory politics in the world, in what Reid calls a “politics of experience” (Reid 1978, 113). Such a politics of experience refuses the politics of “what I think,” that rationalizes Norplant® user’s negative experiences as “side-effects” or outliers. The “anecdotal” (or “storytelling”) both have negative connotations in the instrumental rationality of disciplinary liberal hegemony, as these modes of inter-action provide inroads to the construction of a counterhegemonic intersubjective politics. Such a politics needs no pseudoconcrete. It is built on corporeal lived experiences between people, experiences that find their ontological grounding neither in the Archimedean point above the earth nor in the internalization of that point within “Man,” but at the porous intersections between people and the world that we animate.
While Arendt and others have detailed the ways that lonely subjectivism have thrown “man” back upon himself – a state that legitimates that subject-object dualizing themes of (post)modernity, Thomas Dumm does a particularly good job of articulating the genealogy of these discursive formations within the field of American liberalism. Expanding on Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Dumm examines the penitentiary as the quintessential institutional expression of American liberalism. I want to direct my attention to two aspects of Dumm’s genealogy. First, I want to focus on the significance of the concept of tolerance in defining liberalism and second, I seek to contextualize his analysis of the disciplinary origins of the United States (particularly in his thinking through the works of de Tocqueville and Hartz) within the thematics of new reproductive technologies.
It is striking that given Foucault’s attention to “We Victorians,” that the notion of tolerance and intolerance was never developed in his themes of liberalism. This may have to do with the fact that by the time Foucault wrote The History of Sexuality his interests had shifted to other modes of governance. Still, the ideological construction of notions of tolerance (particularly in British and American models) is perhaps the most important distinguishing characteristic of liberalism. John Milton’s tract on the significance of tolerance in the realm of publication, Areopagetica, is considered to be a foundational text in the construction of the American Bill of Rights. John Locke’s famous Letter Concerning Toleration expands upon many of the arguments put forth previously by Milton. These are just two of a canon of texts devoted to this concept in American and British history. One could argue that within many western political cultures, the notion of “tolerance” is coextensive with the idea of liberalism. The “Nightwatchman State” needs a form of tolerance to function without intervention. Conversely, the expansionist state of liberalism intervenes into non-economic realms in order to engender tolerance and equality. In American political and juridical thought, this notion is played out in the development of the concept of “the marketplace of ideas.” The marketplace of ideas has enormous ramifications in the expansionist tendencies of the politico-economic structures of twentieth century “capitalism.” In avoiding this “discourse,” Foucault neglects to attend to the ideological mechanism through which corporations can advance unfettered by governmental “intrusion.” Depending heavily on the rhetoric of liberty and tolerance, a corporate entity (or any for that matter) can legitimize its actions as inherently American and/or Democratic, as touching the very foundation of free expression.
The Leiras Pharmaceutical Corporation, the Population Council, and Wyeth-Amherst all implicitly or explicitly operate on this assumption in a construction of a highly limited notion of informed consent, in their research on Norplant® in Brazil and Bangladesh, and in the eugenic effects of their population control policies. The landscape of liberalism provides the greatest toleration not for religious and political “liberty,” but for liberties that are directly connected to business ventures. At a bare minimum, as “Virginia Pharmacy Board v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council” would indicate, commercial and business “expression” has the same level of protection as political utterances. This proposition about liberalism is extremely simple: the marketplace of ideas has everything to do with the marketplace. Corporate linkages to the state are so extensive (this being the true expanding logic of liberal forms of thought, contra Foucault) that subordination of subaltern interests becomes only one more facet of the expansion of the corporate “individual’s” “liberties.” It works, ironically within the terrain of “toleration” rather than against it. This magnificent strategy locates the essence of left-liberal adherence to the values of tolerance and freedom and incorporates (Einverleibung) them.
This process of incorporation is critical to an understanding of the transformation of the idea of “choice” in the rhetoric of the Women’s Movement from the 1970s onward, particularly with regards to contraception. In conjunction with the passage of “Roe v. Wade,” a groundswell of support for toleration for a woman’s choice permeated American political culture. Supporters of the decision have consistently posited that they are pro-choice. The totally agonizing decision of abortion is a matter best left up to the woman who undergoes the procedure. While less politically explosive, a similar argument surrounded the birth control pill, whose emergence was also marked by strife and conflict. Again, advocates appealed to a realm of choice and autonomy as an originating or foundational source of freedom. This constituted an extremely cogent defense of these actions because both choice and autonomy are substantively “neutral” concepts: one is to support them, regardless of the content by virtue of the principles contained in the Bill of Rights.
Yet, a peculiar condition of the debate over new reproductive technologies is that it must confront the problematic nature of blanket affirmations of the liberal virtues of choice and liberty. The “free choice” of a white, middle-class woman in America to select Norplant® or Depo-Provera is built on the compulsory use and coercive structures of the trial phases of these medical technologies at an international level. “Free choice” emerges from a particular geographical, racial, gender, and class orientation. This choice is further problematized by advertisements that downplay the discernable side effects of these technologies. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, “free choice” thrives on a rhetoric of liberty and freedom. These lofty concepts function from the liberal tradition of toleration. The autonomous subject is free to do as she sees fit, as long as what she does will not infringe upon the rights of others. This masculinist construction of liberty ignores (or perhaps sustains), the power structures that choice is founded upon. Norplant® is tolerated on a social level, not because it is safe, but because it is “safe” for use by women, particularly women who are poor, “of color,” and/or living in Third World countries. While a strong argument can be made that this ignores the subjectivities of subaltern women, this is not the case. There is nothing demeaning about an argument that takes into account what contraceptive technologies are encouraged in different areas, among different classes and genders. Rather, such an argument can display the power of women in these circumstances who resist and take action, despite the hegemonic makeup of “free choice.” Such an example was investigated above while examining the Brazilian feminist move to refuse further Norplant® testing.
Thomas Dumm, in his Democracy and Punishment: Disciplinary Origins of the United States, pays close attention to the significance of toleration in the construction of disciplinary liberal regimes (Dumm 1987, 65-86). I am taken with Dumm’s analysis of toleration. He deliberates on the ways in which toleration serves as a constitutive element of the inner/outer division that animates subjectivity – a foundational aspect of the private/public spheres in American liberalism. Dumm discusses the significance of Locke’s focus on the “inner” realm – a realm unencumbered by coercion, characterized by autonomous, free judgment. Tolerance of this inner realm (distinct from, but consonant with the Quaker’s “Inner Light”) of “freedom” produced a discourse of persuasion over a discourse of coercion. Prior to the Quaker’s reforms of criminality, punishment possessed a retributive, deterrent function. Punishment was a public demonstration of sovereign power. With Locke’s notion that the subject has a capacity to know the agreement and disagreement between ideas, came the emphasis on the redemptive capacity of suasion through disciplinary measures. Toleration of an inner self hinged on the construction of interiority, of privacy – a privacy which in the case of “the criminal” (or more broadly, the marginal), was subjected to perfectibility. The rhetoric of what de Tocqueville called “the indefinite perfectibility of man” (Dumm 1987, 25).
This inner (yet indefinite and perfectible) soul, this “prison of the body,” was subject to “friendly persuasion” marked a move in the establishment of the liberalism where the soul “becomes the battleground of power, a regime in which people are made into individuals so that they might learn to behave themselves” (Dumm 1987, 85). Toleration, over and over again in American history, is not only toleration of interiority, but of “this process of subjugation” (ibid.). According to Dumm, the genealogy of American penal institutions is marked by a transformation from toleration that led to inner transformation to a toleration of the regulation of behavior, articulated cogently by Benjamin Rush. If the “Inner Light” could not be reached, at least the penitentiary could produce a productive citizenry. If one lesson was learned by the prisoners, it was the lesson that they (we) “are alone in the world” (Dumm 1987, 111). American Enlightenment produced “republican machines,” whose source of unification (our “united state”), was the sharing of that loneliness (Dumm 1987; Kasson 1977). Subjectification produces a united state of solitary confinement. The hegemony of disciplinary liberalism lies precisely in this discourse of private interiority. Here, I find not a frustration of any sense of a “we” (for a “we” is a collection of me and you – and I seek to articulate those embodied spaces that are “neither, nor”), but of plurality – the ontological foundation of natality. Corporeally grounded intersubjective politics is adumbrated by the cohesive episteme of Man – a total set of social relations that both dis-integrates and unifies us as Republican Machines.
Dumm reflects on Tocqueville’s account of American individualism (noting astutely that Tocqueville’s original research in America was on the penitentiary), an account that historicizes the roots of individualism in the complex socio-historical relations that were peculiar to the country. The social and economic flux of expansion (continual westward migration) contributed to a destabilization of time, where “the woof of time is ever being broken, and the track of past generations being lost” (Dumm, citing Tocqueville 1987, 115). Moreover, Tocqueville noted the ways in which isolation is not only ancestral, but contemporaneous – “each man is forever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart” (Dumm, citing Tocqueville 1987, 115; emphasis mine).
According to Tocqueville, Americans are anti-philosophical, but profoundly Cartesian. Skepticism of the words of others and a vigilant reliance on one’s own “devices” leads to subjective judgment and “the absence of common belief” (Dumm1987, 129). Here, interests not ideas bind men together. This radical individualism was balanced by a push towards equality, producing common beliefs rooted in majoritarianism (Dumm 1987, 130). This majoritarianism, however, possesses a tyrannical component (Tocqueville’s famed “tyranny of the majority” and for that matter, Hartz’s “conformitarianism”) that treats all people equally, in isolation. This equality creates social conditions conducive to the “indefinite perfectibility of man” in that the constant flux of democratic society enables “an ideal but always fugitive perfection” (Dumm, citing Tocqueville 1987, 130-131). The fixity of caste limits imagination of radical change, whereas in liberal democratic societies the “jumbling” of “habits, customs, and laws” produces the indefinite (or in terms of the temporal horizon of liberal hegemony, infinitized) perfectibility of man.
That perfectibility is reached through a refinement and reconfiguration of techne as applied through what Lowi (though he celebrates it) calls the constitutive component of policy (police science). Dumm notes, “Policy is ultimately policing, and the late modern state, (is) increasingly a constitutive state of forced consensus, of habitual obedience,… (as it) matures into a police state” (Dumm 1987, 146). Dumm’s account of the disciplinary origins of democracy underscores not only the role of toleration, but also the “Inner Light” of subjectification reified in the disciplinary apparatus of the penitentiary. In the case of the Norplant® Condition, the focus on this “Inner Light” continues, as women are consistently disciplined through techniques that take Benjamin Rush’s notions of behavior modification another step further: the production of the “productive citizen” does not necessarily need a prison at all (as in the case of Darlene Johnson that I discuss in Chapter Five). The soul may be the prison of the body, but another prison is added - a prison to the soul – judicially and politically mandated subdermal (and injectable) contraceptives are inserted in the bodies of women who do not behave themselves. This prison within the prison marks literally the ways in which our access to our bodies and time’s body is (though inconsistently) broken by the instrumental rationality of liberal hegemony. The Inner Light of disciplinary liberalism is reached and produced through techne, at the expense of praxis.
Recent transformations (at least in the American context) of liberal disciplinary regimes are marked by a differentiation and stratification of techniques. There is, in a sense, a return to the spectacular Horror of “punish” in what Angela Davis aptly terms “the prison industrial complex.” Neither redemption of any Inner Light, nor behavior modification can be found in the death penalty (though Foucault adroitly notes its anesthetized, removed character), life sentences or the rise in ultramaximum security prisons. While this social trend marks the fierce marking of the inner self (America’s social imaginary is “threatened”), the Norplant® Condition reveals another training of the body – consonant with Yanarella and Reid’s deployment of the notion of humanware.
Yanarella and Reid juxtapose Taylorism with emergent trends in Japanese and American auto manufacture in their “From “Trained Gorilla” to “Humanware”: Repoliticizing the Body-Machine Complex between Fordism and Post-Fordism” (Yanarella and Reid 1996, 181-219). They note that James Womack and Florida and Kenney stress “the unfolding of an increasingly integrated production system and model of the new worker known as “humanware” (Yanarella and Reid 1996, 200). This post-fordist term applies to the fusion of technology and worker in comprehensive production process.
While they note that it is in the automobile industry that “humanware has reached its most detailed and systematic articulation and where the line between human beings and technology has all but disappeared,” it is in the field of new reproductive technologies where that “detailed and systematic articulation” takes its most significant hold – on the level of women’s reproduction and on the life process itself. Here the sexism, racism and classism of liberal hegemony take hold at the hormonal level by way of the “explicit calculations” that make “knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life” (Foucault 1990a, 143). In more coercive frameworks (such as judicially mandated Norplant® use – with the only other “choice” being prison), the humanware model is particularly illuminating of the flexibile component of this disciplinary measure. Like the “flexible” lean production line that “erases” (read: hegemonizes) the divisions between worker and management, Norplant® sentencing policy similarly erases the distinction between criminal and citizen. Does this “liberate” the “criminal”? Callahan notes that the Norplant® “option” is better than prison – although I critique this stance in Chapter Five. Rather, I would argue that the Norplant® Condition is symptomatic of a broader disciplinary transformation in liberal hegemony, one that turns citizens into criminals – rather than the reverse. For me, part of this transformation is linked to Tocqueville’s crucial insights on the Cartesian connections between loneliness, judgment and “equality” discussed above. This Cartesianism spawned a development in modern and postmodern vigilant reliance on reason – a topic I develop further during my discussion of Arendt in Chapter Four.

Archaeology of Knowledge

2009-12-11T14:47:00.001-06:00

this is running backwards. scroll below for the beginning

3. The Archaeology of Knowledge: Unearthing Foucault’s Definitions of Ideology

While Foucault’s notions of discursivity have gained a certain currency in postmodern criticism, his archaeological focus on discursive formations in The Archaeology of Knowledge is frequently lacking in many accounts of Foucault’s politics. While some of Foucault’s texts receive frequent attention, in overlooking others, a drastic error is made. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, a systematic articulation of the meaning and role of discourses in shaping disciplines is presented. Foucault begins with an account of the emergence of histories of discontinuities in historical time. This emergence (which has been, perhaps most thoroughly formulated by Braudel) can be seen as a critique of the overemphasis on a progressive telos of time through historical generality. Rupture and particularity are diffused through the ascendance of a governing discourse. Such a governing discourse ascends through what Foucault calls the “tools of linear succession.” In turn, Foucault’s work focuses on the issue of discontinuities in historical time. For example, rather than writing a history of war, one might write a history of crop rotations that impact the development of war. In the same vein, it is my hope, that rather than writing a broadly historical account of postmodern liberalism, a political account of Norplant® and other new contraceptive technologies can be provided as a two-way mirror, through which Norplant® and liberalism can be reflected upon.
Unfortunately, this does not mean that the difficult procedure of defining liberalism, approaching it, circumscribing it can be avoided. Rather, it means that the very nature of analyzing discontinuities mandates a significantly different conceptualization of the mode or process of definition. Liberalism is not conceived as a static entity, but rather as a process in the state of becoming. Here, foundation is transformation. Foucault writes:
It is no longer one (a problem) of lasting foundations, but one of transformations that serve as new foundations, the rebuilding of foundations. What one is seeing, then, is the emergence of a whole field of questions, some of which are already familiar, by which this new form of history is trying to develop its own theory; how is one to specify the different concepts that enable us to conceive of discontinuity (threshold, rupture, break, mutation, transformation).... What is a science?...What is a concept? What is a text (Foucault 1972, p. 5)?

Foucault’s answer to this dilemma begins in an attempt to articulate an “archaeology” of discursive practices. In a sense, a science is an imposition of a discursive strategy upon sets of objects. It is a constructed unity of discourse with a beginning, middle, and an infinite end of progressively accumulated knowledge. Yet, in traditional disciplines, this search for a moment of origination or foundation results in a collapse of distinction, subjugating subaltern discursive practices under a unitary secret origin. Moreover, this collapse of distinction into a univocal way of knowing originates not in the observed object, but rather in the group of rules that govern the discursive practices shape and produce a particular field of observation. Experience perspective, knowledge, action all occur within the emergence of these discursive formations. Interestingly, in his discussion of discursive formations, Foucault addresses the transformation of medical discourse in the West during the nineteenth century.
How then, does the linguistic question of discursive formations pertain to the political question of describing ideological processes? More pointedly, what can Foucault’s text offer to anyone attempting to delineate the interstitial points of scientific practice, knowledge, and power? While many political theorists have rightly turned to texts such as Power/Knowledge or The History of Sexuality, one will be hard pressed to find any account of ideology in these texts. As a point of fact, Foucault in his later works sought to problematize the themes of ideology and on more than one occasion declared the end of ideology. However, I refuse to view the history of Foucault’s ideas in a linear, progressive fashion where each work becomes increasingly more important than the one preceding it.
For the purposes of this dissertation, the most crucial passages in The Archaeology of Knowledge evolve during Foucault’s treatment of knowledge (savoir) and ideology in his chapter on “Science and Knowledge.” Here he formulates his analysis of scientific knowledge in the direction of what is said (Foucault 1972, 182). The discursive realm is a necessary precondition for scientific knowledge, yet to what extent has this realm been analyzed? For Foucault, “Science (or what is offered as such) is localized in a field of knowledge and plays a role in it. A role that varies according to different discursive formations, and is modified with their mutations” (Foucault 1972, 184). This passage is significant for it locates the transformation of scientific knowledge in the field of discursive formation. It is in this interplay between scientific knowledge and discourse that “the relations of ideology to the sciences are established” (Foucault 1972, 185). For Foucault, the development of ideology “articulates knowledge, modifies it, and redistributes it on the one hand, and confirms it and gives it validity on the other” (ibid.). Unlike in the early works of Marx, which emphasize the validating function of ideology, the “early” Foucault also includes its productive capacities. That ideology articulates and modifies knowledge is especially crucial when the critical role of knowledge in the construction of power is considered.
It is through Foucault’s articulation of the role of ideology in discursive formations that four propositions are put forth:
1) Ideology is not exclusive of scientificity....
2) Theoretical contradictions, lacunae, defects may indicate the ideological functioning of a science (or of a discourse with scientific pretensions); they may enable us to determine at what point in the structure this functioning takes effect....
3) By correcting itself, by rectifying its errors, by clarifying its formations, discourse does not necessarily undo its relations with ideology. The role of ideology does not diminish as rigour increases and error is dissipated...
4) To tackle the ideological functioning of a science in order to reveal and modify, it is not to uncover the philosophical presuppositions that may lie within it, nor is it to return to the foundations that made it possible, and that legitimated it: it is to question it as a discursive formation... the system of formation of its objects, its types of enunciation, its concepts, its theoretical choices. It is to treat it as one practice among others (Foucault 1972, 186 emphasis mine).

The third proposition challenges the self-corrective measures of scientific discourse. This notion of correction through rigor is the essence of the progressive and evolutionary components of scientific epistemology. The notion that scientific discourse is so thoroughly shot through with ideology that it cannot get outside itself inquires into the discursive formation of the Archimedean point. Whatever “point outside” is no less ideological than the perspective of the observer. While Foucault attenuates his statements in the fourth proposition, this notion of discursive formations radicalizes the practice of inquiry into the human sciences. In the Norplant® case, the ideology of disciplinary liberalism becomes a player (albeit one “practice” or “discourse” among others) in the formation and distribution of Norplant®. The scientific development of Norplant® and the medical history of Norplant® treatment are inseparable from the ideologies that accompany it. Just as ideology is not exclusive of scientificity, “scientificity” is not exclusive of ideology.
Of equal, if not greater, import is Foucault’s elaboration of the notion of the episteme in The Archaeology of Knowledge – a notion first developed in The Order of Things. The notion of episteme is critical to this study because it presents a totality of knowledge, scientific practice and perspective. In a postmodern landscape marked by figures lacking in a sense of totality, this is important not only in understanding the nature of the ideological presuppositions of contemporary scientific practice in western societies, but also in understanding a way in which things are made possible. Foucault writes of the episteme:
By episteme, we mean, in fact, the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems; the way in which, in each of these discursive formations, the transitions to epistemologization, scientificity, and formalization are situated and operate; the distribution of these thresholds, which may coincide, be subordinated to one another, or be separated by shifts in time...The episteme is not a form of knowledge (connaissance) or type of rationality which, crossing the boundaries of the most varied sciences, manifests the sovereign unity of a subject, a spirit, or a period; it is the totality of relations that can be discovered, for a given period, between the sciences when one analyses them at the level of discursive regularities (Foucault 1972, 191).

A complete understanding of the role of ideology in the construction of truth in science benefits greatly from Foucault’s concept of the episteme. The total sets of relations that constitute “this” period are thoroughly inundated with the presuppositions and truth-claims of contemporary scientific discourse. A physicist releasing data based upon the theory of relativity to the public at large in the twelfth century would, with little question, be met with extreme skepticism. In other words, the validity of the truth-claims presented by scientists is based (at least in part) on an epistemic verification that calls into play a total set of relations, epistemological thresholds and boundaries, and sciences. The episteme is an integral component of scientific “truth.” The veracity of scientific “discoveries” is contingent upon the total relations of a society, not upon the rules of scientific falsification.
One aspect of the total relations that governs disciplinary liberal society is that of instrumental rationality. This ideology permeates the development of science and technology and situates the discourse of Norplant® (and other new contraceptive technologies) as a corporeal transition in rationality. Here the body is as Susan Bordo has argued, viewed as the home of the person (Bordo 1993, 72-73). This Cartesian development, she argues, has resulted in a vision of the body as res extensa, as a mere extension of the “true” self. Considerations of “the true” from the Archimedean standpoint of scientific thought (theoria) may have significantly different implications within the embodied “true” (phronesis) of embodied thought-in-action. This particular form of scientific thought aims not at falsification (which is not devoid of its own ideological moorings), but at the ritual of verification.
It is here that one encounters a manic positivity obsessed with its own sovereign certainty. Within the Norplant® cases discussed in Chapter Two, time and again, the premises and practices that constituted the “studies” articulated a terrain of scientific certainty – effectively producing new truth-claims through the tools of objectivism. “Negative” results were frequently diminished or ignored in the Bangladeshi and Brazilian trials. Those “side effects” that were acknowledged (such as menstrual problems) have been diminished as mild and occasional. This process of denial finds its moorings within the socio-political structures of contemporary society. This reading of data (and the ideological nature of “data” itself) is based in the totality of discovered social relations (episteme). To posit an understanding of Norplant® outside of these relations (which include considerations of the mandates of profit that lean on Leiras pharmaceuticals to the construction of the body as vessel for the soul in modern and postmodern societies), is to not only neglect its context, but to neglect the ideology of its production in disciplinary liberalism. Before expanding upon my notion of the ideology of liberalism – particularly as it relates to corporeality, in contrast to Foucault’s, it is first necessary to elaborate upon Foucault’s contributions on liberalism and “the body.”
In the chapter preceding the conclusion of The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault turns not to physics or biology, but to a consideration of the possibility of an archaeology of political behaviors. Considerations of power and strategy entering into the field of knowledge are not exclusively the domain of Power/Knowledge or The History of Sexuality, Volume I - or any of Foucault’s “later” works for that matter (Foucault 1972, 194-195). For Foucault, such an archaeology would pursue behavior and strategies, not “consciousness.” A political archaeology would not be concerned with the manufacture of a revolutionary consciousness out of sets of socio-economic conditions, but rather with the biography of revolutions through examining discursive formations. While Foucault’s considerations of the possibilities for archaeologies of sexuality and politics are inchoate in this text, they point out the applicability of his notion of archaeology to a broader range of disciplines, well beyond those of linguistics and the philosophy of science. This can be seen particularly in his development of the concepts of the episteme and ideology. Both of these concepts are significant in the formulation of a critique of the Norplant® Condition.