Biopolitical authority, objectivity and the groundwork of modern citizenship

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• authority
• biopolitics
• Foucault
• Arendt
• knowledge
• objectivity
• aesthetics
• experience

Notes

1. The extent to which Arendt does in fact romanticise or ‘long for’ the Greek polis is open to debate, given that Arendt clearly explains the dependence of the Greek model upon despotism, rigid patriarchy and slavery. Given her Nietzschian allegiances, we might instead assume that Arendt writes about Greek democracy not because she wishes us to draw inspiration from the ancient Athenians but rather, in the spirit of genealogical critique, because she wishes to problematise the values of mainstream European political philosophy, by disrupting the narratives concerning its mythological origins.

2. For a more extensive discussion of authority as the durational element of political life see Brigstocke (2013) who argues that productions of authority can be understood in terms of amplitude, gravity and distance. See also Brigstocke et al. (2013).

3. Arendt argues that it was his ignorance of the experience of authority that left Plato calling for the despotic rule of a Philosopher King, held in place by the terrible power of a mythological threat of hell (Arendt 1977).

4. Arendt’s ‘we’ appears to be European political philosophy.

5. See Kirwan (2013) for an extensive critical discussion of this argument concerning loss. Brigstocke (2013) also offers a critique and elaboration of Arendt’s arguments concerning the relation between modernity and authority; maintaining that authority persists in modernity in immanent and aestheticised form.

6. See Noorani (2013) for a detailed discussion of the positive role of authority in the constitution of mutual support groups.

7. See Isin (2002) for a discussion of the differences between the Greek polis and the Roman civitas.

8. The council system would be authoritarian, but it would involve an authority that came neither from above nor below, but always from peers; and this egalitarian authority is, for Arendt, ‘the lost treasure’ of the revolutionary tradition (Arendt 1963).

9. Possibly this is what Simmel is thinking of when he refers to subjectivity ‘recapturing’ objective culture (e.g. 1997b).

10. A similar argument is made by Kirwan (2013), drawing on Jean Luc Nancy, regarding the role of the community in contemporary politics. Community can only function as the ground of politics in so far as community is always already lost, failed, ‘inoperative’.

11. For a full exploration of the construction of political bodies and political experience through biological knowledges, or ‘bio-mentality’ see Blencowe (2012).