Life, Objectivity and the Conditions of Authority

Experiencing Life

A lot of thinking on experience emphasises notions such as memory and conservation of time. Experience is often thought of as the accumulation of things that have happened, a capturing of the past or ways of living. But experience can also be about exceptional moments or processes that take us outside of ordinary perception. Mysticism provides an age old example of experience as exceptional escape or retreat (Jay, 2006). In French the term éxperience incorporates the sense of experimentation. For Foucault experience is ‘limit-experience’; an encounter with the limits of the possible. It is a process of desubjectivation – a getting away from the self – most readily associated with transgression, madness and death. Indeed, Foucault argues that the first experience of biological life took place whilst cutting up corpses; in Bichat’s big eye that had stared at death (Foucault, 1973). To experience is to experiment; to go beyond current boundaries of knowledge, capacity and sense. It is far from necessarily orientated towards a past.

Experience means being a part of the universe, of its teeming transforming capacities - going beyond self, moving outside of singular subjectivity. Self-transcendence. Experience is a mode of contact with forces beyond the self (not only ones own self, but also selfhood, subjectivity, in general); an encounter with objectivity. Experience generates a sense of reality, authenticity and epistemic security. It is the trace of the transformations in capacity that takes place as one interrogates and is interrogated by the world; the trace of testing and transforming capacities. Experience is pushing up against and passing the limits of existence. It assumes and augments objectivity, the moments in which the world pushes back, without capturing the objective. Experience states the fact of a gap between the objective (the outside) and the known (the captured).

Biological knowledge has constituted a radical innovation in the conditions of experience: incorporating individual bodies into the collective life of populations; creating a new dimensionality to present existence; and it folding present mundane bodies and their health into this self-transcending, intensive domain. Biopolitical embodiment enfolds experience into the everyday, the everywhere and everyone. Experience, once the preserve of the momentous moment, the aristocrat and the mystic, becomes entwined with the mundane mortal processes of family, sexuality and health. When life becomes the limit (the outside and the objective) authority, being ‘in the know’, proliferates and is pluralised.

To experience life is to experiment with, or bear witness to, life as it reaches and crosses the limits or boundaries of organic being and present time. Statistical techniques are able to register affects of life process by observing events at the level of population – beyond the boundaries of individual organisms. But experience of life might entail observing, participating in, or experimenting directly upon the boundaries of organic lives; birth, death, illness, becoming. Experience of life might come from an encounter with microbes in a laboratory. It might come from a leap into the unknown, transgressing current norms, and testing oneself against forces of survival.

To make life manifest might be to make the extension of life across the multiplicity of individual lives visible (to provide the statistics) but life can be made manifest in many other ways. It might be about recounting powerful narrative that touches upon the immense feeling for life and death that is enfolded in the affective heart of biopolitical subjects (that is to say, in the emotional makeup of modern people); it might be to generate spectacles of creation, death or destruction – making life manifest as intensity.

Biopolitical authority is authority that obtains from having experienced (population) life; from having battled with the limits of life. Biopolitical authority is not, then, simply the rule of scientific truth – nor of a despotic, totalising life force, collectivisation or sovereign. It is, rather, the power and attraction that congeals around a diversity of performances and manifestations of experiencing life. To be biopolitically authoritative is to mediate experience of life, to be a conduit to the force by which life (objectivity) pushes back. To know life, to make life manifest, to make a promise that life is real... to provide a link to life is to generate biopolitical authority. Of course biologists and doctors with their tests and interrogations are authoritative in the biopolitical worlds. But so too are those that have encountered the edges of life – moved close to death, created new lives. Crucially, markets, with their capacity to test imaginings against the free flux of life in its ‘natural laws’, bear immense authority.

Markets, described and perceived in terms of biological growth and self-regulation, are seen as mechanisms by which liberal and neo-liberal governments test their governmental theories against the unfettered forces of life, engendered as the idea of ‘market forces’. It is not so much that economic liberalism affirms that the market is good as that it abdicates responsibility for deciding between good and bad, success and error, by deferring judgment to the market. Economic liberalism affirms and augments the objectivity – the impartiality and the inescapable reality – of the market and, in so doing, augments the basis of liberal authority and political community.

In the late seventies Foucault tried to make sense of the success of neo-liberalism, then ascendant, by pointing to the problem that its early variety, Ordo-liberalism, was able to solve (Foucault, 2007: 120-121). Although developed in the interwar years, Ordo liberalism became influential in Germany after the Second World War. The problem, here, of course, is that of how to found a German State after the horror and shame of the experience of Nazi totalitarianism? This, we could add, marked the start of a more general Europe wide problem of how to recover the objective basis and authority of European nation states after the global denunciation of the eugenic reasoning, and the overthrow and humiliation of Imperial power, which had both been so important to the self-imagining and authority of twentieth century European nations. Through the marketisation of the state, neo-liberalism offers market forces as an external arbiter – an external source of judgment – to men who cannot begin to trust their own, let alone anyone else’s, capacity to take responsibility for the State. Neo-liberalism affirms the objectivity of markets and makes it possible to externalise judgment. Instead of a head of the state there is pragmatic process whereby policies are developed and thrown to the objective-judgment making wind of vital market force. The authority of agents in neo-liberal polities draws upon inequalities of access to the objectivity of market forces. Those who do not participate in markets (which in neo-liberal ontology means being engaged in economistic competition and the production of inequality) exist in that political community at an impassable distance from reality. To be unengaged in markets is not only to be lacking in authority, but to be denied opportunity to garner authority, in the context of the neo-liberal polity.

Conclusion - Proliferating Objectivity

I hope that these reflections upon the making of authority provide some assistance to the practical thinking of how we can foster, pluralise and disperse authority in our era. I am certainly not an authority on the art of participatory democracy and I have not attempted to offer guidance for practical actions of empowerment or authority-building. But I do hope to open up the range of constructive questions that we ask in relation to the politics of knowledge. I hope to provoke questions such as the following: Does the ethical and political focus upon validating different subjective perspectives and voices, to which much progressive social science is (for very good reasons) committed, risk undermining the authority of the very voices that it seeks to empower? How do different ‘empowerment’ practices augment and perform proximity to existing ‘ideas of objectivity,’ and to ‘ideas of biological life’ in particular? What limitations does a given anchor of experience (that particular idea of biological life or other objectivity) impose upon the community, sociality or politics that is being created? How can and do we choose or create good ideas of objectivity? How can and do we augment, validate and call upon those ideas?

Challenging authoritarian structures is not simply about attacking the objectivity upon which they rest, or critiquing a regime’s practice in the name of that regime’s own ideals (though both are of course very valid political tactics). It’s also about creating new socialities and political communities - with all their inherent problems and ambiguities. I want to suggest that this means taking charge of the creation and performance of ideas of objectivity – fostering the courage and imagination to augment, call upon and even to create additional ideas of objectivity. This can mean adopting and affirming other existing ideas of objectivity – such as the deployment of the idea of universalism, in humanitarianism and campaigns for human rights; or the invocation of judicial authority in the practice of citizen’s juries. It could also mean fostering and performing wholly new or unfashionable ideas.

As for the political cultures of biological life (biopolitics)… It is without doubt crucial to challenge monopolistic anchoraging of values in specifying or singular projections of biological life – as in the tyrannical forms of biological-determinism, securitisation, marketisation, cultural progress, racial purity, development discourse and so on. But we might best challenge such authoritarian and tyrannical power/knowledge by utilising and proliferating, not trying to escape from, the authority of biological life as objectivity. Instead of getting stuck in the position of ‘anti-essentialism’, ‘anti-biologism’, ‘anti-science’ or ‘anti-biopower’ we can use our understanding of the power of biological life in political culture to inform strategies of community empowerment, politicisation, and authority-production. Biological life (or ‘the élan vital’) is not a stark material or metaphysical reality (lying now exposed after a modern stripping away of culture, fantasy or imagination - as modernists of various hues have maintained), that we have to either affirm or rail against. Rather, biological life, in its full status as objectivity, as truth and reality, is an outcome of imagining and knowledge practices; it is historically specific, contested and multiple (see Parisi, 2009). We can highlight and play upon that multiplicity, calling authoritative voices into self contradiction. We can also deliberately add to that multiplicity, additionally highlighting and describing peoples’ capacities and their interconnection; affirming our ecological nature, and creating alternative reference points for authoritative relationships, voices and claims.

Biological life is a constellation of ideas of objectivity that are enormously powerful, and that have been historically produced through practices of knowing, observing, describing and testing. Above all biological knowledge is the statement of the enormous existent capacity of bodies, of every body, to influence and create other bodies (other capacities). These practices might serve as exemplars for the practical, politicised, proliferating and dispersing construction of objectivity. I take the development of such exemplification to be perhaps the most important point of Foucault’s genealogical work on biological knowledge and biopolitics.

We can ask ‘what other announcements, observations and knowledge of the capacities and connections of bodies can become ideas of objectivity?’ (and we might wonder whether some affirmations of capacity and connections are less amenable than others to the deathly play of biological-type-racism.) J.K. Gibson-Graham took up the challenge of these questions in their work on alternative economies, which combines a long standing feminist project of pointing to the reality and necessity of ignored forms of labour with a Foucauldian perspective upon the importance of biological ideas and knowledge practice to the authority of the market and capitalist process (1996; 2006). They sought to counter the authoritarianism of economic liberalism, and ‘capitalocentricism’ in general, through action research projects that affirmed and augmented the already existing economic capacities, contributions and affects of everybody – particularly of those bodies normally classified as ‘economically inactive’ and who participated in the research. Similarly perhaps, irregular migration scholars, as discussed by Naomi Millner in this edition, mount powerful challenges to dominant racist regimes of representing and policing asylum through the announcement and augmentation of the capacities of ‘irregular migrants’ as constituters of political community. Knowing, performing, making visible already existing capacities and influences of people in economies, ecologies and polities might help to objectify, augment ideas of objectivity, around which additional authority (systems of community) can concretise.

Further, we might benefit from thinking creatively about the multiple modes and methods of experiencing and making manifest biological life (and other ideas of objectivity). We need to understand that objective experience really isn’t the preserve of statistical knowledge of biological life (of health, economy and risk). There are many ways in which biological life is augmented, many of which are directed at the testing and performance of the intensity of life, rather than tracing its extension across time and population. Militants know only too well the reality making, objectivity monopolising, force of spectacular displays of the limits of life in death, the community captivating ‘beauty’ of terror or war. Humanitarian agencies know the authority of singular testimony and tragedy that can slice through or against the impersonal objectivity of numbers. Leila Dawney explores the power of encountering life and death in the formation of individual ‘figures of authority’ – the veteran solider; the mother of a murdered boy (this issue). In a related vein, we know of the enormous authority that has been wielded in the past century by those that claim the status of the ‘avant garde’, the experimentalists, the creatives and, above all, the entrepreneurs. Like Dawney’s victims and survivors, such figures have been exposed to the forces of life, if not to the decision between life and death then at least to a decisionality, a determining of success and failure, that stands beyond given consciousness, knowledge or perspective – they have taken a leap into the unknown. Reflection on these examples of intensive-life-manifestation might help us to understand the relative force and failure of different authority-making performance. We might conclude, for example, that it is important to generate spaces of experimentation, combat, exception, risk and loss, not because we believe in the value of creative or novel outcomes, but rather because we see the power of experimental process itself as authority-making performance.^v
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