Population, Mobility and Belonging: Understanding Population Concepts in Media, Culture and Society 9780367186876, 9780429197604

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Population, Mobility and Belonging

In a world of increasing mobility and migration, population size and composition come under persistent scrutiny across public policy, public debate, and film and television. Drawing on media, cultural and social theory approaches, this book takes a fresh look at the concept of ‘population’ as a term that circulates outside the traditional disciplinary areas of demography, governance and statistics—a term that gives coherence to notions such as community, nation, the world and global humanity itself. It focuses on understanding how the concept of population governs ways of thinking about our own identities and forms of belonging at local, national and international levels; on the manner in which television genres fixate on depictions of overpopulation and underpopulation; on the emergence of questions of ethics of belonging and migration in relation to cities; on attitudes towards otherness; and on the use by an emergent ‘alt-right’ politics of population in ‘forgotten people’ concepts. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, geography and media and cultural studies with interests in questions of belonging, citizenship and population. Rob Cover is Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne Australia. He is the author of Queer Youth Suicide, Culture and Identity: Unliveable Lives?, Vulnerability and Exposure: Footballer Scandals, Masculine Identity and Ethics, Emergent Identities: New Sexualities, Gender and Relationships in a Digital Era, Digital Identities: Creating and Communicating the Online Self and Flirting in the Era of #MeToo: Negotiating Intimacy. He is co-editor of the anthology Youth, Sexuality and Sexual Citizenship.

Population, Mobility and Belonging Understanding Population Concepts in Media, Culture and Society

Rob Cover

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Rob Cover The right of Rob Cover to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-18687-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-19760-4 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books

This book was written keeping in mind those whose identities, practices and lives have excluded them from population belonging, those millions of displaced people without a place or population to whom they can belong, and those who are hurt or made to die as a result of both extremist or everyday governance views that mark some people as not rightfully belonging to a population. This book is for the victims of the March 2019 massacre in Christchurch, Aotearoa, New Zealand and their families, and for the seventy million displaced persons, refugees and asylum seekers seeking new places and peoples among whom to belong. This book is also for those who struggle to bring about more ethical forms of belonging and relationality, and for those who seek to ensure the Earth and its ecology can be a sustainable place for the enduring cohabitation of populations of all kinds.

Contents

Acknowledgements 1 Introduction: population as a social, media and cultural concept

viii 1

PART I

Population, identity and governance in public debates and (inter) national policy

17

2 Fertility promotion, power and contemporary eugenics

19

3 Crowded concepts and the politics of the big nation

40

4 Population and identity

62

PART II

Popular culture, population size and the composition of peoples 5 Overpopulation in visual representation

87 89

6 Underpopulation and apocalyptic narratives

107

7 Genetics, population purity and the ‘race of devils’

133

PART III

Ethics for belonging to a population

151

8 The ‘forgotten’ people

153

9 Bodies, racialised populations and practices of othering

166

10 Attitudes of welcome: ethics of cohabitation and sustainability Index

183 214

Acknowledgements

The research underpinning this book has benefited from countless valuable conversations with friends, students and colleagues in many settings around the world. I would like to thank members of the Migration, Mobilities and Belonging Research Cluster at The University of Western Australia, especially Farida Fozdar, Loretta Baldassar, Jane Lydon, Sam Han, David Mickler, Chantal Bourgault du Coudray, Ethan Blue, Andrzej Gwizdalski, Martin Forsey and Lin Malone. Thinking about population concepts for good health, education, cultural and creative outcomes has benefited enormously from the interest and engagement of many colleagues across a range of research projects and over many years. These include particularly: Peter Aggleton, Mary Lou Rasmussen, Daniel Marshall, Christy Newman, Kath Albury, Ros Prosser, Chris Beasley, Barbara Baird, Veronika Petroff, Alison Bartlett, Marc Botha, Jules Sturm, Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián, Simon During, Steve Reid, Janet Giddy, Pamela Fisher, Qiaobing Wu, Joseph Tak-Fai Lau, Crystal Abidin, Ian Johnson and Andrew Wenzel. Nascent versions of work that appear in this text have been published elsewhere. A very early version of some sections of Chapter 2 and Chapter 10 appeared in issues of Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies in 2011 and 2015 respectively. Thanks, as always, to Jeff Williams for his unlimited help, support and patience.

1

Introduction: population as a social, media and cultural concept

Introduction At its very simplest, the term ‘population’ means a count of people in a given space: how many people populate an area, a city, a nation-state, the world. It is about counting. More than this, however, population is a socially constructed concept, an object of thought that plays different roles in everyday society and everyday life. Population is an idea that circulates in contemporary everyday culture and social discourse to describe a clustering of people who are countable, accountable, relatable and, often, recognisable. It regularly falls into the backdrop of our lives as something that is felt as being managed on our behalf by governments, such as counting in the right kinds of ways for planning infrastructure for future population growth. Sometimes it is encountered as simple fact, such as hearing with amazement that the global population will be x billion people by a certain date. Policy-makers and researchers working in, for example, health or education will use concepts of population daily in their work as part of the practice of planning for health needs or knowing where to build schools. Sometimes it becomes a point of contention and public debate, in political speeches in the lead-up to elections, for example, when various parties will attempt to capitalise on changes to the population, evoking anger among some of the electorate that there may be x number of people from Mexico living in the United States, or that a British middle-class population is doing less well being part of a European population, or that an existing racial or ethnic population is being, say, ‘swamped’ by another ethnic group of immigrants (Norman 2016). In these instances, the idea of population is repeated regularly in news, media and online commentary, at dinner, at parties, in classrooms, while members of that population are effectively invited to put forward an opinion on what that population should look like and how big it ought to be. And, often, just as suddenly, population drops again into the background of our everyday lives. At the same time, in popular culture, film, television and science fiction literature, we often see population represented as a key narrative or topical issue: sometimes it is invoked to represent a dystopian future of an overpopulated earth; sometimes it is about interaction with other species that has changed what

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we have come to think of as the human population; and, popular today, sometimes it is to depict stories of radical depopulation of the planet. For example, the highly popular television series The Walking Dead, like other zombie apocalypse texts, tells stories set in a world in which very few members of the human population are left. Such stories are not merely about battling monstrous zombies, but deep and insightful reflections on what civilisation, subjectivity and identity might look like with only a tiny number of people left inhabiting the Earth. Not just the work of interesting, creative producers, such popular culture responds to deeply held interests and anxieties about human futures among contemporary audiences; it is therefore notable that stories about what it might be like to live in an overpopulated or underpopulated world circulate as part of a broad, everyday cultural concern—at least in popular culture if not in politics, policy and ethics. Such stories are part of the discursive picture for how we, as human subjects, migratory subjects and national subjects, and sometimes as minorities or identifying through other classifications or groupings, come to make sense of social relationships, relationality and belonging. The concept of population as a node of belonging, however, is not the same as that other troublesome term ‘people’. We often use the word population as a synonym for people, of course. For example, when we use a phrase such as the ‘population of the school’ or the ‘LGBT population of New York city’ we may be talking in terms of the countable people who participate in a place, context or institution. However, we are often also talking about the kinds of mutual identifications through similitude that produce the idea of a people. Even so, such a phrase implies not only a countable number of people, but also practices of deciding who is counted and who is accounted for. The idea of a people, as Jacques Rancière (2016, p. 102) has noted, is always a figure constructed by the politicised act of privileging certain modes of grouping and belonging. These might include racial, national, nationalistic, the ‘deserving’, the descendants of founders, the obedient. Given the ways in which people as a concept is difficult to remove from the question of who?, population comes to be used as a different way of counting bodies—which means bodies present in a space, context, field, country or category. This, as we know from Giorgio Agamben (1995), means living subjects as zoë and not bios, animated flesh and not citizens. Due to the heavily politicised and complex possibilities that emerge when the concept of people is uttered, the term population is regularly used as a depoliticised term to help avoid the negative consequences that come up when we think about belonging to a people, a group, an ethnicity, a race or a nation. In doing so, however, the idea of the ‘countability’ of people is summoned forth, and this has become part of the array of governance, identity and belonging of contemporary life. Indeed, the term population is after all just as politicised as people, because, while it may not require the question who?, it does invoke other kinds of questions: Which? How many? Who is not to be counted? Where do they fit on a normative curve or distribution? Which bodies should live in this space? How will we decide which subjects receive what kind of health treatment? And so on.

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Beyond demography Just as the concept of a ‘people’ is constitutive of that which it names (Olson 2016, pp. 109–110), the idea of population also constitutes the object it purports to count, account for, measure, analyse or understand (and therefore claims to represent). One of the ways in which population is often apprehended is through demography. Demography is, literally, the study, measurement or description of people, although it is almost always a field of work and scholarship based on statistical measurement and analysis of populations, population groups, movements, trends and changes. As with other ‘sciences’, demography delimits the field of study and sets up experts who will speak about population and respond to questions about changes and forecasts using the specific language of demography that, itself, is a dialect recycled by governmental and administrative organisations to manage this object (the countable collection of subjects) in one set of ways rather than another. Instead of utilising demography or demographic data to understand population, this book takes population itself as a cultural artefact, seeing demography as one way that frames and interprets the concept of population, but not the only way and—indeed—very often a limitation. This is to ask what population is as a cultural artefact: the counted people and the accounting for people that governs belonging, that polices the borders and margins, that presents frameworks for deciding who will be deemed within a population, and just as often presents a way of thinking or articulating who is not to be included. What demography does, however, is contribute to the role of population in forging identities. It does this through the way in which it presents statistics allowing for the representation of norms. Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens (2017) have cogently demonstrated that the knowledge framework for contemporary health emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century in Europe with the entry of statistics into medical clinics, helping shift focus away from clinical treatment to the broader medical health of whole populations. As greater quantities of data became available, there developed concepts that came out of a new focus on the health of populations: the average, the typical and the normal (Cryle and Stephens 2017, p. 17). This then inflected clinical practice with new knowledge frameworks that based assessment and treatment of patients within the practice of measurement against averages. The norm, which was not a popular or everyday concept prior to this, came to be the mechanism by which first the health of bodies and then the perception of behaviours, identifications and practices among subjects was measured. Demography as we know it today is the off-shoot of a practice of understanding averages and ratios in relation to large numbers, and the everyday concept of the norm is the emergent product of medical attention to population. In other words, demography and population health in their contemporary forms are good evidence of the power of historical concentration on populations to shape practices, forms of belonging, forms of exclusion, expressions of normality and ways of being today.

4

Introduction

With persistent unfolding and reinvention of the concept of population and its measurement, the production of statistics, norms, ratios and averages, and the utilisation of this knowledge framework in ways that produce certain kinds of subjectivity and belonging, the everyday circulation of the concept of population is, then, central to how we understand our own identities. This occurs in a range of respects, most particularly through the perception of selfhood in relation to a ‘group’ of people populating a space (local, national, community, global). It also involves the perception of the self as an object that, to belong, must be compared with the norms, averages, distinctions, similarities and formations communicated through the science of population management and measurement. The self is thus always produced today as a response to being called upon to self-assess in order to ensure one has proximity to the norm and thereby belongs to or can be categorised within a population. The concept of population, however, is never merely a background, ‘naturalised’ idea or feeling but is always presented in the public sphere of everyday discourse and media entertainment through substantial anxieties, shifting attitudes, concerns, moral panics, fears and celebrations. These tend to focus on two separate but related frameworks through which population is depicted as a cultural artefact: population size and population composition.

Size matters Population size refers here to the circulation of information about the overall numeric demography of groups of people, whether at the level of the nation or of the whole world. Indeed, concerns over the Earth’s carrying capacity—the extent to which the planet can sustain an ever-increasing population size over time—have been a topic of popular, heated debate from time to time, particularly in popular science writing, much of which drew on thinking from the late 1960s. Sources included the work of Garrett Hardin (1968) on the contemporary sustainability of shared resources of the ‘commons’, and the controversial book published the same year, The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich (1968). Such texts contributed substantially to the public imaginary about global population size and its implications and influenced much subsequent cultural, political and popular thinking about human futures in the context of population. This book addresses questions related to the disjuncture between official and entertainment discourse on population size and continued growth, theorising reasons why, for example, it appears so substantially in popular culture as an explanatory trope describing potential human futures, but is not raised seriously in the context today of policy debates related to the human contribution to carbon pollution and hence climate change. The interplay, then, between social understanding and policy is a significant topic of interest for making sense of the relationship between population and climate futures. The disjuncture is a nodal point in the fractured framework through which identity and belonging intersect with concepts of stability, history and futures.

Introduction

5

A number of films as well as television series from the early 1970s focused on questions of overpopulation, making drama out of public anxieties about crowded urban spaces and their implications for living a liveable (and comfortable) life. These popular concerns over population size also contrast significantly with the administrative and global governance perspectives on population growth, which are constituted in an economics knowledge system supported by a foundational United Nations human rights statement that articulates childbirth and family size as matters for the family alone and not to be interfered with by governments. The People’s Republic of China’s one child policy was, of course, publicly derided in Western public discourse throughout the 1970s and 1980s, particularly as a means of stating that restrictions or controls on population growth are antithetical to Western, liberal–humanist and neoliberal cultures. It is notable that unchecked population growth or overpopulation is expressed principally in the creative arts rather than in policy debates, or in relation to increasing human-induced carbon pollution and its impact on ecology and climate. To some extent, this can be understood as a transferral of public anxiety into the ‘safer’ realm of film, television and other popular culture, rather than the more complex, risky and destabilising site of governance whereby intervention in population size would result in significant adjustments to the frameworks through which belonging is performed. At the same time, however, popular representations of underpopulation occur through a significant public interest in apocalyptic film and television, much of which depicts a human future in an era of civilisational collapse through the catastrophe of a sudden loss of population. Again, an attachment to population size is enacted through highly popular entertainment narratives, where social identity anxieties are expressed through the popular appeal of the genre of apocalyptic fiction, serving as a deflection from thinking about the implications of population size on ‘civilisation’, liveability and futurity.

Composition, counting and accountability Parallel to population size discourse is a field of debate and interrogation of greater public prominence, that of concerns about the composition of discrete populations. Such debate is typically in relation to national population, which indicates a countable group of people inhabiting the physical (land) and conceptual (citizenship) space of a nation-state in ways that often feed back into questions of border policing around the concept of a people. Indeed, the category of the nation bears witness to some of the most heated social debates on the composition of a population, by which one means not just its countability but how it is counted, who will be counted and who will be accountable within that count, prescribing contexts of belonging. Much of the concern about Brexit in the United Kingdom, for example, has drawn on problematic and long-submerged fears about the loss of British identity in a European context, or have conflated European Union membership with questions about migration into Britain from elsewhere. That is, concerns are raised both tacitly and loudly

6

Introduction

about whether the British population has been subsumed into Europe, whether the objections to Brexit of the political leadership of Scotland would excise or divide the British population, how ancient questions of population belonging re-emerge, and what might happen to any perceptions of the Irish population should the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland require a customs and immigration border. Much of the discussion about Brexit in parliament and public opinion debate is about the pragmatics of major constitutional change, but underlying this is a deep-seated set of concerns about the identity of the population, and these are concerns that both instigated the push for a Brexit vote in the first place, and that remain points of apprehension and fretfulness as the process continues. The two questions of how the population will be composed and the extent to which subjects will find a rupture in their everyday sense of belonging operate as the central points of destabilisation that have been opened up by the Brexit phenomenon. Questions about population composition are also invoked in the mercenary political campaigns of a number of outspoken, ultra-conservative politicians around the world. The political campaigns, for example, of Marine Le Pen in France over the past few years have advocated an alarming nationalistic perspective that rejects globalisation and delocalisation as stand-ins for an anti-immigration stance that looks to shore up the meaning of the French population and restrict who should be permitted to join it. Indeed, the chief concerns of questions related to the composition of national populations fixate on migration as that which changes not merely the size but the countable population as a composite of a people, with fears often expressed about how such change might affect the culture, form, style, tastes or self-perfection of that population. Such irrational but emotive fears for the consistency of population over time both draw on a mythical idea that the population’s composition has until recently been fixed into neat categories, races, bodies in appropriate places, and so on (it has always been fluid, of course), and that this composition is profoundly threatened, whether by increased mobility, globalisation of international trade, supranational political and economic organisations such as the United Nations and the World Economic Forum, and, obviously, migration and resettlement regimes. While many of the public arguments in support of Donald Trump’s election pledge to build a wall between the United States and Mexico are articulated through oversimplified concerns about employment and access to benefits by non-residents, much of the underlying justification is based in attitudes against the movement of bodies that might upset a preconceived and mostly incorrect notion of what the United States population is or, at least, who deserves to be counted among it. Certainly, there is some truth to the point that the composition of population groupings is more fluid and less easy to be apprehended by those who wish for mythical clear-cut categorisations, and this is the result of the cultural force of mobility. Mobility, as John Urry (2007) has pointed out, is a marker of contemporaneity in contemporary society: ubiquitous, often desired, a structure of feeling that emerged in the

Introduction

7

last three decades of the twentieth century, and from which there is no turning back. Nevertheless, the generation of public concerns over the composition of a population and the politics about making it more exclusive are grounded in a very deep attachment, at the core of many subjects’ sense of being and wellbeing, to the mythical idea that earlier compositions of population were stable, as if mobility is something wholly new, and as if colonial and settler populations have been timelessly and ahistorically situated in the places that presently define them. Addressing that attachment at the level of the constitution of subjectivity itself is a necessary task in the obligatory and ethical mission of producing a lessexclusive and more-welcoming population that does not fall periodically into racialised sectionalisation with all the unethical and marginalising practices such instances bring. Part of the anxiety over mobility’s impact on population also involves a set of attitudes towards the increasingly widespread mobility of subjects as it occurs across certain classes of subjects but not others. It is always an attitude related to a population’s continuity, and it is always political. For example, certain right-leaning arguments about population in the United States focus at least partly on a fear of the migrants themselves, whether they are from the Middle East, Mexico, South America or, sometimes, East Asia. While this anxiety is invoked through the potentialities for local change that an increased mobility produces, it is often simultaneously a class-based response to the perception that there is an elite, left-leaning, ‘liberal’ group of people who are involved in population management or who are influencing migration and hospitality for others and are, themselves, markedly mobile through internationalised, cosmopolitan lifestyles. Conspiracy theories about population change often emerge in public discourses at the point of convergence of anxieties over the mobility of the poor migrant and the mobility of the liberal elite—while such conspiracy theories are often ridiculous, it is not necessarily ethical to dismiss out of hand the affectively felt viewpoints of what appears to be an increasing part of the population, for they do lend insight into how populations perceive themselves. Mobility, as Judith Butler (2016) reminds us, is ‘itself a right of the body … but also a precondition for the exercise of other rights’ (p. 63). Although we might regard mobility as an ethical freedom to move about the place, to not be constrained, to shift where one lives, to travel, to cross borders, to apply to resettle in other parts of the world, and so on, it is of course not in practice freely expressed. Aside from the socio-economic questions that might prevent members of a population (or whole population groups) from the mobility experiences of international leisure travel or from the life-preserving mobility of being resettled from refugee camps and sites of war, famine, violence and death, the very practices of mobility are politicised, not because of the body that seeks to cross a border, but through conceptual frameworks that ask: What does that border crossing do for the composition of this or that population? In the week in which I have been finalising the manuscript of this book, a terrorist attack perpetrated by a white Anglo-Australian man in Christchurch,

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Aoteroa, New Zealand, killed 50 people and injured another 50, most of whom were at prayer in different mosques in that city. On 15 March 2019, a very well-armed white supremacist marched into the Al Noor mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre, and systematically gunned down his victims, who were aged between 3 and 77 years. Although arrested on his way to a third location, the terrorist made an additional impact by being able to live-stream footage of his horrific attack, further internationalising the horror of white supremacist violence. I raise this particular case, not because of the proximity of the attack to where I am writing, not because it occurred in a country in which many of my family members and friends reside, and not because it was a white supremacist terror attack, rather than one perpetrated by an organisation that claims affiliation with Islam. There is nothing in this particular horror that makes these victims more grievable than any other subject who is gunned down due to racism or religious affiliation, or who is made to live an unliveable life due to nationalised disputes or resulting from a cultural perception that they are unworthy to live among a particular population. Rather, this particular case at this particular time both informs and reinforces the need for a cultural critique of the concept of population, and the specific and direct role of anxieties over a population’s composition in the perpetration of both extreme and everyday violence. Prior to this terrible attack, the perpetrator released a manifesto for circulation online. The author of the manifesto writes extensively about population and fears for the future of European populations, including in colonised parts of the world, mentioning the term population itself 20 times. The manifesto begins with the expression of a fear about comparable fertility, starting with ‘It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates’. It bemoans falling European birth rates and increasing birth rates among nonEuropean populations (regardless of location), worrying that it is leading to white genocide. The author explains in advance that his attack was knowingly racist and deliberately anti-immigrant in intent, on the basis of his concern that the population of the world will not remain diverse should current disparities in fertility continue. While worrying about the genocide of a white race, what this manifesto openly argues for is a war on cohabitation. The idea of cohabitation is a significant one for thinking about populations, belonging, liveability and even sustainability of the planet. Judith Butler (2016) has drawn on the earlier work of Hannah Arendt (2006) who, in discussing questions about genocide, asserted that no one has the right to decide who cohabits in the world, and that in attempting to decide one is committing a grave act of unethical violence. Extending this, Butler points out that cohabitation on the Earth is always, from the beginning of subjectivity, unchosen, even if we might choose where we live and, locally, with whom we live (Butler 2016, p. 111). To attempt to decide is to undertake violence not just to others but to the very idea of plurality itself, since there is no person, race, population or nation that can make a foundational claim to the whole world itself, and this means that unchosen proximity to others is a precondition of political

Introduction

9

subjectivity (pp. 114–115). While there is a risk of universalising human population in ways that might violently erase difference, as occurs in some liberal formations, the fact that we are, from the beginning of life and before we have subjectivity, corporeal and precarious beings thrown into the social world, obliged not to do violence to it, and obliged to recognise the vulnerability of others, underlies the obligation to cohabit in interdependency. From the perspective of understanding population, then, there is no possibility of making a foundational, ethical claim to a place on behalf of one kind of population while excluding others. There is no possibility of an ethical way of saying that one population, however it is counted and accounted for, can remove another population or the representative or member of another population. Neither the killer nor the killed here had any choice about cohabiting in the world—the attempt to erase those victims by failing to see them as vulnerable and grievable lives that must be preserved points to the dangers of some of the contemporary perceptions of population as categorised, distinct, invasive, worthy and unworthy, connected to places and not belonging in places, and so on. Problematic understandings of population make it, and lives, more precarious when they are not understood from the very beginning through an ethics of cohabitation that provides no framework for exclusion, eradication or violence but, instead, an obligation to preserve the lives of those we did not choose to live alongside (Butler 2016, p. 121). The title of the Christchurch killer’s 73-page manifesto was ‘The Great Replacement’, which is a reference to the supremacist injunction given by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in January 2019 for international right-wing organisations to unite against migration and settled migrants seen to be replacing the European population in Europe. He had previously expressed fears that European countries were already beginning to experience ‘a mixed civilisation’ (by which we can understand a mixed population composition), and had articulated concerns about population growth in Africa and Asia, seen to be spilling over into the areas of the world in which he understands the population as—by right—non-African and non-Asian (Miller 2019). The term ‘The Great Replacement’ itself originates with French author Renaud Camus who expressed fears in his 2011 book of that title that Europe was being colonised in reverse, with the argument that the existing population was, in the space of a generation, being replaced with a different population. We can take that to mean the composition of the population, as populations are always in a process of replacement through births, deaths and movements. Here, again, to deny such change and fluidity of the population’s composition is to deny the obligation based in the fact that we do not choose who comes and goes from a population. Countries may choose, problematically, who migrates and settles in land within their borders but the shape the population takes in the future is unchosen, as we cannot know who will be born, who will die and how those who are in the future of the population will define and perceive themselves.

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Introduction

While some public commentary has viewed the attack in Christchurch as a one-off instance of extremism, it is possible to argue alternatively that there are indeed many similarities between extreme, white supremacist speech and the growth of anti-immigrant policy and politics around the world. The perpetrator’s manifesto itself praises Donald Trump as a ‘symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose’, even though it is critical of Trump’s administration as a form of governance. A politician, in one instance, has agreed with the views of the perpetrator. What this indicates is not that there is an extremist fringe that seeks the eradication of certain parts of the population or kinds of population and that this is somehow radically separate and distinct from policy, politics and normative frameworks that decide on populations and the liveability of populations. Rather, I am arguing that there is a continuum between such extremism and the more sedate arguments, whereby a growing discursive position in politics around the world is founded in a radical perception that eschews harmonious, mobile, mixed and ethical cohabitation as an obligation and a requirement for liveability.

Population and climate change In the next chapter, I will discuss in greater detail the issues related to the promotion of population growth as a policy of nation-states in contrast to global issues of climate change. However, it is useful to remark here that there is often a disjuncture between the concept of population and the concept of combating climate change, resource depletion and ecological damage, with arguments that suggest continued population growth will have an increased negative impact on the global climate, often relegated to the margins of debates on solutions to problematic climate change. This is despite the power of significant voices in contemporary popular culture including, for example, that of environmentalist and nature documentary producer, Sir David Attenborough, who has stated: ‘All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people, and harder—and ultimately impossible—to solve with ever more people’ (Population Matters 2019). The point is a logical one in the sense that population is a measure of the number of bodies inhabiting a space, and that when we think that in global terms, the number of the world’s inhabitants has a correlation with the amount of pollution and waste produced by a countable number of bodies, the amount of agriculture required to feed a countable number of bodies, and the minimum amount of energy required to keep a countable number of bodies alive. Obviously, it is more complex than simple numbers, although if all the bodies of the world aspired to participation in the laissez-faire consumption of contemporary Western culture, then the extent of growth of that consumption and its related waste, resource depletion and pollution becomes a matter not just of population but for it. Climate change is not just a product of population figures, compositions and practices but will have an impact on it, whether that will be the increase in climate-induced migration for

Introduction

11

liveability or the radical loss of resources required to keep some populations alive. According to Brian O’Neill and colleagues (2001), the anticipated collapse of the Gulf Stream, which delivers warm weather to much of Europe but is at risk if sea temperatures rise, will have a very substantial effect not only on lifestyles in Europe, but on agriculture and farming, potentially drastically reducing the capacity of Europe to host its current population without radical change, increased international trade or forced migration away from Europe to other parts of the globe (O’Neill et al. 2001, p. viii). Although in this book I advocate a more critical engagement with the relationship between population as a cultural concept and the sustainability of the world, I would like to distance myself from the way in which overpopulation anxieties are often expressed by right-wing politicians and white supremacists. To argue that there is an ethical value in incorporating overpopulation as an ‘idea’ into discussions related to climate change, liveability, social responsibility and administrative planning is not the same as suggesting that radical measures should be taken to curb population growth or to present a framework for deciding who will be fertile and who will not be. Nor is it to suggest that the contemporary range of understandings of crowdedness are fixed into the future, nor even to assume that sustainability for a vastly increased human population will not be the product of imaginative, new, ecologically appropriate and ethically sound forms of resource management and manufacturing. The fact that such things are unknowable, however, does not mean that questions about population size should be put aside. Rather, it means that they should be carefully thought about in their complex, nuanced, networked global, local and post-national possibilities. In the same way, while David Attenborough might have stated that addressing population size is the easiest approach to reducing human impact on world ecology, there is no indication in his suggestion that the easiest path is necessarily the most ethical. Rather, the framework through which we can think about population and climate together has to be one that is, once again, conditioned by an ethics that understands the unchosen nature of cohabitation. In this context, it is not the ‘co-’ that matters (although it is very important for how to lead non-violent lives) but the ‘-habitation’ that is significant. The fact that we did not choose to inhabit the Earth, and the Earth did not choose to be inhabited, presents the possibility of a starting point for an ethical framework that brings together the idea of population and the ideas of climate, ecology and sustainability. That is, once we put the present situation of ecological damage and carbon pollution into a framework of temporality, there is an ethical obligation to the Earth of the future and the inhabitants of the future not to make decisions now that mean that such lives would be unliveable. The population, in other words, is not a population simply of now, but a population of the future, one that is just as precarious if not more so, and to whom we are obliged not to do violence. In this case, that can include the violence of irreversible global ecological harm.

12

Introduction

The subject of population In my own everyday life, I encounter population in a number of ways, but three are the most striking: public and political debate, film and television, and attitude and ethics. Ideas about population circulate, then, in news related to governance, governments, policy, migration alarmism, climate debates and stories about refugees, asylum seekers and forced migrants. However, such discourses both condition, and are conditioned by, the significations of the concept of population as it circulates in entertainment media and popular culture. For example, the rise of the film genre of overpopulation anxieties in the 1970s drew directly on some of the population growth alarmism that emerged in the very late 1960s. Together, these contribute to the milieu of ideas that govern how attitudes are formed, particularly in relation to liveability and cohabitation among others, towards migrants, and in the context of better ways in which to express and experience hospitality in a global, networked world; as I argue in this book, the cultural formation of attitude is absolutely central to ethical relationality, and the figuration of population as a concept is at the core of such ethics. In this context, I have broken down the remainder of this book into three sections, aiming to make sense of the cultural production of the concept of population, its role in identity formation and its centrality to social relations from the mutually informative perspectives of policy, popular culture and ethics. To think about population, I draw on a broad range of texts and examples, from newspaper articles, to film and television samples, to political and philosophic writings. At times, I draw specifically on examples from the region of the world in which I am living (Australia), not merely as a site of convenience but to some extent because thinking about how ideas about population, mobility, identity and belonging are experienced at the ‘periphery’, in a troubled, white-settler country located in South East Asia and the Pacific, transnationally connected and accessing popular culture from around the globe, helps us to make sense of some of the concepts that seem normative in the dominant fields of the world. Working from cultural and social theory perspectives, this book is not seeking to provide a comprehensive international survey, then, of population size, composition, debates, legislation and arguments. Rather, as a cultural studies scholar, and media sociologist with an interest in minority health, mental health and well-being, I would like to make use of different examples of population debates, representations and articulations, unpacking them to help understand how population operates as a cultural concept that inflects how we perceive ourselves and each other (and how to live with each other). That is, rather than a demographic account or a social history of demography, I am interested in asking about what ways are available to make sense of the idea of population and how it circulates, what roles these ideas play in the formation and sustainability of particular kinds of identities, and how they are implicated in different frameworks of ethics related to belonging, recognition and cohabitation.

Introduction

13

Chapter 2 investigates some of the issues and debates related to various national policies from around the world that are designed to promote population growth through fertility of extant populations, asking if such growth might be at the expense of the more pressing needs of welcoming refugees, asylum seekers and displaced persons, it being now currently understood that there are about 70 million displaced people on the planet in urgent need of resettlement (CBS News 2018). Grounding an analysis in a critique of biopolitical governance mechanisms, I explore some of the ways in which population management policies operate at the intersection of ‘composition’ and ‘size’. In Chapter 3, I draw on a series of texts expressing concern about Australia’s population size to show some of the ways in which anxieties over population growth pivot between justifications about the ability of urban infrastructure to support a greater number of bodies, and how those questions are often manipulated for political gain to be refocused on migration and fears about the ‘unauthorised’ arrivals of asylum seekers. Given the ways in which the unethical perception of asylum seekers as radically ‘other’ and not ‘fully human’ results in the violence of exclusion, denial or assault, it is important to understand how the circulation of concepts that help condition population size debates is utilised, sometimes for nefarious reasons and sometimes out of ignorance or oversimplification. Chapter 4 presents a theoretical overview of the relationship between population and identity. Judith Butler’s (1990, 1993) theories of performativity articulate a powerful concept of the relationship between subjectivity and discourse, in which the codes, practices, conventions, categories, names and signifiers of identity are given in language and in which subjects are compelled to perform these in order to maintain self-coherence, intelligibility, recognisability for social participation, and belonging. The chapter points to a gap in these theorisations by arguing that in a contemporary neoliberal global culture in which ‘population’ circulates as a meaningful social concept and a practice of counting people, it is directly responsible for producing frameworks of belonging, normativity, citizenship, mobility and other discourses deployed in the constitution, performance and articulation of social identities. How subjectivity is produced in terms of those around us is, in other words, conditioned by population concepts and thus part of the network of discourses across neoliberal, administrative, disciplinary and biopolitical formations that make certain identities intelligible while relegating others to the zone of incoherence and bare life. The second section of this book moves from policy, opinion, journalistic and political texts to examine how population as a concept circulates in popular culture, entertainment and fictional texts, particularly film, television and popular science writing. In the majority of these texts, questions of population are focused on global population size, often serving as the site for addressing displaced public anxieties about both overpopulation and underpopulation. They sometimes also articulate worries over the non-fixity of a

14

Introduction

population’s composition by representing the figure of the migrant or foreigner through metaphors of alienness and monstrosity—not necessarily always in ways that eschew ethics of welcome, care and hospitality. Chapter 5 focuses on the representation of overpopulation, and the ways in some genres of science fiction film and television from the 1970s onwards utilise visuality and setting to represent apprehension over crowdedness, resource scarcity or the emergence of totalitarian governance systems designed to manage large populations. Exploring the genealogy of overpopulation anxieties as they draw on polemicist texts about growth, I argue that cultural representations of population size help condition public attitudes to the idea of population as a figure of troublesomeness. Chapter 6 looks to the converse, focusing on filmic depictions of radical depopulation and what this means for understanding people, identity, civilisation and being. Apocalyptic fiction, film and television regularly present narratives with a backdrop in which there has been a radical drop in global population. Arguably, the popular fascination with the very idea of apocalypse is an expression of anxiety over the social, cultural, economic, civilisational effects and the impact on identity and subjectivity that a substantial, sudden and unexpected drop in population numbers would bring. Apocalyptic texts, I suggest, demonstrate the everyday relationship between an idea of the stability of population size and an idea of human ‘civilisation’. Chapter 7 considers the composition of a global population of humans in temporal and futural terms in the context of one aspect of technological development sometimes depicted as that which will ‘interrupt’ the human population’s continuity: genetic engineering. There have been a number of studies of contemporary understandings of genetics that draw on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein novel and its persistent re-emergence in film and television throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Shelley’s assertion of the dangers of producing multiple post-human creatures that will breed a ‘race of devils’ points to the ways in which population concepts rely on the invocation of an adversarial otherness, while later variants of her work that engage with genetic engineering open arguments about the extent to which a concept of population can accommodate radical change to its form and composition over time. The final section of the book is comprised of three chapters that explore the relationship between attitudes (towards population make-up, migrants, refugees and others) and ethics in relation to an obligation to cohabit the world without violence, exclusion or vulnerabilisation. How population concepts are deployed socially and politically requires ethical consideration, as do the question not only of who to count but also of how to count in ways that, hopefully, do not always need to produce marginalisation and practices of othering. In the 2016 United Stated elections, electoral support was built for the Trump presidential campaign by invoking an idea that the population harboured a ‘forgotten people’, promoting the idea that a disenfranchised group should see themselves as the true representatives of a ‘real America’ in contrast to migrants.

Introduction

15

In the United Kingdom, similar discourses were utilised to produce the Brexit outcome in a way in which populism trumped political interest and social welfare. The term ‘forgotten people’ also has a long history in Australia, having been used in the mid-twentieth century by liberal–conservative political figures to articulate a middle class ignored in policy and social mobility. Chapter 8 examines the relationship between population, populism and belonging, investigating the different discursive and social threads by which certain groups in a population position themselves as having been disenfranchised and excluded in the light of population composition changes of the late twentieth century. It will help us understand how the concept of population is discursively produced through notions of struggle to belong, and how those ideas of a struggle for population belonging and exclusion from populations are utilised variously for political ends. Chapter 9 analyses some examples of administrative, social and cultural mechanisms that use a range of perceptions of bodies to produce exclusions from populations. If population is always a counting of bodies and an accounting of who can be counted, then the extent to which bodies are demarcated to be counted differently or not counted at all demands that we investigate how marginalisation and exclusion begin at the interface between population and corporeality. Focusing particularly on how indigenous bodies, racialised bodies and the bodies of some migrants are critiqued in public sphere discourse, this chapter explores how the practice of raciality is reproduced over time to condition a concept of population, and how thinking about bodies might help find alternatives that are nonexclusionary. Chapter 10 examines some philosophical and ethical texts from the perspective of attitude. Invoking the idea of attitude as that which orients a subject towards others, allows a critique of Judith Butler’s ethics of nonviolence through asking what are the conditions for an encounter with otherness that might reframe attitudes towards refugees and, in some cases, establish an ethics of hospitality and a pragmatic resettlement system but, in other cases, make that ‘welcome’ conditional, thereby repeating the violence of categorisation and rejection. Exploring simultaneously some of the ways in which an attitude towards ecology, sustainability and the role of human life in the production of climate change, I argue that Butler’s account of ethical obligation to welcome cohabitation on the planet presents ways in which identity, space, belonging, hospitality and ecological awareness converge about the idea of population. This is not to suggest that an ethical framework for ensuring practices of welcome and sound ecological management can be produced by changing attitudes alone. Rather, as with all other parts of this book, it is to point to the fact that a critical engagement with an idea of population can be a markedly good starting point for thinking about how we might do subjectivity and belonging in different, more ethical ways for a future sustainability and liveability.

16

Introduction

References Agamben, G., 1995. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. HellerRoazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Arendt, H., 2006. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. London: Penguin. Butler, J., 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Butler, J., 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. London: Routledge. Butler, J., 2016. ‘We, the people’: thoughts on freedom of assembly. In: A. Badiou et al., eds. What is a People?, trans. J. Gladding. New York: Columbia University Press, 49–64. CBS News, 2018. World Refugee Day marked as almost 69 million displaced. CBS News, 20 June. Available from: www.cbsnews.com/news/world-refugee-day-2018-alm ost-69-million-refugees-fled-war-violence-persecution/. Accessed 14 February 2019. Cryle, P. and Stephens, E., 2017. Normality: A Critical Genealogy. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Ehrlich, P.R., 1968. The Population Bomb. New York: Ballantine. Hardin, G., 1968. The tragedy of the commons. Science, 162(3859), 1243–1248. Miller, N., 2019. ‘The great replacement’: an idea now at the heart of Europe’s politics. Sydney Morning Herald, 19 March. Available from: www.smh.com.au/world/europ e/the-great-replacement-the-racist-idea-now-at-the-heart-of-europe-s-politics-201903 19-p515cc.html. Accessed 22 March 2019. Norman, J., 2016. Pauline Hanson calls for Muslim immigration ban in maiden speech to senate. ABC News, 14 September. Available from: www.abc.net.au/news/2016-09-14/ one-nation-senator-pauline-hanson-makes-first-speech-to-senate/7845150. Accessed 21 January 2019. O’Neill, B.C. et al., 2001. Population and Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Olson, K., 2016. Conclusion: fragile collectivities, imagined sovereignties. In: A. Badiou et al., eds. What is a People?, trans. J. Gladding. New York: Columbia University Press, 107–131. Population Matters, 2019. Why population matters. Population Matters. https://popula tionmatters.org/the-issue. Accessed 29 January 2019. Rancière, J., 2016. The populism that is not to be found. In: A. Badiou et al., eds. What is a People?, trans. J. Gladding. New York: Columbia University Press, 101–105. Urry, J., 2007. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity.

Part I

Population, identity and governance in public debates and (inter)national policy

2

Fertility promotion, power and contemporary eugenics

Introduction Promoting fertility in order to increase national population size has been central to the projects of Western national governments since the nineteenth century, and fertility schemes continue to be deployed as mechanisms that control how that population grows and what that population looks like (literally, to some extent). Such growth is seen to be beneficial in Western liberal nation-states as a controlled growth in population is expected to produce economic growth, benefiting those positioned to profit from it by increasing the size of spending markets and the size of a potential debt market (Lazzarato 2011, pp. 154–155). It is thus part of a neoliberal strategy mechanised, not through a laissez-faire approach to population, but through the promotion of particular kinds of fertility via benefits and incentives, such as family payments, bonuses for childbirth, and tax relief designed ostensibly to provide support to the private family’s child-rearing costs while fostering the conditions for an increase in the national fertility rate (Cover 2011). At the same time, a discourse of population growth through fertility of citizens and residents is promoted socially with both mechanisms operating together to discourage views that are sometimes deemed ‘selfish’, such as deciding not to have children in order to avoid the labour costs of child-rearing (Clark 1970, p. 223) or by continuing to use contraception significantly into marriage (Brass 1970, p. 141). At the same time, however, many of these same countries also have strict laws controlling immigration and even stricter rules and practices to prevent the arrival of asylum seekers and refugees. In this context, a mixed message is present as a long-term cultural formation that ‘sticks’ to the concept of population—that controlled population growth is good but only if it is the ‘right’ people growing the population, local births as opposed to foreign bodies arriving from elsewhere. These interventions in the discursive framing of the concept of population serve as particular kinds of logic governing our identification with population—we identify with this as a matter of whose being in this space is encouraged and whose is discouraged. The discourse of pro-fertility has appeared at various times historically in a number of Western nations. For example, a pro-natalist movement was active in France between 1919 and 1945, arguing that French couples had a patriotic

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Population, identity and governance

responsibility to produce a greater number of children, with government support for this movement by the late 1930s (Reggiani 1996). In the United States, Republican presidential primary candidate Rick Santorum proposed in 2012 a tripling of tax credits for children in order to increase the national birth rate (Kim 2012). Several Australian governments during the 1990s and 2000s aimed to increase the national population through increased fertility using the incentive techniques of family payments per number of children in a household, and what was called a ‘baby bonus’ payment made to families who gave birth to a new Australian child (Cover 2011). While most nation-state governments are involved in broad population development programmes of some kind, none are developed in an ideological vacuum, nor are they necessarily deployed for population growth per se. Rather, they are policies that aim to shape a particular formation of national identity through the reproduction of compositional norms of population. Such schemes and the public sphere discourse and dialogue about them make nation-building through controlled growth of ‘its people’ the object of power, arguably at the expense of global overpopulation, climate change, resource distribution and the free movement of peoples, including refugees, across the planet. That is to say, policies that focus on population as the object of power within the contexts of fertility, immigration, border control and ageing, do so by framing population control as a matter for a nation without regard for global interests, excluding from policy such issues as global sustainability as well as issues of the inequitable distribution of bodies globally in ways that could potentially be rectified through increased immigration and mobility. This has implications for the questions of what sort of population will be moulded by policies of governance, and what form of national identity will be constituted by—and constitutive of—that population. By constituting the concept of population through nationalist approaches, the range of governance mechanisms thus always perceives population through a notion of race, which, even when submerged, has a resilience and persistence in discourses that centre on the management of populations (Macey 2009, p. 156, Oswin 2008, pp. 99–100). In this chapter I would like to consider the implications of a discourse that promotes population growth through fertility, while discouraging population growth through the welcome of displaced bodies, refugees and forced migrants. A useful way to do this is to ground these questions in a contemporary understanding of biopolitical mechanisms of governance to explore how different notions of national identity develop through the distinct—yet related—fields of: (1) policies and public discourse on the administrative and social promotion of fertility; (2) public debate on global overpopulation and climate change; and (3) the movement of populations and peoples in and out of countries. By exploring these together through the framework of biopolitics, the argument emerges that Western governmentality is not only biased towards the production of particular types of citizen but, indeed, is grounded in a eugenicist approach that encourages particular kinds of bodies that privilege heritage, longevity in place, cultural practice and assimilatedness over difference, alternative ethnicities and mobility as well as, particularly, compassionate welcome and hospitality for those who are without place.

Fertility promotion, power and contemporary eugenics

21

The discursive mechanisms by which the role of fertility versus immigration in population growth and composition give an important point of inquiry for social sciences and cultural studies, given that population fertility sits at the interface between the sexual and the social, between the intimate and the collective, and between the private and the public. In the light of the role of fertility promotion schemes at a time of increasing debate on climate change, marginal but significant discussions of global overpopulation, migration, the need to find not only solutions but homes for refugees, asylum seekers and other displaced persons, a number of important questions emerge that help us apprehend some of the ways in which population as a concept is governed by nationalism and nationalist politics rather than by demography, ethics and critique. I will examine here some of the ways in which the interface between the different fields and objects of biopolitical regulation can be understood through public sphere debate, popular cultural texts and an assessment of the ways in which Foucault’s theories of the biopolitical centre on the national over the global, providing a constitutive framework of eugenicism and racism in the public discourse of population.

Babies, biopolitics and national fertility Schemes that promote fertility and population growth through the market force of providing financial support to new and continuing parents are common in Western countries. From 1944, Canada provided financial assistance to families with new children until the children were aged 16 (later 18), although from 1979 it was means-tested to provide greater benefit to those on low incomes. However, a tax credit scheme provided parents with tax savings, initially regressively—so that those with higher earnings and taxation saved a greater amount—to a flat rate from 1988. The family assistance programmes were further revised in 1993, combining the above schemes into a single monthly payment, adding up to approximately $1,000 per year per child, with some variation depending on income. There are some state variations, for example additional children born to a family in Quebec receive a higher supplement for each additional child up to the third child, and children in Alberta attract different rates of payment depending on age. In the developed world, the United States has one of the lowest rates of support for its citizens, reflected by very poor schemes for parenting leave, with protection usually only to the tune of unpaid leave for those working for larger companies. There are some small tax credits for taxpayers who have children, although these have varied over time. It is significant, perhaps, that a fiscal practice and policy of promoting fertility is apparently less necessary in the United States. Rather, social and cultural practices do this job better in the United States than elsewhere, primarily through a powerful anti-abortion sensibility, one that sometimes spills over into an anti-contraception set of cultural values in some areas as well. According to a 2018 Pew Research Centre report, 37 per cent of United States adults believe abortion should be

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Population, identity and governance

illegal in most cases—although that figure has risen as high 44 per cent, it has never fallen below 37 per cent and remains close to the 38 per cent level of 1995 at the time this polling began. When broken down into age, it is still as high 35 per cent among those aged between 18 and 29 years. In terms of race, according to the same report, those who believe abortion should be illegal is considerably higher among Hispanic adults (44 per cent) than white (35 per cent) and African American (38 per cent). Unsurprisingly, the higher the level of education, the lower the percentage of those who are opposed to abortion (Pew Research Centre 2018). In this context, the cultural values held across these different sectors does the work of a funded fertility promotion programme, providing an anomaly among Western developed countries. The United Kingdom, unsurprisingly, has a very sound fertility assistance programme, part of the remains of its formerly embedded welfare state. Prospective parents living in most parts of the United Kingdom, and depending on means, are entitled to a one-off payment of £500, which is referred to as a Sure Start Maternity Grant, in addition to varying rates of benefits for children throughout their legal childhood, including weekly payments of approximately £20 for a first child and a smaller amount for subsequent children—these became means-tested after 2013. There is some assumed effect of the various British welfare schemes with the view that they contribute to the continued growth of population in the United Kingdom in contrast to European countries such as Italy and France, which are presently experiencing an ageing population and a reduced level of childbirth (Pettinger 2017). About half of the perceived population growth of the United Kingdom, which is on track to increase by about nine million over the next 20 years, will be due to net migration, the other half to fertility. Various commentators contributing to public debate related to France’s population have, in the past, expressed concern that its population sustainability and growth had been too heavily reliant on immigration rather than childbirth (Williams 2017) and that, despite growth, France has an ageing population with about one-fifth of its members aged over 65 years (Connexion 2018). However, France has had one of the higher birth rates among European Union countries, and part of this is the result of fertility promotion mechanisms designed to encourage parents to have larger families. This was done in 2005 with a scheme that paid a considerably larger family benefit for any parent who took time off to have a third child (DW 2005). This has been in addition to a tax scheme designed to benefit families on the basis of size, and extensive child welfare payments and parenting payments, all of which are policies that marketise participation in the sustainability and, ultimately, the growth of the population, separate from utilising immigration numbers to boost population growth. Population management schemes that promote and reward fertility among white Australian mothers have been deployed in Australia since Federation, including the introduction in 1912 of an allowance that was payable to new mothers but that, under the Commonwealth Maternity Allowances Act,

Fertility promotion, power and contemporary eugenics

23

excluded making payments to indigenous, Asian or Papuan mothers living in Australia (Baird 2006, pp. 198–200). Such a ‘baby bonus’ payment was reintroduced by the Conservative government led by Prime Minister John Howard in 2002 and was continued, expanded and modified by the subsequent Labor government led by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Prime Minister Julia Gillard, and the continuation of an AU $5,000 maternity payment became an ongoing electoral commitment (Coorey 2008). Subsequent to concerns that it was being spent on consumer goods rather than babyrelated consumption (Nader 2008), it was means-tested by annual household income from 2009 (Peatling 2008). The policy framework that maintained the Australian fertility scheme was driven by administrative and business sector concerns that the Australian total fertility rate had fallen to 1.729 births per woman (in 2001) marking a relatively steady fall since the statistic’s height of greater than 3.5 births per woman in 1961 (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2009). For a population to replace itself without migration, a rate of 2.1 births per woman is required (Bell 2004). The baby bonus scheme was, indeed, effective in increasing fertility rates, with a rise to 1.97 births per woman by 2008 (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2009; Australian Bureau of Statistics 2009), and reductions in mothers’ age of childbirth (Martin 2009). On the basis of the increases, the Australian Commonwealth government predicted an Australian population of 35.9 million by 2050 (Commonwealth of Australia 2010, p. 5), causing some consternation and public debate about infrastructure, lifestyle and true sources of growth, some of which I will discuss in Chapter 3. Demographer Bob Birrell (2010), however, pointed out that the Treasury projection for Australia’s population in 2050 was the result of 85 per cent of the projected growth coming from net overseas migration, including children born to migrants once in Australia, rather than wholly the promotion of fertility among the existing population and its descendants, arguing that policies driven by a ‘panic’ to increase the population for the purposes of security were overstated. Indeed, by May 2011, it was revealed that Treasury figures indicated the baby bonus was not producing a sustained fertility increase at all (Fyfe 2011). As with many other countries utilising fertility promotion policies to maintain or increase population size, much of the public purpose of the scheme was articulated in nationalistic terms. For example, then Treasurer Peter Costello (2006) publicly encouraged Australian couples to take advantage of the baby bonus scheme for the benefit of the nation, asking families to ‘have one child for mum, one for dad and one for the country’. In the same year, Prime Minister Howard emphatically urged parents to breed: ‘come on, come on, your nation needs you’ (Shaw and Farouque 2004). Some public commentators put the national need in economic rather than social or nationalistic terms, arguing that an ageing population was reducing the taxation base while increasing the cost of non-working retirees, risking ‘going from a ratio of 5 workers per retiree now to 2.4 by 2051’ (Colebatch 2007) with others pointing to the need to maintain a labour force in order to maintain

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Population, identity and governance

infrastructure (Doherty 2008). Others argued that the policy was a conservative ideological move designed to encourage mothers to stay with their children out of the workforce or to reduce the costs of parental leave on businesses (ACTU 2004). Still others expressed the view that the policy was driven by über-conservative politicians such as Tony Abbott (who later became prime minister) who were opposed to abortion (Grattan 2005). The archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal Pell, stated there was a national crisis in not ‘producing enough babies to keep the population stable’ (Morris 2008). However, it was Malcolm Turnbull (later prime minister) who pointed to the nationalistic, racist or ultimately Western driver for the policy: he asked if it can ‘be true that at the peak of our technology and prosperity the Western world is losing the confidence to reproduce itself ’ and if we were ‘witnessing the beginning of the dying of the West’ (Turnbull 2004). He expressed concern that reduced fertility in Australia would lead to a shift in civilisation itself. For Turnbull, the priority was not population increase by any method, but ensuring population growth was the product of those who would pass down some semblance of ‘Western values’ rather than relying on immigration to maintain population numbers for economic purposes: Certainly we are at a tipping point in our civilization’s story. Unless fertility rates dramatically improve, in a cycle of loss and dislocation matched only by the Black Death in the 14th century, societies with birth rates substantially below replacement level will either dwindle into an insignificant fraction of their current numbers or be swamped by larger and larger waves of immigration. (Turnbull 2004) For example, citing the work of United States conservative writer Don Feder, conservative commentator Miranda Devine (2010) referred to a ‘demographic winter’ in arguing that the decline in birth rates among women in Western countries would result in future international conflict due to the lack of available young men to serve in armies to protect Western nations. The linking of concerns about civilisation and questions of national population numbers indicates some of the ways in which a contemporary ‘terror culture’ clash of civilisations thesis is governing concepts of nationhood, thus national populations, and thus national identities. The theory of the clash of civilisations was proposed by Samuel Huntington, who argued in the 1990s that cultural and religious identification would be a source of international and global conflict in the era subsequent to the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet bloc. For Huntington, a civilisational distinctiveness was posited about Western cultures (North America, Europe and former European colonies) against various other groupings such as Latin America, the Islam-dominated regions, subSahara Africa and various Eastern groupings. The clash would be produced, in this thesis, by identifications of religion and culture exacerbated into conflict by globalisation, economic development, communication speed and increased

Fertility promotion, power and contemporary eugenics

25

interaction (Huntington 1996). This thesis has had some considerable traction since the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the launch of the so-called war on terror, whereby the world became figured as two competing blocs composed of various national populations and demarcated as the Western national population groups and nations with high proportions of adherents of Islam. The emergence of a civilisational clash, as problematic and often reductive as it is (Berman 2004, pp. 182–183), has clearly influenced a number of positions on fertility in the West in two ways: first, the suspicion over immigration that seeks to keep various so-called ‘civilisations’ apart in a geographic and kinship sense, and, second, sponsoring the call for an increase in fertility in order that civilisation-grouping ‘numbers’ or populousness are maintained for both cultural and military purposes. Between arguments for the need for population growth for national security (Devine 2010), for religious reasons, for the preservation of Western civilisation (against an unspoken ‘other’ civilisation), and for economic reasons, fertility promotion schemes across many Western countries condition the figure and concept of population as that which is necessary in size, precarious in composition, and is in the service of that more nefarious concept, the nation, rather than the nation in service of its populace.

The biopolitics of fertility promotion To make sense of the relationship between fertility promotion, the sponsorship of population growth and the protection of the Western nation, it is helpful to understand it through the ways in which they are connected by governance as distinct from political discourse or ideological motivation. Michel Foucault’s histories of governance in the context of power relations remain among the most sophisticated frameworks that enable critical thinking about this topic. Governance, for Foucault, involves the deployment of a number of different technologies of power. First and most traditional is sovereignty, which, in Foucault’s analysis, is no longer connected with the contemporary Western state, although Giorgio Agamben (1998) has argued that the biopolitical concern with natural life is indeed still the object of sovereign power and that the contemporary state is a continuation of sovereignty with new tools and mechanisms of biopolitics utilised in governance, rather than a break from past formations. Indeed, sovereignty re-emerges in regard to population in particular nongovernmental formations in which we see certain subjugations and exclusions, particularly those that are racially motivated (Foucault 2004, p. 27). When sovereignty serves particular kinds of framings of the identity of the nation, racism often underpins ‘local’ sovereign decisions over life and death on behalf of the nation. Second, discipline is connected with but often exceeds institutions, as the mechanism of power enacted through surveillance and regimentation of the body (Foucault 2004, p. 250); within the context of national identity, the subjectification

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Population, identity and governance

of students to educational discourses and categorisations of nationality, practices of teaching history, the development and conduct of national soldiers, and the subjectivity of children constituted within the institution of the family in terms of nationality and bloodlines are all examples. The third technology of power deployed by governance, biopolitics, is that mechanism of power deployed through the national government and its extensive bureaucracy and division of departmental functions. It is a regulatory technology that addresses a national ‘race’ as a whole and is deployed to ensure an economic, cultural and political status quo. What a biopolitical power framework of governance does for population, its fertility, mortality, longevity, health and productivity, and its objects of knowledge, it does with the motivation of making it live, of preserving humanity as a species. (Foucault 2004, p. 243). To do so, it reinforces and maintains contemporary Western liberal–capitalism while reinforcing its own role as an activity that governmentalises the state (Foucault 2007, p. 110). Both, of course, have the same ends: sustaining the neo-liberal social order that began to emerge in the West in the eighteenth century and is today effectively synonymous with authorised descriptions of Western civilisation itself (Lazzarato 2009, p. 119). Thus while there may be arguments about the nuanced differences between the ways in which governments deploy the promotion of fertility under the guise of directing welfare support towards the more needy, the fact that there is little distinction between different national examples of fertility schemes is not because the social and economic policies of different nation-states are indistinguishable, but because the form the Western nation-state takes is indistinguishable from its system of governance, which was established in late eighteenth-century Europe, continuing that era’s articulation of growth, maintenance and security of the individual state in mutual competitiveness with other states, rather than in the context of more global concerns. The biopolitical intervention of fertility promotion is thus one of a range of mechanisms deployed to sustain the nation-state through the reproduction of the existing population. Thus the deployment of biopolitics as a mechanism of power that constructs and shapes a notion of national population, and in this context through the promotion of fertility, clearly demarcates population as defined by nation and nationality in a framework that is often biologically racist. For Foucault, racism in biopolitics does not take the form of mutual contempt or hatred between racialised groupings, but a justification for killing that characterises the ‘healthy life’ of some populations as requiring the death of subjects who are so defined by virtue of belonging to other populations (Clough 2008, p. 18). Racism, in this context, becomes inscribed in the very workings of biopolitics as the basic mechanism of power in the contemporary nation-state (Foucault 2004, p. 254). It allows power to treat population in general as ‘a mixture of races’ or ‘subspecies’ (Foucault 2004, p. 255). It produces forms of contemporary subjectivity on the basis of the necessity of the death of the other, whereby the more that die from another racial grouping, the more that are

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allowed to live—it is thus a form of racism that is not figured within military or political relationships but through biologism (Foucault 2004, pp. 255–256). Not disconnected from the power of normalisation, then, the concomitant purpose of biopolitics is that it seeks to promote and protect the population as a constructed entity through a normalising composition figured in racial terms. Promoting the fertility of the population, even if in a culturally or racially pluralist society, returns to race in other forms as competing civilisations, marking the population through a tacit but ever-present discourse of race.

Planetary overpopulation and climate change If the biopolitical governance systems of contemporary nation-states promote the continued growth of population figured as a national object, then it is important to consider what might be sacrificed in order to do so. What does population growth mean—indeed, what might it result in—if considered critically, outside of the concept of the nation? In what ways do prevailing frameworks of thinking about population in nationalistic terms as that which must be grown obscure the global concerns about climate, environment, ecology and sustainability of life into the future? There is a growing body of work—albeit on the fringes, and rarely informing national policy or the construction of national identity—that indicates that global overpopulation will result ultimately in the non-sustainability of the planet and is the prime contributor to water and air pollution (Tucker 2006, p. 13), overfishing and the depletion of the salt- and freshwater stocks of fish (Coles 2004), significant temperature increases causing sea levels to rise and the reduction of available fresh water (Sargent 2008, p. 283), undermining the capacity of the land to produce food on a global scale and resulting in conditions that would lead to the absolute scarcity of food in the future (Hildyard 1996, p. 292), and desertification and soil erosion (Savage 1993, p. 1285). Global overpopulation remains marginal to the discourses of international sustainability in terms of population health (Mumford 1993) and ecology (Savage 1993, p. 1285), despite arguments that ecological protection or amelioration programmes that do not take into account the centrality of overpopulation are inadequate and ineffective (Bennett 2007, p. 101; Powledge 2007, p. 101). While demographic planning has certainly been part of government responsibility since the nineteenth century, it has traditionally concentrated on national planning, ignoring the more global and/or multiculturalist concerns of planetary overpopulation or leaving these to supranational organisations, such as the United Nations, the World Health Organisation and various international conferences (Sargent 2008, p. 282). Despite their international roles in monitoring the welfare of the planet and its sustainability, these organisations tend to support the interests of their dominant national member nations or other perspectives that operate against a unified global and sustainable population, climate and ecology framework. For example, the Vatican attempted to undermine attempts to bring the global overpopulation question into the debate, discussion and policy development by utilising the services of the Catholic-dominated

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member nations. This occurred at the 1994 Cairo conference sponsored by the United Nations (Sargent 2008, p. 282) and the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, where the Vatican and anti-abortion lobbies insisted on the removal of any reference to overpopulation (Savage 1993, p. 1285). There is also some evidence that the Vatican strategically shaped WHO policy to remove overpopulation as a health concern (Mumford 1993, p. 21). In terms of national interests, such international organisations and conferences will be made up of member nations and will work to represent those national interests (Sargent 2008, p. 282). Thus, while supranational organisations deploy the mechanics of biopolitics and demography, they are typically ineffectual in utilising these to generate policy and change: the effective realm of biopolitics is always grounded in the national, despite cultural and corporate capitalist globalisation. Likewise, the issue of global overpopulation and resource sustainability remains segregated from almost all Western nations’ policies of population growth. Fertility schemes are always nationalistic policies promoting the growth of an existing ‘national’ population at the expense of opportunities to consider other, regional and global concerns such as climate change and its relationship with global overpopulation, and the movement of populations for political and economic reasons, which includes refugees. Declining birth rates and depopulation in one country in a world in which other regions are drastically overpopulated provides an opportunity at least to discuss global population overall. However, overpopulation of the planet is more often seen as a side issue, something for alarmists, fiction writers and Third World governments to worry about—a concern from which Australia and other Western countries can ‘protect’ themselves by increasing border protection, security technologies and reducing immigration in its many forms. Very few commentators, politicians and analysts will engage with discourses that prompt the validity of planned population reduction on either a national or global scale, and this comes from a government and popular uneasiness about state and public interference in the intimate areas of sexuality, reproduction, childbirth and family. The state and the public can promote fertility either nationally or globally, but the restriction of it is deemed problematic, as we have witnessed in the twentieth-century response to China’s excesses in family planning and population reduction (Savage 1993, p. 1285). Any public discourse on global overpopulation tends to remain on the fringe of public debate and national or global strategy. For example, we see commentary on the notion of overpopulation from Prince Philip who, as a member of the British royal family, is not expected to enter political debate: ‘The food prices are going up—everyone thinks it’s to do with not enough food, but it’s really that demand is too great, too many people … It’s a little embarrassing for everybody, no one quite knows how to handle it’ (The Age 2008). Robert Jameson, an independent candidate for the Queensland seat of Mackay, stated in 2010: ‘I am a single issue candidate. On planet earth we have a plague of humans’ (Chapman 2010). A taxi driver and amateur scientist, Jameson suggested that curbing population growth in Australia through

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reduced migration and discouragement of fertility increases—as well as tying overseas aid to family planning—was the only viable solution to climate change. While a valuable contribution in its own terms, much like the discourse of many political outsiders, it is difficult without a broad, popular and cultural groundswell for the opinions of the ‘non-expert’ to be integrated into systems of governance. I discuss the relegation of global discourses of overpopulation into popular culture as a response to social anxieties in greater detail in Chapter 6, however at this point it is important to note that this relegation allows biopolitical governance systems rooted in nationalism and racism to continue without establishing conflict at the policy level. Much less so in policy and public debate, and more so in popular science writing, questions of population sometimes are inflected by global concerns when related, not to the climate (as a vital resource for life), but water (as another vital resource). Water, of course, is an essential resource for the continuation of humans as a species and, indeed, for the continuation of most other life across the globe. Water is not only a limited resource—it is not a resource that can be additionally produced, synthesised or, in the longer term, discovered elsewhere, unlike fossil fuels, agricultural products or the like. As Jeffrey Rothfeder (2001) has put it: With population growth and expanding economies, demands for water are skyrocketing, even taking into account conversation measures. In fact, the 6 billion people on Earth today—projected to grow to 8 billion by 2025—share the same amount of water that was available to less than one-sixth of the population at the turn of the nineteenth century. And while dozens of studies predict what future water requirements will be, the consensus is that the total amount of water needed for people, for producing food of the swelling population, and for industry will increase by as much as 45 percent in the next twenty years. (p. 8) Arguments such as these, of course, are only operating on the very fringe of the discourses of biopolitical governance. The objects of knowledge of biopolitics place both population and economy at the very centre—as putting the resource itself at the very hub of the argument does not find its ‘fit’ within the biopolitical, and therefore is not an argument that has an appeal to a governance structure grounded in neoliberalism and nationhood. This was certainly reflected in the ways in which the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in December 2009—dominated by national representatives and national interests—failed to address the co-conception of climate issues and global population (Wooldridge 2010). For example, the proposals put forward by representative nation-states at the conference frequently included pledges for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions on a national basis on condition of an international agreement being reached. The

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figurative term here, of course, is ‘international’, whereby nation-states manage the reduction of the effects of human-induced climate change through governance at the national level, but in ways that leave intact population growth (nation-by-nation), without a mechanism for the longterm reduction of numbers of persons, despite the arguable relationship between population and consumption of carbon-producing energy.

Eugenics in the West: discourses of fertility versus hospitality for the ‘foreign’ other While fertility promotion to sustain or increase national populations is at the expense of—arguably—more urgent global concerns about shared resources and the shared global ecology and climate, it remains to be asked if the nationalism that underpins it is also at the expense of an ethics of non-violence, by which I mean at the expense of the preservation of a climate that provides liveability or at the expense of displaced persons seeking a home and a liveable life. That is, if the maintenance or increase of a national population for many of the reasons given in policy discussions is simply about numbers of bodies, then what frameworks of thinking govern the favouring of new bodies (meaning overall global growth) over existing bodies in mobility (meaning national growth without encouraging an increase in global population, to put it simply). On the one hand, there is a discourse that allows us to think about national identity in terms of the biopolitical promotion of stable or increased fertility of a nation’s population and, on the other, a discourse that, generally separate, constitutes dialogue on population in global terms and in terms of the connected concerns about climate change, global resource management, the production of pollution, sustainability and health. The disjuncture between these two prompts the strategic need to think about the two together, and one way in which to do so is to revisit the question of population movements across borders. The argument here is that while, on the one hand, national governance mechanisms promote fertility of the existing population (which includes current immigrants permitted into the country through regulated systems), on the other hand large numbers of refugees, who might increase population equally as well, are turned away or are processed to ensure they fit within the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which requires countries to grant asylum only to political dissenters, not those who require asylum due to famine, war or gross hardship (Bagaric 2007). In other settings, similar practices are responses to anxieties over the growth of population through others (‘foreigners’) arriving and settling in various ways, whether legally or illegally, and simultaneously produce and exacerbate those anxieties—even though there may be simultaneous and competing social anxieties about a decline in population warranting marketised welfare intervention to promote fertility. For example, the proposed US–Mexico border wall was articulated as a major electoral platform of President Donald Trump, although

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it has remained controversial and resulted in ongoing tensions between the White House and the legislature, and between different commentators and interested parties. What on the one hand is represented as a desperate need to exclude bodies occurs during a time when Western countries are also expressing a desperate need to increase bodies. What is clearly at stake is the origin, type, look and cultural expressions associated with those bodies. Likewise, some of the less-sophisticated public debate about Brexit over the past several years in the United Kingdom has drawn on anti-immigrant sensibility—again, competing with a broader desire to maintain population size. Understandably, although unethically, in all these cases this results in a simultaneous refusal of the existing, living ‘foreign body’ arriving through a border crossing in favour of the non-existent, future body arriving through birth. Biopolitics is the mechanism deployed, then, on behalf of a racist cultural framework. Biopolitics foregrounds the nation-state, and the regulation of immigration is one part of the biopolitical spectrum of governance technologies deployed for the protection of the nation as a body. Immigration is one of the conceptual hubs through which national communities and populations are institutionally imagined and constructed in material terms through the production of a concept of borders that operate to produce particular tensions between a national population determined by citizenship and residency rights and those who are subjects of such a national community (Vukov 2003, pp. 335, 340). For cultural theorist Joanna Zylinska (2004, p. 526), this is a protection against perceived ‘parasites that might want to invade it’, and it mobilises increasingly developed technologies in order to determine the presence and legitimacy of those who seek to move across borders for settlement. Following the work of Judith Butler on political ethics, life and exclusion, Zylinska (2004) is concerned with developing a new political ethics of response and responsibility towards refugees that ‘goes beyond the set of moral obligations’ through finding new ways to think about the inside–outside dichotomy that informs the governmentality of immigration (p. 531). By developing a critical engagement with the biopower of governance that, on the one hand, keeps discussions of ecology, population, fertility and immigration separate and, on the other, constitutes decisions about each of these surreptitiously in tandem, and options for thinking about Western countries’ national identities and the future of their subjectivity produced through membership within and belonging to population are further opened. The underlying question at stake again involves the idea of the motivation for fertility promotion. Much of the motivation is given as maintaining a population for security reasons, for economic reasons or for the maintenance of a taxation base in the light of the growth of the aged segment of the population. These are, however, the open face of the underlying anxieties about population composition that emerge when one considers questions of its size. A statement that demonstrates these anxieties came out of Australia in 2006 when the then Treasurer Peter Costello argued that failing to ‘boost the number of Australian-born babies’ would result in social disruption, given the only other means of maintaining a population was immigration. As Costello stated:

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Population, identity and governance Increasing immigration to cover natural population decline will change the composition of our population and raise concerns about social dislocation … There are some European countries with low birth rates and high immigration which have moved into this situation and it has caused a lot of social disruption. (The Age 2007)

Anti-immigration discourses are, of course, not new in themselves, and they operate across both policy settings and the more banal forms of everyday nationalism (Noble 2002, p. 55). As Barbara Baird (2006, p. 206) has pointed out, public debates on immigration and anti-immigrant statements are part of an ongoing ritual of nationalism and of imagining the national future. This is the trace of biopolitical policy-making within the popular and public sphere. Thus when United States President Trump attempts to force the US Congress to fund a wall to prevent the movement of people from the south into the lands controlled by the United States, or when the UK Independence Party promotes rupture with the European Union partly on the grounds of reducing the free movement of migrants in Britain, or when Australia’s Pauline Hanson expresses fears that Australia is at risk of being ‘swamped by Asians’ (The Age 2003), we bear witness to a violence enacted against the immigrant outsider by the prioritisation of a hospitality for the not-yet-born child of an existing citizen. What, then, underlies the differences in population planning versus immigration policies? An ethical perspective is necessary not only as a means by which to act without violence towards others and towards the globe or its ecology and various climates, but as a mechanism by which to understand the relationship between nationhood and population in contemporary times. The sort of ethics that I discuss later in this book draws heavily on Judith Butler’s (2004, 2009) work on non-violence through recognition and apprehension, which rereads the ethics of Levinas in order to argue for a responsibility to recognise and respond to the vulnerability of the other, which, for our purposes here, can be figured not only as other subjects and other populations, but as ecology itself. Approaching the question of national identity by considering national fertility and immigration together with a view to inputting climate change, global overpopulation and world sustainability into an ethics of national belonging requires us to theorise in two directions. First, one direction moves us away from the massification of subjects that is conditioned by biopolitical frameworks and towards consideration for the specificity of the condition of the refugee at the individualised level (Fassin 2009, pp. 50–51) in order to be able to state the global benefits of population movement as a means of maintaining national population within a notion of sustainability. Second, the other direction moves us towards a critical account of what it is that underlies biopolitics’ claims of processes of inclusion and exclusion in order to be able to point in clearer terms to what it is that (today) we might consider unethical. What I want to do here is explore briefly the ways in

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which the baby bonus policy, policies on population growth, and the mandatory detention of refugees in Australia are part of a racism endemic to governance systems that utilise biopolitics as a mechanism of power within a society that normalises in order to establish and maintain a national identity as part of the constitution of national subjects. The disavowal of ethical relationality beyond national identity figured through population protection can be understood as framed through a persistent eugenicism that forms a core component of the contemporary operations of biopolitical governance. The term eugenics was coined by Francis Galton (Charles Darwin’s cousin) in 1893 from the Greek for ‘good in birth’. It was originally intended to describe the management of human reproduction according to principles of science in order to favour the procreation of the allegedly fittest and to discourage the reproduction of the supposedly genetically less fit (Pilnick 2002, p. 27). Eugenicist policies at their most ostensible rely on a Darwinist ideology of ‘natural selection’ that can be fostered, managed or coordinated. Natural selection presumes that those bodies, subgroups and species with particular genetic traits that allow resistance against environmental catastrophes or ecological change will survive, and go on to repopulate by passing down those genetic traits. However, eugenicism undertakes to manage that natural selection by ensuring the supposed ‘weak’ traits are removed through human selection and intervention. More liberal attitudes towards the so-called ‘weak’ were antithetical to certain claims based on evolution and natural selection, with advocates arguing that policy should be moulded to fit a survival of the strong or best of the human species. Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871) is often quoted out of context to support such a view. He stated: We civilised men … do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt this must be highly injurious to the race of man. We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind. (Darwin 1871, pp. 168–169) What Darwin advocated, however, was not the eradication of the ‘weak’ in favour of the ‘strong’, pointing instead to the role of sympathy, and suggesting that care of the weak had contingent benefits to the species that should not be ignored. The fact that the quote is often misused to justify eugenicist thinking indicates the heatedness of debates and the complex ethics involved in questions over who should live and who should die. Such an argument, of course, becomes marginalised in the public position of the neoliberal culture’s promotion of life in general, although, as I argue below and in other parts of this book, eugenicism is

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central to biopolitical forms of governance and, in a tacit form, it continues to drive a number of population-based policies about immigration, fertility promotion and sustainability. The term eugenics, of course, became a dirty word after the 1940s when it was discovered the Nazi atrocities were committed in its name (Galton 2001, p. 11). That does not mean eugenicist policies have disappeared— rather, that they are active in biopolitical techniques, such as the economic encouragement of some groups to breed, as we see with many national fertility promotion schemes. For Foucault (2004, p. 82), eugenics combined with the myths of the historical past permitted a Nazi state-based and biopolitical racism that sought to protect one biologically defined national identity through the eradication of another. While politicians working within contemporary governance structures are too savvy to enunciate racially motivated eugenics attitudes in public, eugenicist racism within a normalising, neoliberal society is a precondition of biopolitical decisions about acceptance and exclusion (Foucault 2004, p. 256). An underlying eugenicism, it can be argued, motivates and underpins disparate biopolitical policies and mechanisms that are rarely articulated in the same breath—fertility, immigration, border control, abortion—on behalf of the maintenance of the nation-state, in place of alternative frameworks for thinking about population in global terms. Discussing the baby bonus policy that was introduced in 1988 in order to increase fertility in Quebec, Kevin Milligan (2002) argued that, at a surface level, it attempted to address the need to provide tax transfers to cover public pensions and aged health care. But his analysis suggested that at least part of the motivation was the fear that dwindling populations in Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries could threaten the vitality of various cultures whose survival depended on a critical mass of participants. In other words, what is unspoken but eventually is apparent is that such programmes tend to favour the growth and reproduction of particular identities over others. When alarm is spread over the dwindling of a Western, Caucasian population and it is combined with strategies to reduce immigration and places for refugees, we witness racist eugenics at work, underlying the biopolitics of population planning, immigration policies and the disjuncture of the national interest from the global population. Government figures and politicians often make articulations about national identity and the immigration of refugees and asylum seekers in electoral speeches, but it is the biopolitical technologies of governance that are deployed to protect the nation, by deciding that those who come into a country do so through the birthing canal, with not too many arriving through official migration schemes and hardly any at all trough seeking asylum—at the expense of global sustainability. A national identity predicated on the protection of Western civilisation, security, climate, ecology, economy and its ageing population through an increased fertility of the ‘current’ population, while ignoring the global benefits of

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increased immigration and sanctuary for all sorts of refugees, is effectively eugenics operating in the background of the mechanisms of biopolitical power: not making life live but deciding which kinds of lives live and which other kinds are left to die.

Conclusion: fertility and ethics In Agamben’s (1998) revisions of biopolitics as a governance system conceived as both inflected by sovereignty and in the service of sovereignty, we can see the ‘make die’ of a sovereign power’s objectification of the immigrant and refugee other through a subtle fertility policy favouring birth over arrival. Fertility schemes are, thus, absolutely central technologies of power in the production of the relationship between subjectivity and population through an understanding of population belonging that is mechanised as nationality. Even when biopolitics permits the discursive production of concerns about climate change, ecology, environmental management, carbon pollution caused by human everyday activity and the consumption of industrial products, all of which open up the possibility of understanding and thinking about population in global terms, the definition of population persistently ‘snaps back’ to national interest as the primary definer of the concept. This is one reason why questions of climate change tend not to be discussed in population terms and why human-induced climate change is not understood as the result not merely of human activity that might be done otherwise, but of human population as overpopulation. Biopolitics measures and produces national populations, even if it is in the service of the globalising forms of neoliberalism. Yet in the sphere of global ecology, it is ineffective as a technology that can shape ways of thinking, being, behaving and performing subjectivity that reproduce humanity in terms of place that is signified as global place or place upon the globe. The possibility of understanding the relationship between identity, climate and global population in globalised terms is, then, something that is actively stemmed by nationhood and the production of passionate attachments to population as conceived in national terms. The persistence of these concepts is what Foucault (2007) referred to as a situation in which we find ourselves ‘in a perspective in which historical time is indefinite, in a perspective of indefinite governmentality with no foreseeable term or final aim’ (p. 260). National definitions of the population produced through governance persist in an ongoing way into the future as activity. This is, for Foucault, in contrast to the notion in the Middle Ages that a final empire would be produced in a global way: sovereign kingdoms had not indefinite futurity as the concept of a universal empire persisted, whether that would be, as Foucault notes, the universal empire ‘Of the Caesars or of the Church’ (p. 260). This is a governance of singularity differentiated from his notion of a perpetual peace that ‘will be the dream of a link between states that remain states: in an ongoing balanced plurality’ (p. 260). Concerns that governance of the planet’s whole ecology in

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terms of the population and overpopulation might be supranational emerge as a result of the re-emergence of fears as to what shape such a universal peace would take—the risk that it would be a singular sovereignty. This, of course, is juridical thinking and such fears do not necessarily take into account how biopolitical technologies operate in ways that are both insidious and beneficial. Yet there is an ethical requirement to reshape the making of population and its relationship with subjectivity and selfhood away from national dominance, and that can be said to be through understanding the planet’s precarity (a difficult concept). Judith Butler’s ethics of non-violence demonstrate the obligation towards the vulnerability of the other, since, on the one hand, we are all vulnerable and precarious as living beings and, on the other, we are in a reciprocal relationship with those more vulnerable who demand our recognition and responsiveness. Life, in general, is precarious in that it requires social and economic conditions to be met in order to be sustained as a life (Butler 2009, pp. 13–14). Put in the context of globality and ecology, the obligation on subjects through subjectivity in relationality with global populations is to recognise the precarity of the planet in order to sustain life. This is not life as understood as always sacred: ‘Our obligations are precisely to the conditions that make life possible, not to “life itself”, or rather, our obligations emerge from the insight that there can be no sustained life without those sustaining conditions, and that those conditions are both our political responsibility and the matter of our most vexed ethical decisions’ (p. 23). However, put in the context of climate change, the biopolitical intervention that ought, ethically, to occur should involve an injunction built into the saving of the environment in terms of which life is conditioned and which is a condition of life. That can mean, contrary to other ways in which population is understood, as being beyond the promotion of fertility and the continued increase in the population. And to do so involves, as I will discuss in later chapters, moving beyond the dominance of the nation-state as the definer of population. This is not to embrace biopolitics’ focus on the race or, in this context, humanity in general such that some lives will be sacrificed in order to save the ecology of the planet for other lives. Rather, it is to call upon biopolitics as a technology of power to shape an understanding of population that is at once both local and global, both regional and extensive, and to do so in a way that locates the attachments to place as always from the beginning multiple: attachments to places in which one was born and by which one has a relationality with those in a face-to-face way. This may also include a relationality to others across the globe in ethical responsiveness to the differential production of precariousness and a relation to the globe itself as the place on which humanity conducts relationality as a population as a whole.

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Deutsche Welle, 2005. France moves to encourage large families. Deutsche Welle, 24 September. Available from: www.dw.com/en/france-moves-to-encourage-large-fam ilies/a-1720921. Accessed 31 January 2019. Fassin, D., 2009. Another politics of life is possible. Theory, Culture & Society, 26(6), 44–60. Foucault, M., 2004. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, ed. M. Bertani and A. Fontana, trans. D. Macey. London: Penguin. Foucault, M., 2007. Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, ed. M. Senellart, trans. G. Burchell. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Fyfe, M., 2011. Baby Bonus ‘no boost’ to fertility rate. The Age, 1 May. Available from: www.theage.com.au/. Accessed 1 May 2011. Galton, D., 2001. In Our Own Image: Eugenics and the Genetic Modification of People. London: Little, Brown & Co. Grattan, M., 2005. Cash offer as Abbott moves to reduce abortions. The Age, 16 October. Available from: www.theage.com.au/news/national/. Accessed 19 October 2005. Hildyard, N., 1996. Too many for what? the social generation of food ‘scarcity’ and ‘overpopulation’. The Ecologist, 26(6), 282–289. Huntington, S.P., 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster. Kim, S.M., 2012. Santorum: more babies, please! Politico, 15 January. Available from: www.politico.com. Accessed 10 July 2012. Lazzarato, M., 2009. Neoliberalism in action: inequality, insecurity and the reconstitution of the social. Theory, Culture & Society, 26(6), 109–133. Lazzarato, M., 2011. The Making of Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition, trans. J.D. Jordan. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e). Macey, D., 2009. Rethinking biopolitics, race and power in the wake of Foucault. Theory, Culture & Society, 26(6), 186–205. Martin, P., 2009. New baby boomer generation on the way. The Age, 12 November. Available from: www.theage.com.au/national/. Accessed 12 November 2009. Milligan, K., 2002. Quebec’s Baby Bonus: can public policy raise fertility? Backgrounder. Toronto, ON: C.D. Howe Institute. Morris, L., 2008. Populate or perish: Pell. The Age, 14 July. Available from: www.thea ge.com.au/national/. Accessed 15 July 2008. Mumford, S.D., 1993. The Vatican and the world population policy: an interview with Milton P. Siegel. The Humanist, 53(2), 21–25. Nader, C., 2008. Biological clock beats Baby Bonus. The Age, 6 August. Available from: www.theage.com.au/national/. Accessed 5 March 2010. Noble, G., 2002. Comfortable and relaxed: furnishing the home and nation. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 16(1), 53–66. Oswin, N., 2008. Critical geographies and the uses of sexuality: deconstructing queer space. Progress in Human Geography, 32(1), 89–103. Peatling, S., 2008. Cut-off at $150,000 for Baby Bonus. The Age, 14 May. Available from: www.theage.com.au/business/. Accessed 5 March 2010. Pettinger, T., 2017. Impact of rising population in the UK. Economics Help. Available from: www.economicshelp.org/blog/11031/uk-economy/impact-of-rising-populatio n-in-the-uk/. Accessed 28 January 2019. Pew Research Centre, 2018. Public opinion on abortion. Available from: www.pew forum.org/fact-sheet/public-opinion-on-abortion/. Accessed 28 January 2019.

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Pilnick, A., 2002. Genetics and Society: An Introduction. Buckingham, PA: Open University Press. Powledge, F., 2007. Letter to the editor: response from Powledge. BioScience, 52(2), 101. Reggiani, A.H., 1996. Procreating France: the politics of demography, 1919–1945. French Historical Studies, 19(3), 725–754. Rothfeder, J., 2001. Every Drop for Sale: Our Desperate Battle Over Water in a World About to Run Out. New York: Putnam. Sargent, M., 2008. Big problems, big decisions. Nature, 45(7193), 282–283. Savage, R., 1993. Overpopulation and overconsumption: combating the two main drivers of global destruction. British Medical Journal, 306(6888), 1285–1286. Shaw, M. and Farouque, F., 2004. Keeping Baby Bonus in check. The Age, May 13. Available from: www.theage.com.au/. Accessed 14 May 2004. The Age, 2003. Pauline Hanson still walks among us. The Age, 24 August. Available from: www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/08/23/1061529374928.html. Accessed 14 March 2010. The Age, 2007. Population pushes past 21 million. The Age, 4 December. Available from: www.theage.com.au/news/national/. Accessed 4 December 2007. The Age, 2008. Too many people, says Prince Philip. The Age, 11 May. Available from: www.theage.com.au/news/world/. Accessed 11 May 2008. Tucker, P., 2006. Strategies for containing population growth. The Futurist, September–October, 13–14. Turnbull, M., 2004. Maiden speech in Commonwealth Parliament. Hansard. 29 November. Vukov, T., 2003. Imagining communities through immigration policies: governmental regulation, media spectacles and the affective politics of national borders. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 6(3), 335–353. Williams, J., 2017. What you need to know about France’s rising population. The Local, 26 June. Available from: www.thelocal.fr/20170626/what-you-need-to-know-a bout-frances-rising-population. Accessed 29 January 2019. Wooldridge, F., 2010. Letter to the editor: climate conference ignored overpopulation. The Washington Times, 21 January. Available from: www.washingtontimes.com/news/ 2010/jan/21/climate-conference-ignored-overpopulation/. Accessed 14 March 2010. Zylinska, J., 2004. The universal acts: Judith Butler and the biopolitics of immigration. Cultural Studies, 18(4), 523–537.

3

Crowded concepts and the politics of the big nation

Introduction In this chapter I would like to continue the discussion of population as a cultural concept inflected by debates about national policies by focusing on an example of the ways in which public anxieties can emerge in relation to population size and the availability of shared urban infrastructure such as public transport, accommodation, living space and spatiality in public settings. An Australian example is a useful one because, as a smaller nation with a small population of a little over 25 million in 2019 (approximately doubling over the past fifty years), it is both surprising and yet demonstrative that anxieties emerge. It provides an important account of the ways in which debates about population—at the interface of the concepts of size and composition—emerge in public sphere in the form of scandal. Scandals are typically shorter-term media events whereby a public fear for stability, honesty, order or the status quo is expressed, typically generating concern or anger towards a person or group of people who are figured to threaten it and must therefore be discredited. Both politicians favouring population growth and those seen to be one of its causes— migrants arriving through border crossings—have been the target of a public scandalised by the idea of increased numbers of bodies in urban spaces in Australia. A set of debates occurred during 2009 and 2010 in Australia about predictions of its population size (and whether the government of the day was promoting a significant increase in the population or failing to respond appropriately to curtail it), which introduced some mild public hysteria about infrastructure. This was a significant shift in talk about population that, until then, had been mostly focused on concerns that there were too many refugees and asylum seekers arriving by boat (there were not). At the time of the 2010 Commonwealth government election, the public debate shifted back, predictably, to talk about refugees and asylum seekers. However, this focus on infrastructure is illustrative of the connections made between population, belonging, space and concepts of shared resources, particularly seen as a ‘commons’, which cannot cope with being further

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shared. Of course, much of the public international perception of Australia as a massive space, selfish with its resources, ignores the way in which urban space and urban infrastructure has come to dominate what might be considered a liveable life, as opposed to open spaces, country spaces, farming land, and so on. The question of population size became a matter of significant public and policy debate in October 2009 with then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s use of the term ‘Big Australia’—indicating a commitment not to intervene in the projected growth of Australia’s population, which would see a figure of 35 million by 2050 (ABC News 2009). The response to the invocation of a Big Australia and to Rudd’s support was one of vocal public opposition, partly related to environmental sustainability, but mostly centring on emerging questions as to whether or not Australia’s urban infrastructure, including traffic congestion, housing, hospitals and urban water provision could handle population growth. While on the one hand Rudd initially indicated he was in favour of significant population growth for the sake of national security (Colebatch 2009), on the other hand, others raised concerns that the 2050 population estimate and continued growth would be problematic for Australia’s carbon gas emission reductions (Karoly 2009), the sustainability and distribution of the nation’s resources (Colebatch and Rood 2009), and for maintaining current urban lifestyles (Moore 2010). In April 2010, Rudd famously backflipped on his initial support for the idea of a Big Australia as public discussion continued about cities and infrastructure in relation to any question of a future Australian population size. In the lead-up to the August 2010 federal election in which debates about population size and sustainability were considered key election issues (Peatling 2010), much of the discourse that related population to infrastructural concerns and the capacity to share limited resources with larger numbers of people became linked with immigration rates and the growing issue of asylum seekers arriving by boat. Although these numbers make only the tiniest contribution to population size, there were significant expressions of anxiety over the ability of Australia to handle even small numbers of refugees and asylum seekers. The varying arrangement of linkages between population, immigration, infrastructure and sustainability are open to a conceptual readjustment in public sphere debate. When this occurs, albeit usually only temporarily, it is productive of new conceptual or re-emergent conceptual regimes. In what became known as the ‘Big Australia’ debates, the realignment of population’s various significatory components shifted public anxieties away from questions of foreignness and difference of those who might enter the population, towards questions from members of the public as to whether we can be sure urban infrastructure can handle population growth. In the course of the debates, what we saw was a move away from concerns about refugees and asylum seekers towards one figured about growth per se, and only towards the end did these two concerns merge into a logic whereby it was not extra bodies on public transport, but extra immigrant bodies to be worried about. As a

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major election issue, what occurred was yet another ritualistic public debate about population and immigration numbers that did not openly focus on threats to Australian identity or fears of cultural change but rather the consideration of infrastructural sharing. Although the Big Australia debates of 2009 and 2010 initially discussed population size per se, other elements emerged in the public sphere, which attempted to reframe the debates almost solely about population size in terms of immigration numbers. This was particularly visible in a documentary by high-profile, retired Australian entrepreneur, Dick Smith, calling for a wholesale reduction in immigration numbers in order that infrastructure and resources can better be shared among an existing population maintaining existing population numbers, although much of his argument was driven by a nostalgic attachment to large backyards, with claims for environmental sustainability that limited the perception of ‘environment’ to the Australian land mass. Nevertheless, following the ritualist re-emergence of immigration concerns the debates moved away from infrastructure readiness again to focus on whether or not an ‘Australian We’ should be sharing resources with others, particularly migrant and refugee others. By articulating population change as that which brought risk to infrastructure in Australia, the notion of infrastructure became tied with sustainability, so that the objective of government was argued to be the sustainability of good coordination of population size and composition, the appropriate sharing of urban infrastructure among an existing population, and the question of urban space. I will begin by describing some of the ways in which a Big Australia was discussed in the media, government announcements and public opinion commentaries, how these played into the makings of a minor moral panic and how the discourse of discussing population size—particularly in the context of immigration numbers—shifts from one in which open talk of ethnicity and difference produced key arguments to one in which the sharing of infrastructural resources became central, in tandem with increased arguments for the securing of a concept of the Australian ‘border’. I then want to explore some of the notions that came into play through Dick Smith’s documentary, and how his views ignored the possibility of Australia being part of a globalised world of transnational movement and global environmental concerns, before examining how the infrastructure and sustainability arguments during the 2010 election period were constituted in a piqued public awareness of biopolitical governance. Important here is that this shift in the discourse of population was a temporary one, a debate contained within a framework and the bounds of election-year discussions, the evidence of which is the fact that, in the final days prior to the election and the year that followed it, concerns about population change returned to refugee debates, ethnicity and composition. What makes this interesting, then, is the way in which the concept of population changed in the context of a series of governance issues as they were debated within this particular temporal context.

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Big Australia and shifting discourses of population At the level of politicians’ articulations about the idea of Big Australia during 2010 public debates, Michelle Grattan described the theatrics of the scene best: It all started when Treasury projected Australia’s population would reach nearly 36 million by 2050, leading Kevin Rudd to declare himself a ‘Big Australia’ man before retreating … He appointed Tony Burke Population Minister to develop a ‘strategy’ … Meanwhile, the reinvigorated opposition was adopting the Henny-Penny attitude. (Grattan 2010a) The debatability of a Big Australia began after the release of the Intergenerational Report of 2010, which is a Commonwealth Government Treasury report, usually released every five years. It provides data on population size and age predictions over a 40-year forward-looking period to help assess the sustainability of government policies and the impact of population change on economic growth, workforce and public finances. The 2010 report forecast a population size of 35.9 million by 2050 with continued net migration rates and a stable fertility rate of 1.9 births per woman (Commonwealth of Australia 2010, p. 5). The key economic concern of the report was that by 2050 only 2.7 adult workers would provide support (through taxation) for each retiree over 65 years. When the question of a Big Australia came to be debated in news and public sphere discourse in January 2010, it was demographer Bob Birrell who was able to point to the fact that became, for some, a central concern in why a Big Australia was not necessarily desirable—that the projected population size of 35 million by 2050 would not be the result of increased fertility but net migration and children born in the period to migrants: ‘the projected growth will largely be a consequence of deliberate government migration policy’ (Birrell 2010). However, by April 2010, the newly appointed minister for population, Tony Burke, was arguing that a Big Australia was not only an inevitability but that it would not be impeded by capping migration, stating that even if net migration fell to zero, Australia’s population would continue to expand, mostly as a result of apparently increased fertility and greater longevity (Murphy 2010). His comments were made in response to a Lowy Institute poll, which found that there was strong support for an increase in population size, as long as it was not to be quite as large as the projected 35 million. Opposition immigration spokesperson Scott Morrison argued that cutting immigration would nevertheless be the central means by which to tackle population growth, viewing the size as too large, in line with the poll (Murphy 2010). Acknowledging the centrality of the population debate in political discourse, one of the first acts of newly elected Prime Minister Julia Gillard was to change Tony Burke’s title to ‘Minister for Sustainable Population’ (Gittins 2010b). This was part of a clear distancing from Rudd’s initial pro-Big

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Australia stance, despite Rudd’s own shift and questioning of the value of such a policy. Yet for Gillard this was very much about responding to the increasing connectivity between questions of population size and immigration, particularly evident in her references at the time to her own parents’ decision to come to Australia at a time when ‘the country was saying to the world we’ve got a population of around about 11 million, we want to build it up’; in other words, that was then, but now is a different story (Martin and Rood 2010). Other politicians began discussing the Big Australia concept predominantly through the framework of immigration, circulating in the public sphere the idea that population growth is primarily caused by immigration and leaving questions of fertility and fertility rights unspoken and sacrosanct. For example, former New South Wales Premier Bob Carr commented on the Big Australia debate by stating that immigration had been for some time ‘at levels that are simply too ambitious’ and that they must be reduced in order to give Australia ‘breathing space’ (Martin and Rood 2010). Breathing space, in this context, from increased population produced by the influx of bodies from elsewhere, rather than bodies produced through fertility and birth. Two things occurred in the way in which population growth was framed during the 2009 and 2010 Big Australia debates, particularly in the periods around Gillard’s ascendancy to the prime ministership in June 2010 and in the pre-election period in July and August 2010. The first was that a small moral panic was produced about population size whereby ‘Big Australia’ became signified as the ‘folk enemy’ of sociality and of Australian identity. The second was that the discursive production of anti-immigration discourse, which showed how a shift in the perception of population had occurred over the preceding years from one that focused on Australian identity, subjectivity, ethnicity and race to one that questioned the justice of increased immigration in terms of whether or not Australia had the infrastructure to sustain an influx of people from overseas. The first, the moral panic, was evidenced by the persistent and productive framing by both the media and politicians of the population size debate as a matter for anxiety and public concern. Following Stanley Cohen, Stuart Hall and other cultural studies theorists, Joanna Zylinska points out that moral panics are typically a response to public issues that operate as control mechanisms, whereby the discourse of panic is introduced to defend a set of concepts that is seen or understood to have dominance in ideological or institutional value systems (Zylinska 2004a). While most moral panics have as their object of concern or derision a subset of people who become the figure of the ‘folk devil’ (Cohen 1972), in the case of most population debates that figure is the immigrant other. Routinely, the figure of the immigrant and the social policies of multiculturalism have themselves historically been figured as the scapegoats for uncertainty, economic problems and social anxieties (Poynting et al. 2004, p. 224). However, in the case of the 2010 debates, the immigrant other becomes the submerged figure, the unspoken devil, with population size itself coming to stand in for the folk devil. When

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Prime Minister Gillard was asked by a journalist about how her policy on asylum seekers would operate under her newly formed government, she stated that there was a ‘sense of anxiety’ felt by Australians over unannounced boat arrivals (Goldsmith 2010). However, she did clarify that the fears she understood to be expressed by the Australian people about border security were not in themselves racist: ‘For people to say they’re anxious about border security doesn’t make them intolerant. It certainly doesn’t make them a racist. It means they’re expressing a genuine view that they’re anxious about border security’ (Grattan 2010b). With constantly emerging arguments suggesting that population debates risked ‘pandering to insecurities based on ill-informed assumptions and fears, lurching from poll to poll’ (McAdam 2010), the public discussions were framed in a way that meant the figure of the immigrant other, the asylum seeker or any other subject from ‘outside’ who might be seen to add to the size of the population, was spoken about carefully, avoiding questions of cultural difference, although nevertheless articulating fear of the type generated within moral panics. That is, the questions of the extent to which an Australian identity can manage ethnic and cultural diversity within the ‘ideological project of multiculturalism’ (Ang and Stratton 1998, pp. 26–27) becomes unspoken, submerged, in favour of alternative focal points on which to panic about the impact of population growth. Yet, the question of immigration returns several times within this scandalising of population concepts during 2010. This, then, allows us to identify the source of fear and the reason for an articulation of a threat: where the fear of the immigrant other is allayed by public, moral panic-driven demands for reduced immigration intake and/or strong border protection strategies, the fear of population size centres on no personage, no scapegoat, no one to blame—an unknown enemy. But this also explains why the immigrant other re-emerges in the debates and why the debates about population size come to centre not on questions of fertility or, indeed, on better-organised and strategically planned infrastructure development, but on immigration: the need for an identifiable other, a personage who can play the role of folk devil in the context of a moral panic. At the same time, the need for the figure of the immigrant to return to the deliberations in order to provide the scapegoat during the uncertain Big Australia debates of 2010 was also part of the what Barbara Baird (2006, p. 207) has characterised as the ‘seasonal festivals of immigration debate’ whereby public opinion on immigration numbers and composition returns as part of a ritual, producing a sense of control over national belonging. In that sense, the framework through which immigration can persistently return or, at least, play a shadow role in the background of any population debate and moral panic is one that has already been fixed as part of the cultural ritual of renewing and reinforcing Australianness. The second element, the shift of focus to infrastructure and sustainability, was one framed not through fear but through discourse about risk. Risk has historically signified social engagement in a neutral way, without valuing the acts comprising risk as having either a positive or negative connotation,

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however, recent moves in modernity have instead figured risk as exclusively negative and associated with hazard or danger, mandating institutions to ‘monitor, control and in some way remove the risk act and actor from dominant culture’ (Schehr 2005, pp. 48–49). In the past, immigration and asylum had been signified as problematic or dangerous through a risk discourse that established a notion of threat to Australian identity. For example, the concerns raised by ultra-conservative politician Pauline Hanson in her Commonwealth parliamentary maiden speech of 10 September 1996 were about the risk to Australian culture—hence, the identity of Australia— if immigration policy was not ‘radically reviewed’ and multiculturalism as precept of Australian population policy was not ‘abolished’. Arguing that Australia was in danger of being ‘swamped by Asians’, her concern was based on a problematic claim that they ‘have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate’. Although population movement has historically been the subject of both cultural and economic insecurities (Poynting et al. 2004, p. 82), there is a clear shift of focus on risk towards the first and away from the second of these. To some extent, this is a neoliberal subsumption of questions of difference under a concept of Australian personage as homo oeconomicus or economic man (Foucault 2008, p. 226), thus indicating the ways in which the biopolitical approach to the governmentality of population filters into public sphere discourse. However, at the same time, it is about a collapsing of the cultural into the economic, whereby the Australian ‘way of life’ no longer refers to the cultural concerns raised by Hanson or to the notion of an Australian identity as a white Anglo-Celtic identity, but to a ‘way of life’ that is figured through access to conveniences generally falling under the label of urban infrastructure—non-congested roads, adequate public transport, space, consistent ratios of medical facilities, practitioners and classroom places to local numbers. That is, an Australian identity that is spoken about and figured through a concept of convenience, accessibility and affluence of the population as a whole, signified through infrastructural facilities. Risk discourse invokes security as one of its aims, and security, as Foucault pointed out, is a central element of biopolitics—so much so that he shifted his terminology and often used the term security to refer to the biopolitical mechanisms of power utilised at the administrative level of state governance. As an apparatus of biopolitical power, security in the context of the Big Australia debates and the rhetoric of risk was not about security of the border in the sense of border protection (although that is often a part of the accepted mechanisms of security), but about the security of the economic formation of the nation. Policies and practices of biopolitics that seek to maximise economic value and productivity simultaneously work to divert public attention away from this practice (Chaput 2009, p. 101). Thus it is the norm over a longer period of time that, while biopolitical practices actively produce and maintain populations, they do so without becoming significant focal points in public deliberation over the composition and size of a population. However, it

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certainly became the case that a public awareness of governmentality’s biopolitical role emerged during the Big Australia debates, particularly through the ways in which the debate centred on risk and security of infrastructure as something available for sharing among an existing population through a fantasy of unchanging population numbers; security here was figured in such a way that governmental concerns for the economic were hidden as the debate continued about the acceptable levels of either population size or immigration’s impact on population size. But is it not also the case that the term sustainable comes to be synonymous with the notion of security? Certainly as the Rudd government backed away from embracing the Big Australia forecast in 2009 by the Treasury’s Intergenerational Report, the term sustainable came to be used more and more frequently in connection with population size concerns, leading ultimately to Gillard’s relabelling Tony Burke’s ministerial role as that of administering ‘sustainable population’. The use of the term sustainable during the debates was not without criticism. For example, the adoption of the term ‘sustainable’ by political leaders was attacked as ‘vacuous’ on the basis that no policy should be unsustainable and that, as a buzzword, the term has been used by politicians and economists ‘to mean whatever they’ve wanted it to mean’ (Gittins 2010a). However, with Ross Gittins pointing out that the concept of ‘sustainable’ also referred to the management of ‘carrying capacity’, the term came to signify the ways in which anxieties emerged about the security of the resources, the infrastructure, the economy and, not the cultural, but the economic way of life of existing Australians, and how that security of the sustainable was required to operate as a mechanism by which to manage the risk to economy, resources, and infrastructure should the population size shift in the foreseeable future. As a site of public dialogue on questions of Australian identity, culture, size and sustainability, the Big Australia debates were actively encouraged by the federal government, with Prime Minister Julia Gillard, in July 2010, calling for Australian people to ‘say what they feel’ about population, immigration and border control (Grattan 2010b). What occurred, in articulating this, was a rejustification of what had earlier in the debate become residual—a refocusing, in line with some of the arguments being put forward by the opposition, of the Big Australia debate on immigration and that which is, in moral panic discourse, immigration’s folk devil: the asylum seeker, articulated through issues of border control. By inviting people to speak their minds, the infrastructure issue became that which was sidelined as the Big Australia debate shifted further and further onto the older issue of boat arrivals. Indeed, between 5 July and 18 July 2010, almost all public commentary on population size and Big Australia was focused on asylum seekers; it was only when Ms Gillard gave a speech in Brisbane to discuss her vision for ‘a sustainable approach to population growth’, in conjunction with Tony Burke’s televised statements on population sustainability as an issue of house prices, quality of air, parklands and traffic congestion, that the debate returned to the question of infrastructure (The Age 2010b).

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However, in August 2010, Ross Gittins, economics editor at Fairfax Media, published an opinion piece in which he presented through a particular form of economic language of immediacy—rather than longer-term productivity— an argument that outrightly collapsed immigration with infrastructure concerns: Why doesn’t immigration lead to higher living standards? To shortcut the explanation, because each extra immigrant family requires more capital investment to put them at the same standard as the rest of us: homes to live in, machines to work with, hospitals and schools, public transport and so forth. (Gittins 2010a) Complaining that little of the additional infrastructure is covered by immigrant earnings themselves, Gittins and other writers effectively move the previously separated aspects of the residual and dominant discourses, merging them from this point and throughout the remainder of 2010, so that both cultural elements were articulated simultaneously and always in relation to each other.

Dick Smith and the anti-globalisation excuse for ‘Small Australia’ The documentary Dick Smith’s Population Puzzle, screened on 12 August 2010 on ABC1, made a significant contribution to the Big Australia debates. Its purpose was to present the views held by millionaire entrepreneur Dick Smith on Australia’s population growth. This was achieved through voiceover narrations, interviews with himself and his family, his interviews with other people in Australia, such as commentator Ross Gittins, and excerpts from Smith’s talking tours over a period of months earlier in the year. Beyond its content, the documentary itself was considered controversial, given that it was broadcast less than a fortnight before the 2010 election, in which population was a substantial election issue, and was followed by a special Q&A episode to discuss population size, immigration and the population debates. It was also controversial through the fact that the Australian Broadcasting Network considered it to be a film ‘with an opinionated, didactic approach’, arguing that the documentary itself would become a topic of discussion, rather than leading it, through the Q&A special (Kalina 2010). Finally, it was highly controversial for the fact that it was part-funded by Dick Smith himself, the final credits noting ‘Dick Smith was a contributor to the funding of this film’. Indeed, as ABC’s head of documentary, Stuart Menzies, noted, Dick Smith would make no financial gain out of his contribution to the project’s cost and that although ‘he offered to pay for the whole film and couldn’t grasp why it wouldn’t be in the public interest to do so’ his contribution was minimal. What this implies, however, is that major commentators within the Big Australia debate are not limited only to those with political capital and

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media access, but includes those with strong financial capital who would not ordinarily be considered a primary definer—that is, those who, by virtue of being an accredited source within a hierarchy of credibility, are positioned to have their definitions of an event or phenomenon accepted (Hall et al. 1978). Dick Smith indicated that he was motivated to give his views in the form of a documentary by his grown-up daughter’s apparent sudden brainwave. As he put it: I hadn’t considered the population issue, but my daughter Jenny phoned me up in about October and said ‘Dad, they talk about human-induced global warming, but they never talk about the elephant in the room.’ I said ‘What’s that Jen?’ … ‘Why does no one ever talk about population growth?’ While she was correct to point out that population size and growth had not been at the centre of discussions on climate change and the environmental impact of humanity (Cover 2011), what the documentary did, unfortunately, was to disavow any opportunity to consider population in global terms and, instead, it considered population size only in Australian national terms, which are not, in fact, very significant overall for the issue of climate change. Furthermore, the documentary positioned the question of Australia’s population within the concept of infrastructural sustainability and local environment, but did so without significant reference to population problems in a global context. The documentary was absolutely upfront from the beginning in reiterating Dick Smith’s opposition to population growth on the basis that he believed it would impact negatively on infrastructural sustainability in Australia. As he stated in his opening narration (given as a voice-over, with images of cities in gridlocks and traffic jams being presented): For most Australians it’s never been more crowded. We’re in the middle of a population boom … We’re even out-populating some of the poorer nations, setting a terrible example. The boom is quite literally changing the face of our cities, forcing up property prices, clogging our roads and exhausting our countryside. Yet, the documentary was also framed as if no one had been discussing or debating population at all. As Smith claimed: ‘Politicians don’t want debate about population … It raises too many difficult questions about fertility and immigration. They would much rather shut the discussion down.’ The fact that this documentary was finalised and broadcast during an election period in which population was one of the key issues discussed—and over a month after Prime Minister Gillard had called for a passionate debate on immigration, asylum and population—indicated, in fact, that the topic had been much deliberated, even if sometimes within narrow frameworks. More importantly, there was no indication that population as an issue had been silenced or

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ignored by successive governments. Immigration and questions of asylum strongly marked the years of John Howard’s government (particularly from late 2001 onwards) and, furthermore, governance, as we know, is in fact centred through its biopolitical operations on the management of population, infrastructure, immigration and border controls. In that last sense, Dick Smith was incorrect to imagine that his was one of only a few voices on the topic. Usefully, Smith drew attention to the less-often stated fact that business interests have frequently argued for increased population at the risk of sustainability, infrastructure planning or other concerns, although he did put it in his characteristic ‘rebellious’ tone: ‘The business community, my wealthy mates are completely addicted to growth because of greed’ (ABC News 2010). Smith was right to point out that one ‘wing’ of the debate, led by business interests, had articulated sustainability through productivity, with a commitment to increased population as the means to achieve economic growth, at the expense of other conceptualisations of sustainability, such as environment and cultural concerns (The Age 2010b). In several ways, however, what Smith was arguing against was not the notion that there was not enough discussion of population in terms of infrastructure. Rather, he was arguing with the governance system built on biopolitics as a technology of power for which population and infrastructure were its objects of inquiry, measurement, control and regulation. In attempting to separate the economic from the cultural, Smith was unwittingly critiquing the biopolitical arrangement through which governmentality maintains an ‘all-inclusive character’ not ‘split between two branches—an economic and a juridical art of government’, which is achieved in neoliberal states through the invention of civil society as the correlate of techniques of government and part of the technology of governmentality (Lazzarato 2009, p. 116). Attempting to expunge the economic concern of growth and productivity from the civil concerns of culture, way-of-life or other ways of perceiving infrastructure is, of course, fruitless within a neoliberal framework of power, as the latter serves the former (Foucault 2008, p. 296). In framing population growth as having an undesirable impact on a currently overstretched infrastructure, Smith simultaneously coded the notion of infrastructural resources as that which is only developed by members of the existing population (i.e., not immigrants) and as something that should not be shared with new arrivals to Australia: ‘With 22 million, we have the potential to share in the wealth of this country. Increase the population to 44 million, and each person has the potential to share in half as much. What’s in it for most Australians? I believe the answer is less and less’ (Swallow 2010). In his documentary, Smith interviewed the immigration minister, Chris Evans, who explained that Australia was a migrant country per se and that Australia would continue to need a migration programme for a number of reasons, including economic growth and the provision of skills, and that this would be welcome on the basis of the low population density. When asked by Smith if he thought Australia could feed an increased population, Evans rightly

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pointed out that that would be a question for an agricultural economist, resulting in Smith complaining that the minister lacked a clear policy and knowledge of his area of responsibility. Dick Smith was, therefore, putting forward an argument against immigration and immigrants, problematically and unethically positing immigrants as those who, to maintain Australian affluence, should not become a burden on urban resources and urban space. Although persistently claiming in the documentary that his view was not racially motivated, from an ethical perspective it did involve the eugenicist violence of categorisation between the population that is ‘here’ and the other that must not join ‘us’ here. Contemporary forms of mobility, too, were recognised by him as a problem rather than understood as the ordinary framework through which (some) bodies move, relocate and settle across the planet. Part of his argument centred on a perception of Australia’s space and a fear of becoming overcrowded. Smith argued that while Australia had the physical space, it had nothing to gain by giving it up: ‘I can tell you: most Australians what we identify with Australia is that we don’t have a lot of people, we love that fact, and I can’t believe that we don’t have a right to say we want to keep it that way.’ Noting the rhetoric of ‘we Australians’, whereby he claimed to speak on behalf of the existing Australian population, what was indicated here was, on the one hand, an unwillingness to share with immigrants the resources, space and facilities that made Australia an affluent and attractive country, while, on the other hand, articulating a concern for population size that was grounded only in Australia as a nation, rather than through the contemporary formulation of an Australia and an Australian environment that was part of a region and a globe. This was in stark contrast to the more sophisticated debates and discussions of population, immigration and movement, such as those engaged with by Zygmunt Bauman (2011, p. 429) who has argued that we are currently in an age of post-national diasporas built on persistent global and transnational movement of bodies, and thereby have an ethical responsibility to think not in national or international terms, but in terms of the planetary stage itself. That is, a responsibility to acknowledge, think through and work with ‘the fact that all of us who share the planet depend on each other for our present and our future, that nothing we do or fail doing is indifferent to the fate of anybody else, and that none of us can any longer seek and find private shelter from storms that originate in any part of the globe’ (p. 435). Thus, while the documentary purported to be innovatively addressing population growth negatively in order to protect Australian infrastructure and thereby an Australian way of life, it was simply representative of outdated, narrow and naive views about transnationality, society, governance and theglobal movement of peoples, disavowing the existing affluence of the country and making unnecessarily exaggerated claims that future immigration would cause starvation in Australia (‘My granddaughter won’t have enough food to eat at the end of the century’), or that immigrants would reap the benefit of education while existing local Australians would lose out (‘It disappoints me that big business and the government can just throw away so many local people while they pursue their dream of a big Australia’).

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Most alarmingly, the documentary was driven by Dick Smith’s personal nostalgia, which, at times, informed debates about population growth by representing a past with a slightly smaller population as an ideal. The documentary provided footage of him giving a public speech on the need to stop population growth: I was what you would call a free-range kid; as you know, battery kids live in home units and high-rises, free-range kids can have backyards and can climb over fences. I had a cubby-house in the backyard and a swing tied to a tree; my Dad actually had a vegetable garden. Now call me oldfashioned, but this was a pretty wonderful way to grow up. The audience was treated to a nauseating scene in which Dick Smith wandered fondly around the large back garden of the house in Roseville in which he grew up, explaining to the camera how he used to climb through the fence and play in a cubby-house with his friends. Arguing that houses are becoming too small, with only tiny gardens and not enough room for children to play on the swing and in the cubby-house, Dick Smith called for a return to 1950s recreational activities. Not limited to housing, he complained of the current infrastructural situation in Australia’s larger cities: Look at Sydney now, you can’t drive, you can’t move. The hospitals, in the fifties you could get into hospital, now you can wait two years some people are waiting … Why doesn’t someone say let’s not have all this 36 million? Ultimately, the documentary failed to offer an innovative approach to thinking about population growth, certainly in a contemporary globalised framework or through a means by which the biopolitical mechanisms of governance—or alternative governance technologies of power—could operate. Nevertheless, it made a significant contribution to the debate by further cementing the concept of population within a framework of infrastructure sustainability, leaning always towards the perception of a wholly negative impact upon the population by immigration. Smith’s film was described by Suvendrini Perera during the Q&A Population Debate as ‘a rather long, negative commercial … A rather simplistic focus on population … rather manipulative and rather dangerous’. Rightly, Perera pointed to the fact that it was a partly paid-for commercial for Smith’s views, and one that actively combined the complex issues of population, sustainability, environment and immigration into a narrow perspective that reinforced an older anti-immigration stance through new rhetoric.

Infrastructure and sustainability In April 2010, when Tony Burke was appointed by then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd as the inaugural federal minister for population, with a brief to develop a coordinated, whole-of-government strategy to population management, the

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relationship between population size and infrastructure became more firmly cemented in the public imaginary of Australian population and identity. In several ways, the discursive relating of population and infrastructure planning has always been a part of governmentality at the federal level, operating within the framework of biopolitical mechanisms that strategise about normative curves, risks, numeric coordination and economic sustainability, with population as the object of biopolitics’ technologies of power. Despite the longevity of this link as one of the central roles of the modern neoliberal government, for the first time the relationship of these coordinated areas was made upfront in public sphere debate and formalised through Burke’s new ministry. In describing his new duties, however, Burke framed his responsibilities as something wholly new in Australian governance: As we work through a portfolio that should have existed decades ago and never has, we’ve never had the population or sustainable population, we’ve never had someone in charge of coordinating this area before … certainly you can better plan in the infrastructure in those sorts of areas. (Burke 2010) During the Big Australia debates, the very idea of sustainability was reworked in terms of infrastructure, the alleged impossibility of sharing and the call for greater coordination between immigration, infrastructure and other measures designed to sustain an Australia at its current population level. So how is infrastructure conceptually figured in the context of population debates? There are four elements or approaches to the mutual constitution of the notion of population growth, infrastructure and sustainability in the context of these debates: first, as something at risk from population growth, particularly any growth caused by the immigrant other; second as that which must be secured—different from border security in the sense of sustained over time and in the interests of population coordination; and third, as that which is signified through space, including urban space, living space and housing, and the capacity to move easily through space in transport laneways and through the provision of public transport. In the case of the first and the second, the language of biopolitics, as I have argued, comes to bear on the population debates by articulating infrastructure as the urban spaces that are at risk and must be secured. It became apparent during the Big Australia debates that a ’keep them out’ attitude towards immigration and population growth was being driven by arguments that resources such as water, housing and electricity were becoming scarce (Watson 2010). For example, an opinion editorial in June 2010 by William Bourke, convenor of the Stable Population Party, articulated fears that the population trend data may be incorrect and that current growth data provided by the Australian Bureau of Statistics indicated to him that there was a significant risk that the Australian population might exceed 50 million by 2050, leading, not to a Big Australia, but to ‘an obese, congested and overloaded Australia’. Although he argued, in

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cultural terms reminiscent of the Pauline Hanson years, that this would produce ‘an Australia we won’t recognise, much less want’, he also deployed biopolitical forms of reasoning by arguing for the stability of population size as a correlative concept for economic stability, thus conflating the two (Bourke 2010). In Foucault’s framing of biopolitics, the role of governance is to institute and coordinate regulatory mechanisms in order to ‘establish an equilibrium, maintain an average, establish a sort of homeostasis, and compensate for variations within this general population and its aleatory field … designed to maximize and extract forces’ (Foucault 2004, p. 246). Michael Danby (2010) argued from a pro-Big Australia perspective that coordinated planning would ensure that population size could expand: ‘We can grow larger, richer and maintain our generous care of seniors, but we will need integrated planning for future water, energy, and transport throughout Australia.’ Underpinning this framework is the idea that there is a risk that the government may fail to properly coordinate that equilibrium, stability and sustainability. Indeed, William Bourke and other commentators made that point by obstinately insisting that Kevin Rudd’s embracing a Big Australia of 35 million was not a prediction or trend, but a ‘target’ (Bourke 2010), articulating it as a deliberate, poorly coordinated policy or, indeed, a conspiracy. Likewise, Dick Smith’s call for government intervention in immigration can be understood as a demand for greater coordination: in complaining about Chris Evans, the minister for immigration, as lacking knowledge on the impact of high immigration rates, he jeered: Well it’s obvious that there’s no plan. Here you have the minister for immigration and he’s actually got not a plan or no idea on the maximum number of people Australia can actually sustain. Amazing! The notion of sophisticated governmental coordination thus frames the combination of the signifiers population, growth, sustainability and infrastructure. In late June 2010, then Prime Minister Gillard announced that she was no longer supportive of the notion of a Big Australia. She indicated instead that she was now favouring a coordinated approach to sustainability: Australia should not hurtle down the track towards a big population … I don’t support the idea of a big Australia with arbitrary targets. We need to stop, take a breath and develop … a population that our environment, our water, our soil, our roads and freeways, our busses, … can sustain. (ABC News 2010) Yet part of that coordination involved addressing the need for growth for business interests, and that linked up with the need for skilled migration: ‘I don’t want business to be held back because they couldn’t find the right workers … That’s why skilled migration is so important. But also I don’t want

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areas of Australia with 25 per cent youth unemployment because there are no jobs’ (ABC News 2010). By discursively establishing the notion that population must be coordinated, a language of biopolitics inflects and constitutes the debates on population size—despite the role of government in doing precisely that. For example, just subsequent to Julia Gillard’s takeover in June 2010, opposition leader Tony Abbott revealed a 12-point plan for Australia as part of his early election agenda. While he included in it a gesture towards the enforcement of a strict border security and border control regime, his population plan was to: ‘Link population growth to the provision of better infrastructure’ (The Age 2010a). Yet, over time, the shift towards coordinating not the provision of infrastructure but the numbers who would be sharing it became increasingly central in Abbott’s rhetoric and more broadly in the Big Australia debates. The argument, then, was that the incumbent government was inadequately coordinating immigration by failing to manage the numbers in a sustainable way. Such coordination is in the realm of the biopolitical mechanisms of governance, which produce the notion of a host population for which it aims, on behalf of neoliberalism’s goals, to make live and be productive, but does so through establishing a constitutive outside—the immigrant other—that cannot be guaranteed to increase productivity or maintain equilibrium. The other is perceived as a threat and the failure to manage that threat as a risk for governmentality, which must reduce that risk by coordinating the ‘tools that will allow it to trace, detect and eliminate’ the external threat to the life of the population (Zylinska 2004b, p. 526). Thus the call for stronger, more effective administration and coordination of the population size encompasses not merely the economic but, on behalf of economic growth, the surveillance and measurement of the capacities of the other to contribute to productivity, the health of the existing population, the convenience of infrastructural use and the ability of infrastructural sustainability to maintain production. Finally, the issue of space and ratios of bodies within the space of urban environments and Australia as a whole significantly marked the Big Australia population debates. While Dick Smith claimed that immigration threatened the very large back gardens he knew from his childhood and that, as cities have developed (and subdivision has become normative), have decreased in size, this was merely the re-emergence of a nostalgia for a recreational past that is likely incompatible with today’s child-raising environment, while ignoring the more fruitful communitarian possibilities for shared gardens and leisure areas in urban space. However, both Gillard and Burke drew on the notion of space in presenting themselves as newly coordinating population in a sustainable way, referring not only to traffic congestion and other effects of large cities that have not kept up the development of infrastructure with population growth, but to parklands and quality of air as central to sustainability (The Age 2010b). Surveys were cited indicating a populist view that spatial changes would impact on ‘the lifestyle that is Australian’ through an ‘end of the quarter-acre block’ (Watson 2010), and such views began to be

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echoed by politicians through addressing the question of space. Former New South Wales premier, Bob Carr, claimed that 80 per cent of Australians felt that the country needed ‘breathing space’ (Martin and Rood 2010)—although referring to a temporal break before a further increase in population size, there is a clear connotation that relates to space in which to move and live and, indeed, breathe. In an unusual twist on claims that living space as a resource and a part of Australian urban infrastructure would be eroded by population size increases, the General Synod of the Anglican Church called for a reduction in fertility, avoiding a call for a reduction in immigration, with the claim that current rates of population growth in Australia were unsustainable and that, without intervention, would be breaking the eighth commandment, ‘Thou shall not steal’ (Gordon 2010). Space is, as Foucault (2007) pointed out, common to the techniques of power as exercised through sovereignty, discipline and biopolitical security, whereby the first is through the establishment and articulation of a concept of territory while both discipline and biopolitics operate through internal spatial divisions, distinctions and access (p. 12). Space, as that through which subjects as populations move, produce, consume and live within the framework of economic development and the commercial state (p. 15) is conceived, secured and coordinated through policies of hygiene, ventilation, avoidance of accumulated crowds and overly dense dwellings, that are connected through networks of streets such that the economic produce can move and, finally, the surveillance of space (p. 17). It is ironic that space and the spatiality of cities are conceived through neoliberal concepts of movement and passage (Grosz 1995, p. 131), yet ironically much of the deliberation during the Big Australia debates is about the freezing of movement, of new bodies either born or arriving from elsewhere in order to secure a sustainability. Movement, then, becomes synonymous with growth in size and returns again to the question of the ethics of sharing—sharing resources, infrastructure and urban space. What the questions of infrastructure do for the concept of an Australian population is, in several ways, attempt to address the ‘bigness’ of Big Australia. Where concerns over cultural difference once governed the notion of risks of immigration, framing population change in the terms of infrastructure becomes a means to address the population through the language of the biopolitical. Biopolitics, as Clough points out, accounts for ‘“each and every” element of the population, the individual and the group, and the groups within the group’ (Clough 2008, p. 18). As a power mechanism, it constructs and maintains a range of concepts about infrastructure, space and population but it does so in a way that is always slightly out of step with the dominant arguments in population debates that see growth and new arrivals not as threats, but as risks.

Conclusion: the return to identity The Big Australia debates of 2009 and 2010 influenced the framework through which subsequent discussions on national population, fertility and immigration could be discussed—it fixed to the older anti-immigrant debates

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a concern about urban infrastructure and suburban lifestyle, a fear not of the racial other but of the crowdedness of cities and delays for public transport. In a sense, this is a depoliticisation and desensitisation of the arguments about raciality as the key concern of population change, whereby the capacity to apprehend the other through a recognition or welcoming of the immigrant is not made, only the justification for the refusal of the immigrant other shifts. That is, by disaligning ethnicity, race and other questions of identity that typically emerge through immigration debates from the Big Australia deliberations during 2010, the possibility of welcoming the immigrant other or of seeing the Australian populational identity as transformable, processual and always changing was disavowed. However, as the 2010 election drew near, there occurred a sudden refocusing on race, ethnicity and immigration, primarily through the increasing articulation of asylum seekers arriving by boat as being—erroneously—the major contributor to population growth, and the major threat to Australia’s infrastructural capacity. This occurred as a result of what has been noted as the major political parties ‘chasing the xenophobe vote’ (Narushima 2010). This involved, as Michelle Grattan has pointed out, an offensive hypocrisy in which the coalition increasingly turned on its own pro-immigration and economic growth policy for electoral ‘ideological reasons’ (Grattan 2010c), while the Gillard Labor government responded to that rhetoric by changing ‘the policy to satisfy its opponents …’ (Colebatch 2010). With the stance on population of both the conservative and the progressive parties being driven by a perceived populism (Aly 2010) and a belief that an anti-immigration and anti-refugee stance was the popular site of response to Big Australia forecasts, the Big Australia debates began to return to the more familiar articulations of immigrants, not as a risk to infrastructure, but as a threat to Australia through racial and ethnic differences, with increased exaggeration of the supposed ‘fears’ of the Australian people, re-legitimising the old ‘ethnoexclusivist views’ towards the immigrant other (Mondon 2010). Indeed, in the lead-up to the election, according to Age political journalist Michelle Grattan, it was the conservative liberal–national coalition in opposition who persistently attempted to refocus the population debates not on infrastructure but on refugees and asylum seekers. Grattan indicated that their approach had a singular aim: ‘to tap into the unease of many people about the issue’ (Grattan 2010c). The coalition had previously been accused of designing a fear campaign about asylum seekers as an ‘excuse to behave like racists’ and shift the notion of Australian identity away from one in which ‘generosity and compassion’ could flourish by means of the governmental push, when Rudd was first elected in 2007, towards one that attempted to ‘recreate the hysteria of the Tampa episode’ to make the same electoral gains that John Howard managed in 2001 (Burnside 2010). However, there is a good argument that by refocusing the question on forms of immigration and Australian identity, Abbott was usefully undoing the ways in which the question of identity had been neutralised in the earlier part of the Big Australia debate by its focus on infrastructural coordination rather than the identities of those permitted to arrive or be born.

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While it was the case that throughout much of 2010, unlike preceding and subsequent years, population was figured through questions of infrastructure, the fact that immigration returned persistently into the debates and, rather than fertility, remained the focal point of population size arguments as if it was the only possible source of population growth, betrayed the underlying racism behind biopolitical arrangements that measure, control and make-productive a population as its object of governance. As Foucault points out, racism is central to biopolitics, and this is no less the case in the ways in which biopolitical discourses operated in the Big Australia debates. Rather than a warlike or political relationship with the other, the focus on immigration as the central concern of population management involves a relationship between the idea of an Australian population and the notion of the immigrant other (Foucault 2004, pp. 255–256). It is not warlike in the sense that one will kill in order to preserve Australia, but violently categorical and racial through measurement and selection: to let Australians live—in the sense of livelihood, infrastructural access and other concerns of biopolitics and security in the neoliberal state— the other must be able be left to die as a metaphor for exclusion. Racism thus makes it possible to establish a relationship between one person’s life and the death of the other that is not a military or warlike relationship of confrontation, but a biological-type relationship: ‘the more inferior species die out, the more abnormal individuals are eliminated, the fewer degenerates there will be in the species as a whole and the more I—as species rather than individual— can live, the stronger I will be, the more vigorous I will be. I will be able to proliferate’ (Foucault 2004, p. 255). That is to say, the racism here is about the unspoken identification of those who will be excluded not from access to Australia as immigrants, but from sharing the resources governed as infrastructure. The debates do not identify specific groups of ‘others’ who will not be able to partake in the sharing but, through arguing that infrastructure has been spread thinly enough as it is (there is no more to share) the debates framed the other as the object of exclusion: inhuman, uncaring as to whether the other—the broad immigrant population that might yet be—lives or dies (as long as there is no use of Australian resources). Rather than John Howard’s ‘We decide who comes into this country and the circumstances in which they come’ (The Age 2003), this discourse of biopolitics that draws together population and infrastructure shifts the question of transnational population movement to one in which ‘We decide who and how many will partake of Australia’s resources’.

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Zylinska, J., 2004a. Guns n’ rappers: moral panics and the ethics of cultural studies. Cultural Machine. Available from: www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/ viewArticle/7/6. Accessed 12 December 2013. Zylinska, J., 2004b. The universal acts: Judith Butler and the biopolitics of immigration. Cultural Studies, 18(4), 523–537.

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Introduction Population in its most simplistic sense is usually thought of as a collective term for a grouping of subjects or peoples who can be counted. This idea, however, frames population as if people’s subjectivity always pre-exists their definition by counting, labeling, gathering and assessing. From a social and cultural theory perspective, however, there is a more nuanced, relational way in which we can understand population: that is, the idea of population and the mechanisms through which population as a concept is culturally deployed are heavily implicated in the production and constitution of identity. Just as language constitutes the subjects it names, population constitutes the people it counts. Even more so, how we think about ourselves in relation to others, and the way in which we perceive and perform our identities in those terms, relates significantly to how we ‘belong’ and how we behave in terms of social participation. Arguably, while it is true that subjects are ‘thrown’ into sociality from the very beginning of life (we depend on social structures for basic survival, and our identities are built in interaction with that thrownness), the processes of belonging to a construct we think about as a ‘population group’ are produced over time, stabilising in ways that differ at different points in a life cycle, and in relation to how the populations to which we belong are articulated, modeled, morphed, and affected by mobility, change and shifts in composition and size. This has been particularly the case in a contemporary environment in which population studies have been dominated by demographics as an approach and, in a non-academic sense, through the acquisition, production and circulation of statistics as various, diverse and sometimes conflicting markers of the status of population(s), whether national or regional, groups based around identities, tastes or trends, or the size and composition of world populations. Although statistically generated notions of population are indeed complex, and are built around sets of theories (and sometimes newly developed theories and approaches), an element that is sometimes missing is the complexity and contingency of identity, subjectivity and selfhood, including the interface between population as a concept on the one hand and identities,

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bodies and individual selves on the other. They are relational in the sense that the very idea of a population is determined and defined by those who are gathered under that name but, at the same time, the very subjectivity of those gathered or labeled is constituted in that process of naming, gathering and categorising. In other words, contemporary understandings of population may allow for a range of identities that are more-or-less included or marginalised in the context of population, but problematically they tend to assume that identity precedes population and belonging, which are then figured as a collection of pre-existing identities. Rather, if we are to consider the social, participatory and ethical implications of the cultural concept of population and its uses in governance and belonging, there is considerable value in understanding the relationship between ‘people’ and ‘a people’ from a critical perspective that takes into account the nuanced relationship between identity and such clustering labels used by nations, locales, regions, species and the globe more broadly. Advancing an inquiry into the meaning of population does not lie in looking at ways in which we can better organise the demography or statistical analysis of who is part of a population and who is not. Rather, it lies in interrogating how population, as a cultural, discursive construct, is utilised not merely in representing but in constituting groups, sizes, masses and relations. Identity, as that which gives us a sense of who we are singularly and individually, is thus partly governed by the ways in which we think about and relate to others on a massive scale, that is, the scale of population as a multitude. Population as a definer of mass groups means very different things in different contexts, and it is in these distinctions that the complexity of intelligible identity can often become an ethical issue in terms of how we can relate to others and to ourselves well, without violence or the violence of practices of exclusion. In this chapter, I would like to look at some of the ways in which we can understand identity to be constructed in the context of population. When concepts of identity and concepts of population enter the same frame, nationality often tends to dominate how the two can be thought about together—with questions about belonging; about rights to citizenship, rights to permanent residency in a particular place, and rights to enter particular places or cross borders; and about kinds of identities (migrant, non-dominant ethnic) and kinds of documentation of identity (passports, visas, birth certificates, marriage certificates, adoption paperwork); as well as discussions about the range of mechanisms that seek to measure and regulate populations at national levels. Yet the idea of a national population has insistently been brought into question in recent decades by changes in how we conceive of nationality, ethnicity and culture, by significant increases in the permanent and temporary global movement of groups of people, and by new ways of thinking about identity and place, including the problematic concepts of globalisation and cosmopolitanism. This is not intended to suggest that nationality is the only framework at play, as other kinds of population also figure in practices of

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identification (diasporic populations, local community populations, populations defined by health, age or sexual orientation, for example). I will thus begin by discussing how identity and subjectivity are constituted, performed, made intelligible and played out in the context of population as a framework of knowing, intelligibility and categorisation. Drawing on Judith Butler’s powerful account of performativity, I would like to demonstrate that subjects, always constituted in relationality with other subjects, do so in a mass-information world through a passionate attachment to the concept of population, as precarious as that concept remains (Butler 1990; 1993). By thinking about how population frames the practices of contemporary identity, we are able to understand the role that population as a media and cultural concept plays in constituting the practices of sociality and relationality, through which we make sense of ourselves and others, through which we perceive and experience affective sensations of belonging and non-belonging, and by which we read, rate, classify and act upon the otherness of selves and others. The concept of population, then, provides access to the discourses that precede us and thereby enculturate the field through which identity is practised and performed as a social and relational exercise of liveability.

Population, performativity and identity Given that the concept of population (or, rightly, the competing and multiple representations of population as national, global, local and otherwise) is interrelated with how we think about, define and construct identity, it is important to question the mechanisms by which concepts of population operate to condition identity and selfhood in contemporary Western cultures and global security. Our individual and collective identities are performed in the context of population—a discursively given concept that is structured by various forces, including varying degrees and understandings of nationalism as well as governance power mechanisms, including the biopolitical controls on the movement of bodies from outside a defined population, the births and deaths of subjects from the population, and the administrative functions that manage, rate and sometimes punish difference and diversity. Although we often only talk about the idea of population in terms of demographics and planning, it is highly significant to the ways in which we perform our subjectivity, as it is one of several sites or nodes of relationality—how we make selfhood intelligible in the context of those around us, on whom we are absolutely dependent for coherence and recognisability. There are other sites or nodes such as kinship, communicative mechanisms, disciplinarity within institutions to which we belong or through which we work. Yet the notion of population is remarkably significant, not least in constituting how power is deployed through those sites or institutions, and thus how our identities are performative in those contexts. But what are the mechanisms by which subjectivity is constituted through concepts and notions of population? In the introduction to their volume on

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contemporary population growth, Wolfgang Lutz and Warren Sanderson make the valuable point that population is significant to each individual. They note that the topic of population growth or change directly touches ‘upon the lives of almost everybody’, whether through academic and scientific analysis and public debate, or more subtly through the frames of everyday lives lived among others (Lutz and Sanderson 2004, p. 3). Indeed, they argue that it is more endemic to everyday life than we usually imagine population to be in terms of the role of governance and administration in managing populations: [E]ven aggregate-level population considerations beyond personal experience and based on abstract reasoning about conditions in the rather distant future tend to excite people. Obviously, questions concerning changes in the size and structure of our own species, our nation, or our ethnic group interest us in a rather existential way. Even many people who do not subscribe to collective goals and who are interested only in the possible implications of population trends for their own welfare believe that, at least in the medium to long run, population trends do matter … [I]t is not surprising that people hold deeply felt, but divergent, views about our demographic future. (Lutz and Sanderson 2004, p. 3) In other words, population is widely felt to be a matter that has an impact on individuals’ everyday lives, finances, neighbours. Shifts in population, changes in how it is perceived, critiques of the nation-state as a the dominant force defining a population—all of these can upset such attachment and thus the coherence of subjectivity, for they are strongly bound up with how our identities are made recognisable to each other under the facet, or what I often refer to as ‘coordinate’, of relational (and frequently ‘national’) identity. From a contemporary cultural studies and post-structuralist perspective, all identity is historical and contingent (Foucault 1977, p. 208). Subjects are formed, constituted and sustained in and by discourse and a range of discursive practices that produce certain contextual relationships. The power of discourse over bodies and their behaviour is effected, from a Foucauldian perspective, through a series of regulatory controls (Foucault 1990, p. 139). Among these regulatory formations are discipline and biopolitical governance, the second of which is significant in the discursive construction of population—I shall return later in this chapter to addressing some of the ways in which biopolitics plays a significant role in constituting the relationship between subjectivity and population. However, it is Judith Butler’s work on gender performativity that lends itself best to making sense of the relationship between historical discursive, linguistic and cultural factors and the production of identity. In her earlier work, particularly Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, Butler (1990, 1993) provided us with a framework, derived from Foucault, for understanding how subjectivity and identity are constituted in

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language, culture and the available discourses in ways that require us to perform our identities coherently and intelligibly in order to manufacture a sense of belonging and participation in sociality necessary to meet the conditions of a liveable life. Although wide-ranging and sometimes complex, Butler’s work contributed a powerful way for making sense of how identities are constituted in language, culture, discourse and discursive practices. Building on both philosophic and post-structuralist approaches to subjectivity, she pointed to the fact, first, that the self is not a static, essentialist being, but is a retrospective effect of performing identity that is pre-given in language. That is, identity or selfhood is performed reiteratively, and over time, as a process that is ‘in accord’ with a discursively given norm or set of norms. Identity, then, is only ever an inexact citation of that which is encountered in the social world. Subjects stabilise themselves by producing a fiction of a fixed, inner selfhood as if there is an individual essence that drives those performances—this fictional essence is, indeed, a retroactive production of an illusion that there is a core identity behind the performance, a doer behind the deed (Butler 1990, p. 143). That is, our actions and performances do not stem from an inner essence, rather such an idea of an essence is constituted by those very actions. Identity, then, is the outcome of cultural demand that subjects cite, reiterate and perform ‘a norm or set of norms’ that ‘conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition’ (Butler 1993, p. 12). While subjects are constituted in available discourses and social practices, encounters with new, different, alternative or reconfigured discourses and practices can result in a subject’s identity being radically reconstituted or reconfigured (Butler 1991, p. 18). While identity is usually thought of in terms of an array of commonly recognisable axes of discrimination and distinctiveness, such as gender, ethnicity, ability, nationality, age and sexuality, the subject is produced across a multiplicity of coordinates, some of which involve ostensibly named identity categories and others of which are less easily apprehended. When put in the context of population, it is important to begin by recognising that identity performativity is not an individualised act of citation of available discourses, but one that occurs relationally. Performances may not be thought of as theatrics for an audience, but as the call for identity coherence, intelligibility and recognisability that occurs in a social world of visibilities and engagement; and the capacity to perform intelligibly is vital for social participation and belonging. Thus, placement within a population grouping of others who are positioned not only to recognise but also to give recognition to the subject is key for performativity’s success. This is the form that social belonging takes. Second, and related to this, that subjective intelligibility is produced through recognising the self as a normative subject, and that is played out through practices of self-measurement against norms or ranges of normativities—it is notable that the very idea of norm, normality and normativity only emerge alongside concepts of population and population health—and the production of countable groups of

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bodies that can be categorised within taxonomies of the acceptable and unacceptable subject. Through disciplinary practices we learn not just to be surveilled but also to surveil ourselves in order to be conformable subjects that can find our place among the counted population, in response to a demand for accountability that calls upon us to perform ourselves, not as individuals, but as individuals within and in relation to population. This is not as simple as saying that one identifies with a population, a population grouping or a group of people. Population, of course, is always experienced as multiple, and therefore performativity as a member of a population is contextual—it may be in the context of a national population at 11 a.m. and as a global human at 2 p.m. and as a member of a discrete minority at 10 p.m. that evening. In other words, one does not simply belong to a population, nor does one simply identify with a population and go on to perform that identity. Rather, belonging is produced through the performativity of such identities, identifications and affiliations over time in a manner that is never complete, fully coherent or fully stabilised. That is, identification with those around us is complex and not wholesale, but is played out through manufactured forms of belonging. One therefore does not belong to a national population because one is of that nationality; rather the assertion of that national group produces nationality and a sense of mutual identification. Butler indeed notes that identification is problematic, as too often it is figured as an event: When can we say with confidence that an identification has happened? Significantly, it never can be said to have taken place; identification does not belong to the world of events. Identification is constantly figured as a desired event or accomplishment, but one which finally is never achieved; identification is the phantasmatic staging of the event. (Butler 1993, p. 105) One is compelled to undertake a process of identification as part of the practice of articulating identity, although this process is undertaken as process with neither beginning nor end. Elspeth Probyn (1996) has argued that belonging has an affective modality that plays out through a never-fulfilled yearning for that very belonging. This is significant for the constitutive relationship between population and identity, since it points to the fact that all performativity occurs in the context of relationality: the production and articulation of recognisable identities (intelligible, coherent, forged in belonging) depends on there being at one level the normativities that constitute what is, or should be, a recognisable identity (and therefore a liveable life), and, at another level, the presence of those who surveil the performance and ensure it meets criteria of norms of relative similitude in order to belong. Belonging is not ontological, as Vikki Bell (1999, p. 3) points out, but operates at several levels of abstraction. A theory of performative identity indicates that belonging is not the starting point of

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identity because one does not, from the beginning, automatically belong to a particular identity category, whether gender, ethnicity, race or nationality, but performs in ways of coherence, intelligibility and recognisability in order to fulfil that belonging. In that sense, performing that belonging to a population group (which might be performing Australian-ness or German-ness through particular recognised codes, norms, attitudes, behaviours, affiliations, ways of thinking or seeing, and in contrast with other ways of performing) precedes the identity category that is retroactively produced through that performance of belonging. In bringing the element of belonging into focus, the different configurations, definitions and interpretations of the concepts of population and people(s) can be understood as one—among several—cultural and discursive elements, to which subjects have a deeply felt sense of attachment, such that subjectivity and identity are dependent on that attachment and relationship, which are given meaning through the concept of population. If we bear in mind that all subjects are multiply constituted, and that such constitution occurs through a range of attachments, sites and contexts, then we must remember there can be sites at which there is mutual recognition, while regulatory regimes may refuse to recognise, and indeed such mutual recognitions in one site may provide the resources for a subject to ‘cope’ with being unrecognisable and thereby nonbelonging in another site. This is important in the context of the category ‘population’, which, as I have discussed above, has multiple meanings and operates in different ways at different times, and tends to be dominated by the overly constructed notion of national population. Nation-states are a site of considerable attachment for many subjects, and thus are dominant in how identities are constituted at particular times. The nation-state requires the development and management of a sense of common belonging in order for the historically recent idea of the nation to proceed into an ongoing future (Taylor 2011, p. 45). In Benedict Anderson’s (1983) framework, the imaginary community of the nation is developed through certain ritual practices to which subjects maintain particular attachments, and in many cases these can be—as with many other types of community—particular symbols and constructs put into wide circulation, frequently within media practices operating within the public sphere (Cohen 1985). Today, such attachment to state power as an administrative form can be understood as being mediated through certain civil rights and political participation (Habermas 2011, p. 20), which we might say work for the nation partly as a management strategy and partly as the nation-state’s alibi. Yet what constitutes belonging and identity in terms of that nation is more complex than simply the existence of a group of individuals. The nation as a term is etymologically derived from ‘nascere’ meaning ‘to be born’ (Minca 2006, p. 393). Although national identity as a mode of population belonging is, as I will show, always performative and constituted in the repetition of forms of relationality that are conditioned by the delimiting of the population to one considered a ‘national population’, the figure of birth haunts

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definitions and concerns over who belongs to which population, at what time and in what conditions. The right to participate in the sovereign nation as a way of performing identity and population membership is one that returns retroactively to birth as the primary norm of that belonging. Birth is the alibi for such belonging, by which it is possible for a subject to turn to the claim to birth in order to justify and give coherence to belonging to the nation as a particular and highly limited form of population belonging. Birth, likewise, becomes the justification for the exclusionary actions of the nation, whereby one subject can argue that another does not belong to this population because that person was not born here. Usually this is a mechanism to ensure the dominance of white hegemony in particular Western countries (McAllan 2011, pp. 11–12), although it is lived in both policy/ administrative and disciplinary/everyday terms of embodied experience. The phrase: ‘go back to where you came from’ is effectively to say ‘go back to where you were born, and those who came before you’. Such a performative articulation that marks the one who was not born within the lands of the nation as non-belonging or not-fully-belonging is, of course, another way in which national identity is produced as coherent, for in identifying an ‘other’ to national belonging, one shores up one’s own belonging and, hence, national identity. Yet, as I have discussed above, migration is the complexification of population since the mid twentieth century, and this complexifies national belonging. Governance of the nation-state is central in this context, for it is the state that services ‘the matrix of the obligations and prerogatives of citizenship. It is that which forms the conditions under which we are juridically bound’ (Butler and Spivak 2007, p. 3). Administrative governance of populations breaches the birth–nation–belonging continuum such that migration is uneasily permitted when particular conditions that would tolerate a form of belonging are permitted. In many ways, this can make more concrete a deep attachment for a migrant subject to a new nation or state, although it can also breach the merger of the administrative and the everyday, whereby a government might permit one to identify as a member of the nation (to become a British subject, to become an Australian citizen) and yet not to fully belong, particularly if others in the local environment deny that belonging, denounce migration as a pathway to national identity, or act to marginalise or differentiate that subject from that national identity. The administrative element here is one that concerns itself with spatial definitions of the nation, protecting borders from ‘unauthorised’ crossings and enveloping the meaning of population in terms of territory and spatiality by linking these with an idea of national character (Saxton 2003, pp. 111–112). The crisis of nation as the determinant of population is, of course, what is at stake in this example. But it remains that the formation, which determines belonging here in terms of national populations, is the administration that enacts particular (sovereign) decisions to permit belonging and thus national identification.

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The discourses that constitute the relationship between subjectivity and national population belonging are not wholly those that circulate in governance, policy and administration—despite the investment of governance in border policing, population statistics and normativities. Other levels of experience play a significant role in how belonging to a population is produced and performed. Greg Noble has criticised approaches derived from Anderson for their over-reliance on the idea of the nation as an ideational category communicated in contemporary media. Noble argues that public rituals of national attachment are not the source of national identity, nor are there adequate reasons given for why people choose to participate in such national events. Instead, he turns to the everyday: ‘Our capacity to identify with the nation comes not simply from these events per se, but from the somewhat submerged, half-conscious and ubiquitous experience of nation throughout our everyday lives, which makes those moments of national identification possible’ (Noble 2002, p. 53). Analysing the everyday furnishing, decor and decoration choices made in the private home by a range of people, Noble demonstrates the ways in which the attachment to the nation occurs through submerged and non-voluntary decoration choices, rather than through the ritual annual events of nationhood or the promotion of the nation in media and other public discourse. Rightly, the sites of nationhood are not those obvious points of national ‘obviousness’. Likewise, the identification with national populations—as the dominant identification with population, over and above global and sometimes local or regional population groupings and affiliations—are not driven by public national rituals nor by rituals of population, such as the national census, even though they are very often the sites at which we find the discourse of population as a countable object at its most ostensible. In my analysis here, the nation is that which constructs a dominant use of the concept of population, meaning that relationality is figured through nationhood, nationality and sometimes nationalism. In that context, then, to be a subject means to be to some degree a national subject, even though that sense of nationality that is constituted in a manufactured sense of belonging to a relational group and performed through various conformable behaviours, expressions, articulations and attitudes, peaks and wanes at various times in temporality. In this sense, then, it is in everyday relationality that subjects come to have an attachment to, or with, a sense or understanding of population. However, what matters here is how population itself is conceived by singular subjects and through what mechanisms the notion of population becomes intelligible. Although affiliations and identifications with nationality can occur at the level of the very personal, in thinking through affiliation in populational terms it is through certain administrative and governance communications as to how the population is conceived that it becomes intelligible to us, even though we are not necessarily accessing demographic data or governmental policies every day, with a constructedness of language designed to inculcate a sense of nationality through population numbers and make-up. It is because the

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notion of the population as a mass of people in varying degrees of distinctiveness and similitude is difficult to conceive in the practice of everyday life that we turn to what we know and have heard for the discourse of population to be sensible to us in an everyday affiliational identification. In other words, population is that which provides a discursive node through which we perform an aspect or element of subjective identity in relational and affiliational ways coherent to ourselves and others. What we can see from the relationship between the administration’s implication in the production of the nation-state and the everyday norms by which national identity is performed, is that belonging to a national population and articulating an identity that is conformable with that population are activities that occur between governance and the disciplinarity of the everyday. Belonging to population occurs, then, through particular ways and methods of performing identity, and these are, at one level, always fictional (if meaningful and sometimes even ethical) and, at another level, always unstable: if identity is performative it is, as Butler has shown, based on citing a discursively given signifier (such as nationality) and repeating it, under conditions in which all repetition is always surreptitiously doomed to failure by the very impossibility of genuine repetition. At yet another level, repeating the norms of a population-based identity or affiliation, occurs in the context of regulatory regimes that demand the coherence of the identity and, indeed, that we perform identities at all (Butler 1990, pp. 141–142). Although focused on the population in a way that today is sometimes described as the demeaning nature of government administration that treats individuals as ‘only a number’, the attempt to manage populations produces norms that one is compelled to perform in order to be a coherent, intelligible and recognisable subject; that is, in order to belong to that population. As Foucault (2004) put it: ‘The norm is something that can be applied to both a body one wishes to discipline and a population one wishes to regularize’ (p. 254). Such identity in relationality with those populational norms is thus produced in the nexus between discipline and regulatory governance to articulate what sort of demand for population belonging will be made. Within these conditions, whereby disciplinarity and governance merge to constitute the relationship between population (in its dominant, nationalised form of definition) and identity (as performative in the relationality between the subject and that definition of population), there is an identifiable slippage between race, norm and conduct (Macey 2009, p. 196). To say this is to point back to the problematic arrangements whereby discipline can play a constitutive role in the conduct of ‘citizens’ as members of a population towards each other and towards new arrivals, who are not members by virtue of the ‘birth’ formation, and governance, through which such movement from another place (of birth) has been authorised and by which the activities of determining, counting, figuring and regulating the population at the national level are managed. As I have stated, between these mechanisms of power, belonging is forged and that belonging to population is essential for everyday

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coherence and intelligibility, and thus results in a deep and strongly felt attachment to the population. That attachment is, then, an attachment to the self, to life and to liveability, for without it the work of fulfilling the persistent Enlightenment demand for coherence and intelligibility is either impossible (for some) or requires an exhausting and extensive form of identity work (for others). One has a deep sense of belonging to population as ‘other subjects’, then, not so much because the nation subordinates subjects into submitting to identities, which are defined through a belongness to national populations, but because subjects form a passionate attachment in dependency (Allen 2006, p. 200) on the nation as the definer of normative identity coherence. As I have remarked, the nation is not the wholesale definer of the coordinates of identity for singular subjects at all times—rather there are both peaked moments at which belonging to a national population matters most, and there are tacit and everyday experiences, which express that belonging, as Greg Noble (2002) has shown. Yet because of the force of the connection between nation and population, and because our identities are only meaningful in relationality to population in some form or other, it is the nation to which one becomes passionately attached. Attachment, however, is necessary, for given any choice between an identity that is based on conforming to normativities that are policed through regulatory regimes, and having no identity by failing to articulate the self through recognisable, intelligible and coherent norms, national identity will prevail, even if the extent of that attachment will always, and for every subject, be variable, complex, interwoven with other coordinates of identity from gender, to ethnicity, to age, to regional location, to categories of career choices, and will often be in conflict with other, deeply felt attachments. That is the form subjectivity takes in the contemporary era.

Population, governance and biopolitics Biopolitics, as an administrative deployment of power, emerged in the latter half of the eighteenth century—a new technology of power distinct from disciplinarity, but neither excluding nor wholly competing with it. Rather, biopolitics involves the administrative attempt to modify aspects of discipline for use in broader-scale governance (Foucault 2004, p. 242). Its main set of operations is, as Foucault notes, through the development of ‘a set of processes such as the ratio of births to deaths, the rate of reproduction, the fertility of a population, and so on’ (p. 243), and deals with the population as a political problem, a biological problem and a scientific problem (p. 245). Biopolitical power is thus a framework for the governance of populations that works across a range of activities. Importantly, it does not simply take up the issue of population as if populations pre-existed, but comes to formulate an idea of population, producing a new element for the governance of subjects. Where disciplines dealt with individuals and their bodies in practical terms, biopolitics allows the emergence of ‘a new body, a multiple body, a body with so many heads that, while they

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might not be infinite in number, cannot necessarily be counted’ (p. 245). It introduces mechanisms of power that condition how populations become knowable, including through ‘forecasts, statistical estimates, overall measures’ (p. 246). While we routinely and in pedestrian ways imagine these simply to be the means of measuring and discussing large numbers of people, they effectively operate to bring into being the population as a practice; one that has implications not only for administrative government but for everyday life. Biopolitics seeks to produce, regulate and make efficient use of life itself, but it does so partly through what has sometimes been described as its secondary interest in maintaining classically modern and centralised modes of legal, constitutional and institutional formations (Barder and Debrix 2011, p. 776). Yet in biopolitical formations of governance, law is a diminished force that occasionally is posited as an obstacle to achieving the ends of managing the population through casual, routine and mundane administrative practices (McRobbie 2006, p. 81). This is significant in the sense that juridical thought on the role of the nation-state and its administration in governance tends to assume uncritically that population management, and who belongs to population by virtue of identity, is governed through legislation rather than the complex array of governmental policy and everyday practices. The biopolitical focus on the regulation and management of whole populations is not, therefore, to take the corporeal, singular subject out of the picture altogether, nor does it focus on the management of populations purely through the object of territoriality. Rather, it makes use of the human body as a critical site of control (Fitzgerald 2010, p. 280), thereby producing particular ways of being via particular ranges of normativity that operate at the interface between the corporeal subject and the abstract figure of the population. The figure of population is brought into being within and through biopolitics, in part through its regulatory mechanisms and the promotion of particular sciences. In Foucault’s study, the birth of philology as the study of language is produced in ways that identify a population in and through language (Foucault 2007, p. 78). Human sciences such as sociology, likewise, emerge in ways that understand the human subject, not in singularity, but as ‘a figure of population’ (p. 79). Yet most important here in producing a concept of population is the emergence of statistics, literally the ‘knowledge of the state’. Statistics is the content of governmentality in the sense that it is what must be known in order to govern and thereby preserve the strength of the state. Statistics is knowledge of the population, in terms of the measurement of its quantity, mortality and fertility, the assessment of categories of individuals in a state, of the wealth of those categories, and of the potential wealth available to a state, of the measurements of trade and the effects of taxes—all of these comprise ‘a set of technical knowledges that describes the reality of the state itself’ (Foucault 2007, p. 274) with the entire administrative assemblage dedicated to the production of this knowledge (p. 315). Population, then, comes to be conceived not as the group of

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people living in a territory or land, but as demographic understandings figured through ‘cycles, curves and pyramids’ (Legg 2005, p. 137). Statistics are thus a complex mechanism deployed by biopolitics that makes the population an object of study, but at the same time produces particular, historical and very contemporary forms of understanding the population in ways that are not always figured in similarity but in complexity and contradiction. Different rates, different ratios, different structurations and different curves compete with each other, yet form the overall discursive figuration of the population as object and, in temporal terms, as event. However, statistics are more than simply the collation of data and information about the current situation of the nation-state, for the activity of collation and dissemination of statistics operates upon the population in two ways. First, it is forward thinking, in that it seeks not what the state currently is, but identifies ‘what the state should be’ by utilising statistics ‘to arrange things so that the state becomes sturdy and permanent, so that it becomes wealthy, and so that it becomes strong in the face of everything that may destroy it’ (Foucault 2008, p. 4). Second, statistics—which are, through censuses and other data collecting devices, generally treated not just as knowledge of the public but as public knowledge—come to circulate in the public sphere as mechanisms that provide discursive categories of being. They provide nodes of knowledge, which make the subjectivity of the subject intelligible to the self and others, and thus are sites of passionate attachment (Allen 2006, p. 200). Subjects are subordinated through attachment to the normative frameworks of biopolitics via statistical knowledges of the curve of normativities, the enumeration of identities, the categorisation of subjects by the origin of genetic forebears, languages spoken, incomes earned, levels of education and other factors, which come to stand in for identity and are performed through subjecthood. This is not to say that a subject recognises himself or herself within a statistically compiled category and then goes on to perform that category (intelligible through related knowledges, stereotypes and known attributes) in a linear pattern. It is rather more complex than that, for identity that is produced in biopolitics is not forged in simplicity, but ambiguities, complexities and contradictions, or what Ien Ang refers to as ‘nonlinear processes in which every effect is a cause of yet another outcome in a complex and endless array of feedback loops [in which] contradictions, ambiguities, complexities and uncertainties are, in effect, the regularities of our age of fragmentation’ (Ang 2011, pp. 782–783). That is to say that one does not recognise oneself in statistics, but in the complexity of statistics, as they produce complex and contradictory knowledge of the normativities of selfhood. This is highly significant in understanding the relationship between population and subjectivity, for biopolitics provides the discursive framework that makes identity intelligible and that presents the signifiers, categories, forms and knowledges that are cited and repeated over time in performativity.

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As Judith Revel has pointed out, in offering biopolitics as an understanding of contemporary governance, Foucault was attempting to develop an explanatory framework that helped investigate how it is possible to live in relation to others in a manner in which differences between the self and the other ‘are neither reified, objectified, reduced to the least common denominator (such as a contrived universalisation, or a reduction to sameness), or what one must rely upon to have access to the other’ (Revel 2009, p. 48). The means by which subjectivity is produced in correlation with the biopolitical, then, is by the establishment not of norms through a normal/abnormal distinction, as might be found in disciplinary institutions that exclude the latter or regulate the latter into becoming the docile former. Rather, it is through normativities, which are produced as ranges by which subjects come to be emplaced. Where disciplinary power mechanisms distinguish between the normal and the abnormal, the regulatory functions of biopolitical power technologies plot the normal and the abnormal along ‘different curves of normality’, whereby certain distributions are considered to be ‘more normal than the others, or at any rate more favourable than the others’ (Foucault 2007, p. 63). What this means for subjectivity and identity is that in some contexts, including the contemporary neoliberal formations of governance and society, the strictures of, say, national identities do not map to a normal/abnormal set of mutually exclusive categories such as national subject and foreigner or immigrant other. Rather, it is a matter of distribution and distance from the norm. National identity is discursively performed as normative; non-normative identities, which are deemed to be so because of being a minority statistic within a population, and might include certain immigrant community groups, are by nature not of opposition but of distance from the normative along a curve. This is why it is possible to state today that in legislative and certain social formulations, some immigrant groups within a national population are not only tolerable but are also considered legitimate within national subjectivity, but certain subjects (such as those born in the country of parents born in the country) remain the most legitimate. This set of distributions and curve of normativities, then, produces certain discourses of regulation by which identities can be performed coherently. So, rather than the performative national identity being produced over time and repetition through being fully and only disciplined into particular docile ways of being that are coherent and recognisable, the range of those that can be recognised as (at least) tolerable and certainly as intelligible as part of the relationality of population—as part of the curve of normativities that is figured through statistical analysis and dissemination of the biopolitical knowledge of the population—produces the curve of possibilities and limitations for the performance of a subjectivity that can ‘fit’ within a population grouping. What this means for contemporary performativities of identity is that one relates and articulates oneself through the pure (but always haphazard and marked by failure) repetition of a category or ideal (say, womanhood, Britishness, heterosexuality) but to the population as made intelligible and figured through ratios

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and curves. It is not that one finds the category Britishness, which is communicated along with a host of behaviours, attributes, stereotypes and movements that make Britishness recognisable to the self and to others, but that one is required to manage one’s national identity in terms of the extent to which one can be plotted in proximity to a core or ideal Britishness on a curve—that is, an acceptable or tolerable distance from the ideal. In that context, population as the milieu of others, becomes central to all performativities of identity because it is the means by which relationality (to others) is produced. Foucault’s attention to the notion of security provides us with a concept useful to thinking about the relationship between national and international governance systems and the maintenance of population as a thing and as a concept. Security here stands in for particular biopolitical elements of governance. For Foucault (2007), security operates in biopolitical terms and produces certain forms of normalisation, which likewise, are ‘different from the disciplinary type of normalisation’ (p. 11). Security operates as an apparatus within the biopolitical deployment of power, with four general features: first, the definition of security through spatial metaphors, which can include national borders and territorialisation; second, the treatment of uncertainty as aleatory; third, the form of normalisation through a range or curve rather than a dichotomy of norm/abnorm; and finally, the emergence of the population in relation to the security of political power (p. 11). The population emerges within security first as a ‘milieu’ whereby it comes to be seen as a field of intervention in which power acts not on and through individuals as legal subjects of sovereignty, but as ‘a multiplicity of organisms, of bodies capable of performances, and of required performances—as in discipline— one tries to affect, precisely, a population’ (p. 21). Security aims to ensure the ‘conjunction of a series of events’ produced by individuals and populations (p. 21) that ensure the sound working of the neoliberal political system endemic to contemporary national and international politics. Within biopolitical regulation, the population comes to be understood as a collective ‘political subject’—that is, on the one hand it serves as an object towards which mechanisms of power are directed with a view to having an effect upon the population as a whole, yet on the other hand it comes to be seen as a subject responsible for its own conduct (pp. 42–43). The population serves as a subject through accepting particular political and economic conditions—Foucault points to the example of populations accepting the scarcity–dearness model of the market at particular times (p. 43), as well as the conformable behaviour that is expected of individuals operating in relationality to the population and the conditions in which it finds itself as both object and subject. None of this is, of course, to suggest that the biopolitical mechanisms of power, which produce subjects in the context of population norms, security and risk, are wholesale and monolithic. Rather, there are resistances to mechanisms of power deployed on behalf of neoliberalism and through the nation-state, and various codes of non-relationality with the population and

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the various discursively structured curves of normativities made intelligible through demography and statistics. Stephen Legg, for example, has noted that there are a number of scales through which a critique of accounts of resistance to population management occur. These include campaigns against subjectification, resistance to data collection, competing perspectives on geopolitical imaginations, reactions to biopolitics’ failure to maintain equilibrium (which result in the critique of governance altogether, as has been witnessed in the European financial crises of 2012), and other criticisms and resistances that are produced through international comparisons (Legg 2005, pp. 145–146). At the same time, of course, the existence of a curve of normativities as the site through which contemporary subjecthood is cited and performed in ways that allow liveability with difference (Revel 2009, p. 48), has not meant that difference does not return again and again as the product of violence. As Suvendrini Perera has noted, neoliberal technologies of governance may well have reorganised socio-political relations among different parts of the population, but ‘new demarcations and differentiations dot not replace, but are mapped on to pre-existing racial regimes’ (Perera 2007, p. 8). Rather, biopolitics ‘transcodes’ existing differences in ways that work for neoliberalism, but that can result in the persistent re-emergence of unethical violence towards those who are marked as racially different within the population. Biopolitics is, of course, racist, but not in the older form of mutual contempt or hatred between peoples demarcated by race (Clough 2008, p. 18). For Foucault, racism’s first function in biopolitics is as a mechanism of separating out particular groups existing within a population such as to create certain fragmentations within the biological continuum addressed by biopolitical power (Foucault 2004, pp. 254–255). Its second function is to make positive the biopolitical focus on making life live—by allowing what is deemed a more inferior species to die or be killed, the stronger and more liveable the (national) population will be. Such killing is not, of course, murder in Foucault’s analysis but ‘also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on’ (Foucault 2004, pp. 255–256). In this context, we might consider the way in which countries such as Canada or Australia, which allow a certain type of political, social and physical death to occur to its indigenous peoples, as a segment of the population deemed to be external and/or unnecessary to the core population. Following Perera, then, the wholly unethical removal of this group through various forms of making unliveable in order to let the core population live, is the result of mapping biopolitics against older racisms—including the racism endemic to colonialism and white settler society—whereby identification with the curves of normativities does not fully dislodge the older sovereign and disciplinary forms of identification that require mapping oneself and performing in conformity in opposition to an abjected other.

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Biopolitical health interventions are not necessarily without conflict with other prevailing concerns or campaigns, or attempts to register the population through various means. For example, unfit bodies in Western countries arise partly as a result of the overuse of private transport and the general reduction in walking for practical movement. This is endemically related to the layout of cities and suburbs, the location of workplaces and the temporal arrangements by which labour is undertaken, and the types and forms of labour in many Western countries. Children walk to school less as a result of the neoliberalism of biopolitics that promotes the self-management of risk, including risks to child safety (Rossiter 2010). So there are clear conflicts between that which biopolitics promotes as necessary to maintain population health in regard to obesity, but is effectively sidelined by other forces that utilise biopolitical governance for the management and spatial arrangement of populations in regard to home and work and the injunction to self-manage risk. What this suggests is that biopolitics produces and disseminates normative ranges, but at the same time different ranges compete and there is considerable flux in the extent to which subjects make these differences intelligible and coherent in order to produce manageable subjectivities. Overall, however, this is to point to the fact that biopolitical governance produces not only sensibilities in terms of belonging to populations via ethnicities or behaviours, but actively produces intelligibilities of the body in relationality while manufacturing a mechanism for conformability in which the performativity of selfhood involves a component of persistent comparison of one’s own body with ‘population ideals’ as produced in those ranges, measurements and images. In producing the idea of the population, biopolitics constitutes identities through regulation and the promotion of conformability. While normalisation is, in cultural theory, most frequently connected with the disciplinary power of institutions such as education, the family, workplaces and sites, which operate through surveillance to produce docile bodies, biopolitical regulation and its mechanism of security, as deployed on behalf of neoliberalism via the nation-state, marks out and produces normativities through the population rather than the individual. It is thus a power framework for the production of particular identities—a framework that occurs in ways both similar to and different from disciplinarity’s normalisation, which continues to operate alongside it and, at times, in support of it (Foucault 2007, p. 4). Normativities circulate between disciplinarity and biopolitics (Foucault 2004, p. 253; Lazzarato 2009, p. 118) and normalisation thus remains central to the project of identity as produced in the context of population(s). However, the process by which the norm comes to be the definer of identity is somewhat different in biopolitics. In disciplinarity, one begins with the norm and bodies are trained with reference to the norm with a clearly marked differentiation between the norm and the normal. In the biopolitical deployment of power, however, the normal and abnormal are plotted out, as pointed out above, over different curves of normativities:

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The operation of normalization consists in establishing an interplay between these different distributions of normality and [in] acting to bring the most unfavorable in line with the more favorable. So we have here something that starts from the normal and makes use of certain distributions considered to be, if you like, more normal than the others, or at any rate more favorable than the others. These distributions will serve as the norm. The norm is an interplay of differential normalities. The normal comes first and the norm is deduced from it, or the norm is fixed and plays its operational role on the basis of this study of normalities. (Foucault 2007, p. 63) In that context, then, identity is not produced as discrete categories, but is developed in relationality with the norm, which is both productive of and justified by population norms and standards. As Sarah Sharma (2011) has noted in her study of the biopolitical economy of temporality, recalibration can be a useful concept for understanding the process by which biopolitical governance inculcates subjectivity through calculated normative ranges in the context of population. Recalibration here involves the multiplicity of acts by which individuals and groups synchronise body clocks, their understanding of the present, past and future, and the process by which economic encounters occur in time—all in the context of ‘an exterior relation, be it another person, a chronometer, an institution or ideology’ (Sharma 2011, p. 442). In this sense, then the biopolitical production of subjective, corporeal life is produced not only through relationality with the range of normativities it articulates for a population group, but by requiring the self to be prescribed and inscribed with measurement given in relation to others as framed through relatively narrow norms (Cryle and Stephens 2017, pp. 2–3). This is most apparent in government and public sphere concerns over obesity as a population health issue and an artefact of media engagement. For example, calls to increase government taxes on particular foods (Miletic 2009) is the means by which biopolitical governance seeks to regulate and produce an equilibrium among the population, in response to data that indicates a cost to the nation (labour losses, health care funding) if too great a ratio of the population is obese. Despite arguments from other sectors that drawing attention to obesity produces problems for singular subjects, such as depression and anxiety over body image (Sydney Morning Herald 2008), and that there should be a greater acceptance of a range of body norms, the biopolitical intervention in body weight and health means that data are gathered, categorised, registered and investigated and thereby a range of corporeal normativities considered ideal is produced—regardless of whether these normativities are ideal for individual subjects (though they usually are), they are ideal for the workability of the population. Such intervention responds through various campaigns, including taxes, health advertising and promoting increased exercise and healthy transport. At the same time, however, biopolitics produces normativities through

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a range of acceptable body weights, and it is once again through the proximity to the normative ideal range that corporeality is made sensible in the context of the biopolitics of population health. Today, body weight and size is rarely spoken of in terms of being fat or being thin, but is expressed in terms of an array, too fat, a little overweight, somewhat underweight; or it is measured by a variety of mechanisms such as body mass (weighed on scales) or body mass index (BMI). At a disciplinary level, medical practitioners intervene. When the residue of sovereignty comes into a formation through bullying, for example, an overweight person might be subjected to verbal violence, exclusion or even physical abuse. Yet in the biopolitical context, particular types of bodies come into being not, then, as fat or thin or otherwise, but as always relative to particular ideals in circulation, which themselves may compete with ideals produced through apparent norms in film, television and magazines. In the context of performativity, then, agency in regard to normativities becomes not an activity of manufacture but ‘an activity of maintenance’ (Berlant 2007, p. 759), whereby intelligible performativity can only be understood in relational terms. A subject is required to fulfil the contemporary cultural demands for coherence and intelligibility through undertaking a process of selfreflective measurement in regard to the population (relationality with other subjects), but always through the power relations of biopolitics, which present these over time. Much like the clock that produces not only a statement of time but also particular normative and conformative activities about how that time is received, used and understood, including rituals of time management and the production of everyday life through scales of appropriate behaviours at particular times, biopolitics regularises the self in relation not to a single point in time, but to different configurations of relationality at different times. It is the complex array of power mechanisms that emerge and persist within the framework of biopolitical governance that manufactures the relationship between singular, subjective identity and population. How one performs identity in ways that are intelligible and recognisable to others occurs through the manufactured sense of that population as knowable, through the knowledge of the state and its shaping of conformable actions and behaviours. It follows that the population, then, is presented to us as an arrangement of knowledge in the fields of national territory, security, health, infrastructure and demographics, and one’s subjectivity is coherent in the context of the range of expected and anticipated normativities presented through that knowledge framework. Since this framework is that which gives intelligibility to subjecthood, a deep and passionate attachment is formed to the national population, for to criticise and critique it is to destabilise the myth of the coherent and recognisable self.

Sovereignty, nationality, bare life and biopolitics Although Foucault’s articulation of biopolitics provides a powerful framework for understanding the relationship between population and identity, it is not without criticism, although the most powerful of these are critiques that

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seek to expand on Foucault’s work in interdisciplinary ways to provide an analysis that accounts for both recent and historical global conditions. Giorgio Agamben (1995), for example, has been critical of Foucault’s articulation of biopolitics and the distinctions he drew between sovereignty and disciplinarity/biopolitics as technologies of power deployed in governance. For Agamben, Foucault’s study of biopolitics did not take into account the previous work of Hannah Arendt and her studies of totalitarianism, resulting in Foucault’s theorisation failing to draw together the operations of biopolitics in the service of sovereignty as can be found in the totalitarian state structures of the twentieth century and the example of the concentration camps in Nazi Germany (Agamben 1995, p. 4). Agamben’s critique of biopolitics as a form of power that makes the life of populations its object of governance depends on returning initially to ancient Greek thought and the distinction between zoë as ‘the simple fact of living common to all living beings’, whether animals or humanity, and bios, which was considered the ‘form or way of living proper to an individual or a group’, that is, political subjectivity (p. 1). For Agamben, biopolitics as a technology of power that arises in modernity involves a significant transformation of the political and philosophical categories of classical thinking whereby zoë enters into the sphere of politics. It is Agamben’s thesis, then, that the biopolitical inclusion of bare life in the political realm is not a new technology of power that replaces sovereignty but, instead, the concealed original nucleus of sovereign power: Placing biological life at the center of its calculations, the modern State therefore does nothing other than bring to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life, thereby reaffirming the bond … derived from a tenacious correspondence between the modern and the archaic, which one encounters in the most diverse sphere. (Agamben 1995, p. 6) It emerges in Agamben’s reading of Foucault that the subject becomes bound not only to his or her own individualised identity and consciousness, but at the same time, to the totalising external power of the technologies that make the life of the population intelligible and, hence, liveable. Yet Agamben draws on the ancient Roman concept of the homo sacer or ‘sacred man’ to point to a necessary correction in Foucault’s thesis. The homo sacer was, by decree of Roman law, the human subject who might be killed, but not sacrificed as part of a religious ritual—a subject who is not protected by the law and the charge of murder, but who can be killed with impunity. The figure of the homo sacer is, then, the inclusion of human life within the law by virtue of its exclusion from protection of the law (Agamben 1995, p. 8). In that sense, then, the law within a biopolitical framework that serves sovereignty is built upon the everpresent possibility that a subject will be made a political subject only by being excluded from the protection of the polis. This is what Agamben refers to as ‘the figure of bare life’. As importantly, contemporary democracy is thereby

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marked by a ‘zone of irreducible indistinction’ (p. 8), resulting from its capacity to exclude bare life and thereby capturing it within the political realm. The coinciding of bare life and the political realm makes indistinct the formerly discrete concepts of exclusion and inclusion, zoë and bios, outside and inside. This aporia is, for Agamben, an explanation as to why modern democracy and the contemporary democratic state, despite the claims of the triumph of democracy over adversarial alternatives in the late twentieth century, on the one hand has dedicated itself to the happiness of life (as zoë) and, on the other, has failed to save it ‘from unprecedented ruin’ (p. 10). This brings Agamben to note that there is an ‘inner solidarity’ between democracy and totalitarianism, and a reminder to us all that democracy in its present form and within its claims as the final ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama, 1989) produces subjectivities, policies, political regimes and forms of relationality that are inherently unethical by virtue of the capacity to politicise life by the possibility of its exclusion. When we think about the notion of population—and particularly national populations—through Agamben’s approach to bare life, it is possible to see how the population as bios is figured by that which is excluded as exceptional or other to population. Refugees, for Agamben, are the biopolitical object, par excellence, in the sense that they are reduced to bare life as humans— alive, yet as animals in nature without political freedom. If bios is to be equated with citizenship and if belonging to a nation-state is the requirement for citizenship and the requirement for subjectivity as a political subject, then refugees are, for Agamben, persistently cast as the excluded (and hence politicised) other, reduced to the bare life of zoë by not being deemed worthy of being accorded the status of citizen. What this means, therefore, is that the notion of the population as a group of citizens (and pseudo-citizens in the form of permitted and allowed permanent and temporary residents) within the sovereign space of a nation, is grounded in the fact that the concept of citizenry requires the concept of the excluded other, who is not under the protection of the law (or various conventions such as lives that need to be saved), or who is not accorded the capacity to speak or participate in the decisions on their own future, and is thus reduced to bare life. In other words, the national population is determined by figuring those who do not belong to it, by producing its externalities and exclusions. Such exclusionalities define population and belonging. This helps to provide the conditions by which national population comes to be experienced as a natural sense of affiliation and belonging with a population grouping, for a subject performs national identity not only through the reiterative citation and play of signifiers and practices of belonging, but through the rejection of those signifiers that are deemed other. As those figured as homo sacer, or bare life, are unliveable lives and non-subjects at the zone of indistinction between belonging and nonbelonging, it becomes possible for the national subject to performatively articulate national identity, not merely through belonging but through the liveability that such belonging produces. Life as bios and nationality, then,

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come together—the proper life of a national subject through conformable action and regulated normativity. The bare life of, say, the refugee who seeks belonging is that which is radically excluded from population and belonging as abject, thereby being at once an element in the performativity of nationality by virtue of its necessary externality from it.

Conclusion There is widespread public interest, fascination and anxiety over the concept of population, and this occurs even when that attachment is not based on an interest related to personal or individual gain or benefit. I have been arguing in this chapter that one of the core reasons why this is the case is that a concept of population is absolutely central to the contemporary production of coherent and intelligible identity. We are constituted in population through the mutually entwined practices of relationality in which we experience belonging through being recognised by a population, and recognisable within or without it, and through the utility of biopolitical practices of normativisation, which we measure ourselves by, and plot ourselves on—curves of normativities that are given not through a group of people but through population as a measurable, countable artefact of contemporary culture. Because population is a concept, however, framed through various practices of power, which include biopolitical, securitised and the residue of certain kinds of sovereignty, our practices of identification include being practices that both depend on and embrace governance, shackling us to particular ways of being and ways of forging liveable lives that cannot be disconnected from frameworks of social belonging. One thing that is very important to bear in mind here is the fact that the contemporary understanding and utilisation of population is historical, and thus the ways in which it is constitutive of identity and selfhood is also related to the contemporaneity of culture. While population as a key organising principle of contemporary society is rarely in question, this does not mean that the term, its use or its conceptualisation is fixed forever. Rather, emergent cultural practices may come into play in ways that dislodge the current valency of population for the performativity of subjecthood. In terms of that eventuality, it is possible to argue, how subjectivity is performed will itself be altered in ways unknowable—primarily because the organising framework for sociality and relationality can be replaced with something other, which might be a practice of counter-population.

References Agamben, G., 1995. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. HellerRoazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Allen, A., 2006. Dependency, subordination, and recognition: on Judith Butler’s theory of subjection. Continental Philosophy Review, 38(3–4), 199–222.

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Anderson, B., 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Ang, I., 2011. Navigating complexity: from cultural critique to cultural intelligence. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 25(6), 779–794. Barder, A.D. and Debrix, F., 2011. Agonal sovereignty: rethinking war and politics with Schmitt, Arendt and Foucault. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 37(7), 775–793. Bell, V., 1999. Performativity and belonging: an introduction. Theory, Culture & Society, 16(2), 1–10. Berlant, L., 2007. Slow death (sovereignty, obesity, lateral agency). Critical Inquiry, 33(4), 754–780. Butler, J., 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Butler, J., 1991. Imitation and gender insubordination. In: D. Fuss, ed. Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. London: Routledge, 13–31. Butler, J., 1993. Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. London: Routledge. Butler, J. and Spivak, G.C., 2007. Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging. London: Seagull Books. Cohen, A.P. 1985. The Symbolic Construction of Community. London: Ellis Horwood & Tavistock Publications. Clough, P.T., 2008. The affective turn: political economy, biomedia and bodies. Theory, Culture & Society, 25(1), 1–22. Cryle, P. and Stephens, E., 2017. Normality: A Critical Genealogy. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Fitzgerald, S.A., 2010. Biopolitics and the regulation of vulnerability: the case of the female trafficked migrant. International Journal of Law in Context, 6(3), 277–294. Foucault, M., 1977. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D.F. Bouchard, trans. D.F. Bouchard and S. Simon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Foucault, M., 1990. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley. London: Penguin. Foucault, M., 2004. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, ed. M. Bertani and A. Fontana, trans. D. Macey. London: Penguin. Foucault, M., 2007. Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, ed. M. Senellart, trans. G. Burchell. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M., 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79. ed. M. Senellart, trans. G. Burchell. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Fukuyama, F., 1989. The End of History and the Last Man. London: Penguin. Habermas, J., 2011. ‘The political’: The rational meaning of a questionable inheritance of political theology. In: E. Mendieta and J. VanAntwerpen, eds. The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere. New York: Columbia University Press, 15–33. Lazzarato, M., 2009. Neoliberalism in action: inequality, insecurity and the reconstitution of the social. Theory, Culture & Society, 26(6), 109–133. Legg, S., 2005. Foucault’s population geographies: classification, biopolitics and governmental spaces. Population, Space and Place, 11(3), 137–156. Lutz, W. and Sanderson, W.C., 2004. Introduction. In: W. Lutz et al., eds. The End of World Population Growth in the 21st Century: New Challenges for Human Capital Formation & Sustainable Development. Sterling, VA: IIASA.

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McAllan, F., 2011. Getting ‘post racial’ in the ‘Australian’ state: what remains overlooked in the premise ‘getting beyond racism’? Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, 7(1), 1–21. Macey, D., 2009. Rethinking biopolitics, race and power in the wake of Foucault. Theory, Culture & Society, 26(6), 186–205. McRobbie, A., 2006. Vulnerability, violence and (cosmopolitan) ethics: Butler’s Precarious Life. The British Journal of Sociology, 57(1), 69–86. Miletic, D., 2009. Anti-obesity group calls for diet survey. The Age, 28 September. Available from: www.theage.com.au/lifestyle/wellbeing/. Accessed 28 September 2009. Minca, C., 2006. Giorgio Agamben and the new biopolitical nomos. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 88(4), 387–403. Noble, G., 2002. Comfortable and relaxed: furnishing the home and nation. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 16(1), 53–66. Perera, S., 2007. ‘Aussie luck’: the border politics of citizenship post Cronulla beach. ACRAWSA e-Journal, 3(1), 1–16. Probyn, E., 1996. Outside Belongings. London: Routledge. Revel, J., 2009. Identity, nature, life: three biopolitical deconstructions. Theory, Culture & Society, 26(6), 45–54. Rossiter, B., 2010. Try walking and talking. The Age, 1 February. Available from: www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/. Accessed 1 February 2010. Saxton, A., 2003. ‘I certainly don’t want people like that here’: the discursive construction of ‘asylum seekers’. Media International Australia, 109(1), 109–120. Sharma, S., 2011. The biopolitical economy of time. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 35(4), 439–444. Sydney Morning Herald, 2008. Body image blast: duchess blasts media over daughter. Sydney Morning Herald, 20 May. Available from: www.smh.com.au/articles/. Accessed 20 May 2008. Taylor, C., 2011. Why we need a radical redefinition of secularism. In: E. Mendieta and J. VanAntwerpen, eds. The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere. New York: Columbia University Press, 34–59.

Part II

Popular culture, population size and the composition of peoples

5

Overpopulation in visual representation

Introduction I have argued in earlier chapters that discourses of global human population tend to be overshadowed in the public sphere by a perspective that fixated on populations as national groupings, as well as debates related to how those national populations might be affected by fertility rates and migration. These serve as one element in the production of identity as a performance of relationality, similitude, otherness and belonging. Global populations, or the population of humanity across the Earth, are more difficult to demonstrate in public sphere debate because they are less intelligible. We have certain public markers of global population size, such as spates of news reports and commentaries when the world’s population clicks past a milestone (such as 7 billion human bodies). Occasionally marginal voices express concern about sustainability, the world’s carrying capacity, resource distribution and space; and at various historical points, cultural circumstances make possible a more prolonged expression of concern over rates of human population growth, particularly in the nineteenth-century debates between Malthusian theories of a human global overpopulation catastrophe and Marxist critiques of Malthusian concepts and ethics. Later public fears about overpopulation in the 1970s also demonstrated the way in which a sustained focus on global human population emerged alongside fears of environmental, spatial and agricultural catastrophes. However, such discussions of population in global terms almost always ‘snap back’ to the equation of population with national peoples and national administrative systems for counting and accounting for bodies. While there are a number of problems with the articulation of fears about human population growth, global overpopulation and unchecked human fertility, I argue that the topic does have value in public sphere discourse for the contribution it can make in thinking about an ethical approach to peaceful, nonviolent cohabitation that is ecologically aware, and focused on the management of human impact on climate. This is not the same as suggesting that there should be controls or limitations on fertility, but that such ideas are meaningful, even if not debated and discussed through the more familiar setting of policy and

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governance frameworks. We do, however, see popular entertainment media represent the articulation of concerns over global population size, anxieties about overpopulation, fears of population reduction and interventions into questions of who might belong to a global human population. This occurs particularly in literature, film, television and most often science fiction writing and screen media. What these texts respond to, arguably, is a broad and ongoing cultural interest in thinking about global population in ways that are not accommodated in policy discourse. According to Lionel Shriver (2003), the subject of population size began to appear in literature in response to the persistent growing concerns that began in the nineteenth century, as these concerns remained unexpressed in other ways (p. 153). For Shriver, this produced a literary genre sometimes referred to as ‘demografiction’ in which the social setting is a population size that extends beyond the contemporary norms experienced by writers and readers at the time of writing. He notes that mainstream literature, however, does not include a great deal of reference to overpopulation, and this is why the genre tends to be associated with more marginal or niche texts. While this is undoubtedly true for print entertainment, some of the more popular films of the past few decades have been about population in some form. From the 1970s, parallel to public debate on population growth, a significant number of popular films and television series depicted human global overpopulation as a backdrop or a narrative stumbling block to be resolved, although with a range of different narrative focal points. Silent Running (1972) and ZPG (1972), for example, tell stories of global overpopulation and the decay of international and local civilisation caused by unchecked growth. Some films depict a futuristic, overpopulated world as a dystopia that has become a normative backdrop to lives that are barely liveable, such as Pandorum (2009) and Blade Runner (1982). Some see an overpopulated future as, for various reasons, produced alongside a dumbing down of the population and the cultural imputation of ignorance— Idiocracy (2006) and Harrison Bergeron (1995) are notable examples. Others represent population control as the film’s bogeyman—these include classic films such as Soylent Green (1973) and Logan’s Run (1976). Most of these films make use of visuality to depicted crowdedness derived from unchecked population growth as the site and representation of unliveability; this is notable given the pre-computer-generated imagery expense involved in depicting crowdedness through the use of extras and the use of large public spaces filled with bodies. Science fiction and speculative texts are instructive in that they present potential alternatives that, rather than accurately predicting futures that might result from population growth, open the possibilities of discourse on how a particular present scenario might establish ways in which people make sense of future events through the present. Invoking the concept of overpopulation and the range of connotations attached to it (crowdedness, food shortages, resource depletion, struggles for water, increased rich/poor

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distinctions, among others) is always in these texts a matter of liveability in relation to space. This means it is always about subjectivity, which can be read broadly as that which is processual and normatively temporal—performed over time. Intelligible subjectivity thus demands a particular kind of stasis across relationships with space, with people, with numbers. That is, while it is acknowledged the both subjecthood and the milieu of relations and environs that constitute it will change, there is a simultaneous demand that it remain the same in order for the subject to articulate itself as ongoing and recognisable into the future. Anxiety-producing tracts, visual representations and on-screen stories of overpopulation actively invite the viewer to consider their own subjectivity in the context of space and relationality with others who take that place. Although there are many dozens of popular texts that could be discussed here—as well as dozens of different, interesting and informative ways of reading them—I would like to focus on four aspects that emerge in asking after the relegation of global overpopulation into popular culture and the frameworks of identity that are enabled by texts addressing global population growth. In the next section I would like to talk about the emergence (or, more accurately, re-emergence) in the 1960s and 1970s of cultural engagement with overpopulation in popular pseudo-science writing, specifically Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 text The Population Bomb. Popular (and, indeed, sometimes populist) writings have a significant impact on many publics, particularly those who do not have normal levels of access to higher-level policy debates in governance and formal scholarship. Such texts draw upon and reproduce public anxieties about liveability, linking them to concerns about environment and resource, but mostly focusing on ideas about how overpopulation might change the everyday lives of everyday people. I will follow this by looking at some fictional screen depictions of overpopulation that draw on tropes of crowdedness and the loss of civility that figurations of crowdedness are seen to produce. Ageing is often figured as that which is contributing to population increases, and while it is not as drastic as some public commentators may occasionally argue, the science fiction representation of increased longevity often points to how shifts in chrononormative linear life cycles and the delay of natural death may result in drastic increases in living bodies beyond a world’s carrying capacity. Finally, a number of films and series depicting overpopulation have done so through presenting governance-level population controls as contrary to a liberal–humanist laissez-faire approach to population growth that is positive portrayed. By looking at this small number of aspects of popular cultural representation of overpopulation, it is possible to draw out a broad, discursive position on population growth as concerned with competing ideas about human liveability, whether that is access to resources to lead a contemporary (or aspirational) middle-class life to worries about the loss of freedom intervention in population growth might produce.

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Discourses of overpopulation: anxiety and alarmism in popular, historical and pseudo-scientific writing According to Patrick Tucker (2006), global overpopulation is a legitimate cause of social and personal anxiety, due to the fact that although growth is slow enough that it is not witnessed on an everyday scale, it will over the course of a life make substantial changes to the forms that liveability must take—producing increased likelihood of immigration (which is more an anxiety for some than others), increased risk of terrorism (resulting from struggles for resources and responses to the exclusion from shared resources for some) and interpersonal tensions (caused by overcrowding and increased population density). Anxiety about overpopulation is experienced socially, although often at the margins of scholarship, policy, governance and everyday life. Much of the anxiety is represented through an appeal to the urgency needed in addressing unchecked population growth (Bennett 2007) and the complexity or impossibility of the task (Powledge 2007), although, as I have argued in Chapter 2, such anxieties are almost always radically separated from contemporary discourses of climate change, which are experienced as a different kind of anxiety or concern. The promotion of public anxieties about global overpopulation are not, of course, new in the second half of the twentieth century. Nor do they emerge only in the context of post-industrial growth of numbers of people or the attention to population in Third World countries in the context of aid programmes and food shortages. In 1755, Benjamin Franklin published an essay that projected population growth in the British colonies as likely to be exponential and thus problematic (Franklin 1999). This work was influential on Thomas Malthus, who argued that continued population growth would be catastrophic, leading to global famine and poverty, in his 1798 essay On the Principle of Population (Malthus 2015). Malthusianism is, of course, the most recognisable strand of overpopulation anxiety across history. Although not often cited, secondary material derived from Malthus’s work is quite regularly articulated in marginal and minority political tracts that attempt to raise concerns about overpopulation. It is notable, perhaps, that in many such statements, current statistical predictions of population growth in both national and global contexts tend to be read and conveyed through a Malthusian lens. The very idea of Malthusianism, then, becomes associated with a popular, rather than a traditionally intellectual, approach to overpopulation, with the result that the concepts travel through non-scientific writing and entertainment media. At the same time, of course, the accusation that a person is ‘Malthusian’ or is borrowing ‘Malthusianist’ concepts is sometimes used as an insult, implying a problematic, under-theorised or unethical perspective on population and society. Public interest in overpopulation was marginalised in much of the first half of the twentieth century, primarily more as a result of the catastrophe of war presenting the experience of depopulation for many people in Europe, the

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United States and the Asia–Pacific region. However, by the 1970s overpopulation began to re-emerge as a public issue alongside naturalist, green, anti-establishment and alternative critiques of social norms, which included the norms of fertility promotion. These newly appeared concerns about overpopulation and continued growth were, however, often dismissed from establishment, liberal–humanist and neoliberal positions, often with the argument that any kind of population control or fertility restriction would run counter to moralised perspectives of personal and individual freedom. Certainly throughout the 1970s and 1980s the public perception of China’s ‘one child policy’ was publicly viewed as a keystone of a regime built on restrictions, and deemed unethical or even in immoral in liberal terms. Nevertheless, growing concerns about the supply of natural resources, particularly the perception of the depletion of fish due to increasing global trade, were coming to be noted more widely in 1970s news media, with journalistic links being made between global population size and consumption (Coles 2004). The 1983–1985 famine in Ethiopia, which was recognised as a global catastrophe across the world with substantial public interest generated by celebrity aid campaigns, became linked in the public imaginary with ideas about the dangers of overpopulation. Much of this was the result of a disinformation campaign by the Ethiopian Relief and Rehabilitation Commission, which successfully linked the famine with overpopulation rather than as the effect of poor policies and armed conflict (de Waal 2009, 111). One particularly significant text that contributed to public stress that population growth was a catastrophic problem is Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb. Although Ehrlich was at that time a professor at Stanford University, California, the book was of greater interest to a non-scholarly readership, became a bestseller, and is at least partly responsible for shifting some of the discussion about overpopulation occurring in the 1950s and 1960s from marginal groups of concerned citizens to a wider public. In that sense, the text belongs more appropriately within the milieu of popular culture interventions into global population, given its popular consumption, rather than circulation within formal scholarship. Ehrlich’s book was alarmist in tone, arguing that without immediate and considered intervention, we would witness mass starvation across the world (Ehrlich 1968, pp. 36–37), with famine in the industrialised West mirroring the kinds of starvation images from the Third World (particularly parts of the Indian subcontinent) that were then beginning to circulate in contemporary Western media. As with other texts in the alarmist current affairs genre, Ehrlich’s commenced by pointing to the exponential curvature of human population growth, ending with the very frightening suggestion that if trends worldwide continued the Earth would host ‘sixty million billion people’ within 900 years, which is ‘about 100 persons for each square yard of the Earth’s surface, land and sea’ (p. 18). Ehrlich applies a moral code to population growth, dividing the people into those who take responsibility by curtailing breeding (and who might, should the technology be available, be allowed to leave Earth in spaceships to a

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population-controlled future elsewhere) and those who are irresponsible (who should be left behind in that circumstance to wallow on an overpopulated Earth or otherwise warrant intervention), a sheep and goats judgement in which the sin is to leave population growth unchecked (p. 21). His futural fantasies of categorising the sheep and the goats aside, however, he puts responsibility on the entire human population, its joint ego or ‘swollen head’ (p. 28), for the dire population growth. Identifying the contribution of an agricultural revolution 8,000 years ago, an industrial revolution in the nineteenth century and the developments of medical science in the twentieth century as problematic ‘decisions’ leading to more babies, he argues that the fact each revolution was not accompanied by stricter mechanisms of population control was a disastrous lack in general human foresight (pp. 32–35). Notably, Ehrlich points to important environmental and ecological damage that would occur in the pursuit of sustaining a large population without regard for environmental sustainability, including the use of pesticides that simplify formerly complex and vibrant ecosystems (p. 50), and pollution (p. 61), both again emerging as public concerns in the final decades of the twentieth century, although not always connected with questions of population size but of population practice. Although Ehrlich’s concern here is global overpopulation, as so often happens, and as I have described many times so far in this book, the discussion ‘snaps back’ to national population—in this case the United States—as the site at which solutions will emerge. What this does is assume that nation-states and national identities are timeless, rather than constructed, and futurally normative over time rather than historical and ephemeral. Ehrlich’s solution was for the United States to lead a new era of population control: Obviously our first step must be to immediately establish and advertise drastic policies designed to bring our own population size under control. We must define a goal of a stable optimum population size for the United States and display our determination to move rapidly toward that goal … The second step is very important, as we also are going to have to adopt some very tough foreign policy positions relative to population control, and we must do it from a psychologically strong position. (p. 135) Contrary, however, to the liberal–humanism of United States culture, Ehrlich considers strategies such as compulsory birth control, including perhaps additives to water supplies that would sterilise members of the local population (p. 136), while using military and diplomatic strength to force the rest of the world to do so. It is, of course, extremely difficult in the twenty-first century to imagine any Western country leading a grand international venture, when agreement even on carbon pollution reduction figures in the face of the scientific certainty of carbon’s role in climate change has not yet been achieved. Nor is it possible to envisage any United States government—past, present or future— sterilising the greater number of US citizens by force.

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Ehrlich, importantly, points to some of the ways in which a personal shift in attitude can be productive in reorienting an understanding about the meaning of freedom in the context of overpopulation; he puts these in the liberal terminology of shared rights, which includes, for him, a ‘right to live uncrowded’, a ‘right to eat meat’, a ‘right to drink pure water’, all of which are designed to compete with any idea that there exists an inalienable ‘right to have as many children as one wants’ (pp. 187–188). Again, many of these ideas and rights are represented as timeless and ahistorical, rather than as culturally specific and adaptable, or changeable in the context of both technological and social development. That is, what might constitute crowdedness in the future will not, of course, be as Ehrlich himself thought of crowds, but will be conditioned in the context of new performativities, relationalities within space, the technologies of architecture, noise control, visual control and mobility, among many other malleable social and cultural norms. Naturally, Ehrlich’s text has been widely criticised, primarily for serving as an uncritical restatement of Malthusianism and for making a number of predictions about famine that have not come to pass, due to developments in agricultural, organisational, governance and management technologies. What this points to, of course, is that what we think about as overpopulation today may not necessarily be overpopulation in the future—how crowds, living conditions, food and water consumption and mobility work are not just malleable but capable of undergoing radical change in ways that might not only mitigate large population numbers but could change the relationship between bodies, multitudes and resources. What such a text does, then, is contribute not only to promoting a public anxiety that is grounded in alarmism and criticism of governments, rather than facts about population numbers in their social, cultural, ecological and technical contexts. This is not say that I am fully unsympathetic to some of the sentiments of the work: as I have argued elsewhere, the relationship between population size and human-induced climate change via per capita carbon pollution is a valuable consideration as one of the starting points for seeking a more ethical relationship between population and ecological sustainability, which is different from suggesting that population control should be the endpoint, at all costs, for other important aspects of sociality, liveability and ethics. Alarmist popular writings, however, do help us to understand how public anxieties about global overpopulation are often connected, not just with personal body space, but with global sustainability. In that sense, they are surreptitiously about identity, although not to the extent to which the films and series discussed next attach overpopulation concerns to the subjectivity of individuals through techniques of characterisation. In contributing a specific discourse over a broad historical period that focuses explicitly on global liveabilities over a sustained period, they provide the public with a framework for making sense of population debates, global carrying capacity (MacKellar 1996, p. 147) and policy interventions—or lack thereof—into population as a cultural concept.

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Figuring crowded worlds—Blade Runner and Children of Men Overpopulation is generally represented in film and screen media through depictions of chronic or overwhelming crowdedness, typically shown in the interactions of other characters as being not an unusual, rare or one-off event but as an everyday norm. Indeed, a great deal of science fiction film and television set on Earth utilises this trope, whether Luc Besson’s 1997 film The Fifth Element or, as I will discuss here briefly, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). In popular science fiction literature, Isaac Asimov’s books depict a future Earth beset by mass overpopulation, describing a world in which it is normal to live in very overcrowded underground tunnels with shared bathroom facilities, and as a world experience that is not unliveable or necessarily for his characters undesirable. However, from the perspective of the contemporary viewer or the reader, these depictions of crowdedness are usually there to be read as undesirable and frightening. Crowdedness is significant in perceptions of subjectivity, space and population and is not unrelated to how we perceive our capacity to move safely in public spaces. Butler (2015, p. 1) points out that democratic theories and sensibilities have usually demonstrated concern about crowdedness in public spaces in terms of fear of the multitude as a ‘mob’ and hence of ‘mob rule’. This is also often depicted as a fear of the mob not only moving but making it difficult for others to move, particularly when that becomes a ‘surging multitude’ (pp. 134–135). Our psychic connection to space is, of course, one that is built on an assemblage between bodies, cities, infrastructure and the organised presence of other bodies likewise moving, using and constructing as part of that particular assemblage (Grosz 1995, p. 108). In the context of the management of this assemblage, then, the crowd becomes the object of a desire for control (Urry 2007, p. 8) and, more broadly, that which is undesirable when fixed not as a crowd but as persistent crowdedness from which one cannot escape. Public, social, scientific and governance concerns about crowdedness or overcrowdedness became part of public discourse for many Western countries in the latter half of the twentieth century, particularly with reference to what is seen as the social problem of the slum. In the late 1960s, John Calhoun (1970) undertook a study of rats kept in substantially overcrowded conditions. Normally, rats have certain standards of social engagement, cleanliness, rearing of young and times of sexual engagement. When the conditions for the rats became overcrowded in Calhoun’s experiment, ordinary activities were disrupted: female rats ceased cleaning their nests and caring properly for their young; male rats began initiating sexual activity with female rats outside of their normal oestrous cycle or their willingness; they also began initiating sexual activity with juvenile rats, male rats and then non-living objects (pp. 122–123). While Calhoun rejected some of the more obvious assumptions and analogies that might be drawn from such a study, what it points to is the idea of an optimal population in a space, whereby what constitutes optimal excludes particular rates of overcrowdedness that lead to a breakdown of social norms. Anthropomorphising such findings

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operates as an explanatory factor for certain clichéd assumptions about slum behaviour: that it is the site of bad parenting, crime, interpersonal violence, rape, paedophilia and laziness. I am not, of course, suggesting that such analogies between the study of rat behaviour and predictions of human behaviour can or might be drawn, but I am pointing to the fact that there is a public interest in trying to understand what crowdedness might actually mean for human sociality. A number of films draw on such assumptions that overcrowded worlds are sites of similar kinds of social breakdown, usually including crime, broad untrustworthiness, unsafe public settings, non-conservative sexual mores and poor quality child-rearing practices. Blade Runner, for example, differentiates between an unseen lifestyle experienced by those living off-world, while those on a severely overpopulated Earth experience a normative world of crime, duplicity and inadequate governance of peoples. New kinds of human (the replicants) emerge as the marginalised few who experience imagination, hope, love and joy in life while ‘old humanity’ wallows in its own overcrowded misery. Visual depiction of this world is through signifiers of pollution, massive and noisy networks of transport, high-rise buildings and very small living spaces. Its opening scene announces the location as Los Angeles in November of 2019, against a night-time backdrop of huge urban sprawl, towering skyscrapers, and chimneys letting off balls of fire and smoke. After a short interlude, we see Deckard (Harrison Ford) in a rainy and crowded market street, filled with dozens of bodies carrying umbrellas, and surrounded by sky transport vehicles. It is a site representative of overwhelming crowdedness: noise pollution from the sound of vehicles, machines, car horns, and loud music over public address systems. It is also a scene of visual pollution reminiscent to the casual viewer of depictions of New York’s Times Square—neon lights and large screens advertising. A voice-over on a PA system also conveys advertising for interplanetary migration plans: ‘A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies—the chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure.’ The double play on addressee is telling—will it be the aspirational individual who migrates to begin building a life again, or will humanity in general need to find a way to begin again in a new sociality. The crowdedness depicted in Blade Runner is also a setting for multiculturalism, with a range of racial, ethnic and cultural practices operating together (primarily Anglo-American, Chinese and Japanese), drawing on a much older filmic stereotypes of East Asian food served in crowded market spaces in European or North American settings. Crowdedness, in this scene, brings together subjects of difference in ways that are open to being read as a positive outcome of mobility marked by conviviality (Gilroy 2004), whereby cultural and linguistic difference is minimised and not the source of suspicion, marginalisation or exclusion. Such conviviality across difference, however, does not necessarily eradicate unethical behaviour, mistrust, crime or violence between people in crowded and overpopulated spaces as the film demonstrates. Crowdedness itself positions some subjects to forge alternative survival strategies, which can often involve them taking advantage of those who present

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themselves with a greater convivial sensibility. Blade Runner, in this sense, is suggesting that overpopulation is the cause of human discontentment rather than any underlying negative aspect in a human identity itself. The capacity and social support to lead a liveable life is, of course, never equitably distributed, and in crowded and overpopulation settings it is perhaps even more unevenly experienced. Some of Blade Runner’s characters, therefore, thrive in the crowd, using the ability to be obscured in a crowd or having a greater capability to manipulate the crowd’s inherent diversity. Others experience it as a situation of bare survival, unliveability or death. Blade Runner does not offer a solution to overpopulation, nor is its narrative focused on overcoming it. However, it is notable that, in its first release, the film ends with Deckard and Rachael in a vehicle driving through a vast, uncrowded countryside as the site where they might find safety, survivability or even liveability—away overpopulated spaces and crowded urban environments. Later releases do not give them that opportunity. It is notable that the book on which Blade Runner was based, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep 1996 (first published in 1968), does not depict a world of overpopulation but its converse: subsequent to a catastrophic global war, many animals are extinct and the Earth has been significantly depopulated of humanity. It is notable, then, that rather than depicting a quieter, less-crowded setting with its low population, as described in the book, Ridley Scott chose to draw on the contemporary social anxieties about overpopulation to connect his film with modern social, philosophic and ethical issues. In very much the same way, Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film, Children of Men, reversed the representation of population that was depicted in its source, P.D. James’ 1992 novel of the same name. Both novel and film are about radical depopulation in a near-future world in which human beings are no longer able to produce children. In the novel, Britain is ‘winding down’, art and important artefacts are being put into permanent storage, many people are choosing (or being forced to choose) euthanasia rather than persist among the few remaining human beings in a post-civilisational world of bare survival, a that world that is increasingly marked by quiet, space, solitude and emptiness. While the film version maintains the broader themes of a humanity no longer able to reproduce and a fascistic governance system needed for control as civilisation begins to collapse, it conversely depicts scenes of crowdedness due to the vast immigration of people from parts of the world where the administration has completely collapsed. Huge immigration detention centres house hundreds of thousands of refugees crammed into slum conditions. This is an interesting example because the narrative is actually about depopulation and underpopulation yet the film depicts primarily crowds and unliveable, dangerous crowdedness. The final third of the film is set in an immigration detention centre that is marked by deep precarity—with crime, great violence, gang warfare and bribery as the means for survival. Unlike Blade Runner’s crowded spaces, this penal township is a place in which languages are not mutually understandable and conviviality is wholly lacking. Rather, it is a

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depiction of wholesale dehumanisation in contrast to the warmth and generosity the characters experience in more isolated places with friends and relatives. Of course, the film is attempting to draw on contemporary issues related to the construction and perception of refugee populations and the reality of detention centres that dehumanise, although it is interesting that the vehicle for a depiction of crowded detention is a text about radical depopulation, pointing perhaps to the added dramatic effect and narrative practices that crowds create. The depiction of overpopulation through scenes of overcrowding in film speak to a broader cultural concern, then, that emerged across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries about the fear of slums, of living in slum-like conditions, of the effect of crowded conditions on human behaviour and health, and of the deleterious impact on the human soul of an absence of solitude, privacy and peace. All of these concepts are, of course, culturally produced, historical desires but also ones that remain meaningful to contemporary audiences, utilising these visual representations of overcrowdedness as a means by which to make sense of the kinds of population futures that might be desirable. That is, such television and film depictions of overpopulation as inescapable crowdedness speak to those broader desires and simultaneously put anxieties about population growth further into circulation. The bodies that inhabit these crowded, overpopulated worlds are portrayed as bodies made vulnerable, not necessarily through the failure of food and other resources as Ehrlich imagined, but through the failure of a particular kind of social support as a necessary infrastructure for human liveability (Butler 2015, p. 148). The absence of space, peace, solitude, privacy and ability to move through the public easily may be cultural and historical, and desiring such things might be a mark of contemporaneity, yet envisaging their absence might be perceived as being made vulnerable. Whether a future subject would experience crowdedness as vulnerability is unknown. What is important here, however, is that the representation of crowdedness and overpopulation as a form of human precarity influences our ways of understanding population policy, conviviality, space and belonging in the now.

Ageing populations and the bare life of the multitude The relationship between population growth and ageing has come into focus over the past two decades, with increased public awareness of the implications of increased human longevity beyond retirement. There has been greater debate among economist and politicians in many Western countries, with many arguing that the human capacity to live longer than ever before produces both a larger population as well as a greater proportion of the population requiring care, support and social welfare. This is understood in debates about requiring an expanded taxation base to support the specific needs of bodies made more vulnerable through ageing, an increased need for new kinds of infrastructure to enable basic mobility throughout inhabited spaces,

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and a concern for the kinds of electoral system such an age-based population distribution brings, with fears that the major voting base will be an older, conservative, nostalgic population rather than a younger electorate with forward-thinking needs and concerns for the future. However, ageing is often not discussed in policy settings or public debate in relation to increases in population (or, at least, population projections) that come from an upward shift of average longevity. It thus changes the identity of the population, but also the meaning of population in terms of size, composition, format and activity. While there are a number of texts that deal with overpopulation, there are only a few that depict ageing as a key causal factor of population growth, as an obstacle to human liveability or as a conceptual and cultural problem. Soylent Green (1973), is one such text, in which the discovery that the bodies of elderly people are being converted into food for younger generations is the key backdrop of the story. Another set of concerns about ageing is found in the more recent narrative arc of the fourth season of Torchwood (2006–2011), a spin-off from the long-standing British science fiction series Doctor Who, depicting a group of underground, quasi non-governmental investigators who handle and cover up alien-related phenomena in the contemporary United Kingdom and, later, the United States. Its final two seasons were produced as short mini-series with a long narrative arc, rather than following its earlier episodic format. Its third season, subtitled Children of Earth, dealt with an alien demand for a tribute of a percentage of the world’s children, thereby depicting a sudden reduction of the youth population as social and political issue. Torchwood’s final season, called Miracle Day, presented an allegorical narrative about ageing, dying well and ethics of care. In this season, a strange event (the miracle of the title) occurred in which all people on Earth were suddenly no longer capable of dying. Bodies continue to age or to be injured, but they persist in life, even suffering severe infirmity and disability that would otherwise have meant death, resulting in a very sudden, massive growth of the population by removing the ordinary numbers of deaths by accident, illness or old age that would normally occur each day. All characters thus face disruption to the chrononormative performance of subjectivity in that their expected relationality with time and their life cycle, and thus death, are radically altered. The notable exception is characters involved in corporate organisations and marketing whose own temporalities related not to everyday life cycles but to the longevity of corporate entities; they thus remained desubjectified, both before and after the miracle, opening questions about the capability of such organisations to participate ethically in a human world. Miracle Day alludes intertextually to a much earlier literary work: that of Kurt Vonnegut’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (Vonnegut 1954) in which the Earth is host to 12 billion inhabitants (there were only 2.7 billion people on the Earth at the time Vonnegut’s short story was published), resulting from the production of a new anti-ageing drug that keeps people alive for as long as they wish to remain so. Population increases drastically as a result of multiple generations persisting in life for decades or centuries after

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they might otherwise have died naturally. From a social and identity perspective, younger generations are subject to the dictatorial whims of their familial elders, with many living in slum-like conditions while the eldest family members tyrannically control all family property. Younger generations are also heavily taxed to finance the pensions of the elderly. The story describes a world in which population excess results from the failure of old people to die in a timely fashion—a cycle of life is depicted, then, as a norm whereas death’s absence is a disjuncture from a natural control that would keep the population in check. Vonnegut’s prescience of some contemporary concerns over ageing is notable; Miracle Day invokes many of the same concerns, drawing simultaneously on contemporary social issues produced by ageing, adding to it the breakdown of governance systems and civil society as well as a conspiracy of global pharmaceutical companies that stand to benefit from both. In such texts, the failure to die at an age when people used to die adds to the population. The problem of overpopulation is usually figured, as we say in the discussion of crowded spaces, as an issue of liveability for the subjects of that population. In Vonnegut’s story, it is about the liveability of those who are younger but getting older, unable to reach some kind of hierarchical peak based on their age. Thus they are unable to have housing of their own and have to share ever more cramped space, dominated by their eldest forebear. In the case of Torchwood/Miracle Day it is less an issue of space but of survival, as discussed by two police officers in Torchwood after looking up some population facts. They discover that, on average, 300,000 people die each day while 500,000 are born each day—a million every two days. After some further thinking, they realise that running out of space will not be their first concern, but, rather, running out of food: the infrastructure of the agricultural and trade networks will not be able to cope with a sudden growth spurt. It is also an issue for the liveability of older subjects, drawing on contemporary questions related to euthanasia discourses, quality of life for the elderly who are also infirm, and the similarities between a particular kind of cultural depiction of the retirement home and the hospice, on the one hand, and a dehumanising death camp on the other. Liveability for those ageing beyond the point of ordinary death operates in this text as a metaphor for anxieties over the increased ability of the (upper middle-class) human population to stave off death in spite of their inability to prevent ageing. Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) explains what he can see: This miracle it’s more than people just surviving: they are so alive … I’ve seen bodies at the morgue. Burnt and broken. Still alive, staring right at me. They weren’t even allowed to be unconscious … Forced into life.

JACK:

To be forced into continued life here is to be forced out of liveability. It speaks to the problems for population of a drive to continue living beyond what is normatively figured as ‘natural causes’, the utilisation of

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pharmaceuticals in order to maintain a particular ‘brand’ of living without tiredness or hurt. Liveability here is not about agency, but about conforming to the consumption of life itself. Miracle Day, however, points to the dichotomous opposite, the sovereign taking of life for the sake of the population: those undying bodies that ought to have died are, by administrative order, shipped to ovens for burning in what is a crude allusion to the eugenicist death camps of the Second World War. The categorisation of different kinds of life becomes necessary in order to make decisions about who will be permitted to persist in order to ensure population sustainability and (meaningfully) ‘living room’ on the planet. The United Nations quickly develops a definition for life, which also means a definition for death, providing national governments with the capacity to make the sovereign decision to ‘make die’ and ‘let persist’. Torchwood member Gwen (Eve Myles) faces the horror of the implementation of such a sovereign decision when her own father is categorised as ‘not alive’ due to having had a serious heart attack. It is not clear to her, the doctors or the audience whether this would have been a heart attack he would have survived before the miracle day—in other words, where the line of ‘not alive’ is drawn is not necessarily in relation to our contemporary perceptions of health among ageing populations. We bear witness to the convergence of biopolitics (that seeks to make live) and sovereignty (that is empowered to make die) when Gwen discovers the industrialisation of the processing of patients results in unethical and violent dehumanisation, whereby nurses and doctors whose roles were formerly the care and preservation of their patients are now undertaking the local role of enacting decisions on the basis of the new definitions of life and death. The factory-like separation of the actual killing and burning of those marked for death embeds biopolitical practices as part of the regime for dealing with ageing populations. Miracle Day, however, offers a third, ethical position in contrast to both the unchecked preservation of life for the ageing and the death culture of the post-miracle regime that is struggling to find ways for sustainability in the face of unchecked growth. The ethical position is based on that which the Torchwood team represents: investigation, research and solution-seeking grounded in an ethics of care. Significant for population belonging, then, is that this text points out the greatest risk of attempting to address overpopulation in the context of ageing is to eschew ethics in favour of the most pragmatic solution, which will always lead to the incorporation of sovereign authority over life into the biopolitical processes and practices that govern everyday regimes of contemporary care across the life cycle. The issue, of course, is that a pragmatic solution is never limited: once the aged are dealt with, the Torchwood team realise the definition of life will be further politicised to incorporate not only the undying who cannot look after themselves but criminals, illegal immigrants and others arbitrarily chosen as not being essential to the continuity of stable population.

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Controlling overpopulation: horror In her Creed for the Third Millennium (1985), Australian author Colleen McCullough presented a picture of an international treaty designed to reduce world population to a manageable, sustainable and environmentally friendly level. In her image of twenty-first-century world events, an environmental catastrophe in the form of a new Ice Age is slowly developing—an interesting twist that predates the 1990s rhetoric of global warming, ozone depletion and increased pollution. In this prescient fictional account, energy for heating and transport is increasingly rare, and world governments have come to understand that the population of the planet is too large to be sustained in the long term. The United States—representing ‘the West’ more generally—comes under threat of war from the majority world (the still-existing communist bloc, the Middle Eastern region and the African states) unless they agree to sign a treaty for global population reduction. This portrayal contrasts considerably with Paul Ehrlich’s assumption that the US would need to lead or force the rest of the world into population control. Once environmental catastrophe becomes apparent, the West turns typically to selfish nationalist policies that advocate a two-tier approach: one that works for Western nations and another for the rest of the globe. [W]hat we forgot was the rest of the world. And the rest of the world ganged up on us! One in, all in. Permit the United States of America to grow and multiply while the other major powers brought in population reduction programs they had to bring in? No way! One-child families for every single country in the world for a minimum of four generations and then a two-child maximum in perpetuity, that was the agreement. (McCullough 1985, p. 20) While McCullough’s book deals with the sorts of social and moral problems that might result from a global population control regime, the argument that global depopulation should be encouraged through treaties across the globe (not just in the Third World) is a compelling one. It is an example of the rare interfacing of climate and population in a global perspective; that which is absent in the biopolitics of national control. As a text, it presents an alternative to the common perception of the Chinese one child policy, which was widely derided as a restriction of liberal freedoms: in Creed for the Third Millennium, the policy is hated by many for precisely those reasons, but the solution was never to undo it through a religious appeal to a commandment to multiply, but to live through it as the only valid solution to the joint global needs of addressing both overpopulation and climate catastrophe when all other options for social change had failed. While Creed for the Third Millennium presents a relatively cogent depiction of the kinds of internationalised fertility restrictions that might be implemented in the face of global climate catastrophe, most filmic texts dealing

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with population control represent it as unnecessarily restrictive, fascistic, anti-liberal or evil. Indeed, population control or restriction is often depicted as the key stumbling block for which the film’s narrative must find a solution or an escape. Soylent Green (1973) provides a horrific account in which population control is both secretive and insidious: the use of proteins from dead human bodies, converted into the food supplement of the film’s title in order to feed the overpopulated world after the failure of ordinary agriculture. The 1972 film ZPG (standing for Zero Population Growth) presents a world of strict population control through a 30-year rule in which no children will be conceived on pain of death. The narrative articulates the idea that this is too strict a curtailment of ‘rights’ of those who wish to raise children. Such texts, then, will often represent fertility as a human right, although it is not universally recognised in law across all parts of the globe; indeed, it is regularly protected from becoming the object of legislation. That has left it open to be represented not as a human right but as a moral, religious or philosophic entitlement, even if that entitlement is not universally enjoyed by all subjects. Perhaps the most famous film dealing with population control is Logan’s Run (1976), which shows an ideal population level of human beings living in a domed pleasure city—where population is restricted through the compulsory euthanasia of citizens at age 30, and children are produced artificially. The story relates Logan (Michael York) and Jessica (Jenny Agutter), who are on the run from the domed city’s authorities and its omniscient computer, eventually discovering the outside world and liberal freedoms away from the duplicitous state machinery of the city and its population controls. Having left the city, they meet the last known inhabitant of the outside world, known only as the ‘old man’ (Peter Ustinov), and become encouraged to learn about past freedoms to bear children naturally, without state interference in the life cycle of the human subject. It is notable that the site of this learning is in the decimated remains of Washington, DC’s, congress building, which serves here as a visual marker of liberal–humanist freedom. Logan’s Run, then, is represented as optimistic, primarily because it depicts the end of state controls over life and the restoration of a laissez-faire approach to population size by promoting unchecked fertility and ageing. The domed compound is thus representative of both a breakdown of conservative norms concerning married coupledom and child-rearing and also a Soviet-style dictatorship in which resources may be equally shared but only on condition that people’s lives, fertility and longevity are determined by the state on behalf of the optimised population.

Conclusion The relationship between population growth, liveability and identity is, as I have been describing it, represented in popular culture through tropes of

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crowdedness, through concerns about ageing and through liberal–humanist rejection of governmental controls over population growth. These popular texts and the discourses that they uphold are part of the cultural milieu through which population is apprehended in terms of its size. Contemporary Western culture is marked by its dualistic response to the idea of unhindered global population growth: on the one hand, it is a source of anxiety over the extent to which life might be liveable on an overcrowded planet that may not have the carrying capacity to provide food, shelter and comforts evenly and adequately; on the other hand, there is a rejection of the idea of the curtailment of population growth and fertility via any kind of governmental intervention or normativisation of control. This conflicting, dualistic approach to overpopulation as represented across an array of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century popular texts provide the discursive scene through which subjectivity is constituted in relation to a future-looking relationality with the figure of population. Subjectivity is, as we know, constituted and performed as relational in the context of others who together share the globe, but in this context it is inflected by the idea that such sharing or cohabitation might not be stable or consistent into the future. As Judith Butler (2006) has argued, if identity is performed through an attachment to one’s singularity, then that can only operate in reference to the singularities of others, implying no such possible singularity at all (pp. 112–113). In critiquing the work of Spinoza, Butler notes that if singularity is always from the very beginning common, performing such subjecthood across time as ‘common life’ must be understood in terms of the multitude (p. 121), whereby a movement between individuality and collectivity is always a site of tension, since the subject is neither wholly subsumed by the collective or population, nor gains membership through some contractual arrangement that protects individuality and singularity (p. 123). When we think, then, about this tension for the subject in the context of alarmist discourses that the population is too large or will become too large through unchecked growth, then Spinoza’s multitude is repositioned as that which not only reduces the space, livelihood or share of resources of the singular subject, but is that which risks consuming the possibility of a singularity performed through tension and resistance to crowdedness or loss of access to resources. At the same time and from a different angle, if subjectivity is always in part constructed around its relationship with a perceived idea of space, which includes not only the local but also the perception of the world’s space as global, then the perception that an ever-growing number of human beings (even if it will not be reached in our lifetimes, if at all) will consume the entirety of the planet, is made manifest in many of these texts. This is done by a fascistic depiction of a future world in which subjects are at greater risk of being made to die in order to make living space for others—a point to which I return from the alternative perspective of radical underpopulation in the next chapter.

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References Bennett, J., 2007. Letter to the editor: overpopulation is the problem. BioScience, 52(2), 101. Butler, J., 2006. The desire to live: Spinoza’s Ethics under pressure. In: V. Kahn, N. Saccamano and D. Coli, eds. Politics and the Passions 1500–1850. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 111–130. Butler, J., 2015. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Calhoun, J.B., 1970. Population. In: A. Allison, ed. Population Control. Harmondsworth, UK: Pelican, 110–130. Coles, C., 2004. Global demand for fish outstrips supplies. The Futurist, 38(1), 7–8. de Waal, A., 2009. Famine Crimes: Politics & the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Dick, P.K., 1996. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Ballantine Books. Ehrlich, P.R., 1968. The Population Bomb. New York: Ballantine. Franklin, B., 1999. Autobiography and Other Writings, ed. O. Seavey. New York: Oxford University Press. Gilroy, P., 2004. After Empire: Melancholia or Conviviality? London: Routledge. Grosz, E., 1995. Space, Time and Perversion: The Politics of Bodies. London: Routledge. James, P.D., 1992. The Children of Men. London: Vintage. McCullough, C., 1985. A Creed for the Third Millennium. Sydney, Australia: Harper & Row. MacKellar, F.L., 1996. On human carrying capacity: a review essay on Joel Cohen’s ‘How Many People Can the Earth Support?’ Population and Development Review, 22(1), 145–156. Malthus, T., 2015. An Essay on the Principle of Population and Other Writings, ed. R. Mayhew. London: Penguin. Powledge, F., 2007. Letter to the editor: response from Powledge. BioScience, 52(2), 101. Shriver, L., 2003. Population in literature. Population and Development Review, 29(2), 153–162. Tucker, P., 2006. Strategies for containing population growth. The Futurist, 40(5), 13–14. Urry, J., 2007. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity. Vonnegut, K., 1954. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Galaxy Science Fiction, January, 100–110.

6

Underpopulation and apocalyptic narratives

Introduction The cultural concept of population is, today, that which is understood typically as being in a persistent and relatively exponential state of growth. Such growth, and the social, environmental, epidemiological and cultural effects of continued growth are rarely questioned outside of science fiction, film and popular culture when exploring cultures of overpopulation (Cover 2011). Conversely, apocalyptic fiction, film and television regularly present narratives with a backdrop in which there has been a radical drop in population—usually a substantial depopulation of the entire Earth. Arguably, the popular fascination with the very idea of an apocalypse is an expression of anxiety over the social, cultural, economic and civilisational effects together with the impact on identity and subjectivity that a substantial, sudden and unexpected drop in population numbers would bring. One way of investigating, unpacking and critiquing the place of apocalypse narratives in contemporary popular film and television, then, is to attempt to understand their appeal as a representation of deeply held fears about sudden depopulation and the capacity to survive and maintain a liveable life in a barely populated, post-apocalyptic, de-‘civilised’ world. Anxieties about an apocalyptic ‘radical depopulation’ of the world can thus be understood in the context of the relationality between the cultural concept of ‘population’ (as a civilised, humanity-peopled world) and the performativity of subjectivity and selfhood. As a category of critique, the cultural concept of population provides a valuable way in which to make sense of the figures of civilisation and apocalypse as the turning point towards the ‘post-civilised’. In film and television media, postapocalyptic worlds are typically represented as those in which the global human population has undergone a radical decline through disease (for example, The Stand, 1994, Survivors, 1975 and 2008–2010, 12 Monkeys, 1995 and 2015–2018), nuclear war (Threads, 1984, The Day After, 1983), zombies (Walking Dead, 2010–, 28 Days Later, 2002), alien invasion (Falling Skies, 2011–2015) or climate change (The Day After Tomorrow, 2004). It is notable that many of these texts are remade, such is the fascination audiences have for stories of radical depopulation. Apocalyptic representations of mass depopulation typically reflect

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cultural structures of feeling related to contemporary socio-political formations, such as doomsday narratives reflecting on nuclear war during the Cold War era or, after the mid-1980s, depictions of disease and plague resulting in the deaths of multitudes as a reflection of deep-seated fears of AIDS (Shriver 2003, p. 155). Apocalyptic representations in which the object of narrative is a sudden or catastrophic decline in population are relatively have been around for some time, and can be said to derive the narrative and core concepts from Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man, published in 1826 (Shelley 2004). The recent acceleration of popular narratives that depict apocalypses of radical depopulation represent a node in contemporary Western culture that, I argue, centre on the question of identities that are produced in both forms of relationality with others, and in the context of contemporary knowledge of subjects produced as members of a global multitude. Critiquing the popular depiction of apocalyptic events and post-apocalyptic life in the context of population size and the impact on civilisation, normality and normativity inferred by a radical or sudden decrease in population lend themselves to opening perspectives, not just on the contemporary meaning of apocalyptic concepts, but to the relationship between civilisation and population as interrelated cultural figures. This involves examining popular cultural texts on post-apocalyptic survival for their potential to break down existing categories of power and knowledge (Popke 2003, p. 298) in the context of reading from a perspective that brings to the foreground the questions raised specifically by population loss. I would like to begin this chapter with a discussion of some recent apocalyptic films and television series, looking at the ways in which population reduction through the death of multitudes resulting from disease, climate change or nuclear war is depicted as creating a rupture in an otherwise stable performativity of identity, and as a means of pointing to the fact that all subjectivity is constituted through cultural perceptions of population on a global scale. Examining how post-apocalyptic survival is seen to produce radical shifts in subjectivity, I am arguing that such shifts are predominantly the result of the difficulties of making intelligible a sense of relationality to others when that population—as the counted and accountable other—is suddenly no longer in existence. I will then examine how radical population decline points to the ways in which the mass population threshold is interwoven with concepts of civilisation and civil society, before unpacking some examples of differing representations of post-apocalyptic governance, typically depicted as the state without civility and civilisation. The chapter concludes by looking at some of the ways in which anxieties over post-apocalyptic survival are expressed through the depiction of non-democratic regimes of governance that ultimately establish the conditions for ostensible bare life.

Population and identity in contemporary apocalyptic film and television Apocalyptic representations in popular film and television are replete with references to the ‘concern’ of a radical, sudden depopulation and its effect on

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civilisation, selfhood and identity. For example, P.D. James’ (1992) novel The Children of Men, which was produced as a film in 2006, depicts a world in which the entire human population has become infertile, whereby the impending extinction of humanity results in a dystopian collapse of civilisation, massive population movements from war-torn areas, where society has already collapsed, and the further reduction of the population by mass suicides of those desperate to avoid being among the last of the dwindling human population. Such dystopian representations, as Lionel Shriver has argued, must be differentiated from popular media depictions of threats to global populations that only ever affect a small handful of people, who manage to avert world catastrophe and avoid apocalypse, leaving the population size intact (Shriver 2003, p. 155). A similar, albeit horrific, depiction is made in the 1984 British television film Threads, which used a documentary and cinéma-vérité style to present an account of an apocalyptic nuclear war and a longer-term period of postapocalyptic survival in Sheffield, northern England. Threads makes a specific point of persistently updating British population figures. Initially this is in terms of losses—the first salvo of 80 megatons on the United Kingdom resulting in casualties of between 2.5 and 9 million. Shortly afterwards, twothirds of British residences are within possible fire zones. Proximity to fallout and sites of radiation poisoning are noted and, within a few days subsequent to the attack, the allocation of government-controlled foodstuffs is a primary concern (and, of course, a substantial failure as general chaos and the breakdown of communication become normative). Other demographic issues, such as the allocation of health resources, are pivotal within a few days. Within 22 days, the health impact of unburied bodies emerges, with a growing rodent population and the likely epidemics of cholera, dysentery and typhoid. The population economics that take the form of contemporary labour relations are converted into pre-industrial slavery as part of a government-initiated attempt at recovery and rebuilding. By two-thirds of the way through the film, and 28 days after the attack, population figures are given in terms of unburied dead: 10–20 million corpses. Within 5 weeks food supplies are unreliable, there is very little transport and fuel stocks are diminished. This results in a mass exodus of the remaining urban population into rural areas in search of food. Fallout-related deaths begin to peak and, within 2 months, deaths as a direct effect of the attack are figured at between 17 and 38 million with a ‘remaining population weak, cold and hungry’. Harvesting the remaining, and drastically diminished, agriculture for population survival is difficult with an unfit labour force, and it is acknowledged that fuel shortages mean this could be the last year that tractors and combine harvesters are in use. By winter, most of the young and the old in the remaining population are wiped out from cold. The following year, a second harvest will be attempted without fertilisers or agrochemicals—both technologies developed to ensure agricultural needs of large populations are met—leaving crops susceptible to disease and pestilence. The film estimates the UK population size will decline within a decade after a

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nuclear strike to mediaeval levels of between 4 and 11 million. Ultimately, Threads ends with the hopeless point that, not only is a restoration of civilisation, industry, manufacturing, residency, education or health impossible, but also humanity’s own identity—its recognisability to itself—is disrupted as substantial and hideous birth defects from a radiation-polluted environment become the norm. Where Threads was concerned with the meaning of ‘human’ subjectivity in relation to post-apocalyptic population sizes, the British television series Survivors (1975–1977, remade 2008–2009) fixates on the relationship between self-identity and population size. World populations have been radically reduced as a result of a virus, apparently unleashed by scientists in China. The first series focuses on a small number of the tiny surviving population struggling in a post-apocalyptic environment, in which stored food and fuel are difficult to access and in which towns and cities are inaccessible due to subsequent disease and plagues of dogs and rats. In rural areas, survivors find that the radical drop in population has, of course, meant the end to agriculture, food production, education, health services, communication and government. Aiming to rebuild, they begin by attempting to relearn basic subsistence farming. The second season depicts the survivors experimenting with different methods of growing their community, the reality of increased vulnerability to death, disease and crop failure, and the occasional threat from other survivors who, in the absence of social compact and law, raid the farm or otherwise intimidate or coerce in ways deemed unethical. While the first two seasons represented the possibilities for new ways of living and new forms of community, family and identity that might emerge in the context of a radical depopulation as well as the need to subsist in a pre-industrial environment, the third turned to the attempt by key survivors to restore both trade and industry by redeveloping steam rail, basic telephone communication and coal-fired electricity, as well as attempting to reintroduce a form of currency to enable trade. Across three seasons, the series thus explored different aspects of post-apocalyptic survival in relation to concepts of civilisation, which, then, form the backdrop against which identity changes are explored. Population numbers, figures and knowledge of the size of the local and global population are central to the ways in which subjectivity is produced and made knowable in relationality—the very ‘thrownness’ of the subject into the world of others with whom we cohabit as a condition of being (Butler 2012, pp. 23–24) makes the population of others central to the mechanisms by which identity is constituted. We know peoples by those who are around us, visually and corporeally encountered, or with whom we communicate, or who are communicated to us through contemporary media forms. The population, however, as a body of peoples, a global size and spread, a demography and a statistic, is knowable to us and constitutive of us only through the contemporary dominant form of governance identified by Foucault as biopolitics. Unlike sovereign power regimes, built on the capacity of the figurative

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monarch to make die and let live (Foucault 2004a), and disciplinary regimes built on making live and letting lie through normalisational processes of surveillance and training, biopolitics extends the latter in order to operate at the level of life as ‘whole population’. Biopolitics relies on security mechanisms that foster life in order to ‘establish an equilibrium, maintain an average, establish a sort of homeostasis, and compensate for variations within this general population and its aleatory field’, aiming to capture and control ‘the random element inherent in a population of living beings so as to optimize a state of life’ (p. 246). For Foucault (2004a), biopolitical regulation is a power mechanism that does not work with individuals or individual corporeality, but aims to foster life ‘to establish an equilibrium, maintain an average, establish a sort of homeostasis, and compensate for variations within this general population and its aleatory field’ (p. 246). It depends on security mechanisms that capture ‘the random element inherent in a population of living beings so as to optimize a state of life’ (p. 246). In this context, population numbers operate, in addition to population types, ethnicities, racialities and many other demarcations, as a distributional factor governing the knowledges through which identities are constituted, performed, made intelligible and recognisable and stabilised over time (Butler 1990). This means that knowledge of the relationality a subject has, not with a group or population as a whole, but with the estimated numbers of the overall population is constitutive of how the subject, who is always produced in relationality with others, is intelligible to him- or herself. When there is a depiction of a fundamental shift in population numbers such as an apocalyptic reduction of the global population to a fraction of its previously known size, the formation of population concepts through which subjectivity is performed is radically disrupted. This includes all elements that have meaning for a subject, whether kinship, place, space or recognisability. Indeed, in the opening of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002), a newly conscious Jim walks through the empty streets of London in which all the familiar sites of the city he knew well as a bicycle courier are made strange and frightening by their very failure to be populated: he is unable to recognise either the place or himself. Similarly, the disappearance of entire populations renders all elements of a post-apocalyptic world bizarre and extraordinary. In the 1985 New Zealand film The Quiet Earth, based on Craig Harrison’s 1981 novel, scientist Zac Hobson finds himself alone in the world, bar two others. Although aloneness initially drove him into madness, he has been experimenting to discover the cause of the disappearance of the world’s inhabitants and makes an unnerving discovery: [into his voice recorder]: In an experiment I have just conducted … I can only conclude that the fabric of the universe has not only altered but is highly unstable. God knows where that leaves us.

HOBSON:

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The need for him to be re-subjectivised in a world that is not only quiet without people but is without population is represented by the radical shift not only in sociality but in all forms of relationality represented, for him, in physics that once but no longer seemed universal and constant. To be located in a post-apocalyptic world without population is not, however, to be fully refigured, it is not to have one’s performativity radically disrupted in full such that one is exhaustively unknowable to oneself. Rather, facets that make one’s subjectivity intelligible continue, although they become more apparent when the population is suddenly absent. The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959) was the filmic source for the 1985 New Zealand film The Quiet Earth, which depicted a similar storyline of a love triangle between three known survivors. In the earlier film, Ralph Burton (Harry Belafonte) emerges from an underground mine where he has been spared from the radiation that has wiped out almost all of the world’s population. He makes his way across the country to New York City and sets up electric power in a small area. As a coping mechanism to combat loneliness he has been talking with a white, male, smiling mannequin, later singing to it. Eventually he finds this frustrating: What’s so funny? I’m lonely and you’re laughing. Do you know what it means to be sick in your heart from loneliness. You don’t care, do you? No sense, no feeling. You look at me but you don’t see me. You don’t see me and you wouldn’t care if you did. We’ve been together too long and you’ve laughed at me once too often. Here is a reference to his older, pre-catastrophe, pre-apocalypse self. The mannequin represents the connected, stable, solid and non-productive humanity that coldly destroyed itself, and a self that was integrated into a population that did not need to consider itself, or to think about the structure of its heart (it was sick at heart). His place in the world is in question without knowledge of any other survivors, and the mannequin represents the white society that failed to see him (and forgot he was trapped in the mineshaft). In frustration, he throws the mannequin from a balcony, whereby Sarah Crandell (Inger Stevens), the only other survivor so far, sees it fall and mistakes it for a real person. So when he hears her, his first contact with any other person, the first evidence he is not the last human being, his return to being and selfhood within population (a population of two), it is with the disturbing and transformative shock of a scream. The remainder of the narrative focuses on the love triangle formed by three characters of different backgrounds, articulating new forms of sociality and social norms that may emerge in the context of the radical loss of the remaining population, which is seen, from that point, as the source of a problematic set of racist and conservative morals. Arguably, the connection between the performative constitution of identity and the cultural figure of population has become more intensively foregrounded in recent years, and this is witnessed in the more recent of contemporary

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apocalyptic narratives. For example, the 2008 remake of Survivors, which ran for two seasons, was built on Terry Nation’s original plot and his novelisation of the series, and reiterated a number of the key stories among similarly named characters. The characters themselves were adapted for the twenty-first century, with the particularly obvious movement away from upper middle-class dominant characters with rural working-class representatives as subsidiary or antagonistic depictions. In the new iteration, characters are multicultural, of a greater range of sexualities and religious–ethnic backgrounds and drawn from the ordinarily less affluent more generally. The new series introduced a background narrative of a conspiracy of British and transnational scientists working with global medical research and pharmaceutical corporations responsible for the viral outbreak initially, but now adopting sovereign incursions into the bodies of survivors as part of a series of methods for combating the destruction they had themselves initially wrought. The newer series is also explicitly updated for the role of technology—shifting the focus of the effect of the loss of social services and infrastructure from industry and manufacturing to digital communications as the means of contemporary relationality. In the 1970s iteration of the series, key character Abby encounters a surviving schoolteacher in the first episode while looking for her son—they have a conversation about food, education and manufacturing that helps shape her views of the future for the survivors, particularly after he explains the finite possibilities of scavenging existing food supplies: What is important is learning again. Things you’ve never even needed to consider before. [He points to a candle]. That: could you make that? Where does the raw material come from, do you know? … Could you make it, something as simple as a candle, starting from scratch … A book will tell you how electricity is generated, but could you do it?

SCHOOLTEACHER:

That is, manufacturing, as a conceptual marker of civilisation, has been dependent on a quantum of population size or number. In the 2008 series, a similar situation arises, in which Abby is no longer searching for her son at an elite boarding school but at his outdoor education campsite where she encounters not an intellectual schoolmaster but a physical education instructor. They have, however, a similar conversation with some marked differences after the instructor sees Abby once again trying her mobile phone: We’re going to have to start all over again. We’re going to have to relearn the skills we’ve forgotten. We’ve become like helpless babies. Pushing the buttons of our fancy technology, while distancing ourselves further every day from the reality of what it actually is to be human.

BROWN:

In both the 1970s and 2008 iterations, sociality, subjectivity and liveability are vulnerable to the contemporary alienation from production processes that

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comes about when a globalising network involves greater and greater specialisations, skills, distances, centralisations and personnel for the production of basic items for sustenance. However, in the case of the 2008 series, the emphasis on what has been lost shifts from industrial production to digitally based consumption. Additionally, it is no longer a matter of how an object is produced, but how it is brought to the point of consumption (from global shipping to the expert who determines the health of a mushroom type prior to its distribution for sale) and technologies that distance subjects not just in terms of an alienation from the product, but in terms of industrial production itself: ‘the buttons of our fancy technology’. These, for the instructor, have become the border that separates the subject from ‘humanity’. For Abby, however, her sense of humanity has until this point been produced through her access to such communication technologies and through a distance from all forms of production in favour of (digital) consumption. Letting go of that particular version of humanity, that particular formation of identity, is more difficult for her in 2008 than for her 1975 counterpart. Indeed, the 2008 series is far more attuned to the question of how a subject ‘survives’ in the context of depopulation, a point that is made explicit in the opening titles. The title images do not depict the central characters; rather they present footage of very large masses of people moving through crowded city streets, airports, train stations, parks and otherwise engaging in everyday activities ordinary activities (children playing, adults swimming, birthdays and births). Everydayness is, as Greg Noble (2002) has pointed out, the site of identification in relationality: ‘somewhat submerged, half-conscious and ubiquitous’ (p. 53). It is the everydayness of moving through large crowds, of undertaking activities that are about population in biopolitical terms—exercise, breeding, working, consuming. The footage is interspersed with graphic representations of microbial cells splitting and quickly growing in numbers, alluding to the virus that destroys 99 per cent of the world’s population. The images overlap, with the now large population of microscopic cells infiltrating the images of everyday middle-class humanity from the borders of the screen, such that the two images indicate the rivalry between the population of humanity and population of the mass-duplicating cells of the virus. The title screens end with a relatively plain, white background on which is superimposed a very small number of silhouettes of men and women—nondescript, flashing and fluctuating, somewhat amorphous. In a reading of this opening to an apocalyptic series—a reading that remains aware of population and of the performativity of identity—it can be understood that the silhouettes of the very small handful of apocalypse survivors indicate the vague, fluid and unstructured form that post-apocalyptic identity takes. This small number of silhouettes is representative of forms that have no subjective coherence or intelligibility outside their relationality with the everyday multitude of population that has now disappeared from the screen. Most significant in the 2008 series is an increased representation of the question of what a radical apocalyptic depopulation means for a sense of

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selfhood and identity. In both series, the character Abby, who has recovered from her bout of illness, finds herself alone. After failing to find other survivors, both run out into the street and cry out ‘Please God, don’t let me be the only one!’ In both cases, what that cry to the mystical articulates is an anxiety over the loss of identity—to be the only one in a world in which ‘the other’ has disappeared results not only in a loss of meaning through everyday practices (for Abby: motherhood, coupledom, friends and the routines of the household) but through relationality with population. In both cases, a new identity eventually emerges: away from being the accepting and easy-going wife and mother. for both the 1970s and the 2008 series, Abby is eventually depicted as one of a handful of resourceful, self-reliant and self-assured survivors, devoted not to the domestic space but to the remnants of a public need—ensuring a just, workable future for humanity against barely surmountable odds. Where the newer series differs, however, is in the characters’ articulation and self-awareness of the shifts in identity wrought by apocalyptic events. Characters in post-apocalyptic dramas such as Survivors regularly remark on the fluctuations experienced in identity, and particularly in relation to the ways in which a drastically reduced population affects personal aspiration. For example, in the third-last episode of the 2008 series, we see the two characters, Al and Sarah, surveying a rural town from the top of a hill. Sarah, who began the series as an ambitious user of others, a former ‘party girl’ focused on sustained experiences of both pleasure and leisure, notes the shifts in aspiration as they pertain to identity. I think about things differently, now everyone’s gone. My girlfriends going on all the time about getting married, having babies, settling down. All seemed so boring. Now, I think I’d like to one day. You know. Maybe with someone, have kids.

SARAH:

Sarah’s aspirations here are now made more coherent to herself in the postapocalyptic scenario of the loss of the population. Aspiration is, of course, central to the performativity of selfhood. For Arjun Appadurai, aspirations are not simply individual wants and choices, but are formed in interaction within social life. They are part of a system of ideas, operationalised in relationality, located within a map of ideas and beliefs about life, death, the nature of worldly possessions, the significance of material assets, social relations, social permanence of a society and the value of peace and warfare (Appadurai 2004). Most importantly, for Appadurai, the capacity to aspire is not evenly distributed in any society, for not all have the power, recognition and material resources to be conscious of the links between the self and objects of aspiration (Appadurai 2004). Aspiration begins with the recognition of oneself within categories of similitude. The social effect of aspiration is that each subject possesses a window onto a zone of similar individuals and draws aspirations from their lives, achievements or ideals—noting that all aspirations will be inherently

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multidimensional, not singularly comparative. For Sarah, it is not merely the changed circumstances of the relationships she develops with Abby, Al and the rest of the small group of survivors, but the shift in relationality to the everyday experiences that the majority of the population, represented by her girlfriends, has produced for the intelligibility of herself in the context of others. While having children and undertaking the everydayness of everyday activities was something that she once rejected in favour of the aspirations of partying, celebrity or other forms of notoriety and pleasure, a substantial shift or disruption in her sense of identity occurs not because they are dead, but because there is no population through which to express her own prior aspirations. New aspirations emerge as the performances through which she comes to articulate a new identity. What the post-apocalyptic depiction of survival in contemporary film and television does is demonstrate the extent to which human identity—or humanity itself—is constituted in a notion of population numbers. When those numbers drop, when one is asked to survive in a thinly populated world in which depopulation means the loss of industry, technological production and the collective skills that produce the means of corporeal survival, human identity is destabilised. While population presents itself ordinarily and in normative contexts only as a backdrop or as the ‘everyday’ for individual subjects, its constitutive power in providing a framework for self-intelligibility only becomes apparent in those sites in which one imagines a life as a postapocalyptic survivor, a life in which that population is no longer present. The fear of apocalyptic scenarios of radical depopulation, then, is not about a fear of the death of others, the loss of technologically derived comforts or the erasure of normative governance. Rather, it is a fear of the self becoming the unknowable—selves who are no longer recognisable to ourselves, presented with an imperative to cease everyday performativity of identity and to perform otherwise.

Population and civilisation Post-apocalyptic film and television regularly centres on the connection between identity, culture and civilisation by asking what might happen when this last, which depends on a population threshold, is gone. Civilisation here can be understood to mean two things: first, the force of law; and, second, the formation of civil society in which relationality between subjects within the population is managed by both formal and informal frameworks of sociality, conviviality and governance. In the context of the production of the idea of population within biopolitics as a technology of power deployed by governance, we might ask how population size operates as a regulatory regime constituting the performativity of identity and subjectivity through the forms of governance that not only manage large populations but are produced for and by the presence of large populations. Foucault (2008) viewed the concept of civil society as that field of reference through which governance technologies of power

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manage populations in ways distinct from, but interwoven with, the dominance of neoliberal economic processes, markets, production, consumption and exchange (p. 295). Civil society is inseparable from the dominant form of selfhood in neo-liberal conditions, which is homo economicus or economic man— the figure of selfhood in which the subject is responsible for managing his or her own risk and finance as an ‘entrepreneur of the self’ (p. 226), whereby ‘economic behaviour is the grid of intelligibility one will adopt on the behavior of a new individual’ (p. 252). Civil society operates within this framework, but for the purpose of ensuring that governmentality is not split between a branch of governing economically and a branch of governing juridically—biopolitical governmentality operating within and on behalf of neoliberalism establishes civil society as a frame of reference. Civil society is the framework through which the workable bond of subjects as homo economicus is constituted. The state and civilisation, or civil society, are often conflated, although in a Foucauldian perspective they are not necessarily the same, if interconnected— rather, the state can operate without civility to exclude certain members of a population while caring for others (Butler 2012, pp. 143–144). For Foucault, civilisational governance emerges historically, in a modified form, from the pastoral care of the mediaeval church (Petterson 2012, pp. 90–91) to produce disciplinary institutions and, later, biopolitical and security forms of governance that ‘look after’ groups and populations; in doing so, such post-pastoral governance technologies produce a spontaneous bond of individual subjects. Here, there is no explicit contract, no voluntary union, no renunciation of rights, and no delegation of natural rights to someone else; in short, there is no constitution of sovereignty by a sort of pact of subjection. In fact, if civil society actually carries out a synthesis, it will quite simply be through a summation of individual satisfactions within the social bond itself (Foucault 2008, p. 300) It operates, then, as the matrix of political and social power that permits the neoliberal economic technologies of power to flourish without dissent. At the same time, civil society provides a constitutive force for the social relationalities between subjects within a population grouping beyond the purely economic. In apocalyptic representations, it is civil society, or civilisation, or just plain society, that is named as that which has been lost simultaneously with the loss of the greater proportion of the population. Civilisation depends on population size that is not affected by a radical shift—only ever gradual, governed, managed growth. Population size operates, then, as the spectre that haunts civilisation. Typically, the civilisation–population linkage is given in terms of the loss of shared social, biopolitical and juridical services (water, social security, health security, communications infrastructure, law, a legislative framework for criminal responsiveness and forms of policing) and economic fields of exchange

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(industrial production of food and agriculture, the supply of supermarkets, electricity, communications infrastructure), noting that many of these services are both economic and civil, or shift between the two in recent Western history. Where the West remains, very much problematically, the representation of progress and, as Stephen Muecke (2007) has described, the depiction of ‘man’s sense of mastery of “nature”’ (p. 260), what is lost in the loss of civilisation resulting from a drop in population is the capacity to control nature, whether that be the growth of food, the taming of animals (for example, dogs forming wild packs that compete with humanity and losing their status as a companion species is a common theme in apocalyptic film and television) or the capacity to maintain infrastructure separate from the persistent ‘invasion’ of plant life. Indeed, Muecke points out that in a disaster scenario such as an apocalyptic event, it is only the government formations of civil society that can manage infrastructure and services for survival, since privatised agencies ‘lack coordination and social responsibility, and they have no obligation to respond to citizens’ (p. 266). In that sense, the contemporary neoliberal governance, which gives free rein to the market while retaining a role in the preservation of civil society, is that which is always depicted as precarious in an apocalyptic event, put at risk by radical population size changes and made more so by the uneasy alliance between the economic and the civil. Precarity itself, as Butler (2009) points out, demands ‘certain social and economic conditions to be met’ in order to sustain life, and this includes specifically ‘living socially’ (pp. 13–14), that is living among a population that is not only a population of people but a population in relationality, arranged through obligations of civil, and civilised, shared use of the means of sustaining life. At times, a loss of civil society and civilisation is also represented through flight from the figurative depiction of the city. The city here is, on the one hand, constitutive of contemporary urban identity and, on the other, the site of the gathering of large numbers of corporeal subjects in close proximity. In many representations, survivors of an apocalyptic event flee the city because it has become dangerous and exacerbates the vulnerability of the embodied subject—it is a site of disease due to mass deaths or a site of violence due to gangs. In Revolution (2012), early in the first episode, the characters leave the city, Chicago, for the country in order to avoid the violent groups they have anticipated, although Chicago itself is shown to remain inhabited as a site of market exchange. In the 1970s series of Survivors, the city is made dangerous by replacement of the human population with a population of rats, which has grown exponentially due to the large numbers of undisposed corpses, with the rats carrying fatal disease forming a reminder of apocalyptic plagues of the past. In The Walking Dead, cities are to be avoided due to the vast numbers of resurrected corpses appearing in the places at which the largest numbers of persons lived before the virus. Exile from the physical and conceptual notions of the urban as the epitome of civilisation is, metaphorically, an exile from what David Cunningham (2008) has identified as the ‘anachronistic persistence of the idea of the polis in efforts to articulate, conceptually, emergent

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“real” or “speculative” forms of universality or collectivity today’ (p. 455). That is, where the city is the site of population at its most visible, it is also the site of identity collectivity, of population’s constitutive role in forming contemporary subjectivity through the civilisational. Yet civil society, as the formation to which we are attached, and which is mourned in post-apocalyptic survival narratives, is also represented as normatively global rather than local. As Mark Poster (2001) has pointed out, the increasing globalisation of economic processes results in production and services being dispersed beyond the local (p. 3). In a contemporary biopolitical and neoliberal society, in which the civil is subsumed through the discourse of the economic while separated from it, we witness the persistent shifting away of the processes that provide civility and civilisation, whether that be the globalised production of news and entertainment media or the governance systems that protect against and/or manage the risk of global disaster. In a Marxist analysis, this is an alienation from the product or service of contemporary civilisation, whether that be the goods and services that sustain life or those that make life liveable. Within an industrialised and mechanised society, any capacity to have agency over the forms of civility, the infrastructure for sustenance or the means of survival is lost as it is spread further through stratified systems, broad populations or globalised spaces. When the population that participates in, but does not govern, such services, goods and civil forms is gone, those services, goods and civil forms cannot be restored back to the individual, who remains permanently alienated from them. The loss of civil society becomes at least one of the focal points for the disruption of identity in apocalyptic narratives, explicitly pointing to the contemporary reliance on these services, which are not only for the flourishing of life, but also for the making of life liveable and the making of subjects intelligible in relationality to each other. In other words, a threshold of population is required for civil society to operate, and when that threshold is no longer met or when it is radically disrupted, we see that there is no distinction between civil society and population whatsoever, and thus no subject that is not conditioned and constituted by population as civilisation. The shifts in identity, relationality and culture that occur in a movement away from civil society resulting from depopulation is articulated in Threads. The film’s documentary-style voice-over begins with a statement that points to the relationship between contemporary civilisation and a sustainably large population, in which society itself is depicted as susceptible at the point of that relationship: In an urban society, everything connects. Each person’s needs are fed by the skills of many others. Our lives are woven together in a fabric. But the connections that make a society strong also make it vulnerable. The vulnerability of contemporary civilisation is depicted in Threads as the lack of skills or capacity for the basic elements of contemporary survival

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central to the embodied formation of contemporary subjectivity: food, water, shelter, clothing and education, in addition to emotional and relational connectivity with others, governance and a shared sense of belonging. While civil society operates as a social framework, subjects are made vulnerable without an intelligible sense of ‘civilisation’ and its role in structuring broad, social relationality. As Judith Butler (2009) points out, the state and the law can protect subjects, although to be protected by the state is to always be exposed to the violence wielded by the state (pp. 25–26), such that there is never any framework in which subjects are not already constituted in vulnerability, only that vulnerability itself is produced and accorded differentially across different spaces and temporalities. Vulnerability, indeed, is a key condition of subjectivity, according to Butler. Across several works, including her Precarious Life (Butler 2004) and Frames of War (Butler 2009), Judith Butler develops an ethics of non-violence that is grounded in the recognition of the vulnerability of the other. Butler develops a way of conceiving of the human subject as predicated on a primary vulnerability to and dependence on others, meaning that all our identities are built on our relationality with others. This is marked by the fact that we are vulnerable to the violence of others, and yet always, from the very beginning of our lives, as living corporeal beings, we are dependent on others for physical support. For Butler (2004), vulnerability is primary and it is prior to identity; it cannot be got rid of without ceasing to be human (p. xiv). Vulnerability is also about the possibility of loss that constitutes subjectivity. This means that each of us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies—as a site of desire and physical vulnerability, as a site of a publicity at once assertive and exposed. Loss and vulnerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, and at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure (p. 20). While the vulnerability of others around us, within the population, is not always recognised, it is common to humanity and points to the need to consider an ethics of non-violence that is responsive to the vulnerable other (pp. 42–43). We thus gaze, culturally, at the possibility of the post-apocalyptic because we are attached to civilisations built on population thresholds and therefore already constituted by its loss. In that context, we are constituted in a vulnerability that is exposed to loss of that to which we are attached, we might expand on Butler to say that this is also a matter for the attachment to population, which is pivotal in the formation of both identity and civilisation. We are vulnerable to the loss of the other by virtue of the deep, passionate attachment one has to the other as constitutive of subjectivity, but in this framework that ‘other’ may well be the population. Not a population that is understood as a large number of other bodies, other individuals, other subjects, but a population size that constitutes civilisation as that which not only provides the network of manufacturing services that make a life liveable, but makes particular identities intelligible as

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human subjectivity. In Threads, the lack of population numbers results in the lack of civilisation, which effectively can be understood as a lack of the means by which to produce, manufacture, distribute and prepare food. The film depicts a scene of two survivors stumbling across a sheep, dead from radiation poisoning, and tearing it apart to eat its flesh raw. This is a powerful visual metaphor for post-civilisation as ‘barbaric’ or ‘animalistic’ in the lost practice of cooking meat. The kernel of subjectivity—humanity as marked by a distinctiveness from animals—is increasingly impossible, as basic survival demands the relinquishing of that distinction in a post-apocalyptic low-population environment. Those elements of contemporary society that present meaning for identity—and sites of identification—are vulnerable to loss as a direct result of the loss of a threshold of population. Indeed, in 28 Days Later, Selena speculates that, with the loss of most of the world’s population to the zombie infection, they will never see another film that has not already been made—a reference to the forms of civilisation and civil society that have everyday meaning for contemporary subjects through everyday popular culture and, indeed, the culture of new, mass-produced productions. Civil society as a contemporary manifestation of the governance of populations can be understood in innovative ways when examined from the perspective of its loss in representative apocalyptic texts, and one of those ways is to consider civil society not only as a framework for governance but as a network of subjects, inter-networked with economic governance and ultimately a precarious means by which relationality is performed. That which is vulnerable in apocalyptic depictions is not population as a large number of human beings. Rather, it is the combination of industrialised processes, relations, socialities and administrative governance forms that operate as a network. Contemporary society built on a particular countable number of people in a population who work together to produce a particular way of being is a network morphology, to use Manuel Castells’ (2000) term, that structures relationality and identity in ways never free from structuration. That is, infrastructure and civilisation sustain not just life but liveability, providing a framework for subjectivity that is relational. A subject comes to be a subject not by virtue of a process of subjectification but in forms of network relationality that position a subject within nodes and hubs of infrastructure, ranging from those that sustain bodies (water, food distribution) to those that provide it with civilised belonging (education, participation). What makes these texts apocalyptic, then, is the finality of the loss of civilisation or the very near insurmountability of deliberately attempting to bring about the restoration of civilisation in a depopulated world. To envisage post-civilisation subsequent to an apocalyptic event that has decimated population numbers is no longer to imagine how one might rebuild civilisation (or build it differently, or restore the population) but, instead, to imagine the difficulty of rebuilding without the technologies that emerge from large population numbers.

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Securing the population: fascist post-apocalyptic worlds While concepts of civilisation and civil society operate at times separately from the state, as a formation that, on the one hand, depends on a global population threshold and, on the other, produces that population through forms of relationality, post-apocalyptic film and television series regularly depict competing notions of the ‘civilised state’. That is, in many cases the texts present a range of possibilities for the sorts of states, governmental systems and communities that might emerge or be established in a post-apocalyptic survival environment. In many cases, the most notable and visible forms of the state are those that resemble totalitarian or fascist regimes, typically depending on an informal military to enforce sovereign laws, regularly depicted as unethical. In the postapocalyptic series Revolution (2012), the failure of all electricity and motorised equipment—and, therefore, communication technologies and the infrastructural technologies of biopolitics deployed for the governance of large populations— has led to the rise of geographically localised warlords and militias; and much of the series’ narrative centres on the difficulties encountered by scattered population groups of living an ethical and peaceful existence in an environment in which survival is not only a post-technological ‘battle’ with nature but also involves a physical battle with warlords seeking dominance over unwilling populations. The justification given by these totalitarian assemblages of the post-apocalyptic state borrows from two elements: (1) pre-governance systems and mediaeval concepts of sovereignty; and (2) biopolitical concepts of security in which the role of governance is given over to the security of (and securing of) the population. Both operate together in post-apocalyptic depictions of nascent states and attempted regimes, usually in ways that allow the central characters either to argue for alternative systems of governance or, more frequently, to oppose any governance form that is instituted rather than casually or organically emergent. Sovereignty, as the term is used most regularly today in the concept of the nation, is a power formation deployed to guarantee democracy (Malik 2006, p. 514) or other systems of state government (Butler 2012, p. 149). In its mediaeval framework, however, sovereignty is the de jure power of the sovereign king or noble to make laws, to judge and to do so in a formation that positions the sovereign figure as the one to decide, ‘making die’ and ‘letting live’ in Foucault’s analysis, as opposed to the disciplinary and biopolitical governance forms that, while insidious, are directed towards a making live and letting die of groups and populations (Foucault 2004a: 248). This appears to be the clear framework and raison d’état of the post-apocalyptic future in 12 Monkeys. We see not only a post-industrial civilisation in which disposable plastic syringes, for example, have been replaced by metal intravenous systems, and whereby the time machine used is a massive, semi-industrial, and certainly pre-digital, machine, barely capable of correct calculations. Troublemakers are locked away, not in a disciplinary institution for rehabilitation but in a traditional asylum that keeps undesirable persons separate from the main body of society (a society that we do not see in the

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depictions of the future). The sovereign system at play here is presented as a parallel to the failure in today’s world of rehabilitative disciplinary and biopolitical governance systems, whereby both the asylum in which the time-travelling character Cole is locked up in the 1990s, where psychiatric treatment is eschewed in favour of simply keeping those who need psychiatric care separate from the world, and the future prison in which Cole is locked during times he is not on a mission for the scientists are the same. Sovereign states built on a sovereignty system in which unilateral decisions to ‘make die’ are given by singular or oligarchical rulers, are common in postapocalyptic representations, but the very foundations of such societies are frequently brought into question as having been built upon a primary violence decision. Indeed, the sovereign state is always founded in violence (Visvanathan 2006, p. 533), whether it is the violence of war or revolution that establishes the state (Butler 2003, p. 28) or the violence that first posits both law and rule (Agamben 1995, p. 40). In the 2008 iteration of Survivors, the authority of former government junior minister for health, Samantha Willis, to rule Britain is put in question. Although the only known surviving member of the government, it might be asked whether the authority of an appointed minister in a Westminster system carries through in the absence of, on the one hand, the sovereign who authorises that ministry and, on the other, a democratic electoral system that elects a subject to carry the authority of ministerial governance. Willis has established her site for rule at an Eco-Centre compound that had been prepared for post-apocalyptic survival with food and water stocks. Willis justifies the compound’s high level of security, use of guns and the harshness of her regime to Abby: ‘There’s a lot here to want. Unfortunately, at the moment that makes us a target. There’s enough for everyone, and that’s what we have to make everyone understand. We can make life good again, but only if we work together.’ Abby agrees, particularly keen on the rhetoric of togetherness and community. However, when another raid occurs, Willis is forced by mob justice to make the sovereign decision that the looters must die, executing one of them personally. What Abby witnesses is that a sovereign system of governance has just been established and it is founded in the violence of the law and the enactment of violence to ensure the law. At the same time, as with all sovereign governance systems that rely on the visuality of the scaffold (Foucault 2004b, p. 82), Willis relied on the spectacle of execution as a form of vengeance, barely disguising it with weak claims of pragmatism. In a later encounter with Samantha Willis’s group, even greater utilisation of the technologies of sovereign regimes are seen at play: Willis overruling jury decisions as a form of sovereign exception, the use of slave labour camps to mine coal, and a governance system articulated on claims to security of the population. Security is a second formation that is found in representations of totalitarian post-apocalyptic states, almost always depicted as a weak justification for sovereign political methods. Security and sovereignty work in tandem here, not entirely in Agamben’s formation in which biopolitics is always in service to sovereignty (Agamben 1995), but as the purpose for

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which a supposed return to sovereign technologies of power is claimed. Security here stands in for particular biopolitical elements of governance, operating in biopolitical terms that produce certain forms of normalisation distinct from those typically associated with disciplinary power technologies (Foucault 2007, p. 11). Security operates as an apparatus within the biopolitical deployment of power in which the figure of the population as object emerges in relation to the security of political power (p. 11). The population is constituted within security as a ‘milieu’, whereby it comes to be seen as a field of intervention where power acts not on and through individuals as legal subjects of sovereignty, but as ‘a multiplicity of organisms, of bodies capable of performances, and of required performances—as in discipline—one tries to affect, precisely, a population’ (p. 21). Security aims to safeguard the ‘conjunction of a series of events’ produced by individuals and populations (p. 21) that ensures the smooth striations of the distinctions and relationalities between individual subjects and the broader mass of living beings. Within biopolitical regulation, the population comes to be understood as a collective ‘political subject’, effectively responsible for its own conduct (pp. 42–43) by virtue of its relationality with political and economic conditions, which may include models of the market demarcated by scarcity and dearness (p. 43) and conformable behaviours within legalistic regimes. While the ‘making live’ of the population is the aim of mechanisms of security, it is deployed and ensured through a range of governance activities that operate alongside the recording, measuring and management of populations. Security, in Foucault’s analysis, similarly founded on a politics governed by ‘the calculation of balances’ (p. 205), is seen to require a professionalised soldier trained through disciplinary institutions, a permanent army, an infrastructure of strongholds and transport, and a knowledge system for tactics, manoeuvres and military schemas of defence and attack, as well as forms of diplomacy that help to maintain a status quo between different groups, tribes, nations or peoples (pp. 205, 305). Security, then, for the reduced population of survivors in a post-apocalyptic scenario can no longer depend on the technologies of biopolitical power and technological governance to ensure its continuation. Indeed, civilised governance in a reduced population becomes partially individualised—each survivor must take responsibility not for managing their own risk, as in a biopolitical society, but for ensuring their own security as part of securing that of the full group. Allowing governance to be subsumed under sovereign power regimes, and thus becoming not only sovereign subject but subject to a sovereign, is one such option. The Walking Dead tackles questions of the extent to which a sovereign decision to take life (‘make die’) under the justification of security can operate alongside any sense that survival can remain ‘civilised’ in a postapocalyptic, zombie-riddled world. In the second season, where Rick and his group of survivors have settled on Hershel’s farm, they are faced with the problem of having rescued a young man, Randall, who was a member of a rival gang and hence likely to report the location of their secure premises to that gang. They believe that if their location is communicated to the rival

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gang, their group will be threatened in ways worse than the threat of zombies. Rick had previously been forced to kill two of the gang members who pulled guns on Hershel, Greg and himself—they now fear retribution and worry for the safety of the group. Rick has made the decision to execute the boy to ensure the security of the farm, although Dale objects. It’s settled. We’ll do it today. But you can’t just decide on your own to take someone’s life … There’s got to be a process. RICK: And what would that be? We can’t call witnesses, go before a judge … People are scared. They need to be safe. RICK:

DALE:

Liberal–humanist society determines and constitutes human identity in our contemporary world, and that hangs over into the post-apocalyptic—or at least Dale’s attempt to find civility a form that prevents a wholesale slippage of governance into totalitarian fascism. Humanity, together as population, is determined by civilisation, figured here as the non-sovereign, biopolitical framework of ‘make live and let die’, not the arbitrary decision-making to shoot a subject who may later be determined to be a genuine threat to the overall (remaining) population. Such a framework does, of course, produce an ‘us’ and therefore a normative distributional curve with a threat of execution for those who fail to be in the proximity of the norm, where the norm here is figured as protecting the ongoingness of the remaining human civilisation and being wedded unflinchingly to security as the basis of survival. A clear set of references to Guantanamo and the Western reaction to Islamist terrorists is presented here, in which several characters baulk at the horror of putting the security of population (the ‘making die’) before the capacity to recognise the vulnerability of the other. Population and ethics here are together shown not merely as no longer present, but as simultaneously both past and futural, in which the real object of security ought ethically to be the preservation of the liberal past into the future as opposed to a future in which sovereign decisions to kill are institutionalised. However, the Walking Dead group’s leadership continues to move towards execution. In the end, what saves Randall is neither the restoration of the discourses of the biopolitical that ‘make live’, nor an ethical capacity to recognise Randall’s vulnerability and therefore worthiness of a non-violent response (Butler 2009). Rather, it is Rick’s reaction to his prepubescent son’s bloodthirsty encouragement at the moment of execution as Rick hesitated: ‘Do it, Dad. Do it.’ An awareness emerges that civilisation is not replaced only by a harsh security regime, but that the very identity of the next generation will be one that revels in cruelty and an incapacity to recognise otherness in ethical and non-violent terms. In refusing, then, to execute Randall, what Rick realises is that the security he desires is the security of the future generation as ethical beings capable of non-violent responsiveness, despite the conditions of survival in which they find themselves. Clemency is, of course, also a sovereign decision, and the historical right of the sovereign (to ‘let live’).

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For Foucault, security is a dispositif, deployed to enhance and stabilise institutional and administrative mechanisms of governance and their concomitant knowledge systems. It is not, therefore, the side effect of a risk society nor an essential need of human life, nor is it purely a function of the contemporary state, but, as Ricky Wichum argues, a strategical effect of specific relations of power, knowledge and subjectivity (Wichum 2013, pp. 164–165). In that sense, security is always about power and it is always deployed for the sake of the forms of governance in question. Across post-apocalyptic film and television texts, security of the survivors—whether alone or in a small group—is thus a central element of the narrative, whether that be security against non-human threats (further virus, disease, zombies, radiation), security of the means that sustain life (food, redevelopment of agriculture, education, trade), or security against other groups who seek dominance by specifically targeting the security of the central characters. Security here is always, then, secondary, and subsequent to relations of power, even when the structure of governance systems is relatively benign or ethical. In the context of post-apocalyptic representations of survival in a depopulated world, security tends towards being coterminous with sovereignty rather than being a dispositif of biopolitical governance. Although it is first formulated for the management of populations, security here becomes a heightened trope in a depopulated environment in which the infrastructure of civilisation, civility and civil society does not have the population-based capacity to be managed.

Population and bare life: recognising the survivor A final formation through which identity is produced in the context of postapocalyptic survival and the radical loss of population emerges in more recent films and television series about the figure of ‘bare life’. In Agamben’s framework, the concept of bare life can be disconnected neither from sovereignty nor from the loss of ‘civilisation’ is figured as a loss of the polis in which one participates as a political being (Cunningham 2008, p. 455). In its simplest form, bare life is represented as basic survival at a corporeal level, one side of the Greek distinction between zoë and bios. In being reduced to zoë or bare life, a subject is deprived not only of citizenship but of agency over his or her own life. Within Agamben’s framework, the population is typically understood as a population of bios or citizens, defined against that which is excluded as an exception to the population—its other, whether a racial other, a national other or a subject made homo sacer that is so stripped of subjectivity it can be killed with impunity (Agamben 1995, p. 72). Subjects deemed to be homo sacer or bare life are, in contemporary biopolitical frameworks, made to be ‘unliveable lives’ and nonsubjects at a zone of liminal indistinction figured between belonging and nonbelonging. If the life of the population—typically figured in nationalistic terms of citizenship—is the contemporary proper form of subjectivity as bios, then when the population is no longer there, when there is no site for belonging, life is arguably made unliveable in the sense of being rendered bare, defined and constituted by such bareness in survival as opposed to living.

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In Agamben’s work, the two concepts of zoë and bios cannot remain distinct but coincide in contemporary biopolitical regimes in which bare life is politicised by virtue of its exclusion from the polis. Yet when that polis (figuratively, here, the population or the civilisation that emerges from the fact of population) is no longer present, and when the biopolitical forms of governance are thus no longer deployed or, indeed, available, then the indistinction is no longer going to be the case. This is where we see both the sovereign power in Foucault’s formulation and the modern biopolitical and disciplinary biopowers merge in a reversal or turning-inside-out of the distinction and the merger between the two. As Agamben notes in his Remnants of Auschwitz (Agamben 2002), Foucault characterised sovereign power through the insignia of ‘make die and let live’ via the capacity of the sovereign to ‘decide upon’ those subject to him, while biopower is characterised by the imperative to ‘make live and let die’ whereby certain forms of racism allow killing of those deemed inferior or other. However, for Agamben, the formula that defines the coinciding of sovereignty and biopolitics is neither to ‘make live’ or to ‘make die’ but to ‘make survive’ (Agamben 2002, p. 155). Yet, in my formulation here, the moment the population, which is that governed by sovereignty or managed by biopolitics, is no longer in place, the precise moment at which civilisation fails and therefore the politicisation of life and death is removed, the ‘make survive’ is replicated in a framework in which survival as bare life is the only political constituent of the post-apocalyptic subject. This ‘made to survive’ motif of survivor stories in post-apocalyptic narratives is, typically, one struggled with by its central characters. Although life was found to be liveable, and indeed, the global population not lost after all in 28 Days Later, Selena fell to moments of despair in which she articulated the only possible way of living is through the bare unliveability of survival. She argues, with heavy sarcasm: ‘Have you got any plans, Jim? Do you want us to find a cure and save the world, or just fall in love and fuck? Plans are pointless. Staying alive is as good as it gets.’ In his discussion of the bare life of asylum seekers held in indefinite detention, Joseph Pugliese (2004, p. 299) notes that foreclosing on futurity or a future liveability presents a substantial making bare of life, circumscribing the subject by a past trauma and a trauma of the future that holds no futurity. Here, the trauma of the past civilisation of planning and temporality that is lost and the trauma of the lack of futurity surround Selena in such a way that life is survival, bare and unliveable. However, post-apocalyptic narratives typically seek out a new form of futurity, hinging subjectivity and belonging on a future beyond survival. The post-apocalyptic world of alien invasion articulated in Falling Skies (2011–2013) pivots around forms of survival with a perception of a restoration of civilisation through re-conquest of the Earth. As one character puts it in the episode ‘Mutiny’ (1x09): ‘Do you remember what it was like? Before Porter brought us together? Everybody on their own, scrounging for food and water. Forget about fighting back, it was all we

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could do to survive.’ Here, survival is juxtaposed against a sense of belonging, but only where that belonging is positioned as a mission—one here that is defined solely through combat and militia-style movement in temporal futurity towards a military goal. Such a distinction between preapocalyptic liveable lives within citizenship and post-apocalyptic bare life as survival has, however, also positioned bare life along a continuum of survival that has no bearing on whether or not there has been an apocalypse and a radical drop in the population. 12 Monkeys demonstrated this in articulating a pre-apocalyptic civilisation that bore very few differences from the post-apocalyptic bare life of Cole in the underground prison. The site of the asylum, the threatening of prostitutes with death (with impunity) and the failures of biopolitical and disciplinary state mechanisms to ‘protect’ indicate the extension of the post-apocalyptic unliveable life temporally backwards into our own everyday sociality. In The Walking Dead the survival mode in which all being is now constituted is, for many of the characters, not any different from the pre-apocalyptic society of the living population. Rick’s group encounters a group of Puerto Rican families protecting the nursing home—they have drawn arms against Rick’s group, assuming they were plunderers. When T-Dog points out to them ‘Guess the world changed’, their leader Guillermo counters, ‘No, it’s the same as it ever was. The weak get taken’. Here, while they were protecting their bare life survival against those who make such survival precarious through theft of their food stocks, they note that the world of gangs and violence without state protection (or being under state violence) was just as much a bare life formation of survival as they find themselves in the post-apocalyptic realm. Compared with all the series and films discussed here, it is in The Walking Dead that bare life is made most apparent. This is not only due to the harsh conditions depicted in the series, the persistent deaths of key characters in the group or the fact that they are constantly encountering the remnants of the many-billions-strong population of the world who are now unstoppable and barely killable zombies. Rather, here, it is in the grand scale of the apocalyptic vision that any sense of a liveability beyond the violence of bare life or any restoration of a civilised existence is unthinkable. The zombies of The Walking Dead are persistent reminders of the failure of futurity and the bare life of survival—importantly, they point to the bare life of survival through representing liminality and indistinctiveness. They look like the people who have died, but they are not people with volition or consciousness, only bodies driven by microbes to move about and eat, no matter their decayed state—grotesque in that sense. They are not human, but are completely unlike threatening animals or science fiction monsters: when they eat people they eat as human beings do, using their hands to take pieces of flesh to their mouths, so thus not animals, which typically use mouths directly. The population of human subjects has gone, but this does not mean open spaces of dead bodies lying down. These bodies walk, have mobility, move through space and therefore take up space—a

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space formerly sovereign and governed by humanity. While looking human, they do not have the capacity to decide and thus they do not ever hesitate when they are moving for a kill—they are in that sense relentless. Perhaps worst of all, they are in such mass numbers, indistinguishable and thus this particular post-apocalyptic world is one that points not to a loss of population and the silence that brings but to the noise and chaotic movement of masses who, themselves, represent bare life. For the survivors to be positioned as survivors in this case is to be positioned both as bare life and as distinct from the zombie form of bare life. And perhaps that is the horror of this apocalyptic vision. And its fascination. The ‘walking dead’ of the title reflects not the zombies but the central characters, all of whom are marked by the likelihood of death in this postapocalyptic world of bare survival. Bare life, here, is to be the walking dead—living, but living unliveable lives. Here, then, the characters are not differentiated from the zombies but are positioned in a continuum with them, and with considerable proximity along that distributional curve. Reflecting William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies (2013), civilisation, then, is presented as a superego, whereby the actions that subjects will take in a bare life state to continue survival are those without any ethical recognisability or social contract. The survivors will kill with impunity to survive just as the zombies will kill without thought (literally). All survivors confront the possibility of doing things they wouldn’t do under pre-apocalyptic conditions, but in all cases what ends up happening is that they are capable of recognition of their group, their friends, but not of ‘the other’ who comes to define them, whether that be an ‘other’ that is represented through the non-human of the zombie or the ‘other’ that is represented by a rival group seeking either domination or control of scarce resources for survival. Survival, in this context, then, is to be without ethics, it is to be bare life but it is also to be sovereign in that decisions are made that ‘make die and let live’ in order to ensure they, themselves, ‘make survive’. As Martinez says in the third season when he is questioned about the Governor’s plan to release zombies into the prison complex to kill Rick’s group, ‘What do you care? They’re rats’. That is, post-apocalyptic identity in a world of radical depopulation is one that struggles ever harder to recognise ethically the other as a subject worthy of living and population with security.

Conclusion: a fascination with apocalypse? Population as site of deep identity attachment The concept of population is typically accessed through discourses of demography and governance, although the fact of population as the knowability of a multitude as a site of relationality remains significant to how we perform subjectivity. That is, to have a sense of belonging to the global population is thus an element of performativity. It provides regulatory mechanisms that establish imperatives over particular sorts of identity coherences and

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intelligibilities, and governs relationalities in ways normally recognised as being a form of social contract. In that context, population is absolutely central to our sense of being and recognisability of ourselves in global space. One has a deep sense of belonging to population as ‘other subjects’, then, not so much because one is subordinated by national or global groupings into submitting to identities that are defined through a belongingness to national populations, but because subjects form a passionate attachment in dependency (Allen 2006, p. 200) on the population (the existence of others as multitude/ mass) as the definer of normative identity coherence. Attachment, however, is necessary, for given any choice between an identity that is based on conforming to normativities policed through regulatory regimes, and having no identity, by failing to articulate the self through recognisable, intelligible and coherent norms, identity in relationality with population will prevail, even if the extent of that attachment will always and for every subject be variable, complex, interwoven with other coordinates of identity from gender to ethnicity to age to regional location to categories of career choices, and will often be in conflict with other, deeply felt attachments. That is the form subjectivity takes in the contemporary era. Belonging to population is essential for everyday coherence and intelligibility, and thus results in a deep and strongly felt attachment to the population. That attachment is, then, an attachment to the self, to life and to liveability, for without it the work of fulfilling the persistent Enlightenment demand for coherence and intelligibility is either impossible (for some) or requires an exhausting and extensive form of identity work (for others). Attachment is a key nodal point in the constitution of contemporary human subjectivity, particularly as it occurs through an attachment to networks of others in relationalities of governance, exchange, communication, participation in production, labour networks and globalised patterns of consumption, among many other interrelated facets of the experience of being-in-population. For Bruno Latour (2007), attachment is a grand narrative of modernity, one in which knowledges, technologies and markets together amplify ‘not only the scale at which humans and nonhumans are connecting with one another in larger and larger assemblies, but also the intimacy with which such connections are made’ (p. 5). As Ben Dibley has argued, following Latour’s indication of our constitutive indebtedness to globalised networks of attachments, we seek freedom (another grand narrative of modernity), but not in order to escape enmeshment in the global set of attachments (Dibley 2012). This deep-seated attachment to knowing that there is a population is highlighted by post-apocalyptic texts, narratives and concepts in which the greater part of the population is suddenly gone, asking audiences to consider what it might mean for identity, civility, governance and liveability to persist as bare life in a permanent post-apocalyptic state of everyday survival. Because we are constitutively attached to global populations not only for sustenance of being or turning away from vulnerability but for the everyday making of life liveable in a globalised polis, which obscures our being located to begin with as bare life, we are already predicated upon its loss as that which we will mourn. As socially

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constituted bodies, loss is part of our identity make-up, because we live at risk of losing our attachments to others—attachments that are derived from our foundational exposure to others in sociality (Butler 2003, p. 10). As subjects who are dependent on relationality with others on a global scale, we are defined by the potentiality of the loss of the global population, its thresholds, its concomitant forms of communicative infrastructure and civilisation, its mechanisms of governance and its corollary of our industrialised alienation from both product and self. The very notion of a post-apocalyptic loss of the greater part of the population is, then, an ever-present loss-that-is-to-come, hence we mourn, and we do so not through any rationalist discourse of critical inquiry into population but through popular fascination with post-apocalyptic narratives.

References Agamben, G., 1995. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. HellerRoazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G., 2002. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. D. Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books. Allen, A., 2006. Dependency, subordination, and recognition: on Judith Butler’s theory of subjection. Continental Philosophy Review, 38(3–4), 199–222. Appadurai, A., 2004. The capacity to aspire: culture and the terms of recognition. In: V. Rao and M. Walton, eds. Culture and Public Action. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Butler, J., 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Butler, J., 2003. Violence, mourning, politics. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 4(1), 9–37. Butler, J., 2004. Precarious Life. London: Verso. Butler, J., 2009. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso. Butler, J., 2012. Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism. New York: Columbia University Press. Castells, M., 2000. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Cover, R., 2011. Biopolitics and the Baby Bonus: Australia’s national identity, fertility and global overpopulation. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 25(3), 439–451. Cunningham, D., 2008. Spacing abstraction: capitalism, law and the metropolis. Griffith Law Review, 17(2), 454–469. Dibley, B., 2012. ‘The shape of things to come’: seven theses on the Anthropocene and attachment. Australian Humanities Review, 52 (May). Available from: www.austra lianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-May-2012/dibley. Accessed 16 August 2012. Foucault, M., 2004a. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, ed. M. Bertani and A. Fontana, trans. D. Macey. London: Penguin. Foucault, M., 2004b. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975, ed. V. Marchetti and A. Salmoni, trans. G. Burchell. New York: Picador. Foucault, M., 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, ed. M. Senellart, trans. G. Burchell. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M., 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978– 79, ed. M. Senellart, trans. G. Burchell. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Golding, W., 2013. Lord of the Flies. London: Penguin. James, P.D., 1992. The Children of Men. London: Vintage. Latour, B., 2007. ‘It’s development, stupid!’ or: how to modernize modernization. In: J. Proctor, ed. Postenvironmentalism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1–13. Malik, S., 2006. Global sovereignty. Theory, Culture & Society, 23(2–3), 512–517. Muecke, S., 2007. Hurricane Katrina and the rhetoric of natural disasters. In: E. Potter et al., eds. Fresh Water: New Perspectives on Water in Australia. Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 259–272. Noble, G., 2002. Comfortable and relaxed: furnishing the home and nation. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 16(1), 53–66. Petterson, C., 2012. Colonial subjectification: Foucault, Christianity and governmentality. Cultural Studies Review, 18(2), 89–108. Popke, E.J., 2003. Poststructuralist ethics: subjectivity, responsibility and the space of community. Progress in Human Geography, 27(3), 298–316. Poster, M., 2001. Citizens, digital media and globalization. Mots Pluriels, 18(August), 1–11. Pugliese, J., 2004. The incommensurability of law to justice: refugees and Australia’s temporary protection visa. Law and Literature, 16(3), 285–311. Shelley, M., 2004. The Last Man. London: Wordsworth Editions. Shriver, L., 2003. Population in literature. Population and Development Review, 29(2), 153–162. Visvanathan, S., 2006. Nation. Theory, Culture & Society, 23(2–3), 533–538. Wichum, R., 2013. Security as dispositif: Michel Foucault in the field of security. Foucault Studies, 15(February), 164–171.

7

Genetics, population purity and the ‘race of devils’

Introduction The idea of the genetic modification and enhancement of the human population enters popular culture in the latter half of the twentieth century, becoming a topic of public-sphere interest, representation in film and television narrative and, at times, implicated in short waves of moral panic of the sort seen in the early 2000s in relation to genetically modified (GM) foods, in which some aspects of the debate involved concerns that the modification of food would result in the genetic modification of human beings. Considerable representation of genetic research and genetic enhancement appears in popular film and television and science fiction writing, likewise ruminating on the pros and cons of human population adaptation and, particularly, the extent to which a ‘new human’ or ‘post-human’ being would compete with the form of the human population (Robinson 2003), possibly erasing ourselves from our own future as the dominant population of the world. In the more alarmist versions, a concept of human population is constructed as that which must, at all costs, continue into the future in a recognised, unchanged form, made up of liberal–humanist subjects, uninterrupted by either rivalries of a new human or by genetic enhancement of change to the basic human type. Knowledge of DNA, the possibilities of genetic change, the human genome and the role genetics plays in the constitution of identity, subjectivity and behaviour are, of course, relatively new and still very much under development. Working in the late nineteenth century, Gregor Mendel developed a framework for trait inheritance in the reproduction of life, which continues to underpin basic approaches to genetics today. During the Second World War, DNA was identified as the molecule governing inheritance and transformation of cells, and James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double helix formation and structure of DNA as recently as 1953. Many further developments in the technology of identification and the understanding of genetic processes occurred over the remaining decades of the twentieth century, and the human genome was sequenced in 2003 (Graham 2002; Robinson 2003). Genetics captured the interested of the broader public as a set of ideas at the intersection of health, science and ancestry, including some problematic ideas related to the

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genetic determination of behaviour and intelligence. At the same time, science fiction and popular culture have drawn on genetic knowledge to tell stories about the meaning of humanity and the potentiality of human transformation and the creation of non-human or post-human life. Genetic testing kits that allow individual consumers to pay for information about genetic and racial ancestry, and that can even provide links with lost relatives, are increasingly used. Aside from the value of genetic research for health and food security, the popular idea of what genetic science is—and what it might potentially be— circulates today in popular culture as an interpretative framework that is regularly applied to the concepts of identity, subjectivity, belonging and human population, presenting a particular narrative on what it might mean to be a part of the human population. A common—albeit not necessarily monolith—aspect of the application of genetics to the meaning of humanity is the production of the idea of the contemporary human being as natural, pure and timeless, made precarious by the idea of genetic science as that which might launch a viral Armageddon, a rival species or an unassailable transformation. Genetics in that aspect is seen as a rupture to the human population’s continuity (Nancy 1991, p. 4). It thus adds an additional field of anxiety to the cultural conceptualisation of population. Thus while popular cultural narratives that draw on genetic engineering and manipulation provide a welcome critique of the timeless and unitary liberal–humanist subject (Jameson 1985, p. 115), they also establish popular concerns about population’s future. Genetics has considerable bearing on the conceptualisation of population, not only because it is an interpretative framework for making sense of biological bodies of human subjectivity and generational continuity, but also because it can be highly politicised in ways that utilise genetic myths to exclude groups and individuals from human population. For example, one of the key contributors to genetic science disgraced himself publicly in making non-scientific claims that people of African origin are broadly less intelligent than people of Caucasian origin—a set of statements that excises African people from a human population defined as intelligent mammalian life. Such statements restore eugenicism to contemporary genetic science, giving new and problematic categorisations of worthy and unworthy, belonging and excluded and, ultimately, human and sub-human. In this chapter I would like to work through some of the ways genetic thinking has implications for how ‘human population’ is conceived, beginning by looking at how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein narrative has transformed over time to provide a contemporary story of genetic development of the post-human subject as an object of anxiety and rivalry on the one hand, and of care and nurture on the other. The continuing circulation of this story nevertheless reproduce liberal–humanist narratives of the drive for the continuing reproduction of a population of human purity. I will then turn to a reading of The X-Files (1993–2002, 2016–2018), an enduring television text that has provided a continuing and relevant cultural framework for the

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imagination of subjectivity, genetic science, abjection and conspiracy—the long narrative of alien mythology in The X-Files presents an innovative set of stories about humanity’s purity versus alienness, yet simultaneously about humanity having an originary impurity as a population built by aliens in the first place. I would like to end with some questions invoked by thinking of these two related texts together with Mary Shelley’s conceptualisation that the post-human subject will produce a rival ‘race of devils’, and what such an idea of race might mean for how we think about the composition of human population in futural temporality.

Purity and the post-human: the Frankenstein myth and cultural anxieties As the subject of various, momentary ‘moral panics’, genetic science serves from time to time as a ‘folk devil’ figure, threatening the conceptual boundaries of humanity, longevity and human population. This does not mean it is universally dismissed or feared, but that it may be the object of debates that dichotomise—usually about a ‘pro’ perspective (for example, that GM foods will ensure food security) and a ‘negative’ aspect (for example, that the purity of the bio-ecosystem is threatened by man-made modificatory designs (Pilnick 2002, p. 139)). Or that human beings will benefit from improvements made to future generations at the genetic level, or that they will lose some aspect of uniqueness produced in an accidental evolution of nature, or that the very idea of manipulation indicates insidious designs (Clayton 2002, p. 49). Ultimately, both sides of the debate are about the power to speak about and control perceived levels of ‘naturalness’, and the moral superiority is generally held in debates by those who are best able to articulate a simplistic concept of ‘nature’ in opposition to scientific manipulation or change. Where moral panics about genetic science as a threat to humanity and human subjectivity are articulated in popular film and television, it is through the construction of that which is coded the human subject as ‘pure’ in contrast to the genetically manipulated post-human expressed as ‘impure’. Representations that depict genetic manipulation as a threat to the ‘purity’ of the human population are invoked in films such as Gattaca (1997), The Fly (1958, 1986), the X-Men trilogy (2000, 2003, 2006) or Waterworld (1995), in which the film’s hero has evolved into a water-breathing creature in a world that has been completely flooded and is without access to land; or in television dramas such as First Born (1988) or The X-Files (1993–2002), all of which play out some unsettling form of liberalism’s fragile sense of human subjectivity and human purity, and some of which respond to the moral panic discourse by rejecting the genetically enhanced post-human. For film theorist Barbara Creed (1993), rejection of the other in horror and science fiction film is part of a ritual process in which the abject-construct of the impure mother is, in the narrative structure, expelled, destroyed or punished. This ritual can be understood as a contemporary version of the cultural purification rituals identified by Mary Douglas (1996) in her anthropological account Purity and

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Danger, in which various cultural groupings are understood to have developed different customs, routines and processes for eradicating that which is seen to pollute the purity of the group. The ritual rejection of the impure can be read in such films as The Fly (1986) in which the genetically spliced scientist Seth Brundle must be destroyed before he is able to act out his degraded plan to pollute the human race, through putting the film’s heroine through the same process that refigured him as post-human. The moral threat comes from the possibility of that which is post- or after-human (the genetically altered Brundle) polluting that which comes before (the coherent, ‘natural’ human who stands in for the human race). The not-human or the non-human is, of course, open to wide cultural and historical variance. The Jew, the homosexual, the criminal, the sinner, and those with a physical or intellectual disability, have all variously been categorised as non-human by aligning a performance, act or activity of these groups as somehow ‘impure’. Such dichotomous articulations of the pure versus the impure have produced eugenicist policies designed to maintain the purity of a race or of humanity more broadly through preventing cross-breeding, via compulsory abortion or sterilisation , in order to ensure whatever features have been marked as non-human are not transmitted to following generations (Galton 2001, p. 98). There is no unified articulation of what it is that actually constitutes the posthuman: on the one hand, the notion of the cyborg is articulated in film/literature and in theory via Donna Haraway’s work (Haraway 1991), as well as in questions of ‘artificial intelligence’ represented in popular culture by the robot, the android and the ‘thinking computer’ in a tradition of human-as-creator that extends back to Mary Shelley’s 1818 gothic novel, Frankenstein (Shelley 1992; Hayles 1999, p. 286). However, the concept of the post-human is an extension of an array of postmodern thinking applied to the human subject, seeking to fragment the unitary, fixed or reasonable idea of humanity as a response to contemporary technological conditions (virtual reality, cloning, evolutionary biology, quantum science) and contemporary cultural conditions (feminist, queer and postcolonial critiques of the subject). Human selfhood is performative subjecthood; it is that which is radically put into question or jeopardy through genetic engineering, artificial creation, non-organic reproduction or genetic modification. In other words, the idea of a genetically altered or genetically engineered post-human being ‘stands in for’ the fears about tampering with the mythical fantasy of a ‘natural’ and ‘naturally pure’ human being and how that might be seen to have an effect on the ‘purity’ of the human population over time. The Frankenstein narrative that began with Shelley’s novel and extends through a broad range of films over nearly two centuries is an important Western cultural story often invoked in discussions of recent genetic science. Since Shelley did not reveal the science of life creation utilised by her Frankenstein, the novel is open to being read today as a statement on genetic engineering or genetic modification. Andrew Milner (1996, pp. 149–158) has argued that the monster in the Frankenstein narrative can be read variously as the focal point or representative of different eschewed social groups or

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concepts in Western society at various times. For example, written at a time of increasing consciousness of the possibilities of class conflict, and articulating a strong awareness of the inequitable divisions of wealth, the monster in Shelley’s novel can at one moment be seen as representative of a working-class mob, the creature and creation of the bourgeoisie that threatens to breed, swell and destroy with neither guidance nor forethought. The monster for Shelley, however, is marked as impure not because he was a genetically tampered-with creature, but because he was, on the one hand, a creation of hubris (Freeland 2000, p. 33), and, on the other, neglected—his behavioural problems are the cause of abandonment, like those of the abandoned working class in the industrial factory. Shelley’s narrative fear, however, is that if the monster is able to breed, it would invoke a ‘race of devils’ as an alternative or competitor to humanity and the human population. Representing a concern over the possibility of class insurrection, it is also a fear that can be read awkwardly as the spread of impurity among ‘civilised’ populations. That is, population as the construct ‘human race’ is established and naturalised here only by positing its other (Foucault 2004, p. 77), a second race, a post-human race that is dichotomously ‘devil’ to the purity of humanity, despite the problematic alignment of humanity and its other with class. The Frankenstein narrative has different significations and implications in different times and cultural contexts. James Whale’s 1931 film Frankenstein, for example, explicitly codes the monster through a discourse of biological determinism in an era in which eugenicist approaches to inherited population and personal traits has become more marked. The 1957 Hammer Horror version, known as The Curse of Frankenstein, shifts the focus from the monster as that which is impure to Frankenstein himself as an evil ‘mad scientist’, a response to science in the post-atomic era (O’Flinn 1986, p. 216). However, it is Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that reconfigures the thematic concerns by drawing on explicit signifiers of contemporary popular-cultural ideas about genetic science. The film attempts to depict an anachronistic proto-genetics in the form of medical transplants and the role of electricity in the nervous system, while foregrounding the notion of building a creature from reclaimed (deceased) body parts. The anachronistic references to transplant technologies work to figure Frankenstein as the scientist ‘too ahead’ of his time, experimenting with, and ultimately losing, a technology of genetic manipulation and life creation years before it will again appear on the scene as a possible outcome of applied science. More than Shelley’s novel or any previous film, this entertains the idea of the post-human as a genetically engineered and abject threat to a natural or god-created humanity. The monster in this depiction must be radically excluded, not only because it is a threat to the life of other characters, but also because it is the embodiment of a perversion of nature within a myth of the human population’s natural purity: a genetically built creature that seeks to compete with humanity as the dominant species with a breeding programme of its own.

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Working towards the development of a cultural studies ethics concerning the genetic enhancement of human beings, Joanna Zylinska has rejected the position on genetic manipulation held by theorists such as Jurgen Habermas, who posits a natural human being who should have a moral right to an un-manipulated genome (Zylinska 2010, p. 150). Rather, her politico-ethical position asks us to move beyond this natural versus genetically enhanced dichotomy and to consider the ways in which human subjectivity is always already enhanced and whereby enhancement in its many forms is inherent in the concept of humanity, thereby allowing us to move towards a bioethics that is not grounded in the simplistic articulation of a pure human being (pp. 150, 160). As a nodal point for reading the film and television depiction of the post-human, this perspective allows us to take to task the problematic dichotomies of pure/impure and human/post-human at the level of population belonging. Where such narratives are available to be read as figuring a ‘pure human’ as normative, that which is impure is made, in Agamben’s (1995) terms ‘bare life’—animated flesh as zoë rather than bios or political life of citizenship and belonging. Belonging, then, relies explicitly on the composition of the population in tandem with the ‘proper’ composition of the body that seeks to belong: produced naturally, a body that has grown rather than been made, and a body that is not seen to have been adjusted, modified or changed. Nature comes to stand in for god-like creativity, as if nature operates with a benevolent creationist plan in contrast to humanity’s accident-prone intervention in the science of bodies and belonging.

Genetic science as abject: X-Files, aliens and border hybridity The assertion of the natural and the pure human subject serves, then, as conceptual node that sustains the Enlightenment liberal–humanist subject of coherence and intelligibility in the face of its postmodern dissolution in contemporary late capitalism (Jameson 1985). The contemporary liberal humanist and individualist human self is, however, an effect of performativity, lending the illusion that there is a stable nature behind subjectivity (Butler 1990). The purity of humanity, then, serves as a central facet of performativity, providing a particular way of performing coherence, intelligibility and recognisability in order to belong to the human population. While the idea of humanity is sometimes used to argue for the right to belong, per se, to population, there is a counter argument that, as Chris Straayer (1996) put it, ‘nothing is gained by emphasizing the term human, which, ostensibly inclusive, actually functions to ignore existent power relations’ (p. 147). Rather, the codes that articulate human, which must be drawn upon in order to perform the right kind of humanity for the sake of intelligibility and belonging, are given discursively through an idea of human as natural. The myth that such naturality is shared upholds a concept of the ‘human race’—the evocation of the concept of race (Foucault 2004, p. 77) leads always to the reframing of race as exclusive, categorised, bounded and multiple: two races, the us and them, the intermingled or co-existing races, and the notion of a ‘race struggle’ (p. 80).

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It is valuable to think here about how genetic science itself is positioned, not only as the source of impurity, but also as impure itself: alien to a ‘natural’ human population that risks polluting, transforming or upsetting nature. Such a reading of genetic science disavows Darwinism by imagining incorrectly that humanity is atemporal in form but at risk of an alien science. Marking it as impure helps to present a zone of exclusion in order to identify what must be excluded to maintain humanity’s precarious claim to naturalness. Consolidating human subjectivity requires the establishment of borders through the articulation of a fantasy of inside and outside. Such a fantasy is, for Butler (1995), necessary for the coherent performance of subjecthood, but it is simultaneously an illusion threatened and consolidated by that which must be constructed as external, outside and abject. Julia Kristeva’s conceptualisation of the abject is useful as a way of making sense of the practices through which certain concepts must be excluded. Various readings of Kristeva’s concept of the abject have been used in film and television criticism to discuss the ways in which the maternal, the monstrous and the horrific have been represented as that which must be repudiated to achieve narrative closure and coherent identity (Creed 1993; Cover 2005). For Kristeva (1982), the abject works within her Lacanian psychoanalytic framework in which subjectivity is the result of entry into language or the symbolic. The abject is that which upsets subjectivity, reminding us of our construction in language and the post-oedipal separation from the mother (O’Connor 1990, p. 46). It threatens subjectivity by collapsing meaning, reminding us of the subject’s necessary relation to death, corporeality and incoherence, thereby being that which must be repelled or ‘radically excluded’ (Kristeva 1982, p. 2). The abject is often depicted as that which crosses the fantasy of the body’s borders: for Kristeva, this is frequently bodily fluids or culturally improper foods that remind us of the frailty of the idea of the body as bound and coherent (p. 17). Feminist theorist Imogen Tyler has pointed out that the concept of the abject should be treated not as a psychic process but as a social experience (Tyler 2009, p. 87). Within Butler’s theory of performativity, the abject can be uncoupled from its psychoanalytic roots to be seen as a non-universal concept produced in culture and used in the regulation of identities, bodies and peoples by reinforcing the inner/outer and included/excluded myths (Butler 1990, pp. 133–134). It is thus a necessity but not a universal given for the cultural production of the liberal–humanist embodied subject, maintaining the fantasy of the body’s borders. What the popular-cultural concept of genetic engineering or genetic modification of humans and humanity does is to destabilise the fantasy of inner/outer as a cultural necessity for the coherent and intelligible performance of human selfhood. The abject can be that which penetrates the body and creates a sense of disgust—the sword that pierces the flesh, the syringe that pierces the skin bringing the outer to the inner and both complexifying the fantasy of inside/ outside and upsetting the illusion of a discrete and self-contained body.

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Genetic science and the ‘manipulated’ gene in popular film and television is thus a new depiction of the abject, which creates disgust, worry and anxiety concerning the disruption of the codes of that which is required to belong to the human population or race. In Kristeva’s (1982) historical account of the abject, a ‘whole facet of the sacred, true lining of the sacrificial, compulsive, and paranoid side of religions, assumes the task of warding off that danger’ (p. 64). Where religious mechanisms of abjection have waned, it has been artistic practice such as film and television creativity that serves as the means of a popular cathartic process that separates and rejects the abject in order to uphold subjectivity. Anxieties about genetic enhancement of human subjects and populations and the popular-fiction notion of altering or changing the DNA of an existing human being is representative of an abjection that is more than a disruption of the usual inner/outer fantasy. Where anxiety, revulsion and horror are expressed at the abject revelation of the inside of the body or that the body is permeable and open to foreign substances or implements, genetics is all about an inner-of-an-inner: not just the body’s ‘insides’ but the insides of the cells of the body. It is not seen to tear and fragment tissues, nor to expose those tissues and organs that need to be contained for human biological functioning, but is a tampering with and/or transformation of each individual cell of the body—the introduction of the ‘foreign’, the ‘non-natural’, the ‘non-organic’ or the ‘other’ material into the pure, natural or god-designed cell. Indeed, not merely the human cell but the nucleus inside the cell. Indeed, not merely the nucleus but its protected chromosomes inside. And indeed, not merely the chromosomes but the double-helix strands of DNA comprising the chromosomes. In other words, about as ‘inner’ as one can get. Anxieties over genetic science, then, are simultaneously concerned with the radical exclusion of the ‘threat’ of intervention at two levels: (1) the individual corporeal subject whose subjectivity is temporally disrupted by some sense of an alteration; and (2) the human population that, in contemporary knowledge, is constituted in continuity through the passing on of genes. What this indicates, then, is the significance of population for individual identity. If identity is performative and constituted in discourse, then it is constructed through a notion of relationality, not only with others who are living at the time we are present, but also with forebears and those who will come afterwards, with ancestors and descendants. For this relationality to operate successfully in order to ‘shore up’ subjectivity into intelligibility and coherence within a concept of the ongoingness or timelessness of humanity, the myth of purity must be deployed by articulating an abject that the population must eradicate. Population, as a concept, depends on the establishment of ‘equivalences among subjects, objects or events’, what has been referred to by Bruce Curtis (2002) as ‘a common abstract essence’ (p. 508). In the context of genetic science as a threat, it is the notion of purity that stands in for that commonality: subjectivity that remains natural and untampered with by genetic science.

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The X-Files presents a treatment of Shelley’s Frankenstein narrative in a number of ways, primarily through a late twentieth-century and early twentyfirst-century utilisation of science fiction narratives in combination with the pleasure of conspiracy theory and the continuing critique of humanity through stories about aliens and alien invasion. One reading of The X-Files and its alien genetic science conspiracy is that it critiques genetic science in favour of the liberal–humanist perception of the human population as pure, but threatened by genetic change through alien scientific intervention, whereby such intervention is coded as abject. This narrative represents the fears of the tampering with human genetic purity on the one hand, while simultaneously suggesting that human populations throughout time have all along been a product of an alien genetic science experimentation. The alien conspiracy episodes that run as a long arc across the narrative of Chris Carter’s The X-Files depict a broad array of ideas about the abject alienness of genetic science. It is implied that the ‘grey aliens’ who abduct human beings are conducting genetic experiments, sampling human DNA in the form of ova and sperm, or actively impregnating women abductees and returning to take the unborn foetuses months later. Likewise, alien abduction represents the abject in some physical or visual way: repugnant monsters, chips implanted in bodies by aliens upsetting the human/technology border, drills that bore into human bodies or eyes during alien genetic surgery, scenes of strange or monstrous pregnancy, for example. Depictions of alien abductions in popular culture are often representations of attempts to establish clear us-and-them boundaries, and depictions of paranoia about the Other’s imminent attack of some representative other (McLarty 1999, p. 345). Aliens themselves are the most other of all: not from Earth, not from this ecosystem, not the knowable, not located within a transcultural, globalising framework, and outside of the possibilities of cultural translation. In popular culture, they are that extra-discursive formation of abjection, putting into question the stability of human selfhood as central in the universe, top of the food chain, creations of a biblical and earth-centred god, or located in a cultural depiction of a natural history that is accessible and knowable. Furthermore, aliens represented in popular culture are often articulated as biologically distinct from human beings, their biology is seen as the ‘site of monstrous difference’ (p. 353), thereby abject in the unassimilability or uselessness of the alien to forge a human/ other boundary. That is, the boundary is never one that is purely clear or that works to uphold the coherence of human identity. In other words, while aliens in popular media have often been understood to represent a national, racial or ethnic otherness (Bernardi 1998, pp. 11–12), they are also often available to be read as an abject otherness to coherent human subjectivity; this is so even if the repudiation of the alien figure rehearses the previous or ongoing cultural marginalisation of racial, ethnic or other minorities. Across its long, multi-year narrative arc that persistently revised and rewrote itself, The X-Files series never quite revealed the motivation behind the alien abductions, but it does disclose the fact that aliens are planning a

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conquest of the Earth, that they intend to eradicate human beings through biotechnology, that they are possibly the genetic-scientist progenitors of the human race in biblical and pre-biblical history, that they are involved in a conspiracy with powerful and shadowy human beings seeking to save themselves from death under the coming alien sovereign regime, and that the conspiracy itself is unclear in that some members are attempting to delay colonisation by using genetic science to develop vaccines against the aliens’ own biological weapons. The X-Files rewrites the history of science, suggesting that the advancements in genetics have been either the result of alien knowledge and technology or a response to alien invasion plans (or both). That is, genetic science is itself alien, non-human, the beyond of human social coherence and thereby abject in and of itself. Indeed, genetic scientists and aliens are interchangeable in the series (Badley 1996, p. 162), and in the darkened mise en scène of the spaceship and the bunker it is never entirely clear which are experimenting on helpless human beings. The episode ‘Jose Chung’s From Outer Space’ (3x20, 1996) elucidates this when hypnotised abductees alter their stories of alien scientists to human scientists; it is also revealed that (possibly) underneath ‘alien costumes’ are members of the conspiratorial military–scientific establishment. A part of the conspiracy plans has been to develop a human–alien hybrid, designed to replace humanity altogether and serve as a slave race to alien colonisers. Human scientists are in possession of a well-guarded alien foetus from which to draw alien genetic material. Experiments on pregnant abductees, the sampling of the United States population’s DNA during routine population health measures such as smallpox inoculations, the storage facilities of records on human biology that are the mark of a Foucauldian population administration system, are all also factors. The attempt to mix human–alien DNA is one that occurs not merely in the laboratory upon unborn or non-conceived embryonic tissues but by the incorporation of alien genetic material into existing human beings abducted in various ways and treated as experimental objects—perhaps the ultimate abjection in that nothing is more alien than the insertion of alien body matter into the human body and the human population. Importantly, the genetic material that makes up the alien bodies, the ‘black oil’ virus that is their substance (their life force), and other elements of their technology are referred to as ‘purity’. The aliens, as Cassandra reveals, are taking over the universe by infecting all other life forms with their own substance or eradicating the other, that which is deemed (from their subjective position) ‘the impure’. What is shown up here is the dependence of subjectivity on a culture of taxonomy. Under enlightenment modern discourse and in line with earlier religious and social proprieties, all subjects and objects must be appropriately classified. Mixing, interbreeding or consuming that which crosses borders is taboo. For Kristeva, taxonomic distinctions belong to a pre-Christian Judaic religiosity represented in the biblical Leviticus books. As Kristeva (1982) relates it:

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The pure will be that which conforms to an established taxonomy; the impure, that which unsettles it, establishes intermixture and disorder. The example of fish, birds, and insects, normally linked to one of three elements (sea, heaven, earth), is very significant from that point of view; the impure will be those that do not confine themselves to one element but point to admixture and confusion. (p. 98) Thus the genetically engineered substance is ‘foreign’ but abject by virtue of the possibility that it is not confined to the laboratory or to some other ‘proper place’, but is potentially ‘mixed in’ with human genes, confusing the boundaries of classification that are necessary for the coherent and performative self. As a technology of power and mechanism of governmentality, biopolitics classifies groups, populations and races—typically within the context of the administrative nation-state—in order to protect life, usually in the service of neoliberalism (Foucault 2008, pp. 81, 172–173). However, in contemporary neoliberal societies such classifications are not undertaken through a mutually exclusive articulation of the normal/abnormal or other dichotomies that construct otherness. Rather, they are made on a more complex distributional curve of normativities by which otherness is rated and determined on a curve by a distance from the norm. The point of distinction here rests in the difference between biopolitical forms of governance, which produce the curve of normativities, and disciplinary forms of governance, which operate at the local, institutional and community levels, which more rigorously apply categorisation through exclusion and policing of the non-normative on a different scale (Foucault 2004, p. 242). In that sense, that which is abject is not the wholesale ‘other’ grounded in a dichotomy of subject/otherness, but an articulation of the abject through which alienness is a matter of significant, but always unclear, distance from that which is framed as the norm. By reading the non-human genetic material as ‘alien’, it serves not only as abject but as that which threatens taxonomy. The alien genes and alien virus involved in The X-Files conspiracy have their ‘proper place’: out there, not on this planet. Indeed, it is possible to argue that, whereas Christianity interiorised the abject by targeting the sin that must be repressed (Kristeva 1982, pp. 113–114), contemporary culture has restored this particular form of abjection to a pre-Christian apprehension over the law of borders and dichotomies. When the law of taxonomy is taken to an extreme, we have fascist racism: the alien substance ‘purity’ is a clear reminder of the eugenicist policies of German Nazism, whereby one group is labelled pure, and the remaining ‘impure others’ are either to be eradicated or to continue as second-class functionaries. At the same time, a competing, and perhaps encroaching, postmodernism critiques the taxonomy of borders and categories, allowing the emergence of the fluid, the taxonomically unclear, the unstable border and the hybrid identity (Nicholson and Seidman 1995). For example, gender

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clarity—while still important for various forms of social belonging and participation—is no longer well defined and distinct. Nor is the clarity of racial bloodlines, as people develop new ways to articulate and experience hybrid identities that compete with and exacerbate, while simultaneously realising and demonstrating, the cultural force of globalisation over identity, place, space and race (Barker 1999, p. 38). In other words, while classical dichotomies are increasingly less tenable as a means of articulating various forms of identity and belonging, new dichotomies emerge as new imaginations with new means of attempting to make lucid various codes of purity. Narratives such as The X-Files might work allegorically either to relay or quell fears and anxieties over the increasing untenability of racial, gender, sexual and ethnic borders, but they also ‘show up’ the cultural angst over the purity of human bio-subjectivities, in opposition to various new fantasies such as aliens that come to stand in for new threats to new purities. That the alien virus, black oil substance is called purity is, further, a reminder that the classification of what is and is not ‘pure’ is arbitrary and cultural, for it is certainly clear that the virus is represented as the abject. In discussing the experiments on controlled plant hybridisation by early geneticist Gregor Mendel, Alison Pilnick (2002) points out that when plants that differed in flower colour or height were crossed, the result was not a plant with a height or flower colour that was a combination of the originals. Crossing a purple flowering plant with a white flowering one gave a plant with purple flowers, and crossing a standard plant with a dwarf one gave a standard plant. In each case, the offspring showed only one of the parental traits; the other was absent. Mendel named those traits that were visibly present (or ‘expressed’) in the hybrid plants dominant traits, and those that were not visibly present recessive traits. (p. 8) In genetics’ originary framework, hybridisation is not merely a blurring of the taxonomic borders that keep apart species, categories and types, but a blurring in which the results cannot necessarily be seen or easily recognised. For example, an alien gene may appear recessive, leaving a creature that looks human but is ultimately also alien—this was clearly the result in the hybridisation of Cassandra Spender in The X-Files. The abject otherness is taken within, and the response is the production of an anxiety or repulsion towards the lack of clarity, for it would put permanently into question what it is that indeed constitutes biological and juridical ‘human’ subjectivity. If human purity depends on the subject rejecting that which seeks to destabilise it or make subjectivity permanently unclear, then it depends on labelling otherness as alienness—as Michael Dillon (1999) has put it: ‘An alien is thus an alien in virtue of the operation of the law itself’ (pp. 132–133). The law in operation here is the law of taxonomic classification, and the breach of classification by genetic engineering works to make the imaginary non-human gene the impure, the alien, the abject.

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However, The X-Files narrative has been driven by partial revelations, subsequent corrections and convolutions of previously clear material, and the same occurs in its depiction of the human/GM border, represented by the human/alien border, and the angst over the production of the human–alien hybrid. Rather than suggesting that such borders were always already clear and pure, it is revealed in the Season Six finale, aptly titled ‘Biogenesis’ (6x22, 1999) that humans were always the product of alien intelligence and genetic intervention. Indeed, an alien artefact is discovered containing passages from the book of Genesis as well as symbols for gene clusters in the human genome. Mulder’s assessment is ‘it would mean that our progenitors were alien, that our genesis was alien, that we’re here because of them; that they put us here’. The artefact is soon discovered to be a piece of an ancient alien spacecraft, and Scully’s examination finds that its surface is covered with writings not only in the discourse of genetic science and from the Judaic bible but ‘from pagan religions, from ancient Sumeria … science and mysticism conjoined. But more than words, they are somehow imbued with power’. That imbued power, as the plot emerges over the two-part opener to Season Seven, is a power that leaves Mulder incoherent and babbling for several days, an identity thrown into chaos and schizophrenia until it is revealed that his exposure to the words and symbols—having a performative effect as in Austin’s (1962) speech act theory—have caused recessive genes that have been part of the human genome since genesis to emerge, leaving him a genuine human–alien hybrid immune to the apocalyptic virus and the accidental fulfilment of the conspiracy’s plot. What this turn in the conspiracy narrative of The X-Files reveals is that human purity was never pure in opposition to alienness, but was always already alien to itself. The claim to human coherence through subject sovereignty, borders policed under the law of taxonomy, and the claim to purity through repudiation of the abject alien genetic material falls apart at this point, suggesting that the coherence of human subjectivity has been a fantasy all along. What is recognised in Mulder’s post-subjective state is the impossibility of identity through a recognition that the abject is, indeed, always incorporated into the performance of that identity. What The X-Files does is reverse the Frankenstein narrative that calls for the eradication of the abject, which rivals the purity of human subjectivity as a the marker of belonging to human population, and instead critically engages not only with what belonging might mean in a postmodern era, but also with how we might see the idea of a pure human, a natural and nature-grown human population as mythical in the first instance. This helps us demystify the idea of human population by seeing it as processual, transformative, historical and unstable rather than fixed over time by an originary creationist nature.

Pure populations and the race of devils By reading popular film and television’s treatment of genetic science as circulating discourses that either seek to consolidate a myth of human purity for the sake of population belonging or, in more innovative narratives, undermine

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that notion by showing it to be mythical in the first place, we can see some of the ways in which anxieties over population belonging are built around the idea of the fixity and futurity of global human population, whereby that which rivals this fixity and futurity is positioned as the abject figure whose ritualistic exclusion, destruction or discrediting we take pleasure in witnessing. A human population—a humanity that, literally, peoples the planet—is founded culturally, however, on its other: a notion of a non-human population, whether that be through linguistic delineations of otherness or the popular imagination of alienness. For Butler (2004), contemporary liberal cultures routinely operate to render particular human lives as dehumanised, whether those be lives that can suffer violence without social grieving (p. 36), those who are decreed non-subjects, such as ‘enemy combatant’ detainees not protected by international law (p. xvi), or those whose lives are deemed already forfeited because they have been framed as ‘threats to human life as we know it’ rather than populations with the same common human needs for protection, support and sociality (Butler 2009, p. 31). These are the subjects made bare life, whenever demands for normative humanity are dependent on conformability with governance-constituted norms of sociality. However, in the context of the ways in which a notion of population norms is established through the concept of purity in popular culture, such subjects that routinely are rendered non-human are invisibilised in favour of a notion of the impure as the population of the future, and that includes the anxieties over the genetically manipulated population, the non-human futural population or ‘race of devils’ I have been discussing here. Public-sphere concerns over the idea of a genetically manipulated, enhanced or created post-human ‘race’ that is to come, then, serves as an alibi for other forms of dehumanisation operating today. What this tells us about how the notion of a population is constituted is significant, in that it points not only to the fragility of the myth of purity, but its recuperation as an imperative for the ‘protection’ of the population as future; the population as that which is constructed as pure human and must operate against the post-human competitor. In that context, contemporary subjectivity is constituted through its relationality not only with the concept of the human population or human race, but the population as always already futural yet precarious. In Shelley’s Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein expresses his concerns about the possibility of humanity’s future competitors while fulfilling a promise to his creature to create a second (female) monster: Even if they were to leave Europe, and inhabit the new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the daemon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. (Shelley 1992, p. 160)

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The imagined possibility not only of humanity’s divergence through genetic manipulation, but that humanity may no longer be the prime species within a biopolitical conception of sociality drives the anxieties about change, transformation and competitiveness—it is imagined as always vulnerable to the possibility of its end. The idea of the human population as precarious is that which must be resolved in the narratives we consume, including both the more conservative Frankenstein stories or the more critical X-Files, which presents struggle against conspiratorial governance and/as alienness. From an ethical perspective, however, there is some value in pointing to the precarity not merely of the human body and the subject constituted in relationality and a need for support, but also the precarity of the human race as that which is built on a myth of pure continuation. There are a number of reasons why it is useful, then, to draw out the vulnerability of the human race, and many of these are obvious: the vulnerability of the population and its continuation in the light of human-induced climate change, the vulnerability to atmospheric damage from a spatial body hitting the Earth, the vulnerability to natural disasters, and the vulnerability to disease. Within an ethics of responsibility built on the recognition of vulnerability, however, articulating the human population as indelibly vulnerable is not an injunction by which to demand humanity makes itself stronger or less vulnerableto threats such as these . Indeed, the posturing of humanity’s inviolability has been one of the problematic ways in which humanity has framed off the sensibility of genuine threats and built attitudes of nonchalance to issues such as climate change. However, without, of course, wishing to universalise the meaning of human by collapsing it into the precarity of life and the life of the population, the duty of ethics not only to the other as an individual but to humanity as a people (Derrida 1999, pp. 72–73) presents a means by which the recognition of the other as vulnerable is produced in the knowledge that subjectivity is constituted and performed in the context of the precarity of humanity. Undoing the myth of human purity opens the schema of humanity not to the addition of those who, in some frameworks, are considered non-human, but to the fact that there is no condition of purity that can usefully mark what is human and what is a human population in the past, present or future. That the product of genetic science—the race of devils—is already humanity reconfigures the notion of population and human race in ways beyond the purity/impurity and human/post-human dichotomies as one, among several, means of reframing subjective norms. Of course, as we get further into the twenty-first century, the conceptual threat to humanity returns to the spatial and geographic rather than the scientific and philosophic conception of humanity itself: the failure of climate stability, the figure of the immigrant, and the instability of national bounds. It is notable that, in the 2018 series of The X-Files, the narrative changes once more: the aliens are no longer coming, they have given up on Earth, finding global warming and pollution not to their liking, leaving the story to move to other kinds of threats to humanity—very much reflecting the ways in which different impurities that threaten the conceptualisation of human population belonging emerge and disappear at different times.

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Addendum It is notable that while Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) drew on the Frankenstein narrative to present the possibility of replicants who supersede humanity in an overpopulated, crowded and miserable world, the sequel Blade Runner 2049 (2017) returns to this story with a significant twist: the possibility of the replicants breeding. As one of the officers charged with investigating the discovery of a replicant-born child, ‘this breaks the world’. The separation of the species is one built on the idea of the purity of the human being who has a soul, because born and thus able to birth more, and the replicant who is soulless because made and unable to breed. The ‘race of devils’ is presented in this postmodern text as not that which might supersede humanity, but as that which must. Blade Runner depicts a world gone to hell due to overpopulation, but the sequel, which is set in a world after terror attacks have destroyed all past digital data, after catastrophes have destroyed much of the flora, and where population has begun to decrease, we still see crowded spaces, though not to the extent of the past; rather the film depicts a great deal more landscape to demonstrate the ecological apocalypse of dead trees and barren land. As with the first film reflecting social concerns about population size, the sequel draws on contemporary anxieties about the world. As a postmodern text, however, it finds the potentiality of solutions not in humanity, nor in individual human beings, but in the idea that a better race, a better population might find the way to a less-violent, less-destructive populace, to the more-innovative and more-caring population of the posthuman.

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Cover, R., 2005. (Re)cognising the body: performativity, embodiment and abject selves in Buffy The Vampire Slayer. AesthethikaC, 2(1), 68–83. Creed, B., 1993. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. Curtis, B., 2002. Foucault on governmentality and population: The impossible discovery. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 27(4), 505–533. Derrida, J., 1999. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. P-A Brault and M. Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Dillon, M., 1999. The sovereign and the stranger. In J. Edkins, N. Persram and V. PinFat, eds. Sovereignty and Subjectivity. Boulder, CO: Rienner Publishers, 117–140. Douglas, M., 1996. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge. Foucault, M., 2004. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, ed. M. Bertani and A. Fontana, trans. D. Macey. London: Penguin. Foucault, M., 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79. ed. M. Senellart, trans. G. Burchell. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Freeland, C.A., 2000. The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Galton, D., 2001. In Our Own Image: Eugenics and the Genetic Modification of People. London: Little, Brown & Co. Graham, G., 2002. Genes: A Philosophical Inquiry. London: Routledge. Haraway, D., 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: the Reinvention of Nature. London: Routledge. Hayles, N.K., 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Jameson, F., 1985. Postmodernism and consumer society. In: H. Foster, ed. Postmodern Culture. London: Pluto Press, 111–125. Kristeva, J., 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. T. Gora et. al. New York: Columbia University Press. McLarty, L., 1999. Alien/nation: invasions, abductions, and the politics of identity. In: C. Sharrett, ed. Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 345–359. Milner, A., 1996. Literature, Culture & Society. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Nancy, J-L., 1991. Introduction. Who comes after the subject? In: E. Cadava, P. Connor and J-L Nancy, eds. London: Routledge, 1–8. Nicholson, L. and Seidman, S., eds., 1995. Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Connor, N., 1990. The an-arche of psychotherapy. In: J. Fletcher and A. Benjamin, eds. Abjection, Melancholia, and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva. London: Routledge, 42–52. O’Flinn, P., 1986. Production and reproduction: the case of Frankenstein. In: P. Humm, P. Stigant and P. Widdowson, eds. Popular Fictions: Essays in Literature and History. London: Methuen, 196–221. Pilnick, A., 2002. Genetics and Society: An Introduction. Buckingham, PA: Open University Press. Robinson, S., 2003. Transhumanism reloaded. The Newsletter of the Centre for Genetics and Society, 32 July. Available from: www.genetics-and-society.org/news letter/archive/32.html. Accessed 12 December 2005. Shelley, M., 1992. Frankenstein. London: Penguin Classics.

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Straayer, C., 1996. Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Re-Orientation in Film and Video. New York: Columbia University Press. Tyler, I., 2009. Against abjection. Feminist Theory, 10(1), 77–98. Zylinska, J., 2010. Playing God, playing Adam: the politics and ethics of enhancement. Bioethical Inquiry, 7(2), 149–161.

Part III

Ethics for belonging to a population

8

The ‘forgotten’ people

Introduction Many of the discursive practices involved in producing a concept of population are implicated in the production of various forms of marginalisation, minoritisation and exclusion from population belonging. I have already discussed some of these, such as the eugenicism of population control mechanisms that promote population size increases through fertility in preference to migration, or the forms of biopolitics that provide curves of normativity that condition how a sense of belonging within population is experienced, as discussed in Chapter 4. I will return, too, to some questions about the use of population concepts for the unethical marginalisation or exclusion of indigenous persons, other minorities, and the making of unliveabilities in Chapter 9. There are, of course, other frameworks of demarcation that are important for determining population belonging: for example, certain strands of population health discourses, by necessity, concentrate on the immediate needs of a segment of population while ignoring certain other parts of the population (Kaestle and Ivory 2012). In other words, it is not necessarily always unethical or problematic to reproduce population with certain kinds of demarcation, categorisation or classification. Here, however, I am interested in a particular formation of demarcation that is built around the idea that a core, ordinary middle class, which has typically reaped some of the multigenerational benefits of being located within a Western, national population, but which nevertheless simultaneously sees itself as distinct from other parts of the population—more authentic, and yet more marginalised. I am thinking specifically of those who politicise a competitiveness between the genuinely vulnerable and their own conditions through the use of claims of being ‘forgotten people’, or those who feel excluded from the presumed benefits directed at ‘special interests’. A certain composition of distinctiveness, vulnerability and marginalisation is used in this framework, not to develop relationality and connectivity with the more marginalised or excluded, but to actively marginalise and exclude others. Population governance mechanisms can operate in ways that are actively drawn upon to make the idea of being part of a forgotten middle class feel genuine against any reasonable assessment of benefit, inclusion and

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belonging. Indeed, while much identity is built upon a deeply felt attachment to a particular means or category of population belonging, the so-called ‘forgotten people’ are constituted in a deeply felt sense of attachment performed through a perception of being disattached, of not mattering, of not being important in the stakes of population discourse. This in some sense relates to the distinction between belonging and inclusivity. Inclusivity is a term often used in relation to policies and structures that seek to ensure marginalised groups within a population have adequate access to shared services, such as healthcare. Belonging, on the other hand, implies a greater sense of affinity and of mutual recognition between the parties involved in fields and spaces of inclusion and exclusion. While inclusivity is often built on concepts of human rights and liberal–tolerance frameworks, belonging suggests a cultural setting of unconditional acceptance and ethical recognition of difference and otherness based on justice. One does not simply belong to a population by virtue of being identified or recognised as within a category or framework. Rather, belonging is actively produced in ethical recognition of a subject as a subject (Bell 1999, p. 3). As Nira Yuval-Davis (2006) has argued, belonging involves not feeling that one is located in an inferior position along a power axis of difference in contrast to one’s peers (p. 200). While at one level it appears ironic that a group that experiences inclusivity also feels excluded or forgotten, the reality is that the affectively experienced sense of being forgotten occurs because belonging is not the dominant, ethical practice by which population operates. Liberal attempts to produce and foster inclusivity arguably result in the production of anti-diversity arguments by which an included and less needy majority are positioned to feel neglected or excluded from the ‘attention’ of governance and social policy. Combined with other processes and practices, such as the networking of a global society that upsets the ‘certainty’ of national population belonging (Lazzarato 2013, p. 156), the precaritisation of classes of population that no longer feel financially secure (Sabsay 2016), and the capabilities of individuals who are positioned to feel ‘neglected’ to now use digital networks to share their frustrations (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017, p. 40)— produces a group within the population who are simultaneously invisibilised through normativity and yet make rhetorical claims of being excluded from certain rights to belong. This chapter examines a number of political perspectives that have utilised the concept of ‘forgotten people’ through a lens attentive to the relationship between populism and population in a globalising cultural framework. Given the unethical framework through which exclusions occur, it is important to make sense of how claims to being marginalised from the population compete with actual marginalisation. This is not to set up a hierarchy of competing forms of marginalisation and vulnerability, but to begin the process of making sense how the very idea of population is utilised in ways that may sometimes be unethical. By looking first at how the idea of ‘forgotten people’ has emerged from time to time, most recently in the United States, and subsequently at the role of memory and forgetting in the forging of identities of population belonging, it is possible to begin to approach the ethical questions

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that emerge through the discursive production of notions of struggle to belong, and how those ideas of ‘struggle’ are utilised variously for political ends.

Politicising the ‘forgotten people’ Australia’s longest-serving prime minister, Robert Menzies, who served in that role during the pivotal mid-twentieth century and post-war years (1939–1941 and 1949–1966), is remembered as much for his most famous speech ‘the forgotten people’ (1942) as for his key role in forming the early ideology of Australia’s liberal–conservative political party. Not unlike Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘fireside chat’ radio broadcasts (1933 and 1944), Menzies gave a number of talks, radio speeches and written texts that appealed to the figure of an ‘ordinary’, hard-working, middle-class Australian, actively constituting a particular mode of belonging to a segment of the Australian national population. For political purposes, Menzies effectively invented the figure of an Australian middle class as simultaneously authentically Australian and neglected within the national population. He noted that his interest in the middle class was initially because the very rich can look after themselves and the mass of unskilled labourers are looked after by organisations such as workers’ unions and various legal protections. However, the middle class are forgotten because, unlike the rich and the workers, he argued, they are unable to command political attention in a democratic climate. Within his ideological positioning of different classes, the apparent forgetting of the middle class was detrimental, in his view, because he deemed them to be more valuable by virtue of living lives devoted to working productivity and private domesticity, as well as their contribution to population growth through ‘good’ child-rearing practices: I do not believe that the real life of this nation is to be found either in great luxury hotels and the petty gossip of so-called fashionable suburbs, or in the officialdom of the organised masses. It is to be found in the homes of people who are nameless and unadvertised, and who, whatever their individual religious conviction or dogma, see in their children their greatest contribution to the immortality of their race. The home is the foundation of sanity and sobriety; it is the indispensable condition of continuity; its health determines the health of society as a whole. (Menzies 1942) The figure of the middle-class subject for Menzies is thus marked by a kind of purity through the ‘health of society’ their presence in the population produces. In this perspective, the middle class is the group that is both self-serving and self-reliant, not requiring welfare or support, which are seen as among the great social problems. Concomitantly, he argued that a strong authoritarian government is required to protect this forgotten majority from the presumed ‘drain’ of welfare and support for the needy (although he had no argument against the rich):

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Ethics for belonging to a population The great vice of democracy—a vice which is exacting a bitter retribution from it at this moment—is that for a generation we have been busy getting ourselves on to the list of beneficiaries and removing ourselves from the list of contributors, as if somewhere there was somebody else’s wealth and somebody else’s effort on which we could thrive.

In articulating a constitutive middle class among the Australian population as one that was the ‘true’ population and yet was, in his view, forgotten, Menzies sought to refigure the forgotten not merely as those who deserve notice, attention and/or a reduction of services to the poor, but as ordinary Australian heroes, not least through his sly reference in that speech to Tennyson’s depiction of Homer’s Greek hero of The Odyssey, by referring to them as a group unafraid ‘to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield’. Unlike Odysseus’ journey of discovery, however, this heroism involves a journey in which enterprise, hard work and sedate domestic family life are its goals. Menzies’, mostly benign, articulation of a ‘forgotten people’ among the Australian population was built upon and followed by a far more malevolent discourse that billed exclusion of otherness as the core ‘moral activity’ of the middle class. By the 1980s, Queensland conservative politician Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen had been maintaining a long career through a populism that drew support not merely from a staid middle class, but by actively appealing to the undereducated figure of the silent majority, using this support to justify his authoritarian approach to governance (Moffitt 2017, p. 3). In a reframing of Menzies’ approach, Bjelke-Petersen and other populist Australian politicians had to shift the category of ‘forgotten people’ from the everydayness of the middle class to a somewhat different population grouping distinguished by a sense of entitlement. He was particularly keen to differentiate his forgotten people from Menzies’—his were members of a narrower conceptualisation of authentic population, mostly white, working, without tertiary qualification, and who would have felt threatened by migrants and, often, left-wing students. This was primarily the result of a middle class that had itself changed in attitude between the 1950s and the 1980s, with a far greater number gaining formal tertiary qualifications, a shift of work from ‘blue collar’ factory roles to ‘white collar’ office and professional careers, the increasing cosmopolitanism of the middle class, who had travelled further, ate international cuisine, and were beginning to see films and television from elsewhere. This new middle class was of less value to populism than it was in Menzies’ era. This tactic of reshaping the claim to being ‘forgotten’ by appealing to a less tolerant sector of the population was further embedded in the 1990s with the rise of Pauline Hanson and her One Nation Party. Hanson gained notoriety (and popularity) through the articulation of a forgotten white Australian population who were at risk, she claimed, of being ‘swamped’ by immigrants (from East Asia in the 1990s; later, from the Middle East, following the 11 September 11 2001 attacks in the United States) and bearing the cost of the presence among the population of other minorities, including Indigenous

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peoples, whom she viewed as an unnecessary drain on taxes. Unlike Menzies, but very much like Bjelke-Petersen and later, in the United States, Donald Trump, Pauline Hanson’s continuing populism has been through the persistent reinvention of a group within the Australian population encouraged to see themselves as vulnerable and threatened by the mobility of other parts of the population—the ease of movement of the elite and the migration of the racialised other—while simultaneously reinventing authenticity as an appeal to anti-intellectualism. This is part of what has been referred to as a distinctively Australian populism that is simultaneously anti-elite and exclusionary, seeking actively to ‘exclude others along material, political and symbolic dimensions’ (Moffitt 2017, p. 11). This populism produces exclusions of others through being encouraged to see the authentic population as ever more narrow and ever more subjugated. The Australian populist articulation of the forgotten members among its people is a way of framing population (the countability of people) in terms not of belonging to a people but as a set of arguments of who should be counted among the remembered, and who should be forgotten. Contemporary populism focuses on the question of what constitutes population and who is counted among it in order to make claims that seek to overturn the status quo—by demanding attention be turned away from the elites, who are well represented in the media, and the poor, the asylum seekers, the indigenous peoples, and others who are beneficiaries of welfare and governmental support. While this anti-intellectualism is distinctly Australian, because it has been grounded in a distance from Europe as the former setting of intellectual and scholarly enterprise in the earlier parts of the twentieth century, it has emerged more recently as a mechanism upon which populism is effectively built as a political strategy in the United States and the United Kingdom, linking claims of being forgotten or neglected to arguments for the exclusion from population of certain others.

Trump’s ‘forgotten deplorables’ The deliberate production through political and electoral processes of a ‘forgotten people’ is the attempt to produce a power bloc that will, usually, support a marginal political figure, one who is both extremist and authoritarian, often supportive of neoliberalism while arguing against it, and typically utilising nationalist rhetoric to develop hatred and violence against marginalised subjects within a national population. The forgotten people are thus actively created through a political process that seeks to generate not consensus but a particular mode of discord that looks like class struggle, but is actually wedge politics instead. The figure of the ‘forgotten people’ emerges as a construct, goal and tool of certain brands of populism in many Western democracies, typically invented by political figures performing both insider–outsider status. The term ‘silent majority’ is a common synonym for forgotten people, operating in the United States since the 1960s, with former president, Richard Nixon, using the term to refer to those who have been marginalised or suppressed by liberals

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within establishment politics and cultural production (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017, p. 24). Throughout the 1980s, both the United Kingdom and the United States experienced a particular kind of right-wing populism that built on the idea that liberals had suppressed the needs of a patriotic and hard-working majority, often arguably the result of left-wing politics’ failure to build a social populism that brought together the intellectual grounding of socialist politics and the everyday realities of the people it represented (Fiske 1989, p. 153). Both Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom were thus able to advance neoliberal strategies by obscuring these behind the view that they were in service to the everyday forgotten people in a way the left had not been. They achieved this by manufacturing a new idea of the national population through the use of a ‘wedge politics’ that first builds resentment and then actively mid-directs it along gender, ethnic and racial lines rather than lines of class (Fiske 1996, p. 31). True class demarcations are obscured, particularly those that make visible the distinctions in such populations between those who own, manage and benefit from the means of production and those who labour and consume. This is, of course, in contrast to the utilisation of the more popular but less sophisticated framing of class in terms of upper, middle and lower, which has had less value for understanding the population since the 1970s. Although the idea of a forgotten people or neglected silent majority has never quite gone away in North America, Donald Trump actively reinvigorated the concept by articulating a group of normative, white, lower middle-class United States citizens as vulnerable to being forgotten and in danger of losing something (national greatness, resources, national military strength, perceived sovereignty, dominance of other world powers, dignity) to both outsiders and left-liberal politicians. This is to project vulnerability onto a group in a way that simultaneously does a violence to that group but also serves to institutionalise violence towards others through a circuitous route in what can be referred to as a playing off of different parts of a population via the hiding or forgetting of the in-built ‘unequal distribution of vulnerability’ (Butler, Gambetti and Sabsay 2016, pp. 4–5). It is to make one group feel disposable in order to dispose of another set of groups, and to do so not only without regard for the ethical obligations of fostering non-violence, but for personal political gain. While it would be unhelpful here to articulate a hierarchy or star system of who is most vulnerable, what is notable in this act is the creation and production of an affectively felt sense of having been forgotten. That is, resentment and discord are turned into the experience of having been socially, politically and economically abandoned, while anger over this felt experience of abandonment is stirred up through direct political engagement via media and rallies, and that anger is then redirected towards minorities and others who are deemed to ought to have been forgotten without a logic but in the illogic of a heated articulation of desperation for change. The ‘forgotten people’ to whom Trump appealed both before and after his election as president in 2016 was of a different construction from those of

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Menzies, Thatcher and Reagan. While Menzies, writing in the middle of the twentieth century, had in mind a heroic figure, and Thatcher and Reagan never disavowed intellectual pursuits or the spectacle of elitism, Trump’s construction of a forgotten people is grounded in a rhetorical claim to abandonment rather than an actual exclusion from welfare benefits, rights, health care or access to political processes. As with Pauline Hanson’s framework in Australia, it is arguably more anti-intellectual and further grounded in the expression of feeling and emotion than earlier forms of populism. In that context, I am not identifying Trump’s forgotten people as those voters in the rust belt states who, after persistent job losses due to deindustrialisation, loss of hope and loss of aspiration supported Trump in the light of the (reasonable) view that the establishment figures of Washington had been unable to do anything to reverse their circumstances. This, indeed, is a group of the population not forgotten but certainly ignored in a culture that focuses on the dramatisation of electoral politics, the celebrification of political process and the personalisation of policy. Trump’s supporters were identified during the 1996 election campaigns by Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton who, to her detriment, referred to them as being made up in part of a ‘basket of deplorables’ in a speech that alienated many voters and likely contributed to her electoral loss: You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic—Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites … He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks—they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America. (Clinton 2016) What Clinton was referring to was, of course, the alt-right, a group of people who have cynically utilised a populist platform built on aggressive discrimination and vocal violence of exclusion, particularly along gendered, racial and sexuality lines. She drew attention to the rhetorically false link between an aggressive, white masculinity and the claim to precarity that simultaneously expresses violently exclusionary arguments through fabricated claims to having been abandoned or removed from population belonging in the eyes of the media, the government and the elites. In identifying a basket of deplorables whose hate for others and otherness among the United States population drives a populist resurgence, Clinton took pains to differentiate from another basket of Trump supporters for whom she argues we must all have empathy, and these are the forgotten people not of the middle class but of the underclass, who are genuinely positioned to feel that their aspirations are wholly thwarted:

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Ethics for belonging to a population [T]hat ‘other’ basket of people are people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures; and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well. (Clinton 2016)

In this part of the speech, less-often quoted, Clinton was deliberately and effectively pointing to the distinction between the claim to be a forgotten people and the reality of a people more truly forgotten (perhaps, in a sense, re-invoking the idea of a silent majority or, at least, a group that has been more forgotten than those whose voices have become hard to forget). In countering Clinton’s analysis of voting motivations, Donald Trump was effective in re-collapsing the two groups back to a singular perception of the forgotten people by suggesting that Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ term was a reference to the full set of people who have been marginalised through industrial shifts in North America; he thereby reconstituted a singular true American population as performing the ‘attitude’ of the first group, and the precarity of the second, arguing that together they were all ‘hardworking American patriots who love your country’ (cited by Jackson 2016). As with other examples of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century populisms, this was to present the base, anticipated voting group as a group that had been left out, marginalised, insulted by liberal elites, displaced by migrants, or threatened somehow by people with different cultural, racial or ethnic backgrounds. The logic is one that ignores any possibility of factual, statistical or experiential evidence of the kinds of marginalisation experienced by migrants, people of colour, people of diverse genders and sexualities, and so on. The forgotten people are encouraged to see themselves as the core type in the population, ultimately threatened by a range or conspiracy of forces seeking to change the population to a different type to which they will not belong. In the context of population discourses, this rearticulates a distributional curve of normativities that seek to excise those subjects less proximate to what is realistically a ‘forgotten norm’—the white, male patriot. It is not an appeal to nostalgia but a way of reframing belonging as that which should be experienced by only a small minority, figured as if they are an authentic majority. The vacuousness of that figurative norm allows an ever wider group to identify with it, and thus be part of a community of supporters of a populist rhetoric.

Reconfiguring the present: rupture for capital A number of writers, journalists and pubic commentators have argued that the populist emergence of an angry, silent majority, of a forgotten lowermiddle class now wanting recognition, and of a white majority made

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precarious, is something new that has disrupted the normative codes by which governance is disrupted in ways that not only surprise but also risk bringing about a new epoch in the history of subjectivity and administration. Populist supportive media and websites as well as alarmist news columnists have referred to the rise of Trump, Brexit and other instances of populism not only as unforeseen but as radically shifting the structures of politics, the economy and society more broadly. To some extent there is value in pointing to the way in which populist leaders such as Donald Trump were unexpected: the disappointment that logical, reasonable, socially conscious arguments and policies are not appealing to the wider population during elections is often felt and presented as surprise. At the same time, however, there is actually nothing particularly new about the rise of populism as a genuine political force prompting right-wing governance and anti-immigrant sensibilities—this has been the norm, of course, in parts of South America and Africa for a much longer period. As it forms in the West, populism is represented through the signification of a rupture, a break from history, a new pathway that cannot yet be understood. Ruptures, however, have to be approached with great caution. As we know from Foucault, history is replete with continuities that evolve into marginally different forms that may appear to be epochal changes but are in reality not radical disjunctures at all; rather, they involve the same power frameworks in a different guise. Any kind of rupture, for Maurizio Lazzarato (2013) ‘emerges from history’, and, often, that which looks like a radical change is set up as a platform against another as a goal of capitalist institutions (p. 20). The current set of crises that has produced the forgotten population as an emanation of the so-called ‘will of the people’ (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017, p. 40) is not, therefore, transformative and creative. Rather, what operates across Menzies, Hanson and Trump, as well as certain populist–racist aspects of Brexit in the United Kingdom and the experience of populist right-wing politics in the Netherlands, France and elsewhere in Europe, is the fact that a particular subset of the population serves an ever-present, ready-made historical mechanism to coopt a certain kind of unwarranted and unethical anger to the cause of supporting neoliberalism. This suturing of populist anger and neoliberal policy furthers the goal of shifting biopolitical governance mechanisms ever further into the mode of authoritarian sovereignty, with the view that it is a more effective means for controlling the conditions that enable capital to flourish. The population, in this respect, is both fragmented and unified in taking its form as the object of capital—not only a labour resource but what Lazzarato (2013) calls ‘a laboratory for neoliberal governmentality’ (p. 160). In this context, it is important to bear in mind the way in which population itself is the object and creation of capital: the capability to count, measure and attempt to understand the economic motivations of a large group of people. At one level, right-wing populism shines a particular light on the construction of population, but only in the sense of invoking social belonging as through the misdirection of resentment, anger and the sense of having been

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forgotten. The true forgetting, however, is in the constructedness of the concept of population as a tool of belonging and an object of capital. There is, therefore, some value in thinking about the recent instances of populism through the perspective of questions of ethics: the obligation towards a hospitality for all members of a population because, despite social differences, origins, differences in benefits, and other demarcations of inequality, all subjects are constituted in processes of defining population in the first instance. The claims to a rupture draw attention, indeed, to the continuity in that constructedness.

Recognising belonging: memory, forgetting and being forgotten While the use of the concept of a ‘forgotten people’ evokes the perception of a group marginalised from a population who, ironically, are not necessarily those who in ethical terms warrant attention, recognition and inclusion towards belonging, it remains that there is a felt sense of non-belonging that constitutes the claim to being forgotten. This opens, in some respects, the possibility of making sense of population belonging, then, through acts and frameworks of remembering and being remembered as a reciprocal ethics of engagement. It calls upon us to look at the way in which the constitution of subjectivity in a population’s past is obscured in order to produce a particular kind of population future. Stuart Hall suggests that the terms of identity are always pointed in the two directions of past and future: ‘mythically it constructs and invests its past’ (Hall 1996, p. 132). Part of this production of a performative self involves producing the past through a re-signification of memories within a framework of demands for conformity (Scott 1995, p. 10) and the avoidance of self-ambiguity and non-coherence. Alexander Düttmann provides a useful trope in exploring the political/social notion of representation through the possibility of re-cognition of the iterability of cognition and understanding, indicating that in order to fulfil the demand to be recognised, one is re-cognised (Düttmann 1997, p. 31). That is, in recognising that we are members of a population, we are persistently re-cognising (re-thinking) ourselves into a particular kind of membership. Rather than asking after particular groups that may be truly forgotten from the population (such as many minorities and indigenous persons) or that make radically false claims to being forgotten or neglected (such as white supremacists), the questions over identity, ethics and belonging are best found in thinking about the ways in which processes of the production of subjectivity within the frame of population are both remembered and forgotten in different ways. That is, the concept of forgetting is a useful one to draw attention to some of the ways in which belonging to a named population grouping is constituted and reconstituted through an identificatory process that involves a simultaneous recognition of the self in population and a forgetting of that process. While persons may have entered a particular kind of national population at birth (e.g. citizenship) or through immigration processes (e.g. the award of

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permanent residency), it is not necessarily the case that they recognise themselves as part of a population. For example, they may know they are Canadian from early on in life, but there are encounters with certain discourses that make that subject aware of being Canadian through a practice of recognising that as a category of identity and recognising that there are other Canadians likewise in that process who form a community of similitude. For many, particularly those who are deeply attached to a national population through a nationalistic perspective on the world, or to a minority population grouping through a cultural performance of distinctiveness, or to a population defined by other axes of discrimination such as class demarcations, ethnicities, abilities or disabilities, health populations, or even careers, such population belonging may be recalled at certain instances as particularly meaningful and part of a deeply felt attachment. Such remembering of how we came to belong to population is, of course, always part of a set of identity performances that retroactively establish the illusion of a fixed inner core that founds our desires, behaviours, attitudes and sense of subjectivity (Butler 1990, p. 143), and that people experience in multiple and contextual ways. While it may be true that that subject—broadly speaking—could always remember having been a member of a population, there is a counterposition that allows us to argue that memory, rather than being a proof or a useful claim to a ‘truthful experience’ or a ‘record of the past’, ought to be reconceived as being a product or effect of subjective belonging, by which I mean processes of subjection and subjectivation. That is, a memory of having always been a part of a population grouping is, itself, a non-foundationalist construct that is deployed to: (a) stabilise an identity in the present and future by giving it a past; and (b) disavow the moments of encountering discourses of population belonging that constitute and produce the subject as a particular kind of (national, ethnic, human, etc.) subject. What I am suggesting here is that while it is true that the very idea of population precedes the subject who is thrown not only into sociality, but into certain mechanisms of sociality that include the counting and countability of subjects as population, for population belonging actually to occur an encounter with the ideas, discourses, administration and practices of population must happen in a way that both recalls belonging but rewrites or reframes it through disavowing or forgetting that instance in which belonging to a population was revealed, recognised or remembered. Memory, then, is a tool both used and forgotten in the forging of population belonging.

Conclusion: utilising memory tropes towards an ethics of belonging As a normative framework for the production of population belonging as if timeless, it is implied that, under these discursive conditions, it is the subject who is capable of remembering or re-cognising such belonging, because the subject born into the population is thereby positioned as the true, authentic, coherent and intelligible member of that population. Even better is the subject who can prove a lineage—not just being born into the population by being

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able to fulfil the requirements of citizenship at birth, but able to trace a lineage that gives longevity stretching even further back: parents and grandparents. What then for the migrant, the subject who arrived, the subject who defected, who sought asylum, who gained citizenship or residency at a later stage, or who is in limbo, at present awaiting some kind of outcome? What of the subject whose body or face or accent or religious and cultural practices betray a lesser lineage, even if a citizen born to citizens? In the normative structuration of population belonging, such subjects are deemed to belong less well. They are positioned to always be suspect, not only through some of the problematic political interpellations of subjects who are seen to be potential terrorists, or subversionists, or troublemakers, as so often happens in white, Western cultures. These are subjects whose capacity to ever belong (not just in the past, but the future) remains suspect in the eyes of those who have a deeply felt attachment to their construction in population belonging, which is remembered through a disavowal of memories of belonging, that is, the position often taken by intense patriots and white supremacists. From an ethical perspective, however, there is of course no logical reason why race, religion, ethnicity, citizenship status or indeed being sans papiers should have any bearing on how one belongs to a population or a people. This is not to suggest, necessarily, that subjects are free to choose a national population, local population, population grouping or other identifier as if these are labels operating in a free-flowing, laissez-faire liberal–postmodern perspective of identity. Rather, what I am suggesting is that the constructedness of the connections between subjective belonging and population, being founded in a disavowal of instances of entry to the population through a forgetting of belonging, breaks any idea that there is a natural link. There is, instead, an obligation to accept those who seek belonging because, at the very least, the fact that they enter the population is not different from how all members of populations enter: by an instance of encounter at a particular point in life in which membership of a population is recognised. In that sense, perhaps how a subject remembers how they came to belong to a population is less important. This is to say, we can utilise the tropes of forgetting and being forgotten that have been raised by populists attempting to forge support by invoking a ‘forgotten people’ to build a lens that allows us to see, not what belonging is or might be, but how belonging to a population occurs. It brings to the fore that there is a range of experiences in which belonging to a national population grouping is forged through memory and forgetting, entry into discourse and disavowal of that encounter with discourse, and in the contexts of being born into population and arriving into it at some other point in life. And what it demonstrates is that belonging is not something that can be produced through claims of authenticity and calls to exclusionary practices, nor to an idea that all subjects are part of a wider global population, beyond national distinction, that erases the different ways in which a subject came populate a particular space. Rather, it points to the fact that belonging to population involves a complex set of identifications that are both recalled and forgotten in

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ways that are genuinely diverse, and through the existence of this diversity all parts of the population are obliged to ensure that the other parts and other subjects are given the opportunity to forge belonging in their own ways. By focusing on the trope of an idea of forgetting, we begin to approach a means by which to argue the populist claims of a constructed ‘forgotten people’ are always, from the beginning, unethical when built upon ideas of authenticity, longevity, rightfulness, racial supremacy or other discursive mechanisms that assert their entitlement through a timelessness of population belonging.

References Bell, V., 1999. Performativity and belonging. Theory, Culture & Society, 16(2), 1–10. Butler, J., 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Butler, J., Gambetti, Z., and Sabsay, L., 2016. Introduction. In: J. Butler, Z. Gambetti and L. Sabsay, eds. Vulnerability in Resistance. Durham, UK: Duke University Press, 1–11. Clinton, H., 2016. Speech in New York City, 9 September. Available from: http://time.com/ 4486502/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorables-transcript/. Accessed 17 January 2019. Düttmann, A.G., 1997. The Culture of polemic: misrecognizing recognition, trans. N. Walker. Radical Philosophy, 81 (Jan–Feb), 27–34. Fiske, J., 1989. Understanding Popular Culture. London: Unwin Hyman. Fiske, J., 1996. Media Matters: Everyday Culture and Political Change. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Hall, S., 1996. Politics of identity. In: T. Ranger, Y. Samad and O. Stewart, eds. Culture, Identity and Politics: Ethnic Minorities in Britain. Aldershot, UK: Avebury, 129–135. Jackson, D., 2016. Trump seeks to profit from Clinton’s “deplorables” remark. USA Today, 15 September. Available from: www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elec tions/2016/09/15/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorables/90352670/. Accessed 17 January 2019. Kaestle, C.E. and Ivory, A.H., 2012. A forgotten sexuality: Content Analysis of bisexuality in the medical literature over two decades. Journal of Bisexuality, 12(2), 35–48. Lazzarato, M., 2013. Governing by Debt, trans. J.D. Jordan. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e). Menzies, R., 1942. The forgotten people, 22 May. Available from: www.liberals.net/ theforgottenpeople.htm. Accessed 19 January 2019. Moffitt, B., 2017. Populism in Australia and New Zealand. In: C.R. Kaltwasser et al., eds. The Oxford Handbook of Populism. Oxford: Oxford University Press [online]. Mudde, C. and Kaltwasser, C.R., 2017. Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sabsay, L., 2016. Permeable bodies: vulnerability, affective powers, hegemony. In: J. Butler, Z. Gambetti and L. Sabsay, eds. Vulnerability in Resistance. Durham, UK: Duke University Press, 278–302. Scott, J., 1995. Multiculturalism and the politics of identity. In: J. Rajchman, ed. The Identity in Question. London: Routledge, 12–19. Yuval-Davis, N., 2006. Belonging and the politics of belonging. Patterns of Prejudice, 40(3), 197–214.

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Bodies, racialised populations and practices of othering

Introduction In Chapter 8 I argued that a certain way of forgetting how one has come to belong to the population operates to structure a particular mode of nationalistic belonging that fixates on claims to authenticity. This forgetting or disavowal of the entry into population draws attention away from the fact that there are certain mechanisms at play that position some subjects as ‘true’ members of a population while others are positioned as marginal, suspect, non-normative and—thereby—non-belonging. In this chapter, I would like to turn to a few ways in which exclusion, marginalisation and othering condition aspects of belonging, who belongs where and to what, and how population as a process of counting people both disavows and restores the figure of the body as central to the constitution of population and its exclusionary boundaries. The significant and ongoing issues related to past and present practices that exclude indigenous persons from full participation in many nationalised colonial and postcolonial populations provide an important set of examples. In many liberal–multicultural Western nations, indigenous persons are often either forgotten among other population issues relating to the arrival of more recent migrants of various kinds, in the questions opened by increasing global mobility, and sometimes, just as problematically, in the attempts to place indigenous groups as one ‘category’ of multiculturalism that retains its white, settler hub and represents racialised bodies, practices and communities as satellite cultures in an uneasy but tacit tension with the frameworks of population belonging. I would like here to open some brief questions based around a handful of examples of the othering of indigenous populations through a right-wing articulation of a suspicion that some of them might not be quite ‘other’ enough. This is to bring the question of otherness not merely to the ways in which bodies, appearances and visibilities are part of the picture governing belonging, but also to the ways that, at times, it is unethical to position subjects as belonging to minority population groupings based solely on bodies and appearances without regard for cultural practice, participation and engagement in minority communities. I will then turn to some broader

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questions about how racial and ethnic groupings can sometimes be minoritised through means other than bodies and visualities, but through practices that nevertheless maintain a focus on the figure of the body of the new arrival as abject or repulsive in non-visual ways. I will end with an additional focal area of minoritisation: how the bodies of refugees and other recent arrivals into the ‘space’ of a population are actively made other through processes of making ‘bare life’, relegated to be bodies (of survival) rather than corporeal and embodied citizens or residents: excluded from population belonging through the inconsistency in which population’s management focuses on making certain bodies live while others are disregarded. Here, I return to some of the important considerations about the production of population as a cultural concept raised in Chapter 4 in relation to Agamben’s rereadings of Foucault and how these shed light on the relationship between bodies, subjectivity and population as concept and practice. At core is the need to begin thinking about bodies and corporeality in relation to the ethics of population belonging in order to move away from the limited and failing liberal–humanist frameworks that focus belonging on disembodied notions of rights and citizenship, particularly since these have not been able to overturn the kinds of hierarchies and practices of exclusion that make some subjects’ lives unliveable at the fringes or beyond the bounds of population.

Indigenous exclusions Throughout much of the world, indigenous populations have been positioned within colonial population systems that count people and account for belonging through frameworks that retain practices of domination, ownership and hierarchy, and, of course, their converse in subjugation, prohibition from previously shared land, and exclusion from participation in governance, politics, and other forms of social belonging, such as employment and education. Many Native American groups, for example, experienced otherness and marginalisation through exclusion from lands on which they formerly lived. More recent attention has been paid to Canadian Inuit peoples, who are often excluded from leading a liveable life, and thus belonging to the broader population, with regard to the experience of suicidality among their people. Indeed, suicide among Inuit people is among the highest in the world (Kral 2016), a point that draws attention not only to the demarcations of population within the field we refer to as ‘population health’, but also to the disparities in liveability experienced by people who can be defined as a distinct population experiencing different relationships with land, sovereignty, coloniality, inclusion, exclusion and participation in a broader national and social structure. In the Australian context, many Indigenous people have experienced past exclusions from remaining within city boundaries, or being persistently moved on (or out) by police and security— simply for being present in public spaces through which the remainder of the population are able to move without question. Indigenous people in Australia likewise have experienced unliveability with, again, higher rates of suicide and

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self-harm than the broader Australian population (Cover 2016a). So widespread internationally has been the exclusion from ordinary forms of population belonging that in 2007 the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution to affirm that indigenous peoples are equal to all other peoples, that scientifically false practices of differentiation have been racist, and that the many social and health problems experienced by indigenous peoples have been as a result of a failure to recognise the important relationship between their cultural practices and the lands on which they originally lived. The depth of the situation and the lingering social effects of colonialism on population belonging are, of course, more complex than can be discussed here in the detail they warrant. At stake, however, is the continuing effect of past and present unethical acts of dispossession that establish the persistence of exclusion from populations. Dispossession is significant for understanding the historical mechanisms by which certain groups were and are made excluded, in ways maintained generations later, whereby attempts to reverse such past crimes do little to establish better frameworks for belonging and liveability for indigenous people. If we bear in mind that, in its originary use, the term population refers to the numbers of people who inhabit a particular place or land (Foucault 2007, p. 67), then we can see the multiple movements by which exclusion of indigenous persons works: not only by dispossession and displacement from regions and lands on which a group traditionally lived, but also by the fact of becoming ‘non-counted’, not worthy of being accounted for, within numbers that make up a ‘true’ population. It is important to bear in mind the definition of indigenous: as belonging or occurring in a place. What marks the experience of indigeneity, first peoples and First Nation subjects in many settings is the breach between bodies that inhabited and, subsequent to colonial domination, bodies that cease to belong to that place due to forced mobility, dispossession or disempowerment. To put this another way, if population is always a connection between people and place or space, whether that is in the context of overpopulation (too many people for a given space), or a global population (the numbers who inhabit the Earth and share in some way its resources), or a national population (the numbers who warrant being counted and thus accounted for as citizens in a given nation-state’s boundaries), then an act of exclusion occurs when a group of corporeal subjects within that population is radically disconnected from the land, place or space that has served to define it through this particular discourse. Thus, while various indigenous groups and peoples may not necessarily have had the same discourses of countability of persons to produce a concept of a people, the figurative and literal separation of indigenous bodies from the connection with place operates as an historical act of unethical violence that persists, even when lip-service gestures to the importance of recognising indigenous connections to original lands is regularly made. The violence of the past is not an act alone, but a foundational act that pushes forms of unliveability into the present and future, making indigenous persons’ subjectivity constituted in a positioning that John Frow (2012) refers to as the form of the

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‘institutionalised stranger’ (p. 12), the subject who cannot be a subject within the frameworks of belonging to a population. Rather than assuming indigenous peoples can be ‘invited into’ the national population in the way more recent migrant arrivals can be, what is demanded is a further radical disjuncture of a more ethical kind: the separation of population and the control of (and right to remain settled upon) land and place for the broader population itself. Connections with—and affections for—land, place, space, home, not-home and the Earth most broadly are, of course ethical, but only in the form of dominion and ethical care, not in the context of acts of dispossession that exclude one group from belonging while others enjoy the resources.

Not appearing a minority enough In this section, I would like to turn to another Australian example of mechanisms that make certain subjects ‘other’ and actively exclude them from multiple forms of population belonging: the example of suspicion directed at indigenous persons who do not appear to be quite indigenous enough, and, therefore, are relegated as untrustworthy and unpalatable subjects for social participation according to certain right-wing, exclusionary and supremacist views. This is an instance in which certain practices, interventions and ways of speaking about others does the sort of violence that marginalises a person for not being marginal enough, or argues that the person who is seen to be part of a marginalised population should be further marginalised from that population, or uses outdated and under-recognised views in an ignorant push for the sorts of clarities and simplistic categorisations that cannot exist for the complexities of human belonging that are, by necessity, complicated, nuanced and incomplete. This is a significant and persistent concern for those who, in nationalised population terms, are considered minorities. The capacity to belong to a minority community, whether through face-toface interaction or conceptually through a perceived shared history, use of language, or use of identity terminology, has very significant health and mental health benefits for those for whom the experience of marginalisation from the broader population results in reduced capability for social participation, employment, dignity or liveability. For many, health and mental health resiliences are formed and supported through a sense of affiliation with a minority in a population, even if that population remains subjugated and marginalised. For a member of that minority to be made to feel that they do not belong either in the mainstream or a minority community has a potentially dire impact on health and, as I have shown in some of my previous work about sexual and gender minorities (Cover 2012, 2019), as well as indigenous and migrant minorities (Cover 2016a), is implicated in the kinds of identity breakdown that cause self-harm and suicide. When the question of the extent to which a subject, body or identity belongs to a minority community is made about already subjugated and excluded persons, such as

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indigenous subjects, and when that is made by mainstream, white Australian commentators within a discourse of continued colonialism, we are speaking not merely of questions of dignity and respect but of questions that are at the core of the potentially life-and-death positioning of a significant section of a national population. In 2010, right-wing conservative commentator Andrew Bolt was sued under Australia’s racial vilification laws by a group of Indigenous Australian persons whom he had defamed by arguing that they were deliberately benefiting from Indigenous programmes, affirmative action policies and career frameworks despite being fair-skinned Indigenous Australians. His accusation relied on the idea that there could be something problematic when a person claims Indigenous heritage and identity when only partially and not wholly descended from Indigenous persons. Bolt’s articles had named 18 individuals, in most cases claiming that they were essentially of European ancestry and had ‘chosen’ to claim an Indigenous identity rather than being truly Indigenous. Many of them were very high-profile public figures and professionals, including Geoff Clark, chairman of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), activist Pat Eatock, academics Wayne Atkinson and Larissa Behrendt, and lawyer Mark McMillan, among several others. Nine members of the group gave evidence to state that the articles were offensive under Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act 1975. The Act in question contains a section that was added in the 1990s to identify a public act as racially offensive if it is reasonably likely to ‘offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or a group of people’ if that act is performed due to the ‘race, colour or national or ethnic origin of the other person’. The Act contains a defence for artistic works, academic and scientific study, accurate reporting and fair comment. According to the September 2011 hearings in the Federal Court of Australia, the presiding Justice Mordecai Bromberg was ‘satisfied that fairskinned Aboriginal people (or some of them) were reasonably likely, in all the circumstances, to have been offended, insulted, humiliated or intimidated by the imputations conveyed by the newspaper articles’ (Eatock v Bolt 2011). The Justice found that the articles were not protected under fair comment on the basis of distortions and inflammatory language. The case was a particularly significant one for matters of racial discrimination and marginalisation, with ongoing debate in the public sphere over the extent to which the Act might be perceived to curtail freedom of speech or expression. However, the more meaningful debate for questions of population, race and belonging occurred in both the lead-up to the trial and the post-judgment commentary, particularly about the assertion that Bolt’s articles went beyond insult and offence and were acts of attempting to decide issues of identity (‘who gets to say who is and who is not Aboriginal’), and to associate identity with visual appearance (Quinn 2010) and genetics (Bird 2011), rather than cultural practice. Naturally, such attempts to decide or proclaim who is an indigenous person and who is not open a range of awkward historical frameworks for the subjugation or genocide of

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many indigenous peoples in many parts of the world: attempts to ‘breed out’ indigenous groups (Bird 2011), attempts to determine ratios of blood (Bock 2011), attempts to perform the violence of categorisation that articulates certain peoples on the basis of race, practice or identity as something other than fully belonging to human population. At the same time, Bolt’s position on fair-skinned Indigenous Australians was a demand for clarity in identity—the kind of demand for identity coherence that is part of the Enlightenment era framework for the production of intelligible subjectivity (Cover 2016b). It is what Elizabeth Povinelli (2002) has referred to as a cultural drive to demand an impossible level of authenticity in identity claims by indigenous people in order for them to be perceived as capable of belonging. That is, indigenous groups and individuals can participate socially among the population on the condition of an authentic visual and genetic identity and a set of everyday cultural practices aligned with precolonial living. What this does is provide the conditions for the kind of unjust argument that Bolt was making: that subjects who are not clearly identifiable in these ways and who might move about the broader population, who live in cities rather than outback settlements and who interact with others in ways in which race and ethnic background are not immediately apparent, are suspicious and, by virtue of such suspicions, ought not to belong within the broader national population. When frameworks of identity, belonging and population are built upon demands for visual and genetic authenticity, or upon demands for coherence and clear categorisation, what we witness is a practice of othering based on a claim that such peoples are other not only to the broader population (because they claim to be part of a minority group) but also to that minority group itself (because they are not instantly recognisable as authentic members of that group). What Bolt ignored, however, were three important aspects of population belonging: cultural participation, recognition and choosing how to belong. In terms of the first of these, Bolt had wrongfully claimed that many of the persons asserting Indigenous identity were doing so only later in life in order to gain career benefits or credibility, particularly targeting those working in academic institutions. The lack of research undertaken prior to these inflammatory claims meant he had failed to account for the fact that almost all of the 18 people he targeted had participated in Indigenous communities for the greater part of their lives. For example, Bolt had described one complainant, Mark McMillan, as ‘pink in face’ and objected to the fact that he was an appellate court judge in Arizona, living in the United States, gay and educated. McMillan’s father was English and born in Sussex. However, McMillan was raised, according to court transcripts, by his mother and grandmother who both had Indigenous ancestry; his great-grandmother was the daughter of an Aboriginal woman and a non-Aboriginal man. In terms of genetic heritage as it is typically understood, this might seem distant. However, his Indigenous heritage—what makes him part of an Indigenous population—is only as distant as his white great-great grandfather. The form of

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subjection that matters for population belonging and exclusion for minorities, then, is a further form of suspicion beyond intent: suspicion that, on the one hand, traditionally marginalises certain subjects having any heritage at all (the ‘one drop [of blood] rule’) while simultaneously subjecting the same person to marginalisation for having a blood quota of less than some arbitrary figure. What matters is not that either of these positions are right or useful, but that the figure, quotient or number of drops requirement is applied when it involves a minority but is never called upon as a framework of classification in terms of European blood or majority heritage. Part of the issue for belonging here, then, is that while Bolt was interested in arguing that the drops of blood were not enough, what he was ignoring was the fact of how one is raised as a member of a community. As detailed in court, Mark McMillan was raised by his mother and his maternal grandmother as a Wiradjuri person and as part of the Trangie Aboriginal community in New South Wales, Australia: ‘Growing up, Mr McMillan and his siblings all knew they were Aboriginal. Whilst growing up in Trangie, Mr McMillan and his siblings were told stories about their Aboriginal relatives … Those stories helped to shape his identity as an Aboriginal person.’ How one is raised, the practices, perceptions, self-identities, ways of speaking and ways or articulating one’s own sense of belonging as a family can often occur in the private domestic sphere. Indeed, it is here that they are more pertinent and meaningful to most subjects and become part of the constitutive framework through which performativity of self-perception occurs. Bolt, on the other hand, was looking to that which is available to be read publicly or ostensibly, such as the visible trace of racial otherness, the public science of genetic testing, the declaration in the public sphere, effectively as a special condition that is not ordinarily asked of people of European descent in postcolonial countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia or New Zealand. Applying that combination of a discursive suspicion and a discursive demand to shift a domestic perception of belonging and self-identity into a public declaration distinguishes indigenous populations, particularly those who are directly targeted and named, providing the framework for additional forms of marginalisation and minoritisation. Cultural participation and the longevity of engagement with a minority population is clearly very meaningful for the production of identity and certain kinds of belonging. The second aspect of belonging that Bolt failed to uncover in his accusations against the complainants was the role of recognition. Although those he named had private, domestic and sometimes public connections with the Indigenous communities of which they were perceived to be a part, he nevertheless saw them as having arbitrarily and quickly adopted a minority identity. What underpins the long, private and deeply felt connection is, of course, the extent to which it is mutually recognised by the communities themselves. In the cases of the complainants, they were indeed recognised by their various Indigenous communities in ways sustained across their lives. For example, activist Pat Eatock stood for election as an Indigenous independent

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candidate and represented her community in a range of ways, all of which would only have been feasible had she been recognised as an Indigenous person by others in her community. Likewise, photographer Bindi Cole was recognised by Indigenous peoples as a member of the Koori community. As an artist, her achievements, grants, awards and exhibitions have been recognised by Indigenous communities and organisations and celebrated as aspects of Indigenous cultural and creative production. Indeed, this is despite the fact that some of her art has explored the very questions of belonging when one does not fit the stereotype of an Indigenous person as dark-skinned and living in a remote community—a set of questions that looks to the contingency of identity but at no stage undermines the recognition by her community that she was part of it. Recognition is, of course, flexible, multiple and both expressed and experienced diversely. What mattered for the court was that there was some degree of recognition. What was ignored by Bolt in his articles was that although he was identifying individuals, those individuals had deep, ongoing ties of mutual recognition among people in ways that were complex, considered, nuanced and meaningful. By ignoring this, he reduced subjects whose identities were constituted in such meaningful forms of connectivity, affiliation and belonging to corporeal individuals categorised by expectations or demands for visual clarity, unethically reducing—in Kantian terms—the subject to an object or thing in a way that would not be evenly applied to the white people of whom he also writes. Finally, there is the important matter of choice, choosing how to belong and the difficult knowledge framework in which we might query the extent to which personal agency in self-identification can be part of the formation through which belonging to populations in particular ways is constituted. In presenting his findings that Andrew Bolt was racially discriminatory and offensive under the Act, Justice Bromberg drew on earlier legal cases that had asserted a three-part test to determine Aboriginality: descent, self-identification and recognition, noting that several uses of the rule with certain flexibility had left open the possibility of self-identification and communal affiliation without genetic heritage. Part of Bolt’s claim was that those he named had chosen their Indigenous identities (for gain). The idea of purely arbitrary, agential choice is a patent oversimplification of processes and practices of identity. If there is ever a choice involved then it is a choice conditioned by the discourses and structures that precede us, and by the questions of recognition, affiliation and participation in minority communities or population subsets. It is a choice in terms of choosing how to belong, the nuances of performativity, and the formations of meaningfulness in the life and make-up of subjectivity. Although questions of identity choice in terms of sexual minorities have long been disavowed, asserting instead descent, genetics or ‘born that way’ arguments, recent discourses over the past half-decade have produced a greater number of public assertions from gender and sexual minorities of

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having ‘chosen’ to be or to become lesbian, gay, bisexual and so on. This aligns to some extent to questions about choosing whether one is part of the male population or the female population or neither, primarily through a range of different forms of transition that include complex, nuanced choices at different stages (Cover 2019, pp. 97–130). In just this way, choice to identify in a particular way is not wholly excluded from the practice of identity, which is not to say there is some genuine postmodern movement or fluidity between different identities or a casual decision to be something today and something else tomorrow. Rather, choice to identify is produced within existing frames of subjectivity and belonging, is never a singular act, is conditioned by existing affiliations, and is produced in the ethical mutuality of recognition. What matters here is that Bolt’s claims about choosing to be part of one population were articulated as disingenuous and insincere choices, suggesting that the Indigenous people he named were doing so only to access funding and opportunities made available through affirmative action schemes. What the trial indicated, however, is that it is offensive to presume to know the complex, networked framework of identity possibilities that occur in a person’s life, that articulations of choice need to be carefully understood, and that the ethical practices of population belonging are always, from the beginning, diverse and complicated. This points to the need for an ethics that does not reduce bodies to simple, individualised objects for categorisation but seeks ways to incorporate the diversity of corporeal life at the very heart of ethical relationality.

Minorities, ethnicity and bodies I would now like to turn to the relationship between corporeality, migration, mobility and the subjugation of ‘other bodies’, and how this cultural form and practice operates to uphold exclusionary formations of population. While certain Indigenous bodies were marked in Andrew Bolt’s writing as non-belonging on the basis of his objection to their visual appearance, other bodies are targeted as being out of place among the population on the basis of smell. This is often in relation to the embodied practices of sweat and the consumption of food, and particularly where such everyday corporeality is witnessed in public spaces. Bodies move across borders but, interestingly, bodies tend also to be absent from the language of migration policy and the structural understandings of multiculturalism and other social mechanisms designed to encourage integration and harmonious sociality. Many national governments express deliberate policies of social integration, harmony and conviviality in settlement of migrant groups and individuals, although these tend to centre on the conceptual hub of citizenship rather than bodily practices. Occasionally, however, there are instances in which the corporeal element of migration and international mobility becomes highlighted, typically in order to make migration conditional on bodies comporting and conforming to relatively narrow views of a unitary national culture. The body, here, is

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separated from culture rather than understood as flesh that is materialised always within diverse cultural practices—it is the migrant body that can be tolerated within the conditionality that the body practices Australian values and ways-of-being. It is worth noting this particular case, because it highlights some of the ways in which Western liberal culture has sought to ‘not see’ the body in order to promote cultural diversity while, simultaneously, enabling policies that ‘will see’ the body in instances and occasions in which cultural diversity is disavowed but the economic benefits of migration are foregrounded. Often neglected in public thinking about population, mobility and belonging, the various scenes and sites of migration are over-determined by bodiliness: the physical crossing of borders, the corporeal risks and embodied precarity of traveling and arriving by boat to seek refuge, the searchable body at the point of a border crossing, the bodily health determinants and conditions for gaining a visa, among others. This indicates, as Mark Salter (2006, pp. 176, 184) puts it, that migration and movement across borders involves an interfacing between the body and the body politic that can be recoded here as an interfacing between corporeality and belonging within population. The body of the temporary or permanent migrant, the body that is performative and, in Butler’s (1993, pp. 4, 15) terms, materialised into particular ways of being bodily within various frameworks of population or being among, alongside or outside population, is a body that is constituted in the conditionality of tolerance. Smell as the physicality of migration and the performativity of migrant bodies within the populations has emerged many times in many countries. One of the more significant examples of smell used to articulate forms of population exclusion occurred in Australia in early 2012 when a former Liberal Party politician and the then-spokesperson on citizenship, Teresa Gambaro, made some inflammatory and insensitive remarks suggesting that new migrants to Australian need to be taught about Australian customs, such as the wearing of deodorant. Gambaro, whose parents were themselves immigrants from Sicily, argued that mandatory ‘cultural awareness training’ should be provided by employers who were bringing in immigrants under the 457 programme, and that Australia was failing in a perceived obligation ‘to teach them how to fit into Australian culture on issues such as health, hygiene and lifestyle’ (Karvelas 2012; Cover 2015). These comments built upon a much older connection between foreignness and the food traditionally associated with non-white or non-Anglo settlers in Australia, which is often represented as either a key benefit of multiculturalism or a problematic representation of foreignness in everyday spaces (Gunew 2000). In his book, All for Australia (Blainey 1984), conservative Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey argued that multicultural tolerance was opposed to the national interest, particularly in terms of the rate of immigration from East Asia. He drew specifically on examples of food and cooking odours to address the ways in which, in his view, non-European migrants sat uneasily or improperly within the Australian population. Here, he referred to letter writers

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concerned about the smell of migrant neighbours’ cooking: ‘Can I tell you what we have to put up with? … They cook on their verandahs, so the sky here is filled with greasy smoke and the smell of goat’s meat … At one stage they were even drying noodles on the clothesline in the backyards’ (p. 132). He argued that these performances of non-Australianness within traditional neighbourhoods can leave an Australian subject ‘feeling like a stranger in her own home’ (Edwards et al. 2000, p. 303). In Blainey’s view, the presence of smells perceived to be foreign smells dispossessed existing Australian citizens from connectivity with their space (Blainey 1984, p. 134). This perspective argued that certain smells associated with migrants were invasive because they overpowered the familiar smells of the normative member of the population. The migrant body is thus tolerable if that subject’s cooking smells conform to the normative cultural practices of cooking within the dominant population. The smell generated by the preparation of food extends in a continuum to the odours that emit from the human body, often related to the consumption of particular foods. Body odour is generated by the excretion from skin glands, and bacterial activity resulting from variances in hygiene, bodily activity, clothing types can generate further odours. All bodies emit odours of varying kinds, although it can be argued that—as with other smells—those that are most familiar to us are rarely smelled, noted or remarked upon. Those that are new or ‘foreign’ are noticeable and draw our attention, not necessarily negatively, but certainly resulting in various reactions that are socially and culturally constituted. There is some evidence of a genetic and racial basis for different types and rates of body odour, with certain body types having fewer sweat glands by heritage, meaning less prone to certain body odours (Stoddart 1990, pp. 60–61). In contemporary Western culture, the late capitalist emphasis on the marketing of products that reduce the emission of bodily odours such as antiperspirants, deodorants, perfumes and other scents has arguably become increasingly (and problematically) central to the normativities by which otherness is discussed in ethnic, gender, age and class demarcations. Without attempting to reduce all bodies into a problematic sameness by pointing out that all bodies do emit odours to varying degrees, it remains that the emission of odours resulting from food consumption and subsequent sweat in the context of the bacteria-ridden earthly environment is part of the condition of being human (or, indeed, animal). Exclusionary attitudes towards diverse or different or unfamiliar body odours are not dissimilar from other kinds of extremist exclusionary tactics that actively target a minority and maintain its minority status by maintaining the subject as non-belonging in the population and in the space inhabited by the ‘true’ population. Just as the indigenous subject is made marginal over time through an act of dispossession that reverberates into a futural unliveability, the perception of migrant bodies as different and therefore unpalatable, by virtue of a weird perception that they smell different, likewise maintains a marginalisation into future generations, providing

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the children and grandchildren with the experience of the violence of being seen as not fully ‘fitting in’ with a perception of normativity required for population belonging. Unethically, this maintains an idea of what constitutes the ‘true’ or ‘real’ population in contrast to marginalised others. It actively establishes a narrative of home as a space that is pure and uncontaminated by otherness (Ahmed 1999, p. 340); one that would be made impure by the presence of otherness that can be detected by the foreign smell of that body’s otherness. The invisibilisation of the body odours that are familiar to us is, in this context, a necessary element in maintaining the problematic myth of the purity of the familiar population before ‘contamination’ by the foreign other.

Bare life and practices of exclusion from population In Chapter 4 I discussed some of the ways in which biopolitical governance is implicated in the role of population concepts and practices in the constitution of identity, particularly when understood as performative and citational, produced through forms of relationality and belonging. There, I pointed to Giorgio Agamben’s (1995) extensions of Foucault’s work on biopolitics, particularly how he showed the way in which disciplinary and biopolitical power systems operate in collusion with sovereign forms of power, and the fact that this produces certain kinds of exclusions by differentiating lived subjectivity between zoë (which might be read at times as bodies living) and bios (which is typically more associated with the liveability of citizenship and belonging). Forms of exclusion, for Agamben (2002, p. 155), produce some subjects ‘bare life’—subjects of survival who are excluded from the social, contractual or ethical protections and promotions of life. Although sovereign power is often understood as a power formation of the past, one that is represented today only as a residue in the forms of the monarchical part of constitutional monarchies, for Agamben it remains more than just a spectre, and is arguably highly interwoven with practices of population management (Barder and Debrix 2011, p. 777, Curtis 2002, p. 506). This is not to say that they necessarily operate in favour of each other, for biopolitics seeks to ‘make live and let die’ in contrast to sovereignty’s ‘let live and make die’, although there are instances of convergence between the two forms, particularly in the context of managing the exclusions of certain kinds or types of bodies from being counted among or countable within a strictly bounded concept of population. As Maurizio Lazzarato (2009) has pointed out, biopolitical regulation finds its limitation in taking charge of the life of the population or subjects in the context of population, and at times relies on sovereignty as a mechanism to secure bonds based on territorialised concepts of space—this is because biopower itself ‘has no localization, or territoriality or its own space’ (p. 131). In the context of the biopolitical production and regulation of the population, then, sovereignty is deployed to ensure that population remains wedded to the figure of the nation-state, which is, from the very beginning, founded in

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racism and read as the construction of difference and the violent exclusion of that which is different. That is, it constructs the other as a race and then mechanises exclusions against it, as we see most clearly in the example of the refugee or asylum seeker (Zylinska 2004, p. 526). Sovereignty operates not only to ‘let die’ those who are turned away from participation in a population, but also to be the mode through which that decision is made—unlike biopolitics, which can handle ranges and continua of normativities, sovereignty demands the forms of exclusivist categorisation that mark the points of entry to a population and the space it inhabits. Indeed, sovereignty is always present in the use of biopolitical tools such passports and visas, with their appeal to the sovereign or the sovereign state, which requests the subject be granted passage (Salter 2006, pp. 169–170), and the forms of power that operate in routine ways at sites of immigration and border crossings, including searches, strip-searches, cavity searches, and the lack of processes for appeal in that strange but familiar space at international airports around the world. Yet these are not wholly sovereign in form, for immigration and passage also always include processes of measurement, record-keeping and regulation as among the primary forms by which biopolitics operates to determine populations in the context of movement of bodies This is the site by which we can see how the domains of sovereignty and biopolitics are interwoven and interconnected. Where sovereignty is deployed, it is not to suppress or oppress, but to make exceptions that exclude in ways that constitute the included. The points of migration are, then, sites at which, in Angela McRobbie’s terms, we bear witness to ‘sovereignty inside governmentality’, which informally licenses the intensification of aggression across everyday life (McRobbie 2006, p. 84). Indeed, for Foucault, the kinds of violence that relate to population and mobility are the reasons why he was determined sovereignty persists rather than was wholly replaced: ‘sovereignty is absolutely not eliminated by the emergence of a new art of government … The problem of sovereignty is not eliminated; on the contrary, it is made more acute than ever’ (Foucault 2007, p. 107). The distinction between sovereignty and the newer disciplinarity and biopolitics is that the former is a power relation that acts directly upon individual subjects, whereas the latter two new technologies act upon actions, including at times future actions that have not yet arisen (Frost 2010, p. 566). Sovereignty, for Agamben, is not control of territorial space or border crossings, nor is it the monopolised control of the means of violence (Owens 2009, p. 571). Rather, the figure of the sovereign is that which decides exceptions to the rule and the law. Agamben derives this point from Carl Schmitt, by invoking the figure of the sovereign who is authorised to suspend the constitution and institute a state of emergency or marshal law. For Agamben (1995), this is a paradox in that the sovereign is both inside and outside the juridical order: ‘the juridical order grants the power of proclaiming a state of exception and, therefore, of suspending the order’s own validity’, then ‘the sovereign stands outside the juridical order and, nevertheless, belongs to it,

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since it is up to him to decide if the constitution is to be suspended in toto’ (p. 15). The rule (and the rule of law) is thus wholly dependent on the possibility of the exception. An exclusion, for Agamben, such as the exclusion that makes a subject homo sacer or bare life, is the exclusion from a general rule that promotes and protects corporeal life in order to promote and protect only some corporeal life, defined as population. Indeed, ‘the sovereign exception is not so much the control or neutralization of an excess as the creation and definition of the very space in which the juridico-political order can have validity’ (Agamben 1995, p. 19). Agamben makes extensive use of the figure of the refugee to demonstrate the centrality of sovereignty in the contemporary conditions of power that make some subjects mere zoë or bare life: If refugees (whose number has continued to grow in our century, to the point of including a significant part of humanity today) represent such a disquieting element in the order of the modern nation-state, this is above all because by breaking the continuity between man and citizen, nativity and nationality, they put the originary fiction of modern sovereignty in crisis. Bringing to light the difference between birth and nation, the refugee causes the secret presupposition of the political domain—bare life— to appear for an instant within that domain. (Agamben 1995, p. 131) Such defining of the population through the problematic representation of the figure of its other as bare life is not, of course, limited only to refugees who emerge from outside the population. This includes all those others described above who are excluded or marginalised from population, including indigenous populations, those of suspicious or mixed or unclear racial background, or who otherwise defy simplistic classification, and those who, by use of pretexts related to the senses of sight and smell, are marginalised for being more recent arrivals into the population. The exclusion, killing, banishment or production of unliveability for such subjects is to make them ‘suddenly cease … to be part of ’ population, to use a phrase of Patricia Owens (2009, p. 387). The point here is that this is not simply about identifying certain bodies and excluding them, but producing and protecting the concept of the national population by manufacturing a figure of abject otherness in order to call for the population’s security. In this way, the power technologies that produce a concept of population do so based entirely on an unethical practice in the first instance: the constitution of population in the exclusion of the other, grounded in a spurious and dispersed logic, itself produced through the tenuous construction of race and racialised difference. With that in mind, the mechanisms by which the figuration of the population as an always national population can only ever be wholly unethical, since this involves making the other bare life, whether that other is those who seek to belong to a national

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population or those from within the population who cease to be members in a moment in which suspicion falls upon them. The task at hand, then, is to develop ways in which a more ethical subjectivity can emerge by refiguring how population, citizenship, membership and globality are perceived, framed and understood, such that a genuine relationality with selves and others is a responsive and ethical one.

Conclusion I have discussed in this chapter several forms of othering that are experienced by minorities in the framework of nationalised population, and the ways in which such othering practices are complicit in the production of certain kinds of belonging and certain kinds of exclusion: the making of lives unliveable, the demands for minority clarity in the face of the complexity of identity, the rejection of minority bodies in public space, and the making of certain subjects bare life through a range of decisions that actively exclude rather than welcome. All of these centre on very vexed questions of life and liveability, of how to live a good life and of how to ensure the same for subjects around us and to whom we are obligated to recognise as worthy of humanity and human belonging. The quarter-century-long approach to corporeality in cultural theory (Grosz 1994, 1995) provides a set of tactics by which we might be better positioned to apprehend the inherent unethical violence that founds the concept of population (a countable group of people in a given place or space) through exclusion, not merely because a perception of bodies often goes hand-in-hand with a call for care of others and care of the self. Rather, looking at relationships between bodies, visuality, space, place and land can help lead us to an ethical framework for understanding population and belonging. Ethics is not a matter simply of who belongs to which population, since practices and frameworks of population belonging actually conditions that ‘who’ in the first instance. Rather, it is a matter of how one belongs and is permitted to belong. That ‘how’ in a contemporary era of mobility, migration, postcolonial issues of continuing indigenous exclusions, cultures of marginalisation and ratings of normativities is a ‘how’ that must be understood through complexity, which means embracing that complexity at the level of diverse corporealities that, by necessity, make up population. I will come back to the question of bodies towards the end of Chapter 10 in considering the connectiveness between bodies, space, environments and ethics of cohabitation as an approach towards a better way of doing population.

References Agamben, G., 1995. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. HellerRoazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G., 2002. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. D. Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books.

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Ahmed, S., 1999. Home and away: narratives of migration and estrangement. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2(3), 329–347. Barder, A.D. and Debrix, F., 2011. Agonal sovereignty: rethinking war and politics with Schmitt, Arendt and Foucault. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 37(7), 775–793. Bird, D., 2011. Aboriginal identity goes beyond skin colour. The Age, 8 April. Available from: www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/. Accessed 8 April 2011. Blainey, G., 1984. All for Australia. North Ryde, Australia: Methuen Haynes. Bock, A., 2011. Bolt echoes a shameful past that’s more than skin deep. The Age, 3 October. Available from: www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/. Accessed 3 October 2011. Butler, J., 1993. Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. London: Routledge. Cover, R., 2012. Queer Youth Suicide, Culture & Identity: Unliveable Lives? London: Ashgate. Cover, R., 2015. Mobility, belonging and bodies: understanding attitudes of anxiety towards temporary migrants in Australia. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 29(1), 32–44. Cover, R., 2016a. Suicides of the marginalised: cultural approaches to suicide, relationality and mobility. Cultural Studies Review, 22(2), 90–113. Cover, R., 2016b. Digital Identities: Creating and Communicating the Online Self. London: Elsevier. Cover, R., 2019. Emergent Identities: New Sexualities, Gender and Relationships in a Digital Era. London: Routledge. Curtis, B., 2002. Foucault on governmentality and population: The impossible discovery. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 27(4), 505–533. Edwards, L., et al., 2000. Food and immigration: the indigestion trope contests the sophistication narrative. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 21(3), 297–308. Foucault, M., 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78. trans. G. Burchell, ed. M. Senellart. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Frost, T., 2010. Agamben’s sovereign legalization of Foucault. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 30(3), 545–577. Frow, J., 2012. Settlement. Cultural Studies Review, 18(1), 4–18. Grosz, E., 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. St. Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin. Grosz, E., 1995. Space, Time and Perversion: The Politics of Bodies. London: Routledge. Gunew, S., 2000. Introduction: multicultural translations of food, bodies, language. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 21(3), 227–237. Karvelas, P., 2012. Hygiene lessons will help migrants intergrate: coalition. The Australian, 10 January. Available from: www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/imm igration/. Accessed 26 January 2012. Kral, M.J., 2016. Suicide and suicide prevention among Inuit in Canada. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 61(11), 688–695. Lazzarato, M., 2009. Neoliberalism in action: inequality, insecurity and the reconstitution of the social. Theory, Culture & Society, 26(6), 109–133. McRobbie, A., 2006. Vulnerability, violence and (cosmopolitan) ethics: Butler’s Precarious Life. The British Journal of Sociology, 57(1), 69–86. Owens, P., 2009. Reclaiming ‘bare Life’?: against Agamben on refugees. International Relations, 23(4), 567–582.

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Povinelli, E., 2002. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Quinn, K., 2010. Aborigines sue Bolt over racial writings. The Age, 18 September. Available from: www.theage.com.au/victoria/. Accessed 18 September 2010. Salter, M.B., 2006. The global visa regime and the political technologies of the international self: borders, bodies, biopolitics. Alternatives, 31(2), 167–189. Stoddart, D.M., 1990. The Scented Ape: The Biology and Culture of Human Odour. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zylinska, J., 2004. The universal acts: Judith Butler and the biopolitics of immigration. Cultural Studies, 18(4), 523–537.

10 Attitudes of welcome: ethics of cohabitation and sustainability

Introduction Population and identity, as I have been arguing in this book, are mutually constitutive through a range of competing frameworks of belonging. In an increasingly globalised world with greater transnational movement of peoples as well as regions persistently marked by the violence of war, persecution and poverty, and a global environment put in a state of ecological precarity, establishing the need for ever greater mobility of peoples, one of the most significant factors governing belonging relates to the practices that enable, prevent or circumscribe mobility across national borders. Such movement has included refugees or ‘forced migrants’, many of whom have spent years in refugee camps waiting for United Nations support for sponsored residency in other regions, while others have been forced in desperation to seek non-official means of finding safety and a liveable life for themselves and their families. Despite persistent public calls for a rights-based ethics that accepts and welcomes refugees who come by any means on the basis of their flight from violence, justice remains elusive due to the ways in which the figure of the refugee remains demonised in a considerable amount of public sphere discourse. At times, this has been due to the paranoia-driven perception that forced migrants are attempting to enter countries in waves of such magnitude that an existing national population will become overpopulated with those radically different from what is articulated as an existing identity and culture (Limbu 2009, p. 268). At other times, the rejection of an welcoming responsiveness towards refugees has been justified through coding forced migrants and those without identification documents as disguised terrorists, invaders, criminals or those who would criminally overuse welfare (Turner 2003, p. 415; Klocker and Dunn 2003, p. 77). How a national population orients itself towards the figure of the refugee or towards an ethical relationship with others, migrants, the world, the climate, the ecology, the Earth, the subjugated peoples, and many others depends substantially on how attitudes towards otherness and towards complex topics of mobility and sustainability are produced, maintained or changed.

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Today, various national and international policies on population, immigration, responses towards arguably small numbers of refugees and asylum seekers, and to the relationship between populations, mobility and ecological sustainability, are not driven by questions of justice, nor of precedent, international conventions or agreements. Rather, as has increasingly been argued (Aly 2010), border protection, immigration policies and responses to climate change continue to be driven by public polling on attitudes, whether they be attitudes towards a perceived ‘refugee problem’ or conspiracy theories about climate science and its objectives. Attitudes here are both produced by and related to national governmental planning for the future electoral successes, rather than to impartial policies, knowledge, administrative continuity and efforts towards genuine sustainability. This fact leads to important questions as to the place of attitude in contemporary culture, how and why particular attitudes towards the otherness of population’s others can change, whether that be in response to the subject seeking to join the population in flight from violence or the climate migrant who seeks a space of liveability when their island is disappearing into a rising ocean. Attitude, as a habitual mode of regard towards an object of thought, is a complex term, typically discussed within the field of psychology. While the idea of attitude itself is both problematic and under-theorised from a cultural perspective, it is a term that is invoked regularly in discussions about the perception of refugees, the notion of a refugee problem, and the public understanding of government policy and international conventions in relation to mobility, climate and global ecological sustainability. Attitudes are habitual in the sense that they condition particular kinds of responses that are not necessarily fully conscious, reasoned, rational or dependent on knowledge, and can be sustained even when a conscious instance of acceptance or new responsiveness has been invoked in an encounter with otherness. Understanding how attitude is a factor in the maintenance of certain problematic conceptualisations of population and the dominance of nationalism in defining and circumscribing the meaning of population, movement and belonging, is vital from a perspective seeking justice. The relative absence of the concept of attitude from cultural theory is notable when critically engaging with popular perspectives on refugees in the broad global context of an international ‘wicked problem’. It is thus important for cultural theory to take into account the way in which attitude is marked by the relationship between policy, ethics and bodily vulnerability. The failure of cultural theory to engage more strongly with the concept of attitude is not merely the result of border policing between the disciplinary areas that tend to relegate ‘attitude’ as an object for psychological studies, but a distancing of a term used heavily in marketing and non-scientific opinion polling. More importantly, perhaps, the unwillingness to investigate the complex ways in which attitude, subjectivity, relationality and ethics are interwoven is the result of understanding attitude as a personal and individual disposition that is easily changed and fixates on the banal and the everyday

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rather than on matters of profound ethical and political importance. However, by viewing attitude as performative—as the discursively constituted expression or articulation of regard towards others—opens the opportunity to see how it is related to the maintenance of the cultural conditions that frame and/or prevent the capacity for ethical responsiveness to others by subjects, publics, communities and nations. Population is figured through a range of articulations of relationality, belonging, similitude as well as exclusion and otherness, and it is particularly the case that the focus of marginalisation is presented against those who seek to join a population and belong to it. By virtue of seeking belonging in particular ways (often because they do not belong elsewhere), refugees are responded to through frameworks of attitudes that position them as being impossible to belong to the population. By seeking to belong, the attitude is that they must be radically excluded. There is thus considerable need for an investigation as to how ‘attitude’ operates to condition the field of ethical relations, particularly in the context of how refugees, asylum seekers, forced migrants and displaced persons are perceived to impact on the concept of a national population and a national identity. From where I have been writing in Australia, one often sees the use of the term attitude in relation to public and community debates about refugees and asylum seekers, particularly in relation to those arriving by boat and those who have been held in detention. Public attitudes are regularly measured not only by newspapers and polling companies, but by political parties looking to gain an electoral advantage by deciding on how intensely they should focus on making it easier or more difficult for asylum seekers to become part of the population. The term is also often used by those who have developed programmes designed to change how the public perceive asylum seekers and thus to vote in elections and polls accordingly. In February and March 2008, for example, Oxfam Australia developed an events programme called Refugee Realities, which took members of the general public and school groups through a simulated refugee experience, and was designed to ‘generate empathy and encourage progressive attitudes towards refugees and asylum seekers’ (Oxfam Australia 2008, p. 16). Testing through surveys the impact this experience had on knowledge about and attitudes towards refugees, results for the question ‘How has the exhibition affected your attitude towards refugees, if at all’ showed 75 per cent of respondents stating ‘I feel more compassionate toward refugees’ (p. 12). Additionally, a number of studies have attempted to measure ‘negative attitudes’ towards refugees (e.g. Schweitzer et al. 2005). The connection between ‘attitude’ and ‘refugees’ also spirals out of statistics into various forms of judgement and valuation. The use of the concept of attitude in relation to questions about refugees seeking hospitality and safety within the Australian population regularly included questions of whether or not asylum seekers arriving by boat should have their applications processed in Australia or at Australian-run sites overseas and outside of the country’s sovereign territory. Media commentary on the former Gillard government’s attempt to find an offshore processing and exchange solution, and the High

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Court of Australia’s finding that the proposed arrangement was not legal, resulted in former Prime Minister Gillard being understood to have ‘incorrectly guessed the attitude of the High Court to the sort of offshore processing that, in various forms, has been going on for years’ and that ‘nearly everyone else incorrectly guessed the court’s attitude’ (Glover 2011). Thus ‘attitude’ is closely associated in public discourse with the construction of refugee identity, population management and population change. Attitude shifts in the context of refugee debates also formed a very instructive element in the narrative of a three-part documentary screened on SBS Australia in June 2011, Go Back To Where You Came From, which I have written about elsewhere (Cover 2013). This popular documentary reflected the style developed within reality television programming in which mystery and revelation are significant elements in the unfolding of a narrative, in addition to encouragement for audiences to comment, respond or participate to some extent through online forums. The narrative was framed by the question as to whether or not experiencing particular ‘scenes’ common in a refugee journey from fleeing a country of origin to spending time in refugee camps and other countries might have an impact on the participants’ attitudes towards refugees and, by corollary, the attitudes of the viewers and audience members. I will return to some of the examples from this programme later in this chapter. Attitudes are also both expressed and discussed in the context of migrants in public spaces, especially those who are visibly or culturally different. As discussed in the previous chapter, there is a long history in many countries of expressing negative attitudes about cooking smells and body odours of the migrant other, and of scholars and public commentators identifying these as an attitude problem (Cover 2015). From the perspective of understanding public discourse on refugees, then, the concept of attitude frames discussions, debates, policy initiatives, surveys, interviews, artistic experimentation and the relating of refugee stories. Attitude can be fixed, adopted, changed or reoriented, but its role as a mechanism that governs and deploys power relations through performative articulations can be examined by seeing not only how attitude is repeated to continue inequitable or unethical relations, but also how it shifts—sometimes unexpectedly—in ways that might be implicated in our search for pathways towards ethical relationality. Thinking about attitude as an affective orientation towards otherness among or outside a population opens the possibility of using the notion of attitude to gauge the capacity of persons to welcome refugees. One way to look at this is through Judith Butler’s framework of ethics (see below), built on the recognition of the vulnerability of others through the commonality of vulnerability as a condition of human subjectivity. Attitude, as a performativity of selfhood towards otherness, operates to produce recognisability, thereby having an effect not only on the everyday relationships between national citizens and new arrivals who have a refugee background, but on the ways in which government border protection policies are grounded in public opinion. The purpose of this chapter is, therefore, to explore some of the ways in which post-structuralist approaches

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to ethics can help us rethink population vis-à-vis the concept of welcome and hospitality, whether that be welcoming the migrant or refugee other who seeks to join with the population, or welcoming the possibilities of apprehending the relationship between population growth and ecological sustainability towards a more ethical relationship between bodies and space. I will first work through some of the ethical underpinning that obliges or demands an ethical responsiveness towards refugees and asylum seekers that must occur at the level of population and not the individual to be truly ethical. I will then turn to some of the ways in which attitude either prevents such an obligatory welcome or enables an adjustment towards a more ethically focused frame for perceiving the migrant or refugee other. I would like to end this chapter and the book overall with some comments on ignorance, climate change and ethics of cohabitation that demand a non-violent relationship not only among and between populations but between the population and the spaces it inhabits (the Earth).

The vulnerability of population’s others Butler has put forward the most cogent framework for a twentieth century ethics relevant to the relationship between population, belonging and otherness by arguing that an ethical stance must begin from the possibility of recognising the commonality of the precariousness of life in order to explore the ‘conditions of life, life as something that requires conditions in order to become a liveable life’ (Butler 2009a, pp. 22–23). The condition for a life to be liveable is that it has a possibility of a future beyond the day-to-day static experience of the refugee camp. This is the futurity of subjectivity that, as Joseph Pugliese points out, does not exist for the refugee in detention or on a temporary protection visa, which, he notes, structurally ‘precludes the possibility for refugees to project their lives into the future’ (Pugliese 2004, p. 299). Where the present comes to occupy the full possibility of one’s everyday experience as totality, it maintains a psychological extension of the incarceration experience in detention camps (pp. 300–301) and is thereby unethical in that the failure to address the futurity of the other both exhausts and terminates the possibility of justice (p. 306). Having a liveable life requires futurity: a sense that one can live into the future, and this is closely tied up with the relationship between the cultural demand for coherent and intelligible subjectivity and population belonging. On the one hand, having a future is necessary for intelligible identity and thus for belonging and participation. On the other, belonging to a population in relationality is vital for futurity. In that context, it is multiply produced but essential to liveability and subjecthood. However, the extent to which exposure to stories that are designed to help recognise the condition of unliveability experienced by refugees enculturates not only a new attitude but also an ethical responsiveness to asylum seekers is questionable, as I will go on to show later in the chapter. In other words, does bearing witness to vulnerability (Lingis 1994, pp. 178–179) play a role in producing a reciprocity and recognition?

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Why welcome population’s others? The concepts of population and nationhood are inextricably linked, defining each other and sometimes being used in place of each other. This is particularly the case when that which is considered other to the national population—the applicant for immigration, the refugee, the asylum seeker or other potential or successful migrant—is within the frame. The question for us, however, is whether the idea of ‘population’, as it is constituted alongside concepts of nation, nationality, national interest and nationhood, can allow for an ethical responsiveness and relationality with migrants, refugees and others who may ‘arrive’. We can include into this arrival the knowledge of ongoing climate disaster as that which changes (and must change) how we think about and perform population and belonging, not only because it will produce the mobility of climate migrants in the not-too-distant future, but also because it opens enormous questions of liveability and whether current ways of perceiving and practicing population will produce not only unliveable lives but an unliveable world. I will return to the questions of climate towards the end of this chapter when I discuss cohabitation, but it is important to say at this point that the ethical obligations in relation to responding to our new knowledge of climate change and the ethical obligations that require a response to displaced persons, migrants, refugees and asylum seekers are not mutually exclusive. What matters is that both are ‘welcomed’ into the worldviews that make the concept of population signify as a framework for belonging and identity rather than exclusion or death. There is, therefore, a need to think beyond the idea of a population formed and circumscribed by an exclusivist, historical nationalism, rather than assume that the increased development of supranational human rights organisations advising national governance systems will lead to an ethical form of belonging that provides futurity and liveability to the other. Rather, it may require destroying central aspects of biopolitical governance that continue to foreground the nation in how we speak about and apprehend concepts of population. A post-national ethics here operates as an obligatory form of intersubjectivity relationality, although it will be operating differently in the different frameworks of subject and institution or community. Following Levinas (1969), the encounter with the face—real or metaphorical—can be the site at which ethics is demanded and by which we are called upon to respond, recognise and offer hospitality and welcome. If subjects in their singularity are able to achieve this, if there can be attitudinal and identity shifts that allow an ethical relationality with the other, a responsiveness that disavows violence towards the other, then might it be possible for the nation and its administration of borders, crossings and citizenship likewise to engage ethically with the migrant or potential migrant? In terms of international relations, nations as sovereign states are often represented as having a form of subjectivity of their own, separate and beyond the subjectivity of the populations in whose name the nation appears to act. However, in the context of the

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biopolitical operations of governance where border protection is the mechanism for managing population as its object, is it possible for the nation and its institutions themselves to adopt a position of welcome, regardless of what individual subjects desire and/or the attitudes they hold? Does an ethics that is performed through an attitude of welcome and hospitality at an individual level transpose itself to the administrative functions of a nation-state? And if it can, what are the mechanisms that make such a transposition possible? To put this another way, the nation itself is not the source of all violence against the migrant other, yet it is a significant source of violence. For Butler (2009b), looking to the nation as the solution to violence and to rely on the nation-state for protection from violence is to ‘exchange one potential violence for another’, even though this may be one of the few available choices open to a singular subject (p. 26). In this context, then, the question is whether the nation can be transformed into that which can operate in ways that engage the migrant other without violence, or if the nation itself needs to be done away with so that populations as a broad collectivity of subjects can, en masse, articulate and perform a hospitality without violence. To welcome migrants is not just to permit entry across borders, to provide citizenship papers or to tolerate cultural practices different from those of the majority or the mythical norm. Rather, it is to open the concept of population to a persistent becoming through acknowledging that the population, its size, its age distributions and its make-up are always, in the first place, in a state of perpetual change and transformation. To welcome the other, then, is to transform the population, but also to take note of the fact that, through birth, death, generations, ageing and internal migration, the population has always been in a state of flux—a process towards becoming. Indeed, the question of the population’s collective identity is a vexed one, but in the context of almost all Western countries a national identity is expressed in popular deliberation and through political and ritualistic processes. That identity is, of course, always mythical. Much as the individual performative subject, constituted in discourse and reiterating the category and behaviours that make that identity intelligible is always in a never-ending process of becoming (Butler 1990, p. 70), the identity or subjecthood of the national population—represented by the signifier nation or people—is likewise always processual and thus in a state of transformative flux. Indeed, the nation can be understood as the subject that is performative and thus always constituted in an array of processes that are regulated: the subject is not determined by the rules through which it is generated because signification is not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition that both conceals itself and enforces its rules precisely through the production of substantializing effects. (Butler 1990, p. 145)

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In this context, acknowledging that a population’s identity as a group formation is always a process towards becoming something opens the ethical possibility of understanding the population as being capable of welcoming new arrivals such as migrants and refugees unproblematically by virtue of the fact that the transformation wrought through diverse migration is not, after all, a threat to the national stability of the population’s composition and identity. Rather, that that stability was always mythical in the first place. In the ethical position put forward by Emmanuel Levinas, which has been drawn upon heavily by Butler in her thinking on ethics, vulnerability, recognisability and framing, the needs of the other are figured as our spiritual needs—one is obliged by virtue of being a subject ‘to apprehend the Other’s material needs and put those needs first’ (Butler 2006, p. 127). The subject is summoned by the other to assume responsibility for the other’s welfare without recompense or payment. In the context of this encounter and this response the subject is inherently transformed (Levy 2006, p. 489). In putting this into the perspective of population change and immigration, then, there is already an obligation to respond to the other’s call for recognition, which, in this case, is the call to be permitted to enter the population and belong to it, to participate and move among it, and to share in the resources, benefits, protections and life-sustaining climate enjoyed by it. Recognising this obligation results in the transformation of the population, not by virtue of the change to its make-up that occurs in adding a migrant or refugee, either temporarily or as a resettlement in belonging, but through the act of responding in relationality to the migrant and the migrant’s call for recognition. Responding to the other is to give welcome and hospitality such that in welcoming the other, one brings the other into one’s home, not as an object but by virtue of the need to offer ‘things which are mine to the Other’ (Levinas 1969, p. 76). In doing so, the language of the welcome is an act of ‘calling into question of the I’ (p. 171), which occurs because the subject is linguistically constituted by the other, and thus exists for the other and is thus obligated towards the other (p. 261). That is, prior to the act of migration, the national population is constituted by the otherness of the other, and in the encounter with the other that comes through the request for asylum or permission to settle, the subjectivity of the population is obliged to welcome the other without the violence of conditionality or decision. For Derrida (2001), an ethics of welcome or hospitality is not something that is cultivated and does not emerge simply through culture but precedes it by virtue of the formulation that ethics is hospitality. To act in a manner of hospitality is not necessarily always an ethical hospitality, ‘because being at home with oneself … supposes a reception or inclusion of the other which one seeks to appropriate, control, and master according to different modalities of violence’ (p. 17). Hospitality depends on a paradox of ontology: an interruption of the self by the self as other (Derrida 1999, p. 52). An ethics of welcome, in Derrida’s reading of Levinas, then, is one that cannot emerge from within a juridical and political framework (Limbu 2009, p. 263). Rather, hospitality depends on the interruption of the subject with itself. In the case of

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national and international politics, this means the interruption of the population, which is ethically bound to offer receptiveness to the migrant. The population as an object of study, a thing, is transformed not by virtue of the addition of the other to its numbers, but by virtue of the codes that define the population as a particular kind of population—a national population, a national body. To welcome the migrant other, then, refers to an ethical obligation of a national population group to perform that welcome without conditionality and within the context that the welcome not only radically critiques the national group that performs the welcome, but also is given in a manner that does not depend merely on a democratic inclusion of that other into the population, rather, an ethical national population must always be undone by its encounter with the other. There is no assessing and asking what it is the migrant will do to conform to the national population’s styles or behaviours or attitudes, nor can there be an assessment as to what the migrant will bring to the population, for these are not the welcome in the sense given by Levinas and, later, Derrida. Rather, the welcome of the migrant other is always a hospitality that is the deconstruction of ‘at-home’ (Pugliese 2004, p. 292), and for a national population that brings about not only a disjuncture between unconditionality and sovereignty (Derrida 2001, p. 59), but a separation between the idea of population and nation such that no population is at-home in the bounded land it calls home. To ask the question as to why welcome the migrant other into the population is to call for an answer that, in simple terms, would be to state that the welcome must be offered because it is ethical to do so, because it is unethical to make categorical decisions, unethical to refuse entry, unethical to categorise, and unethical to utilise nationalistic citizenship regimes as the means of undertaking a sovereign decision as to how a population is constituted and changed or reframed. All of these unethical acts are violences that are dependent on the concept of ‘nation’ to uphold their internal logic of righteousness and decision-making, and all privilege a few in ways that are opposed to the democratic, accepting welcome. The concept of ‘nation’ here does not merely signify nationality, ethnic or cultural make-up, but denotes population composition (and sometimes population size) as static and unchanging. Yet pointing to the fact that the subjectivity of the ‘national population’ as imagined is inherently bound up in such violences presents the call for an ethics of welcome, a responsiveness to the other that is non-violent by virtue of the unconditional offer of hospitality. Such an ethics, of course, is prevented by the ways in which the migrant is not recognised as simultaneously other and a member of the population, due predominantly to the ways in which the population is imagined as frozen, fixed and identifiable or intelligible along the lines of a particular set of stated criteria. The nation is, indeed, founded upon the very idea of its other—the foreigner who cannot be permitted to remain or who can settle but only under particular conditions. National institutions, governance administrative

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units, the formations of national identity and the rituals that circulate, reinforce and maintain national identity are dedicated to upholding an unethical denial of the migrant’s welcome into the population in order to maintain, not its sovereignty, but the conceptualisation of its population as object. While an ethical response is self-evident to some, through various means of making ethics intelligible, for others, the framing of debates and the available discourses that constitute the figure of the refugee mean that a response of welcome, of non-categorisation and of non-violence in both physical and linguistic terms is not always the habitual form of response. What, then, are the reasons why an ethical responsiveness is required for those who seek to belong to a population, and thus to produce its more obvious changes or transformations?

The violence of the nation’s decision: framing prevention of ethics of welcome The figure of the nation, and its dominance not only of concepts of population but also of processes and practices that decide who can be part of a population, is at the core of that which constructs frameworks that prevent a people from acting—as a whole—ethically towards others. The process of the decision is key. Such decision-making is not entirely dissimilar from the ‘sovereign decision’ identified by Giorgio Agamben in his assessment of biopolitics and sovereignty. Agamben (1995) draws on the constitutional example of the state of exception whereby a sovereign power is permitted to suspend the juridical order and enact a state of martial law. It is the sovereign who can make this decision, empowered by law to suspend that same law by deciding when a state or situation is exceptional. In this scenario, ‘the decision must be distinguished from the juridical regulation … and authority proves itself not to need law to create law’ (p. 16). By the very notion of the state of exception, the sovereign power creates and guarantees the situation that the law requires for its own validity (p. 17). The foundation of society is not, for Agamben, to be found in the model of the city or the social contract or liberal–pluralist sociality, but in the sovereign decision that is ‘continually operative in the civil state’ (p. 109). The decision, as foundation, occurs at the point and in the event of deciding when (and which) life ‘ceases to be politically relevant’ and is thereby relegated to bare life, sacred life in the sense of a life that can be killed or left to die (pp. 139–140). In this sense, then, the apparatus of decision-making over migrant bordercrossings is that which relegates subjects to bare life, in that it is a decision that does not concern itself with the futurity of the stranger who attempts to enter the nation or become part of its population, but turns it back, much as we see in the case of refugees arriving by boat sans-papiers either ending up in detention or turned away, dying on beaches or waiting in unliveable conditions for years (and sometimes decades) to be processed as ‘genuine’ refugees (Allard and Needham 2012). This is to treat those migrants, refugees and displaced persons as ‘bare life’ in Agamben’s sense of the homo sacer: a life

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that is excluded not only here from citizenship, but in the sense of its capacity to be killed without the charge of homicide (or made to live an unliveable life), the life that is not protected by the state (Agamben 1995). The decision to banish forced migrants—to force them not to be migrants—is, on the one hand, a sovereign decision to exclude such persons from participation in the population as citizens able to engage in the political scene, but, on the other hand, politicises these lives by deciding on their unliveability (Agamben 1995, p. 142). The process of decision-making is, regardless of the outcome, unethical in that it makes the migrants or potential migrants the object of biopolitics—as those who can be regulated and governed in a permanent ‘state of exception’, outside normal legal frameworks (Owens 2009, pp. 567–568), particularly in terms of those legal frameworks that are utilised for other decisions concerning the population (existing and those yet-to-be-born). Indeed, the distinction between a population’s future subject who is a child of citizens and the future subject who is a migrant seeking asylum, entry or permission to settle is significant here in the process of decision-making. The decision to conceive a child is a decision that is made in the private realm, even though it is sometimes not a decision and at other times it is a decision that is implicated in policy, including policies that promote increases (or decreases) in the national fertility rate. It is, however, an arbitrary distinction between accepting entry into the population of the child who is born and the excessive regimentation that governs permission of entry into that population of the migrant. Biopolitics, in the name of the nation, does not refuse entry into the national population of the one who is born into it, only the one who arrives and seeks membership among it. Indeed, the failure of ethics here is that the subject of alterity who makes the call to be recognised as a member of the population, as worthy of entry, as vulnerable and thus obliging us to responsiveness, is the subject who can be refused. Whereas the subject who, born in vulnerability and tacitly demanding protection but not at all asking for membership in an ostensible demand for recognition, is never refused membership. It is that arbitrariness that points to the unwillingness of the nation—founded on sovereignty, decision, exception and othering—to permit entry into the population in the same way as being wholly unethical. The migrant is thus the object of a decision, which is a first form of violence by which the migrant is subjected. The birthed citizen, conversely, is not grounded in cultural, administrative, legal and disciplinary processes of the sort that dehumanise the migrant or potential migrant in the context of being at the site of entry into the population. This distinction opens the question of the humanity of the human being. The normative meaning of ‘human’ is, of course, that which allows a nation to condemn the migrant who is turned away to the violence that the migrant might be seeking to escape, which is, then, a secondary violence subsequent to the decision that refuses entry and the decision that citizens born are given precedence and an automatic, uncontested right of participation among the population. As we have seen in Butler’s more recent reformulation of Levinas’s ethics, to not be responsive to

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the other who demands recognition and to fail to recognise that other as both human and different is to act without ethics and to disavow the ethics that call upon us, and call upon the nation, as subjects (Butler 2009a). In pointing to the corporeality of this process, then, it is possible to see that the moment at which one is determined as ‘human’—the moment of birth (something that is common to all humanity) is that which is graded depending on a decision as to where that birth occurred. The birth that occurred within the territorial lands of the nation or, perhaps, in the site and sight of the parents who are members of that nation, is—as has been already decided or assured—the humanity of the human beyond the humanity of other humans. The decidability of the decision on the recognition of migrants as worthy of participation in a national population is grounded in that very nationness, whereby the decision’s sovereignty is built upon the perception of an emergency in which the nation is under threat from its other. Thus the migrant, the refugee and the temporary worker are actively made other by the idea of a threat to the nation that precedes them. A second form or site of violence against the other enacted in the name of the nation and the population is the violence of refusal of entry through maintaining the disempowerment of the stranger who has no status, which at times can include the refugee or forced migrant: that is, is the stranger who ‘by the entire writ of the law, both national and international’ remains stateless (Dillon 1999, pp. 132–133). As with the above, this involves a decision, but it is a decision that not only makes the migrant the object of a decision, but a decision that decides in advance to refuse, whether that be a policy decision to reduce migration or reject refugees or process refugees at offshore sites, or a decision made in how individual assessments of subjects seeking membership in a population are conducted. This, in the case of refugees, is a violence that threatens an existing precariousness of citizenship and, more importantly, the brutality of a lost citizenship without access to a new or alternative one. Derrida’s (1999) formulation here identifies the subject who is sans-papiers and sans domicile fixe (without papers and without abode) as the worthy object of a justice that calls for new international laws, new border politics and new humanitarian politics that operate beyond the interests of the nation-state. The failure of justice is in the refusal to welcome into the population those who make the call for it—the deliberate call by approaching the border without papers, crossing a space destined in policy to have a great wall, for example—to respond ethically to those who have no state, no home, and none of the privileges that documentation bring. Additionally, it should be borne in mind that the utilisation of the refugee without home or citizenship as other (as an unethical means by which to uphold the concept of the nation-state) is a repetition of the violence through which, as Derrida (2001, p. 57) rightly points out, all nation-states are born—the trace of the extra-legal instituting moment. While arguments citing the stress on urban infrastructure and other resources are, as we saw in Chapter 3, often employed as a means by which to say, sometimes sorrowfully, that the migrant is not welcome among the

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nation’s population, the duty of hospitality is, as Derrida (1999, pp. 72–73) has argued, an ethical requirement to accept those who come to settle among that population, even though they are foreigners. It is a duty that cannot be reduced to a begrudging tolerance. Humanity is not humanity if it is built on the refusal to accept the stranger among the population, if its privilege or if the day-to-day performative rituals and enactments that make that identity a subject are grounded in the denial or refusal to transform the population by accepting the other within and among it. While many migrants as persons moving either permanently or temporarily around the globe are doing so for reasons of being near family, a change of scene, for new employment or other reasons that might relate more to comfort than need, it does remain that other migrants are forced into migration by circumstances that they have no capacity to change or participate in changing (Appadurai 2003, p. 19). Such forced migrants seeking to escape the conditions of life as unliveable lives are, as we know, routinely refused entry as a matter of policy. The refusal here is, of course, a refusal not based on a concern about the expansion of the population, but one that sponsors expansion of the population to occur in other ways. It draws a strict dichotomy in refusing membership for those located outside the border and yet not doing so for those born within the border (except in the case of those born to non-citizens and other categorisations, for whom there is a similar establishment of borders and welcome/refusal statements). For Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak, the absence of ethics in the refusal of entry into a nation-state is located at the site of the line that is drawn ‘between the inside and the outside of the nation-state’ (Butler and Spivak 2007, p. 34) They note that this line and the mechanisms deployed for containing or expelling are implicated in the drawing of that line, which, then, implies that the line is arbitrary but is not necessarily always deliberately decided, indeed it can be the result of historical forces that operate to uphold the concept of the nation. In the light of the ways in which the two constructed concepts of nation and population are inherently tied together, the population to which one belongs is built on the mechanisms and processes, then, which can enact that refusal. Meaning that our very identities as members of a population or as citizens of a nation are grounded in an unethically arbitrary distinction between the inner and the outer of the population. Where that line is deployed unethically is not simply in the refusal of entry to the stranger, but in the fact that the refusal manufactures and produces the stranger—it is the ‘making strange’ of the person who attempts to join the population, regardless as to how that person arrived. For John Frow, ethical arguments that depict an ‘us’, who do or do not welcome an other depicted as them’, fail to come to terms with the fact that all subjects are strangers to each other in a cultural environment in which ,familiarity and strangeness constantly intermingle and the positions of native and stranger change depending on context, (Frow 2012, p. 5). One important aspect of this is that ethics that attempt to state that no one is a stranger (or strange) are

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problematic in that there is a tendency to cover over difference and alterity by making all persons common. However, in order to do so, there still needs to be an outsider against which that commonality is determined. In that sense, the identity of a national population is grounded in a determination of its other as the object of he or she who is not a member of that population. In doing so, the otherness of some is ‘covered over’ or invisibilised, while the otherness of others is made so strange that entry into that population is refused with the justification of strangeness deployed to moralise that refusal. Critiquing the production of strangeness as a means by which to point to ethical problems in the regimes and systems and logics that manage population change is not, then, to disavow alterity. Rather, it is to point to the ways in which acts of ‘making strange’ posit the foreigner, the new arrival or the attempted migrant as ‘too other’ to be permitted to enter. Of course, the manufacture of strangeness and estrangement is one that occurs on a continuum, from the demand that migrants already within a national population conform to a set of norms, such as discarding the headscarves that may have religious or ethnic meaning and significance for those people, to incarceration of the asylum seeker rather than permitting that subject to mingle with the population, whether temporarily or as a permanent settler, to the outright but arbitrarily determined refusal to permit entry to those who seek it. The stranger is seen to be automatically capable of being conceived and subjected through a notion of refusal because they are strange, in the sense that they do not belong within the population but belong to an imagined non-population that is radically ‘other’ to the host country or the population they seek to join (Turner 2003, p. 412). Estrangement and the production of the other as both strange and as stranger is unethical, then, for several reasons. At one level, it enacts a violence through reductively determining the status of a subject as unable to participate socially, unable to forge belonging within a population group or being dehumanised wholly (Asad 2009, p. 24). At another level, it is deployed to refuse entry, even if the reasons for the refusal are given differently—such as policy by way of infrastructure demands, or administration by way of inadequate paperwork. Other forms of violent dehumanisation are grounded in the interpretative frames that govern the act of refusal of entry or settlement. One further example is the contemporary norm of Western governments adopting a stance of seeking to be seen to be ‘tough’ on immigration, which usually goes along with other authoritarian ‘toughness’ regimes, such as on drug use or crime (Vukov 2003, p. 339). Very often, the stance of refusing to take in refugees or reducing immigration numbers is based on viewing migrants as a burden (Klocker and Dunn 2003, p. 84) on the existing members of the population, typically by citing infrastructural stresses, space, school places or social security use as evidence of that burden. By stereotyping migrants as a burden, by linking the identity ‘migrant’ with the characteristic of ‘unwanted load’ or ‘free-loader’, the stance of toughness is justified in the public sphere as the appropriate government stance, regardless of ethical concerns. Where

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the refusal of entry on this basis is, then, a form of violence in addition to those already discussed, it is by virtue of the fact that this combination fails to recognise the migrant as anything but an object for which toughness is the only response. Indeed, toughness is complex, as it is not merely about a governance stance of refusing entry, but about needing to be tough with oneself—that even in the face of the need for an overwhelmingly ethical response, violence is the necessarily ‘expected’ form of responsibility of governments through refusal. Arguably, this is a position that emerges through the juxtapositioning of masculinity, nationalism and toughness—a frame that forecloses on many ethical alternatives grounded in care, care of the other, care of space, and care of the self. A third form of violence is enacted in the linguistic categorisation of the migrant or refugee as other. Violence is always discerned in conceptualisation and the drawing of grammatical and linguistic distinctions, which is, of course, central to the structuration of language and certain types of ethics (Frazer and Hutchings 2011). From a Derridean perspective, all language and writing is violent, due to language’s involvement in difference, classification and the system of appellations, and this is no less violent than when subjects are ‘classified and grouped [as] they can have their individuality obliterated and overlain with some other order of naming’ (Frazer and Hutchings 2011, p. 10). That is, from Derrida’s perspective in his rereading of Levinas’s ethics, there is little point in asserting that categorisation and conceptualisation are non-violent compared with physical coercion and force (although, for Derrida, it is acceptable to differentiate between the least violence and worst violence, which calls then for a determination as to where categorisation might sit ethically in terms of, say, doing nothing for refugees and migrants at all). In the case of refugees and asylum seekers, particularly in the context of national debates on the topic, the violence of classification demands a justice and an ethics; violence occurs through the categorisation of refugees as other, but also through certain naming techniques, such as ‘illegal immigrants’, not only a misnomer given that asylum seekers very much legally seek refuge under the United Nations Convention—and are only illegal if they refuse to leave after a refugee claim has been assessed and rejected (West 2012)—which operate as a signifier that categorises legitimate from illegitimate refugees, asylum seekers from legal migrants, and detainees from accepted refugees. In that sense, the call for justice is a response to the two violences that occur—the primary linguistic violence of categorisation, and the secondary socio-political categorisations that stereotype, mark and demarcate, in often arbitrary ways, coalescing a complex pattern and history of experience, journey and request for asylum into a small set of signifiers that are regularly utilised as a means to represent their unbelonging in a Western or host country. If we are to take these three calls for justice in a non-relativistic way as the calls for an ethics of non-violence towards (or an ethics of welcome for) the asylum seeker or refugee, then what is called for is a change in attitude (the habitual orientation for responsiveness of subjects to others) to one that is constituted in an ethics of non-violence.

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Categorisation occurs in multiple ways and, again, it is not only in the context of administrative assessment, tribunal appeal or executive decisionmaking that the migrant is rated, assessed and categorised in ways that are reductive and violent. At both policy and cultural levels (and these are always highly intertwined), categorisation combines the first violence of the sovereign or arbitrary decision with the second, the potential for refusal. But it does so by relying on certain forms of categorisation and differentiation that can be acts of ethical violence. For example, the conventions of refugee representation tend to categorise refugees and migrants in terms of population numbers. Following Edward Said, Bishupal Limbu points to the exile as a personage excluded from the nation who is typically depicted and categorised as a solitary figure of little threat. The refugee or migrant, on the other hand, is depicted through the conceptual imagination of a large mass of people forming an ‘overwhelming influx of unwanted persons’, disruptive to the national order (Limbu 2009, p. 268). This categorisation of the individual subject as forming part of a subpopulation that threatens to overwhelm the wider population shifts easily, as Limbu indicates, from media depiction into policy discourse of national governments as well as non-government organisations (Limbu 2009, p. 268). In that way, the demand for recognition and entry by the migrant is clouded by the categorisation of that subject as belonging to— and identifiable both with and as—a larger population. Indeed, in several ways this serves to position the subject categorically not only as other but as within a duality of races. As Foucault (2004, p. 77) notes, until recently race did not refer to groups of persons identified by a biological attribute or heritage. Rather, the middle ages saw the development of what was considered a race struggle—not between two ethnic groups, but to a perpetual interaction between two groups determined otherwise, which may be language, custom, religion or forms of citizenship and belonging, whereby relations of oppression operate along that set of categorisations. In the context of migration, it can be argued that there are two races that result from the depiction and categorisation of the migrant as other (a hoard of others at the physical and conceptual borders of the nation’s population) and this categorisation can be understood through a concept of race struggle. For Foucault (2004), we can say that two races exist when there are two groups which, although they coexist, have not become mixed because of the differences, dissymmetries, and barriers created by privileges, customs, and rights, the distribution of wealth, or the way in which power is exercised. (p. 77) In this sense, then, the figure of the subpopulation produced through migration—whether that be the forced migrant refugees calling for entry into the population, those who temporarily reside for labour within the population, or those who have already arrived and settled—is figured as being in a struggle,

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a tacit war that demands not only the toughness of the refusal, but the persistence of categorisation and classification as a means by which to manage that struggle. Other mechanisms of categorisation occur, and likewise enact violence, sometimes on top of the other violences already experienced. For example, being categorised as being of bad character (Klocker and Dunn 2003, p. 79) is a form of violence that extends into the contextualisation not only of refugee debates in public but of government policy-making on the issue of forced migrants. Government documents often excuse politically difficult policies for mandatory detention of migrants and displaced persons by representing them being actively engaged in threatening and ‘provocative conduct’ (p. 79), as ‘potential terrorists’, as potentially ‘menacing’ to the public, and as ‘invaders’ (Saxton 2003, p. 118). To be categorised as being of poor or dubious character is more than simply a justification for a sovereign decision based on a set of background criteria, for it induces a contextualisation of the migrant subject in the act of responding to the migrant’s call for recognition and support. Contexts are a formation of a back story, according to Ranjana Khanna—they create a notion of the prior within the terms of the present or the future, given as an appendage to the subject that both elucidates the past but conditions or categorises the reception of the subject in the present and future (Khanna 2003, p. 16). Where a subject seeking asylum is categorised as being of bad character in debate, policy and assessment, a context is given to the refusal to permit that subject to enter, but in a violent manner this establishes that subject as unworthy of welcome on the basis of an untrustworthiness, regardless of actual experience. The context of being recategorised from being an asylum seeker or migrant to being a negatively perceived asylum seeker or migrant is one that writes over the subject’s past in order to prescribe a particular future (a future that will not include cohabiting in the country of arrival or sought settlement). This is not to mention the effect such public perceptions can have when that forced migrant is, subsequent to processing, permitted to settle in the country and join the population: potentially subjected to violence, exclusion, bullying or a lack of genuine sensibility of welcome when such perceptions circulate and are reinforced by the discursivity of migration and population in the policy of national governments. Categorisation is not, of course, ever fully avoidable, even if it is always violent and unethical. From a Butlerian perspective, Hoffman notes that we are given categories of gender and other social labels always against our wills, and such categories confer intelligibility and recognisability (Hoffman 2010, p. 222). Seeking to be ethical does not eradicate all the forms of violence that constitute us, for indeed non-intelligibility and non-coherence would, if such were achievable, be the outcome and that would be a violence also as it removes the possibility of social participation. However, there are some forms of categorisation that are more violent than others: to categorise the migrant as migrant is not in itself as problematic as differentiating between legal and illegal, or by giving a reductive context to the migrant’s subjectivity by

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categorising forced migrants as being of poor character or as a burden rather than as a contributor to a social population. What matters for an ethical approach towards welcome, then, is not to do away with categorisation altogether, nor to assume that the process of migration can be performed and managed without decision and assessment. Rather, it is to recognise the humanity of the migrant in a state of diversity in such a way that the population can expand or be transformed by permitting migrants to participate and belong. It is to minimise the violence done to the other as the only available form of pragmatic responsiveness. And to do that can mean undoing the very foundations by which population itself is understood and classified. Indeed, by rethinking the concept of population in general in the ethical terms of hospitality, it is possible not only to deconstruct the common and everyday usage of the idea of a ‘national’ population that is grounded and defined through processes of othering, but in terms of the population’s other as supplement (Khanna 2003, p. 13). What this means is considering how the idea of population is framed through liberal and anti-migration discourses and showing how this frame supplements the ways in which a nation perceives itself.

Responsibility: attitude and an ethical response I would like to turn now to thinking in a little more depth about attitude. We know why we are obliged to accept the migrant other, or the refugee or asylum seeker, and we know the cause of the failure to see that obligation to be the conceptual frameworks that make us turn away and forget the requirement for an ethical welcome or hospitality. What, however, do we do about it? And, if attitude is at the core of the doing that makes a change or reorientation towards the ethical, how can we better understand it when we try at times to think about the obligation to global ecological sustainability and the obligation to the migrant other together? Butler’s work on precarity (Butler 2004, 2005) has put forward the case for an ethics of non-violence. This provides some useful ways in which we can approach and understand the global situation of millions of displaced persons, refugees and asylum seekers seeking a new place to live a liveable life, and to do so from an ethical perspective based on the key concept of recognition in addition to the ways in which attitudinal change can operate as the performative articulation of a movement towards ethics. Butler argues that an ethics of non-violence can be formed through an understanding that all humans are vulnerable in our exposure to language and to the face of one another. Through perceiving the commonality of vulnerability for ourselves and for the other whom we encounter, following Levinas, we are compelled to engage in relationality through responsibility and responsiveness to one another. What she thus articulates is a means by which the human subject is conceived as predicated on a primary vulnerability through dependence upon others, meaning that all our identities are built on relationality. This is marked by the fact we are

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vulnerable to the violence of others and yet always from the very beginning of our lives are dependent on others for physical support. Rereading Levinas, she proposes an ethical position through the notion that one has a responsibility to others that emerges in an act of encounter and recognition of the other. This ethics is not, for either Levinas or Butler, a simple injunction to behave in a particular way. Rather, it produces a quandary, a requirement persistently to question one’s actions and a situation that can reconstitute the subject anew in the encounter with the other. What the encounter with the face of the other describes is a ‘struggle over the claim of nonviolence without any judgment about how the struggle finally ends’ (Butler 2007, p. 187). In other words, it does not resolve the ethical problem it raises, but opens the possibility for subjects to recognise the vulnerability of others through understanding it in terms of their own vulnerability and thereby initiating a struggle they must undertake with their own violence (Butler 2007, p. 181). It is therefore, as Angela McRobbie puts it, a discourse capable of ‘intervening to challenge, interrupt and minimize aggressive retaliation’ (McRobbie 2006, p. 82). In Butler’s formulation, it is at a moment of fundamental vulnerability that recognition becomes necessary, possible and self-conscious, and this form of recognition is a reciprocal state of being for the other or given over to the other. It is not a collapse of the self into that of the other, but a communicative process through which one understands oneself to be reflected in the other and vice versa; not a literal moment of seeing and being seen but a communicative form by which one is transformed through engagement (Butler 2000, p. 272). This can be said for the figure of the excluded refugee as well as for the concept of ecology and sustainability of liveable spaces on the Earth. To recognise the need to respond ethically to climate change, to avoid violence not just to human others but all sorts of others, including the sustainability of life itself, warrants such a communicative process that sees one’s own liveability as reflected in the sustainability of life-giving space (this should be, perhaps, a little easier than recognising the migrant other). For Butler, as Estelle Ferrarese points out, such recognition is not merely an outcome but a ‘starting point, a tool and one of the goals of her ethics’ (Ferrarese 2011, p. 11). It is the starting point because the act of recognition is also an act of recognising the self—identity is produced, changed, transformed or renewed in an ethical act of recognition, it is a positive and transformative site of identity disturbance (Jenkins 2010, p. 113). It is a tool towards ethics, because the act of recognition of the other’s humanity is a condition for responding ethically to his or her vulnerability. And it is an ethical goal in itself, for recognition is asked for and demanded by the other (Ferrarese 2011, p. 11). Thus recognition is about regarding subjects as human, thereby a starting point for an ethical response, a tool by which responsiveness is produced and an outcome by which the other is given recognition in both the political and moral sense. To recognise the other as human or as human enough to be worthy of asylum is not, as Butler points out, a matter of a simple ‘entry of the

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excluded into an established ontology, but an insurrection at the level of ontology, a critical opening up of the questions, What is real? Whose lives are real? How might reality be remade?’ (Butler 2004, p. 33), thereby indicating the ways in which such a recognition operates across the three levels of inauguration, tool and outcome. Such a discourse of intervention comes to the aid of the political (McRobbie 2004, pp. 505–506) through a concentration on the scene of the encounter between selfhood and other. Such an encounter should not, however, be understood as a real encounter between subject and other for, as I will argue, the encounter or act of ‘bearing witness’ to the conditions of vulnerability of the other do not in themselves produce an ethical relationship. Importantly, what this opens up is the possibility of a shift away from liberal individualist perceptions of identity politics and attitude change (Murphy 2011, p. 587) to an intervention built on the notion of an ethical relationship between people who are or appear to be wildly different or distinct, or between a population and the globe on which it stands or the air that it breathes. In the case of the figure of the refugee, this is an ethics predicated, not on the injunctions of the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, but on a call for a relationality of non-violence. This is not merely physical violence towards refugees, but the violences of: (1) the use of border control to protect the expectations that a host population’s culture is unique, singular, sustained or eternal (Koerner 2010, p. 1); (2) the use of mechanisms of immigration administration to maintain a racial and ethnic consistency and permanency of the national population (Foucault 2008, p. 4; Derrida 2001, p. 57); (3) the violence of failing to respond to the stranger who is stateless (Dillon 1999, pp. 132–133) and without citizenship (Derrida 1998, p. 15); and (4) the violence of grammatical and linguistic distinctions and categorisations of the refugee (Frazer and Hutchings 2011, p. 10), and the violence of ignoring the urgency of both policy and individual responses to carbon pollution and human-induced climate change. Here, questions of people, belonging and space begin to converge at the point at which subjectivity is constituted in belonging—to each other, and to the space in which belonging is performed. The question remains, however, what it is that prevents an overwhelmingly ethical responsiveness to the other, the stranger, the refugee or the dying world. Butler provides a sensible way of understanding why an ethical position is commonly and popularly disavowed in the work Frames of War (Butler 2009a). For Butler, interpretative frames are those that socially and politically constitute formations that ‘allocate recognition differentially’ (Butler 2009a, p. 6), producing some subjects as recognisable and others as more difficult to recognise (pp. 5–6). That is, for the refugee to be recognised as human and therefore worthy of welcome into a (national or other conception of) population through justice, the refugee as subject needs to be framed as recognisable to those positioned to offer the welcome or hospitality. For Butler, such frames are the operations of power through which we apprehend or fail to apprehend (modes of knowing that are not yet recognition) the lives

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of others as vulnerable, injure-able or lose-able (p. 1). That is, our capacity to understand and recognise the other as a life is ‘dependent on norms that facilitate that recognition’ (pp. 3–4). Frames set the conditions for reactions to particular scenes, visualities, texts, images or knowledges (p. 11). Such conditioning is activated in the thinking subject (person) and the collective subject (population) and constitutively performed through the affective disposition of attitude, particularly in terms of attitude towards others and otherness. That is, frames presuppose certain ‘decisions or practices that leave substantial losses outside the frame’ (Butler 2009a, p. 75)—such decisions, practices or, in the case of the argument here, attitudes, are the performative articulation of subjects that are made intelligible, reasonable, coherent and recognisable in accord with discourses that govern those frames. In that way, framing makes it possible for an attitude to be not a fleeting, easily shifting view or opinion or, indeed, a subjectively chosen rational commitment (Rushing and Austin 2008, p. 251), but a habit of deep attachment that, if disrupted, can be the undoing and remaking of a subject or point to the instability and processual nature of subjectivity. By corollary, the undoing and/or awareness of the instability and processual nature of subjectivity can be one of the ways in which an attitude, as its performance, shifts in line with the critique or undoing of the frames that make such an attitude seem reasonable and sensible. About five years ago I wrote a short article about how the idea of attitude, in conjunction with Butler’s arguments on how interpretive frames prevent the recognition of the worthiness of the other, could be discerned in the threepart documentary Go Back to Where You Came From, which put a number of participants on what was referred to as a ‘reverse’ refugee journey (from halfway houses, to precarious boat journeys, to refugee camps in Africa, to war-torn towns in the Middle East). What the participants experienced was an encounter with refugees and with alternative discourses—the documentary attempted to gauge the extent to which such encounters caused an attitude change. The key finding, in the context of my reading, was that most of the participants did not experience a change, because although the encounter with complex, new ways of thinking about the experiences of forced migrants and displaced persons could upset frames momentarily, attitudes would typically ‘snap back’ to those with which the participants began their journeys. That is, attitude is much harder to change and the exposure to population’s others and the ethical demands those others articulate is not enough to bring a subject to recognise the mutually constitutive vulnerability that obliges hospitality (Cover 2013). If the task, in Butler’s theory, is to call into question ‘the framework that silences the question of who counts as a “who”—in other words, the forcible action of the norm on circumscribing a grievable life’ (Butler 2009a, p. 163), then understanding the mechanisms of attitude as a disposition of regard to others and otherness is key. A critique, as we discovered in the Go Back to Where You Came From documentary, does not necessarily take hold. Attitude

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and the discourses and ways of knowing can be something for which a subject holds a very deep attachment, particularly when it is involved in the constitution of the self through a performativity built on the exclusion of the other, or, in the case of climate change, the disavowal of the precarity of the Earth. The critique of the frame does not necessarily produce ethics purely through the act of bearing witness and hearing the stories of vulnerability and life’s precariousness in order to reframe how objects of otherness are perceived and to refigure an attitude towards them. Rather, it requires two elements: (1) a shift in the constructedness of ignorance, which is itself a social construct and a subjective position, and is implicated in preventing the critique of circumstances necessary to adopting an ethics of non-violence and hospitality towards the other; and (2) a disturbance in the subjectivity of the self, such that vulnerability and precarity as common become more marked in the relationality with the other, opening the potentiality of attitude change. I will discuss these two components of attitudinal change in turn.

Ignorance: construction and mourning of false certainties One of the ways in which a shift in attitude has been represented is through a linearity from ignorance to the acquisition of knowledge or fact. Ignorance is usually represented by the notion of a lack, a blank space that can be filled with knowledge, and this frequently figures as an argument as to how and why refugees do not find all citizens of a potential destination country responsive in an ethical, non-violent relationship of welcome and hospitality. It is also used to present education and information, as that which replaces ignorance, as ignorance’s antidote—the sharing of knowledge about refugees’ and asylum seekers’ experiences, reasons, purposes and desires as a means of overcoming ignorance. Indeed, programmes such as Oxfam’s Refugee Realities are designed to produce attitudinal change brought about by the act of educating the public about the rights and common experiences of displaced persons (Oxfam 2008, p. 4), much as other programmes and interventions are designed to increase public (the normative population in a country) understanding for refugee experiences through exposure to stories and stories of conditions, especially conditions in detention centres and on precarious journeys to move away from locations of danger, persecution or unliveability. Ignorance, of course, has been central to the disavowal of climate change, the effects of carbon pollution and the role played by decades of human industry in reducing the viability of the Earth to sustain life in its present form. Such ignorance manifests itself not as a lack of knowledge on climate change, but as a denial of the critical expertise of the climate scientist, the belief in a conspiracy of scientists to damage well-being through faking scientific data, or the view that the planet is self-correcting, or too large, to be affected by the heat and damage of global trade and industry. It is the ignorance that assumes the population of human beings on the Earth can continue doing as it has done for

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a little over a century: use heat to make things, consume things, remove forests for industrialised agriculture, use machinery driven by coal-powered electricity or fossil fuels to continue these activities, and to persist in growth unchecked. Such ignorance is not different or separate from the kinds of ignorance that refuse to recognise that a small number of refugees or migrants arriving in a population will not alter it, or that the composition of the population is always changing and always has, or that many populations living on particular lands are not native to it but came to those lands through mobility or, often, violence and genocide in the first place. But how useful are the ideas of ignorance and the acquisition of knowledge as a framework for understanding an attitudinal change towards refugees that leads towards an ethical relationship of non-violence and welcome? Rather than using this account of ethics as a means by which liberal norms of ‘placing blame’ on those who fail to recognise the precarity of the other, it is important to think through not only how these frames deny the vulnerability of and disavow responsiveness to the other, but also how they produce certain forms of ignorance about the dignity, humanity and vulnerability of the others. That is to say, we do not bash the ignorant for being ignorant, but critique the process through which ignorance is actively produced. Normative frameworks, as Butler indicates, can mandate ignorance about a subject (Butler 2009a, p. 143), meaning that ignorance is not a trait of a person, a claim to their being uneducated or undereducated, or without knowledge or wisdom, but a cultural product whereby the capacity to see the humanness, precarity and vulnerability of the other is suspended. Ignorance is not a ‘lack of knowledge’, although we often speak of ignorance in this way, assuming that a person who might be labeled ignorant has simply not read up on a topic, or encountered and learned some important piece of information or routine way of living. Ignorance, rather, is something that is ‘actively produced and maintained’ by cultural forces, power arrangements and disciplinary techniques (Gilson 2011, p. 309). In that sense, there is limited utility in arguing for increased knowledge as the solution to global problems of climate change or displaced persons. To assume that increasing knowledge will be the first and last step in resolving ethical issues is to assume that there is some pre-knowledge state, a ‘natural’ condition, in which the subject is wholly unethical, selfish, unwelcoming or resistant and that knowledge produces ethical outcomes. Rather, ignorance has to be seen as a cultural product constituting a particular subjectivity that, through the expression of attitude, performs that subjectivity in line with a self-perceived sense of coherence and intelligibility. The reverse argument is, of course, equally problematic: there is limited value in suggesting that there is some ‘natural’ state in which the human subject is conditioned towards an ethical relationality with others that becomes obscured through actions that ‘make subjects ignorant’, for that would be to equate the production of ignorance with a problematic notion of false consciousness.

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Ignorance is not a lack of knowledge but is experienced sometimes as a form of refusal to see or bear witness to the mutual experience of shared vulnerability as people who live together on a planet. It is a socially and politically impelled instrument through which to perform the self as inviolable, to obscure vulnerability and to disavow the possibility of recognising one’s own vulnerability, thereby undoing the possibility of an ethical relationship. This indicates, then, that the acquisition of information or knowledge through an encounter or exposure as a means by which to replace ignorance is not necessarily the means by which an ethical relation or a change in attitude is to be formed. While curiosity about the causes of human-induced climate change and the sharing of stories by refugees might operate at one level to dispel a certain kind of ignorance, such ignorance is maintained because it is part of the performativity of selfhood required to retain inviolability and disavow the precarity of life. Ignorance, then, is not a blank space or container that can be ‘filled’ by knowledge, rather, it is a way of behaving that, matrix-like, is the cultural effect of particular frames of knowing the self and, simultaneously, produces and maintains particular frames of knowing the self and others. It actively constructs the self as inviolable and therefore unable to recognise one’s own vulnerability, thereby unable to recognise the vulnerability of the other or the precariousness of life itself. It is the mechanism for the disavowal of knowledge, experience, encounters that might otherwise transform or critique frames that present a taken-for-granted reality and that might otherwise compel recognition. Given, then, that it is a way of being or performing, ignorance can be integral to the self and thus difficult to undo without a reconstitution of subjectivity. If it can be done away with, critiqued or put in question, if it can be taken out of the performance of being, excised, then it would need to mourned. As Butler indicates, mourning involves the agreement ‘to undergo a transformation (perhaps one should say submitting to a transformation) the full result of which one cannot know in advance’ (Butler 2003, p. 11). Yet, in reverse, submitting to a transformation in knowledge can require mourning—a mourning over the loss of certainty, the loss of a particular way of knowing and relating to others, the loss of the attitude that has been habitual or a familiar and easy way of thinking about who belongs in what population and where and in what state of sustained liveability. That is, one mourns the fact that the other, the refugee, the ecology, has become worthy of recognition, has become recognisable as vulnerable, has become the figure that demands an ethical response of hospitality rather than, through a certain construct of ignorance, a disavowal, an ignoring. In that sense, while ignorance is neither a lack nor a possession, it is in its various forms a way of being, and a ‘way’ that needs to be mourned or, at the very least, contained through frameworks that disavow its loss by claiming it as a lack filled by the revelation of new knowledge.

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Apprehension and disturbances: frames and attitude change Addressing ignorance and instilling the capability among people to mourn its loss and the comfort it brought is a first step. However, the second necessary step is the disturbance that makes an attitude change in the direction of ethics possible. If we are to understand attitude as performative, it is to see it as an expression or articulation that occurs ‘in accord’ with available discourses that lend the illusion of a fixed subject behind that attitude but that, effectively, constitute it, in order to fulfil the cultural demand for intelligibility and identity coherence of the self (always mythical but demanded nevertheless). Attitudes, then, are expressed in particular ways not only in terms of the available discourses by which the subject seeks to be intelligible, but by the frames that govern the pathways through which those attitudes themselves become not only recognisable but align with the intelligibility of the self. For Butler, an ethics built on mutual recognition is one that involves subjective change, which means a disruption or shift in the performativity that constitutes retrospectively the illusion of a fixed subject. As she has argued, the call for recognition or the scene in which we recognise another ‘is to solicit a becoming, to instigate a transformation, to petition the future always in relation to the Other. It is also to stake one’s own being, and one’s own persistence in one’s own being, in the struggle for recognition’ (Butler 2003, p. 31). A change of attitude, then, can be the performative expression and, simultaneously, the indicator of an alteration or a disturbance in subjectivity, and this occurs through the realisation that one is not what one thought one was. In the Go Back to Where You Came From documentary, the one brilliant example of a change in attitude occurred for the one character from whom it was least expected. Racquel, who in earlier episodes had been openly racist, surly, aggressive and direct in her belief that forced migrants and refugees should never be made welcome, underwent a very significant change in attitude such that her sense of the national population became one that was no longer grounded in exclusiveness and inviolability but in porousness, openness and obligation to help others. The knowledge of the refugee journey, hardship and unliveability as she saw it experienced by others was not enough— addressing her ignorance did not do the trick alone (Cover 2013). Rather, what was required was a bodily disturbance—one in which she realised her own vulnerability through her distaste at being in a refugee camp in Africa, unable to eat, unable to sleep, finding the experience of the toilet difficult, and being unwashed. The disturbance she experienced was, indeed, very specifically bodily, and this is highly significant for the understanding of vulnerability and the precarity of life: the risks of illness or accident are ‘built into the very conception of bodily life … always given over to modes of sociality and environment that limit its individual autonomy’ (Butler 2009a, pp. 30– 31). Highlighting her vulnerability to herself through the very basic bodily needs drew attention to the precarity of her subjecthood: toilet, washing, hygiene, sleep, food. Racquel, then, was forced to recognise her own

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vulnerability through acknowledging her bodily precarity at that site. This encounter with the otherness of the refugee through her bodily location in the refugee camp was a nodal point, then, in her attitudinal shift because it disturbed, at a very basic level, her sense of subjectivity. This was not a simple act of reflection, or recognition of the self, or gaining new knowledge through the encounters with refugees, but a disturbance in selfhood of the kind Cathy Caruth refers to as an ‘event’s essential incomprehensibility, the force of its affront to understanding’ (Caruth 1995, p. 154). The disturbance of her embodied subjectivity in that encounter undoes the frames that have prevented her from acting ethically, they have untangled the ignorance that produced an inviolability and an incapacity to critique the frames of knowledge. The encounter effectively re-produces the performativity of her subjecthood in a way that is now capable of responsiveness towards the other without the violence of rejection, categorisation, dislike, hatred, lack of hospitality, or lack of care. What is significant about this is that the encounter with the otherness of the refugee at the site of the camp does not, in itself, either produce or guarantee an ethics. Nor does Butler’s account of the undoing of frames that disavow recognisability of the commonality of vulnerability in itself produce the reconfiguration that sponsors an ethics of non-violence by making the figure of the refugee recognisable to the subject. Indeed, Butler herself points out that there is no sudden encounter that undoes an interpretive frame: Encountering a life as precarious is not a raw encounter, one in which life is stripped bare of all its usual interpretations, appearing to us outside all relations of power. An ethical attitude does not spontaneously arrive as soon as the usual interpretive frameworks are destroyed, and no pure moral conscience emerges once the shackles of everyday interpretation have been thrown off … The tacit interpretive scheme that divides worthy from unworthy lives works fundamentally through the senses, differentiating the cries we can hear from those we cannot, the sights we can see from those we cannot, and likewise at the level of touch and even smell. (Butler 2009a, p. 51) Although Butler does not expand on this point, what can be understood here is that the encounter is more than one that involves a range of senses, but that invoking the capacity to recognise the refugee or asylum seekers as worthy (of welcome) requires more than just an encounter with otherness, as if that encounter undoes an existing ideology and replaces it with a sense of reality. It requires a shaking, bodily disturbance through those senses, through an exposedness. This, then, indicates that the undoing of frames that prevent or disallow an ethical relationship conditions and is conditioned by a disturbance of subjectivity from the perspective of discovering one’s own precariousness and the undoing of inviolability as the product of ignorance. This is not necessarily to suggest that all those who hold a negative opinion or attitude towards

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asylum seekers must physically spend time in a refugee camp in order to recognise the other through the commonality of bodily precariousness and the worthiness to be welcomed into a population, for how vulnerability will be recognised will occur differently for different subjects. Rather, it is to point out that there can be no assumption of an attitude change that does not involve a reconstitution of the subject.

Vulnerable bodies, precarious climate and an ethics of cohabitation Throughout this book, I have being attempting to consider ‘population’ as a social and cultural construct, produced through a range of competing and uneven discourses, playing a highly significant, although often ignored, role in the production of identities through its power to circulate recognisable knowledge and practices for relationality, and integral in the many questions related to belonging and global sustainability. There are two key ethical questions for rethinking the role of population here. The first is centred on the way in which population concepts can both stem and enable the capacity for the redistribution of bodies in global terms, and the second is about the ways in which cohabitation is key to the acceptance of the other beyond nations and in specific world regions. In the first chapter, I made the point that much Western national policy that seeks to increase population through birth is eugenicist and unethical, in that it excludes the possibility of population increase through migration in a world that contains many regions that are heavily overpopulated. A supranational organising function and its concomitant technologies of power—however it may be developed through nonnational policies—must make population the object of its power mechanisms by centring its activities on the possibility of population redistribution. This is to do away with the notion of population increase itself, which is always considered in national terms and thus marks populations as defined by nations and nationality in favour of population as beyond the nation and defined, in Butler’s terms, through a concept of cohabitation as an ethical basis for the critique of state violences, whereby relationality is built on the knowledge that ‘we not only live with those we never chose, and to whom we may feel no social sense of belonging, but we are also obligated to preserve those lives and the plurality of which they form a part’ (Butler 2011, p. 84). Such obligation towards the preservation of lives takes the form of an ethics that acknowledges we are already, in our corporeal vulnerability, in the hands of the other before there is a ‘I’ (a subject) or a ‘we’ (a population grouping, a nation, a humanity). We are also already from the beginning thrown into a space that is life-sustaining (the Earth, the habitable parts of the Earth), that at once precedes us but is also mutually shaping us. This is perceivable, not at the level of the individual subject, but of the population as mass, that has genuine capacity for impact on its space. Subsequent to her valuable work on vulnerability, recognition and ethics, Butler expanded on her ethics of non-violence by foregrounding the notion of

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cohabitation, which she drew from Hannah Arendt’s work. For Butler, cohabitation begins by acknowledging the heterogeneity of the Earth’s population ‘as an irreversible condition of social and political life itself’ (Butler 2011, p. 83). Such heterogeneity can include a massive range of diversities expressed by people differentially from around the world and in ways that may never be recognisable but nevertheless call for recognition of a right to cohabit the Earth or a particular region or site. Cohabitation means that: we not only live with those we never chose, and to whom we may feel no social sense of belonging, but we are also obligated to preserve those lives and the plurality of which they form a part. In this sense, concrete political norms and ethical prescriptions emerge from the unchosen character of these mode of cohabitation. To cohabit the earth is prior to any possible community or nation or neighborhood. We might choose where to live, and who to live by, but we cannot choose with whom to cohabit the earth. (Butler 2011, p. 84) Butler is not suggesting here that we cohabit the Earth and therefore must live in peace in a way that locates those we do not wish to live by in places other than ‘here’. Rather, this is to argue that there is an obligation for an ethical relationality with others that is obligatory because it precedes our very subjectivities and is the condition for it. The point I want to underline here is that such an obligation for cohabitation is not only to ensure that others (individuals, other populations) are not excluded from liveability on the planet, but that we are also obliged as both subjects and subject-populations to cohabit with the Earth as the life-sustaining space, and thus obliged not to do violence to it. A useful, contemporary way to think about the obligation to cohabitation with the migrant other, the asylum seeker, the displaced person, the stranger, the Earth, its earth and its air and so on, is to think about that obligation through the networkedness of subjectivity, population, relationality, space and liveability. That the genocide of another group or people and their culture and knowledge is wrong is not something that is difficult or problematic to communicate in the twenty-first century. However, when we understand that such practices that either enable or refuse cohabitation relate to the conceptual, embodied and subjective flows between and across space in a globalised world of borders, mobilities and relationships, we are obliged to extend the concept of population into the field of relationality, not only between people but also people in space. The interconnectedness of bodies thrown into a space for which we today have uncertainty over the sustainability of its capability to always preserve life provides us with new openings (starting points) for thinking about how to live together as population. As starting points, these are not necessarily instances in which we can envision immediate practical outcomes, new arrangements, post-national and anti-violent codes of conduct, or even best ways to manage migration and carbon pollution reduction.

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The engagement necessary here is one inflected by the need to open up subjectivity towards new attitudes that try to embrace more ethical relations than we experience now. Rethinking the meaning of population, belonging and liveability is at the centre of that enterprise.

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Derrida, J., 1999. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. P-A Brault and M. Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Derrida, J., 2001. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. M. Dooley and M. Hughes. London: Routledge. Dillon, M., 1999. The sovereign and the stranger. In: J. Edkins, N. Persram and V. Pin-Fat, eds. Sovereignty and Subjectivity. London: Rienner Publishers, 117–140. Ferrarese, E., 2011. Judith Butler’s ‘not particularly postmodern insight’ of recognition. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 37(7), 759–773. Foucault, M., 2004. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, ed. M. Bertani and A. Fontana, trans. D. Macey. London: Penguin. Foucault, M., 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978– 79, ed. M. Senellart, trans. G. Burchell. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Frazer, E. and Hutchings, K., 2011. Avowing violence: Foucault and Derrida on politics, discourse and meanings. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 37(1), 3–23. Frow, J., 2012. Settlement. Cultural Studies Review, 18(1), 4–18. Gilson, E., 2011. Vulnerability, ignorance, and oppression. Hypatia, 26(2), 308–332. Glover, R., 2011. How would you solve a problem like Julia’s? The Age, 10 September. Available from: www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/. Accessed 10 September 2011. Hoffman, J., 2010. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? by Judith Butler. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 96(2), 219–223. Jenkins, F., 2010. Judith Butler: disturbance, provocation and the ethics of non-violence. Humanities Research, 16(2), 93–115. Khanna, R., 2003. Contexts, community, justice. Diacritics, 33(2), 10–41. Klocker, N. and Dunn, K.M., 2003. Who’s driving the asylum debate? newspaper and government representations of asylum seekers. Media International Australia, 109(1), 71–92. KoernerC., 2010. Whose security? how white possession is reinforced in everyday speech about asylum seekers. Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association (ACRAWSA) e-Journal, 6(1), 1–14. Levinas, E., 1969. Totality and Infinity, trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Levy, K.D., 2006. To approach, to welcome, to contest: Levinasian teaching and the feminine in Le Clézio’s Mauritian sagas. Orbit Litterarum, 61(6), 488–513. Limbu, B., 2009. Illegible humanity: the refugee, human rights, and the question of representation. Journal of Refugee Studies, 22(3), 257–282. Lingis, A., 1994. The Community of Those who have Nothing in Common. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. McRobbie, A., 2004. Feminism and the socialist tradition … undone? A response to recent work by Judith Butler. Cultural Studies, 18(4), 503–522. McRobbie, A., 2006. Vulnerability, violence and (cosmopolitan) ethics: Butler’s Precarious Life. The British Journal of Sociology, 57(1), 69–86. Murphy, A.V., 2011. Corporeal vulnerability and the new humanism. Hypatia, 26(3), 575–590. Owens, P., 2009. Reclaiming ‘bare life’?: against Agamben on refugees. International Relations, 23(4), 567–582. Oxfam Australia, 2008. Refugee Realities Project Evaluation: Summary Report. Melbourne, Australia: Oxfam Australia.

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Pugliese, J., 2004. The incommensurability of law to justice: refugees and Australia’s temporary protection visa. Law and Literature, 16(3), 285–311. Rushing, S. and Austin, E., 2008. Conflict and community: Butler’s Precarious Life and land use public hearings. Administrative Theory & Praxis, 30(2), 246–252. Saxton, A., 2003. ‘I certainly don’t want people like that here’: the discursive construction of ‘asylum seekers’. Media International Australia, 109(1), 109–120. Schweitzer, R., et al., 2005. Attitudes towards refugees: the dark side of prejudice in Australia. Australian Journal of Psychology, 57(3), 170–179. Turner, G., 2003. After hybridity: Muslim-Australians and the imagined community. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 17(4), 411–418. Vukov, T., 2003. Imagining communities through immigration policies: governmental regulation, media spectacles and the affective politics of national borders. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 6(3), 335–353. West, S., 2012. Arrogant PM stoops low to conquer. The Age, 12 September. Available from: www.theage.com.au/politics/. Accessed 12 September 2012.

Index

Abbott, Tony 24, 55, 57 ABC News 41, 50, 54–5 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission 170 Aboriginal people 172; see also indigenous people abortions 21–2, 24, 34, 136 affiliations 67–8, 70–1, 82, 169, 173; communal 173; existing 174; religious 8 affirmative action policies 170 Agamben, G. 35, 81–2, 123, 126–7, 138, 177–9, 192–3; biopolitics as a technology of power that arises in modernity 81; critique of biopolitics 81, 123; framework and the concept of bare life 82, 126; and the two concepts of zoë and bios 127; and the writings of Michel Foucault 167 age-based population distribution 100, 189 ageing 20, 91, 99–102, 104–5, 189 agriculture 10–11, 109, 118; industrialised 205; redevelopment of 126; and rural areas 110 air pollution 27 alienation 113–14, 119, 131; contemporary 113; industrialised 131 alienness 14, 135, 143–6; and conspiratorial governance 147; genes and virus 143–4 aliens 135, 138–9, 141–5, 147; abductions 141; artefacts 145; grey 141; intelligence 145; invasion plans 107, 127, 141–2; scientists 139, 142; substances 143; virus 143–4 Anderson, Benedict 70 anger 1, 40, 158; cultural 144; directed towards minorities 158; and the sense

of having been forgotten 161–2; unethical 161 anti-immigrant debates 32, 44, 56 anti-immigrant policies 6, 8, 10, 52, 57 anti-refugee stance 57 anxieties 2, 4, 7–8, 13–14, 30–1, 40–1, 90, 92, 99, 101, 107–8, 134, 140, 144, 146–7; contemporary 148; personal 92; underlying 31 apocalyptic events 108, 115, 118, 121 apocalyptic narratives 107, 109, 111, 113, 115, 117, 119, 121, 123, 125, 127, 129, 131 apocalyptic representations 107–8, 117 Arendt, Hannah 81 arguments 9–10, 12, 25–7, 29–30, 33, 47–8, 51, 53, 55, 57, 155, 157, 171, 173, 203–4; anti-diversity 154; ethical 195; exclusionary 159; genetic engineering open 14; right-leaning 7 Asimov, Isaac 96 asylum seekers 12–13, 21, 34, 40–1, 45, 47, 57, 127, 178, 184–5, 187–8, 196–7, 199–200, 204, 208–10; arrivals of 13, 19; negatively perceived 199 ATSIC see Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission Attenborough, David 11 attitudes 6–7, 12, 14–15, 68, 70, 147, 156, 160, 163, 183–7, 189, 191, 197, 200, 203–8; changing 15, 202–4, 207, 209; and the connection with refugees 185–6; court’s 186; ethical 208; ideas of 15, 184, 203; liberal 33; problems 186; progressive 185; public 14, 185; racially motivated eugenics 34; shifting 4, 186, 208 Australia 12, 15, 22–4, 28, 31–3, 40–4, 46, 48–58, 155, 159, 167, 170, 172, 175,

Index 185; and the baby bonus scheme 23; ‘congested and overloaded’ 53; and Costello’s statement regarding the need to boost Australian-born babies 31; and couples encouraged to take advantage of the baby bonus scheme 23; culture of 46, 175; and entrepreneur Dick Smith calls for a reduction in immigration numbers 42; and fears of cultural change 42; and the ideology of Robert Menzies 155–7, 159, 161; and identity threats 42, 44–7, 57; and the impact of immigration on infrastructure readiness 42; infrastructure 51, 56; maintaining affluence of 51; and national identity 69; politicians 156; and teaching of customs for new migrants 175; total fertility rate 23 Australian Bureau of Statistics 23, 53 Australian population 23, 41, 43, 49, 53, 56, 58, 156–7, 175, 185; broader 168; identity 57; policy 46; white 156 Australians 40, 42, 45–6, 49–51, 56, 58, 155, 157, 169, 175; existing local 47, 51; fair-skinned Indigenous 170–1; population size 13, 41; and their lifestyle 55 baby bonus policy 33–4 bare life 13, 80–3, 99, 126–30, 138, 146, 167, 177, 179–80, 192; the figure of 81; formation of survival 128; ostensible 108; post-apocalyptic 128; and practices of exclusion 177–80; state 129 ‘basket of deplorables’ 159 behaviours 3, 65, 68, 70, 76, 78, 80, 124, 133–4, 163, 189, 191; human 97, 99; unethical 97 Behrendt, Larissa 170 beneficiaries 156–7 Besson, Luc 96 ‘Big Australia’ 41–4, 47, 51, 53–4, 56–7; debates on immigration 47, 55; population debates 41–2, 44–8, 53, 55–8; and shifting discourses of population 43 biopolitical 25, 29, 32, 56, 75, 83, 117, 125, 128; arrangements 50, 58; contemporary 119; deployment 76, 78, 124; economy 79; elements 76, 124; formations 13, 73; forms 34, 54, 127, 143; intervention 26, 36, 79; mechanisms 20, 46, 52–3, 55, 76; operations 50, 189; processes 102;

215

production 79, 177; regulation 21, 76, 78, 111, 124, 177; technologies 34, 36; terms 76, 114, 124; tools 178 biopolitics 20–1, 25–8, 31–6, 46, 53–4, 56, 58, 72–5, 77–81, 102–3, 110–11, 122–3, 127, 177–8, 192–3; foregrounds the nation-state 31; mapping against older racisms 77; measures and produces national populations 35; regularises the self 80 bios 2, 81–2, 126–7, 138, 177 birth rates 8, 22, 24, 28, 32 births 9, 19–20, 23, 31, 33, 35, 43–4, 64, 69, 71–3, 162, 164, 179, 189, 194 Bjelke-Petersen, Joh 156–7 Blainey, Geoffrey 175–6 BMI see body mass index boats 40–1, 57, 175, 185 bodies 2–3, 6–7, 10, 15, 30–1, 44, 63–5, 71–2, 78, 95–7, 99–102, 120, 138–41, 166–9, 173–80; alien 142; biological 134; dead 128; existing 30; minority 180; multiple 72; national 191; new 30, 56, 72; odours 176–7, 186; weights 79–80 body mass index 80 Bolt, Andrew 171–4 borders 3, 7, 9, 30–1, 42, 46, 63, 69, 114, 143, 145, 174–5, 184, 188–9, 194–5; and the control regime 20, 34, 47, 50, 55, 202; crossings 40, 142, 178; establishment of 139, 195; ethnic 144; human/alien 145; human/technology 141; protecting 28, 46, 69, 184, 189; security 45, 53, 55; taxonomic 144; unstable 143 Bourke, William 53–4 Boyle, Danny 111 Branagh, Kenneth 137 Brexit 5–6, 15, 31, 161 Bromberg, Justice Mordecai 170, 173 Burke, Tony 43, 47, 52–3, 55 Butler, Judith 7–9, 15, 31–2, 36, 64–7, 71, 117–18, 120, 122–3, 138–9, 186–7, 189–90, 193–5, 200–3, 205–10 Calhoun, John 96 campaigns, disinformation 93 capitalism 26, 138 carbon pollution 4–5, 11, 35, 94–5, 202, 204, 210 Carr, Bob 56 Carter, Chris 141

216

Index

catastrophes 5, 33, 89, 92–3, 103, 109, 112, 148; agricultural 89; averting world 109; environmental 33, 103; human global overpopulation 89 childbirth 19, 22–3, 28 children 19–24, 26, 43, 52, 78, 95–6, 98, 100, 104, 109, 114, 116, 146, 155, 193 Christchurch mosques shootings 7–8, 10 civil society 50, 101, 108, 116–22, 126 claims 3, 32–3, 42, 51, 56, 82, 145, 153–4, 156–7, 159–60, 162–4, 166, 170–1, 201, 205; ethical 9; fabricated 159; false 162; inflammatory 171; populist 165; problematic 46; rhetorical 154, 159 climate 5, 11, 27, 29–30, 32, 34–5, 89, 103, 183–4, 188, 190; debates 12; induced migration 10; migrants 184, 188 climate change 4, 10–11, 15, 20–1, 27–30, 32, 35–6, 49, 92, 94, 107–8, 184, 187–8, 201, 204–5; humaninduced 30, 35, 95, 147, 202, 206; problematic 10 Clinton, Hillary 159–60 coal-powered electricity 205 coalition government 57 cohabitation 8, 12, 105, 185, 187–9, 191, 193, 195, 197, 199, 201, 205, 207, 209–11; ethical 9–10, 180, 183, 187, 209; and hospitality 203; non-violent 89; and sustainability 11–12 Cohen, Stanley 44, 68 colonialism 77, 168, 170 commentators 22, 28, 31, 48, 54, 170 Commonwealth Maternity Allowances Act 1912 22 conditions 15, 27, 29, 36, 65–6, 69, 71, 73, 99, 146–7, 153, 171, 175–6, 184–7, 201–4; contemporary 179; crowded 99; harsh 128; irreversible 210; neo-liberal 117; overcrowded 96; pre-apocalyptic 129; unliveable 192 control 5, 45–6, 50, 58, 89, 94, 96, 98, 101, 105, 111, 129, 135, 169, 178–9; compulsory birth 94; immigration and border 47, 50; mechanisms 44; national 103 cooking smells 176–7, 186 coordination 42, 53–5; governmental 54; infrastructural 57; numeric 53 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference 2009 29 costs 23–4, 79, 95, 133, 156; of child-rearing 19; of the Dick

Smith’s Population Puzzle screening 48; private family’s child-rearing 19 countries 8–9, 19–20, 22–3, 28, 30, 34, 50–1, 56, 58, 75, 77, 183, 186, 199, 204; host 196–7; postcolonial 172; potential destination 204; white-settler 12 Creed for the Third Millennium 103, 139 Crick, Francis 133 crime 97–8, 196 crop failures 104, 110 Cryle, Peter 3, 79 Cuarón, Alfonso 98 cultural demands 66, 80, 187, 207 cultural differences 45, 56 cultural diversity 45, 175 cultural framework 31, 134, 154 cultural practices 20–1, 97, 164, 166, 168, 170–1, 175, 189; emergent 83; normative 176 culture 46–7, 66, 90, 92, 94, 96, 98, 100, 102, 104, 107–8, 116, 118–22, 138–40, 142; contemporary 83, 143, 184; national 174; and population 12, 139, 158; satellite 166 damage 11, 94, 147, 204; and climate change 10–11; ecological 10–11, 94; and sustainability 11 Darwin, Charles 33 data 3, 43, 53, 70, 74, 77, 79, 148, 204; demographic 3, 70; digital 148; population trend 53; scientific 204 death 7, 9, 25–6, 58, 72, 77, 98, 100–2, 104, 108–10, 115–16, 127–9, 139, 142, 188–9; absence of 101; mass 118; natural 91, 101; physical 77; political 77 debates 5, 10, 12–13, 27, 33, 40–2, 44–5, 47, 49–53, 55, 58, 99, 133, 135, 186; informed 52; national 197; nineteenth-century 89 decisions 11, 31, 44, 69, 82, 94, 102, 125, 129, 178, 180, 190, 192–4, 200, 203; arbitrary 198; casual 174; categorical 191; enacting 102; nation’s 192; unilateral 123 delocalisation 6 democracy 81–2, 156 demographic data 3, 70 demographics 62, 64–5, 80

Index demography 3–4, 12, 21, 28, 63, 77, 110 depopulation 28, 92, 98, 107, 114, 116, 119; apocalyptic 114; global 103; sudden 107–8 Derrida, J. 191, 197 detention centres 98 Dick, Philip K. 98 discourses 12–13, 15, 19–20, 27–30, 41–2, 44–5, 64–6, 89–90, 137, 163–4, 168, 170, 173, 201–4, 207; alarmist 105; anti-migration 200; biopolitical 58; euthanasia 101; global 29; malevolent 156; of overpopulation 92; rationalist 131; reconfigured 66 discrimination 66, 159, 163 Discrimination Act 1975 170 disease 107–10, 118, 126, 147 disinformation campaigns 93 displaced persons 13, 20–1, 30, 185, 188, 192, 199–200, 203–5, 210 disruption 100, 116, 119, 140, 207; anxieties 140; social 31–2 distributional curve 129, 160; complex 143; normative 125 DNA 133, 140, 142 Düttmann, Alexander 162 earth 2, 4, 8, 11, 89, 93, 96, 98, 100, 141–3, 146–7, 168–9, 201, 204, 209–10; heterogeneity of the population ‘as an irreversible condition of social and political life 210; and mass overpopulation 96; and the population 11, 89, 100, 142, 146 ecological damage 10–11, 94 ecological sustainability 95, 184, 187, 200 economic conditions 36, 76, 118, 124 economy 29, 34, 47, 160–1 education 1, 22, 26, 51, 74, 78, 110, 113, 120–1, 126, 167 Ehrlich, Paul 4, 91, 93–5, 99 elections 1, 14, 42, 48, 57, 158, 161, 172, 185 electoral processes 157 electricity, coal-powered 205 elites 7, 157, 159 employment 6, 167, 169 environment 27, 36, 42, 50, 52, 54, 91, 122, 180, 207; contemporary 62; cultural 195; earthly 176; post-apocalyptic low-population 121 ethical framework 11, 15, 180 ethical goals 201 ethical issues 63, 98, 205

217

ethical problems 196, 201 ethical relationality 12, 33, 174, 186, 188, 205, 210 ethical relationships 95, 183, 187, 202, 205–6, 208 ethics 11–12, 14–15, 32, 100, 102, 147, 154, 162–4, 167–8, 174, 180, 184, 186–98, 200–2, 204–10; of cohabitation and sustainability 183–211; complexity of 33; eschewing 14, 102; post-national 188; reciprocal 162; rights-based 183 ethnicity 2, 20, 42, 44, 63, 66, 68, 72, 78, 111, 130, 163–4, 174; disaligning 57; and immigration 42 eugenicism 21, 33, 153 eugenicist policies 33–4, 136, 143 eugenics 30, 34; and biopolitics 35; power and contemporary 19–36 Evans, Chris 50, 54 failure 71, 75, 77, 99, 101, 104, 109–11, 122–3, 128, 158, 168, 184, 187, 193–4, 200; ageing population 101; crop 104, 110; to die 101 families 5, 20–1, 23, 26, 28, 48, 78, 110, 172, 183, 195; extra immigrant 48; members 8, 101; members and friends 8 famine 7, 30, 93, 95 fears 4, 6–8, 13, 32, 34, 36, 42, 45, 57, 89–90, 96, 99–100, 116, 136–7, 141; articulated 53; deep-seated 108; emotive 6; long-submerged 5; public 40, 89 Federal Court of Australia 170 fertility 8, 13, 19–23, 25–31, 34–6, 44–5, 49, 56, 58, 72–3, 89, 104–5, 153; increased 20, 30, 34, 43; national 21, 32; rates 24, 89; reduced 24; restrictions 93; rewards 22; rights 44; schemes 19, 26, 28, 35; unchecked 104 fertility promotion 19, 21, 23, 25–7, 29–31, 33–6, 93; funded programmes 22; mechanisms 22; policies 23; schemes 21, 25, 34 films 1, 5, 12–13, 48, 90–1, 95–9, 104, 107, 109, 112, 121, 126, 128, 135–8, 140; apocalyptic 5, 108, 118; classic 90; contemporary 116; documentary-style 119; post-apocalyptic 116, 122, 126; science fiction 14, 96, 135; and television 12, 14, 107, 133, 139, 156 food 27–8, 51, 95, 99–101, 105, 109, 113, 118, 120–1, 123, 126–7, 133, 174–6,

218

Index

207; consumption 174, 176; distribution 121; improper 139; prices 28; production of 29, 110; security 134–5; shortages 90, 92; stored 110 ‘forced migrants’ 12, 20, 183, 185, 193–5, 199–200, 203, 207 ‘forced migration’ 11 Foucault, Michel 25–7, 34–5, 46, 58, 65, 71–9, 110–11, 116–17, 122–4, 126–7, 137–8, 143, 167–8, 178, 198; attention to the notion of security 76; framing of biopolitics 54; study of biopolitics 80–1, 177 Frankenstein, Victor 135–7, 145–6, 148 Franklin, Benjamin 92 freedom 7, 82, 91, 93, 95, 103–4, 130, 170; ethical 7; individual 93; political 82 Frow, John 195 Galton, Francis (Charles Darwin’s cousin) 33 Gambaro, Teresa 175 gangs 118, 124–5, 128 genetic enhancement 133, 138, 140 genetic material 142–3, 145 genetic research 133–4 genetic science 134–42, 145, 147; conspiracy 141; contemporary 134; disavows Darwinism 139; experimentation 141 genetically modified foods 133, 135 genetics 14, 133–5, 137, 139–45, 147, 170, 173 genocide 8, 170, 205, 210 geopolitical imaginations 77 Gillard, Julia 44, 55 Gittins, Ross 43, 47–8 global overpopulation 20–1, 27–8, 32, 89–92, 94–5 global population see also population 1, 14, 28–30, 34–6, 89–90, 93, 109–11, 127, 129–31, 164, 168; control regimes 103; growth 91, 105 globalisation 6, 24, 28, 42, 63, 119, 144, 183, 210 governance 20, 24–6, 28–32, 34–6, 50–2, 54–6, 63–6, 68–78, 80–3, 91–2, 95–6, 116–17, 120–7, 129–31, 143; biopolitical 29, 33, 42, 65, 78–80, 126, 177, 188; civilised 117, 124; communications 70; contemporary neoliberal 118; economic 121; mechanisms 20, 30, 161; normative

116; of populations 72, 121; post-apocalyptic 108; power mechanisms 64; regulatory 71; right-wing 161; structures 34; technological 124; technologies 31, 52, 116–17 governance systems 33, 35, 50, 101, 119, 123, 126; advising national 188; fascistic 98; international 76; totalitarian 14 government, coalition 57 governments 1, 5, 12, 28, 40, 42, 50–1, 54–5, 69, 79, 95, 110, 159–60, 197, 199; allocation of controlled foodstuffs 109; border protection policies 186; national 26, 102, 174, 198–9; policies 43, 184 Grattan, Michelle 43, 57 groups 2, 4, 56, 58, 62–3, 81–2, 122, 124–6, 128–9, 134, 136, 143, 154–60, 168–71, 198; cultural 136; ethnic 1, 167, 198; global 130; immigrant 75; marginal 93; minority 171; particular 77, 162; of people 7, 40, 67, 83, 159; racial 26; relational 70; rival 129; school 185; synchronising body clocks 79; violent 118 growth 4, 10, 13–14, 19, 22–3, 26, 28, 31, 34, 41, 49–50, 53–4, 56, 92–3, 107; addressing population 22, 51, 65; controlled population 19–20; curbing population 28; economic 19, 43, 50, 55; global 30; managing 117; national 30; politicians favouring population 40; post-industrial 92; projected population 23, 41, 43, 92; unchecked 90, 102, 105 Habermas, Jurgen 138 Hall, Stuart 44, 162 Hanson, Pauline 32, 46, 156–7, 159, 161 Hardin, Garrett 4 Harrison, Craig 111 health 1–3, 12, 26–8, 30, 64, 66, 78–80, 99, 102, 109–10, 114, 133–4, 153–5, 167–9, 175; contemporary 3; medical 3; mental 12; resources 109; security 117; services 110 heart attacks 102 Hoffman, J. 199 homeostasis 54, 111 homo economicus 117 homo sacer 81–2, 126, 192

Index hospitality 7, 14–15, 20, 30, 32, 162, 185, 187–91, 195, 200, 202–4, 206, 208; and cohabitation 203; ethical 190 hospitals 41, 48, 52 housing 41, 52–3, 101 Howard, John 23, 50, 57–8 human beings 98, 104–5, 121, 128, 133, 135, 138, 141–2, 148, 204 human bodies 73, 89, 104, 141–2, 147, 176 human identity 98, 116, 125, 141 human population 2, 9, 35, 94, 101, 109, 118, 133–8, 140–2, 145–7, 171; adaptation 133; continuity 14, 134; increasing 11; ‘natural’ 139; naturegrown 145 human purity 134–5, 144–5, 147 human race 136–8, 142, 146–7 human subjectivity 110, 121, 134–5, 138–9, 144–5, 186; coherent 141; contemporary 130 human subjects 2, 73, 81, 104, 120, 128, 135–6, 138, 140, 200, 205 humanity 35–6, 97–8, 110, 114–16, 118, 120–1, 125, 129, 134–42, 146–8, 179–80, 193–5, 200–1, 205, 209; demanding 147; everyday middle-class 114; god-created 137; non-productive 112; peopled world 107; population of 89, 114; superseding 148; threats to 135, 147 humans 13–14, 28–9, 82, 130, 133, 138–9, 141, 145, 193–4, 200 Huntington, Samuel 24–5 hybrid identities 143–4 hybridisation 144 hygiene 56, 175–6, 207 identification 3, 24, 64, 67, 70, 77, 83, 114, 121, 133, 164; documents 183; dominant 70; everyday affiliational 71; mutual 2, 67; national 69–70; religious 24 identity 4–6, 12–15, 24–8, 32–6, 44–8, 56–8, 62–83, 107–10, 114–16, 118–21, 129–31, 143–5, 162–4, 169–74, 185–90; Australian 42, 44–7, 57; categories 66, 68; coherence 66, 72, 129–30, 171, 207; human 98, 116, 125, 141; intelligible 63, 83, 187; national 20, 24–5, 27, 30–4, 68–72, 75–6, 82, 94, 185, 189, 192; politics 202; and population 13, 62–3, 65, 67, 69, 71, 73, 75, 77, 79–81, 83, 183; populationbased 71; subjective 71, 80

219

immigrants 1, 30, 35, 44–5, 50–1, 53, 55, 57–8, 75, 147, 156, 175; community groups 75; earnings 48; and extra bodies 41; illegal 102, 197; as outsiders 32 immigration 19–22, 24–5, 31–2, 34, 41–58, 92, 98, 175, 178, 184, 188, 190, 196; administration 202; coordinating 55; debates 45, 57; detention centres 98; increasing 20, 35, 44; numbers 22, 42, 45, 196; policies 32, 34, 46, 184; processes 162; and questions of asylum 50; rates 41, 54; reduction of 28 indigenous 23, 156, 168–70, 172–3; Australians sue Andrew Bolt 170; bodies 15, 168, 174; communities 171–3; groups 168, 171; identities 170–1, 173; peoples 77, 157, 167–9, 171, 173–4; persons 153, 162, 166–70, 173; population 166–7, 170–2, 179; programmes 170 individuals 65, 67–8, 71–3, 76, 79, 95, 111, 115, 120, 124, 134, 154, 170–1, 173–4, 210; abnormal 58; corporeal 173; identifying 173 infrastructure 23–4, 40–2, 44–5, 47–8, 50, 52–8, 80, 96, 99, 101, 113, 118–19, 121, 124, 126; Australian 51, 56; communications 117–18; communicative 131; demands 196; issues 47; overstretched 50; perceiving 50; planning 1, 50, 53; readiness 42; and sustainability 41, 45, 49, 52–3, 55; urban 13, 40–2, 46, 57, 194 intelligible identity 63, 83, 187 interests 2, 4–5, 12, 20, 27–9, 34–5, 50, 53–4, 65, 83, 90–3, 97–9, 133, 153, 174–5; business 50, 54; ethnic group 65; national 28–9, 34–5, 175, 188; ongoing cultural 90; political 15 The Intergenerational Report 2010 43 international trade 6, 11; see also trade interventions 5, 19, 33, 56, 76, 79, 90, 93, 124, 140–1, 169, 202, 204; biopolitical health 78; genetic 145; humanity’s accident-prone 138 Jameson, Robert 28 justice 44, 123, 154, 170, 183–4, 187, 194, 197, 202 Khanna, Ranjana 199–200 knowledge 51, 54, 73–4, 80, 108, 110–12, 126, 130, 147, 184–5, 188, 203–10; acquisition of 204–5; biopolitical 75; contemporary 108, 140; contradictory 74; of DNA 133; framework 3–4, 80,

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173; genetic 134; lack of 204–6; new 188, 206, 208; public 74; of the state 73; statistical 74; systems 5, 124 Kristeva, Julia 139, 142–3 labour 78, 158, 198 labour relations 109 language 3, 13, 53, 55–6, 62, 66, 70, 73– 4, 98, 139, 169, 174, 190, 197–8, 200; economic 48; inflammatory 170; involvement 197 Latour, Bruno 130 law 73, 81–2, 104, 110, 116–17, 120, 122– 3, 143–4, 178–9, 192, 194; international 146, 194; and sovereignty 81; of taxonomy 143, 145 legal frameworks 193 Levinas, Emmanuel 32, 188, 190–1, 200 liberal-humanists 5, 93, 139; contemporary 138; frameworks 167; freedom 104; laissez-faire approach 91; narratives 134; society 125; subjects 133–4, 138 life 29, 33, 36, 81–2, 97, 100–2, 104–5, 111, 115–16, 119–21, 123–7, 163–4, 187, 192–3, 208; biological 81; bodily 207; corporeal 79, 174, 179; domestic family 156; everyday 1, 12, 65, 71, 73, 80, 92, 178; human 15, 81, 126, 146; liveable 30, 41, 66–7, 98, 107, 167, 183, 187, 200; political 82, 138, 210; post-apocalyptic 108; post-human 134; social 115; sustaining 36, 118–19, 126, 204 lifestyles 11, 23, 41, 57, 97, 175 Limbu, B. 198 losses 5, 24, 91, 105, 109, 113, 115–17, 120–1, 126, 130–1, 159, 203, 206–7; of civil society 118–19, 121; electoral 159; labour 79; post-apocalyptic 131; radical 11, 112, 126 Malthus, Thomas 92 Malthusianist concepts 89, 92 manipulation: genetic 135, 137–8, 147; and the population 134–5 marginalisation 14–15, 69, 97, 153–4, 160, 166–7, 169–70, 172, 176, 180, 185; groups 154; ongoing cultural 141; unethical 153 Marxist critiques 89 McMillan, Mark 171–2 McRobbie, Angela 201

measurements 3–4, 50, 55, 58, 73, 78–9, 178; self-reflective 80; statistical 3 mechanisms 19, 25–6, 30–5, 62–4, 69–71, 73–4, 76–8, 80, 163, 166, 177, 179, 189, 195, 202–3; communicative 64; historical 168; regulatory 54, 73, 129; religious 140; social 174 media 1, 42, 44, 64, 70, 157–9; contemporary 70; Western 93 medical transplants 137 membership 31, 105, 162, 164, 180, 193–5; of the European Union 5; identity and population 69; refusal of 193 Mendel, Gregor 144 mental health 12, 169 Menzies, Robert 155–7, 159, 161 Menzies, Stuart 48 Mexican border wall 30 migrants 7, 12, 14–15, 23, 40, 42–3, 156, 160, 164, 166, 176, 183, 186–201, 205, 210; arrivals 169; bodies 175–6; border-crossings 192; legal 197; minorities 169; new 175; non-European 175; permanent 175; potential 188, 193; settled 9; stereotyping 196; welcoming 189 migration 5–7, 9, 13, 21, 23, 69, 153, 157, 174–5, 178, 180, 190, 194–5, 198–200, 209–10; alarmism 12; capping 43; internal 189; reducing 29; skills 54 Milligan, Kevin 34 Milner, Andrew 136 minorities 2, 92, 141, 153, 156, 158, 160, 162, 169, 172, 174, 176, 180; gender 169; migrants 169; population groupings 163, 166; sexual 173 mobility 1–15, 20–36, 41–58, 62–83, 90–105, 108–31, 134–48, 154–65, 167–80, 183–211; basic 99; circumscribing 183; forced 168; increasing 6–7; international 174; life-preserving 7; social 15 Morrison, Scott 43 mothers 23–4, 115, 139, 171–2; and reduction in the age of childbirth 23; white Australian 22 multicultural 27, 44–6, 113, 166, 175; characters 113; tolerance 175; Western nations 166 multiculturalism 44–6, 97, 166, 174–5 Nation, Terry 113

Index nation-state 1, 5, 26, 30–1, 34, 36, 65, 68–9, 71, 73–4, 76, 78, 82, 189, 194–5; administrative 143; contemporary 26–7; governments 20; modern 179; representative 29 national identity 20, 24–5, 27, 30–4, 68–72, 75–6, 82, 94, 185, 189, 192 national population 24–6, 28, 30–1, 67–72, 80, 82, 153–5, 157–8, 162–4, 168–70, 179, 188–91, 193–4, 196, 200; Australian 155; broader 171; ethical 191; existing 183; fixating on migration 6; maintaining 32; style 191 nationalism 21, 23, 27, 29–30, 32, 64, 70, 126, 184, 188, 197; policies 28; and the population 23, 29; rhetoric 157 neoliberal 13, 76, 117; concepts 56; cultures 5; framework 50; global culture 13; society 34, 119; states 50, 58 neoliberalism 29, 35, 76–8, 117, 143, 157, 161 net migration 22–3, 43; see also migration new migrants, and teaching of Australian customs 175 Noble, Greg 70, 72, 114 nodes 2, 64, 121; conceptual 138; in contemporary Western culture 108; and demographics 64; of knowledge 74 non-violence 32, 158, 192, 201–2, 205; ethics of 15, 30, 36, 120, 197, 200, 204, 208–9; responsiveness 125; terms 125 normalisational processes 111 normativities 13, 66–7, 70, 72–5, 77–80, 108, 130, 143, 153–4, 160, 176–8, 180; anticipated 80; corporeal 79; curve of 74–5, 77–8, 83, 143; regulated 83 norms 3–4, 46, 66–8, 71, 75, 78–80, 93, 101, 110, 125, 143, 161, 196, 203; coherent 72, 130; contemporary 90, 196; cultural 95; governance-constituted 146; liberal 205; populational 71; primary 69; social 93, 96, 112; subjective 147 nuclear war 107–8 obligations 9–10, 14, 36, 69, 118, 162, 164, 190, 200, 207, 209–10; ethical 11, 15, 158, 188, 191; moral 31; perceived 175 odours 176 OECD see Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development offensiveness 159, 170, 173–4

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offshore processing 185–6 One Nation Party 156 O’Neill, Brian 11 opposition 47, 57, 75, 77, 135, 144–5; of Dick Smith to population growth 49; and immigration 43; public 41 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development 34 overpopulation 5, 13–14, 27–9, 35–6, 89–93, 95–6, 98–103, 105, 107, 148; context of 95, 168; depictions of 91, 99; global 90; planetary 27; in visual representation 89–105 Oxfam Australia 185 Oxfam’s Refugee Realities Programme 204 performativity 64, 67, 74, 76, 78, 80, 83, 107, 112, 114–16, 138–9, 172–3, 175, 204, 206–8; contemporary 75; intelligible 80; new 95; stable 108 perspective 9, 15, 27, 35, 89, 96, 105, 108, 135, 138, 155, 162, 184, 186, 190; cultural 62, 184; ethical 32, 51, 147, 164, 200; global governance 5; informative 12; nationalistic 6, 163; political 154; pro-’Big Australia’ 54; unethical 92 planning 11, 54; infrastructure development 45; national 27; national governmental 184; population 32, 34 policies 2, 4, 10, 12–13, 15, 20–4, 28–30, 33, 44–7, 56–7, 69–70, 92–4, 159, 193–6, 198–9; affirmative action 170; coordinated 54; debates 4–5, 41, 91; discourse on 90, 198; framework 23; governmental 70, 73; impartial 184; international 184; non-national 209; and practices of biopolitics 46; pro-immigration 57 political 6–8, 12–15, 25–36, 46–8, 52–8, 72–3, 75–83, 117, 122–8, 154–5, 157–9, 161–2, 177–9, 188–90, 201–2; campaigns 6; debates 12, 28; dissenters 30; ethics 31; figures 15, 157; journalists 57; leaders 47; parties 155; power 76, 124; processes 157, 159 politicians 10, 28, 34, 43–4, 47, 49, 56, 99; left-liberal 158; right-wing 11; über-conservative 24; ultra-conservative 6 politics 2, 7, 10, 40–1, 43, 45, 47, 49, 51, 53, 55, 57, 81, 161, 167; electoral 159; international 76, 191; left-wing 158;

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nationalist 21; new humanitarian 194; right-wing 161; socialist 158; ‘wedge’ 157–8 pollution 10, 30, 94, 97, 147; carbon 4–5, 11, 35, 94–5, 202, 204, 210; increased 103; noise 97; visual 97 population 1–15, 19–36, 40–58, 62–83, 89–105, 107–31, 133–48, 153–80, 183–211; ageing 22–3, 34, 99, 102; of Australia 23, 41, 43, 49, 53, 56, 58, 156–7, 175, 185; broader 167, 169, 171; changes 7, 42–3, 57, 186, 190, 196; and climate change 10; composition 4, 6, 9, 31, 191; concepts 13–14, 45, 111, 153, 177, 209; constitution of 166, 179; control 90, 93–5, 103–4; coordinating 55; as a cultural artefact 3–4; cultural production of the concept of 12, 139, 158; debates 12, 43–5, 48–9, 52–3, 56–7, 95; defining 64, 162; and demography 3–4, 12, 21, 28, 63, 77, 110; discourse of 42, 70–1, 154, 160; global 1, 14, 28–30, 34–6, 89–90, 93, 107, 109–11, 127, 129–31, 146, 164, 168; and identity 13, 62–3, 65, 67, 69, 71, 73, 75, 77, 79–81, 83, 183; and identity in contemporary apocalyptic films 108; immigrant 58; indigenous 166–7, 170–2, 179; issues 49, 72, 166; large 14, 94, 109, 114, 116, 119, 122; local community 64, 94, 164; loss 108, 129; management 4, 7, 20, 22, 50, 52, 58, 65, 73, 77, 124, 126, 177, 186, 189; marginalised 169; national 24–6, 28, 30–1, 67–72, 80, 82, 153–5, 157–8, 162–4, 168–70, 179, 188–91, 193–4, 196, 200; non-European 8; numbers 14, 24, 70, 95, 107, 110–11, 116, 198; planning 32, 34; postcolonial 166; projections 100; purity 133, 135, 137, 139, 141, 143, 145, 147; racialised 166; redistribution 209; refugee 99; shifts 198; sustainability 22, 27, 43, 47, 53, 102 population control 20, 90–1, 93–5, 103–4, 153; framing 20; governance-level 91; mechanisms 94, 153 population groupings 6, 66–7, 75, 82, 117, 156, 162–4, 209; national 164; regional 70 population groups 3, 7, 62, 68, 79, 196; national 191; scattered 122 population growth 5, 9–11, 13, 19–22, 24–5, 27–30, 41, 43–5, 47, 49, 52–3, 55–8, 90–4, 99–100, 104–5; and

alarmism 12; in Australia 23, 41, 43, 48–9, 53, 56, 58, 156–7, 175, 185; human 89, 93; and moral panics 4, 44–5, 47, 133, 135; unchecked 5, 90, 92 population health 3, 27, 66, 78, 80, 167; discourses 153; issues 79 population numbers 14, 24, 42, 47, 70, 95, 107, 110–11, 116, 121, 198; decimated 121; large 95, 121; maintaining existing 42; national 24; unchanging 47 population reduction 28, 90, 108; global 103; planned 28; programs 103 population size 4–5, 11–12, 40–5, 47–9, 51, 53–6, 90, 94–5, 104, 108–10, 113, 116–17, 120, 148, 153; Australia’s 13, 41; debates 11, 13, 44, 58; global 4, 13, 89–90, 93; national 19; projected 43; refers to the overall numeric demography of groups of people 4; stability of 14, 54; stable optimum 94 populism 15, 154, 156–7, 159, 161–2 populists 55, 91, 156, 161, 164 Povinelli, Elizabeth 171 power 25–7, 33, 35, 50, 52, 64–5, 71–3, 76, 81, 115–17, 124, 126, 145, 177–9, 208–9; biopolitical 35, 46, 72, 77, 124; disciplinary 78; frameworks 78, 161; mechanisms 56, 80, 111, 209; object of 20; relations 25, 80, 138, 178, 186; secret ties uniting 81; social 117; technologies of 25–6, 36, 50, 53, 81, 116, 143, 179 pro-immigration policies 57 production 30–1, 35, 62, 65–7, 71, 73, 114, 116–17, 144–5, 153–4, 158, 162, 171–2, 179–80, 196; contemporary 83; creative 173; globalised 119; industrial 114, 118; of population 163, 167; processes 113; technological 116 productivity 26, 46, 48, 50, 55, 155 programmes 34, 175, 185–6, 204; population development 20; sound fertility assistance 22 protecting borders 46, 69, 184, 189; see also borders public anxieties 5, 13, 40–1, 91–2, 95 public transport 40–1, 46, 48, 53, 57 purity 135–6, 140, 142–8, 155, 177; human genetic 141; of humanity 135, 137–8 ‘race struggle’ 138, 198 racial discrimination 170 Racial Discrimination Act 1975 170 racialised bodies 15, 166

Index racism 8, 21, 25–7, 29, 33, 58, 77, 127, 178 rates 21–3, 56, 64, 72, 74–5, 79, 89, 175–6; national birth 20; net migration 43 Reagan, Ronald 158–9 refugees 12, 14–15, 19–21, 28, 30–5, 42, 82–3, 178–9, 183–8, 190, 192, 194, 196–8, 200, 202–8; and asylum seekers 34, 40–1, 57, 184–5, 187–8, 197, 200; background 186; camps 7, 183, 186–7, 203, 207–9; categorising in terms of population numbers 198; debates concerning 42, 186, 199; excluding 201; genuine 192; illegitimate 197; journeys of 186, 207; and population 99; problems 184; processing 194; and refusal of entry 195–7; rejecting 194; welcoming 13, 183, 186 regimes 93, 102, 122–3, 196; alien sovereign 142; contemporary biopolitical 127; harsh security 125; nationalistic citizenship 191; political 82; re-emergent conceptual 41; regulatory 68, 71–2, 116, 130 religion 8, 24, 46, 140, 145, 155, 164, 198 reproduction 20, 28, 33–4, 72, 133–4; and fertility promotion 26; human 33; non-organic 136 resources 29, 41–2, 47, 51, 53, 56, 58, 68, 91–2, 95, 99, 104–5, 168–9, 190, 194; depletion 10, 90; infrastructural 42, 50; labour 161; limited 29, 41; nation’s 41; natural 93; scarce 14, 129; sharing of 4, 30, 40, 42, 56, 92; urban 51 responsibility 20, 31–2, 51, 53, 93–4, 124, 147, 190, 197, 200–1; ethical 51; political 36; social 11, 118 responsiveness 36, 188, 191, 193, 197, 200–1, 208; criminal 117; ethical 36, 185, 187–8, 192, 202; new 184; pragmatic 200 Revel, Judith 75 risk 9, 11, 32, 36, 42, 45–7, 50, 53–7, 76–8, 105, 117–20, 124, 131, 156, 161; corporeal 175; increasing 92; significant 53; society 126 risks, polluting nature 139 rituals 45, 70, 80, 135, 192; cultural 45; public national 70; purification 135 Rudd, Kevin 41, 43–4, 54, 57 Said, Edward 198 Sanderson, Warren 65

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schemes 19–23, 25–6, 28, 34–5, 174; baby bonus 23; official migration 34 Schmitt, Carl 178 science fiction 90, 107, 133–4 scientists 3–4, 33, 110, 123, 133, 136–8, 142, 145, 204; genetic 142; transnational 113 security 23, 26, 34, 46–7, 58, 76, 78, 80, 122–6, 129, 167; biopolitical 56; global 64; national 25, 41; notion of 47, 76; population’s 179; social 117; and sovereignty working in tandem 123 Sharma, Sarah 79 Shelley, Mary 108, 135–7 Shriver, Lionel 90, 108–9 silent majority 156–7, 160 sites 12–13, 64, 68, 70, 77–8, 97–8, 104–5, 109, 111, 114, 118–21, 128–9, 178, 193–5, 208; critical 73; offshore 194; transformative 201 smells 174–7, 179, 186, 208 Smith, Dick 42, 48–52, 55 social anxieties 29–30, 44, 98 social contract 129–30, 192 social disruption 31–2 society 24, 33, 51, 75, 92, 109, 115, 119, 122–3, 155, 161, 192; contemporary 6, 83, 121; global 154; health of 155; mechanised 119; neoliberal 143; pluralist 27; pre-apocalyptic 128; urban 119; white settler 77, 112 sovereign power 25, 81, 127, 177, 192; characterising 127; objectification 35; regimes 110, 124 sovereignty 25, 35, 56, 80–1, 83, 102, 117, 122–3, 126–7, 167, 177–9, 191–3; authoritarian 161; demands of 178; legal subjects of 76, 124; perceived 158; service of 35, 81; singular 36 space 2, 4–5, 9–10, 53, 55–6, 91, 95–6, 98–9, 105, 128–9, 167–9, 176–80, 187, 196–7, 209–10; breathing 44, 56; crowded 97–8, 101, 148; domestic 115; globalised 119, 130; inhabited 99; issue of 55, 101; life-giving 201; life-sustaining 210; liveable 40, 53, 56, 97, 105, 201; overpopulated 97–8; physical 51; territorial 178 Stable Population Party 53 stories 2, 12, 44, 90, 100–1, 104, 107, 134–5, 141–2, 147–8, 172, 187, 199, 204, 206; civilization’s 24; conservative 147; contemporary 134; on-screen 91; short 100; survivor 127

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Straayer, Chris 138 subjecthood (contemporary) 74, 77, 80, 83, 91, 105, 139, 189, 207–8 subjective identity 71, 80 subjectivity 7–9, 13–15, 62–6, 74–5, 82–3, 105, 107–8, 110–13, 120–1, 126, 138–40, 161–3, 187–8, 202–8, 210–11; embodied 208; ethical 180; intelligible 91, 171, 187; migrant’s 199; national 75; people’s 62; political 81 subjects 6–8, 64–72, 74–6, 80–2, 110–11, 114–17, 119–21, 123–7, 129–31, 162–7, 176–80, 188–90, 193–9, 201–5, 207–10; embodied 118, 139; indigenous 170, 176; individual 79, 116–17, 124, 178, 189, 198, 209; marginalised 157; migrant 69, 199; political 76, 81–2, 124 supranational organisations 27–8 survival 33–4, 98, 101, 116, 118–19, 122, 124–9, 167, 177; bare life of 98, 128–9; basic 62, 126; contemporary 119; corporeal 116; post-apocalyptic 108–10, 123, 126 survivors 107, 110, 112–13, 115, 118, 121, 123–4, 126, 129; apocalypse 114; groups of 116, 124; post-apocalyptic 116; self-assured 115 sustainability 11–12, 15, 27, 30, 32, 34, 41–3, 45, 47, 50, 52–6, 183–5, 187, 201, 209–11; articulated 50; contemporary 4; ecological 95, 184, 187, 200; economic 53; environmental 41–2, 94; global 20, 34, 95, 209; and infrastructure 41, 45, 49, 52–3, 55; international 27; of population 22, 27, 43, 47, 53, 102; resource 28 tax credits 20–1 tax transfers 34 technologies 24, 31, 35, 50, 81, 93, 95, 109, 113–14, 121, 123–4, 130, 133, 137, 142; disciplinary power 124; fancy 113–14; infrastructural 122 television 1, 5, 12–14, 80, 90, 99, 107–8, 116, 118, 133, 135, 140, 156; creativity 140; depiction 138; dramas 135; media 107; programming 186; series 2, 5, 90, 108, 122, 126 terrorist attacks see Christchurch mosque shooting terrorists 7–8, 125, 164, 183, 199 Thatcher, Margaret 158–9 Third World governments 28, 92–3, 103

threats 42, 45–6, 55–7, 103, 109–10, 125, 135, 137, 140, 146–7, 190, 194, 198; conceptual 147; external 55; moral 136; new 144; non-human 126; vulnerable to 147 totalitarianism 81–2, 122–3 trade 6, 11, 25, 73, 93, 101, 110, 126, 204 transformation 133, 140, 147, 189–90, 192, 206–7; human 134; significant 81; unassailable 134 transport 54, 97, 103, 109, 124; private 78; public 40–1, 46, 48, 53, 57; vehicles 97 Trump, Pres. Donald 6, 14, 157–8, 160–1 Turnbull, Malcolm 24 underpopulation 5, 13, 98, 105, 107–31 ‘unequal distribution of vulnerability’ 158 United Kingdom 5, 15, 22, 31, 100, 109, 157–8, 161 United Nations 5–6, 27–8, 102, 183, 197 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees 30, 202 United Nations General Assembly 168 United States 1, 7, 20–1, 24, 32, 93–4, 100, 103, 142, 154, 156–8, 171–2; culture of liberal-humanism 94; and Mexico 6; population 6, 159; and President Donald Trump 6, 14, 32, 157–8, 160–1 urban infrastructure 13, 40–2, 46, 57, 194 urban space 5, 40–2, 51, 53, 55–6 violence 7–9, 11, 13–14, 32, 63, 120, 123, 128, 157–8, 168–9, 177–8, 183–4, 189–94, 196–7, 199–202; of categorisation and rejection 15, 171; ethical 198; institutionalising 158; interpersonal 97; physical 202; potential 189; unethical 8, 77, 168, 180; verbal 80, 159; white supremacist 8 Vonnegut, Kurt 100 vulnerability 32, 36, 99, 118–20, 125, 130, 147, 153–4, 158, 187, 190, 193, 201–2, 204–9; commonality of 186, 200, 208; corporeal 209; increased 110; of others 9, 120, 186, 201; physical 120; primary 120, 200; shared 206; social 120 Watson, James 133 welcoming migrants 189 welfare 27, 65, 155, 157, 190 welfare state 22 Western civilisation 25–6, 34

Index Western countries 19, 21, 24–5, 28, 31, 69, 78, 94, 96, 99, 103, 166, 189 Western cultures 24, 164, 175 Whale, James 137 white supremacists 8, 11, 162, 164 Wichum, Ricky 126 Willis, Samantha 123

women 24, 114, 141 workers 23, 155 workplaces 78 World Health Organisation 27 world populations 62, 103, 110 zoë 2, 81–2, 126–7, 138, 177, 179

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