the question of value
by jebni on October 4, 2004
This week I attended an interesting training session on “community development with refugee communities” that was facilitated by the Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors. We were warned that some bits (i.e. working through accounts of torture, etc.) might be upsetting, but what proved to be the most contentious and upsetting for all of us was a discussion about the consequences for communities in the wake of state terrorism — consequences which (according to the STARTTS presentation) included “the devaluing of human life” amongst a population.
A colleague, F, found it really offensive to suggest that some communities simply get used to the idea that “life is cheap”, regardless of whether certain conditions are forced on them by certain regimes. She was convinced that there must be an essentially noble, unassailable moral core, a reflective, individual interiority of mourning that remained in the face of the “exterior”, social conventions of “unsurprise” that would be required in a context of constant death. I’m unconvinced by this kind of humanism, but really sympathised with how it challenged the self-fulfilling “nominalism of victimisation” that many of us identified in the presentation, i.e. “the survivors of state terrorism just end up devaluing human life; that’s what they do” — a story in which the constantly contested processes of social life end up disappearing, and you end up with a pat classification, the yoke of a social typology.
What many of us found so disturbing was the position that “value” could both implicitly and explicitly occupy in such rhetoric. What we found so alarming was the chain of “value” that could so easily frame such a definition of social pathology: the valuing of the capacity to value life. “Those people don’t value life like we do.” A biopolitical mania. In a liberal discourse of care, the implication of this meta-valuation is that “we” must “enlighten” these damaged zombie peoples about the civilising role of our institutions of healthcare, etc.
The first thing we can unpack is the unacknlowedged similarities between these supposedly opposed regimes of value: under state terrorism (which Western capitalist states surely don’t practise, oh no), torturers often employ the services of health professionals in order to ensure to continued life of those tortured, so that torture can be prolonged indefinitely. As Dinesh reminded us at the Italian Effect, life is valuable to the torturer. Often, the torturers are themselves health professionals.
Perhaps the next step is not to reactively enshrine survivors of torture as essentially noble and “civilised” (which ultimately reinforces a Western capitalist frame of reference), but to wrestle with liberal narratives of “civilising care” on a terrain that actually faces real difference. If people who have survived long conditions of everyday death (wherever they come from) find themselves alienated by Western capitalist rhetorics and institutions of health care, perhaps they should be listened to, rather than glibly brought into the light of unquestioned “civilisation”. I’m thinking that some people might either immediately associate doctors with torture and control, or they might find Western capitalist rhetorics of care somewhat “hysterical”, or somewhat ominous. I’m by no means suggesting that people engaged in activities with newly arrived migrants and refugees should encourage preventable deaths out of some misplaced “respect”, but that “our” local regimes of biopolitics and value need to be problematised by this encounter, too. What is hysterical and ominous about the liberal capitalist modulations of how to value human life? How much is the image of a fit and healthy body politic, ready to defend The Fatherland, a bizarre fetish that suits certain interests? How much are certain powers’ preoccupations with sustaining life also able, in the current context, able to create stunning and seemingly permanent exceptions to these regimes of care, like detention centres for asylum seekers, and how much are they sides of the same coin? We need to go way beyond ideas about “hypocrisy”.
Of course, the certainties of “local values” need to be unpacked — beyond the fact that the forces of the benevolent Health State might wage state terror abroad and incarcerate visitors without papers, the legacies of colonialism (hellooooo the attempted extermination of indigenous people) and the spectre of new and continued endocolonialisms (hellooooo the enforced poverty, policing and deaths in custody of indigenous people) mean that the inside/outside, foreign/local oppositions are never tenable anyway: the socially disorganising strategies of state terror, and thus survivors of torture and genocide, are never far away.
Finally, how can we account for the differing modulations of “valuing human life” in a global, systemic context? In what contexts are various notions of value tenable and convenient for the continued functioning of various planetary regimes? Just how does “extending the hand of civilising care” contribute, then, to planetary justice? I thus really like the fact that as noted below, NaturallySweet‘s list of things to do (rather than demands) for
2 comments
Re your comments on health-care workers in torture, and torturers’ valueing life: It’s also an interesting bias in western capitalist thought that where torturers are demonized in part because their torture is so direct, so immediate (just as the decapitations are so terrifying because of their immediate brutality), the everyday tortures inflicted upon (for instance) the poor through distant but everpresent economic structures, and the slow death of missing health care – or even the instant death from a missile (immediate in time, but again, distant in space from its cause) are somehow invisible as being torture, in a very real sense, to the west. If the goal of torture per se is making its subject speak from a particular, desired position (giving information, being intimidated from speaking “incorrectly”), surely those slower, distant forms of torture have the same effect – or can do so.
by 2fs on 5 October 2004 at 2:53 am. #
Indeed. I think the most useful way to think about this kind of “generalised logic” is to think about “continuua”, which avoids the flattening that usually comes with “generalisations”.
by jebni on 8 October 2004 at 10:37 am. #