Life, Objectivity and the Conditions of Authority
Biological Life: An Idea of Objectivity
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Biological Life: An Idea of ObjectivityMany writers have proposed that there is a loss of authority or of objectivity in modernity. In a world in which there is such enormous coordination of living together, in which scientific expertise or knowledge in general has so much power, and in which we can find everywhere obedience combined with freedom, I find such a position hard to accept. In line with the arguments of Michel Foucault and many others I would instead support the view that there is a plethora and surplus of objectivity. Modernity is a matter not of loss, but of additional production – production, in particular, of imaginations, technologies or ideas of immanent objectivity. Biological life, by which I mean the constellation of ideas of life engendered in theories and knowledges of evolution, reproduction, genetics, vitalism, phenomenology and political economy, is a powerful, this-worldly, materialist and presentist figuration of externality, or objectivity. It is widely maintained that, for better or for worse, the analytical tools and evidence production of evolutionary biology undermined the theological structuring of values, meaning and authority of the ‘Western’ Judeo-Christian traditions (e.g. Grosz, 2004; Weikart, 2004). The theory of natural selection provided a rational and worldly explanation of the creation and ordering of the living world as finite, even mechanistic, processes. It described how complex, normative, creative processes and ‘progress’ could have been achieved within the world, as the result of random accident and chance variation, without the intervention of either divine or rational judgement and design. With this the theory either ‘tragically undermined’ or ‘liberated us from’ the conceptions of genesis, morality and authority of Judeo-Christian faith and tradition – conceptions that hinged upon the primacy of a divine eternal transcendent domain and power. My concern here is not to engage directly in these metaphysical and scientific debates, but rather to explore the history of experience and authority that form their context. I am interested in the political force of biological life as a general idea of objectivity. As Aécio Amaral explains, Foucault characterised biological life as a ‘quasi transcendental’, a modern, immanent, presentist ‘historical a priori’. In his well known comments on biopolitics or biopower Foucault stressed the contemporary importance of political community and authority, or governmentality, that takes biological life as its objective – its raison d’être, its reality and its principle of verifiability. Biological life is the real, the external, to which human sciences, including political economy, medicine, biology and liberal politics refer. I want to argue for a particular understanding of biopolitical authority – where the centre of biopolitical authority is the becoming objective of life; a becoming that occurs through a reconstitution, above all a collectivisation, of embodiment. Biopolticial authority is what happens when life – biological life – becomes objectivity; when biological life becomes the outside of thought. Biological life becomes such insofar as it affirms human bodies as generative connected capacities involved in auto-normative processes. The recent literature that takes up this theme of biopolitics adds to a longstanding concern amongst feminists, anti-racists, Marxists, and a great many others, about the political power of biological science, biological determinism and the ideas and imaginaries of biology in political culture and power relationships at large. Biological life is a powerfully reality making idea, a contemporary idea of objectivity. Biology and life, it seems, name brute facts and reality – what we cannot choose or deny. ‘Biology’ is ‘inescapable fact’ beyond perspective or interpretation. Life and death, survival and morbidity, are no matters of debate or opinion. Life is hard reality. Indeed many (wrongly in my view) hold biological life to be (for better or for worse) what we ‘moderns’ are left with after a sweeping away of tradition, religion and illusion – the cold facts that remain. Life is a concrete commonality – what we share and what connects us, the stark facticity that comes before and after all individual organic lives. Life is an immanent kind of objectivity, a pre and post experience, but it is one that obtains in the capacities of, and connections between, living bodies themselves. Biological science and political economy speak of the connections between individual lives and of flows of influence, creativity and co-causation inherent in bodies; reproduction, infection, development, degeneration, growth, recession, evolution. Biological knowledge of life is the knowledge of trends, processes and connections. Simmel argued (at the highly biopoliticised start of the twentieth century) that we experience ourselves as vital, as life, to the extent that we know that we are other than ourselves; ‘the living present exists in the fact that it transcends the present’ (1977b:360). Trancendence is immanent in life and ‘the innermost essence of life is its capacity to go out beyond itself, to set its limits by reaching out beyond them, that is, beyond itself’ (1977b:364). Life is the name of the investment of bodies in other bodies and processes; its movement, affects and finitude.ii Crucially, life also serves as a principle or provider of judgment. Life is a capacity for normative differentiation, for delineating good and bad, rightness and error, figured as the choice between survival and death, growth and decline, normality – or operationality – and pathology. Life is not only creative, auto-generative, it is also auto-normative – and this normative capacity is essential to the role of life in political culture. The auto-normative character of life means that it can serve as a locus of judgment, an immanent external, impartial, objective, position. Biological life, where it is augmented as objectivity, is the outside of experience, perspective, consciousness and thought – the outside reality in which resides the knowing of what is right. Biological life is an accessible outside. We experience life, we push up against and experiment with it, we run tests and write theories. We have a great deal of experiential knowledge about life. Nonetheless life remains uncaptured, uncapturable by individual thinking reason, its force remains somewhat secret, mysterious, hidden. There are special techniques for experimenting with or observing life and institutions devoted to the task; normal encounters with life, birth and death; as well as chance occurrences and individual escapades that generate a sense of having ‘really lived’. People and statements draw authority from the inequalities in access to (inequal experiences of) biological life. By fostering life, knowing life or making life manifest we augment life as objectivity and establish authoritative relationships, voices and statements.
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