Episode 24: Solidarity Chat 4: Michelle Murphy

Professor Michelle Murphy in conversation with Dr Aimi Hamraie

[Start of recording]

00:00:11 INTRO: [Various overlapping voices] Contra* is friction. Contra* is nuanced. Contra* is transgressive—good trouble. Contra* is questions. Contra* is collaborative. Contra* is a podcast. It’s a space for thinking about design critically. Contra* is subversive. Contra* is texture.

00:00:32 Contra*: You are listening to Solidarity Chats: a special section of the Contra* podcast on disability, design justice, and the life world. These episodes, recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic, focus on disability, eugenics, and mutual aid. We’re hoping to capture some of the conversations that disabled people, and our allies, are having about issues such as healthcare infrastructure, medical triage, eugenics, and technology as it is unevenly distributed across the population. These episodes are also going to come out at a different rate than the regular Contra* episodes, so please make sure to subscribe on Google, Apple, or Stitcher so that you don’t miss any.

00:01:29 Aimi: I'm so thrilled to be here with Michelle Murphy, who is a Professor of History and Women's and Gender Studies, and the director of the Technoscience Research Unit at the University of Toronto. Michelle is one of my favorite feminist scholars, and someone who I have learnt a lot from, from her work. Especially about histories of eugenics and technoscience and feminist politics. So, welcome, Michelle!

00:01:55 Michelle: Thank you! I'm so thrilled to be here. I'm a big fan of the podcast and mutually fanning you. So, how wonderful that we're brought together in this strange way on Zoom, in these conditions, to share our thoughts together.

00:02:12 Aimi: Yeah, it's such an honor to talk to you. And I wish it was under better conditions, but here we are! This is the world that we're in. So, there are a few pieces of writing that you have done that have been on my mind a lot lately. As, you know, things have happened in the news, as the pandemic has been unfolding. And also, as I think about how we are maybe in a place that is not as novel as it seems, and maybe there are ways to find our way out of it? So, the first is your book, The Economization of Life, which I believe came out in 2017? From Duke University Press.

00:02:55 Michelle: Yep.

00:02:55 Aimi: And this is a book where you offer a history of the concepts of economy and population, in a very provocative way. So, would you like to say a little bit about the key arguments in that book?

00:03:05 Michelle: Yeah, so that book started with me looking at the history of feminist reproductive projects. And looking at how those projects were battling something gigantic. And wanting to figure out, "What was this thing they were battling, in the Sixties and the Seventies?" Which was population control. And as I began to research that, I really came to understand and see that population control wasn't just about controlling birth rates. It was a project that was deeply tied to changing nation-state governance, to being oriented to prioritizing their national economies and to govern life: whether it be health; whether it be birth rates; whether it be famines and food, for the sake of that national economy usually measured with GDP. 00:04:08 And so, the book is about that history. It's about the rise of the national economy, or macro-economy as measured by GDP, and all the ways that that's been attached to projects that are eugenic, that are racist; for saying some lives are more productive than others; some lives are more worth being born; some lives are worth letting die and are more valuable dead. And you know, in doing the work, you know, we're used to eugenics often being announced as a kind of, like, a really direct sentence. You know, a direct statement about, "This particular body," or, "This particular life is abnormal or devalued." And, you know, what I—the research kind of led me to think about was how that logic became dispersed and built into our very infrastructures of governance; of quantification; of calculation; of how we build hospitals; how we build roads; how we organize toilets. 00:05:24 All sorts of—you know, sanitation. All sorts of infrastructures that we rely on, all our life supports, particularly in relationship to the State, have been built relative to calculations about how they can create economic productivity and which lives are worth propping up. And then, what other things are worth propping up like… a corporation. Corporate profits over, let's say, human lives. And so, sometimes that eugenic form that we're used to seeing as a direct racist statement or an ableist statement—you know, like, about the delivery of, let's say, services or care—gets extended into the material forms of the infrastructures we live in. 00:06:15 And into all sorts of statements that seem like they're neutral and acceptable to say with numbers that are, in fact, quite deadly and carry that eugenics logic in them. So, that's what that kind of "economization" is about, and then the resistance to that.

00:06:34 Aimi: One of the things that immediately came to mind about your book, when I was reading the news about—just all sorts of triage decisions, and also policy decisions being made about—in the name of the economy, essentially. So, decisions about who had to work and who didn't have to work. Or decisions about who's life had to be saved. And you have this great point about the economy as a phantasmagoria? Am I saying that right?

00:07:04 Michelle: Phantasmagrams.

00:07:05 Aimi: Phantasmagram, yeah. And that has been really helpful for me to think through what this thing called "The Economy" is, that we're invoking. So, could you just, like, explain that argument a little bit more?

00:07:18 Michelle: Yeah. So… just to go back a bit, you know, we didn't always live in nation-states that imagine themselves to have economies. So, you know, if we even look at that history, the nation-state has a kind of universal form that's supposed to kind of territorialize the entire planet, is only so old. Really, if we look at when, kind of, the entire planet gets called into the kind of purported norm of having a nation-state; it's really in the moment of mid-century decolonization. So, that's—there's people that we all know that were around then. And then, that project became also the project that each of those nation-states had to have an economy; had to build these apparatuses, right? To then decide, "What activities count towards… measuring the economy of a nation?" 00:08:16 Well, probably, you know, everyone listening won't be surprised to hear, "Okay, what counts?" What a factory does, what a construction site does, what a mining operation does, what an oil company does—counts. “What doesn't count?” Our mutual aid for one another, growing food and caring for one another, any kind of labor that happens in the household. Many kinds of healthcare labor; caring for the land. All of that purposely gets left out of the calculation of economy. So, then we have then, the building of infrastructures by nation-states that, you know, want to value some kinds of things versus others. Like, you know, building pipelines here in Canada. Or, in the United States, you know, having—keeping the construction sites open. So, that was a whole history. And that history of deciding what counts towards the economy is, you know, built into statistical apparatuses of the state; forms of accounting—when you fill out your taxes. 00:09:20 All sorts of, kind of, quantitative practices that then like, add up, to then allow someone like Trump to feel—you know, to feel like he's got a whole kind of world behind him of numbers, of macro-economy, of nation-states; that legitimates in his mind and his cohort—decisions that say, "We must keep these kinds of economic activities going, for the sake of the economy." And that being the number one priority. And so, we see that over and over. So, we have like, a kind of double devaluing. We have the devaluing of that which doesn't count towards the economy; all the mutual care we're all doing right now. And secondly, we have the devaluing of particular laborers, right? Who are put to sacrifice for the sake of the economy. The measure of the economy is always not what the—so much what the laborer makes, but what the corporation profits.

00:10:22 Aimi: Right.

00:10:22 Michelle: Right? So, in the end, there's a tremendous amount of, you know, what we could call "disposable" life, or that life that's designated as disposable, or that which is understood to lose value, for the sake of the economy. All around us right now. And what's so perverse and disturbing is to see major public figures say those kinds of statements in the most bald, horrific and violent ways right now. Where they're just incredibly explicit, as opposed to more surreptitious, which is what we're used to, about saying, "Let's just let people die!" You know? And so those—when we see those kinds of statements, or hear them, or encounter them, they do feel, like, abhorrent and, like, kind of out of the norm. But they're—in a way, they're like a saying-out-loud of something that has been built into our governance systems for a long time. 00:11:24 And we're also kind of seeing it here, let's say, domestically in the United States or in Canada, being spoken in a way, where if you look at development language, foreign aid policy, military policy; those kinds of statements are par for the course in those spaces, by, you know, US Government officials, and in the documents, and in the way of calculation. So, it doesn't come from nowhere. Right?

00:11:52 Aimi: Yeah.

00:11:53 Michelle: We can, you know, think of many histories, right? We could go back to slavery. We could go back to settler colonialism and Indigenous elimination. You know, these deep, deep histories, right? Of, "That which can be killed for the prosperity of others; for the future prosperity of others." And so, you know, it is very, very deep when we hear it. Doesn't make it any less horrific, but it's happening now.

00:12:21 Aimi: Yeah, and I think this is really important, because it helps us to understand that eugenics is enacted, not often explicitly in eugenicist terms, and what appear to be eugenicist projects. It's often enacted through ideas about health and contribution to society and, kind of like, value in terms of, you know—in a way, labor-value, but labor-value to corporations and to the broader economy. And this is something that, you know, disability bioethicists and activists have been making arguments along similar lines for a long time; that eugenics didn't stop with the end of sterilization, which, of course, is still an ongoing phenomenon in many places too. But that there are these very insidious ways in which it basically exists in all of these calculative logics. And the legal scholar Sam Bagenstos wrote this great article recently about how—even, you know, the deaths due to the Coronavirus are due to a lack of infrastructure. 00:13:24 But, this is called "scarcity" in a neoliberal economy in which it is normalized that in the United States that your healthcare access should be tied to your employment, and it shouldn't be a public amenity. And so, the fact that we don't have enough hospitals and ventilators and stuff isn't just a naturally occurring phenomenon. It's directly tied to calculations about how many people are to be kept alive. And, you know, what vulnerabilities exist. So, at the end of The Economization of Life, you start to talk about this concept that now, you are focusing on in your work, which is "Alterlife." And I think that this is amazing, and something that everyone needs to know more about. Do you want to talk more about alterlife?

00:14:11 Michelle: Maybe I can say how we get from one thing to the other? Right? So, you know, I think you make such a good point thinking about the connections between thinking about economization and the kinds of, you know, arguments people in kind of Crip-worlds, Crip-activism, Crip-studies, have been making about infrastructures, and their non-neutrality, and that they're achievements, right? They're not accidents. They're not broken things. And we can see that all over, that these lacks, these abandonments are—when we do the history of them, they're achievements. So, we can begin to think about how these, you know—we, I think, have a lot to pull on, to understand how these infrastructures make some forms of life possible. Let's say, like, oil-extractive fossil capitalism! And other forms of life just very difficult to continue. 00:15:13 And so, out of that work, I came to really want to think about reproduction. Not as something that happens in our body; not as something that happens in the households we're being asked to shelter in. But something that's distributed in infrastructures, in our supports in—not just our mutual aids, but in the ways we built our architectures, our cities, our technologies across bodies. Of course, that's a kind of Marxist-Feminist tradition in a way, to see, like, reproduction in that way. This distributed reproduction. And so, out of that, you know, I began to really want to think about this condition of being not just… our lives made possible, or impossible, or difficult, or supported in these infrastructures. But the way we're also put in relationships of co-constitution, through that. We are really co-constituting one another. 00:16:16 And we live in these conditions where we're not sovereign bodies. We're lives that are co-constituted in a state of being altered by these conditions and one another. And so, that's why I wanted to think about, you know, what I've been calling "alterlife." Which is this condition of being already altered; infrastructurally, extensively, with one another. But also, this capacity to become something else, like it's not over. We're not just altered, but we get to keep working on this with one another. And, yeah, with the Covid-19, of course, we're in a profound co-constitution, right? Where we are being… confronted with seeing each other as potentially harmful, in our contact with one another, right? An endangerment to one another in our intimacies. 00:17:15 And it really brings home this project, or this, I guess, political life community project of, "What does it mean to co-constitute one another?" How to do that in a loving way, when we're also… in a way, constitutively caught in violences that we might be doing to one another, just because of the world we're living in. And so, that's a hard one, you know? And so, you know, I think about all that, in relationship more to, you know, chemical exposures, and the relationship between colonialism and pollution here, where I live in Toronto and the Great Lakes. And trying to do it through, you know, an Indigenous, feminist-science studies form. But… it's obviously much bigger than that. And I think it's something—like, I’m… you know, almost like, I think maybe, we're all kind of struggling with it, like, all day long, right now? 00:18:16 Right? What does it mean? How do we figure out how to kind of co-constitute one another, right? In this moment where our very contacts carry both, maybe care and love and support, but also 00:18:32 potential harm. How do we—what do we do with that?

00:18:37 Aimi: Yeah. There's this line, I can't remember now, if this is in your alterlife piece that's in Cultural Anthropology, or in Catalyst, but about how, you know, apocalypses are not just these one-time events. They're ongoing. And I've been thinking about that so much, as, you know, I have, and many other people have been like, "The apocalypse has now arrived. And what are we doing? And how do we organize, and build solidarity and stuff?" But you remind us that this kind of, like, massive-scale vulnerability and threat to life is not unique to this moment. And, I just wonder if you could say more about that, and how alterlife may give us a way to think past this or in a different way.

00:19:28 Michelle: That's a—that's beautiful. So… I mean, I think for many of us, right? we already feel we live in hostile worlds. We might feel we are intergenerationally survivors of hostile worlds. And we already have tremendous legacies of, kind of, alter-world making. For living in hostile worlds, right? Worlds that aren't built to support us. And so, in that way, you know, the apocalypse is not at all new. And… you know, we were kind of reflecting, before we started this podcast, on mutual aid right now, and how… what a kind of shift it is, to see very normative media and newspapers, and maybe, like, colleagues at university delighting and getting excited about, you know, forms of mutual aid. 00:20:33 And creating this kind of community. And, that for some of us, we live in deep, thick worlds that have already been doing this work for a long time. And, we live in vectors of mutual support and aid, and live in this alter-wise way of existing in hostile worlds. And it's not just between ourselves and our bodies, but, like, it's almost like a terraforming project, right? Like, we're kind of making worlds in—you know, the world of many worlds. And we're doing that together in these different kinds of vectors. And, you know, that's the, like, the strange beauty of this moment? You know, even in, you know, the difficulty and challenge and grief of it, as well? 00:21:28 As we see some things coming apart, there is this strange and disturbing moment of—there's something else that we've already been working on. A kind of thickening. Right? And coming up together, and being more legitimated and valued, and more people wanting to get in on it. And that kind of, you know, helps you get through the day!

00:22:00 Aimi: Yeah, absolutely.

00:22:02 Michelle: It's a theory of change, you know, that, where you start with a theory of changes in these kinds of worldings that we do with one another. And kind of step by step, not waiting for the better conditions to arrive, because they're not going to.

00:22:14 Aimi: Mhm. Yeah, that's so beautiful. Thank you so much for giving language to that. I feel like I really needed to hear everything you just said. So amazing. What are some ways that folks who are listening to this, or reading the transcript, can be in solidarity with the projects that you are working on right now?

00:22:35 Michelle: Hmm, that's an interesting question! Well, so, the main thing that we're doing right now at the Technoscience Research Unit, besides our own… kind of mutual aids with one another, is, we predominantly have been working on a part of Ontario called Chemical Valley, where forty per cent of Canada’s 00:22:55 petrochemicals are refined. And it's on the territory of Aamjiwnaang First Nation. And our group is an Indigenous—majority-Indigenous led group of university people and community people, working on this question. And right now, as all this is happening, you know the other thing that's happening is for example, the EPA is deciding in the States, they're not going to enforce any more environmental regulations. We're beginning to see that unfold in Canada. In the province of Alberta, they've now declared that environmental regulations are not going to be enforced. 00:23:30 We're seeing, as the price of oil drops, we're seeing these companies delaying maintenance on their facilities, and so people who live really close to these facilities are in increasing, kind of, danger of accidents. We see, you know, wanting to bail out the oil industry over people. And so on. And so, I think one of the things to—you know, in terms of being in solidarity, is, you know, to notice that in this moment, there are big grabs happening, by the oil and gas industry that have deadly consequence, for not only people living proximate to those refineries, but for things like climate change, and so on. And, you know, that kind of solidarity with Indigenous communities here in Canada, or you know, communities of color and poor communities in the United States, who bear the bodily burdens of that violence, constitutively, that solidarity doesn't just happen at a Standing Rock moment. 00:24:39 Right? It has to be part of our vision, you know, of mutual care. And so, that's one of the reasons I love this conversation. I think that the kind of work we're doing, and the kind of, you know, crip technoscience work that you do, it actually has tremendous solidarity potential. To learn from one another, and to pay attention to what each other is doing.

00:25:04 Aimi: Yeah.

00:25:05 Michelle: So, that's kind of what I can think of.

00:25:06 Aimi: Yeah, that's great. And thank you too, for, kind of—the reminder that in the midst of this pandemic, that all of those extractive industries, and the harm that they're causing, and the resistance against them hasn't stopped. And so, all the things that we were working for and against before, still need to be at the forefront, and even as we're distant from each other. So… this has been so wonderful, Michelle. Thank you so much for your words, and your wisdom! Is there any other stuff that you want to say?

00:25:44 Michelle: I guess I want to say, my gratitude to you and the communities you've been building, online and through this podcast, and in your own work. And I'm grateful to be folded into that.

00:25:58 Aimi: Thank you! It's really great to be in community with you. And to learn from you.

00:26:03 OUTRO: You’ve been listening to Contra*, a podcast about disability, design justice and the life world. Contra* is a production of the Critical Design Lab, learn more about our projects at mapping-access.com, and be sure to follow us on Twitter and Instagram. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please head over to Apple podcasts to subscribe, rate and leave a review. The Contra* podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike-International 3.0 license. That means you can remix, repost or recycle any of the content, as long as you cite the original source, aren’t making money, you don’t change the credits, and you share it under the same license.