The Objectification of Life as Objectivity?

The Objectification of Life as Objectivity?

There is considerable debate in the contemporary literature on biopolitics over the historical and imaginary or not status of biological life. Italian neo-Marxists, such as Antonio Negri or Paolo Virno, for example, suggest that biological life is potential, capacity, itself – that it is the same as the labour power or capacity of the multitude and that this is something like the essential underlying facticity of life driving history – a facticity that is left exposed to light by the stripping away of illusion and fantasy that is capitalism (Hardt & Negri, 2000; Virno, 2004). Whilst contesting the objectivity of capital (arguing that capital is too impartial, too versatile to come into contact with subjective experimentation, too abstract and indifferent to count as reality) these theories augment their own idea of biological life, or labour power, as objectivity. Such augmentation leads to something like a call for ‘the true’ biopolitics of life itself (stripped clean of the last vestiges of authoritarian fantasy in the idea of ‘population’).

Foucault, in contrast, took a genealogical or archaeological approach to biological life – treating life as a historical a priori (see Amaral this issue). Life is an objectivity because it has been objectified (Foucault, 2000a) – made as objectivity in history. Genealogies of biological life seek to establish its historicity, plurality, specificity and constructedness – placing biological life as an event within the history of bodies and thought. Foucault claimed that there was no such thing as life (as we know it, as an incontrovertible point of distinction from the non-living) before the eighteenth century (Foucault, 1970: 250-1). Biological life, he later argued, could become objectivity only on the prior and technological specific basis of observing and creating population level phenomenon – the ‘carving out of the population as a domain of reality’ through things such as statistical technique, polling and public health campaigns (Foucault, 2007: 93). Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s insights we could add to this the technological reproducibility of text and image (Benjamin, 2002; Blencowe, 2012).

What is at stake in this debate over the historical specificity of biological life is the assertion and acceptance, or not, of the multiplicity of objectivity as figured in life; the historicity and multiplicity of life as commons. The ‘progressive’ approach to contesting current power is to call upon the real true life (freedom, the capacity of the multitude, evolution), the real singularity, as a counter to current authority – as if to say ‘your objectivity is not objectivity, for this is objectivity’. The genealogical approach is to insist upon the constructedness and diversity of objectivities, an insistence that demands that we take charge of (take responsibility for) choosing or even creating, the objectivity upon which we draw. This does not discredit existing objectivity. Rather it discredits and challenges the monopoly of any given objectivity. The idea of genealogy is not to install the one right and true ‘progressive’ way, but to pluralise and disperse legitimate and objective voices. Genealogy is not about taking over (differently monopolising) authority, but rather troubling and dispersing authorities.

With the concept ‘ideas of objectivity’ I am, of course, promoting the latter, the genealogical, position. However there is a considerable danger in my choice of words. It might seem that I am (as it often seems to many that genealogy is) suggesting that objectivity is ‘just an idea’, a ‘mere’ construction, a discursive artifice. This is certainly not my intention. Objectivity is a matter of ontology and pragmatic determination. Not just anything, and no mere artifice, can function as objectivity.ⁱⁱⁱ The emergence of biological life as an idea of objectivity, the objectification of this objectivity, is an event in the history of bodies and thought, not in the history of ideas. The point of genealogy is not simply to know and assert that thing could, in theory, be otherwise – it is to know more about how things have become what they in fact are, to develop comprehension of our determination, to get to grips with the technologies of our production.

Foucault’s analysis suggests that the lynchpin of the objectification of biological life is the establishment of a connection between the intimate forces of people’s bodies, and the vitality of the trans-organic life of population. This connection is addressed at length in Foucault’s writings on sexuality and sex.^iv. Vitalist and biopolitical values are sometimes associated with modern individualism – the affirmation of the creative and emancipated individual. Foucault’s account suggests, however, that we should understand that very individualism as a part of a broader collectivism; the biological and biopolitical formations of embodiment render individual bodies already a part of collective, trans-organic, extra-individual life, such that the pursuit of individual creation, emancipation, health or normality is already a part of the pursuit of collective life and of connectivity, sociality, or escape from alienation.

Evolutionary biology participated in an expansion and multiplication of experienced embodiment for people who were captured within (or captivated by) biopolitical discourse. Hereditary flows of evolution, degeneracy and reproduction carried health, affliction and propriety into future generations and into the present future life of other people. This extension of embodiment (beyond the somatic) radically intensified the sense of the importance and meaningfulness of the present moment, the immediate future and of the private. Biopolitical authority expresses this new immense significance of the present and the private. Evolutionary biology gave form to a trans-organic embodiment and this transformed the present and the ubiquitous into the immensely significant potential; potential to impact upon the future of countless other lives that constitute the present and future of the community, the nation, the race or the species.

One’s present mundane and most private actions really matter in the context of genetic, trans-organic, embodiment – especially as that embodiment came to be formulated in legal psychiatry and theories of degeneracy. They matter not only (as they do in the Christian pastorate) with respect to the personal concerns of eternal salvation and moral correctness. Henceforth they matter because they are the matter of the health, success and potentiality of a countless, potentially infinite, series of other people’s bodies. They are the objective. The previously aristocratic privilege of potential historic significance could become the property of every body – or at least of every body that partakes (potentially) in sexual reproduction or the administration of care for the population. Potential historic significance is no longer the preserve of the very few, made manifest in public spectacle. It is now the common property of a general populace and is made manifest in the (previously) private domains of corporeality and care.

When the ‘social body’ changed from a mere metaphor to an actual (corpo)reality, with the development of biological theories of population and of race, society (as other individuations of trans-organic embodiment) could become objectivity. The generation of trans-organic embodiment, radically multiplying the causal connections between somatic bodies, transforms the historical grid of intelligibility, value and meaning. It produces collective embodiment as an intensely affective reality, an objectivity, in which individual and family bodies are themselves invested. It generates a whole new world of stakes, ambitions and responsibilities for political power and struggle. The generation, or recognition, of trans-organic embodiment ‘unblocks the art of government’ (Foucault, 2007: 104-5); it de-privatises corporeal and family life, giving life itself over to the realm of politics, and demanding of politics that it base its claims and values upon the protection and maximisation – augmentation – of this life. With the production of trans-organic embodiment the present and immediate future becomes full of potentiality and significance. Relative immortality is present within the living world as manifest in population life. The mere fact of living becomes the manifestation of life – a process that is self-transcendent, (quasi)-transcendental, a becoming more than itself. Modern sexuality organises bodies as participants in flows of life that are trans-organic, reaching beyond and breaking the limits of given organic bodies. Biopolitical embodiments, modern classes, nations are animated by this experiential economy, the augmentation and investment of bodies’ capacities. These transformations in embodiment, in the technological conditions of experience, constitutes life as objectivity. It is life as transorganic connection that is able to appear as objectivity; to become the outside of perspective and thought; to become the common.

Biological life really is immanent embodied processes of transcendence. We really do create each others bodies. We certainly are ecological, biologically related, beings and we are most definitely determined by the facts of life and death. An idea of objectivity is not ‘just an idea’ and could not be ‘just anything’. It is an event in thought, not ideas, bodies and experience. Ideas of objectivity name transindividual planes of reality that anchor experience, producing worlds in common. Biological type objectivity resides in the interconnected capacities and co-causation of present living bodies.