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Eric Schliesser on “Lice and Biopolitics”

January 8, 2014

Schliesser thought he could escape the Borg, but a senior philosopher elsewhere has tracked him down for us here. In this very interesting reflection, he writes about the head-lice inspection all Dutch kids undergo at school, and connnects it to Foucaultian analyses of biopolitics (or, with less fancy terms, that government rationality that licences, among other things, involvement in public health). But, as Schliesser recognizes, it's hard to be simply "against" public health — what, you *want* your kids and other kids to have lice?

Also, any objections, like his about evidence of the effectiveness of school level inspection, share much the same rationality — what's the most effective means of obtaining a health-managed population? Now we could do some sort of neoliberal twist here: some sort of market in private insurance against the costs of head lice treatment with a tax penalty for non-compliance might fit — a AHLIA (Affordable Head Lice Inspection Act), if you will — but would this neoliberalization not still fit within a biopolitical horizon?* Or, if you prefer more direct means, do we continue at the level of schools or centralize ("up") to the level of the city or state, or further de-centralize ("down") to the level of the household with say, random house visits?**

* I was reminded the other week on FB of just how brief and passing are the points in Security, Territory, Population in which the terms "governmentality," "liberalism," and "biopower" are brought into close proximity.

** This last bit reminds me of the discussion Schliesser and I had about Plato's Laws, back in the days of the unruptured Borg, though there the worry was the health of the soul through checking on games and music. The difference, of course, is that Plato was much less worried — to put it mildly — about the inculcation of obedience through submission to such checkups than Schliesser.

Posted in Biopolitics, Foucault, John Protevi, Political Affect

8 responses to “Eric Schliesser on “Lice and Biopolitics””

CircSqu

January 8, 2014

It’s an interesting microcosm of a case but this kind of thing flies dangerously close to petty, bourgeois, liberalist whinging – am I alone in feeling this?
Maybe this inspection regime is handled in an unduly authoritarian and sexist manner – that’s an issue, clearly – but Eric seems to be taking exception not only with the way this is handled but also with the mere fact of the examination as though it were something quite sinister.
I think the term biopolitics is actually a very poorly one. It should really be called biogovernance. Politics implies popular deliberation (if etymology means anything) – biopolitics usually implies something imposed from above/outside (i.e. something more like governance). Drawing a distinction between these two things allows us to say, provisionally, that biogovernance that precludes biopolitics (i.e. popular contestation) is wrong but biogovernance is not, in itself, a bad thing. Who doesn’t want schools to look after their children’s health? Why shouldn’t the state do postnatal checkups? The real questions are how difficult it is to subject these procedures to contestation and how resistant the mechanisms are to adaptation in light of the participation of those they affect. (Been reading a lot of Dewey recently, I apologise.)
I don’t want to sound belligerent because it’s an interestingly mundane case of everyday biopolitics/biogovernance but there is a part of me that’s tempted to just snort and ask: first world problems much?
Compare this lice thing to something far more serious like the MMR/autism issue. That isn’t something superficial but a matter of life and death, potentially. What right does the state have to force people to immunise their kids or nit-comb their hair? It’s very easy to just say ‘hands off, you dirty State!’ but that is, in my opinion, a reactionary and vulgar liberalism that doesn’t recognise the profundity of the political entanglements that the health sciences put us in. If some parents free ride either in terms of nit-combing or MMR jabs then the health of the whole population may suffer. So whose liberty trumps whose? Freedom from state interference or freedom from nits and measles, mumps and rubella? We don’t even need to get past negative liberty to see the conundrum.
Of course these things are often handled badly and any kind of state official with a small amount of power can become an unpleasant fascist – complaining about that is all perfectly valid – so I don’t want to detract from the frustration that this kind of thing can create but then again … come on. Head-lice are unpleasant things to be afflicted with and they can spread through a school like wildfire, even with intensive combing regimes. Smothering the issue in a dose of Foucault doesn’t, ultimately, cover up the fact that this is a bit of comfortable, middle-class, weekday, school-gate griping.
At the level of political philosophy there’s not much more than a cigarette paper’s width between this kind of thing and parents taking their kids out of biology class because they don’t want them being indoctrinated about that there evolution gubbins. It speaks, to my ears, not so much to a love of liberty as to a hatred of politics and communal life in general.

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Jon Cogburn

January 9, 2014

You had me until the bit about anti-vaccine fanatics. Those people are completely ignorant of history and themselves public health menaces, causing horrendous needless suffering to their own children and other vulnerable people. I can’t see how the discussions here have anything to do with that.*
More importantly. What’s wrong with “comfortable, middle-class, weekday, school-gate griping”?
I found the OP to be mostly just an interesting presentation of a slice of life (there’s nothing approximating hatred in it). And when compared with the way American schools deal with lice, the Dutch reaction really is quite weird! Isn’t it fun to read and meditate about these kinds of differences?
I’m not trying to be confrontational. I think maybe the tone of the two posts got past you. Please know that any response you have to this will be the last word at least as far as you and I are going over this.
[Notes:
*There is an old criticism of Foucault that he was so anti-realist about diseases that he ended up being a victim of his own philosophy. I very much doubt that this is fair. People who have the most interesting things to say about Foucault never present him as being this anti-realist. And willingness to use someone’s tragic death in a polemic against their philosophy suggests that something has gone wrong with the polemicist, not the intended target.]

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dmf

January 9, 2014

http://onpoint.wbur.org/2014/01/09/anti-vaccines-whooping-cough-measles

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John Protevi

January 9, 2014

Curses, foiled again! I see Schliesser and I will have to be even more subtle the next time we peddle our sincerely held anti-vaxxer views.

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Charles R

January 9, 2014

Why doesn’t state-enforced vaccination schedules have anything to do with this discussion? It’s clear herd immunity is the very point to why we all should be vaccinated, but if we assume the state is the only institution for enforcing vaccination schedules, then we’re not being all that reflective about such an arrangement. At least, that’s my take: if the question is about either effectiveness of the health-focused strategies or how intrusive/comprehensive (choose the framing word one wants) health will be managed by the state, then vaccination, it seems to me, is a clear-cut case. Even if those people who are ‘fanatics’ about resisting what they see as the state willfully introducing substances they firmly believe are harmful to their children (Kinds of questions here: Who is sovereign over the children? Who is the custodian of the children? Who decides which custodial obligation triumphs over the other? When can collectives/herds override the consent of individuals for the preservation of what the collective thinks is the only means of survival [A Handmaid’s Tale, for example]? &c?)—even if those people are “ignorant of themselves and public health menaces,” isn’t it still worth asking in light of the rampant use of alcohol or firearm ownership within our cultures? We let ignorant, public health menaces purchase firearms in some of our states; we even let them get drunk.
I think being anti-vaccination for principled reasons—and even ignorant reasons—is deeply connected to the idea of how much it is the job of the state to manage the health of the people. Because, even supposing the people are ignorant, then is it the job to help educate those people so that they come to consent (“We won’t force you to be vaccinated, but we will force you to take these reeducation classes until you choose to”) or do we just say the state’s job is not to educate people into making healthier choices? —At which point we’re right back again at this opening post about using schools to inform students about health or manage their actual health.

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Jon Cogburn

January 9, 2014

It’s child abuse.

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Jane Brownstein

January 9, 2014

More seriously: is anyone else disturbed by what’s going on in the comments thread at Phil. Anonymous? I for one was shocked at how overt the feminist bashing is. Where is everyone?

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Charles R

January 9, 2014

How is it child abuse?
How does it differ from parents or caregivers being unable to provide vaccinations in those situations where war conditions, corruption, or lack of an appropriate infrastructure make it extremely difficult to provide care?

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