Life in Our Current Historical Moment

The definition of life is given by the epoch or historical moment in which the question is answered. Definitions of life have been shaped by (or possibly shaped the) conditions of the given historical period. Historically speaking life was considered to be “among other activities, growth, metabolism, locomotion, perception, responsiveness, and sentience.” However, in our modern historical moment, existential crises and new technologies have caused philosophers and scientists to once again rethink the definition of life. In addition, modern political systems have been moulded such that they are forced to enforce a power over life to ensure the continuation and success of a state’s constituents.

This essay will firstly detail how modern science and philosophy have redefined and expanded the idea of life, through the examination of Tardigrades and Vibrant matter, to a non-human centric view. Secondly, it will introduce biopower and how modern states effect regularisation of human life. Finally, I will tie the two ideas together to demonstrate how the ethics of life, as defined in our current historical moment, are incorporated into biopower.

Life beyond life

In Roosth’s 2014 Life, Not Itself: Inanimacy and the Limits of Biology, Roosth demonstrates how modern studies in biology push the boundaries of what was previously understood to be life. She does this through an examination of the Tardigrade. (Picture included for the readers’ displeasure). Tardigrades, also known as water bears, are tiny plankton-sized eight-legged organisms. The Tardigrades act in accordance with regular biological life, displaying all the familiar features of biological life: animation, metabolism, and reproduction. However, when faced with extreme environments the Tardigrades enter a state of cryptobiosis, a place between life and death, where their metabolism slows to nothing, they become stagnant (inanimate) and are for all purposes dead. Yet after rehydration, Tardigrades resurrect and continue on living like Lazarus of Bethany. Scientists have subjected Tardigrades to “a volley of environmental abuses, heating them to 151 degrees Celsius, freezing them to temperatures approaching absolute zero, assaulting them with noxious chemicals (sulfuric acid, ethanol, and methyl bromide), and exposing them for days to vacuums, high pressure, and over 570,000 roentgens of radiation,” as well as complete dissection and have still found that after rehydration they are able to continue on living.

This animal pushes the boundaries of what was previously understood to constitute life. While in the state of cryptobiosis, Tardigrades can not be described with any of the nouns we previously used to describe life, yet we know they are living. This led philosophers and scientists to re-examine what we can use to describe life.

Living things

While the Tardigrades scientifically demonstrate how life exists outside the definitions of previous philosophies. In Jane Bennett’s work Vibrant Matter, a Political Ecology of Things, the definition of life is modernised into a functional ethical framework. Vibrant Matter, posits that all matter possesses a vitality in and of itself. Bennett uses a poem to illustrate this fact:

While this collection of objects is considered devoid of all in which we consider lives, Bennett paints a romantic image of the collection of objects, highlighting the “excruciating complexity and intractability” of these non-human bodies. While lacking metabolism or activity the objects (or things) are indeed biologically lifeless, however, they have in themselves a certain power. The term Thing-power describes how seemingly inert objects have their own capacity as “actants” to affect the world. This power as an actant is not predicated on any form of agency, but rather the innate ability for all matter (living and non-living) to affect each other. She borrows the term assemblages from Deleuze and Guattari to describe this ability for vibrant matter to form together and produce effects on the universe. Thus while the objects present are passive and inanimate, they have an impact on the surrounding environment, have had an impact on the environment, and its constituent matter will continue to act upon the environment.

This picture of vibrant matter expands Roosth’s erosion of the biological view of life from the domains of esoteric science to the philosophical. Bennett creates a secularised framework to support Spinoza’s idea of “god or nature”, creating an ethical foundation to ascribe all matter as being alive (from all nature being god). This ethical theory has serious implications for how we interact with the world. If everything is alive and thus “an end in itself” society has a categorical imperative to treat all matter as such. Thus we must respect nature and the environment not as a thing for humanity to appropriate but as a living thing that has its own will and ergon. Bennett’s hope was that this ethic could bleed into the political and pose as an ideological force to save our planet from the crisis of climate change.

Biopower

At this point, I have described how modern attitudes towards life have been redefined in response to our current historical moment. I will now describe how modern political systems regularise life through Foucault’s biopower. As liberalism shifted the power of life from what was once the sovereign’s (despotic head of state) divine right to “let live and make die” to the state’s (governing institutions in theory the people’s will) right to “make live and let die”, life became a political issue. This transition reduced the variability of how life itself is permitted to be exercised. Life became “massif[ied], that is directed not at man-as-body but at man as species”, creating the power of “biopolitics” that takes “the population as a political problem”, where individuals are not an issue but population, mortality rate, lifespan… come under political control. Biopower takes control of the “biological process of man-as-species and ensuring that they are not disciplined but regularised” The state regularisation of life can be seen through the modern issue of abortion as the state enforcing a policy of “let live”, the Chinese one-child policy controlling population, or the banning or free accessibility of contraceptives. These are examples in which the individual who has power over life is externalised and dictated by the mandate of the social contracts which govern a society. Foucault extends this power to the state’s organs, found in institutions such as “medical institutions, welfare funds, insurance, and so on”, which exert their own power on life. This extends further, into the structure of towns (modern suburbia designed to support the nuclear family) to the repaving of roads to build bike lanes. The power structures of the state and its organs create a blueprint for life, dictating the total amount of choices you can make with your body, health and life, sic semper libertati.

Vibrant Material Biopower Foucault’s interpretation of biopower is constructed around a human-centric view of life; however, with the modern philosophies expanding that which we ethically consider alive, biopower must extend its power to match the modern definitions of life. This attitude is already taken by many modern states, with regulation and institutions being set up to preserve and recycle all matter; power is being used to regularise non-animate life and enforce a vitalistic ethic upon them.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I have introduced how our definition of life has changed in response to our historical moment, how life is regularised by modern states and how the notion of life and biopower combine to form our current political moment.

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Citations

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press, 2010.

Foucault, Michel. Society must be defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-76. PENGUIN Books, 2020.

Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott. London: Penguin, 2006.

Roosth, Sophia. 2014. “Life, Not Itself: Inanimacy and the Limits of Biology.” Grey Room 57 (October): 56–81. doi:10.1162/grey_a_00156.