Week 3

I found the thread in this week's readings to be related to sympathy/compassion/naked life. McPhee tells a story of immersing herself in a tragedy to better understand it; Agamben discusses the concept of "naked life", or life as biological, not political. It occurs, for example, in the site of McPhee's study - the people whose livelihoods were disrupted by landslides are ordered to evacuate rather than receiving government aid, and by continuing to live there they live at the mercy of the powers involved, for their rights have essentially been stripped. Both McPhee and Sontag remark on the sensationalizing of tragic images.

The town of La Conchita was the site of "a deadly debris", and the people were ordered to evacuate, but they stayed. An artist and author Christina McPhee ventured there to immerse herself in the tragedy because to see it from outside would be to only see afterimages of a whole that could only be perceived by those who have experienced it in its entirety. Says she, "there's no honest way to approach the place of trauma without being implicated in it somehow." There's also "the diagram", which is something that resists an author's frustration, requires surgery, refuses everything, and makes its appearance when the author tries to cut together all the footage she has taken of La Conchita. There is a problem of the footage of trauma becoming essentially pornographic - sensory overload that is touched up to make it as overloading as possible. However, the diagram refuses it. This is a problem, but thankfully the linear editing machine explodes psychotically into itself, creating unwatchable footage that excites the author, who then recuts the footage digitally. Lust, permeable membranes, breakage, and strange colloid mixes from which springs the diagram combine to form a veil of "inscape".  By experiencing the tragedy not when it happened but in the aftermath firsthand, she gains an insight that no CNN sound bites could ever deliver.

I suppose that I must first distinguish between zoe' and bios, the words that were used to refer respectively to "naked life", or biological life, and political life, life as a citizen. In any nation-state, Agamben remarks, the two exist, and there is a fracture. There has already been a distinction in this class between "people" and "People", the former referring to the proletariats and the latter referring to the citizens of a nation. This always just seems to sort of be inherent in any Westernized (capitalistic?) nation. The Nazis' Final Solution, Agamben posits, was an attempt to "heal" the fracture between People and people. It seems to me that trying to bridge the divide is reliant on everyone not being greedy (i.e. a main reason that Communism didn't work out).

Sontag and McPhee discuss the issue of sensationalizing tragedy. It becomes almost "pornographic", says McPhee, and the reason that we as People find these images so compelling is that be observing remote tragedy, our innocence and lack of participation in creating that tragedy make us feel good, and we can focus on that instead of on whether our affluence actually perpetuates such tragedies. 

Now for DENIZENS, which is my thread of interest. Agamben was the only author that used the term, and he used it with respect to both non-citizen immigrants and non-political citizens. When citizens of a nation whose idea of citizenship is more zoe than bios decides to immigrate, they become residents of another nation. However, though they may be protected by laws that apply to all the nation's residents, they are not citizens in a political sense. They cannot participate in the government without naturalizing themselves - becoming citizens. The problem is that many do not wish to become citizens. This problem is compounded by actual citizens who simply refuse to participate politically. Both of these classes of residents may be termed "denizens" rather than "citizens". An example of a denizen would be, until two years ago, me. I didn't vote for my first two years of elligibility because of various reasons, but the point is that I didn't participate politically, and that therefore I did not serve my responsibility as a citizen. However, my goal is to participate in capitalism, the ideology that drives the politics of this nation, and so I suppose that by indirectly advancing it by simply living as a consumer could be construed as a vague sort of political participation.