Among the indefinitely many evil things the Trump administration has done that will take years and years to fix (and in this case has undoubtedly cost many lives already). Propublica has the story.
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By Gordon Hull
I’m going to be teaching Harold Demsetz’s “Toward a Theory of Property Rights” (1967) tomorrow, and noticed a couple of things that I hadn’t before. I suspect they’re related, and say something about the moment the article appeared. At least, that’s what I want to propose here. To set it up: Demsetz is known for the theory that property rights emerge when it is efficient to internalize externalities. His example is land rights among Native Americans; he says that property in land increases with the arrival of the fur trade. Absent land rights, there was always a risk in overly intensive hunting occurring: without private property, it is in nobody’s interest to invest in the growth and maintenance of hunting stock. Before the arrival of Europeans, this was fine because there was no particular incentive to hunt too intensively. When the European fur trade arrived however, the incentives to intensive hunting grew, and property rights emerged as a management strategy. If I have to live with the consequences of depletion of the hunting stock on my land, I’ll have the incentive to manage it correctly. That, at least, is the story. It’s quasi descriptive in the sense that Demsetz thinks this is an explanation for why we have property regimes, and somewhat normative in that it’s clear between the lines that he thinks private property is a good way to go. Here’s the observations: first, the piece is heavily reliant on Ronald Coase, and second, although the narrative sounds like a tragedy of the commons narrative, it actually flies in the face of what Hardin was trying to do in that article.
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UPDATE: Dahlia Lithwick has some helpful context, including litigation from the 1970s involving forced sterilizations of poor Latina women in California. Lithwick also recounts some of the more familiar history about the early 20c legal history of forced sterilization (endorsed by SCOTUS in Buck v. Bell and Justice Holmes' declaration that "three generations of imbeciles is enough" and supposedly ending in another case in 1942), but I didn't know about the California cases.
Mass hysterectomies at an ICE detention center:
Several legal advocacy groups on Monday filed a whistleblower complaint on behalf of a nurse at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center documenting “jarring medical neglect” within the facility, including a refusal to test detainees for the novel coronavirus and an exorbitant rate of hysterectomies being performed on immigrant women …. Multiple women came forward to tell Project South about what they perceived to be the inordinate rate at which women in ICDC were subjected to hysterectomies – a surgical operation in which all or part of the uterus is removed. Additionally, many of the immigrant women who underwent the procedure were reportedly “confused” when asked to explain why they had the surgery, with one detainee likening their treatment to prisoners in concentration camps.
A little more:
The complaint details several accounts from detainees, including one woman who was not properly anesthetized during the procedure and heard the aforementioned doctor tell the nurse he had mistakenly removed the wrong ovary, resulting in her losing all reproductive ability. Another said she was scheduled for the procedure but when she questioned why it was necessary, she was given at least three completely different answers.
“She was originally told by the doctor that she had an ovarian cyst and was going to have a small twenty-minute procedure done drilling three small holes in her stomach to drain the cyst,” according to the complaint. “The officer who was transporting her to the hospital told her that she was receiving a hysterectomy to have her womb removed. When the hospital refused to operate on her because her COVID-19 test came back positive for antibodies, she was transferred back to ICDC where the ICDC nurse said that the procedure she was going to have done entailed dilating her vagina and scraping tissue off. “
Another nurse then told her the procedure was to mitigate her heavy menstrual bleeding, which the woman had never experienced. When she explained that, the nurse “responded by getting angry and agitated and began yelling at her.”
Here's a refresher on how ICE has been treating children.
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By Gordon Hull
I want here to tie together the preceding several posts (one, two, three, four, five) and finish the case for a Deleuzian undercurrent (perhaps better to say, Deleuzian and Althusserian undercurrents) to Foucault’s 1969 “What is an Author” seminar. Recall the specific point of interest: in a somewhat odd moment near the end of the lecture, Foucault distinguishes between authors and “instaurateurs.” The first move is to distinguish Marx and Freud from Ann Radcliff, the founder of Gothic novels. Radcliff “opened the way for a certain number of resemblances and analogies which have their model or princiuple in her work” (114). Marx and Freud, on the other hand, “have created a possibility for something other than their discourse, yet something belonging to what they founded” (115). He then disginguishes Marx/Freud from science as established by Galileo; for Marx/Freud, “the initiation of a discursive practice is heterogenous to its subsequent transformations” (115) rather than a development of it.
The most direct Deleuzian way to express this distinction is to say that instaurateurs are repetitions (as I explored earlier) or “events.” Before doing that, though, it’s worth noting that Foucault did not have to mention Marx in this context. Indeed, given his dismissals of Marxism and his hostility to the PCF, it is perhaps striking that he does so. After all, while it is certainly the case that Foucault sees himself as offering a different critical approach from that in Marxism, he could achieve that simply by distinguishing his approach from Marxism. Why the reference to Marx? As I have suggested, the Foucault-Marx relation is one that’s under-explored in the literature; here, it’s only necessary to note that Foucault takes appreciative notice of Althusser’s circle and its efforts at rereading Marx. In a decisive passage (that I noted last time), Althusser writes:
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By Gordon Hull
Early on in the Covid-19 pandemic, I dedicated a post (and a short follow-up) to the idea that our knowledge of Covid-19 is mediated by the indicators we have to represent it, and that those indicators are themselves epistemically tricky. In particular, there’s a difficulty in understanding “Covid incidence,” because of difficulties in translating from “positive Covid tests” to how many Covid cases are actually present in a given population. The standard shorthand way of addressing this has been to look at percentage of positive tests, with the guideline that unless this percentage is low enough, the number of positive tests likely significantly under-represents the number of cases. The situation reminded me of the ambiguity of “malaria cases” in parts of Africa, where the dashboard tally of number of cases does not transparently communicate the number of people who actually have malaria.
The last couple of weeks have indicated the extent to which there’s a further STS point lurking. The standard test for Covid-19 is a PCR, which has the advantage of being highly sensitive. It has the disadvantage of requiring complicated reagents and a lab, and so one reason (and the only even faintly forgivable reason) for the lack of testing in the U.S. is bottlenecks at the lab and supply level. A number of folks have been arguing that there isn’t enough capacity in the system, even if it were done well, to test as many people as need testing. Certainly in the status quo, where lots of people have to wait a week to get their test results, the test is useless for a lot of purposes, since they’ll probably no longer be contagious by the time they get the test result. The test, in other words, doesn’t produce any actionable information.
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UPDATE (8/26): This should surprise exactly no one, but apparently upper levels of the Mafia Donald regime pushed for the change. This is after all the same regime that scuttled an earlier testing plan in order to score political points against blue states.
The CDC now recommends against testing asymptomatic people who have a known exposure:
"If you have been in close contact (within 6 feet) of a person with a COVID-19 infection for at least 15 minutes but do not have symptoms:
- You do not necessarily need a test unless you are a vulnerable individual or your health care provider or State or local public health officials recommend you take one.
- A negative test does not mean you will not develop an infection from the close contact or contract an infection at a later time.
- You should monitor yourself for symptoms. If you develop symptoms, you should evaluate yourself under the considerations set forth above.
- You should strictly adhere to CDC mitigation protocols, especially if you are interacting with a vulnerable individual. You should adhere to CDC guidelines to protect vulnerable individuals with whom you live."
Phew! Because that would be really problematic advice if we were to find out, several months ago, that this is a really contagious disease, and that like a third of cases are asymptomatic!
- You do not necessarily need a test unless you are a vulnerable individual or your health care provider or State or local public health officials recommend you take one.
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By Gordon Hull
The last couple of times (first, second), I have been setting up Althusser’s Marx as the background to Focuault’s invocation of Marx as an “instaurateur” in his “What is an Author.” Today, I want to finish that project by noting three additional moments in Althusser’s reading that indicate that he is not treating Marx as an “Author,” at least not straightforwardly. (a) Marx’s self-consciousness is irrelevant to the reading (“it is essential to avoid any concession tot the impression made on us by the Young Marx’s writings and any acceptance of his own consciousness of himself” (For Marx [=FM] 74). (b) In accounting for Marx’s emergence in the context of German idealism, Althusser defers to Marx’s own account of why “this prodigious layer of ideology” existed at that time and place. The reason – Germany was unable “either to realize national unity or bourgeois revolution” (FM 75) was basically exogenous to philosophy, but it made the subject position of German philosophers possible and intelligible. (c) Althusser rejects any implication of a Romantic author thesis; even an author like Marx who invents new worlds “must have absolute necessity have prepared his intelligence in the old forms themselves” (FM 85).
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By Gordon Hull
Last time, I set up the context for reading Foucault’s remarks on Marx in “Author” in the context of Althusser, as well as some of the basic contours of the Althusserian anti-humanist Marx. Here, I want to pursue that line further. Althusser writes against the growing popularity of a humanist Marx, which is derived from Marx’s early writings. Althusser (and his circle) want to read an anti-humanist Marx, which requires that the early writings be successfully contained. At stake in this project is thus both a question of the content of Marx, but, perhaps even more importantly, a strategy for reading Marx.
According to the Althusserian reading, Marx had a humanist phase that he abandoned as he reached theoretical maturity, a moment that Althusser calls – explicitly following Bachelard (For Marx, 32) – an “epistemological rupture.” The turning point, on this argument, is found in the “Theses on Feuerbach” or German Ideology. For a sense of how the argument works, consider Rancière’s contribution to Reading Capital, in which Rancière says he will be tracking “the passage from the ideological discourse of the young Marx to the scientific discourse of Capital.” (1973 Maspero edition, p. 8).
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An important part of the human cost of the Covid-19 pandemic is the loss of life and health not due directly to Covid cases, but to the disruptions it causes. American hospitals have long worried about the decline in ER visits from cardiac patients, and drops in cancer diagnoses. Presumably, those health problems haven't suddenly gotten better. It's just that people aren't seeking (or are seeking but not getting) care for them. So too, childhood vaccination rates are in decline globally, especially in developing countries, though evidence from Michigan suggests that is happening here in the U.S. too.
And then there's the situation for places dealing with TB, HIV/AIDS and malaria. Per the New York Times:
"According to one estimate, a three-month lockdown across different parts of the world and a gradual return to normal over 10 months could result in an additional 6.3 million cases of tuberculosis and 1.4 million deaths from it. A six-month disruption of antiretroviral therapy may lead to more than 500,000 additional deaths from illnesses related to H.I.V., according to the W.H.O. Another model by the W.H.O. predicted that in the worst-case scenario, deaths from malaria could double to 770,000 per year. Several public health experts, some close to tears, warned that if the current trends continue, the coronavirus is likely to set back years, perhaps decades, of painstaking progress against TB, H.I.V. and malaria."
In the meantime, as of now, nearly 700,000 people have officially died of Covid.
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By Gordon Hull
Back in Before Times, I wrote a couple of posts beginning to make the case for a Deleuzian influence behind Foucault’s “What is an Author” (part 1, part 2). This post resumes that series… Recall that Foucault’s narrative in “Author” distinguishes between those who found a science, like Galileo, and those who are an “initiator [instaurateur]” of discourses. Examples of the latter are Marx and Freud. So let’s consider how the Foucault of the late 1960s reads Marx, given that he pretty much despises Marxism. For example, in Order of Things, he worked hard to say that Marxism was not genuinely revolutionary:
“At the deepest level of Western knowledge, Marxism introduced no real discontinuity; it found its place without difficulty, as a full, quiet, comfortable and, goodness knows, satisfying form for a time (its own), within an epistemological arrangement that welcomed it gladly (since it was this arrangement that was in fact making room for it) and that it, in return, had no intention of disturbing and, above all, no power to modify, even one jot, since it rested entirely upon it. Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water: that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else. Though it is in opposition to the ‘bourgeois’ theories of economics, and though this opposition leads it to use the project of a radical reversal of History as a weapon against them, that conflict and that project nevertheless have as their condition of possibility, not the reworking of all History, but an event that any archaeology can situate with precision, and that prescribed simultaneously, and according to the same mode, both nineteenth-century bourgeois economics and nineteenth-century revolutionary economics. Their controversies may have stirred up a few waves and caused a few surface ripples; but they are no more than storms in a children’s paddling pool” (OT 285).
On this reading, the 19th-century project is to merge humanism and history into one larger, utopian project: “History will cause man’s anthropological truth to spring forth in its stony immobility; calendar time will be able to continue; but it will be, as it were, void, for historicity will have been superimposed exactly upon the human essence” (OT 286). It wasn’t until Nietzsche that this conceptual apparatus declined, as he “made it glow into brightness again for the last time by setting fire to it” (OT 286).
New APPS 