The Economization of Life
Douban
Michelle Murphy
résumé
What is a life worth? In the wake of eugenics, new quantitative racist practices that valued life for the sake of economic futures flourished. In The Economization of Life, Michelle Murphy provocatively describes the twentieth-century rise of infrastructures of calculation and experiment aimed at governing population for the sake of national economy, pinpointing the spread of a potent biopolitical logic: some must not be born so that others might live more prosperously. Resituating the history of postcolonial neoliberal technique in expert circuits between the United States and Bangladesh, Murphy traces the methods and imaginaries through which family planning calculated lives not worth living, lives not worth saving, and lives not worth being born. The resulting archive of thick data transmuted into financialized “Invest in a Girl” campaigns that reframed survival as a question of human capital. The book challenges readers to reject the economy as our collective container and to refuse population as a term of reproductive justice.
contenus
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction. Bottles and Curves 1
Arc 1. Phantasmagrams of Population and Economy
1. Economy as Atmosphere 17
2. Demographic Transitions 35
3. Averted Birth 47
4. Dreaming Technoscience 55
Arc II. Reproducing Infrastructures
5. Infrastructures of Counting and Affect 59
6. Continuous Incitement 73
7. Experimental Exuberance 78
8. Dying, Not Dying, Not Being Born 95
9. Experimental Otherwise 105
Arc III. Investable Life
10. Invest in a Girl 113
11. Exhausting Data 125
12. Unaligned Feeling 133
Coda. Distributed Reproduction 135
Notes 147
Bibliography 179
Index 211