Biopolitics: bad

In honor of the news I am about to relate, and in the absence of any actual personal technological capabilities, I ask you to imagine that your screen has now turned to black, alarm bells have begun to sound from the tinny speakers of your computer, and the sky outside has suddenly become gray. If you can get a chill wind to whistle in your ears and imagine, somewhere, a cellar door banging futilely against its frame, better still.

Is the state working its way into our bodies? What if, somehow, our junior high indignation at the futuristic, apocalyptic landscapes of Ray Bradbury, George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, ultimately anesthetized us to our present, making us unable to reconcile the fact that what we once would have recognized as an intolerable future is now practically our past? I begin with old news, but news which is new to me: one year ago, Giorgio Agamben cancelled a class he was scheduled to teach at NYU, citing the bio-political politics of the United States (specifically the fingerprinting of visa-holders arriving in the US after the institution of the Patriot Act) as the reason for his protest:

“There has been an attempt the last few years to convince us to accept as the humane and normal dimensions of our existence, practices of control that had always been properly considered inhumane and exceptional.
“Thus, no one is unaware that the control exercised by the state through the usage of electronic devices, such as credit cards or cell phones, has reached previously unimaginable levels.
“What is at stake here is nothing less than the new ‘normal’ bio-political relationship between citizens and the state. This relation no longer has anything to do with free and active participation in the public sphere, but concerns the enrolment and the filing away of the most private and incommunicable aspect of subjectivity: I mean the body's biological life.
“These technological devices that register and identify naked life correspond to the media devices that control and manipulate public speech: between these two extremes of a body without words and words without a body, the space we once upon a time called politics is ever more scaled-down and tiny.
“I would have liked to suggest that tattooing at Auschwitz undoubtedly seemed the most normal and economic way to regulate the enrolment and registration of deported persons into concentration camps. The bio-political tattooing the United States imposes now to enter its territory could well be the precursor to what we will be asked to accept later as the normal identity registration of a good citizen in the state's gears and mechanisms. That's why we must oppose it.”

Alarming enough on its own. And yet, a year later, there’s this report from NPR, which when initially I tried to recount out loud, sounded so ridiculous that I didn’t actually believe it could have been a news item:

“The Department of Homeland Security is experimenting with a controversial new method to keep better track of immigrants who are applying to remain in the United States. It is requiring aliens in eight cities to wear electronic monitors 24 hours a day.
“The ankle bracelets are the same monitors that some rapists and other convicted criminals have to wear on parole. But the government's pilot project is putting monitors on aliens who have never been accused of a crime.”

And all of the sudden, in a sort of mid-day hallucination, I remembered my eighth grade reading class and Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron.” So I ran to the internet to sigh at the wonderful, unforgivable resonance of the story. Coincidence that the beer-drinking protagonist speaking in consolatory terms is named George?:

George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. “You been crying?” he said to Hazel.
“Yup,” she said,
“What about?” he said.
“I forget,” she said. “Something real sad on television.”
“What was it?” he said.
“It’s all kind of mixed up in my mind,” said Hazel.
“Forget sad things,” said George.
“I always do,” said Hazel.“That’s my girl,” said George.