Claire Blencowe

Biopolitical authority, objectivity and the groundwork of modern citizenship

Authority is a powerful concept for coming to terms with the diversity of power. This article reframes the concept of ‘authority’ and articulates its continued relevance in a context of radical contingency and biopolitics. It argues that authority is essentially objectivist. Biopolitics is conceived as a historical process of constituting biological life and economic forces as objectivity. The paper addresses the question of whether biological-type relations destroy or foster capacities for politics. Arguing against Arendt’s diagnosis of the fate of authority in modernity, the article maintains that biological knowledges and economism create new groundworks of politics, citizenship and authority. This suggests that politics is instigated not simply through breaking given aesthetic orders (dissensus), but also through aesthetic productions of objectivity.

Authority and experience

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Biology, Contingency and the Problem of Racism in Feminist Discourse

In the 1970s and 1980s a strong opposition and anxiety towards biological and naturalizing knowledges was the norm in feminist discourse. In the past decades the certainties of that ‘anti-biologism’ have been challenged, in part because of a new recognition of the role of contingency in both biological determination and biological science. What seems to have survived the shift is a set of normative assumptions concerning the role of determinacy and contingency (or being-born and becoming) in the political implications of ontological claims: an assumed political valorization of contingency. This article challenges those assumptions. It draws attention to the embrace of contingency and processuality on the part of supremacist biopolitical discourse, and suggests the need to think again about the politics of contingency and becoming (in constructivist as well as biologistic discourses). Focusing on the issue of racism and supremacist-specification, the article takes a genealogical look at ‘second-wave’ feminist anti-biologism. Monique Wittig’s materialist feminist attack on naturalizing ideology and ‘the myth of woman’ provides the (ideal-typical) historical example. The article draws attention to curious absences in Wittig’s (and Rosalind Rosenberg’s) anti-biologistic statements concerning early 20th-century biologistic feminism: the absence of a critique of eugenics, racism and supremacism. Arguably the condemnation of biology as a conservative ‘ideology of the status quo’ created masks for biopolitical ontology, obscuring the progressive, dynamic, processual character of biologism and of modern racism. While dislodging some powers of biologistic discourse, feminist anti-biologism might also have played a part in facilitating the revitalization of biopolitical racism within the constructivist culturalist rubric. The aim of the article is not to critique ‘second-wave’ feminism from the perspective of contemporary scholarship, but to help generate new ways of thinking and feeling about the role of ontology, contingency and temporality in the present politics of classification.

Engines of alternative objectivity : re-articulating the nature and value of participatory mental health organisations with the Hearing Voices Movement and Stepping Out Theatre Company

Through two case studies, the Hearing Voices Movement and Stepping Out Theatre Company, we demonstrate how successful participatory organisations can be seen as ‘engines of alternative objectivity’ rather than as the subjective other to objective, biomedical science. With the term ‘alternative objectivity’, we point to collectivisations of experience that are different to biomedical science but are nonetheless forms of objectivity. Taking inspiration from feminist theory, science studies and sociology of culture, we argue that participatory mental health organisations generate their own forms of objectivity through novel modes of collectivising experience. The Hearing Voices Movement cultivates an ‘activist science’ that generates an alternative objective knowledge through a commitment to experimentation, controlling, testing, recording and sharing experience. Stepping Out distinguishes itself from drama therapy by cultivating an alternative objective culture through its embrace of high production values, material culture, aesthetic standards. A crucial aspect of participatory practice is overcoming alienation, enabling people to get outside of themselves, encounter material worlds and join forces with others.

Ecological attunement in a theological key : adventures in antifascist aesthetics

This article embarks on adventures in search of antifascist aesthetics—an excursion born of despair at the increasingly racist, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim poison of our political ground. It asks whether ecological attunement can provide a counter to such capitalist sorcery and barbarism. The article draws on feminist philosophy of science, new materialism, and ecofeminism. What, it asks these guides, can ecological attunement offer to the task of composing antifascist, anticapitalist political subjectivity or shattering the reality principle of the “no alternative”? Among the responses to that question are certain ideas that we might call theological figurations—figures that open onto the theological task of questioning the value of values, and the political task of mustering spirit. Centering on an attempt to think with Stengers, the article turns to three such figures: the enchantress, the witch, and the intrusion of Gaia. It asks how these figures might succeed and fail in speaking to a popular politics that could lift our despair.

Authority, experience and the life of power

Taking up the challenge of understanding power in its complexity, this volume returns to and revitalises the concept of ‘authority’. It provides a powerful analysis of the ways that relationships of trust, attachment, governance and inequality become possible when subjectivities and bodies are invested in the life of power. The collection offers a vibrant new analysis of the biopolitical, arguing that ‘experience of life’ has become equated with ‘objectivity’ in contemporary culture and has thus become a primary basis of authority. ‘Biopolitical’ or ‘experiential’ authority can be generated through reference to a variety of experiences, performances or intensities of life including creativity, radicalism, risk-taking, experimentation, inter-relation, suffering and proximity to death. The authority-producing capacities of community and aesthetics are key issues, pointing to vexed relationships between politics and policing, inventiveness and violence. The contributors develop their theoretical analyses through discussion of a range of specific sites including mental-health service user and survivor politics, biological knowledge, refugee activism, stories of suffering, urban art, anarchism, neo-liberal community politics and marketization. Authority, Experience & the Life of Power challenges thinking on what ‘the political’ is and isn’t, pushing against the all too easy equivocation of revolutionary break and empowerment.

Churches, blackness, and contested multiculturalism: Europe, Africa, and North America

non-Arabs and non-Muslims. Importantly, Straus stresses that genocide is not the automatic, unavoidable outcome of such exclusionary founding narratives. On the contrary, he points to the contingent nature of genocides, which are not planned long time in advance but occur as the consequence of a convergence of geopolitical and ideological factors. In other words, although Straus clearly states that ideas matter, his analysis shows they only do so as they interact with other factors, which may escalate or deescalate conflict, depending on the situation. The discussion of such factors leads to the formulation of specific policy recommendations about how both national and international actors can help prevent genocide. This is a fascinating and well-crafted book that covers a lot of analytical and empirical ground. The main argument about the role of founding narratives is convincing, and so is the use of the three negative cases, which are as insightful as Rwandan and Sudanese cases. The presence of these cases is a key innovation that should inspire future scholarship on the topic. This is especially true because these negative cases are both rich and well-researched, as is the book as a whole. Importantly, Making and Unmaking Nations is also written in a way that should appeal to all students of genocide, ethnic conflict and nationalism, even those who study other regions of the world than Sub-Saharan Africa. Additionally, scholars interested in the role of ideas in politics should find this book particularly interesting, as it explains how ideas can directly impact conflict situations. Considering this, it is a pity that Straus only engages with the growing literature on ideas and politics in a very superficial way. Clearly, his book has profound implication for ideational scholars. Conversely, engaging with their work could have helped Straus formulate a more sophisticated approach to founding narratives and how they interact with other explanatory factors. For instance, the latter issue has been discussed at length by ideational scholar Craig Parsons in his book How to Map Arguments in Political Science (Oxford University Press, 2007), which Straus does not engage with. This minor flaw should not deter social scientists to read and engage with this original and compelling book about such a crucial topic.

Escaping the Laws of Being: The Character of the ‘Bio’ in Foucault’s Genealogies of Biology and Biopolitics

This chapter will give a detailed analysis of what Foucault actually means by ‘biology’ in his assertions concerning biopolitics. This demands a detailed picture of the concept of ‘life’ that is at play in modern biology. So this chapter sets aside the many issues of politics in order to gain a full and clear picture of what the bio in biopolitics actually refers to (in Foucault’s work at least). The key argument of the chapter is that ‘biology’ and ‘bio’ in Foucault’s work, does not refer to the somatic, to fleshy living bodies, but to life which is in a sense beyond bodies, existing at the limit of finite bodies, traversing finite lives. Biology pertains to a domain beyond that of individual finite bodies, to processes that can be described as ‘trans-organic’, extending beyond the unity and self-persistence of individual organisms. As such ‘biopolitics’ (in Foucault) is not all and any politics that pertains to peoples’ physicality or health, it is specifically the politics of life, of man as a living species.

Incorporation: Foucault on the Co-Constitution of Modern Embodiment, Experience and Politics

This chapter will draw on Foucault’s genealogy of sexuality and the above account of biopolitics as the politics of trans-organic population life (Chapter 1), to explain the link between the production of population life and that of vitalist immanent biopolitical values. Vitalist ontologies and ethics, indeed the very existence of life as something that could be the ground of political or epistemological evaluation or an end in itself, are conditioned upon the material historical production of trans-organic biological embodiment. Conversely, the production of biological embodiment is a process of vitalisation — not of objectification, physicalisation, or reduction. Biological embodiment vitalises and produces vitality — creative evolutionary life — as experience and values, not simply as objects of power.

Eternally Becoming: Feminism, Race, Contingency and the Critique of Biopolitics

This chapter builds upon the interpretation of Foucault, biopolitical power and positive critique set out above by developing a specific example of biopolitical discourse and its critique — the example of feminism. Although Foucault does not himself discuss the issue, feminism is an exemplary site for thinking both the positivity and the critique of biopolitics. Twentieth-century feminism has been embroiled in the logics, values and problems of biopolitics — including the problems of biopolitical racism.