The New Global Political Economy: Life-Times Lived and Expended
a talk by
Neferti Tadiar
I've been thinking a lot about the limits of what we do and the limits of our words. This has to do with my having to confront recent events and conditions in the Philippines, and the fact that I’ve been writing a book called “Remaindered Life”, part of which is an argument against what is now understood to be the new political economy of life. The new political economy is one in which, it is maintained, life is labor, we are working all the time, there is no more distinction between labor and life, and there is no distinction between the time that we use to create productive value and the time we use for living. There is an extraction from all of our social activities, from all of our reproductive life. The argument of the book is not so much to say that that’s not true, but that there is a need to distinguish between certain kinds of life. Thus, I distinguish between lives worth living - lives with the ability to accumulate value, to have transmissible value across generations, lives that can solidify, lives with mobility - and lives worth expending - lives that can never accumulate, can never solidify, will always be liquid, always sinking in value, always accumulating waste rather than having any achieved solidity. Lives worth expending can be furthered divided into lives of absolute expendability, and lives of servitude, which constitutes temporary redemption from absolute expendability. These two kinds of lives and these two kinds of life-times – servitude and absolute expendability – are very evident in the Philippines in an intensified form today.
I have discussed some of this as operating in what I've called “City Everywhere”, in a recently published essay as well as in an online piece I just published on a Filipina artist and the experience of bypass.[i] In the 1990s there was already this kind of metropolitan form in Manila that created an archipelago of places that were largely connected by roads of “flyovers”. This was a post-authoritarian solution to the urban excess under modernization, which had generated very solidified kinds of exclusion and elimination of neighborhoods. These were the tactics under the dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s, such tactics were superseded by this metropolitan archipelago, with its freeing of movement and liberalization of flows, and the kind of letting go of these other places that subsequently became sinkholes. It foreshadowed the future. The flyovers became a network. Today, what used to be an urban model has become a component of a fractal logic so that the entire country is becoming an archipelago in this sort of way. I see this as a global form, not only of urbanization but also of value production. You have these city emulants that are produced – on reclaimed land usually, because this happens long after people have been eliminated – and that become platforms for the value-productive movements of what I see as globopolitical urban life.
There is an underlining dualism here, which is not really a dualism, which refers to a globopolitical humanity for whom the whole infrastructure of the world is being built. It's a fantasy but also a reality of total access, a keyed world, all-inclusive, where everything is within reach, that supports this mobility of the globopolitical humanity. And that includes people like us, who are able to move, to do all of their activities, whatever activities they are, that is part of connectivity, and connectivity and circulation are where value production is created in this current moment of finance. It doesn`t matter what the content is of what you are presenting. The fact is that you move with facility, that the world was built for our easy mobility because the world has created its infrastructures for people like us, for people to inhabit that movement because of all of our value-productive activities.
This facility of movement rests on whole strata of servants: not in the sense of simply certain bodies working as servants but it has to do with the conversion of peoples’ idle times, their waste of times, the life-times of waste into the work of waiting on others. Whether this is the domestic worker - and the Philippines has giant industry of exporting global domestic workers - or whether this is infrastructural servants in the sense of people compensating, in Global South cities like Manila, for all the failure of infrastructure in their cities, such as drivers, and in the sense of a whole host of activities where people serve as infrastructure, forms of vital infrastructure. This is about life-times being placed in the service of others. Therefore, the theoretical fiction that I have been writing is about revising the idea of labor and labor time to an understanding of life-times, but also trying to approach life-times in a less humanist sort of way so that we can understand the way that value production is created not in terms of particular peoples doing labor, but in the flows and conversions of variedly graded life-times into the global economy.
This is why the world doesn’t completely look like the world of ramparts and walls, in which those who are already human are seeking to preserve their humanity. This is what I understand to be the war to be human. The wars to be human are waged everywhere. But there is also becoming-human in a time of war, which is not necessarily a good thing but rather a very broad term for understanding the forms of survival, and accommodation, and participation of people who are excluded from humanity, in a world that creates the disposability of other's peoples' lives. But this world doesn’t look like a world of ramparts because it is about fluency. All of the control is in the protocols, whether they are in social media, or the protocols of the grade separations of roads. Such forms of fluency are what enables control. This is not about exclusion, but rather what is named 'deep inclusion': it’s about getting everybody to be in some kind of autonomous social constituency and getting them to move.
The population of the Philippines is over 100 million. Between 12% to 15% of Filipinos are operating as overseas migrant workers. They are everywhere. We are everywhere. I've been writing about the distinction between the way that Paolo Virno talks about servility as a form of our post-Fordist labor, and what servitude is and the genealogy of servitude. The genealogy of servitude can be seen precisely in the kind of posthuman, nonhuman, replicant form of the domestic worker who is neither mother nor daughter but a quasi-mother, quasi-daughter, quasi-appliance, and functions in this way: as a machine, a domestic implement, in the machines of other homes. I take this seriously, the idea of them as a machine, because it actually enables us to go back to Marx and see what the function of these machines are, which is about saving time - and what the function of saving time actually is and what producing time means. For me, it comes down to producers of time and savers of time. Even smugglers who bring migrant workers across, in very deadly circumstances, are engaging in the exchange of life, trading in life currencies. You want to trade into a higher life currency by going to this other place because your life-times will be valued more. Therefore, the smuggler is saving the time of the migrant because if they go abroad their life-times will cost more, they can then subsidize the people back home, who can then live on less, but they also subsidize the state. So if you follow the tracks of the ways that the life-times are produced, saved, and reinvested –and domestic workers do reinvest in the cities – then you arrive at a different kind of picture from the picture you get when we are just talking about particular people doing particular things. This is very big in the scholarship of Filipino scholars because it is a reality that none of us can deny since we're all part of this structure of servitude, which is a structure of social reproduction, and is a force of global social reproduction that offers an important insight into racial capitalism today. It is a form of social reproduction that is also a part of the infrastructure of valued globopolitical life, which is the most valued productive life in the world.
As I said, the genealogy - and the continuities if you will - between servitude and slavery is in the nonseparation of life and labor. This is also a gendered issue, obviously, the inseparability, the working all the time, the lack of distinction between the time of living and the time of working, which now we find to be the condition of the most advanced form of post-Fordist servility. These advanced spaces forget this history, the racialization, the inscription of difference through violence, and this comes from thinking about the conditions that domestic workers face with other people of color who have to inscribe them with violence in order to ensure that they do not experience gendered sameness. Or do not experience any kind of sameness, and therefore the racializing practice is in the creation of pain. I'm speaking about this from a position of contestation of the new political economy of life: trying to nuance the understanding of what life is and what life-times are in the economy of life-times that fuels financialization.
[…]
I would like to make several points. One is that in this City Everywhere, in which servitude serves as infrastructural support, there is a logic of franchise, where franchise means freedom, immunity, and privilege. It is what is offered by these spaces of belonging, these spaces of mobility. It is what is offered by places for growth, what is offered by cities everywhere. The model that I was drawing on for this project was the US bases. The US bases were converted from these actual physical spaces of occupation into these city emulants. It was a conversion strategy in which US bases were turned into these all-inclusive spaces where you can work and live, where the real estate was speculative, where outsourced business processing can be carried out. In some ways the mode of the bases of security is the same as the mode of speculation. It entails the active surplusing of lives, the active surplusing of disposable populations. What it offers, though, is this freedom, immunity, and privilege. Immunity here doesn't only have to do with the fact that you are immune from national laws, that you can take your profits out; or that you are immune from the sovereignty of the nation, that you are not culpable. It also means the opposite of punishment. And that should draw a little bit of resonance with the current Philippine president who is called "the Punisher": he has killed more than twelve thousand people, almost one thousand every month, in a war on drugs. Most people see this as some kind of egregious, rogue state sort of thing and they draw comparisons with Trump and so forth. But what all these comparisons miss and what the idea that this is some right-wing outlier misses, is that there is absolutely no contradiction between this state of affairs and deregulation. There is no contradiction between this state of affairs and this cosmopolitanism. There is no contradiction between this active mode of punishment, which is what you as a globopolitical citizen are guaranteed to be free of. Immunity just means immunity from punishment, but punishment is the everyday mode of creating expendability and the everyday mode of what I see as the new derivative economy of the killings.
One thing perhaps that you will not have known from the reports is that the killings are a derivative economy. The police largely do it, but they are gains to be made all along the way. It is because in the world in which these people move, meaning the police and the people who are being targeted - which by the way is the same world; they are not two different people – they're all exchangeable. In some ways, they go back and forth, there is no clear difference all the time. The people who are being targeted for drugs are worth more dead than alive because, like the derivative, a whole series of attributes that they have can be priced, with their underlying referent (death) being the thing that moves. I am talking about this in economical terms because I think it is important for us to actually understand how it works. But obviously, I don’t think that this is the end of the story. The pictures of the killings have a numbing kind of repetitiveness. You can see all of it – all the killings, on YouTube, from security, CCTV, they are all blatantly out there; how these bodies are signs. The police are active agents who embark on this kind of economy of killing because it is also part of a whole mode of survival, which is also a mode of doing politics.
The important thing to think about here is that this is not a top-down scenario wherein there is a "Filipino president who has authorized these killings and therefore we need to stop this guy". The whole economy which I was trying to explain very briefly and in abbreviated fashion about the life-times, global life-times, is supported by these forms of expendability: both whether it is lives of expenditure in the service of others, which is servitude, or absolute expendability, where your death is the underlying commodity that can spin off all kinds of gains for people and which therefore people are participating in because it becomes a whole income producing and power producing activity. But these lives worth expending support lives worth living. If you look at the way people are killed, something comes across very, very strongly: one article put it in terms of "murder is a meme" in the Philippines.[ii] The bodies are metabolical vehicles for messages. They are often accompanied with signs, they are used as signs, which is why they are all out in the open. None of this is hidden in the way that they used to do covert killings. And there is a long history of the mode of these killings, which has to do with counter-insurgency operations from the Cold War to the present. The bodies themselves are their surfaces for writing and everybody writes on these bodies, and I mean everybody, including us. All these bodies are the substrate for making claims, for writing, for creating memes, for all the cyberwars in social media. They become these surfaces, these signs – they do become memes. And it's there that one confronts the uselessness but also the imminence of words, of all these contents being produced.
It's no accident that the most virulent wars are happening in social media about the current Philippine president, or that it brought him to power. Social media is the fuel of city everywhere and the fuel of murder, of the punisher. It is the fuel of all these freedoms and these liberalized movements, but also the fuel of punishment as a mode of extraction of value. Punishment has become a mode of extraction of value. Even though there are so many continuities with slavery, there is also continuity with the sixteenth century Just War when the Spanish came over and killed native Filipinos. It was always about the Just War. This is what today’s war on drugs is: a Just War. It is always a Just War, but it is always a just war on captive populations, they are captive because - and this is where land is important - they are territorialized, they are citizens of this land that can be discounted in a single moment, at the drop of a hat, by the devaluation of currency. They can have their life-times cashed in immediately when the government decides to devalue the currencies.
There is a lot to say about the continuities, but I just wanted to bring out that aspect of the way in which words rest on these bodies, the way they are used as signs, but also the ways in which our productive lives, the lives we make productive with our writing, with our books, with our art – all of these are the lives worth living that need to take into account their connections to lives worth expending. It's not as if these are only other people. It is also in the way we evaluate our own life-times: what is waste and what is value, what is creative, what is a waste of time. These are fractal in the sense that they don't inhere in given units of what we understand peoples to be. They are fractal in the sense that they go down the scale and they go up the scale. They can aggregate into populations and into monetized futures that governments cash in on in austerity politics. Or they can scale all the way down to your decision about how you are going to spend the next five minutes. It is a question about the temporalities of life, our understanding of the life-times that we live and how we understand the value of those life-times, and how we participate in this infinite evaluation of our time and what we use as the measure for that.
NOTES
[i] “City Everywhere,” Theory, Culture, and Society, Vol 33, Issue 7-8 (2016): 57-83. “By the Waysides, or, Bypass and Splendor,” Modernism/Modernity [https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/waysides]
[ii] Patricia Evangelista, “Murder as Meme” [https://www.rappler.com/newsbreak/in-depth/154193-impunity-drugs-crime-murder-meme]
