The Economization of Life

by Michelle Murphy

What is a life worth? In the wake of eugenics, new quantitative racist practices that valued life for the sake of economic futures flourished. In The Economization of Life , Michelle Murphy provocatively describes the twentieth-century rise of infrastructures of calculation and experiment aimed at governing population for the sake of national economy, pinpointing the spread of a potent biopolitical some must not be born so that others might live more prosperously. Resituating the history of postcolonial neoliberal technique in expert circuits between the United States and Bangladesh, Murphy traces the methods and imaginaries through which family planning calculated lives not worth living, lives not worth saving, and lives not worth being born. The resulting archive of thick data transmuted into financialized “Invest in a Girl” campaigns that reframed survival as a question of human capital. The book challenges readers to reject the economy as our collective container and to refuse population as a term of reproductive justice.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Research, History, Theory, Academic, Economics

232 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2017

Reviews

[el · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great stuff on infrastructures of experimentality, Cold War state social science, distributed reproduction as an analytic that refuses the orders and surrounds of "population" and "economy."

"The economy, uncountable and yet felt, infiltrates the sense of the world." (24)

"Development measures become their own extrastate industry with cadres of social scientists gathering data, running sample surveys, crunching numbers, executing experiments, and feeding indicators. Poor countries become data rich." (30)

"Moreover, experimentality, as a mass intervention into consciousness and bodily practices, relentlessly produces evidence that then legitimates continued interventions as a self-perpetuating relation of rescue." (79)

"...experiments are conjectural future-making assemblages...What was most generative about the experimentality emerging through family planning in the 1970s was not the production of certain kinds of pragmatic results (for many experiments had meager results) but rather the building of infrastructures positing aggregate life as a recomposable conjectural domain open to and in need of repeated intervention." (80)

"Experimental intervention often aimed at individualized and minimized cost-effective technological fixes that have as their most durable outcome the reproduction of an infrastructure of experiment...No matter the result of the experiment, no matter if results are achieved as intended or if no change is measured (as often happened), what is reproduced is the infrastructure of experiment itself." (91)

[Stephen Wong · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review of Michelle Murphy's The Economization of Life (2017)

Michelle Murphy in this critical work in the "hustings" (following the Old Norse hūsþing etymology) of "population studies" (experimentation, infrastructure, purpose, valuation) develops a counter-narrative and counter-theory to the prevailing and hidden-in-plain-sight supranational governmentality approach of managing manifestations of world population. The author locates the lacunae of analysis and brings to bear to the effort an articulatable framework of further work in the field; that is, the invention of tools of analysis is as much key to Murphy's work as the product of the work (the book itself) and the research programs it would generate. Certainly a work of scholarship (one-third of the published work consists of notes and bibliography and thankfully an index), the analysis grapples with epistemology, affect, economics and politics in a new way, meanwhile situating these within as well as outside of histories and futures, challenges and opportunities, entrenchments and aftermaths.

But as with any work in the hustings, Murphy appears to have left it to hope for a new politics to maybe do the work for itself. The prevalent structure of biopolitics might be tangled with, but such entanglement would not necessarily dismantle it. And so the scholar herself is left unoccupying the lacunae but she has left behind the instruments of entanglement/dismantling for others to pick up. The reader might be able to distinguish the work itself in speech act as either "constative" or "performative", either just saying something to be the case as matters of fact, or also saying something to elicit an act or a response (say, to ignore Because I Am A Girl fundraising campaigns). On top of grappling with the tetrad of epistemology, affect, economics and politics of world population, an ethics is also demanded. Murphy hints at the vulnerability of an ethics of western feminism in this regard; at least the patina of this ready and available ethics is rubbed out a bit, but the challenge of developing a critical ethics on the question is maybe left for others to take on.

And how about the people, individually and collectively, at the receiving end of maleficent/beneficent biopolitics? The work picks them out of the data of the aggregate, simultaneously rich and impoverished, in the laboratory of histories of particular place. Murphy will also likely say "abandoned histories", or "histories otherwise", because the systematic outcome of population experimentation is not the plethora of outcomes but the controlled and limited ones which necessarily invalidate all other potential for the actualization of targeted potential. What Murphy calls the various phantasms of data and where she indexes them, she also fingers the hauntological, but a deeper haunting of non-existent data because non-existent existent.

This generates, in my view, a demand for a philosophy of data. By the time we read the coda of the book, we get an idea of where Michelle Murphy in her grappling with her work feels at home philosophically between Heraclitus (on becoming) and Parmenides (on being). She also extends our language of analysis of logos and doxa (what constitutes the epistemic and the affective), while also tracing a relation of the two to economics (the dismal science) and to politics (in its current incidence and prevalence, populist and xenophobic).

But to say that this is all that Michelle Murphy grapples with is not entirely accurate and complete. Murphy rather grapples also with the larger neoliberalism capitalist milieu (not quite late capitalism, but perhaps so). Someone will just say, if it might explain it, what Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus celebrate in the pre-oedipal, which might constitute a psychopathology before castration, that the current politics is a strategy for survival under an emasculating capitalism and modernity. There is datum of affect in there, in the atavism towards an Ur-mother, perhaps into the whole of Nature; or, if we subscribe to Ibsen then into some kind of troll:

"What is the difference between troll and man?"
"Out there, where sky shines, humans say: 'To thyself be true.' In here, trolls say: 'Be true to yourself and to hell with the world.'"

This "helling with the world" could be given to ambivalence: the dropping away of the epistemic (that facts don't matter, the Alþingi can suck it), and the taking up of fantasies. Such fantasies can be generative of even more of the same. Shakespeare's Polonius's "This above all: to thine own self be true" also does not quite restate the Socratic maxim of 'know thyself', the inevitable price of which is in this context to transcend the pre-oedipal identity with the caring nourisher to a knowledge of difference (and behavioural indifference). If it were true, in what some say is a truthiness and later a post-truth world, then we may be handed the affordances to distinguish the handles of a post-medieval utopic "heavening of axis mundi" from the dystopic visions populated by genuine true-to-selfers.

Abandoned histories for constructed ones? How about abandoned cosmos. In this axis of correspondence, what is clearly the lacuna, nay the chasm, is the (privileged) ethics that could bring or tie them together, harmonies and conflicts and ambivalences all. If the characteristic struggle of survival is to try to be disabandoned, either psychologically or physically, then it might be necessary to cling, as it were, to a new or renewed constancy and permanence, even if a provisionary or constructed one for the time being. Then when it has come into flourishing, that is, if we could grant post-truth its chance at flourishing as if we were not already giving it all the rope to hang itself with in this "exuberant experiment", then we find it all such a wasteland.

In the prospect-refuge theory of landscape, perhaps a clue towards an ethics-aesthetics of survival and flourishing.

[Amber Sweat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hands-down my favorite reading in this class. The concept of the phantasmagram is really unique and philosophically rich for such an empirical set of data, and I am a real fan of Murphy's transparency considering her experimental limitations.

[Tyler]

What would it take to smash the container of economy? What feelings, forces, and phantasies haunt the quantification and calculation of GDP? Beyond individuals, what systems, relations, distributions, and infrastructures are reproduced over time?

[Dahye · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was a difficult book for me, but it was good because it gave me many things to think about.

[KT · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great read on the eugenic and racist implications and reasonings behind the measurement, called the economisation, of life

Discussing the Malthusian models of Raymond Pearl that relied on the so-called natural experiment of colonised Algeria, whose data underpinned his S-curve of human population growth curve that was intended to mirror that of Drosophila flies in a bottle. This version of population came into what the author calls the economisation of life that they define to be a historically specific regime of valuation hinged to the macrological figure of national "economy". The practices that differentially value and govern life in terms of their ability to foster the macroeconomy of the nation-state, such as life's ability to contribute to the GDP of a nation. This is distinct from commodifying life or biocaptial, or from the broader history of using quantification to monetise practices - it was not a mode that generated surplus value through labour, but instead designated and managed surplus aggregate life.
The economisation of life was performed through social science practices that continued the project of racialising life - that is, dividing life into categories of more and less worthy of living, reproducing, and being human - and reinscribed race as the problem of "population" hinged to the fostering of the economy. Thus the history of the economisation of life is part of the history of racism and the technoscientific practices of demarcating human worth and exploiting life chances.
The book traces through "population control", the economisation of life was, and remains, a historically specific regime of valuation created with technoscientific practices (rather than markets) that used quantification and social science methods to calibrate and then exploit the differential worth of human life for the sake of the macrological figure of "economy"

Other highlights include:
Criticism of the discipline of development economics, a field itself invented in the 1940s with the intended goal of expanding "modern" economic activities , then GDP and national income accounts become adequate to this singular goal, as GDP will track only the hoped-for expansion of waged labour, factories, and industralised agriculture that was the midcentury dream of economic development. It will not track the debt and the damage, nor the sustaining and caring, nor the distributions.

Development measures becoming their own extrastate industry with cadres of social scientists gathering data running sample surveys, crunching numbers, executing experiments, and feeding indicators - poor countries become data rich

If poverty was a breeding ground for communism, then only by funding population control in decolonised frontline sites could the USA, extract "the maximum result out of our military expenditure" and achieve mutual security against communism. Birth control, in its military function, would work to stem the tide of communism as well as offer a before-life/pre-death delivery device - contraception. Birth control would prevent the need for more conventional weaponry, and hence future deaths. In this way, contraception became a preemptive strike against both the purported population explosion and future war.
Population control would be measured via the figure of averted birth, the better-not-born, a naming and counting of a better-to-have-never-lived. Emerging in the 1960s in the USA, it was a new calculative figure of devalued or "wasteful" life to be prevented. Averted birth counted toward a future in which particular lives do not exist, as demonstrated by US economist Stephen Enke, who estimated that money spent for each "averted birth" was "100 times more effective" in raising GDP per capita than the same amount spent on "productive investments", a claim that helped to further spawn cost-benefit analyses for specific family planning interventions. This work was crucial in convincing US president Johnson to order earmarked foreign aid funds for family planning over health, food or kinds of aid, as well as making family planning a funded component of the domestic "war on poverty"

The history that showed that the landscape of human-achieved destruction in Bangladesh had set the stage for the creative explosion of Bangladeshi trials, pilot projects, and experiments, generating innovative techniques of development that would become global models. Postwar and postcolonial precarity became the fertile ground for the flourishing of inventive techniques for attaching life to economy, for bringing to market, for individualising and choreographing choice, for new forms of debt, for social enterprise, as well as for averting life in the name of speculative prosperity. Precarity fed experimentality, which promised to attach survival to a better economy

How NGOisation does not merely describe a form of nonstate governance and service but names how "issues of collective concerns are transformed into isolated projects" and reigned in an era of experimentality that invented neoliberal techniques for the economisation of life

[JC · Rating 5 out of 5]

The introductory story about fruit flies in a bottle reproducing ‘too rapidly’ and collectively dying feels like its an allusion to a Jared Diamond book. I like Murphy’s suggestion that we smash the bottle and think about better types of experimental questions. Also glad that Murphy clarifies at the end of the section that they see the bottle as emblematic of the economy. It’s this capitalist economy that is the reason for death. Not as the Malthusians say over-population. This book feels like it’s a response to Haraway’s sloganeering about “making kin not babies.”

Murphy divides this book into three arcs (sections). The first involves Cold War quantitative practices that rendered the economy and population as objects of governance and intervention, and produced categories of surplus life (as Melinda Cooper called it) along with all sorts of population charts that tracked global reproduction. The second arc focuses on family planning especially as it interacted with neoliberal interventions in Bangladesh, as well as infrastructures that were reproduced to avert life rather than death. The third arc describes how capitalism financialized certain stains of liberal feminism with campaigns that urged donors to “invest in a girl” making very clear how life becomes a form of capital.

There’s quite a bit of Marxist theory deployed here, largely Marxist feminist stuff as one might expect because reproduction is a central issue for any work dealing with issues of eugenics. The stuff on international development NGOs is important, but may be perhaps obvious to anyone already in that field. Most development students I know had to read Foucault in school, but whether they except the critiques that emerge from that discourse is another matter. It’s also relevant to issues being raised about tech preoccupations with TESCREAL ideologies and their eugenic origins.

Perhaps my favourite thing in this book was finding out there’s a 2007 Goldman Sachs paper called “Women Hold Up Half the Sky.” Financial crisis hits and suddenly Goldman is in its Maoist era. Some grad student intern must have pitched it as a joke to see how far a title like that could go.

[Ahmed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely enlightening, especially on experimentality as new form of governmentality. Loved the concept of phantasmagrams as material-semiotic-affective-infrastructural ontologies, and its applications to the concepts of macroeconomy and population.

The text is also full of amazing citations:

"Economy is capitalism's secular divine and GDP its oracle"
"Neoliberal experimentality was premised on a sense of the world as generative not despite of but because of its precarity"
"Happiness and future national economic prosperity was an unpayable debt in exchange for consuming family planning technologies and attaching to circuits of heterosexual propriety and consumption"
"The Girl is a phantasma, an affectively charged figure of a subject brought to life with numbers and animation...The Girl is imbued with the liberal feminist promise of individual agency, translated into a data point charged with the promise of value-add human capital"

[Keala Uchôa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book early in undergrad and it was so crucial for me as a scholar of Environmental Justice and Black studies (I.e. regarding population control as it relates to the climate crisis).

[FluffyNyctea]

So good Michelle Murphy is so good love love love