Live And Let Die: Did Michel Foucault Predict Europe's Refugee Crisis?

Asylum seekers are held at the Macedonian border. EPA/Georgi Licovski

By Stephane J Baele, University of Exeter

In March 1976, philosopher Michel Foucault described the advent of a new logic of government, specific to Western liberal societies. He called it biopolitics. States were becoming obsessed with the health and wellbeing of their populations.

And sure enough, 40 years later, Western states rarely have been more busy promoting healthy food, banning tobacco, regulating alcohol, organising breast cancer checks, or churning out information on the risk probabilities of this or that disease.

Foucault never claimed this was a bad trend – it saves lives after all. But he did warn that paying so much attention to the health and wealth of one population necessitates the exclusion of those who are not entitled to – and are perceived to endanger – this health maximisation programme.

Biopolitics is therefore the politics of live and let die. The more a state focuses on its own population, the more it creates the conditions of possibility for others to die, “exposing people to death, increasing the risk of death for some people”.

Rarely has this paradox been more apparent than in the crisis that has seen hundreds of thousands of people seeking asylum in Europe over the past few years. It is striking to watch European societies investing so much in health at home and, at the same time, erecting ever more impermeable legal and material barriers to keep refugees at bay, actively contributing to human deaths.

The One:12 Collective Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice Wows Collectors

The new line of collector-grade, super articulated action figures from The One:12 Collective is a "game changer" according to collectors. (PRNewsFoto/Mezco Toyz)

During their annual Toy Fair Preview at their world headquarters in New York last week, Mezco revealed their latest additions to The One:12 Collective, Batman and Superman from the Dawn Of Justice.

Why Leonardo Da Vinci Would Have Aced The Internet Cat Craze

By Gabriele Neher, University of Nottingham

Leonardo da Vinci may have been ahead of the curve in aerodynamics, anatomy and mechanics, but he also possessed an incredible foresight for another modern staple: cat obsessions.

Pride And Prejudice And Zombies: It's The Jane Austen Horror Show

By Camilla Nelson, University of Notre Dame Australia

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a bestselling monster mash-up must be in want of a movie. Perhaps this explains why Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016) – beset by myriad casting woes, money worries, and directorial setbacks since the project was announced – has finally arrived in cinemas this month.

The film – starring Lily James, Sam Riley and Jack Huston – is based on the bestselling book of the same name by Seth Grahame-Smith.

Fans – and the weirdly fascinated – can rest assured. England’s green and pleasant land will be beset by a plague of the living dead. Corpses will dig their way out of graves. Crypt doors will burst open. Armies of Satan’s soldiers – shambling, soulless, brain-devouring monsters – will upturn coaches, invade the houses of the rich, and generally terrorise the good citizens of Austen’s Hertfordshire.

But it is unlikely that this will be accompanied by any cries of indignation from the Janeites, howls of outrage from Austen bibliophiles and scholars, or publicity-generating accusations that the barbarians of Hollywood have finally set “our dear Jane” spinning in her grave.

The reality is a lot more interesting.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, book trailer.

Websites frequented by the Janeites are more likely to be sponsoring book giveaways and free movie passes. And the movie is more likely to get a genial nod from popular culture and Austen scholars, not to mention neo-Marxist scholars of the apocalyptic school who have a deep appreciation for the way in which Seth Grahame-Smith has tethered the paradigmatic exponent of western middle-class mores with the zombie monster – the ultimate proletarian monster, which was, at the time of the book’s 2009 release, declared by Time magazine to be the cultural mascot of the GFC.

In fact, Jane Austen horror has burgeoned into a distinctive subgenre of Austen adaptations. Joining Seth-Grahame Smith’s interpretation of Elizabeth Bennet as a katana-weilding zombie slayer, is Michael Thomas Ford’s Jane Bites Back (2009), featuring Jane Austen as the undead 233-year-old author and owner of an upstate New York book store.

There is also Amanda Grange’s, Mr Darcy, Vampyre (2009), in which Elizabeth Bennet wakes up to the worrying truth that she is married to a “vampyre”; and Carrie Bebris’ Pride and Prescience (2012), and subsequent books, which cast Elizabeth Bennet as one half of a dynamic detective duo investigating supernatural mysteries.

Even the latest BBC Masterpiece sequel to Pride and Prejudice, based on PD James’ Death Comes to Pemberley, features a plotline transformed by the conventions of the neo-gothic thriller.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, film trailer.

These works of Austen horror – styled as fan fictions, spoofs, satires or comedies – are oddly interesting for the way in which they blend the aesthetics of British heritage drama with chic lit, 20th-century soap opera, and the genre of monster tales, which, for many scholars, signals widespread fears and anxieties about the monstrous dislocations at the heart of contemporary life.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a curious case in point.

The film may be set in the past, with lavish hair-dos, costumes and make-up, but there is of course nothing historical in the film. The mysterious plague that the plot envisions has far less to do with the violence of Austen’s world, and more to do with the violence of the Anglophone world today. This makes it one of the more interesting examples of what David McNally has evocatively called the “capitalist grotesque”.

The capitalist grotesque
In Haitian folklore, the zombie represents the historical memory of slavery – the idea of one human enslaved by the will of another. Appropriated by US directors such as George A. Romero, the zombie expressed a range of domestic threats, from civil rights to violence arising from the war in Vietnam, or as critiques of consumerism and the military industrial complex.

Wikimedia Commons/ Quirk Books, Philadelphia

In the wake of the global financial crisis activists and scholars appropriated the zombie image as a metaphor for a newly globalised proletariat – modernity’s outcasts, disenfranchised social classes, the “superfluous” populations evoked by sociologists such as Zygmunt Bauman, depleted of their affective and intellectual energies by a cultural and economic system dedicated to the production of “human waste”.

In short, the zombie usurped Frankenstein’s position as the proletariat monster of choice – a symptomatic representation of a cultural and economic system rotting away from within and without.

Austen is an apt target for such anxious envisioning not only because of her centrality in the western cultural canon, but also because she is fundamentally an uncompromising moralist.

Her ethical system is every bit as complex as Kant’s, and her ethical values – including such allegedly quaint-sounding notions as “amiability”, “civility”, “propriety” and “dignity” – are, as Thomas Rodham has argued, fundamentally about middle-class existence.

Indeed, the middle-class myopia of Austen has long been a point of critical attack. As Raymond Williams famously pointed out in his book The Country and the City (1973):

where only one class is seen, no classes are seen.

These critical concerns also attach themselves to anxieties about the imperial “unconsciousness” of Austen.

In the novels of Britain’s imperial age, “money from elsewhere” in the guise of profits from the East India Company, or exotic sugar plantations, provided the means for many a plot resolution, as Edward Said famously argued in Culture and Imperialism (1993) with respect to the sugar plantation that sustains the Bertram’s family estate in Austen’s novel Mansfield Park (1814).

The Pride and Prejudice and Zombies cover, by Doogie Horner, is a ‘zombification’ of a painting of Marcia Fox by William Beechey. Wikimedia Commons

Hence, in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – a putative democratisation of Austen – the upper classes also go to the “Orient” not to acquire wealth, but to acquire the “deadly arts” that will allow them to impose order on society in a more direct and violent way.

But despite these apparently democratic renovations, the “Orient” still functions within this monster franchise as a site of exploitation, just as the disaffected zombies still function as an outcast social order to be vanquished.

Moreover, the novel somewhat blunts the force of its critique by breaking the conventions of the zombie narrative – one of the few mainstream genres to adhere to the convention of the nihilistic ending – by featuring a happy ending. Indeed the other two books in the trilogy – Dawn of the Dreadfuls (2010) and Dreadfully Ever After (2011), by Steve Hockensmith – do the same, giving us three happy endings in a row.

But there is also something in this monster movie for the Janeites.

Jane Austen was no revolutionary. But had she seen the state of our world – the way in which we appear to have failed so completely at “amiability”, “civility”, “propriety” and “dignity” – then, perhaps she might even have agreed that, as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies' original fanboy trailer put it:

Maybe You Need Some Zombies.

Further reading:
Jane Austen … Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem, by Camilla Nelson.


About Today's Contributor
Camilla Nelson, Senior Lecturer in Writing, University of Notre Dame Australia

This article was originally published on The Conversation. 

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STAGE RUSH: Imagine Dragons Helps Families Fighting Childhood Cancer

Stage Rush: Imagine Dragons lets you play as your favorite Imagine Dragon on your smartphone. Even better, for every $1.99 download purchase, $1 will be donated to Imagine Dragons' foundation, the Tyler Robinson Foundation, during the first month of release. The Tyler Robinson Foundation was created by Imagine Dragons and Tyler Robinson's family in 2015 to help families deal with the financial and emotional costs of childhood cancer. The more games downloaded, the more money will go to TRF. After the first month, 25% of the revenue from a game download will got to TRF. (PRNewsFoto/Zig Zag Zoom)

Play STAGE RUSH: Imagine Dragons as your favorite Imagine Dragons band member and help families fight pediatric cancer. Created by mobile game publisher Zig Zag Zoom, this fun and fast-paced endless runner game launched today on iOS and Android. In STAGE RUSH: Imagine Dragons, you run as a member of the band to the beats of their hit songs, weaving your way through the streets of their hometown Las Vegas and the enchanting streets of Paris.

For every $1.99 download purchase, $1 will be donated to Imagine Dragons' foundation, the Tyler Robinson Foundation, during the first month of release. The Tyler Robinson Foundation was created by Imagine Dragons and Tyler Robinson's family in 2015 to help families deal with the financial and emotional costs of childhood cancer. The more games downloaded, the more money will go to TRF. After the first month, 25% of the revenue from a game download will got to TRF.

Here is what Imagine Dragons had to say: "The ability to incorporate meaningful charitable components in ordinary, everyday activities and purchases is something the younger generation appreciates like no other. We teamed up with Zig Zag Zoom to bring that giving spirit to mobile gaming, an area not really explored in the past. The game is a blast, but we're even more excited about the money it will raise to rescue pediatric cancer families by way of our charity, the Tyler Robinson Foundation."

"The Martian" Tops 100,000 Ratings on Audible.com

Podium Publishing's audiobook version of Andy Weir's novel "The Martian" has surpassed 100,000 ratings on Amazon's Audible.com, affirming it as one of the most beloved audiobooks ever produced. The Ridley Scott-directed film adaptation starring Matt Damon is nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture. (PRNewsFoto/Podium Publishing)

Audiobook published by Podium Publishing achieves monumental milestone

"The Martian" is one of the year's most popular films, garnering seven Oscar nominations, two Golden Globes, and a whopping $599 million at the global box office.

Now, the thrilling space adventure has reached another milestone: 100,000 fan ratings on Audible.com, affirming it as one of the most beloved audiobooks ever.

The Seducer's Diary: How A 19th Century Philosopher Anticipated The Pick Up Artist Movement

Daryush Valizadeh. Bartek Kucharczyk-Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

By Patrick Stokes, Deakin University

Barely a year after Julian Blanc was denied a visa to Australia, the outcry over Daryush Valizadeh’s planned visit and cancelled meetings has once again drawn media attention on the global “Pick Up Artist” (PUA) movement.

Valizadeh, aka “Roosh V.” is one of the more visible PUA figures, and one of the most overtly sexist. He’s written a series of books on how to sleep with women in various countries such as Brazil, (“Poor favela chicks are very easy, but quality is a serious problem”) but advises his readers to avoid Denmark as Nordic social democracy has made Danish women too independent. He cites Arthur Schopenhauer to argue that women are less rational than men and so should be controlled by them. He insists “no” usually doesn’t mean no, and anyway women should understand that men just can’t stop themselves (so much for all that rational decision making…).

And here’s the kicker: he has proposed legalising rape on private property. If Valizadeh meant that to be some sort of tongue-in-cheek Swiftian parody, it’s not a particularly good one, and given the context I’m disinclined to give him the benefit of Poe’s Law.

Other PUAs might insist they don’t go quite that far. But all belong to a movement that presents itself as ‘empowering’ men by giving them tools and techniques (often plainly abusive ones) to manipulate women into bed. It reduces women to sites for the agency of men, mere mechanisms for producing sex and comfort.

On one level the PUA pathology is easy enough to diagnose: it’s just misogyny organised into a self-reinforcing club. It is men who have lost undeserved power – in particular, access to and control of women’s bodies – interpreting this loss as subjection.

PUAs and their “Men’s Rights Activists” (MRA) brethren will, of course, vociferously reject that claim. To do so, they’ll make various appeals: to history, to biological essentialism, to weirdly cherry-picked factoids (“women can’t really be oppressed because men die in workplace accidents more!”). All of it, however, amounts to little more than obvious figleaves for a desire to reclaim power over women.

Who Will Donald Trump Attack Next? Boom Fantasy Brings Live Fantasy Format to Republican Debate

Boom Fantasy will bring its unique live fantasy format to the political arena on Saturday, February 6th at 8 pm ET for the Republican Debate on ABC News. (PRNewsFoto/Boom Fantasy)

Trump vs. Cruz. Bush vs. irrelevance. Rubio vs. his insatiable thirst for water. If you thought the last few debates were fun, brace yourself. Saturday night will be like no other, as staunch conservatives and bleeding-heart liberals alike can be a part of the ABC News Republican debate by predicting what will happen next on Boom Fantasy, the live fantasy sports leader.

Four Key Takeaways From The Iowa Caucuses

Bernie Sanders at his caucus night rally in Des Moines, Iowa. Reuters/Rick Wilking

By Anthony J. Gaughan, Drake University

The Iowa caucuses have a long history of upending the conventional wisdom and Monday night was no exception.

The biggest surprises came on the Republican side. The final polls over the weekend predicted victory for Donald Trump and showed Ted Cruz losing support in Iowa.

But that’s not what happened. Cruz won the GOP caucuses with 28% of the vote, followed by Trump with 24%, Marco Rubio with 23%, and Ben Carson with 9%.

Meanwhile, in the Democratic caucuses, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders finished in what was essentially a tie.

So what does it all mean?

The Next Chapter: Seeking the Stories of Refugees in Europe

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InterAction Interviews Photographer Behind the "Where Are You?" Project

When Italian photographer Massimo Sestini captured an image during the Mare Nostrum rescue operation in 2014, he didn't know it would go viral. After realizing the impact the photo had on viewers, Sestini began the "Where Are You?" project to raise awareness and find out what became of the hopeful faces captured in the image.

Sestini agreed to a Q&A with InterAction Blog Editor Sarah Siguenza to explain how he captured the photo and what he has learned in the time since. In advance of the "Supporting Syria and the Region" conference convening in London, InterAction has released an excerpt of the conversation:

Why Would Anyone Believe The Earth Is Flat?

The Earth as seen from space – looks curved from up there. 
Flickr/NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, CC BY-NC

By Peter Ellerton, The University of Queensland

Belief in a flat Earth seems a bit like the attempt to eradicate polio – just when you think it’s gone, a pocket of resistance appears. But the “flat Earthers” have always been with us; it’s just that they usually operate under the radar of public awareness.

Now the rapper B.o.B has given the idea prominence through his tweets and the release of his single Flatline, in which he not only says the Earth is flat, but mixes in a slew of other weird and wonderful ideas.

These include the notions that the world is controlled by lizard people, that certain celebrities are cloned, that Freemasons manipulate our lives, that the sun revolves around the Earth and that the Illuminati control the new world order. Not bad for one song.

Even ignoring that these ideas are inconsistent (are we run by lizards, the Freemansons or the Illuminati?), what would inspire such a plethora of delusions? The answer is both straightforward, in that it is reasonably clear in psychological terms, and problematic, in that it can be hard to fix.

Nuclear Experts Are Scared -- 48 Hours To Act

"Doel Kerncentrale 2" by Torsade de Pointes - Own work. Licensed under CC0 via Commons 

Nuclear experts are scared:

Belgium has just restarted two ancient and cracked nuclear power plants that threaten to unleash another Chernobyl disaster right in the heart of Europe!