June 29, 2017

Homelessness is one of the clearest expressions of the relationship with disqualified alterity. As such, those who live on the street present themselves as ontological and structural manifestations of the subject-less-than, an entity permanently constituted as inferior in relation to the types of subject positively valued by dominant statistical-scientific norm and socio-juridical normativity. Informed by this intellectual sensibility, this thesis assumes itself as an essayistic exploration of a sociology that observes the contemporary relations of power, knowledge and subjectivation through homelessness. Taking this object as an entry point to the current stage of the modern Western societal model, it is to the latter that the research is directed.

To accomplish this, homelessness is interpreted as a form of life on the street, an expression that has two fundamental ideas. The street is a socio-political space of permanent exception in which the normativity that governs the lives of middle-class and elite domiciled citizens is not de facto applicable, being replaced by the arbitrary exercise of power by non-homeless when they interact with the homeless. This turns the latter into expressive examples of homo sacer as it leaves their lives exposed in all of their bareness to a randomness of decision and action that can maintain, encourage, or eliminate them.

The forms of life of the homeless are conditioned by the actions of subjects other than themselves. Namely, this shaping of the lives of the homeless is carried out by the various elements of the medical-(a)moral dispositif of government of life on the street. Although several other elements compose this network, this thesis uses as an entry point to the dispositif that which might be named as its official segment, i.e., that which has the socially legitimized explicit function of producing reality effects in homelessness. This official segment of the dispositif is mainly composed of the institutions, actors, statements, architectural spaces and procedures from the fields of (public and private) welfare and psychiatry. The collective action of these elements, coming together in an agonistic manner, operates inside of a truth regime of pathological individualization. As such, this collective action has both the objective and the effect of performing a certain conduction of the conducts of those who live on the street, aiming to normatize and normalize the homeless, as they are perceived as subjects that live on the street due to their anormativity (laziness, propensity to lie, alcoholism, drug-addiction) and their abnormality (mental illness and/or disability). This translates into a series of actions which fosters the (re)subjectivation of the homeless as a peculiar variation of neoliberal homo oeconomicus, therefore aiming to produce them as enterprising, active, self-responsible subjects. However, the kind of homo oeconomicus that the homeless are (more or less coercively) urged to be emerges on the street and is not supposed to exit this space of exception. Thus, those who live on the street are made to become a poor version of homo oeconomicus that never loses its sacred dimension because it always remains exposed in its bareness to arbitrary exercises of power. In the dispositif's governmental logic, the homeless must become homines oeconomicae-sacri, subjects-less-than that, by accepting their fundamental inferiority, become abnormal and anormative in a different manner, above all, in a less disturbing fashion, participating in the activities that are exogenously decided for them (psychiatric treatments, educational and professional training courses, activities to occupy "leisure time", etc.).

In order to encourage this form of life on the street all other forms of life have to be sacrificed, above all, those that would be amenable to a politically positive qualification of the homeless. Thus, the dispositif reveals a modus operandi that is simultaneously and with the same relative weight biopolitical and thanatological. The life of the homeless is in fact encouraged and protected but not all life is the object of such an effort. To foster the version of bare life that is life on the street it is necessary to introduce a fragment of death in life, it is necessary to diminish life, to circumscribe its conditions of possibility, in the exact same movement by which life is made to persist. Life and death become inextricably linked in the government of life on the street, making this form of action inescapably bio-thanato-policical: its operation assures the survival of the homeless without allowing their life to leave the well limited field of the street through biological death nor through life as something other than bareness.

Keywords: biopolitics; exception; homeless; power; subjectivation.