Caring for “The (Non)-Innocent

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SAMARTH VACHHRAJANI

Ideology has always been at the center of operation of the architecture discipline. Political ideologies have always motivated architects to work and act in certain way. Yet the discipline today is totally obliterated to this fact. It functions under the myth of “pure innocence” to mask itself from the political realities of the discipline. How does the discipline so inherently focused on the idea of building and helping the “innocent” figure forget that the figure of innocence is a produced idea?

In 1990s, France passed a legislation where they, looked at politics of immigration from the lenses of humanitarianism. This legislation, which was called Humanitarian exception, allowed for sick bodies to reside in France and receive papers to do so. Here the sick body is the innocent figure in suffering. Miriam Ticktin, in her conversation with Leopold Lambert on the podcast Archipelago, recognizes that this focus of the French state on the innocent is based on the logic of humanitarianism where it is used to find the next innocent body in order to be complacent from the political framework. But in the course of this, other forms of immigration even economic migration became very hard to get approval for. Hence more people turned to this clause. There were instances, as documented by Ticktin, where bodies were biologically compromising such as exposing themselves to diseases such as HIV AIDS, for political recognition.

But getting papers was highly dependent if the sick body seeking immigration, matched the colonial script of “the innocent”, that the French authorities and doctors assessing the sick bodies had. For example, Ticktin explains, an Algerian woman, was more likely to receive papers because she is stereotyped as the one on who violence is inflicted upon by an Algerian man. And this is also how the immigrants seeking papers would perform, to embody the script. This would make it extremely difficult for people who would not fit the ideal figure of innocence, and hence not receive papers. The inability to receive papers and stay in France have medical consequences on the “non-innocent” bodies.

The myth on which nation-states operate to define “humanitarian” efforts or extend “humanity”, is the existence of absolute innocence. To care for the innocent requires the state to define who the innocent is and what are the parameters to qualify.

“To care for the innocent requires the state to define who the innocent is and what are the parameters to qualify.”

There is a constant search for the “figure of innocence,” because somehow, we always fail to find “pure innocence”. (Ticktin, Archipelagos Podcast).

The qualifiers applicable to the figure of innocence go beyond humans and expand to non-humans. Subsequently, so do the “humane” efforts. The search for pure innocence or absolute innocence is often determined through biology. Biological claim is embedded in humanitarianism, because suffering is manifested as a common universal denominator, worthy of care. Yet, care is only received, when biological claims, embodied in performances are recognizable to those who have developed a script, as understood from Mariam Ticktin’s field work in France. (Ticktin, from human to the planetary, 140) The defining of pure innocence, connects to the histories of colonialism and extraction. And it is within these discourses, the parameters of care are defined for the human and non-human.

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Work by Brenna Fransen

66 Ticktin, in her essay From Human to the Planetary, equates humanitarian care with biology. She beautifully compares the histories of biology, that of immune systems, to our collective histories which force people to embody a specific scripture to qualify as innocent. But raises a very important speculative question: “Immunity can be understood as the memories of previous encounters between an organism and its environment and can be used to measure the distance between species crossed by the same pathogens (Keck and Ticktin 2015). This model evokes a different human-nonhuman collective, one created across time and space, between species and microbes, histories and encounters. Could we follow this model as a new way to measure our connectedness and our history, and as a way to produce new forms of care?” (Ticktin, from human to the planetary, 150)

If collective histories of biology and geopolitics can be used to speculate forms of care, then it becomes essential to remind ourselves that these connections operate on multiple complex scales.

“If collective histories of biology and geopolitics can be used to speculate forms of care, then it becomes essential to remind ourselves that these connections operate on multiple complex scales.”

Albeit as Ticktin suggests, we can learn from the processes that occur in sciences such as immunology to potentially understand complex political occurrences.

From Ticktin’s work, biology as a model of comparison might be useful to understand occurrences due to the political systems in place. But it does not necessarily prepare us to understand its consequences. By the defining of the innocent and using colonial or other such historical scripts, the state might be becoming immune to one singular ideal of “the figure of innocent”. This model does not help us explain, what the consequence of this immunization can be on bodies who do not fit into the narratives of “the innocent”. Her speculation involves studying CDC’s One Health Initiative, which recognizes connections between the health of people, animals and the environment from an interdisciplinary and multisectoral approach, specially set up to study zoonotic diseases such as H5N1, Ebola and the 2019 Novel Coronavirus. It is an exemplary approach to study models such as One health to theorize new forms of care. While this model is successful in hypothesizing alternate imaginaries, it does not talk about finding relationships between lack of/ or control of care with biology.

From Ticktin’s study in France, as the parameters for receiving care are generated, parallelly produced illegality for the figures who do not qualify to be innocent and hence do not receive papers. As G.F Sandoval (G.F Sandoval is a researcher and professor studying neighborhood planning, immigration and community change)

Work by Mae Murphy

recognizes in his paper on shadow transnationalism, illegality is produced by the “caring” entities such as the state where the apparatus of “care” is the very action of defining “the innocent”. With the definition itself, creates another category, that of the non-innocent, unauthorized, or illegal. It is the production of illegality that produces measures initiated by the state to control a community of “illegal aliens”. Eventually, this illegality is perpetuated through palpable architectural objects such as walls, made of metal panels, electric wires, with technologies to trap (similar to that of trapping animals such as crabs, lobsters and chickens) which are designed to dehumanize.

The question to ask is, what does care look like within a practice, which has participated in political agendas, yet has distanced itself from political frameworks. The profession uses the same “humanitarian logic” which the French legislation did, in order to be complacent of political framework. It is under the same myth that architects design, which is the existence of the pure innocent. It has become more important, now more than ever, to recognize the existence of the noninnocent, in order to CARE. 67