Vital Geographies: Life, Luck, and the Human Condition

Abstract

Life has been problematized anew by recent social change and scientific innovation. There are important and little studied geographical dimensions to any such understanding of "the politics of life itself," however. A geographical perspective involves, first, highlighting the spatial aspects of both states and capital, two rather neglected dimensions of vital politics. Elaborating the geographical constitution of vital politics entails further describing the related powers of knowledges and practices. Reflecting on the geographical dimensions of longevity and health leads directly to a recognition of the ethical implications of the geographical luck of birth and residence. Taking up this ethical challenge requires specifying at least six components of geographical justice: culpability, fairness, care, state failure, human rights, and solidarity with environmental and social justice. Key Words: biomedicine, care, health, inequality, justice, longevity, medical ethics. Otra vez, la vida adquiere dimensión problémica en virtud del cambio social y la innovación científica. Sin embargo, aunque existen importantes dimensiones geográficas para comprender "las políticas de la vida misma," muy escaso es el estudio hecho sobre el particular. Una perspectiva geográfica a este respecto implica, primero que todo, destacar los aspectos espaciales tanto de los estados como de sus capitales, dos expresiones de las políticas vitales hasta ahora muy marginadas. Elaborar la constitución geográfica de la política vital demanda describir con mayor profundidad los poderes relacionados de conocimientos y prácticas. El reflexionar sobre las dimensiones geográficas de longevidad y salud lleva directamente a un reconocimiento de las implicacioneséticas de la casualidad geográfica del lugar de nacimiento y residencia. Para asumir estos retoséticos se requiere especificar por lo menos seis componentes de justicia geográfica: culpabilidad, equidad, cuidado, falla del estado, derechos humanos y solidaridad con la justicia ambiental y social. Palabras clave : biomedicina, cuidado, salud, desigualdad, justicia, longevidad,ética médica. L ife is being politicized in new and novel ways today, especially in Western societies and especially with regard to some of the possibilities wrought by recent and rapid developments in the biological sciences. A growing number of geographers, anthropologists, and sociologists are exploring such "vital" issues as the social implications of neuroscience or the political and legal vortex surrounding regenerative medicine (Fischer 2003;N. Brown and Webster 2004;Wainwright et al. 2006). So, too, are they analyzing how life is being revalued (Collier and Ong 2005;Sunder Rajan 2006;Waldby and Mitchell 2007). Such nonphilosophical accounts of the politics of life (that is, accounts that are based primarily on ethnographic or sociological investigation rather than on a purely philosophical reflection) concern what we might call the form of life itself and how various technologies reconfigure it. Such work cons...

Molecular Life

“…Yet, in a world in which access to resources, health care, science, and government are already unequally distributed, it is pertinent to ask, as does Braun, " for whom is the molecular age an ethopolitical age that is defi ned and experienced primarily as a matter of choice and the individual management of risk? " (Braun 2007 : 7; see also Kearns and Reid -Henry 2009 ). The individual and collective identities Rose and others distinguish are those subject positions and spatial -temporal imaginaries predominantly enabled under advanced liberal governmental regimes.…”

Sharing the Pain: Perceptions of Fairness Affect Private and Public Response to Hazards

“…Geographical scholarship in this area draws on political ecology traditions to explain structural factors in unequal outcomes and focus on duty and care. Kearns and Reid-Henry (2009) argued that components of justice are interconnected and that inequalities in longevity and health are molded by political processes rather than the fortunes of birth and choice of residence. These raise new possibilities for human-environment relations "as elements on a wider plane of moral and political economy" (Kearns and Reid-Henry 2009, 570).…”

“…This focus on fairness draws on new insights into political economies of hazard and risk (e.g., Kearns and Reid-Henry 2009) to describe how the distribution of risk is malleable. These perspectives, we argue, are complemented by political economy and environmental psychology models and methods on the cultural construction of risks.…”

State Security and the ‘Hostile Acres’

“…Similarly, following Giorgio Agamben (1998;, he is painfully aware of what happens when state and law 'abandon' the marginal, and when spaces for their 'care' and 'confinement' are allowed to drift beyond the reach of state, law, or international rebuke. His pioneering interrogation of 'vital geographies', coauthored with Simon Reid-Henry (Kearns and Reid-Henry, 2009), provides a blueprint for articulating the biopolitical and the vital, together with critical geoeconomic and geopolitical analysis; and the unashamed deployment in that paper of what Kearns once described to me as 'big-picture historical geography'-a readiness to reason and speculate across vast swathes of time and space-comes to the fore again in his paper below on "Governing vitalities and the security state". Taking seriously the provocations of Foucault's later texts and lecture courses, he scrambles standard Foucauldian periodisations of 'sovereign power' (when early territorial states worried about the externalities of geopolitics) and 'biopower' (when later infrastructurally infilled states worried about the internalities of biopolitics).…”