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violentandmagnificent · 11 days ago

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Okay, now that I’ve finished Partizan and processed it a bit, I wanna talk about how Partizan handles the issue of ‘bare life.’

So, for some context, in my real life, my PhD research heavily emphasizes the ways in which social life and especially cultural practices are fundamentally embodied. As part of my research practice, I am always asking questions about the role that bodies play in political life. How are bodies and their functions politicized? Who decides which bodies are “political?” How are bodies cared for? By whom? Whose bodies aren’t cared for? Why? What are the material effects of our norms about bodies and their functions? What meaning does a system implicitly give to bodies? Which bodies get exploited? What is the toll a system takes on bodies?

Put more simply: we live our lives in these meat sacks, so in what ways do our politics account for and fail to account for their needs?

Needless to say, when Austin said at some point in relation to speaking with diversity consultants in preparing for Partizan (I don’t remember where, so I’m paraphrasing), “this season is about robots and robots are about bodies,” my excitement shot through the roof.

And Partizan did not disappoint!

There is an acute understanding that bodies are fragile which makes them both dependent upon one another to function and easily exploited that runs through the entire season. From Jack’s famous proclamation that the weakest point of a mech is “the fucking pilot” to Clementine’s political power literally bound up in her control over the bodily freedom of the Rapid Evening to Thisbee being made in the image of an assimilated people to the Branched being forced to take embodied forms in order to defend themselves from a war of extermination, Partizan is truly a season about bodies. The moon of Partizan is filled with people who are missing limbs, suffer from invisible disabilities, and otherwise augment their bodies in order to better serve or resist the power of empire. This is, I think, the most interesting and important way in which bodies show up: as tools empire. Whether you are resisting the Principality or wholeheartedly embracing it, your body becomes subsumed into its logic.

And Partizan does not shy away from showing us the toll that empire takes on the body. Eiden Teak lost a leg as soldier. Leap, Millie, Sovereign Immunity, and A.O. Rooke are prisoners, their freedom of movement stripped of them. Valence’s body needs to be replaced after it is destroyed in combat. Broun… Broun, uh, gases all those civilians. Motion’s Black Century replaces the failed body parts of its soldiers so they can keep fighting past the point at which their bodies would naturally fail. Even the privileged and (nominally) powerful Clementine is injured in combat and elects to endure Leap’s disastrous amateur attempt at surgery. Millie’s body wasn’t really her own, since she is a clone of some ancient Apostolosian created as part of a super soldier program. Likewise, Gur Sevraq’s body is not permitted to rest after his death, instead becoming a puppet of Nideo used to spread propaganda. Conversely, Clementine’s body is allowed to die as she is saved by Perennial, who then gives her the power to alter the bodies of others, like The Figure in Bismuth. Thisbee’s body is shaped in the image of the Hypha and was created expressly to do the menial labour of colonization. Cas’alear Rizah is injured in combat and forced to walk with a cane, but nonetheless still takes to their mech when battle is adjoined between Millennium Break and Motion. The Branched are forced to take on bodies so that they can be rendered intelligible to the empire who seeks their destruction as well as to take on bodies capable of fighting that same empire. The totalizing logic if empire is so complete that the bodies of every single person who comes into contact with it are changed.

And yet.

Empire is still dependent on those bodies. Empire does not function without bodies. It seeks to control and reshape them precisely because it understands that without bodies, it is nothing. Here is where we come to the subject of ‘bare life.’ Earlier this year, I read Tiina Vaittinen’s excellent 2015 paper “The Power of the Vulnerable Body: A New Political Understanding of Care.” In it, Vaittinen explores the political power that bodies in all their vulnerability exert. She conceptualizes the body as fundamentally vulnerable, writing that, “the vulnerable body is to be understood as a living organism that is internally and persistently vulnerable to life itself: to aging and decay and, ultimately, to death. This corporeal vulnerability is part of our very embodiment, and there is nothing dramatic about it. It is just life” (Vaittinen 2015, 104; emphasis in original). Following on from Judith Butler, Vaittinen also emphasizes that:

[…] care is given, and relations of care are maintained, in order to avoid or delay loss. In fact, also neglecting particular needs often has to do with the maintenance of an existing order, where some bodies’ needs can be neglected in the favor of others’. Indeed, when a political apparatus is securing care for its population, this is often done at the cost of neglecting other populations’ needs. Otherwise, the existing sovereign relations of governance could be lost.(Vaittinen 2015, 105; emphasis in original).

Even if the care of some bodies is neglected, the fact of vulnerability remains and exerts some pull over the state. To understand the political power of the vulnerable body, she draws on the work of Giorgio Agamben’s account of ‘bare life.’ This phrase is derived from Hellenistic (Greek if you’re nasty) divisions between “bios as the politically relevant life and zoē as the mere fact of living or ‘bare life’” (Vaittinen 2015, 107). In this ancient view, the mere fact of living is politically irrelevant. It is some further fact that elevates a life to the realm of political relevance and thus recognition, consideration, and power. As she puts it, “In other words, if you cannot speak or articulate your being in the world in comprehensive terms, if you only just corporeally exist, you do not represent politically valuable life. You are homo sacer – bare life that can be killed but is not worthy of sacrifice” (Vaittinen 2015, 107). This distinction matters to Agamben, who argues that sovereign power is, in part, the power to define the boundaries between bios and homo sacer, between political relevance and bare life. This is, in a word, biopolitics — the politics of life itself.

For Agamben and Vaittinen, this division has collapsed in the modern age:

Furthermore, in modern times, life has also become so completely politi- cized that bios and zoē have entered “into a zone of irreducible indistinction,” meaning that anyone or anybody at any moment can be banned by the sovereign as “bare life,” and thereby excluded from the sphere of political existence. Indeed, if the human need of care (the body’s inescapable vulnerability) is recognized as “bare life,” it is difficult to think of a life that would not always be imbued with forms of “bare” apolitical existence. Namely, despite the passing moments of seeming independence, our bodies never truly rid themselves from needs and vulnerability. Given that we live in and through a body, there is no escaping neediness. There is no escaping the fact that, as embodied human beings, our life is always potentially “bare.” (Vaittinen 2015, 108; emphasis in original)

Agamben argues that in this state of ‘irreducible indistinction,’ it is time to abandon the distinction between the two altogether. Vaittinen here departs his account, instead arguing that this is not desirable and perhaps not even possible. Instead, she turns to care ethics to provide a better framework for understanding the political power of vulnerable bodies. She writes:

Care and its need constantly draw bodies towards each other. This latent movement creates unavoidable relations between human bodies, and these relations are political. They are not only some immaterial trajectories of morality, however, brought into existence because we care. Rather, the political relations of care derive from human vulnerability and our concrete, corporeal need of care from embodied others. (Vaittinen 2015, 112)

The power that vulnerable bodies exert over the state lies in this way that care draws bodies together. Vaittinen articulates a political economy view of care, which draws attention to the ways in which this movement has effects that ripple far beyond the care-giver and care-receiver. Care-givers require training and care resources. Care-recipients must be housed and fed. These require political-economic structures. Thus, politics must account for vulnerable bodies in some measure precisely because of a single act of care-giving will have a political-economic impact beyond the footprint of the most intimately involved individuals. To once again quote Vaittinen herself:

[Care] is constrained by the structures, but also challenges and shapes them. Thereby, through corporeal relations of care, the allegedly apolitical “bare life” influences, challenges and shapes the structures of political economy. This implies that even the “barest” of lives with absolutely no subjective agency left in terms of capacity to articulate one’s needs – the fully demented, paralyzed and aphasic person in intensive care, for instance – can exert pressure on the sovereign power. (Vaittinen 2015, 112)

However, can does not imply does, which Vaittinen is all too aware of:

Thus, the body’s need of care opens up a political space that extends beyond caring: The needy body provides an opening for moral-political decisions that must constantly be taken. Not all decisions result in relations of care. Yet, since the vulnerable body remains an inescapable fact of life, there is no closure as long as there is life. (Vaittinen 2015, 113; emphasis in original)

In other words, that bodies require care means that states are always presented with a choice about whether to provide (or rather, enable the provision of) care or not. That many states choose not to enable the provision of care is not inevitable but rather a reflection of the norms and values that govern that state. That is to say: the choices a state makes regarding care are never apolitical. Perhaps this is an obvious observation to some, but considering how poorly provisioned care is in many nominally wealthy states in our contemporary world and how little political will there seems to be around changing this, it is worth emphasizing.

Lying beneath the surface of Vaittinen’s argument is recognition that a state which fails to attend to the bare life of its citizens is one that cannot sustain itself. The fact of vulnerability shows that choice between providing care and withholding it is a false one. All bodies are vulnerable. All bodies will fail. When they do, who will be left to do their work? Even the most vulnerable bodies have political-economic value (in the most cynical possible way) because they create opportunity for economic activity. Caring for them — or anyone else — is not a drain because the alternative is an unsustainable stasis. The state only functions when it is in… well… motion. Care brings people together into political-economic relations which are invaluable. In the absence of care, bodies waste away and the state rots from the inside out as there is no one left to prop it up with political-economic activity.

Partizan’s acute awareness of bodies reflects Vaittinen’s biopolitics. It recognizes the fact of vulnerability and does not shy away from its depiction. Mechs are themselves a means of exploring the politics of vulnerability. The weak point of an empire is its bodies just the same as the weak point of a mech is its pilot. This is, I feel, the thesis of the entire season. The bodies that make up Millennium Break are bodies that bear the scars of empire. What Millennium Break fights for is, in part, to free themselves of the pressing weight of empire on the bodies of its subjects. The harder empire presses, the more rebellious its bodies get. If you want to stop a mech, you kill its pilot. If you want to stop an empire, you unshackle the bodies it holds in bondage.

The Principality is depicted as constantly shaping, reshaping, and exploiting bodies. The Columnar have learned to adapted to body plans with legs. Motion treats bodies like machines. Kesh uses prisoners as soldiers. Nideo puppets the corpse of Gur Sevraq. Orion (I think? It’s late, don’t quote me on this) builds labour robots in the shapes of conquered bodies. It is not depicted an empire of abstract oppression and exploitation. It is an empire that is continually depicted as completely and utterly dependent on the bodies it exploits. It is apt that the state is often referred to simply as “Divinity” since, in the logic of the Divine Cycle, Divinity demands a pilot. Call them Candidates, Excerpts, or Elects, they are pilots. They are vulnerable bodies, exploited by immense and incomprehensible systems. The Divine called Empire, everyone is an Elect.

What makes Partizan so brilliant is how it is able to recognize the fact of vulnerability and even recognize that the weakness of empire is its dependence upon those vulnerable bodies without making the solution to the problem of empire itself simple. Throughout the entire season, the fact of vulnerability is demonstrated over and over again. And yet, the characters — trapped as they are within material circumstance and imperial frames of reference — struggle with what to do about it. Clearly, empire is unsustainable, but why? How can it be broken from within? Once you take responsibility for caring for vulnerable bodies yourself, how to you apportion the limited resources you have? How do you build something better than empire if empire is all you’ve ever known? Bodies are vulnerable, so what?

And still. Bodies remain vulnerable. They Break much more quickly than Millenniums do. No matter what the revolution looks like, no matter who leads it, no matter what ideology it strives to embody, it will always be faced with a question: what do we do about vulnerable bodies?

Bibliography

Vaittinen, Tiina. 2015. “The Power of the Vulnerable Body: A New Political Understanding of Care,” International Feminist Journal of Politics, 17(1) (100-118).

#partizan #it's about bodies!#this is one reason why partizan is still my favorite

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