February 3, 2012

In tracing out links between what have been understood as different forms of insurance in the United States—insurance taken out on slaves, and life insurance—Michael Ralph’s paper draws our attention to speculative capital and its differential evaluation of human lives—or, as he puts it, the “subterranean trajectory that traffics in embodied labor and in the value to be extracted from the human as a capital asset” (19). This takes slave insurance as the basis for a range of evocative parallels between the logics of slavery and that of modern capital. These parallels are grounded in the histories of capital formation in the West—since the slave trade arguably provided the capital basis for the industrial revolution—and the 19th century emergence of a variety of financial techniques that continue to be of relevance to us today, as well as in something more interpretive, what one might see as a kind of poetics of capital that works through abstraction, alienation, and differentiation.

The paper takes life insurance and the category of disability as interrelated sites from which to reveal how speculation and differentiation work in tandem across quite a long trajectory of US history. I’m going to try to briefly outline the central arguments here—as I understand them—before posing a couple of questions.

1. The first half of the paper demonstrates that contemporary forms of life insurance—particularly corporate owned life insurance but not only that form—rely on techniques for valuing human life that are closely linked to slave insurance and to the institution of slavery itself. In describing a range of speculative practices associated with slavery, including mortgaging slaves as well as the more notorious maritime insurance practices, the paper does more than make a somewhat familiar argument that things we don’t think of as subject to market valuation—human life, in this case—in fact are. The paper uses the link between slavery and life insurance to extend that kind of argument in two ways. First, by expanding our conception of the ‘value’ of the life of a slave: the slave’s value is understood not only as a source of labor, but also as a ‘bundle of capital’—one that can be the source of speculative value (can be, in a sense, financialized). Second, by pointing out how the valuation of slaves—according to skill sets, for instance—is already closely related to the forms of valuation of life insurance, rather than that of property. Thus the distinction between life and capital is blurred in several senses.

2. The second suggestion of the paper is that the abstraction and valuation of human life operate through processes of differentiation. This differentiation works through social, moral, legal and even regional categories, and is linked to particular epistemological forms—specifically to the rise of the probability and statistics. Thus, ‘vital’ statistics both emerge as part of the business of evaluating life and value and provide the basis for ongoing exclusion of former slaves even after formal inequality is abolished. Statistics replace eugenics and race theory with new kinds of categorization and differential valuation in the form of “high-risk” subject pools, or criminal types.

A key argument here is that it’s not only former slaves who are subjected to statistical differentiation, but also a range of marginalized populations who are considered to be “ugly” to society—and who are excluded from full participation in the labor market for a range of reasons. Ralph points out the bidirectional nature of this exclusion—on the one hand, it marks as marginal those populations who are unable to participate in wage labour, the disabled for instance, on the other it creates stigmas around those who might all too well be able to sell their labor such that they appear unfit. A focus on disability thus reveals intense anxieties around the participation of women and former slaves in the market.

With the rise of the welfare state, race ultimately structures even this more inclusive category of marginalization, as racialized statistics differentiate between the deserving, injured dependent and the undeserving, criminalized ‘dependent.’ Different kinds of forensic knowledge (testing medical and moral fitness) work together to differentiate between those who can access the benefits and rights of the welfare state and those who will remain excluded from it—in other words, how different lives are differently valued. It is in this way that the “weak” vital statistics that underwriters attribute to former slaves are linked to a much broader political and economic landscape.

One of the things that this paper does is to trace a genealogy of the category of risk in the United States, and by doing so, it adds a new dimension to ways of thinking about the way that slavery—and anxieties about slavery—have structured political and social categories in the United States. For the purposes of this seminar, it seems also very useful to use the sites that Michael Ralph points to as places from which to think about how some of the political concepts that have been structured by slavery—particularly political and social ideas of freedom, dependence and independence, sovereignty, and rights are linked to financialized concepts of risk and security. This seems of particular relevance given that the category of risk has taken on such importance in the ‘neoliberal’ moment as to be almost inescapable.

A few question/comments along those lines:

1. It might be useful to think further about the extent to which financialized risk thinking structures our understanding of security and protection. There’s been an ongoing discussion in the seminar about the emancipatory potential, or lack thereof, of distributive justice — This paper engages that question in interesting ways because it pushes us to think about the relationship between security—in the risk sense—and rights. This paper is suspicious of the language of security, and suggests that the concept of social ‘protection’ is closely linked to financial protection, in a doubled sense—first, both are structured around concepts of ‘interest’ and techniques of valuation that focus on protection from loss, and second, in the sense that a set of closely linked financial, social, and legal instruments emerging in the period after emancipation ends up linking the security of persons to business interests—the fact that corporations gain protection as persons under the 14th Amendment is thus exemplary rather than exceptional. (Jack Balkin, who has a legal theory blog called balkinization, recently posted an entry arguing that if corporations are persons, they can only be understood to be slaves, which is a sort of interesting reversal of the corporate personhood argument, but that’s another story.) So, where does this leave protection? Are rights also to be understood as a form of security? How do we understand the relationship between the kind of protection provided by public or social insurance—embodied in the welfare state, for instance, and private insurance? More broadly, what does it mean to structure the concept of security around the fear of loss? Do attempts to provide security or protection inevitably lead to forms of exclusion, or is this a particular problem of the risk-based logic of insurance? Is there an outside to risk?

2. The historical story that’s told here describes the perpetuation of inequality in the form of exclusion from wage labor and from the benefits that attend access to the labor market. In this sense, then, wage labor is a kind of condition of possibility for self-realization. At the same time, Michael Ralph points out, and as we discussed last time we met, the freedom to sell one’s labor is an ambivalent kind of freedom, and Du Bois and others have connected the institution of modern wage labor to that of slavery. In his book Wages of Whiteness David Roediger argues that ultimately even the white working class came to recognize the links between slavery and wage labor, despite a century of using racial logics to suppress that very recognition. What’s interesting in the era of finance capital is the nostalgia that attends both the welfare state and the ‘time of labor,’ despite the decidedly complicated nature of these forms of protection, as MR points in revealing the ambivalent relationship between disability, industrial accidents, and workers’ compensation. So this is a long way of saying that we might think about labor in relation to the shadow economy of finance capital—in particular given the discomfort that attends our thinking of the human as simultaneously embodied labor and a capital asset, as MR puts it—particularly when these are brought together in the form of corporate owned life insurance.

3. Finally, I wanted to raise the question of thinking about the value of life in terms of the value of death. Having an interest in someone else’s life doesn’t seem so bad, in fact, in seems like the basis of society – but having an interest in someone else’s death seems very problematic, which is one reason why questions of trust are so important as narrative devices in stories about life insurance. While it’s particularly salient in life insurance, this is a tension that attends all forms of insurance—which profess to—and do—provide value and a form of security, while also speculating and capitalizing on loss. We’ve explored throughout the course of this seminar a range of ‘ethical’ bases for forging connections which do not rest on the concept of risk management or shared vulnerability, or, put differently, other kinds of interest in the lives of others (passion, for instance, though we see that love and affection are already incorporated as ‘interests’ in life insurance). So with this kind of jumble of things in mind I wanted to ask about the Rick Ross quoted in passing—“Live Fast, Die Young”—in particular because I’m interested in what it means to deny having an interest even in your own life, and in the different kind of link between social mobility and death. On the one hand the song responds to the discourse of irresponsibility that goes along with risk management (“they say we can’t be livin like this for the rest of our lives”). But in the context of theories which tell us that our whole world is shaped by risk management, what do we make of the “live fast die young” logic?

—Amiel Melnick