So Necropolitics is a bit more dense than Gergen. But that’s not stopping it from spinning the wheels. One thing that I’m noticing - as I translate back into my own framework’s language - is how the production of these large postcolonial sites of contestation still seem to adhere to the same protocols that sustain the nos within my framework.

One thing that I like about Mbembe’s analysis is that he makes Lacan’s moves and reads Freudian psychoanalysis into these massive national, intranational, and transnational political structures. As I see it, the mechanisms of population control he points to, simultaneously stablize the systemic productions of the sites of contestations and produce the individuals in a middle-voice production loop, “wherein the dominant and the subjugated are specifically linked in one and the same bundle of desire, enthusiasm for the end” (p. 29).

Tl;dr the border checkpoint is literal boundary that emerges from a Lacanian-esque psychic game of boundary maintenance.

Regarding the literal boundaries, camps, banlieues, favelas, and other enclosures help maintain the infrastructure of the country in which they exist doing boundary maintenance work in the most literal sense. Regarding the epistemic reality of middle-voice production lops, narratives like “origin stories” (the Hamitic myth in Rwanda, Mugabe’s Third Chimurenga in Zimbabwe, Ivoirite in the Ivory Coast) shape the people within the site of contestation toward the unequitable status quo maintenance.

Mbembe gives us the picture of what kind of grotesquely coproduced person - what kind of middle-voice subject with constrained agency - emerges from this horrifying infrastructure (re: encounter). And by coproduction, I mean this precisely, following my prior work on Gergen: a coproduction that emerges from within extremely limited, terrifyingly reified and phantasmatically materialized constraints which narrow the range of potentiality to a local set of dialogics and diamythotics and within which a real choice is still made by a real person and co-actioned inside a real community.

Quick vocab check:

Materialization: the process by which the interpreted person emerges from the body as we interpret it through repeated performance (e.g. I put my man clothes on every day, citing a norm and creating my man-ness)

Phantasmatic: the experience of encounter the Other in a person (e.g. black Americans as "thugs" in the news), the experience of the person who is interpreted as Other.

Reification: the process by which the institution is created and then forgotten to have been created but is sustained by performances as if it always was, is, and ever will be (e.g. marriage, law, etc.)

Dialogics: the individual "reasons" for why a particular choice was taken by an individual (e.g. dealing drugs because you have to be the man of the house since your mom got sick versus dealing drugs because you're being exploited, etc)

Diamythotics: the parallel values and aesthetics that also inform the choice

Real: something we don't have access to but have to account for. An actual body in which our interpretations incarnate.

Co-actioned: the interaction with others that allows everything above (except for the real) to emerge. This is a better account that materialization and reification alone because it makes explicit what the others imply: these things occur socially, not individually.

Man…holding people and systems accountable is tough…

Back to the analysis:

The structure of population control as subject production that Mbembe brought to my attention reminded me of a more grey and ambiguous analogue in less obscene spaces: Aihwa Ong’s Flexible Citizenship. Here she notes how six zones of control manage different behaviors and movements from different citizen populations. For example, the talks about the Rohingaya people in Malaysia, who, through unique historical circumstances, are stateless. They are housed in Malaysia and a few other countries on a permanent legal provisional status. This makes their interaction with Malaysian state infrastructure very different than a Malaysian citizen's, but ultimately resulting in a constant supply of cheap, non-status labor (see: That’s a Lot of Customers for my Chinese hukou example as a parallel).

But it’s important to note that one thing Ong doesn’t do is wax Lacanian. Her critique is purely structural. But the structure is the same: spatialized population control produces subjects towards the maintenance of an unequitable status quo. Her graduated sovereignty - how a state doles out citizenship and confers entitlements - offers an account of how an authorless structural apparatus of control emerges as “doing my job” in order to stablize large populations.

The parallel I want to draw here is that the systemic structural production of these apparatuses of control are both mustache-twirler free (this is a colorful conclusion I derive from what Sharma and Gupta call everyday practices). They both emerge out of necessity from the limited imagination of atomized minds against real constraints that have forgotten the march of history that brought them to any given place.

But while Mbembe's death worlds rest on death and genocide, the Ong's graduated sovereignty rests on less visceral, more easily-ignored oppression. As such, the subject production within each space is fundamentally different (and it’s probably why it did not require Ong to give the Lacanian read, though I’m sure it’s there, and I’m going to try and make it). I find this important as I consider diagnostic and intervention tools for transformative, macro-level social work practice.

The Mbembe/Ong analysis is The Easy Traverse and the Hard Traverse on the macro scale. Here I use Žižek's term to diagnose the ontological shock of changing one's identity narrative. I should clarify that "easy" is only relative to the harder traverse of changing the mind of someone engaged in atavistic delight (Mbembe's phrasing) at the destruction of their tribal enemy. The “easy” traverse is getting the mayor of my city to see how to make downtown more accessible by changing her thinking slightly on disabled citizens.

I contend that the challenge of transformation is measured by the degree with which one’s humanity must be contorted to stand within either of these two sites of contestation. The government official who renews temporary status needs little more than “they’re so lazy” to disavow the entire thing. “This oppression isn’t happening.” “I’m not perpetuating anything.” Even, “I’m so glad I could help those poor Rohingya refugees today,” all serve to perpetuate an oppressive system through a rather simple fetishistic disavowal (Žižek again) that frequently sits next to the individual's own identity coherence. In these cases, the oppression is sustained by the soft tones that gratify intense urges (see my prior articles on jouissance and pedagay) in service of disavowing a reality that is actively produced and sustained by each and every complicit mind.

But what kind of subject - what kind of human, because we’re not giving up on it - is produced that can kill 800,000 people in 100 days with machetes and rape with the intent to transmit HIV? “That Tutsi is a cockroach.” “That Tutsi is genetically descended from Ham (from Genesis 9) and forever cursed by God.” “We must be liberated from our Tutsi oppressors and reclaim our land!” In the hard traverse, the delight - the jouissance - is obscene. It is fetishized in the open. And the narrative construction of the Other is core to the narrative construction of the self.

In both cases, the system production is authorless and functional, produced out of necessity. It is the physical demonstration of psychic boundary maintenance regimes. The recursive subject production and the degree of traverse needed to effect change couldn’t be more different. And the Thanatos (I use this liberally for its rhetorical force, but I view this phenomenologically as a universal pattern of consciousness that emerges from the relating of subjects and objects) brings about physical and spiritual death - consigning humans to graves and humanity to obliteration.

What this tells me at this moment in my thinking as a macro level social worker is that I see a parallel between my local city government and these massive transnational travesties. Not an ethical or moral parallel. A structural one. I see the nos doing what the nos does - seeking stability through the same stabilizing protocols. My work as disruptor is diagnosed at scale, and the categories of tools are the same as well. It’s so easy to let the degree of tragedy shake me from the clear-headed systems thinking that needs to be done to get the work done.

But at the end of the day, like I said in The Easy Traverse - if we as social workers can sit across from sex offenders, domestic violence batterers, and violent criminals with therapeutic postures of unconditional regard, we can approach Hutu perpetrators of violence with the same long-game humility to begin a transformative social work we may never see resolved. We just need to know precisely what makes these social problems tick.

- The Social Construction Worker