AIDS and EMPIRE: the epidemic in a globalised world

1. AIDS and EMPIRE:the epidemic in a globalised world Heather Worth

2. AIDS and Empire • Thanks to: • The Faculty of Arts and Sciences for a grant to carry out this project • Karen McMillan for assistance in researching this project

3. Infectious disease and power • Mortality and morbidity proxy measures of general economic, social and political well being. • Nature and operation of power revealed through circuits of global inequality which are traced in and through infectious disease. • Attention to that circuitry, as it is set out in and set off by infection, offers a vantage point from which to view the global domain of power relations

4. Hardt and Negri’s thesis of ‘empire’ • Last few decades - irresistible and irreversible globalisation of economic and cultural exchanges. • Not opposed to globalisation but see the downside - the emergence of a new global order • Notion of ‘empire’ turns on two aspects: • a decentred and deterritorialising apparatus of rule, incorporating entire global realm • “New notion of right”: • New inscription of authority • New production of norms and legal instruments of coercion

5. HIV • HIV: • an infectious agent which travels in space and time • traverses, inhabits and alters the state of bodies, populations and social life itself. • implicated in cultural, economic and political realms • HIV threatens global chaos through: • breakdown of production • decimation of value-producing age group 15-49 • infrastructural decay • destabilisaton of the state. • Management of HIV= containment of disorder

6. Bio-politics and HIV • Hardt and Negri argue that empire relies on relays and networks of relationships of domination and wields enormous powers of oppression and destruction. • Groups most affected by HIV are both the primary objects of this bio-productive apparatus, and remain alienated as subjects through the globalisation of norms of behaviour. • The response to HIV offers an instantiation of the way that: • “Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command” (Hardt and Negri 2000).

7. Global ordering of HIV • ‘Empire’ facilitates an understanding of the management of the HIV pandemic through: • global organisations of governance of HIV • internationalisation of subjectivity • moral imperatives and cultural norms of sexual and drug using behaviour. • HIV management = global response : • HIV-testing • Roll-out of ARVs • promotion of individual behaviour change.

8. Global organisations of governance of HIV • Decentred and globally administered management processes: • facilitate pharmaceutical industry profits through the creation of a demand for drugs, testing kits etc • generate a certain kind of ‘behaviour change’ industry concerned with the production and management of a particular globalised subjectivity. • Organisations that govern HIV - WHO, UNAIDS, World Bank, ADB etc as well as international donor or financing organisations such as Gates, Global Fund for HIV, TB and Malaria produce the supranational scaffold for the globalisation of the HIV response and the new HIV subject.

9. Internationalisation of subjectivity • Empire: “creates the very world it inhabits”( Hardt and Negri 2000:xv) through the institution of subjectivity. • Production and extension of Empire’s domain - management of subjectivity constitutes a smoothing of the surface that would facilitate the free flow of capital • Production of a ‘neutral’ and universal subjectivity is, at its most fundamental, an alienating command. • Counsel close scrutiny of that realm of production, as the generator of social inequalities - and also as the site of most effective resistance.

10. moral imperatives/ cultural norms of behaviour • Development of supranational jurisdiction which maintain global civil norms of behaviour - such as sexual practice and ID use (eg funding of aid for HIV) • Political action around HIV rests on a universal moral call – life itself . • Moral enforcement of global imperial values - brutal reinforcement of global rules of governance.