'Necro' it seems is 'in' among the cultural studies people. Necro is the new black or the circlet of pig tusks and human incisors around the young warrior's neck.
Goldie Osuri's 'Media Necropower: Australian media reception and the somatechnics of Mamdouh Habib' in 5(1) Borderlands (2006) - the journal where the UnDead such as Foucault and Derrida haunt the landscape (please, someone, please show them the way back to Pere Lachaise or unleash Jane Austen the Fearless Zombie Killer!) - discusses how Mamdouh Habib -
was discursively positioned within Australian media reception. Specifically, I argue that Habib's body was made culturally intelligible within what I call media necropower or contemporary media practices which reconfigure the politics of race and assimilability within the somatechnics of racialised bodies. Reading at least two televisual interviews on Sixty Minutes (2005), and Dateline (2005), as well as newspaper articles and a number of public responses to Mamdouh Habib's interviews, this paper will explore how the materiality of Habib's body was produced within a speculative, judgmental regime, media necropower.Hmmm, can't beat necropower and judgmental somatechnics. The latter is -
a newly coined term used to highlight the inextricability of soma and techne of the body (as a culturally intelligible construct), and the techniques in and through which bodies are formed and transformed' (2005). With reference to Derrida's work, Joseph Pugliese discusses somatechnics as a way of addressing how 'techne', understood as 'writing, signifying systems and hard technology', is not applied to the body. In fact, the body and techne are indissociable since 'techne in fact constitutes a type of "arche trace" that constitutes the very conditions of possibility for the cultural intelligibility of the body' (Pugliese, 2005). In this sense, 'the body comes into being only through techne' (Pugliese, 2005). Or, to put in another way, the technologies of thinking, seeing, hearing, signifying, visualizing, and positioning produce bodies as culturally intelligible.And necropower, you ask? No, it's not a green form of electricity generated by attaching a set of jumper leads (ouch, no alligator clips on the nipples) to the phosphorescent cadaver of a philosopher who hs reached his use-by date but is still getting the tonsil-hockey treatment from the disciples.
Necropower is associated with necropolitics.
Post 9/11, these technologies are intensified through the practice of necropower. The practices of necropower by the U.S. and its allies have been represented as necessary to the very identity of democracy and freedom. This necessity of the practices of necropower marks a discursive shift in post 9/11 national and international politics and mediascapes. In making visible how the 'war against terrorism' enables the reinvention and practice of necropower, which constituted the difference of colonial rule, on populations within colonial centres, I make the claim that contemporary western governmentalities (through state and other forms of governmentalities such as media governmentality and the exercise of consumer citizenship) demand new forms of racialised assimilable bodies and subjectivities which will comply with, consent to, and even demand overt practices of necropower while maintaining the identity of the 'west' as 'civilized,' democratic, and free. These new forms of racialised assimilable bodies and subjectivities are always already situated within the shifting historical hierarchies of racial formations in different locations. ... But the practices of necropower point to the intensification and reconfiguration of race and assimilability through the somatechnics of racialised bodies.Damn, until today I had missed out on Mbembe.
In order to understand what racialised assimilable bodies and subjectivities these post 9/11 forms of governmentality require, it is necessary to trace the theorization of necropolitics and the practice of necropower as outlined by Achille Mbembe.
Positing biopower in Foucault's terms as 'that domain of life over which power has taken control', Mbembe outlines a series of ways in which the concept of biopower does not account for the place of 'life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)' in the context of politics as a form of war. Mbembe's articulates necropower specifically as the type of power exercised in Palestine reconfiguring the relationship between suicide, resistance, sacrifice and terror. So if necropolitics is the 'subjugation of life to the power of death' (2003: 39), freedom itself (for the figure of the suicide-bomber, for example) may be a vision of that which is to come through death, which is itself 'a release from terror and bondage' (2003: 39). In this context, the concept of necropower accounts for the ways in which 'in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of the maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of the living dead' (Mbembe, 2003: 40).No, he's apparently not describing the Shoah ... or what happened in the Ukraine under Mr Stalin or Comrade Pol Pot.
In Mbembe's thesis, necropower operates in the space of the late modern colony where the sovereignty of the colonial power is based on the violence of occupation. ... In the historical moment that we're living in, the practices of necropower are constitutive of the discourses of security and freedom of populations located in western nation-states through forms of governmentality not simply aligned with the state. The invocation of security and freedom shifts dominant discourses on the acceptability of torture or other 'state of exception' practices as now fundamental to the freedom, sovereignty and security of western nation-states and its citizens.Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee, writing on 'Live and Let Die: Colonial Sovereignties and the Death Worlds of Necrocapitalism' in the same issue of Borderlands, generously develops -
the concept of necrocapitalism by discussing contemporary forms of organizational accumulation that involve dispossession and the subjugation of life to the power of death. Drawing on the works of Agamben (1998, 2005) and Mbembe (2003) I discuss how some contemporary capitalist practices contribute to this subjugation of life. I discuss some ideological formations of necrocapitalist practices and examine what kind of social relations are disrupted and destroyed as a result of these practices. I discuss the organization and management of global violence and explore the rise of the privatized military and its use in the so-called war on terror.You can't have too much necro - the academic equivalent of the black eyeliner used by seriously emo Goth kids (essential for members of the little tribe but underwhelming grizzled wrinklies such as myself who wonder whether the insights are all that exciting or original once the academic mantras are translated into ordinary English). Banerjee notes that -
... rather than reduce death to distinctions between labor whether in a colonial or a metropolitan context, it is necessary to understand necrocapitalism as a practice that operates through the establishment of colonial sovereignty, and the manner in which this sovereignty is established in the current political economy where the business of death can take place through states of exception. In this sense, it is necessary to read the manner in which colonial sovereignty operates to create states of exception conducive to the operation of necrocapitalist practices.
Situating necropolitics in the context of economy, Montag (2005: 11) argues that if necropolitics is interested in the production of death or subjugating life to the power of death then it is possible to speak of a necroeconomics - a space of 'letting die or exposing to death'.What about necrogastronomy - the endless wait for service that is a feature of life "in the historical moment that we're living in" followed by food that sees you parked interminably, twixt life and death (or just smells and feels that way), in the smallest room in the house. Or necrocallcentre, situated in the offshore limbo land staffed by resentful subalterns you'd much rather be home reading Gayatri Spivak than keeping you on hold for two hours.
