SDC-32806: SOCIOLOGY IN DEVELOPMENT: TOWARDS A CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE (2021)
LECTURE 1:
Bodies as borders by Achille Mbembe
Introduction
My intervention is a set of urgent, fragmentary, and unfinished reflections on our global present.
o When I say ‘our global present’, what I truly have in mind is the sustainability and durability
of our planet.
Many are wondering how we should inhabit anew and share as equitably as possible a planet
whose life-support system has been so severely damaged by human activities and that is in dire
need of repair.
In view of the deep state of fragmentation the planet finds itself in, they are asking: how should we
re-member it, that is, put back together its different parts in which everything is interlinked in a
grand gesture of mutuality?
These questions of inhabitation and interconnection, of mutuality, sustainability and durability, of
the interlacing of human history and Earth’s history are far from abstract concerns.
To properly attend to them forces us to refocus our attention on three mega processes that have
an almost overwhelming bearing on what humanity and the planet we live on might become.
Early 21st-century corporate sovereignty
The first mega process is the unprecedented consolidation of power and knowledge (political,
financial, and technological) in the hands of private high-tech corporate entities whose sphere of
action is not one country or one region, but the globe.
The conditions that have enabled the expansion of privatized government in the first half of the
21st century
o Various legal frameworks behind international trade agreements, foreign investment
treaties and other mechanisms that have turned markets into the single most undisputed
forces of our times.
o Computational transformations of financial markets
o The possibilities afforded by media technologies
Surveillance capitalism (by Shohana Zuboff): argues that a global architecture of behaviour
modification is under way.
o Driven by powerful states, high-tech corporations and military apparatuses, surveillance
capitalism threatens what she calls “human nature” in the 21st century,
o Just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the 20th.
o Behavioural futures markets: markets where predictions about our behaviour are bought
and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to new means of
behavioural modification.
Capital, especially finance capital, has become our shared infrastructure, our nervous system.
o It leaves vast fields of debris and toxins, waste heaps of humans ravaged by sores and boils.
o Now that everything is a potential source of capitalization, it has made a world of itself: a
hallucinatory phenomenon of planetary dimensions.
Corporate sovereignty is therefore an unprecedented form of power, whose main aspiration is to
free itself from democratic oversight.
We are witnessing the historical bifurcation between liberal democracy and finance capitalism,
and the emergence of a new form of sovereignty – corporate sovereignty – which claims for itself
the law of immunity and the powers of exception.
The computational speed regime
, The second mega process is technological escalation and the ways in which it has totally redefined
the nature of speed, unshackled markets and the economy, and the way it constantly monitors our
behaviour in an attempt at revealing how it could be modified and optimized.
o Some of the fastest expanding markets in the world today are ‘markets for future
behaviour.
These markets also rely on the extraction and mining of new forms of raw material, mostly
consisting of information and details about individuals’ behavior (our moods, our emotions, our
lies, our vulnerabilities)
The purpose is not only to heighten the predictability of our behaviour. It is also to make life itself
amenable to ‘datafication’.
A key feature of our times is therefore the extent to which all societies are organized according to
the same principle – the computational.
o We are surrounded with technologies that weave themselves into the fabric of our everyday
lives,
o The computational is generally understood as a technical system whose function is to
capture, extract, and automatically process data that must be identified, selected, sorted,
classified, recombined, codified and activated
Also a force and energy of a special kind, a speed regime with its own qualities and
infrastructures.
It is a force and energy that produces and serializes subjects, objects, phenomena;
that splits reason from consciousness and memory, codes and stores data that can
be used to manufacture new types of services and devices sold for profit.
The aim is the same, i.e. the conversion of all substances into quantities
The dialectics of entanglement and separation
The third mega process is what we should call the dialectics of entanglement and separation.
new redistribution of the Earth and of population movements
In the process, the human race has come up against terrestrial limits.
o Such limits are not only the consequence of the sphericality of the planet. They are also
limitations on the expansion of life as such.
We are (more than ever before) not only in close proximity to each other but also exposed to each
other.
This close proximity and exposure is experienced less as opportunity and possibility and more as
heightened risk.
The drive is simultaneously and decisively towards contraction and towards containment.
o Various practices of partitioning space, of fencing off wealth, of fragmenting spaces,
saddling them with various kinds of borders whose function is to decelerate movement for
certain classes of populations, in order to manage risk
The goal is to better control movement and speed, accelerating it here, decelerating it there and, in
the process, sorting, recategorizing, reclassifying people with the goal of better selecting anew who
is whom, who should be where and who shouldn’t, in the name of security.
Borders are increasingly the name we should use to describe the organized violence that
underpins both contemporary capitalism and our world order in general
Borders borderization
Borderization: the process by which certain spaces are transformed into uncrossable places for
certain classes of populations, who thereby undergo a process of racialization; places where speed
must be disabled and the lives of a multitude of people judged to be undesirable are meant to be
immobilized if not shattered.
o The technological transformation of borders is in full swing.
One of the major consequences of the acceleration of technological innovations has been the
creation of a segmented planet of multiple speed regimes
, Connection between the human body and identity as a means to achieve detailed control over
movement and speed.
The question we must ask: What explains the migration from the border understood as a
particular point in space to the border as the moving body of the undesired masses of
populations?
o The answer is a new global partitioning between potentially risky bodies vs. bodies that are
not
It is in the nature of risk to be hidden that which is hidden is generally unknown for it to be
known, it must be visualized.
The screening of bodies at border checkpoints aims at making visible “that which is hidden from
view, opening up new visualizations of the unknown, potentially risky body”
In such a context, biometric technologies are supposed to fragment the human body in order to
recompose it for the purpose of securitization, of elimination and neutralization of the risk.
o This happens because the human body is seen as an indisputable anchor from which data
can be safely harnessed or extracted.
o As a result, we are witnessing a gradually extending intertwinement of individual physical
characteristics with information systems
Deepens faith in data as a means of risk management as the body is a source of
absolute identification
o In this sense, biometric technologies should perhaps be best understood as techniques that
govern both the mobility and enclosure of bodies
These three mega processes are driving the movement towards what I have called ‘planetary
entanglement’, as well as its opposite, that is, enclosure, contraction, containment, encampment,
and incarceration.
o Shaped by the alliance between military power, the industries that surround it
(contractors), and tech giants.
Life and mobility
Part of what we are witnessing as a result is a novel imbrication, a symbiotic merging of life and
mobility.
We are witnessing a bifurcation (division) between life on the one hand and bodies on the other
hand
Discounted bodies are believed to contain no life as such. They are, strictly speaking, bodies at the
limits of life, trapped in uninhabitable worlds and inhospitable places.
o The kind of life they bear or contain is not insured or is uninsurable.
o to be alive is always and already to breach boundaries or to be exposed to the risk of the
outside entering the inside
This disentanglement of life from discounted bodies is a key dimension of contemporary migration
regimes.
Contemporary movement restrictions are not limited to national boundaries.
Borders are meant to concretize the principle of dissimilarity rather than that of affinity.
o They are not only obstacles to free movement.
o They are boundaries between species and varieties of the human.
They play a crucial role in contemporary modes of production of human difference and relatedness.
Those that matter/move and those that do not
o Bodies that should not move are those that are uninsured.
o They must be tracked, captured, and dispensed of.
One of the major contradictions of the liberal order has always been the tension between
freedom and security.
o Security now matters more that freedom.
o The aim of a society of security is not to affirm freedom, but to control and govern the
modes of arrival.
, The current myth claims that technology constitutes the best tool for governing these arrivals
Perhaps more than before, we are increasingly faced with the question of what to do with those
whose very existence does not seem to be necessary for our reproduction?
o One historical response has consisted in putting in place spatial exclusionary arrangements.
o A late modern example is Gaza
Here, control of vulnerable, unwanted, surplus or racialized people is exercised
through a combination of tactics, chief among which is ‘modulated blockade’.
A blockade prohibits, obstructs, and limits who and what can enter and leave the
Strip
Spatial violence, humanitarian strategies, and a peculiar biopolitics of punishment all
combine to produce, in turn, a peculiar detention space in which people deemed
surplus, unwanted, or illegal are governed through abdication of any responsibility
for their lives and their welfare.
o Another, early 21st-century example,
Wars on mobility are wars whose aim is to turn into dust the means of existence and
survival of vulnerable people taken as enemies.
Wars against the very ideas of mobility, circulation, and speed, whilst the age we live
in is precisely one of velocity, acceleration
The targets of this kind of warfare are not by any means singular bodies, but rather
great swathes of humanity judged worthless and superfluous.
Two broad questions that confront us today:
o The question of life futures, that is, of the self-organization of being and matter
o The future of reason.
The future of life and the future of reason
The human race has been concerned with how life emerges and the conditions of its evolution.
The key question today is how it can be reproduced, sustained, made durable, preserved and
universally shared, and under what conditions it ends.
Unprecedented numbers of human beings are embedded in increasingly complex technostructures
Both metabolically and reproductively, technologies are becoming more and more tied in complex
networks of extraction and predation, manufacturing and innovation.
There is a shifting distribution of powers between the human and the technological, in the sense
that technologies are moving towards ‘general intelligence’ and self-replication.
These are also times when many are gradually coming to the realization that reason may well have
reached its limits. Now it is a time when reason is on trial
Reason is on trial in two ways.
o First, reason is increasingly replaced and subsumed by instrumental rationality
The logic of reason is morphing from within machines and computers and
algorithms. The human brain is no longer the privileged location of reason.
o Second, many are turning their back to reason in favour of other faculties and other modes
of expression and cognition
Africa in the global regime of mobility
I am worried about Europe’s anti-immigration policies because their ultimate goal is to turn Africa
into a huge Bantustan
I believe we urgently need to open the continent to it self and engineer a new historical cycle of re-
peopling it.
We should stop peddling the myth according to which Europe is besieged by refugees and migrants.
Europe is fast becoming the biggest reservoir of older people on Earth.
The choice is therefore clear. It is between cynically embracing the full consequences of a creeping
para-genocide, or imagining together different ways of reorganizing the world and redistributing
the planet among all its inhabitants, humans and non-humans.
