Slow death and debilitating infrastructures: Jasbir Puar (and Neel) on debt, labor, mobility impairment, and carceral temporality
(Originally posted elsewhere on 23 October 2023.)
Just a couple of excerpts in conversation. Puar has a way of putting things. I'll not dilute it with added comments. With a little complimentary framing from geographer Phil Neel. (My commentary/critique is implicit in arranging these passage together! Can you tell I've been waiting to hear back about health insurance application process?)
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Excerpt 1:
Slow death is, quite simply, “a condition of being worn out [...].” If debility is endemic to disenfranchised communities, it is doubly so because the forms of financialization that accompany [...] the privatization of services also produce debt as debility. [...] Debt peonage [...]. Debt as enclosure, as immobility, is what Gilles Deleuze writes of [...]: “Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.” This is especially true [...] in the United States, where health care expenses are the number one cause of personal bankruptcy, a capacitation of slow death through debt undertaken to support one’s health. [...] [O]ne is, as Geeta Patel points out, paying for one’s own slow death, through insurial and debt structures predicated on risk and insecurity, and essentially forced into agreeing to one’s own debilitation. [...] More perniciously, one could suggest [...] that finance capital enforces repeated mandatory investments in our own slow deaths [...].
Text by: Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017). [Emphasis mine. From her chapter: "Introduction: The Cost of Getting Better."]
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Excerpt 2:
[A]nd their [...] local government [weaponizes] [...] an array of fees and fines ["extortions of the poor" as governments "turn to such predatory practices facilitated by growing armies of police and preexisting legal mechanisms for debt collection, surveillance, and incarceration"]. Many of those who live within these neighborhoods thereby experience class exploitation in the form of direct violence - by police, racist vigilantes, Immigration [border policing agencies] [...] - and onerous rents extracted by anyone with a modicum of power. [...] A final type of [place] is the Logistics City [near shipping corridors and freight nodes, like Twin Cities, SeaTac, Chicago, and Cancer Alley in Louisiana], a concentration of industrial activity in the form of factories, fulfillment centers, ports, warehouses, rail yards, and massive facilities for waste management and food processing. Here, many of the above forms of exploitation are experienced alongside the barefaced misery of doing too much work for too little money.
Text by: Phil A Neel, "The New Geography of Suburbia: An Anatomy of America's Hinterland," New Labor Forum (2018). [Quotations within brackets added for clarity/context, and actually reproduce--unaltered--language from elsewhere: Neel's book Hinterland, also 2018.
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Excerpt 3:
[D]ebilitating infrastructures turn able bodies into a range of disabled bodies. […] [C]heckpoints […]; administrative bureaucratic apparatuses that stall and foreclose travel, mobility for work, […] the capacity to move and change residences - baroque processes to apply for permits to travel […], absence of public services […]; and finally […] denial of resolution, suspension in the space of the indefinite […]. In fact, slow death itself is literalized as the slowing down of life […]. [Land] itself becomes simultaneously bigger - because it takes so long to get anywhere - and smaller, as transit becomes arduous […] where it is so difficult to travel between areas without permits [...]. Movement is suffocated. Distance is stretched and manipulated [...]. Time itself is held hostage. This is the slow aspect of slow death: slow death can entail a really slow life, too, a life that demands constant calibration of different speeds and the relation of speed to space. [...] The suspended state of the indefinite, of waiting and waiting (it) out, wreaks multigenerational psychological and physical havoc. […] Time thus is the meter of power; it is one form that physical enclosure takes on. The cordoning of time through space contributes to an overall “lack of jurisdiction over the function of one’s own senses” (Schuller 2018: 74) endemic to the operation of colonial rule […]. [T]his process entails several modes of temporal differentiation: withholding futurity, making impossible anything but a slowed (down) life, and immobilizing the body […]. [T]he extraction of time […] produce[s] a depleted and therefore compliant population so beholden to the logistics of the everyday that forms of connectivity, communing, and collective resistance are thwarted. The extraction of time functions as the transfer of “vital energy” […], an extraction that recapitulates a long colonial history of mining bodies for their potentiality. […] Fear of not getting to work [on time] then adds to the labor of getting to work; the checkpoints affectively expand labor time […]. Bodies in line at checkpoints […] [experience] the fractalizing of the emotive, cognitive, physiological capacities of bodies […]. It’s not just that bodies are too tired to resist but that the experience of the “constant state of uncertainty” becomes the condition of being.
Text by: Jasbir K. Puar, "Spatial Debilities: Slow Life and Carceral Capitalism in Palestine," South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 120, no. 2 (2021), pages 393-414. [Emphasis mine.]
