Well burrowed, old mole!

Timothy Campbell’s Improper Life is an exposé of the consequences of accepting Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of technology. As he explains on page one, “to the degree that we speak of biopolitics today, lurking beneath is a conception of technology deeply indebted to Heidegger’s ontological elaboration of it.” He aims to isolate the emergence of a politics of death in Heidegger, and to show how it has impacted thinkers who try to critically appropriate Heidegger’s work. This book is a response to a crisis within contemporary academia; the historicist/posthumanist/biopolitical paradigm seems to be incapable of offering anything but fatalistic prophecies of doom when it comes to the relation between life and technology.  Campbell follows Heidegger’s ontologization of technology in the work of Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito and Peter Sloterdijk. The first three chapters of the book are devoted to critical readings and in the fourth, Campbell offers an outline of what he calls an affirmative biopolitics which historicizes biopolitics instead of ontologizing it and thus releases other potentials than the current entanglement of technology and death. 

     Campbell’s discussion of Heidegger centers around the Parmenides seminar that the philosopher delivered in 1942-3. In this seminar, Heidegger posits a difference between proper and improper writing “that has ontological effects such that a division in life is constructed between one Art, or species of man, associated with proper writing and another with improper writing.” (2)  Campbell shows how Heidegger identifies socialism with improper being through the figure of Lenin identified with the reign of technicity. Campbell notes that “Heidegger’s anticommunism thus goes hand in hand with his wide-ranging critique of improper writing, both founded on a perceived anxiety related to threats to man’s proper relation to being.” (7) When people seize control of technology, they risk “falling out of being into a merely ‘technical world’ of the Leninist sort.” (9)  We should note the continuity of this technical world with the mass-society dreaded by bourgeois philosophers throughout the 19th and 20th century and expressed in  Heidegger’s critique of publicness in Being and Time or Ortega y Gassett’s Revolt of the Masses. In these cases it is a caricatural fantasy of the possibility of communist society as imagined from a hostile perspective.    

     Campbell abstracts away from the concrete connection between Heidegger’s philosophy and anticommunism as a reactionary ideology,  “I don’t want to circumscribe thanatopolitics simply to Nazism but rather to see it as implicit wherever Being, language or life is divided against itself into proper or improper.” (3) This seems to be a repetition of the ontologization that characterizes Heidegger’s philosophy of technology and leads to the disastrous implications that Campbell wants to avoid. He does not trace Heidegger’s attitude back to a definite position in the discursive articulation of the class struggle, instead he sees its genesis in a philosophical division.  The history of the human race is replaced with the history of being. This reading of the genesis of thanatopolitics  has political consequences when it culminates in Campbell’s ‘practical’ call for a renunciation of judgment in favor of attention and play.   

       In his closing chapter, where he aims to articulate a response to the intersection of life technology and politics, Campbell rightly insists that we should turn our focus from the subject or the self (as a site of self-preservation, reproduction and defense of borders) to the form of life and to the decisive question of how we live. However, his further contention that we need to renounce judgment in favor of attention is problematic. I would agree that we need to renounce the hierarchizing judgment of propriety, or authenticity as is practiced by Heidegger, but this is not the only kind of judgment.  Campbell falls toward a formalism around this point that undermines his attempts at an affirmative biopolitics. He does not distinguish between hierarchizing judgment and radical critique.  His vision of a planetary movement that is the other of globalization, characterized by nonjudgmental aesthetic playing with existential possibilities amounts to little more than a call for creative accommodation to the established order.  If he had followed Heidegger’s problematization of technics back to its source in the polemic against socialism he would have confronted that thanatopolitical tendency with its other, namely the Marxist biopolitics which it seeks to pre-empt.            

    From a quick glance at Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program we can get a sense of Marxist biopolitics, of Marxist discourse on the connection of technology and life; it has to do with the connection between the control of the material conditions of labor and the power to extract forced labor from human populations:   

Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. the above phrase is to be found in all children’s primers and is correct insofar as it is implied that labor is performed with the appurtenant subjects and instruments. But a socialist program cannot allow such bourgeois phrases to pass over in silence the conditions that lone give them meaning. And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth. The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission.

A society based on slavery or forced labor will inevitably be a society based on death. An affirmative biopolitics involves superceding the wage relation, private property whatever one wants to call the  monopoly ownership of the means of life. The politics of starvation is what is at issue here.  From a Heideggerean perspective, the effort to overturn this relation, the attempt by working people to appropriate the material conditions of their lives is an evil that challenges the proper being of humanity.  Campbell is not immune to this prejudice.  In his attempt to elaborate an affirmative biopolitics, he is working within an ontological problematic and not a historical one.  He is right to affirm Foucault’s historicist reading of thanatopolitics as merely one possible way of having a tekhne of life, but he is still ontological in refusing any possible horizon of meaning-i.e. in substituting a philosophical thesis for a historical one. Thus, the affirmative biopolitics ends up being an aesthetics of existence without a collective, historical horizon.  It is difficult to see how this is affirmative instead of neutralized.  It leaves us in the same position as Heidegger’s philosophy does, standing before a taboo placed over the means whereby working people would achieve emancipation. This taboo on emancipation conflates revolution with  “mastery” and asserts that expropriation of the expropriator is the only crime.