Necropolitics and Death-world in William Delisle
Hay’s Doom of the Great City
Akhila
Vincent,
Ph.D. Research
Scholar,
School of
Liberal Studies,
Dr B R Ambedkar
University Delhi,
New Delhi,
India.
Abstract: Harry Harrison’s Deathworld, a 1960 novel imagined a world where humans had to
fight death at every turn for survival. The concept of necropolitics views such
exposure to death as a form of control. Taking inspiration from these works, an
attempt is made here to see how ecological degradation similarly fashions a
death-world for humans which takes away their autonomy. It thus underlines the
urgency for rethinking human to nature and human to human interactions.
Keywords: Biopolitics, Necropolitics, Death-world,
sovereignty, Ecocriticism, social ecology
Michel Foucault
remarked that with the coming of biopolitics death is no longer talked about.
The ‘age of life’ only focused on ways to enable living. A challenge to this
has emerged in the form of environmental degradation and ecocriticism has
enabled conversations around the changing human-environment relationship and
its adverse effects. These papers then turns to the representation of an
environmental hazard (London smog) in one of the literary works to explore how
death-worlds are created in which humans are transformed into the living-dead.
It tries to show how the idea of sovereignty has undergone a change as biopolitics
is being replaced by necropolitics.
Foucault
characterized biopolitics as the attempt to control and regulate population.
Here, the government exercises its sovereignty by trying to maximize the life
span of its citizens (Murray 193). Earlier under Roman rule, the father, who
was the head of the family, possessed the power to decide on whether his
children would live or die (patria potestas). This sovereign power was summed
up as “to take life or let live” (Murray 197). Stuart Murray observed that this
was a society where the constructs of power and life were built around death.
Death showcased the existence of life and the sword symbolized this power. This
changed with modernity when government devised the policy of taking charge of
life by providing the means to sustain it. Hence there arose counting of
births, deaths, alongside planning public health, hygiene, welfare, marriage
laws etc. There arose a new formula to explain this, “to make live and let
die.” Now the individual was part of the state’s population and this is the
point at which state makes its entry to put in place new mechanisms of control
in the name of well-being. For Foucault free-market, globalization, capitalism,
medical advancements, judicial protection are all aimed at maximizing this
regulation over the individual’s life. In this new scenario death is not a
favored option (Murray 197).
Hazel Marie
Vitales then questioned this positive outlook on biopolitics since such
regulation also produced negative results. War, racism, famine, ethnic
cleansing and environmental crisis were pointed out as examples (162). Murray
too talks about how the concept of ‘us against them’ develops where sacrificing
the life of a few (inferior race or groups) is allowed to promote the
well-being of the majority (198). But, environment crisis has now become a
phenomenon where the entire population is exposed to life-threatening
conditions. The reluctance of countries and governments to address
deteriorating environmental condition is contrary to their theory of
biopolitics. This paper then takes up the concept of necropolitics, as
formulated by Achille Mbembe to explore how the meaning of sovereignty has
undergone a change. Now individuals are exposed to the ‘threat of death’
constantly. Here then they are made to carry on their daily life in a ‘death-world’.
They thus become the ‘living dead’ without any power over themselves and their
conditions (92).
Anagha
Sivasakaran and Sayant Vijay traced the emergence of death-worlds under
colonialism in the Malayalam novel by M. Mukundan titled, On the Banks of
the Mayyazhi (1974). The novel depicts the shifts underwent by Mayyazhi
town under French administration. Kurumbi Amma is a character shown as
collaborating with the colonial setup while Dasan is depicted as a rebel
(Sivasankaran and Vijay 54). Sivasankaran and Vijay point out that Kurumbi Amma
symbolizes the colonised who are like slaves ‘living a social death’ without
autonomy (55). They are being regulated and their identity is also being
dictated by the colonial government. This leaves no space for resistance and
the colonised internalizes the coloniser’s view of them. Coming in contact with
the colonizer everyday thus invokes the social death of the colonised. Hence,
necropolitics in the form of lingering social death is employed by the
coloniser to achieve sovereignty (Sivasankaran and Vijay 55).
Guy Emerson
brought forth another perspective from the Mexican scenario where “bodies are
always immersed in a violent death that infects all fields of knowledge beyond
external constraints” (3). According to him the drug cartels of Mexico invoke
fear, control and possibility of death by displaying dismembered corpses or
engraving their insignia on them. The death-world enters the body and the
living dead is forced to inhabit ‘cartographies of violence’ (3).Emerson noted
how it slowly evolves into thanatopolitics where all bodies are rendered to be
killable (5). Thanatopolitics then leads to the condition of ‘physically
wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people’ (Emerson 5). It is
an all- encompassing, nondiscriminatory politics of death—a politics that
operates despite the limits of institutional power to inform living death”
(Emerson 5). Taking cue from these studies this paper turns attention to how
worsening air pollution is another death-world where each breath confers the
status of living dead on a person’s body. The aim is to look at the worsening
human-nature relation as depicted in the account by William Delisle Hay on the
great London smog, titled, Doom of the Great City; Being the Narrative of a
Survivor, written A. D. 1942(published in 1880).
The account
starts with the celebration of the protagonist’s eighty-fourth birthday with
his family at New Zealand. It was upon his great-granddaughter’s request that
he finally decided to write down the ‘great event’ of his life. He admits how
the thought of recalling the ‘catastrophe’ makes him to ‘shudder’. Adding to
this is the fact that this disaster took place on his birthday fifty-nine years
back, because of which he “spend the night of the 2nd of February in prayer, in
meditation, and in communion with Nature in her calmest and most peaceful
aspects” (Hay 5). It is evident how the incident has left an everlasting impact
on the narrator’s mind and body. He then proceeds to explain his life in
London, back in 1882, with his widowed mother and sister. After his father’s
demise he had to forego University for a living and was employed as a
merchant’s clerk. They lived in a basement of a building which he describes as
“murky, dingy” and sighed at the fact that they had few friends. He compared
his city life to the “hard labour of a prison” where he “endured constant
torture of mind at the sight of my dear ones undergoing hardship, which,
despite my most ardent efforts I was powerless to relieve” (Hay 8). The
helplessness of the narrator to control the course of his life emerges here.
City life is a sort of punishment for him as it alienated him from the
countryside, nature and friends. He therefore labels London as “foul and rotten
to the very core, and steeped in sin of every imaginable variety” (Hay 10).He
identifies “vice and sin” as the “most cherished inhabitants” of London. The
company of his mother and sister who rescued him from a complete social death
was his only solace.
The account then
shifts to the day of the tragedy, when the narrator was supposed to enjoy his
time on a picnic with his friends. His mother and sister decided to stay back
as the smog covering London intensified. He recalls how “the gas-lamps that
were alight all day were wholly insufficient to penetrate the cloudy atmosphere
with their sickly lights” (Hay 21). He remembered that the London smoke arising
from the consumption of coal carried poisonous substances as it was let out in
the atmosphere without any filtering. “It filled the nostrils and air-passages
of those who breathed with soot, and choked their throats and lungs with black,
gritty particles, causing illness and often death to the aged, weakly and
ailing” (Hay 22). So then every Londoner lived with death daily since breathing
the poisonous air was fatal. The narrator notes how Londoners totally
internalized their plight as they never looked into its causes and ways to
improve the condition. He also blames the government for ignoring the
persistent “nuisance” which was about to turn into a “grave evil.”Murray
Bookchin’s observations become important here. He identified two kinds of
shifts once the society became a class based one. He calls the first one
material (coming of city, State, regulation, market economy) and the second one
subjective (codes on morality, sexuality, values). He clubbed both under the
term ‘epistemologies of rule’ which instilled a patriarchal egoistic morality
in the ruler, while the ruled was trained for obedience at the ruler’s command
(73). Slowly, the state became all powerful once the “personal loyalties are
transmuted into depersonalized institutions, power becomes centralized and
professionalized, custom gives way to law, and governance absorbs
administration” (Bookchin 103). This is achieved through delegation of power
enacted through the social contract which is “as an act of personal
disempowerment, a conscious surrender by the self of control over the social
conditions of life” (103).In Hay’s account too this surrendering is evident.
The apathy continued despite the fact that there occurred accidents at rail,
river and road because of low visibility. Meanwhile criminals turned this
opportunity to carry out their deeds without being captured. The description
thus fits the criteria of a death-world. Here all the bodies bear the mark of
death by being an inhabitant of the city. The lingering smog is the greatest
symbol of this death and everyday life is exposed to it. The sovereignty over
one’s life is completely taken away as the vital exercise of breathing which
sustains life becomes the biggest threat.
Things took a
wild turn when the narrator overhears a passenger telling how people at
Bermondsey locality were taken dead after inhaling the smog (Hay 24). After
reaching his destination the narrator settled down with his hosts, the
Forresters. The narrator brings up the incident from the train and one of the
men, Dr. Wilton, explains how he once attended a case where a cab driver was
brought dead after inhaling the London smog. The postmortem revealed that his
clogged lungs resulted in suffocation leading to death. The men if at all they
left the matter, were deeply disturbed and their distress turned into reality
the next morning when they heard that almost five hundred lost their lives at
Bermondsey. The three men set out to confirm the news and discovered that their
locality was in a state of panic as all communication with London was cut off.
People testified how those who went up to the City returned as they felt being
choked. The testimonies grew grave once people narrated how bodies were lying
everywhere. The narrator’s remark over here is profound: “the fog drawn over
midnight London an envelope of murky death, within whose awful fold all that
had life had died” (Hay 36).Throughout his journey he described the violent
death inflicted upon bodies invoking horror in himself and the guilt of not
being able to take his dear ones with him. His state of powerlessness
intensifies upon discovering the motionless bodies of his mother and sister.
His account ends by reminding the “awful load of memory” he is carrying within
him. Here then survival too doesn’t hold much meaning since the memory
reproduces the effect of death in him and transforms him into a ‘living-dead’
again.
If at all Hay’s
account is an imaginative piece it serves as a warning. Ecological degradation
can cause huge loss to the present and future if left unattended. The question
arises as to whether an alternative to the death-world is possible. Bookchin’s
concept of social ecology offers hope. He advocates moving away from the
‘mechanistic’ view of environmentalism that present plants, animals, minerals
etc. as raw materials to fulfill human needs. Under this the cities become
‘urban resources’ and population gets labeled as ‘human resources.’ In
environmentalism the goal is to arrive at a form of truce and not to sustain
the equilibrium between nature and human (Bookchin 21). Domination is the
underlying principle here and an ecological approach corrects this in order to
recognize the interdependency between living and non-living things. The fourth
wave of ecocriticism then calls to recognize the ‘shared materiality between
human and non-human’ aimed at ‘dissolving the human/nature binary’ (Marland
857). For Serenella Iovino there should be “an ecological horizontalism and
extended moral imagination” (Marland 857).The Native American proverb thus
underlines the need for such a change, that, “we do not inherit the Earth from
our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.” Hence, addressing the human to
human and human to nature relationship is the need of the hour.
Works Cited
Bookchin,
Murray. The Ecology of Freedom: The
Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy. UK, Cheshire Books, 1982.
Emerson,
Guy. Necropolitics: Living Death in
Mexico. Macmillan, 2019.
Hay,
William. The Doom of the Great City;
Being the Narrative of a Survivor, written in A.D. 1942. London, Newman
& Co., 1880.
Marland,
Pippa. “Ecocriticism.” Literature Compass,
Vol. 10, no. 11, 2013, pp. 846-868. Wiley,
https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12105
Mbembe,
Achilles. Necro-politics. Translated
by Steven Corcoran, Duke UP, 2019.
Murray,
Stewart. “Thanatopolitics: On the Use of Death for Mobilizing Political Life.” Polygraph: An International Journal of
Politics and Culture, vol.18, 2006, pp. 191-215. https://stuartjmurray.com
Sivasankaran,
Anagha and Sayant Vijay. “Death-worlds, Necropolitics and Decoloniality.
Colonial Negotiations in Mahe.” EPW,
vol. 59, no. 52, 2024, pp. 52-57. https://www.epw.in
Vitales,
Hazel. “Foucault and Beyond: From Sovereignty Power to Contemporary
Biopolitics.” Mabini Review, vol. 9,
2020, pp. 161-178. PhilArchive, www.philarchive.org