#mel chen

As Karl Marx insists, it is only when matter is understood to be lifeless that it can be used unconditionally, and without permission, to create profit or property. It is only because we assume that rivers, soils, mountains, and rocks are not animate—let alone divine—that we can even imagine rerouting, poisoning, removing, or fracking them. These sorts of ecological concerns form a good deal of the motivation behind Jane Bennett’s retrieval of materiality as agential, or “vibrant”: “Why advocate the vitality of matter?” she asks. “Because my hunch is that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption.”

Ed Cohen’s (2009) recent work traces the history of immunity as an initially political/legal notion that was taken up into biomedical discourses. What is most interesting to me here is the translatability of this political notion into biopolitical understandings of self and world. On the basis of belonging to a worldly community predetermined by civic codes of face and faciality ascribed to Western possibilities of subjectivity individual immunity gives way to a certain vulnerability. Yet, as Priscilla Wald notes in her theorization of "imagined immunities," epidemiological narratives resolutely align themselves in terms of national boundaries (2008, 65). We might consider a tension between political immunity and resolute sovereignty, on the one hand, and a felt vulnerability that codes as a state of emergency in Western regimes inchoately aware of their brokenness, on the other. Ultimately, concerns of health and political sovereignty come together and blend, seemingly irretrievably, in the heightened figure of the mask.

2014 Theme: ANIMACY

If we ask further what lies beyond the strict material positionality of an object, what the object may have been affectively invested with – in a sense, this is to acknowledge that vegetality may be defined as more than simply not being able to think, but a failure of lifeliness, of ability to act upon others – we find something like animacy. The question then becomes: Who are the proper mediums of affect? Are they humans? Humans and animals? Vegetables? Or inanimate entities, such as the incorporeal blend or a “dead” but warming and comforting piece of furniture? “I just don’t want to be a vegetable,” while seemingly an imaginative fancy, also informs, microcosmically and iteratively, of what proper humanity resembles – nonvegetables - and, further, that humans could in some way become vegetables. Further, it describes what discredited human subjects are like: vegetables. Indeed, vegetables, believed to be living, are not at the bottom of the animacy hierarchy, as stones seem to be; for instance, when humans and nonhumans eat them, they have specific effects and can be either nourishing or toxic to bodily systems. As Jane Bennett cogently notes, food itself is an “actant.” Using a term like persistent vegetative state potentially, again microcosmically, informs us of how we should understand vegetables themselves: vegetables cannot think; they are passive; they merely survive; they are dependent, not freestanding plants, but partaking of plants’ nutrients. In this way, the “vegetality” (constructed between the medicalized language of “persistent vegetative state” and the lay expression “she’s a vegetable”) of Terri Schiavo, whose non-speaking body became the subject of contentious national, legal, and interfamilial debate for seven years, culminating in the court-ordered removal of her feeding tube in 2005, became a politicized linguistic event as well as a politicized discussion of life and death. Indeed, Lennard Davis has pointed out that had Terri Schiavo been considered a “severely disabled woman” rather than a “vegetable,” different politics – even different legal consequences – would have ensued. As many scholars and activists have made clear, disability politics is a consistently unacknowledged and erased partner to right-to-die bioethical considerations; everyone loses by not thinking deeply enough about their underlying connections.