Part of our class inquiry this semester has been to develop a line of thought that notes the difference between everyday life and the theories we establish about it, between the thing itself and our means of understanding it. The way I have tried to incorporate this into the larger scope of my work has been to examine cross-epistemological or cultural encounters as a point where the constructedness and necessity of theories or narratives can be simultaneously recognized. In the last 48 hours I’ve been forced to recognize the theoretically detached nature of even this endeavor of positive recognition because of an occurrence or moment in life. Over the past three years or so my grandmother’s mental and then physical health has waned, on Friday evening she passed away. Luckily, because I grew up in Tucson and most of my father’s family lives here, I was able to be there even though I’m in graduate school – something I think that might be different for many people who face similar events. I was not prepared to be as affected as I’ve found myself to be (my hands are twitching involuntarily as a type this, for instance), but I think this points out an important difference between theorizing or abstracting an encounter with the fragile constructedness of human truths and lives, and the experience of living through and witnessing that realization. I’m going to copy a portion of something I wrote Saturday morning because I couldn’t sleep that coincidentally (or perhaps ironically) calls upon some similar ideas to those used by Jonathan Xavier Inda in his article on the biopolitics of immigration policy (at the time that I originally wrote the paragraphs below I hadn’t read his essay), afterwards I’ll try to reflect on its meaning in the context of our course. I should point out here that my grandmother, whose nickname was Mimi, was unconscious when my wife and I arrived, and had been for several hours.

5/2/2009, 5:30 a.m.

I wasn’t prepared for what I saw when I walked into Mimi’s room last night. Having not been in Tucson or St. Louis when my other grandparents passed away, I had not before seen someone so close to death. The first thing that entered my mind when I sat down next to her to say goodbye was that this was bare life. (It seems weird that I would think of an academic concept in a moment like that, but the impulse is hard to turn off.) Bare life is an idea discussed by an Italian philosopher and legal theorist named Giorgio Agamben who I’ve been reading and using in my work for about three years. It refers to the state of human existence when all the social, cultural, and political markers that create our identity have been stripped away. It is when there is nothing left but the sheer fact of physical existence – a breathing organism, which may or may not be human. Entering Mimi’s room, I did not want to recognize the person in the bed as my grandmother, and so I think I tried to find a way of conceptualizing what was going on that would allow me to maintain that distance. This narrative distanced and protected me from what was going on in a sense: at first I couldn’t touch her. After sitting for about thirty seconds and telling her I loved her I got up and went to the other side of the room. I think there is another way of looking at her passing though, one that showed itself to me as the evening went on. Her existence was not stripped bare because she was surrounded by the people to whom she gave life, and who love her. At the actual moment that she died, her three remaining children were sitting close to her, and her grandchildren and their families were surrounding her. This moment was her physical existence in a sense, but it was not, and is not, stripped bare. Her family is the material continuation of the life that she lived – we literally proceed from her body. For Agamben, bare life is a negative thing in the contemporary world, the left-over portion of existence after everything else has been atomized in its subjection to an unwieldy and often monstrous social organization. For my grandmother, what was left over after her physical existence ended is everything that made her life what it was.

I think that the difference between the narrative that I’m constructing here, the similar ones that I’m sure my father and his siblings are writing for themselves, and the narrative(s) of biopolitical exclusion that Inda discusses in his essay is not simply one of scope. It has something to do with the two meanings of passing: one having to do with a performative identity and the other with a traditional euphemism for death. The logic may be similar – the family is finding a way to deal with my grandmother’s death by narrating the difference between her conscious life and the physical life that expired, and the nation narrates a difference between its legal or cultural existence and the lives that are treated as excess and deported; my grandmother’s life is dissolving into our memories of her, but in a way already has passed materially into the lives of those who are her genetic descendants, and the person of the sovereign (the king) dissolves in a biopolitical nation-state into the sovereign existence of a people, which is then protected in the same way that his body once was. However, in some ways I think (or want to say) that the purposes of the parallel narratives are different. They’re both a preservation of self, but one is cognizant of the material history to which it relates, and the other is not. My attempt to begin working through the experience of watching my grandmother die is conscious of my material relation to her, whereas the narratives of American national identity that criminalize migration are not conscious of the historical causes of the particular patterns of that migration (to use the terminology emphasized by De Genova in his article on deportation). We might say that the current form of the United States and its concurrent narrative of self were birthed by the process and effects of westward expansion and colonization that we read about in Philip Deloria’s book, as well as by the forceful transfer of what is now the southwestern portion of the United States from the hands of the Mexican state (also constructed through a process of colonization, though different in important ways) into those of the U.S. government and its sovereign population. The fear that the narratives of “illegal immigration” depend upon are a fear of passing away. Instead of a physical expiration though, this passing would be a passing into a different identity – which, if we were to work through the logic, would point out that the national identity (or individual identities that make it up) are performed, though passed off as essential. The liminal lives of migrant workers are not valued, while the liminal life of my grandmother was valued, even as she passed away and was unconscious of what was going on around her, her family was intent upon narrating the experience in a positive way that included her as a meaningful participant in the event. Thus my father and his siblings engaged in a narrative not of biopolitical exclusion (as sovereign decision makers withdrawing support and allowing death), but of understanding and release. In contrast, the biopolitical decision of the sovereign as described by Inda is one in which passivity and aggression become indistinguishable as the nation state actively ignores its own historical constructedness and fragile legitimacy: It enacts deportation but does not give witness to the effects. On the other hand, the moment that I witnessed and participated in (and still am, in a way) was one in which I’ve been forced to confront and work through the fragile construction of “me” through identification (material and otherwise) with my grandmother. This recognizance pushed me through what I think was initially an impulse for purity through disavowal when I first arrived, and I was eventually able to briefly embrace her and then say goodbye. This type of recognition of ultimate sameness and the contact that it allows between two apparently different forms of the same life (human) is what is missing in the immigration policies and politics of the United States in the attempt to manage and support only one.

-- Andy DuMont